The author’s encounters with Americans range from the fascinating to the shocking and raise compelling questions about freedom, equality and alienation.
- Genre:
- Memoir
- Page Length:
- 250 – 500 Pages
- Book Status:
- Completed Manuscript
American Encounters is a memoir by a Ugandan creative writer, journalist and editor who, for five weeks in September and October 1981, was among some fifty African public officials and professionals that undertook a study tour of the United States of America on a programme meant to improve the skills of middle-cadre officials perceived to have potential as future African leaders. As the only writer-cum-journalist in the group, the author was facilitated to travel alone most of the journey that took him from Long Island to Westport, New Haven, Seattle, Winston Salem, Washington DC and, finally, New York.
Along the way and in each of these cities, he met and talked to mostly American writers, theatre professionals, newspaper editors and academicians; attended rehearsals and performances by some groups; and also addressed a community audience. American Encounters recounts the author’s memorable experiences on the journey that are replete with ominous clashes of culture and ideology and feature riveting classical Africa-meets-America type of episodes that pose fundamental questions on issues such as human freedom, social deprivation and the rights of minority groups. Against this background, the author finds that, everywhere he goes, he is required to explain what went wrong that Uganda could be ruled by a dictator like Idi Amin for close to a decade (1971 – 79). Paradoxically, his country was for all that time hitting international news headlines for the wrong reasons.
Highlights in American Encounters include one on the very first night of their stay for orientation at a holiday inn at Long Island when the adventurous author is involved in a verbal altercation with two white gentlemen (who do not seem to like his presence) as he takes a drink. One of the men tells the author point-blank that he does not care whether he has been invited to America by the State Department: “Who the hell is the State Department? George Bush (then US vice president) is my personal friend.” At Yale University, New Haven, he quickly abandons notes for a community group lecture because while he thought he was going to address a mixed community meeting, he finds the audience is predominantly white. At Seattle, Washington State, he is appalled that the city residents break into celebration that the US government has ordered for the production of the MX Missile which can destroy humanity at the switch of a button. For the Seattle people, what is important is that the Boeing plant that will make some of the missile components will guarantee them 1,200 jobs. Still in Seattle, he is forced to wait and watch in fear of possible arrest at a house of a professional actor who requests they go together to his house to pick “cash for an extra drink”, only for the actor to end up in a drug-puffing orgy with the cab driver that took them. While travelling from Greensboro to Winston Salem, North Carolina, he gets another shock when the limousine chauffer asks him discretely whether he has “the weed”. And an otherwise low-key stay in Winston Salem is sharply galvanized by television images of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat being assassinated at a military parade in his country. For his very close ties with the United States, the assassination is ominous. In Washington DC, the author comes face-to-face with the frightening reality of black youths with groggy but penetrating eyes roaming the streets in the evenings. This reinforces similar scenes he saw in a poor neighborhood of Westport. And when he thought he had mastered how to get along in America, he is left looking like a zombie when, returning to his hotel after having dinner at a Lexington Avenue restaurant, three street girls surround him, caress him into a love-like stupor, pick his pockets clean, and disappear as fast as they came under the full glare of Manhattan lights.
As the plane returning the “future African leaders” back to Africa takes off from the John Fitzgerald Kennedy International Airport in New York, the author starts to wake up from his version of the “American dream” and gears himself to plunge back into the rough-and-tumble of African society and politics and the complexities of sitting on the edge of a boiling cauldron as contending forces struggle for pieces of the “fruits of independence”.