PERSONAL ESSAY
ON GIANTS’ SHOULDERS Reflections on individualism in Liberia and America.
BY ABRAHAM KEITA
Growing up in Liberia, every day was the same: clear and sunny, beaming with the fresh warmth of a hot summer day. In the scourging heat, I would play 38
soccer with friends, while adults occupied the kitchens, preparing the day’s only meal. There were families that would go weeks on end without food. That was the group to which my family belonged. But when it was dusk—the sun sliding into solemn repose, the moon and stars beginning their nocturnal course—all families gathered. As the night unfolded, I would, like other kids, make my way to the open space where neighbors congregated. Some nights were chilly, with the thick and dry wind, larded with the smell of tropical orchids in bloom, beating against our fragile, often malnourished faces. When everyone had settled in a spot, the adults would begin telling stories. Listening to stories was a daily chore. One story I frequently heard throughout my younger life was about “the land of the free.” That this phrase squirmed its way to my small slummy hometown, into the ears and onto the tongues of men, women and
children whose lives had been arrested by poverty is still befuddling. I became familiar with the phrase before I knew the country’s name. When the adults told the story, some pronounced it “Ar-marica,” or others, “Air-merica.” But I didn’t care about the correct name or pronunciation. Nor was I interested in the authenticity of the story, for I knew that the adults who narrated it had never been on a plane, let alone traveled to America. As the adults would explain, America was a country of enormous wealth. There were no haves and have-nots. It was the best in everything, including education, health, infrastructure. Sometimes, an adult would mutter that if there was an asphalt road connecting Africa to America, he would walk to enter America. That, they said, was better than wallowing in abject poverty. And so, I came to believe that America T HE NEW JOUR NAL
DESIGN BY ANNLI NAKAYAMA Images source: Wikimedia Commons
L
iberia is the land of my birth. Tiny, with a population of about five million people, it was the first African nation to gain political independence. In Africa, some prefer to call it “small America,” others “the America in Africa.” Why? Because Liberia was founded by Black people from America, many of whom were formerly enslaved. Indeed, there couldn’t be better monikers for a country whose first ten presidents were born on American soil. But to me, these labels are meaningless sounds, mere rhetoric meant to invoke good feelings in a people languishing in poverty’s depths. The difference between the two countries couldn’t be any wider. My country ranks in the pantheon of the world’s poorest nations, while America is the world’s biggest economy. Yet nowhere is the difference between both countries more apparent than in their conception of individualism.
