'Don’t get out of the car,’ my Nigerian driver instructs as he winds up his window. Joseph is going to talk to the policewoman who has pulled us over because she spotted me taking photos along a Lagos road. With a tinny thud of the Corolla’s door, he’s gone, and I’m left in loud silence.
The unfolding drama has drawn a crowd, eager for a diversion from the monotony of waiting for an odd job or selling items as small as a single cigarette. The onlookers seem more curious than hostile, but I’m not about to get out and test my theory. Embarrassed by their stares, I gaze at the road throttled with semi-trailers waiting to enter the Lagos Port Complex. I tuck the offending iPhone under my thigh, although it’s a bit late for that now.
I was simply taking random pictures of the roadside, a boil of trucks, motorcycles and three-wheeled taxis, peddlers of everything from corncobs to car parts, and women walking with beanpole backs to balance massive baskets of goods on their heads, but the cop seems to think I have a sinister motive, I suppose because I’m evidently a foreigner, and thus a possible spy. ‘I want to know who you are, who is behind you,’ she told Joseph. Other than a few Shell and Chevron workers at the airport, I’ve seen no Westerners here so far.
Nerves frill my stomach, but I remain calm. As a journalist, I ran into similar situations at an airport in Guyana and a guerrilla roadblock in Colombia. Officials unused to outsiders are often suspicious or just want to show off their power. So far, I’ve never had to call the U.S. Embassy.
I arrived in Nigeria the previous night from Sweden. Lagos is the second stop on a pilgrimage to retrace the earliest years of my childhood, the ones that predate my memory, but I’ve heard about from my mother and father my whole life. It’s a zigzag of a journey, thanks to my adventurous parents who moved me around seven countries by the time I was thirteen. Mum and Dad met in Zambia in the early sixties when it was still Northern Rhodesia. My mother was an English nurse and my father a mining engineer from New Zealand. Along with hundreds of other expats, they came to work at Zambia’s huge copper mine in Mufulira near the Congo border. When Mum was eight months pregnant with me, they left Africa for New Zealand where I was born on a winter’s day in June. Three weeks later, we moved to a gold mining town in Fiji. Following Dad’s rising career, we then lived in Sweden, England, Nigeria, New Zealand, Australia and the United States, where I now live.
Most of the countries we lived in, I have revisited over the years, or I lived there when I was an older child, so I remember them well. But there are gaps: Stockholm, where we lived in 1964, and Lagos, from late 1964 to 1966. I’ve also long wanted to visit Zambia, where my parents met. That’s my next stop after Lagos.
The trip represents both a geographical and emotional checkerboard. Travel allowed my parents to escape working-class backgrounds so they thought it would be grand and glamorous to raise their children as citizens of the world. But for me, it has meant a lifetime of living in the limbo of paradox. I am from everywhere and thus nowhere. I have three nationalities although I belong to no country. I can relate to almost anybody, but few can relate to me. I experienced an extraordinarily rich, stimulating childhood, yet it has brought me deep loneliness in its singularity. I have felt conflicted about my childhood my entire life. Perhaps this journey will bring me resolution.
When planning this trip, I wondered whether to skip Nigeria, which is on the U.S. State Department’s ‘Reconsider Travel’ list. But my quest wouldn’t be complete without Lagos, and I’ve travelled without mishap in other countries with State Department warnings. I’d make it brief. Two days.
We arrived in Lagos when I was not even two years old for Dad’s job as the West Africa sales rep for Atlas Copco, a Swedish multinational that sells industrial equipment in 180 countries. We lived in a then-new block of flats on Rycroft Road, which I know thanks to Mum’s notation on the back of a small black and white photo showing Dad holding my sister outside the apartment. After finding Rycroft Road on Google maps, I hired a driver to take me there. It’s a short street in the Apapa district, which is now the site of Nigeria’s largest port.
I’d taken four photos when a traffic warden walked in front of the car, forcing Joseph to a stop. Then two policewomen appeared on either side of the Corolla demanding to know why I was ‘snapping.’
‘I will handle this,’ Joseph said and turned back to the officer in his window. ‘What is the offense? Why have you stopped me?’
The other policewoman was rapping on my window and pointing at the phone in my lap. I ignored her since Joseph was handling the situation. She tried the door handle. I was suddenly glad it was broken.
‘Let me see the camera.’ The policewoman on Joseph’s side poked a long forefinger through the window.
