Reagan Ought to Visit the Real Africa

President Reagan has just been invited to meet with the leaders of the “front-line states” in Southern Africa. He should go. It would do him good to see the real Africa.

Most Americans, and this includes our President, grew up with a notion of Africa that is almost entirely cinematic. First there were all the “Tarzan” movies with Johnny Weissmuller swinging from one convenient vine to the next. Then the film “The African Queen” with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn cutting through more vines to fight the Germans. Then, to reawaken the old romance, along came “Out of Africa.”

All of these stories have been told to us against the majestic, colonial backdrop of Rudyard Kipling, high adventure, Stanley meeting Livingstone, East meeting West. The names themselves evoke it: Mombasa, the Congo, Zanzibar. It is this celluloid “Africa” that holds Americans so much in its grip.

These are not the musings of a tourist who once breezed through Africa on a package tour. I spent two years living and working in rural Swaziland 15 years ago. I hitchhiked and rode local buses through five countries on the African continent. I was appalled that people could come from Hollywood, take in all the wild beauty of the game parks and close their eyes to the poverty and crippling disease that existed along the roadside. But I also sensed that no matter how much I saw and absorbed of the real Africa, it would be the “Africa” of the movies and of myth that I would remember.

Someone who worked with me in Swaziland, and who now teaches film at a university in Louisiana, developed a clever technique for bringing this silver-screen “Africa” into view. Mimicking a Hollywood director, he would frame the shot with his thumbs and index fingers, then “pan” the vista before us. Incredibly, it worked. For months we had been living in the wilds of Africa with the sweltering bush, the huts, the music and the smells of the continent all around us. Never did it seem like “Africa.” Only when we blocked out the peripheral view and framed the picture did it resemble the romantic place that we had thought we’d be living in when we first signed up for the Peace Corps.

There was one other trick. Making our way slowly home from our two-year tour, a couple of us spent a few weeks languidly enjoying the exotic ports of East Africa: Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar and Mombasa, places clogged with Indian culture and their Arab slave-trading pasts. I remember that the “background music” of our travels was provided by a cassette tape recording that someone had made of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” For Americans those magical places were not enough in themselves--we needed the sound track!

All of which brings me to my hunch about Ronald Reagan. Some critics have suggested that his blind support for the whites of South Africa is based purely on ideology: He just cannot abide the thought of the communist-allied African National Congress taking over. But this ignores the extent to which he has been able to do business with African countries such as Mozambique and Zimbabwe, both of which are led by Marxists.

My hunch is that Reagan’s support for the last white foothold in Africa runs deeper than that. The black militants of that continent call it a love of “kith and kin,” a feeling by whites for other whites. In the case of our President, I think it is something far more subtle. It is a romantic attachment to a notion of “Africa” that is maybe 10% politics and 90% movies.

Early this year I stayed for few days in Cape Town’s Mount Nelson Hotel. It is an alluring spot. You can sit on the terrace, sipping a late-afternoon gin and tonic, and watch the clouds drifting past Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain. You can wander through halls and parlors that reek of empire, of the days when young Winston Churchill was a guest just after his dramatic escape from the Boers.

But no thinking person of the 1980s can visit a place like the Mount Nelson without sensing that something is wrong. Walk just a few blocks and you realize that the whole neighborhood is protected by the “Group Areas Act.” In all those snappy little cars driving along those well-cultivated hillside lanes there is not a single black person. Travel 20 minutes on the expressway to the notorious shantytown known as Crossroads, and you see the human price of preserving such charming little 19th-Century relics as the Mount Nelson Hotel.

Ronald Reagan should visit Southern Africa. Like the rest of us, he can continue to enjoy the myth of “Africa.” He can relish the vision of vast plains covered by giraffe and rhino. But the people of that continent need an American President who also knows something about the real Africa. Before our President reads another speech supporting the way things are in South Africa, he should see the way things are.