We Were 12 Years in Africa: An Essay

On February 5, 2002, I stepped off a plane and into a new world. It was snowing. A cold wind blew white flakes that swirled around me as I barrelled forward into a dark winter night. The metaphor would become apparent in due time.

Thus ended 12 years in Africa.

Thus, began an odyssey 20 years and counting. Out in the wilderness trying to return to who I once was, to who I really am.

Along the way, I would learn the power of myths and the strength of illusions. I gained consciousness, the ability to see clearly in a world that insists on refusing to see. I gained the ability to scream at the void when all around you everyone stays silent. To see the world as it is, when everyone around you is dreaming. I lost home forever. It was a fair trade. 

I had the luxury of not being completely ignorant of Canada when I first entered. In the history books where I learned about my people. The freed slaves on my mother’s side and the proud resistance fighters on my father’s, I learned of a place. We spoke of it in hushed tones, the same way we spoke of Mississippi, South Carolina, the South. We spoke of Nova Scotia. A place where my ancestors who had escaped the bonds of slavery, who had faced slings and arrows so cruel, were so maligned that they thought to themselves, ‘anywhere else is better than this’. And so, they travelled to another shore, back to the motherland. They risked dying on the high seas, being buried in the oceans, like their forefather before them, because they knew death was better than bondage. That to die on your feet was preferable to living on your knees.

I was coming to a place where the first race riots in North America happened. A place with laws such as these:

• His Excellency in Council, in virtue of the provisions of Sub-section (c) of Section 38 of the Immigration Act, is pleased to Order and it is hereby Ordered as follows: For a period of one year from and after the date hereof the landing in Canada shall be and the same is prohibited of any immigrants belonging to the Negro race, which race is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada.

And so, I was under no illusion about where I was headed. The myth of Canada held no appeal for me. I knew the truth long before I found myself on Canada’s cold frozen shores. 

It was many years before I realized the great luxury, the true privilege I had of not being born in or into Canada. I had perspective. The kind that can only come from being entirely removed from the mythology of a place.

Every nation has its myths. Like fish swimming in an ocean, its inhabitants need it to survive while simultaneously never noticing it all. I was lucky to be raised separate and apart from the influence of these myths. 

I was Sierra Leonean. That was my identity; who I was, but in time I would embrace Blackness, that hazy thing, defined as much by what it is not as what it is.

I wore it like a protective cloak against the gauntlet of whiteness. I read Black Panther, learned of the black panthers. I learned to give dap and I learned how to navigate whiteness and Blackness. I learned that it was not a black and white world. It was a black and every other colour world. That we were truly alone, that there was no such thing as solidarity. We weren’t all in it together. The one thing all other groups had in common was that they hated and feared blackness. I would come to realize that whiteness was a thing that was separate from white people, that sometimes it ensnared even people who weren’t white. A racist world that did not necessarily require racist people. Subjugation and plunder hidden in a genteel glove, a gauntlet hiding its true identity, a siren song attracting sailors to their shipwrecked doom.

At first, I fought the futile fight. What folly. The reward for speaking the truth, for fighting against the box into which everyone wanted to trap you was isolation, scorn, disdain. No one wanted to be told that the waters in which they swam were hopelessly polluted, so I kept my thoughts and my knowledge of the truth to myself.

Day-to-day, it was easy enough to be non-threatening, say the right things and on a personal level, you could get yourself through, but as a way to live a life, it felt impossible, like trying to escape a maze that everyone was telling you was a straight and true road, a hidden gauntlet you had to walk through, an invisibility cloak that covered everyone but me or people like me.

In time, to survive this gauntlet, I forged a new identity out of the remnants of my old one. I had to. Along the way, I learned new things about myself and about the world I was in. That it was possible to resist, but only up to a point, the gauntlet. The invisible orb everyone but you held.

And so, now I live, a sort of half life. Surrounded by people and feeling a sense of aloneness. How could you live in this world surrounded by people like this and remain true to yourself? You create two identities, a smiling happy face, a mask, and your true face, introspective, clear-eyed, alone.

It’s possible to muddle along with no one the wiser. I can break bread with people here, go to their parties, work at their soul-crushing jobs, eat at their interminable brunches, but that all happens on the surface. To see me is to see an iceberg. A smiling facade on the surface and a clear-eyed truth seer underneath. To trust seems entirely out of my grasp. How can you trust someone who you don’t believe sees the same things you see? Who you don’t trust to do the right thing when the dread time comes? An impossibility.

Sadly, I have no faith in this world and how could I, populated as it is with people who have no faith in themselves, who refuse to see the world as it truly is. Happy as they are to surrender themselves wholly and without reservations to myths, to succumb in their minds and in their actions to illusions and then in acting on these illusions advance them even further. Thus, I remain here, out in the cold waiting to find my way back inside, but unsure how or even if it still possible. And all the while, still wearing the perfectly beautiful and ugly mask.