Massive loss of human capital, distorted political economies and randomly artificial nation-states are just part of the legacy. How brave of Keith Richburg to think or write or tell anything not shaved and carved and whitewashed to fit current demands for acceptance. It is the likelihood that the emotion of Mr. Richburg's candid prose will be distorted by some of our elected representatives into an argument that affirmative action programs were never justified as a means toward undoing the effects of slavery, an institution whose legacy, we will no doubt hear, has been unfairly maligned. They are the frightful result of the importation of Western culture, which, when poorly stirred with the indigenous, formed the noxious cocktail that Africans must now drink. He should beware.
Solipsism is a fatal disease in a journalist.
Had he remained in Yugoslavia, I could easily now be dead in Sarajevo or be a soldier in a paramilitary force trying to kill Serbians. THAT HE HAS lived in Africa. I have lived there, too, not as a reporter but first as a schoolteacher in Ivory Coast and later as a development project administrator in Sierra Leone. I have no romantic illusions about Africa, but I can say without hesitation that those years were some of the best in my life. Living as a black person in this country can be a complex and sometimes painful experience, and I am not sure whether we African Americans will ever find any final answers to the complex questions posed by our dual identity.