I'm Judging You (13 page)

Is there a lion in your backyard?
Yes. In fact, that scene where Mufasa was telling Simba not to go to that shadowy area was a reenactment. He was talking about our nosy next-door neighbor's property. The one who wears leaves with unholy nipple cutouts on Sundays. She doesn't have any respect. I also heard her leaves were made in China. Traitor.

Do you speak African? When did you learn to speak English?
I used to be fluent in African, then I learned American, and now I'm trying to learn Asian, so I can be trilingual. Anyway, I was determined to learn this language they referred to as “English,” so I went to the one library on the continent of Africa, headed to the Restricted Books section, and pulled out the only book in English, which was
The Cat in the Hat
, and read it for many months. OR maybe I learned to speak English from birth, and it is as much my first language as Yoruba is. Go have a damb seat.

How did your hut fit your whole family?
Our hut was a nine-bedroom house. We managed, against all odds. We thank God. And Orisha.

Did you have electricity?
This little light of mine is all I need to let shine. Besides, who needs electric light when you have the sun? When the sun comes up, we start our day. If the sun is down, we have no need for light, for we are a people of the earth.

Who is the president of Africa?
President Olu Obama, of course. He's Barack's third cousin. He rules the Republic of Africa with an iron fist.

How did you get here?
From Nigeria I swam to France, then hopped on a train to London. Then my mom worked as a waitress for five years, saved up money, and bought tickets on a ship coming to the United States. But then our tickets got stolen, so we had to stow away on the ship. Three years later, we made it to the Promised Land.

*   *   *

These questions would be fun to shoot down if their absurdity didn't illustrate how insultingly misguided people are about Africa. Folks thinking that because
Coming to America
is their favorite movie they know all they need to know about the continent. Someone somewhere believes it was a documentary about a kingdom named Zamunda. I just KNOWED it. If I facepalmed as often as I want to, I'd have a permanent indentation on my forehead. It doesn't end with young children being curious about lions or folks believing there are professional royal penis cleaners. It goes to the hearts and minds of people in positions of power who create policy and of regular folks who think they're open-minded when they are anything but.

The way the 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic was handled and reacted to by people around the world perfectly encapsulates how problematic and racist the single (scary) story about Africa is. When the Ebola epidemic started in Sierra Leone in 2014, ravaging communities, taking lives, and leaving children orphaned, the Western world paid very little attention. We had very few fucks to give, because it was an African people problem. Then the epidemic moved to Liberia, and still there was little alarm on this side of the ocean. But when Ebola finally made its way to Dallas, Texas, through a man who did not know he was infected until after he flew here, shit got real. He shattered everyone's safety bubble in an instant
—
a fake-ass bubble if I ever saw one.

Two American doctors who got infected while treating patients in Liberia were airlifted and taken to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, and the panic peaked as people wondered why we were allowing the virus to be brought closer to home. Apparently, while it was contained to certain regions of West Africa it was okay, because that was far away. People wondered why the Centers for Disease Control wouldn't want to “keep that in Africa.” Oh, okay
—
let's not use the best modern medicine has to offer to see how it can be handled better everywhere. Let's not have the brightest scientific minds try to curtail an outbreak for the good of the whole world.

Ebola wasn't “our” problem before that moment, but we forget that the entire world is now no more than a twenty-four-hour plane ride away. Air travel makes the world tiny, and something on one side of the world is less than a day away. So we were never as protected from Ebola as people thought. The Ebola hysteria got so real that people stopped traveling to all parts of Africa—even places where the virus had never been present. Canceling travel to Tanzania because Ebola is in Liberia is like saying you won't go to Canada because England is having a bird flu outbreak. A teacher in Kentucky was forced to resign because she traveled to Kenya during the panic, when the virus never even made it to freaking Kenya! How the hell does that even make sense? People proposed barring all incoming travel from West Africa. Stigma is a bitter bitch.

Countries that were nowhere near the outbreak saw their tourism revenues plummet because of people thinking that Africa is one giant country and a sneeze in Sierra Leone can travel five thousand miles to South Africa. Foolishness abounds. The media stoked the fire, and it was all irresponsible as hell. Everyone who was on a plane and coughed was profiled as a possible carrier of the virus, and all of it was just panic. There were only five cases
total
in the United States, and the only fatality was the initial patient from Liberia. We all breathed a sigh of relief because we had dodged a bullet. We didn't even look back to see who we had left behind. We did not try to help address the infrastructure issues in rural communities in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea that spurred the epidemic on. That was not our business, right?

It's funny how folks insist on being hands-off with only
certain
issues in Africa. The world hasn't always been so shy in meddling all up in the continent's business for centuries. Hell, colonialism was just global gentrification on steroids. The Dutch, the Spaniards, the French, and the British were on some nosy-neighbor bullshit and carrying themselves to the Motherland to “save the people.” They weren't so laissez-faire then. The Dutch came up on the shores of South Africa and thought it was beautiful, so they parked their asses on the land and decided to never leave. I've been to Cape Town, so I can see why you would want to stay forever, because it is magnificent, but that's bold. It's like me liking your shoes, taking them off your feet, and declaring them to be mine now. That's BOLD!

Folks have not minded their business when it most mattered, running through Africa drawing arbitrary borders and planting flags since forever. Even in 2014, a random white dude from Virginia took himself to Sudan, picked a plot of land, and named it the Kingdom of North Sudan, all because his daughter said she wanted to be a princess. I don't know why he didn't just go to Burger King and get her a paper crown. You can actually still go around the world putting janky homemade flags in places and declaring them to be yours? Did we fall into a hole in the space-time continuum and end up in the 1400s, before we had all figured out the guidelines to this “country” thing? White folks, y'all gotta quit this shit. Columbussing is so 1492. And the fact that it can still happen in Africa is absurd. History is crowded with people who just randomly showed up in Africa and grabbed some land, like the cradle of civilization is a Monopoly board. There are too many countries on the continent that celebrate fifty-year (or less) national anniversaries because they just recently got independence from Britain, Spain, or France. The only African country to have never been under colonial rule at any point is Ethiopia.