‘It is not a crime to take photos,’ he said. ‘She wasn’t taking photos of you.’
‘The camera.’
I handed him the phone. She tried to grab it, but Joseph jerked it out of her reach. I was grateful for his protectiveness. If she took the phone, I might not see it again.
‘Scroll to the pictures,’ she ordered. Joseph swiped the screen to the slightly fuzzy photos. The other policewoman joined her, and they huddled at the window scrutinizing the pictures like blood spatters at a murder scene.
‘I can delete them,’ I said. ‘They’re really nothing.’
They ignored me. The second officer flashed a finger at a photo. ‘I know that man!’ She disappeared.
Before he’d left the car, Joseph made a phone call. ‘I’m with a friend who was taking pictures. She’s a white lady. I want to know what crime it is to take pictures,’ he said, visibly upset.
HE'S BEEN GONE FOR a while now, and it’s stifling inside the Corolla. I twist to see what’s going on behind the car. Joseph is pleading his case to the lead cop, who’s not buying it. She’s an impressive size, six feet tall with a sturdy build. I hear buzzing and look out my window. A man crouches at the front wheel with a dusty machine. He’s inflating the tire. He duckwalks to the rear tire and does the same. Are they giving Joseph a ticket for underinflated tires?
Joseph returns, grim-faced. The rear door opens. To my surprise, the policewoman slides into the back seat, followed by a well-dressed man then another man with eyeballs that bobble in different directions. The passerby from my photo, the one the other policewoman said she knew. She must have fetched him. Jesus.
No one says anything so I don’t ask where we’re going but I assume it’s the police station. After pushing through the traffic choke, we turn onto a lumpy dirt road to a low-slung, concrete building painted in aqua and chocolate brown. A couple Jeeps with police insignia and light bars are parked outside. I feel spark of excitement. This is going to be interesting.
We file into a dim corridor. The only light comes from a wall of concrete ventilation blocks with holes shaped in a decorative pattern. The policewoman ushers us into an office where a well-built man stands behind a desk. In sharp contrast to the threadbare station, he cuts a smart figure. Standing over six feet with a neatly trimmed mustache, he wears an immaculate white ‘senator suit,’ Nigeria’s traditional cotton tunic-style top with matching fitted-leg pants. His shirt is embroidered with black and red around the neckline and still has sharp creases from an iron. I presume he’s the local police chief.
‘What is going on here?’ he says.
‘She was videoing.’ The policewoman points at me.
He looks puzzled, then Joseph explains our mission to find Rycroft Road.
The chief turns to me. ‘I want to hear from you, Madame.’
‘I wasn’t videoing. I took four photos of the street to have a memory of the area because I lived on Rycroft Road when I was a baby.’ I find the old picture, which I had uploaded onto my phone, and hand it to him.
He smiles. ‘Is that your father?’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘Is that you?’
There’s no point in complicating matters by saying it’s actually my sister. ‘Yes.’ He swipes through the photos I took of the street. ‘I wasn’t taking pictures of anything specific. It’s just to show the area I once lived in. To remember it by.’
He looks at the policewoman. ‘She was just snapping to have a memory of where she lived. They are always snapping. Look, selfies. They love selfies.’ He swishes through the photos with mild amusement. ‘You are free to snap. You can snap me, if you like.’ He hands me back the phone. I have been exonerated.
He turns to Joseph. ‘If you had told the officer this to begin with, we wouldn’t be here. You must respect the police. If the police tells you to do something, you must do it. You have wasted my time. You have wasted the madame’s time. You have wasted the officer’s time.’
The other better dressed man who accompanied us in the car turns out to be a supervisor dispatched after Joseph called the police complaint line. He chimes in. ‘You should behave better.’
Joseph hangs his head and mumbles an apology. Then the chief signals the googly-eyed man standing in silence. ‘Who is this?’ The policewoman starts to explain, but the chief gives a dismissive wave. We’re free to go.
We drive the policewoman and the googly-eyed man back to the intersection, then head to Rycroft Road. We laugh about the incident, which took an hour to resolve.
‘At least we are laughing now,’ Joseph says. ‘It wasn’t so funny a little while ago.’
I ask him what the tire inflation was about. ‘They deflated the tires so I couldn’t drive away. Then I have to pay to have them inflated again. That’s why I was arguing. If the police officer had been a man, there wouldn’t have been any trouble.’
