“Thank God our grandpappies caught that boat!” is a line generally attributed to late boxing great Muhammad Ali. It appears, however, that it might’ve actually been uttered by rival George Foreman’s manager, Dick Sadler, in 1974. Regardless, the meaning is the same. The man was happy his ancestors ended up in America — even if it was slavery that brought them here. (The issue arose because Ali and Foreman were at the time in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for their “Rumble in the Jungle” heavyweight title fight.)
Someone else who learned this is a black American woman who, distressed about the “racist” United States, moved to Ghana. How’d it go? Well, she didn’t exactly find her Wakanda.
In fact, she complained, there are horror-movie-worthy creepy-crawlies of the four- and eight-legged varieties getting into your room at night. Bribery is expected. Poverty is rife, and people try to scam you out of money. Electricity and other services are unreliable. Why, she even griped about the lack of either (it’s hard to decipher) SNAP or “snacks.” (And looking at her, she might’ve been snapping up those snacks with SNAP.)
Oh, but don’t think all of this has meant an attitude adjustment. In fact, she says that Africa is so bad, she might as well have stayed in the “United Snakes of America.”
This is all in a video that, while some years old, has gone viral. And it dovetails perfectly with an article I wrote just yesterday on anti-Americanism — and the hatred breeding it.
Not Called the Third World for Nothin’
Now, I always shake my head at how my countrymen are so often oblivious to life beyond the U.S. (The relevant phenomenon is not, though, confined to Americans. A Pole living in the U.S. once told me his countrymen often think gold grows out of the streets here.) And this brings to mind my experiences decades ago as an aspiring athlete (tennis) traveling on a shoestring budget.
While playing in India, a fellow American competitor told me he was happy he’d arrived in the country early. Because his mind was so blown by the conditions that he was severely depressed for a day or two. Then there were the Europeans who returned home from North Africa before even completing the tournament. They found the realities intolerable.
I found the conditions OK (and I like exotic food). But maybe these guys were accustomed to a life of silk and satin, I don’t know. Oh, sure, there was my time in Casablanca. No, I didn’t find there any Rick’s Café Américain (that’s a reference the young won’t get). But I did find a scorpion in my hotel room, a critter I’m lucky I didn’t step on in the dark. Then there was the $4-a-night room in the medina (old city) in, I believe, Marrakesh, Morocco, that didn’t have wall-to-wall roaches. (No, they were on the walls, too.) I kept a stiff upper lip and handled these and other situations myself. I knew what to expect — and the Third World is gonna Third World.
Snowflakes in Africa
This brings us to the aforementioned woman, seen in the following video. (Language warning: She possesses the eloquence you might expect.)
And below she’s seen talking about how she could’ve stayed in the “colonized **s United Snakes of America.” But she wanted to “build Africa,” altruist that she is.
Apparently this woman has never heard the acronym TIA. Popularized in the film Blood Diamond (2006), it means “This is Africa.” Africans sometimes use it to epitomize, with resignation, their continent’s intractable problems. The woman also, though, has clearly never heard and taken to heart a truth found in my piece yesterday. To wit:
“Hatred is like darkness: The more there is, the less you can see.”
She wasn’t happy in the U.S. She wasn’t happy in Africa. And she wouldn’t be happy anywhere because, well, she’s unhappy. Sin (in her case wrath, among other things), which is psychological poison, will do that to you.
But who helped feed this woman the sin? Commentator Andrea Widburg, who gets credit for the above videos, has some idea. She presents the below, in which Michelle Obama complains that black women aren’t allowed to complain.
Widburg’s point is that race hustlers such as Obama cause fellow blacks to be enslaved by their own defeatist attitudes.
By the way, the participants in the above also complain that people don’t “care” about black women’s problems. But they ought to ponder the saying, “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry alone.” No one likes a compulsive kvetcher — of any color.
Harsh Reality
In truth, anyone who travels to Africa — and many other places — learns how blessed we are in the U.S. Consider, for instance, Keith Richburg, who once wrote about being ecstatic over becoming the Washington Post’s African bureau chief. Then reality hit. As he expressed in Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (as presented by Widburg):
I am terrified of Africa. I don’t want to be from this place. In my darkest heart here on this pitch black African night, I am quietly celebrating the passage of my ancestor who made it out.
[snip]
Had my ancestor not made it out of here, I might have ended up there in that crowd, smiling gleefully, while a man with a cleaver cuts off the hands of a thief. Or maybe I would have been one of those bodies, arms and legs bound together, washing over the waterfall in Tanzania. Or maybe my son would have been set ablaze by soldiers. Or I would be limping now from the torture I received in some rancid police cell.
And then maybe I would be thinking: How lucky those black Americans are! It’s been said time and again that nothing makes you appreciate your own country like traveling away from it, and America has been like that for me. I see the flaws, I curse the intolerance, I recoil from the racial and ethnic tensions. And I become infuriated at the often mindless political debate that to me never seems to cut deeper than the crispest sound bite. But even with all that — maybe because of it — I recognize that it’s the only place I truly belong. It’s home.
TIA Forever?
Widburg also presents an excerpt from the powerful essay “Let Africa Sink,” by one Kim du Toit. In it he “explains that, in a way, Africa is just a catapult for every person toward early and awful death,” she relates.
And why is the African ship listing? The problems are many, but, as with all peoples, it boils down to a lack of virtue. As long as corruption is rife, and what’s yours is yours only until someone decides otherwise and contracts are meaningless, businesses will never flourish and resources won’t ever be fully utilized — by Africans. This will only be exacerbated, too, as long as the vice that is socialism is indulged.
The bottom line is that we should all be happy our ancestors got on those boats — wherever they came from and for whatever reason they came.
