The Interview
Philippe Wamba
By John Koch, Boston Globe
How do you sort out priorities of allegiance?
I feel empowered by my experience to make my home where I choose to. I'm living in the United States now but maintaining a bicontinental existence. I've been to Africa twice this year and plan to move back semi-permanently in the near future. Home is less about geography than about family and relationships. There are more and more hybrids that are yielding these new identities. A lot of us are going to have divided allegiances and more complex approaches to identity and nationality.
Close your eyes and tell me, where is home in your heart?
Right now, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania is where I feel at home. It's where my mother lives. I write in the book about romanticism and how, so often, Africans and African-Americans have looked at each other with this sense of idealism and romanticism. Part of that just comes from distance: Living in the United States for the past 10 years, it might just be that I wishfully think of living in Africa, and maybe there I'll be looking back this way. I often slip between contexts. I'll dream in Swahili one night and English the next. [Wamba, an American citizen, spent part of his childhood in the Boston area, part in Dar es Salaam.]
How is your father?
I saw him in Africa recently. He's doing OK, persevering. There are three separate rebel movements; he is president of one of them. His view is that Congo's problems have to be solved politically through a long process of negotiation. I'm very proud and supportive. It's difficult, because it heightens this duality of having two separate lives. It becomes a bit surreal sometimes when I'm worrying about a broken copier, and my dad calls on the phone and tells me there's a crisis in Bunia [a city in Congo] and could I do some things to help him.
Should you be there?
There's a part of me that has considered that, but, at the moment, I can be most effective here. I've done some advocacy work, contacting the press, attending meetings at the UN. In Bunia, although he has a satellite phone, he's cut off from day-to-day news even within Congo. I probably have a more privileged vantage point. Sometimes, he just calls me to catch up on how the family's doing.
Is there a role for Africana.com concerning Congo?
We have had regular coverage, but it's not a central component.
What's the mission of the Web site?
It's become a source of information and news about Africa and the African diaspora. Our primary audience is African-American, so we tend to have a bias toward African-American issues and events, but we're packaging the entire black world with an educational perspective. When I was hired, it was just a site [based in Cambridge] marketing the Encarta Africana encyclopedia and showcasing some entries. I thought it would be great to parlay some of the ideas in Kinship into the idea of a digital bridge. It's partly about getting African-American children to make use of Internet resources and also about bridging gaps between communities. In east Africa, Internet cafes are proliferating. It will be years before most Africans have computers at home, but through cafes and other public access, people are making use of it.
Are you puzzled by so many Americans' political apathy?
In Africa, I'm always impressed by the possibilities. When you have a blank slate, you can build anything and anything is possible. In the US, it often feels as though the system is so entrenched that the parties' job is to maintain the status quo more than to challenge and build. There's often a kind of lethargy that disturbs me. At the same time, I can't help but admire the amazing foundation that has been laid. I think about the Congo: There's nothing - no foundation, no institution - that is stronger than the individual. That was my take watching the [Clinton] impeachment trial: Wow, there's this system in place that's a couple of hundred years old, and they're abiding by it, going by the book. It made me sad to think of how far we have to go in a country like Congo.
But despite some hard life experience, you tend to express a lot of optimism.
I am genuinely optimistic and positive and forward-looking, but on some level, I don't really have a choice. If the alternative is what is often called Afro-pessimism, the idea that Africa is this basket case that will never go anywhere, that doesn't do much for me. Optimism is a survival mechanism, much the way humor is. And humor is one of the things that's kept my family and me going and kept African-Americans in this country and Africans at home going - being able to laugh and persevere in spite of tremendous odds and to appreciate and celebrate life.
Are you perhaps ahead of your time, a globalized man?
There are many more like me. It's a really useful and relevant perspective to have now; you're probably well positioned to accept this coming globalization and take advantage of it. If it means being multilingual or being familiar with multiple cultures and knowing something about how people from different places interact, people will be well served to learn all of that. You have a jump on things if that was your experience.
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