The paved road gives way to a lunar-landscape patch of baked earth then the asphalt starts again. We turn into Rycroft Road. We drive slowly, then near the end of the street, I spot a three-story building, white with grey trim. It’s surrounded by a high wall and metal gate, but through the gap between the wall and gate, I make out distinctive concrete ledges that jut out over the windows, as in the photo.
‘I think that’s it!’
Joseph reverses, and we get out. A security guard ambles over from a plastic chair parked under a tree. This time, Joseph explains my story and asks if I can take a photo. The guard opens the gate and we enter. The place is tidy, the paint fresh.
I place my palm against the wall of the ground-floor flat that we may have lived in and in that moment, I claim my exotic childhood that has often seemed the stuff of story more than reality. For those of us who grew up among far-flung cultures, our childhoods lack physicality. They become Brigadoon-like, existing solely in the mist of memory. It’s inevitable. When we move, we must focus on adapting to a new setting that demands we molt our past self and mold ourselves to fit the present. As a child, I had to change shape so many times, I never really knew who I was, nor did it really matter. I had to belong, and in order to do so, I had to be the same as everyone else, discard the things that made me different. Finding this building is a touchpoint to how my upbringing shaped my true self, where it doesn’t matter what clothes I wear, how I pronounce words, what passport I use.
Joseph snaps a picture of me, triumphant at locating this tiny scrap of my history that I’ve come halfway around the globe to find. It was absolutely worth the hassle to come here.
‘This used to be a nice area,’ he says after we get back in the car and drive through a nearby shopping district. ‘Our problem is poor leadership.’ He gestures at the street. The legions of unemployed, the cratered roads, the dingy shop interiors that mean the power’s out.
The contrast between Stockholm, where I’ve just spent six days, and Lagos could not be more extreme. Lagos is vibrant, the vivid colors and patterns of clothing people wear, its legendary music and movie industries, the multitude of evangelical churches that provide hope along with welcome packets of maize flour. But the air is thick with soot and struggle. Daily life here is an ordeal for many.
Sweden is pine-tree clean and hums with purpose. Stockholm is a lovely city spread among fourteen tiny islands. It has played an oversize role in my life. Dad travelled to corporate headquarters in Stockholm several times a year. He’d bring back toothpaste tubes of salty pink caviar and the rye crispbread we squeezed it onto and gleaming Orrefors crystal that pinged a soprano note when flicked with a forefinger nail. We had Swedes with names like Bengt and Rune over to the house for drinks and dinners or went to theirs. When I had to do a report on a country in fifth grade, I chose Sweden. On the day of my class presentation, Mum made meatballs from a recipe in her Swedish cookbook, and I took my Sámi dolls from northern Sweden, dressed in traditional indigenous clothing, to round out the show-and-tell.
As I wandered around Stockholm’s centuries-old buildings, museums and shops, I was pinged by bits of my childhood. At the Stockholm City Museum, I found mentions of Atlas Copco, the company Dad worked for that no one had ever heard of, but here it’s part of history. At the Swedish Design Museum, a case displayed the same fork-spoon with a black handle that I grew up with using to eat desserts. Guests to our house in New Jersey were always puzzled as to what they were, same with the long-handled cheese slicer. Brightly painted Dalecarlian horses filled shop windows. My sister and I each had one, presents from Dad. As I sat in the lobby of the Grand Hotel, Stockholm’s storied hotel where Dad boasted of having stayed, I felt an overwhelming validation. By virtue of growing up in many places, I have had to constantly explain myself – why I say or do things differently, like different things, laugh at different jokes, even write cursive differently. But all these things I had stumbled across were routine elsewhere. They weren’t odd, or weird, or out of place, and by extrapolation, I wasn’t either.
The biggest validation was ABBA The Museum. In the early seventies, the Swedish quartet was huge in Australia. I had all three of their albums and I’d play them on the record player in the living room. My sister and I would dance and sing and pore over the album covers to choose which of the four were best looking. Sunday nights I watched videos of ABBA and other pop groups on a TV show called ‘Countdown.’ When we moved to America, my thirteen-year-old self was profoundly disappointed that no one liked ABBA and no equivalent of ‘Countdown’ existed. I missed those things terribly but there was nothing I could do except toss them in the ocean of must-forget. When you move countries, you get used to jettisoning beloved things, including people, into that ocean. You learn to move on quickly.
