African Americans Aiding Rwandans Find Special Tie

Spanish nuns, Swedish civil defense workers, French doctors have come to bind this nation’s wounds, hug its orphans and mend its schools. But for one small group of Americans, the sense of duty and dedication is as personal as their genes and family tree.

Their skin, like that of the Rwandans, is black.

“For me, when we made that ‘middle passage’ to America, it didn’t sever our ties or our responsibilities,” Cary Alan Johnson says.

Operating out of a Greek restaurant on the outskirts of this capital, the contagiously enthusiastic 34-year-old New Yorker and the rest of the small local staff of Africare, the oldest and largest African American nonprofit organization assisting Africa, are doing what they can to revive a battered country.

Elton King, an accountant and Africare’s director of management services, had already spent 18 1/2 years on this continent as a Peace Corps administrator and roving trouble-shooter. But the lanky, gray-haired 59-year-old left his home in Silver Spring, Md., and the company of his wife and his three daughters last month to come back.

“My whole life has been spent working with Africa,” King reflects in a mellow, Southern-accented voice. “For me, there’s a spiritual dimension to it.”

The Peace Corps retiree personifies the unique mix that Africare can offer: Yankee managerial talent and know-how coupled with a keen dedication to helping the lands where many Americans’ ancestors were captured, clamped in irons and shipped through the “middle passage” to the sugar and cotton plantations of the New World.

Africare’s call for Rwanda aid has already elicited more than $100,000 in donations, as well as food and clothing, from across the United States, King and Johnson say. The Detroit chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People has shipped vehicles to replace cars that disappeared in a citywide orgy of looting here this year.

Black Artists for Africa and the distinguished African American poet Maya Angelou, who read a poem at President Clinton’s inauguration, have also helped marshal support to deal with Africa’s latest humanitarian emergency, Johnson says.

In consultation with Africare, the staff of the hospital at Howard University, one of the most distinguished of America’s black institutions of higher learning, offered to assemble a medical team because many of Rwanda’s health professionals are now dead or in refugee camps outside its borders.

“We especially need nurses, midwives and midwife trainers,” Johnson says. “As quickly as possible, we want to restore the capacity of the Rwandan health system to function on its own.”

For the 130 children now at Les Hirondelles orphanage in Kigali, Africare’s staff has bought plastic dishes and silverware and an electric generator, and paid to repair a roof damaged by a mortar round. They’ll be driving to Kampala, Uganda, soon to buy shoes for the children.

Within two weeks, two African American nurses and a social worker are expected to arrive to care for the boys and girls who lost their parents in Rwanda’s genocidal massacres and civil war, Johnson says.

Unlike many foreign charities or aid organizations that responded to Rwanda’s emergency, Africare is no newcomer to this former Belgian colony in Central Africa. Since 1984, when it began a U.S. government-financed refugee resettlement project on the Rwandan-Tanzanian border, Africare has run many small-scale, self-help, rural development projects, from beekeeping to goat-breeding.

“We know that many of the organizations are here to respond to the emergency,” says Johnson, who until last month worked for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, managing aid deliveries to some of the 1.2 million Rwandans who fled to camps in Zaire. “But when the world’s attention has shifted to other crises, we want to make sure the pieces are in place to help Rwanda rebuild in a long-term, sustainable way.”

For the moment, though, Africare is focusing on aiding children orphaned by the war. It also hopes to get funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development to pay for rebuilding and restaffing two medical clinics in the hills near Kigali that were looted and damaged.

Likewise, Africare will seek U.S. government aid funds to pay for carting away the trash that has been mounting on many Kigali street corners since the bloodshed erupted in April.

Africare was founded in 1971 as a response to the terrible drought then afflicting the Sahel, the band of sparse grassland that lies south of the Sahara. C. Payne Lucas, the former Peace Corps director for Africa, was the driving force.

The focus was intended to be unique. Africare was created as a vehicle for African Americans to help Africans transform their societies to withstand disasters like droughts or famines. Also, it was meant to be a forum where African Americans could interact with Africans and discover, or rediscover, their heritage.

The organization’s headquarters, Africare House, was intentionally built in an inner-city, working-class neighborhood on R Street in northwest Washington, D.C., to, in Johnson’s words, “bridge the gap” between visiting African leaders and black Americans.

Donald F. McHenry, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is now a research professor of diplomacy and international affairs at Georgetown University, serves as the nonprofit organization’s chairman. It now directs assistance programs in 27 African countries, from Senegal to Mozambique.

Last spring, when Rwanda was swept by massacres of the minority Tutsis by the dominant Hutus and a dormant civil war flared back into life, most of Africare’s local staff were killed or fled. According to King, the organization lost $137,000 that it had in Rwandan banks; two offices and two houses; four or five vehicles, and furniture, refrigerators and computers worth thousands of dollars.

Its two American staff members left in a hurry to escape the fighting and massacres. Soldiers from the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, the victors in the civil war, took over the main office. Only the desks, file folders and some of the file cabinets could be recovered.

To rebuild from the shambles, King flew back Aug. 8--and was aghast at what he found. “To come to a country that has no running water, no telephone--hold it--you look around, and it’s like being in the desert,” he says.

In a stroke of luck, King met a Rwandan of Greek origin, who because of the turmoil and looting was eager to rent his hillside restaurant for $4,000 a month and leave.

Africare set up its headquarters in the restaurant’s spacious sunken dining room.

The group has hired six Rwandan employees and will add more when it begins implementing its projects.

For Johnson, a Brooklyn native who was named Africare’s full-time, salaried representative for Rwanda on Aug. 25, helping Africans help themselves has been a rich discovery of his innermost self. Johnson grew up in the projects of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the son of a nurse and a 35-year employee of the U.S. Postal Service.

“Like a lot of African American families, we were detached from African culture. Back when I was a kid, black people didn’t know about Africa, didn’t care,” he says.

His own moment of discovery came when, as a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, he decided to spend his junior year abroad at the University of Nairobi, in Kenya.

“I just got bit by the Africa bug,” Johnson says. “Just enjoying the people and the life and the lifestyle.

“By the time I got here, I had a real gap in my personality,” he says. Africa filled it.

The bearer of a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University, Johnson went to Zaire with the Peace Corps and to other African countries as an employee of the U.N. refugee office. When his U.N. superiors asked him to go work with refugees in Bosnia-Herzegovina, he said no. It just didn’t have the same “spiritual connection” as similar work in Africa, he explains.

In 1963, King recalls, when he first arrived in the West African country of Gabon to work for President John F. Kennedy’s fledgling Peace Corps, the citizens of newly independent black African countries had doubts about the abilities of African Americans.

“They’d always heard of the whites, that the whites would help,” he says. “But as they became exposed to us, they very much became our brothers and sisters.”