There is a certain pathos in an African American's determination to recognize people from home among the faces of strangers in Africa. In Mali, I met a man, a dealer in artifacts, who looked so much like Michael Jordan I was at once convinced that Michael's ancestry had to be Fulani. I even took his picture and sent it to Michael. This principle can work both ways: here in the holy land, Amharic Ethiopians tended to address me in their own languages, mistaking me for one of their own kinsmen. And who knows, perhaps I am, by ancestry; yet doomed never to be, on account of culture; and never to know for certain, because of history. Nowhere in the twelve African countries that I visited was I more consistently mistaken for an African than in Ethiopia. There are few emotions more sublime and exhilarating for an African American than to be mistaken for an indigenous African, as a person whose home is "the Continent," as we fondly call it. Perhaps this feeling is one reason why I love visiting Africa so very much.
There is a certain pathos in an African American's determination to recognize people from home among the faces of strangers in Africa. In Mali, I met a man, a dealer in artifacts, who looked so much like Michael Jordan I was at once convinced that Michael's ancestry had to be Fulani. I even took his picture and sent it to Michael. This principle can work both ways: here in the holy land, Amharic Ethiopians tended to address me in their own languages, mistaking me for one of their own kinsmen. And who knows, perhaps I am, by ancestry; yet doomed never to be, on account of culture; and never to know for certain, because of history. Nowhere in the twelve African countries that I visited was I more consistently mistaken for an African than in Ethiopia. There are few emotions more sublime and exhilarating for an African American than to be mistaken for an indigenous African, as a person whose home is "the Continent," as we fondly call it. Perhaps this feeling is one reason why I love visiting Africa so very much.
