There are a lot of ridiculous assumptions Americans hold, wittingly or not, about Africa. That it’s a country. That it’s always at war. That its people are all poor, starving and sick, and usually all of the above.
We also tend to assume that Africans are illiterate. So there was a bit of collective cosmic justice in my brief encounter, on a sunny, sweaty afternoon in Bangui, with a Central African composer.
He was selling cold Cokes outside the World Health Organization headquarters. On a stool next to him, beneath a bag with small change, I saw sheet music, penned by hand.
“You’re a musician?” I asked.
“No, a composer,” he corrected me. He pulled his sheet music out for me to look at; the flirtatious flags of eighth notes, the thick hips of whole notes, the five-line musical staph, all had been delicately inscribed on the page.
“It’s too bad I don’t have my violin,” I offered. “I could play your music and you could sing the words.”
He looked at me doubtfully. “But can you read music?” he asked. I nodded; he stared with surprise.
“That,” he declared, “is impressive!”
It’s a moment with its own coda a few days later, when I met Charles. But for rest of that story, you’ll have to check out my post on Untold Stories, where I’m blogging for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting about my four-country trek to uncover the successes and failures of peacebuilding. You can learn more about that project here.
Quadri-lingual Rwandans are always impressed I can speak three of the four languages they use every day.