4/8 05 White Africans

Some years back I went to Africa. I didn’t know what is was doing. This is what I do once in a while. It has become a habit, though I don’t know if it makes sense. I used to think that going to another continent had a specific purpose. I even talked about ‘out of continent experiences’. He also claimed that he did it for anthropological reasons, but now I admit that it all happened by accident. It was coincidental. I did it by mistake.
In Africa I met a white woman, who called me childish [‘barnslig’] for my birthday indicating that I looked younger than my age. I took it as a compliment, though I never knew if I deserved it. She was Swedish, but grew up in Tanzania. We always refered to her as ‘white african’. It was only later that I began to think about what it meant. She was not the only one.
We have all kinds of names. In Africa it is called tribes to be more specific. It is not because we won’t be a tribe, but we don't think about ourselves as such. We are not very many and only very rarely together like other tribes. We are scattered around and will only meet accidentally. We even identify ourselves being apart. It is our individuality that defines us.
While I was still around, I remember one day, when I was standing alone on the terasse in the big house I was living in and reading the back page of a black book. There is a saying that Africa never will become a habit. You will never get used to Africa. Maybe that is my problem, that Africa began to run in my venes. If you live on colored blood, then you will never forget the eyes you saw and the eyes that touched you. It is for real when a white man, who is married to a woman that grew up in Africa, tells me that I will never recover from Africa. I think he is right. Suddenly I don’t belong anywhere. It is only at night that I can breath. During summer season it is hard, because then it begins getting light around 3.30 in the morning. I realise how little time I have to live my life. It makes me change my mind. The best time to go to Europe is not May. Sometimes I try to mingle – and in order to do that I force myself to sleep at night. In that way I will be awake when other people go to work.
Bye.