from In the United States of Africa

The tales of our travelers back from terrae incognitae are enough to keep you from sleeping. But Gondwana welcomes you with open arms.

Twenty-three. That is the number of slave ports in Eritrea, Nubia, Somalia and all of blessed northeast Africa. Ports where Yacuba¹ and his like are breaking their backs today. Ports once watered with the sweat and blood of bold workers from the West, following the example of Batavian produce vendors, Icelandic fishermen, Basque fish-dryers, Sardinian stone-cutters, Moldavian ironworkers, hired gunsmiths and horsemen, Romanian tanners, Calabrian dyers, Slovenian bear-trainers, Uzbek gravediggers, Maltese falcons, Texan pawnbrokers, Serbian eunuchs, Mongol shamans, masons from the distant Baltic, ash-blonde slaughterers from the Rhineland and Provençal trouvères, some of whom have walked dry-shod across the Red Sea. And then ports living for centuries off ivory from all over Europe, especially the Slavic countries, carried to the bottom of Africa by way of Asia Minor, Palestine and happy Arabia.

And so, from this centuries-old trade, from these trading-posts, grain and sugarcane plantations, memory has retained nothing. Few traces in stone in Asmara, Massawa, Obock, Port-Said or Bengazi—the oldest cities in the region, from which African civilization sent its missionaries, scholars and geographers. Following Nzila Kongolo Wa Th'iongo (1786–1852), once so popular in the court of the unpredictable monarch Kodjo Alemjoro, author of the classic An Evening on the Danube, travel writers back from terrae incognitae have darkened page after page with "exotic screwing," the urge to "wash away the equatorial fogs," to "plunge their weapon into the mouth of alabaster-skinned houris" and to swing their navels to the rhythm of "bronze-belled mules." I still get hard thinking about it, but let us move on.

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African man felt sure of himself very early on. He saw himself as a superior being on this earth, without equal, since he was separated from other peoples and races by an infinitely vast space. He elaborated a system of values in which his throne is at the top. The others—natives, barbarians, primitives, pagans (almost always white)—are reduced to the rank of pariahs. The universe seems to have been created only to raise him up, to celebrate him.

Did you know, Maya,² that at the beginning there was only one continent surrounded by seas, Pangaea, that would split into fragments at the end of the Jurassic era? Africa was located at the south of a single block called Gondwana. Later on, Gondwana would break up into many drifting continents, but only Africa would remain stable, at the center of the world. Remember the main point: Africa was already at the center, and still is. Nothing has changed since then, or very little. Under the visible crust of the Earth, there is still an underground world, swarming with life. What is life, if not organisms appearing and taking their energy from the food chain—or if you will, Maya, all-out predation? Nothing has changed; geology proves this. Just think a moment, Maya, of the artificial lakes we have made, their waters still flowing with atavistic regularity over Quaternary wadis. Think of the countless fossils periodically uncovered by sandstorms. Finally, think of those millions of grass, cactus or orchid seeds waiting peacefully for the drop of water that will transform them from an inert chrysalis to the vegetable and floral state. Between two rocks standing like the forefingers of the law, hundreds, thousands, of insects, small rodents, and tiny reptiles slither around, hanging on to puny stalks—stalks of thirst-quenching green.

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On the author's latest inspired invention for entertaining the reader.

Armstrong, I'm not black My skin is white It's a real lack For singing hope No use seeing birds and sky Nothing, nothing there is bright Angels? Nope My skin is white

That's a song of Claude Nougaro's, right? Are you still listening to it inside your studio, Maya dear? Nougaro, the notes on the record jacket clearly say, is a...