On very rich men and the continent of Africa
I've been to the continent once, and it did not go well. This year, I'm trying again.
I have a complicated relationship with very rich men and the continent of Africa. I’ll explain.
The first and only time I traveled to Africa was last year. I was a spur-of-the-moment addition to a then-boyfriend’s business trip to Ethiopia. I think that a part of him believed I wouldn’t take him up on the offer when he offered. But I did. That time was a gooey transition period in my life, in-between businesses and relationships, and when a first-class roundtrip ticket was offered to and from a continent I hadn’t been to before, I jumped at the opportunity.
The morning that we arrived in Addis Ababa, he took a nap to sleep off the jet lag. I felt a bit manic and confused in my sleep cycle, so I walked around the hotel courtyard. During my walk, an African man with a mischievous grin ambling towards me asked if I was attending a wedding at the hotel.
I averted my gaze, but he started to make a more acute diagonal beeline in my direction, so I completely rerouted my walking path in order to prevent a collision. When back in the lobby, I questioned myself, wondering if I was unconsciously biased, as maybe this man was just trying to be friendly.
I had some work to do before New York City woke up, so I retrieved my laptop and went back down to the lobby, trying to stay awake by sponging the energy of other people.
The hostess at the hotel’s restaurant first sat me next to three stiff and unsmiling European businessmen in suits. She saw me eyeing an open table by the window, facing the terrace where the wedding was being held. Bright blue and pink flowers flanked a shallow pool, and a curtain billowed out from out of the window. With her go-ahead to relocate, I happily set up at this perch with my ginger tea, thick with honey.
I was writing on my laptop with little awareness of what was happening next to me. About an hour in, out of the corner of my eye, I caught someone at the table next to me, waving and trying to get my attention. He seemed to be an African man in his mid-seventies with kind eyes.
“Are you a writer?” he asked, in English with no accent.
“Oh maybe one day,” I blushed.
“You look like you are writing a novel. Are you from America?”
“I am, yes, maybe this was a little obvious?” He laughed. I explained:
“I am with a soccer delegation, my boyfriend is doing some business over here…I tagged along. I’ll only be here for a day or so.”
I learned that this African man and his cousin, who was sitting with him, were Ethiopians who had lived for several decades in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.
“My name is Mordecai, and my son is a tour guide, in case you need someone local who can speak good English,” said one of the men. “My son’s name is Nahum. Here’s his number, in case you want to WhatsApp him.”
The cousins emanated a strong paternal energy, and a genuine desire to show me their country. So I WhatsApped his son, feeling relieved that I did not have to bother anyone, especially my busy-business-boyfriend, to arrange something for me. I told my boyfriend that I had found a tour guide, and the guide picked me up an hour later. His car was a little beat-up, and I saw the uniformed hotel porters staring past the manicured bushes and observing me curiously.
But everything went as planned; Nahum first dropped me off at a museum where I saw the bones of a 3.5 million year old hominid named Lucy, whose remains were dug up by archaeologists in Ethiopia. There in the museum it was safe for me to be alone. I walked alongside a French woman and her two children as they admired the many displays of early creature skeletons.
The museum, which seemed to have revamped its infrastructure in 1992, most definitely did not have wifi. So I left the premises in search of a cafe to contact my tour guide.
Walking down the street was like existing on an entirely different planet. I was so very obviously the only only white woman for miles and people were gawking. Eventually I found a young woman at a store who allowed me to tether to her hotspot, and I texted the guide that I was ready for pickup.
Nahum arrived at the museum parking lot, and then we went to the market, because I wanted to see some traditional Ethiopian dresses while my boyfriend was meeting with gas station kingpins. The guide suggested that we go into the market together so he could help me negotiate on price. I told him I probably would not want to buy anything for myself, but if I did, I would come back with my boyfriend, who had mentioned wanting to buy me a traditional dress.
The guide told me that of course, no pressure at all. He would show me around, and that on the off-chance I did want to buy something, he would help me negotiate and give me a bit of cash.
I felt like Nahum was my shield from the peddlers taking total advantage, so I bought a scarf for my mother with the Ethiopian alphabet on it, and told Nahum that I would reimburse him as soon as I could.
As we walked to the car, a little Ethiopian girl popped out of nowhere and tugged on my shirt, offered me a piece of gum. Then another one emerged from behind her, and then another one. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by six or seven girls with coffee-colored eyes, lightly tugging at my shirt and handing me pieces of fruit-flavored gum. One said “I love you,” and the others were telling me their names or speaking in the Ethiopian language Amharic.
I slid into the car, the little girls practically sliding in next to me, and after I closed the door they stared at me through the window while smudging handprints all over the car door. My window opened a crack, and there were seven pieces of gum being squeezed through that tiny crack. I made a a deep eye contact with one and was drawn in, so I asked Nahum for a bit of cash to buy gum from one of the girls.