Entering ABBA The Museum was like immersing myself in a tub of amniotic fluid. I went around three times so I could keep singing ‘Waterloo’ and ‘SOS.’ I remembered the lyrics, a little cobwebbed but they were there. Again, the comfort of finding something I’d loved filled me like a balloon. I sat on a bench to anchor myself then a twinge of sorrow pierced me. If I had not had to shrink and twist myself to conform to other cultures, what would I have been like? Would I have been the same shy, introverted bookworm? Probably, but perhaps I would’ve been more confident if I’d had the sturdy platform of belonging underneath me. Maybe not. Who knows? I let the music carry away the thought. It hadn’t been my journey to make.
I headed to the ferry back to central Stockholm. As the boat chugged across the water, I leaned on the railing, huddling against the wind with ‘Waterloo’ playing in my head. I felt serene, full of happiness and gratitude being on that ferry and for all these threads that had braided together to form my life.
I was simply taking random pictures of the roadside, a boil of trucks, motorcycles and three-wheeled taxis, peddlers of everything from corncobs to car parts, and women walking with beanpole backs to balance massive baskets of goods on their heads, but the cop seems to think I have a sinister motive, I suppose because I’m evidently a foreigner, and thus a possible spy. ‘I want to know who you are, who is behind you,’ she told Joseph. Other than a few Shell and Chevron workers at the airport, I’ve seen no Westerners here so far.
Nerves frill my stomach, but I remain calm. As a journalist, I ran into similar situations at an airport in Guyana and a guerrilla roadblock in Colombia. Officials unused to outsiders are often suspicious or just want to show off their power. So far, I’ve never had to call the U.S. Embassy.
I arrived in Nigeria the previous night from Sweden. Lagos is the second stop on a pilgrimage to retrace the earliest years of my childhood, the ones that predate my memory, but I’ve heard about from my mother and father my whole life. It’s a zigzag of a journey, thanks to my adventurous parents who moved me around seven countries by the time I was thirteen. Mum and Dad met in Zambia in the early sixties when it was still Northern Rhodesia. My mother was an English nurse and my father a mining engineer from New Zealand. Along with hundreds of other expats, they came to work at Zambia’s huge copper mine in Mufulira near the Congo border. When Mum was eight months pregnant with me, they left Africa for New Zealand where I was born on a winter’s day in June. Three weeks later, we moved to a gold mining town in Fiji. Following Dad’s rising career, we then lived in Sweden, England, Nigeria, New Zealand, Australia and the United States, where I now live.
Most of the countries we lived in, I have revisited over the years, or I lived there when I was an older child, so I remember them well. But there are gaps: Stockholm, where we lived in 1964, and Lagos, from late 1964 to 1966. I’ve also long wanted to visit Zambia, where my parents met. That’s my next stop after Lagos.
The trip represents both a geographical and emotional checkerboard. Travel allowed my parents to escape working-class backgrounds so they thought it would be grand and glamorous to raise their children as citizens of the world. But for me, it has meant a lifetime of living in the limbo of paradox. I am from everywhere and thus nowhere. I have three nationalities although I belong to no country. I can relate to almost anybody, but few can relate to me. I experienced an extraordinarily rich, stimulating childhood, yet it has brought me deep loneliness in its singularity. I have felt conflicted about my childhood my entire life. Perhaps this journey will bring me resolution.
When planning this trip, I wondered whether to skip Nigeria, which is on the U.S. State Department’s ‘Reconsider Travel’ list. But my quest wouldn’t be complete without Lagos, and I’ve travelled without mishap in other countries with State Department warnings. I’d make it brief. Two days.
We arrived in Lagos when I was not even two years old for Dad’s job as the West Africa sales rep for Atlas Copco, a Swedish multinational that sells industrial equipment in 180 countries. We lived in a then-new block of flats on Rycroft Road, which I know thanks to Mum’s notation on the back of a small black and white photo showing Dad holding my sister outside the apartment. After finding Rycroft Road on Google maps, I hired a driver to take me there. It’s a short street in the Apapa district, which is now the site of Nigeria’s largest port.
I’d taken four photos when a traffic warden walked in front of the car, forcing Joseph to a stop. Then two policewomen appeared on either side of the Corolla demanding to know why I was ‘snapping.’
‘I will handle this,’ Joseph said and turned back to the officer in his window. ‘What is the offense? Why have you stopped me?’
The other policewoman was rapping on my window and pointing at the phone in my lap. I ignored her since Joseph was handling the situation. She tried the door handle. I was suddenly glad it was broken.