Robbing a place of its resources and pilfering the land dry can get tiring after a couple of centuries, so when colonialists decided to be done with wherever they had conquered, they left behind political, socioeconomic, and class-structure issues that rendered countries in shambles. In their wake they left deadly civil wars stemming from forcing clans and ethnic groups with major differences under the same umbrella. But when shit hits the fan and problems develop from the legacy of colonialism
—
like a butterfly effect, if the butterfly was really an elephant that flipped tables and ruined everything
—
then the colonizers want to say it's not their business. They want to play Captain Save-a-Hoe when it comes to pilfering the land of its wealth, but when it's time to offer the countries on the continent actual aid, they come up missing like we do when Sallie Mae calls asking about our student loan payments. I call bullshit.

Just like African problems are thought to belong in Africa only and to be the sole responsibility of the people there, African people outside of the continent must assimilate or face rejection. It is frustrating to see how people approach things regarding Africa and Africans in such alienating ways, even the way people look at our names and cringe before they try to pronounce them. Like my classmates when I first arrived in the United States, people's tongues get heavy with the pressure of the hardship they assume comes with multiple vowels and more than six letters, and you can see their shoulders slump in expected failure. You'd think you just asked someone to take a surprise SAT test. People see our names and automatically assume they'll be tongue-twisted.

I used to hate the first day of school, when the teacher would be taking roll and would get to “Ajayi.” I would know it was me before they even said my name because I was almost always first on the list, and almost without fail, my teacher would look up and say, “This is a hard name.” This is when I would say, “It's probably me,” and dread having to pronounce my unique name while all the other kids watched me, eyebrows raised with curiosity. It is AJAYI. Pronounced AH-JA-YEE. There are no tricks. I used to wish I had a simple name like “Lauren Jones” because I got sick of standing out on the first day of school. Sometimes, the teacher would ask, “Is there something else I can call you?” because learning how to say my first name correctly was just too cumbersome, I guess. If they could not pronounce “Ajayi,” then surely “Ifeoluwa” was their auditory nightmare, so I gave them an alternative. Feeling like you have to go by an alias so the world doesn't butcher your beautiful real name sucks.

I still remember my high school graduation and how my vice principal botched my name. He had no excuse, especially since he had the phonetic spelling written on a notecard
and
we had practiced the day before. He called my name, and the only reason I knew it was mine was because I was next in line. I might have looked around momentarily for the person who he just called. I was all “Dang, her name is ugl
—
Oh, that's me.” My last name is not even hard. It's one of the easier Nigerian ones. I always say, “It's pronounced just like it's spelled.” Still, folks look at it and go, “Ay-jay.” Don't ignore my I, bro! I have been on the phone with customer service reps multiple times where I've had to spend three minutes teaching them how to say my last name.
Ah-jay. Ah-ya-jee. Ah-jay-ya.
Ma'am, it is Ah-JAH-YEE. Yet folks can say Schwarzenegger or Galifianakis without a problem. It makes no sense whatsoever.

How African names are approached by many Americans and the barrier of entry to even saying them feels like more othering. We have learned to say much harder names. We have learned phonetic rules of other tongues while ignoring the fact that a lot of African names still follow English pronunciation rules. By doing this, we're telling people that their African names are too difficult and not worth learning how to say correctly. We tell them their culture is a nuisance to our Western tongues and we force people to either abandon their real monikers or be faced with people who are annoyed at having to make an effort. It's disrespectful.

When we look at a map, North America seems worlds away from Africa. But that distance is less about the miles between the two and more about the strangeness attributed to the continent's people. Honestly, we live in bubbles of ethnocentrism, and we carry around ideas and stereotypes about places we've never been. Like my shero Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” That single story has painted a broad stroke of gloom and doom on Africa's canvas, and I want people to see beyond that disingenuous caricature.

I wrote this chapter while I was on vacation. My view was of the mountains in front of me and an infinity pool to my left. There was a Givenchy Spa in the hotel lobby, and the people around me mostly spoke French. There was a wind that was cooling me from the hot sun. I was eating seafood linguini as I restarted my iPad so I could connect to the hotel Wi-Fi. This was in Africa (Fez, Morocco, specifically). So was the national park where I spotted a giraffe and a hyena (Nairobi, Kenya). So was the beach that doubled as a penguin colony where I watched the little tuxedoed birds waddle around (Cape Town, South Africa). So was the site of the weeklong tech conference that was a part of a global network in a modern, bustling city (Lagos, Nigeria). So was the shantytown where the houses had tin roofs (Malabo, Equatorial Guinea).

These places are all Africa, because it is a continent with fifty-four countries, hundreds of landscapes, and thousands of languages spoken by people across countless cultures. Fourteen percent of the world's population can be found there. The entire United States, China, and India can fit comfortably in the continent with room left over. Africa is north, south, east, and west. Three oceans touch its borders. Africa is amazing. I mean, come on. Science has traced the first humans back to the continent, and civilization is thought to have begun there. The place is rich with oil, diamonds, and jollof rice. It is not a monolith, and it is not solely populated by helpless people who need to be pulled from the depths of misery. There are feasts and famines. There are prosperity and poverty. There are democracies and dictatorships. The continent is much greater than the sum of its single parts.