AFRICA

I began travelling now three decades past in West Africa in Nigeria, later learning a bit of East Africa in Kenya, then Central Africa in Zaire, and later still Southern Africa from the Cape to Namibia, the Okovango Desert Delta of Botswana, then later "the green, grey, greasy Limpopo, all set about with fever trees" (Kipling, again!) along the Transvaal in South Africa. I had seen the Bushmen's ancient rock art among the balanced rocks of Epworth in Zimbabwe and the "moonbow" over Victoria Falls. I worked for a month in the high veldt of Swaziland and followed the UN peacekeeping forces into Mozambique and savored the Indian Ocean prawns in Maputo. I returned to West Africa through Abidjian, Cote d'Ivoire and visited friends in the medical research Council in the Gambia nestled inside Sennegal.

I have now spent over two years of my adult life in the Dark Continent, and I keep coming back for more! I had watched as South Africa made its very hopeful leap forward into the world community of democratic nations, with some staggering backsliding into the world of uncontrolled criminal free enterprise--a story common to emerging Russian and Eastern European nations as well. I hope for the best and am working hard at optimism for Africa, but a strong reality check is always quickly apparent as an antidote for pollyanna wishes that things might be better.

The 1996 Fulbright in Africa allowed a prolonged time to live and learn in Mozambique, and South Africa (with an interruption only long enough to return to Boston for the 100th running of the Boston Marathon!) and a return to Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Zaire and Malawi. This unique experience in 12 African nations was a wonderful opportunity to continue developing my interests in several areas such as the color coding the Bantu and Pygmy languages in linguistic anthropology, my interest in the geographic medicine and adaptation responses, continued work in endemic hypothyroidism and metabolic maladaptation, teaching innovative responses in medical education for critical health manpower shortages. And beyond all that, a simple continuing passion for the natural history, cultures, and people of Africa.

If ever you should want to wrap your mind around something bigger and needier than you, it is all here in a Dark Continent desperate for hope. I return to Africa as Rhett Butler was drawn to the South after the cause was already lost. It is an atavism resonant with my ancestry in the pre-history of African origins of we hunter-gatherers. I have friends here who have next to nothing, yet will gladly give it all to you. They, and we, must succeed, since this is the laboratory of our future. For people who needed to hold out some hope, John Kennedy once stood at the Berlin Wall and stated all men with human ambition for justice should join in his statement, "Ich bin ein Berliner." From the desperation of Mozambican Dumbe Yenge, the hunger of Malawi, the squalor of Soweto, and the crumbling disintegration of the fictitious nation of Zaire, I identify myself with these poor friends; I am an Africanist.