‘Let me see the camera.’ The policewoman on Joseph’s side poked a long forefinger through the window.
‘It is not a crime to take photos,’ he said. ‘She wasn’t taking photos of you.’
‘The camera.’
I handed him the phone. She tried to grab it, but Joseph jerked it out of her reach. I was grateful for his protectiveness. If she took the phone, I might not see it again.
‘Scroll to the pictures,’ she ordered. Joseph swiped the screen to the slightly fuzzy photos. The other policewoman joined her, and they huddled at the window scrutinizing the pictures like blood spatters at a murder scene.
‘I can delete them,’ I said. ‘They’re really nothing.’
They ignored me. The second officer flashed a finger at a photo. ‘I know that man!’ She disappeared.
Before he’d left the car, Joseph made a phone call. ‘I’m with a friend who was taking pictures. She’s a white lady. I want to know what crime it is to take pictures,’ he said, visibly upset.
HE'S BEEN GONE FOR a while now, and it’s stifling inside the Corolla. I twist to see what’s going on behind the car. Joseph is pleading his case to the lead cop, who’s not buying it. She’s an impressive size, six feet tall with a sturdy build. I hear buzzing and look out my window. A man crouches at the front wheel with a dusty machine. He’s inflating the tire. He duckwalks to the rear tire and does the same. Are they giving Joseph a ticket for underinflated tires?
Joseph returns, grim-faced. The rear door opens. To my surprise, the policewoman slides into the back seat, followed by a well-dressed man then another man with eyeballs that bobble in different directions. The passerby from my photo, the one the other policewoman said she knew. She must have fetched him. Jesus.
No one says anything so I don’t ask where we’re going but I assume it’s the police station. After pushing through the traffic choke, we turn onto a lumpy dirt road to a low-slung, concrete building painted in aqua and chocolate brown. A couple Jeeps with police insignia and light bars are parked outside. I feel spark of excitement. This is going to be interesting.
We file into a dim corridor. The only light comes from a wall of concrete ventilation blocks with holes shaped in a decorative pattern. The policewoman ushers us into an office where a well-built man stands behind a desk. In sharp contrast to the threadbare station, he cuts a smart figure. Standing over six feet with a neatly trimmed mustache, he wears an immaculate white ‘senator suit,’ Nigeria’s traditional cotton tunic-style top with matching fitted-leg pants. His shirt is embroidered with black and red around the neckline and still has sharp creases from an iron. I presume he’s the local police chief.
‘What is going on here?’ he says.
‘She was videoing.’ The policewoman points at me.
He looks puzzled, then Joseph explains our mission to find Rycroft Road.
The chief turns to me. ‘I want to hear from you, Madame.’
‘I wasn’t videoing. I took four photos of the street to have a memory of the area because I lived on Rycroft Road when I was a baby.’ I find the old picture, which I had uploaded onto my phone, and hand it to him.
He smiles. ‘Is that your father?’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘Is that you?’
There’s no point in complicating matters by saying it’s actually my sister. ‘Yes.’ He swipes through the photos I took of the street. ‘I wasn’t taking pictures of anything specific. It’s just to show the area I once lived in. To remember it by.’
He looks at the policewoman. ‘She was just snapping to have a memory of where she lived. They are always snapping. Look, selfies. They love selfies.’ He swishes through the photos with mild amusement. ‘You are free to snap. You can snap me, if you like.’ He hands me back the phone. I have been exonerated.
He turns to Joseph. ‘If you had told the officer this to begin with, we wouldn’t be here. You must respect the police. If the police tells you to do something, you must do it. You have wasted my time. You have wasted the madame’s time. You have wasted the officer’s time.’
The other better dressed man who accompanied us in the car turns out to be a supervisor dispatched after Joseph called the police complaint line. He chimes in. ‘You should behave better.’
Joseph hangs his head and mumbles an apology. Then the chief signals the googly-eyed man standing in silence. ‘Who is this?’ The policewoman starts to explain, but the chief gives a dismissive wave. We’re free to go.
We drive the policewoman and the googly-eyed man back to the intersection, then head to Rycroft Road. We laugh about the incident, which took an hour to resolve.
‘At least we are laughing now,’ Joseph says. ‘It wasn’t so funny a little while ago.’
I ask him what the tire inflation was about. ‘They deflated the tires so I couldn’t drive away. Then I have to pay to have them inflated again. That’s why I was arguing. If the police officer had been a man, there wouldn’t have been any trouble.’
