Shy

“I read everything I could find about the Congo, which wasn’t much. Americans had no connection with that place. At the top of the African continent stood some pyramids that might be worth a tourist’s while, and down at the bottom, a headline-grabbing political drama of apartheid was playing out. But the middle was a great blur. If Africa came up in conversation, it was framed by power imbalance: the Christian mission to help the unenlightened; the charitable donation to feed the wretched children. This kind of talk, with the attendant photos of pleading waifs, didn’t square with the spirited Congolese kids I’d once known, so dazzlingly proficient at the skills their lives required, so very plainly not trying to be like me. Absent from the haves-and-have-nots conversation was any notion of fully formed African cultures with their own laws and scriptures and ways of making food and homes and families. Cultures that might have been on the way to making their own history, but somehow had gotten arrested instead. Now they seemed to be marching in place, shut off from the rest of the world.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost