?For Kenyans who went through the old education system before 8-4-4, America featured predominantly in the ordinary (O) level school curriculum, particularly geography.
There was a topic on how the Tennessee Valley Authority project tamed floods. There was a topic on the wine industry in California’s Napa Valley and filmmaking in Hollywood. There was still another on New York City and its bridges and tunnels.
The other avenue through which we came to know about USA was through politics, particularly Vietnam War and the civil rights movement that made Martin Luther King a hero.
It is still a matter of conjecture if Martin Luther King and other civil rights compatriots were inspired by Mau Mau. I got that impression from my interaction with African Americans.
We also did watch movies, which created an impression that America was the land of cowboys. Rock n Roll was also popular. This was long before CNN and DSTV were in our rooms. The fact that only few ever travelled to America created a myth about the country.
That was long before the Green Card became common and the cold war ended. That was long before we developed affinity for China and the East. That was when we could still hear echoes of the British Empire; visiting or studying in London was still cool.
Surprisingly, American technology was popular during Kenya’s colonial era with Ford and Buick cars popular among the British settlers.
In history we read about slave trade, its evils and how the British helped bring this practice to an end. Less emphasised is the role technology played in ending slave trade as farms and industries shifted to power from coal, electricity and later oil.
I carried these images as I followed the footsteps of beneficiaries of the airlift to USA. That included Prof Wangari Maathai and Mutu Gethoi, among others. The only difference was that while the airlifters went to the rest of the America, I went to the southern part of USA as a Fulbright Scholar.
Delineated
The south can be generally delineated by the Mason Dixon line of 1763-67 and roughly separates the North Free States and the South where slavery was allowed before the civil war.
This region is also called the Bible belt because of predominance of religion. It has higher church attendance than the rest of the country with most citizens being conservative Evangelical Protestants whose influence goes into both politics and society.
Some of the Bible belt states are Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.
The deep south is a bit narrower in definition to include states like Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. I lived in the heart of the Bible belt - Jackson, Mississippi - for four years from 2001 before relocating to Frankfort, Kentucky for another two years.
Through schooling and interaction with African Americans, I felt the evils of slavery and why Dr King was a hero. Long after his death, I still felt the echoes of segregation. Remember the state of Mississippi has the highest percentage of African Americans.
I thought I would be at home in the company of African Americans, my brothers. I was mistaken. I was resented, seen as a competitor for scarce resources like jobs. Every day I was asked when I was going home. No-one asked me such a question in the other 39 US states I visited.
With joblessness higher among the African Americans than whites, it was understandable that they would see me as a threat. Lots of people think African Americans are not hard working. But for any community that would have gone through such a bad experience including being translocated from one continent to another, then slavery would take long to recover.
In Jackson City, we rented a three-bedroom apartment with two Ghanaians to cut costs just across the road from the school, 1108 Fairmont Avenue. I did not know I was living in a ghetto; more advanced, better than Umoja when it was new. But soon “the ghettoness” started to emerge.
Lots of people in my neighbourhood were not working, they just hang around most of the day. When I was buying bread early in the morning, they were buying alcohol.
When leaving school at night, I would meet “ladies of the night” on the streets. They were hard bargainers for “services” starting from $20 to $5. I listened attentively, purely for research. The neighbourhood had lots of abandoned buildings.
It was a startling lesson that I soon learnt; in the USA, the inner city, the region next to CBD is where the poor live. The affluent live in the suburbs, with more space and well served by highways.
Near our residence along Terry Road which joined Fairmont, white Americans ran several businesses. They left in the evening. I soon learnt that more than 30 years after Luther’s death, there were still shades of segregation. South Jackson was predominantly black, the north white. If you visited Walmart at night, most workers were black; during the day they were white.
Predominantly black
The school across the street, Jackson State University was predominantly black, more than 90 per cent - very surprising to a Kenyan whose media is dominated by whites.
Soon, I realised there are about 100 historically black universities and colleges that admit mostly black students, and are run by black professors and administrators.
Their leading university is Howard, which rhymes with Harvard. Their curriculum differed from mainstream American universities. They would teach criminal justice instead of law, healthcare administration instead of medicine. They would teach technology instead of engineering.
To my surprise, there were very few interracial kids in Mississippi. A sign of hardened racial attitudes?
It seemed to me that Martin Luther King’s dream on equality has not been achieved despite much improvement from the past, before civil rights. Torn between the African-Americans and the mainstream Americans, I found myself lost in a faraway land.
There were black churches and white churches. For once I realised how hard it is to change the society. Politically, African Americans held the key positions in the city like the mayor because they had numbers in the inner city to vote in one of their own.
The America in the media and movies is vastly different from the one on the ground. The America Martin Luther dreamt of, it seems, will be achieved in iterations, not at once.
We could ask if the inheritors of Martin Luther King’s mantle from Jesse Jackson to Al Sharpton have fitted into his shoes, 50 years after his death.
- The writer teaches at the University of Nairobi.
xniraki@gmail.com