The paved road gives way to a lunar-landscape patch of baked earth then the asphalt starts again. We turn into Rycroft Road. We drive slowly, then near the end of the street, I spot a three-story building, white with grey trim. It’s surrounded by a high wall and metal gate, but through the gap between the wall and gate, I make out distinctive concrete ledges that jut out over the windows, as in the photo.
‘I think that’s it!’
Joseph reverses, and we get out. A security guard ambles over from a plastic chair parked under a tree. This time, Joseph explains my story and asks if I can take a photo. The guard opens the gate and we enter. The place is tidy, the paint fresh.
I place my palm against the wall of the ground-floor flat that we may have lived in and in that moment, I claim my exotic childhood that has often seemed the stuff of story more than reality. For those of us who grew up among far-flung cultures, our childhoods lack physicality. They become Brigadoon-like, existing solely in the mist of memory. It’s inevitable. When we move, we must focus on adapting to a new setting that demands we molt our past self and mold ourselves to fit the present. As a child, I had to change shape so many times, I never really knew who I was, nor did it really matter. I had to belong, and in order to do so, I had to be the same as everyone else, discard the things that made me different. Finding this building is a touchpoint to how my upbringing shaped my true self, where it doesn’t matter what clothes I wear, how I pronounce words, what passport I use.
Joseph snaps a picture of me, triumphant at locating this tiny scrap of my history that I’ve come halfway around the globe to find. It was absolutely worth the hassle to come here.
‘This used to be a nice area,’ he says after we get back in the car and drive through a nearby shopping district. ‘Our problem is poor leadership.’ He gestures at the street. The legions of unemployed, the cratered roads, the dingy shop interiors that mean the power’s out.
The contrast between Stockholm, where I’ve just spent six days, and Lagos could not be more extreme. Lagos is vibrant, the vivid colors and patterns of clothing people wear, its legendary music and movie industries, the multitude of evangelical churches that provide hope along with welcome packets of maize flour. But the air is thick with soot and struggle. Daily life here is an ordeal for many.
Sweden is pine-tree clean and hums with purpose. Stockholm is a lovely city spread among fourteen tiny islands. It has played an oversize role in my life. Dad travelled to corporate headquarters in Stockholm several times a year. He’d bring back toothpaste tubes of salty pink caviar and the rye crispbread we squeezed it onto and gleaming Orrefors crystal that pinged a soprano note when flicked with a forefinger nail. We had Swedes with names like Bengt and Rune over to the house for drinks and dinners or went to theirs. When I had to do a report on a country in fifth grade, I chose Sweden. On the day of my class presentation, Mum made meatballs from a recipe in her Swedish cookbook, and I took my Sámi dolls from northern Sweden, dressed in traditional indigenous clothing, to round out the show-and-tell.
As I wandered around Stockholm’s centuries-old buildings, museums and shops, I was pinged by bits of my childhood. At the Stockholm City Museum, I found mentions of Atlas Copco, the company Dad worked for that no one had ever heard of, but here it’s part of history. At the Swedish Design Museum, a case displayed the same fork-spoon with a black handle that I grew up with using to eat desserts. Guests to our house in New Jersey were always puzzled as to what they were, same with the long-handled cheese slicer. Brightly painted Dalecarlian horses filled shop windows. My sister and I each had one, presents from Dad. As I sat in the lobby of the Grand Hotel, Stockholm’s storied hotel where Dad boasted of having stayed, I felt an overwhelming validation. By virtue of growing up in many places, I have had to constantly explain myself – why I say or do things differently, like different things, laugh at different jokes, even write cursive differently. But all these things I had stumbled across were routine elsewhere. They weren’t odd, or weird, or out of place, and by extrapolation, I wasn’t either.
The biggest validation was ABBA The Museum. In the early seventies, the Swedish quartet was huge in Australia. I had all three of their albums and I’d play them on the record player in the living room. My sister and I would dance and sing and pore over the album covers to choose which of the four were best looking. Sunday nights I watched videos of ABBA and other pop groups on a TV show called ‘Countdown.’ When we moved to America, my thirteen-year-old self was profoundly disappointed that no one liked ABBA and no equivalent of ‘Countdown’ existed. I missed those things terribly but there was nothing I could do except toss them in the ocean of must-forget. When you move countries, you get used to jettisoning beloved things, including people, into that ocean. You learn to move on quickly.
