Out of America

Nothing in Keith Richburg's long and respected journalistic career at the Washington Post prepared him for what he would encounter as the paper's correspondent in Africa. At first all he could focus on was an Africa he tried his best to explain, a continent where brutal murder had become routine, where dictators and warlords silenced dissent with machine guns and machetes, where local officials sought payoffs for the most routine tasks, and where starvation had become depressingly common.

But slowly, and with a great deal of personal anguish, this reporter asked a much more difficult question: If this is Africa, what does it mean for me to be an African American?

In this provocative and unvarnished account of his three years on the continent of his ancestors, Richburg takes us on an extraordinary journey that sweeps from Somalia to Rwanda to Zaire and finally to South Africa, and shows how he was forced to confront the divide within himself between his African racial heritage and his American cultural identity.

Are these really my people? he wonders. Am I truly an African American? The answer, Richburg finds after much soul-searching, is that black skin is not enough to bind him to Africa and that he is an American first, foremost, and singularly. To those who would romanticize Mother Africa as a black Valhalla, where blacks can walk with dignity and pride, he regrets to report that this is not the reality. He has been there and has witnessed the killings, the repression, the false promises, the horror.

And in his darkest night of the soul, Richburg looks into his own family's past and concludes, "Thank God. Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive. Thank God I am an American."