The whole excursion lasted two hours or so and I returned back to the hotel. My boyfriend spotted the gum on the drawer and asked if he could have a piece, so I explained the surreal experience of being ambushed by these little girls. (When he found out that the gum came from the hands of these girls, he declined to have a piece.)
My then-bf went to some business event, while his chief of staff took me out to a lively nightclub in the hotel. An Ethiopian businessman who apparently owned most of the gas stations in D.C. was also there, offering me copious champagne. Eventually boyfriend joined me, and we swayed along to the Ethiopian jazz.
That night we had a hard time sleeping because of our body clock confusion, so we talked all night. When the breakfast buffet opened, we shared fresh bananas and papaya over an early breakfast, told stories about our past, and envisioned the future. I was at that point exhausted from the jetlag, so I accidentally left my phone at the breakfast buffet. But before someone brought it back, he told me not to worry, that he would buy me a new phone if it were lost.
Back with my phone, I had received texts from my new Ethiopian acquaintance over WhatsApp, asking if I needed another tour. I, fatigued, told him that I would likely not be up for anymore touring that day, but that I still wanted to compensate him for his time and for the money he had spent on me.
He did not have any digital way of accepting payment, so I agreed to meet him in the early evening to give him some cash. I put on sweats to go to the lobby ATM, and as I walked to the door, my business-boyfriend asked me where I was going. I told him I was getting cash for the tour guide.
“Have you been texting him?” he asked, “Yeah,” I said, “to tell him we were too tired to go out and going back home soon. But I’ll be quick, I just have to pay him back.”
“Do you feel unsafe? Do you want me to come with you?”
“No, I can handle it…”
“Ari, that’s weird.” He looked at me as if I were not only naive but also in trouble.
I started to wonder, was it weird? Maybe I had misjudged something and this tour guide was going to shove me in his trunk.
With those thoughts swirling in my mind and an awkward smile spreading across my face–how awkward was this? –I wanted to get it out of the way. So I quickly left the room, withdrew money, exchanged the cash in the parking lot, and pleasantly shook hands with the guide. It all happened as I had imagined, and I safely returned to the room.
Curiously, my boyfriend would not make eye contact with me when I had changed into my evening clothes.
“Hi, does this look nice for the event tonight?” He looked down at his phone and grumbled something like “It’s fine.”
I couldn’t let it go though, something seemed off. “Hey, you seem annoyed. What’s up?” All of a sudden, this mild-mannered man’s eyes bulged and he bellowed…
“DO YOU THINK I’M A FUCKING IDIOT?”
In a strange almost crab-like shuffle, he mimicked me scurrying out of the hotel room, eyes still bulging, words unfurling like blades from his mouth, proclaiming how terrible I was.
“You couldn’t get out of this hotel room faster, like a bat flying out of a cave to see this strange man, to have him buy you gifts! You’re sick, Ari, sick, you have an addiction, to attention from men. This relationship is over, we are done.”
“Give me a moment to explain, you are completely misreading the situation,” I pled. His face looked so deranged and almost demonic that in lieu of feeling fear, I started to nervously laugh.
“Look at you, you are laughing! What the fuck is wrong with you? I am done with you, I am so glad I did not waste any more time on this. I see who you are.”
The more I presented him with evidence to the contrary of an alleged flirtation–including my logistical text messages with the tour guide–the more he doubled down on the idea that I was conspiring to deceive him. And there was no one who I felt I could go to to check the reality with, because they were all paid for by him.
That romance ended, as I’m sure you could surmise. I made my way back to North America. At some point, I’ll write more about my feelings there.
But in any case, it turns out that Africa as a continent has a complicated relationship with rich men, too.
A few years ago, I was contacted by a South African woman who led various conservation efforts at a giant wildlife park in Mozambique. The park, called Gorongosa, had been funded by a complicated billionaire from Idaho named Greg Carr. People were thrilled about the infusion of money into a place ravaged by civil war and famine. But as we all know, one guy sinking tons of money into a place doesn’t necessarily mean happily-ever-after.
I ended up writing about some of the power dynamics involved in this conservation park, which you can read about in this deep dive piece that I wrote for The Revelator. There’s more that I found interesting about Greg Carr in my extensive correspondence with him, that I may talk about in various ways later. He and my ex-boyfriend are different in a lot of ways, similar in others; with positive impacts on the world in certain ways, and questionable ripple effects in others.
I’m back in Africa tonight to write a follow-up story about this region: to understand the people, the motivations, the politics, the power, the relationships. I’ll let you know how it goes this time, and here’s to hoping I don’t have any affairs with my tour guides.