Entering ABBA The Museum was like immersing myself in a tub of amniotic fluid. I went around three times so I could keep singing ‘Waterloo’ and ‘SOS.’ I remembered the lyrics, a little cobwebbed but they were there. Again, the comfort of finding something I’d loved filled me like a balloon. I sat on a bench to anchor myself then a twinge of sorrow pierced me. If I had not had to shrink and twist myself to conform to other cultures, what would I have been like? Would I have been the same shy, introverted bookworm? Probably, but perhaps I would’ve been more confident if I’d had the sturdy platform of belonging underneath me. Maybe not. Who knows? I let the music carry away the thought. It hadn’t been my journey to make.
I headed to the ferry back to central Stockholm. As the boat chugged across the water, I leaned on the railing, huddling against the wind with ‘Waterloo’ playing in my head. I felt serene, full of happiness and gratitude being on that ferry and for all these threads that had braided together to form my life.
⸎ ⸎ ⸎
AFTER LAGOS, I FLY to Johannesburg and from there into the abdomen of Africa, to Zambia, where I was conceived and almost born. As the prop plane descends over Zambia’s Copperbelt Province, I press my forehead to the windowpane. The sky is a cerulean vault so wide and deep I want to dive into it. Below, the earth is a vast savannah, a rich ochre color from its mineral wealth, daubed with scrubby trees.
My destination, the provincial capital of Ndola, appears. It’s smaller than I thought it would be, gridded with only a few macadam streets. Most roads are ruts of red dust, bordered by shoe-box cement houses, their corrugated metal roofs glinting in the harsh midmorning sun. As at the ABBA museum, I suddenly feel myself expanding like a desiccated sponge sopping up water. I am again reaching my true self, the self I have had to retract for so much of my life as I tried to belong. Tears simmer in my eyes from the unexpected gush of elation at reaching this remote, wild and beautiful outpost of the planet – and of myself.
We land at Ndola’s small airport and clank down the metal staircase onto the tarmac. A rush of hot wind greets me, lifting my spirit even higher. Estelle from the guesthouse where I’m staying picks me up in an SUV. As we drive, I tell her that the following day I want to visit Mufulira and why. ‘Is there a bus?’
‘You can go by bus, but it is cumbersome. You have to change at Kitwe. It is better I arrange a driver for you. I will make some inquiries.’
When we pull into the guesthouse driveway, the high wall topped with electric wires reminds me of the indurate poverty here. The big metal gate squeals open. Estelle drives in with a wave to the security guard. We park and walk by a pavilion of tables decorated with pastel floral arrangements.
‘Is that for a wedding?’ I ask.
‘A kitchen party,’ Estelle says.
I assume it’s akin to a bridal shower. After I check in, the DJ starts up. I lie on the bed as upbeat percussive notes float through the open window and into my memory.
In 1977, a South African hit musical called Ipi Tombi arrived in New York. My parents, delighted at the rare appearance of something African, took us to see it and bought the soundtrack album. I loved the pounding drums, the stamping feet, the rich-throated chants. Four years later when I was a student at Boston University and sharing a flat with two friends, I played the Ipi Tombi soundtrack one Saturday afternoon. One of my roommates marched into the living room, turned off the stereo then marched out. I was stunned, but even more so, embarrassed. I’d put a smidgen of my difference on naked display, and I was rejected, for some reason with anger. I took off the record, slid it into its sleeve and never played it again.
It was far from the only ‘switching off’ incident I’ve experienced over the years. A few months after I’d arrived in the United States, a girl at school snapped at me for using the word ‘properly.’ ‘Why can’t you just say, “You didn’t close the locker right?”’ I never said ‘properly’ again. Once I told a boyfriend about my mobile childhood and he accused me of making it up. More often, people looked at me blankly, then flipped the conversation to another subject, as if I hadn’t said anything at all.
In retrospect, these were petty incidents caused by youthful insensitivity. I absorbed them personally because I didn’t know not to. Still, all these years later, I remember the sting of not being accepted as I was. That feeling stayed with me. Decades into adulthood my stock response was ‘New Jersey’ when anyone asked about my background. But there in Ndola, no one is turning off my music and I realize it was never turned off inside me. The music frees the tears I had frozen into a shield of numbness to protect me from rejection. I get up from the bed and with tears sliding down my cheeks, I dance to the music. With every step I shed all the criticism, the invalidation, the dismissal I have felt as an outsider. The hurt, the self-denial, the loneliness. I dance for all the experiences that gave me my uniqueness. I dance to celebrate me.
