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“An Unblinkered” look at Africa

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Anchor Marco Werman speaks with journalist Joan Baxter about her book “Dust from our Eyes: An Unblinkered Look at Africa.”

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is the World.  In the season of giving, many turn their thoughts to those who are less fortunate.  Many Americans give money to help Africa, but what do Africans need and want?  Canadian writer Joan Baxter has long asked that question.  She’s lived and traveled throughout the continent over the past 27 years.  I knew her back in the 1980s when we were both working at journalists in Burkina Faso.  Baxter now divides her time between Nova Scotia and West Africa.  Her most recent book is called Dust from Our Eyes: an Unblinkered Look at Africa.  The title she explains comes from an old saying.

JOAN BAXTER: It is actually a proverb, which probably has biblical origins, which is that if you want to help your neighbor out, who’s got some dust in his eye, you should stop and take the dust or the straw out of your own eye, so that you can see well before you go to help your neighbor.  And I thought that that was a very apt proverb given the number of people who head off to Africa thinking they’re going to “help Africa” without really having a clue what the problems might be, and the sources of those problems, which very often actually have their roots not in Africa, but in other parts of the world, particularly in the last 20 years in the rich west.  And I would say probably increasingly now in China and India.

WERMAN: Didn’t you go to Africa yourself in the first place to help out “your neighbor”?

BAXTER: Well, to be honest, Marco, I actually went to get married, but once I was married, I thought oh, yeah, well, I’ll just help out here because we all know that these people are helpless, and my whole life I kind of started in school, in fact.  My Grade 4 Social Studies book we learned about a boy called Banga, who we thought spoke a language called Ooga-Booga, and that was sort of the extent of my knowledge of Africa.  And they lived in kind of this little mud hut village with no discernible culture or anything else.  So it was this incredible assumption, actually, it pains me to think about it thinking that I, knowing absolutely nothing about an entire continent, the most diverse continent in the world, had anything to offer.  But I just assumed that I might, which was completely wrong.

WERMAN: So as a writer and a journalist, and kind of your jobs is to explain the many parts of misunderstood Africa to a western audience.  I mean, that was important to you.  Do you recall the first things that you were seeing that made you wanna get Canadians and Americans in the west more concerned, more aware, even perhaps more outraged by what’s going on there?

BAXTER: Well, I hate to admit this, but I’m going to be completely honest, and for the first three or four years that I was in Africa, I was just like a good colonial, I thought what’s wrong with these people?  Why can’t they be like us?  And I think really that my eyes started to open in Burkina Faso when I went there and Thomas Sankara had just come to power at that time.  President Sankara, a 34-year-old young military captain, who was a revolutionary in all sense of the word, and I think you share some of my time in Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara.  And he started to speak about the values that he wanted Africa to try to retain, at the same time, as he wanted it to progress in a very positive sense.  Take the positive lessons from outside, apply those when it came to gender, equality, and so on, but not reject all the good things that Africa had.  And I think I was one of his most faithful students at the time, which wasn’t good because I was a journalist, I was supposed to be objective, but frankly, I wasn’t very objective.

WERMAN: I mean, you and I met well in Burkina Faso and it was hard to remain objective in the presence of such a charismatic and quite frankly, progressive army captain.  Thomas Sankara remains a hero in the streets of many parts of Africa, very popular and galvanizing figure for young Africans in the same way, some musicians like Fala and Ivory Coast Alpha Blondy move Africans still.  What do you think westerners should learn from this little-known narrative of the late Thomas Sankara?

BAXTER: I think that they should know that there were people like that in Africa, and when they tried to stand up and do something different, and to counter, and I’m sorry to use the term neocolonial, but the neocolonial forces of France, of the United States, and even Libya in this case, they don’t live very long.  And I think that’s the lesson that people outside need to know.  We love to focus our attention on the leaders that westerners love to hate, such as Mugabe of Zimbabwe, ignoring that there are a lot of other leaders in Africa, whom we call friends, who are equally undemocratic, dictatorial and who also have horrendous human rights records.  And people on the outside, outside Africa very rarely hear about African heroes, so they only hear the negative coming out of Africa.  They don’t hear about the positive role models that are there, and there are a lot, writers, musicians, thinkers, intellectuals, whose voices just aren’t heard in our media.

WERMAN: Joan, let’s loop back to the notion before helping your neighbor getting the straw out of their eyes, get the dust out of your own eyes.  Ali Farka Touré is a subject of your first chapter of your book.  The chapter’s called, Who’s Crazy?  Now, you made the pilgrimage up to Niafunké, the village where Ali Farka Touré’s farm is located, the late Ali Farka Touré’s farm is located.  That was in 2003.  It was really to admire his efforts as a gentleman farmer, and less pilgrimage to see the musician in the autumn of his life.  Why was that visit so significant for you, and why the question, who’s crazy?

BAXTER: Well, can I answer the question?  I think I was crazy because –

WERMAN: But you were wondering whether Ali Farka Touré was crazy.

BAXTER: I was because there was somebody who was on his way to his second Grammy, and there he was.  He had just announced that he wasn’t going to tour any more that he was going to set up in Niafunké and he was going to farm in one of the more unforgiving parts of the world.  And I went up there with one question, which is why on earth would you give up all those things you had to go back to your village to be benefactor generale, as I called it, and try to farm in such an unforgiving landscape?  And my question was wrong, and all day long, he refused to answer me, which is a very typical thing in Mali.  If you ask too many questions, you don’t get any answers.  And then finally, right out of the blue, we were crossing the river in his boat.  At the end of the day, the sun was getting low on the river.  It was absolutely magnificent, and he picked up his guitar, and he started to play the haunting tune called Hawa Dolo.

And for the first time all day, I understood what it was that he had there.  He pointed to the river.  He said, “This is my goal.  This is my diamonds.  If this river weren’t here, I wouldn’t have the music in me.  This is the source of the blues.”  He started to talk about feeding the people in the village.  He said, “What I eat, they will eat.”  So he didn’t feel that he’d given up anything.  In fact, his words to me were “that life out there that was like dried crap.  It just didn’t stick to my shoes.”  So he completely turned my question on its head, and made me realize that what I thought he’d given up, didn’t mean anything to him, and what he’d come back to meant everything to him.  And that sort of crystallized the premise on which I wrote the whole book really.

WERMAN: Is that why you went back to your home in Nova Scotia kind of like the way Ali Farka Touré went back to his home in Niafunké?  You don’t have anybody to feed there.

BAXTER: I didn’t have the fame and fortunate, actually, to give up, so I didn’t have to give up a lot.  I think one of the reasons I come back to Nova Scotia is because Africa’s taught me the importance of family and parents, and that my job as a daughter is to look after my parents in their old age, and that’s certainly one of the lessons that I got from Africa.  So yeah, I come back to Nova Scotia and Canada because this is where my family is, but I have to admit that I leave a great big chunk of my heart behind in Africa every time I leave.

WERMAN: Canadian writer and journalist Joan Baxter.  Her book is titled Dust from Our Eyes: an Unblinkered Look at Africa.  Thank you so much.

BAXTER: Thanks very much, Marco.

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