THE AIR CONDIDIONER cuts out in the wee hours. It’s the dry season and in countries reliant on hydroelectricity that means power rationing. Awakened by the stuffiness, I get up to open the windows. They’re hinged at the side, like old windows in England. I push them open with the attached metal rod and fasten them by placing a hole in the rod over a peg in the sill. Then I unfurl the mosquito net over the bed, tuck the hem under the mattress to make a tent and crawl under it.
Satisfaction surges in me over my competency with the windows and nets. So often my past has felt like an appendix, originally there for a reason but now devoid of use and meaning. If I were to excise all the bits and pieces of my knowledge from where I’ve lived and travelled, it would make no difference to my present. But lying in my netted cocoon, I realize these things are meaningful because they form part of me. A symphony of croaks and chirps from invisible frogs and crickets wafts in on the breeze. Night in the tropics is abundant with life.
At breakfast the next morning, I meet Isaac, the driver Estelle has arranged, as he butters bread at the breakfast table. He’s bony with grizzled grey hair and wearing a sweater. It’s probably in the mid-eighties, but I suppose this is cool for Zambia, climate being as subjective as beauty. There are two roads to Mufulira, he informs me. We’re taking the new asphalt highway that cuts west to Kitwe, then we’ll turn north to Mufulira, which lies twelve miles south of the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. The other road, although shorter in distance, would take longer because it’s unpaved. That was the one Mum would take to Ndola. Almost sixty years later, it’s still dirt.
We head out in the guesthouse SUV. Isaac isn’t chatty but he tells me he used to work at the Mufulira mine with no further detail. Again, I feel the comforting touchstone of familiarity. I grew up with rock samples around the house and hearing about things like tunnel-boring machines. Mining is foreign to most people, but everyone here knows it.
Sunday morning plays out on the roadside. Women sell onions and tomatoes. Boys kick a soccer ball. Men loll on crates in scraps of rare shade and drink bottled beer. Every so often there’s a church and a clutch of well-dressed people, or a group of girls wearing knee-length Sunday school uniforms with white ankle socks and buckled shoes. We pass sandy villages of mud-brick huts and herds of goats, which probably haven’t changed in centuries.
Driving through Kitwe, I spot the blue cursive script of the Atlas Copco logo bannering a building. I tell Isaac that my father worked for Atlas Copco. He nods. ‘You know it?’ I ask. ‘Oh yes,’ he says. I smile. Another stamp of validation.
A convoy of eighteen-wheelers rumbles in the opposite direction. They’re heading to South Africa, Isaac says, taking cathode sheets from the mines: 99.9 percent pure copper panels about forty square inches, maybe three-quarters of an inch thick. Each trailer carries only three stacks of maybe five cathodes, strapped down with nylon belts, but each sheet weighs about 320 lbs.
After Kitwe, we zoom along a lonely swath of road where the shaggy bush abuts the asphalt. I wave at the few pedestrians. Their faces light up and they wave back. A small boy races us in bare feet that scarcely touch the ground, his chest pushed forward and legs striding wide like he’s hurdling the air. Then concrete buildings, fences and signposts emerge. Mufulira. Within a few minutes, I feel like I’ve been dropped into an English town in the middle of the African bush. Bungalows with chimneys and gabled roofs line the streets. Hedges rim large lawns.
‘This is where the whites lived,’ Isaac says. ‘Their houses are made of brick. We don’t have brick anymore in Zambia.’ He mentions this several times as we drive around. It seems to be a big deal.
Decades ago, the mine built the houses for its expat employees. The mine was then owned by the Rhodesian Selection Trust, a British company. After the mines were nationalized following independence in 1964, the foreigners left, and the houses were sold to locals. Many of the gardens look slightly unkempt with patchy grass and weedy flowerbeds. The houses could do with a lick of paint and repairs to doors and windows. ‘It used to be a nice area,’ Isaac says, oddly echoing Joseph’s words about Rycroft Road in Lagos.
He pulls into the gated driveway beyond which a sweep of verdant lawn is studded with white low-slung buildings. The Mopani Copper Mine Hospital. This must be where Mum worked. There are no people or even cars on the manicured grounds, and I wonder if it’s even functioning. I get out to take a picture, but a security guard pops up like a jack-in-the-box and says photos are not allowed. Unlike Joseph, Isaac doesn’t argue. Mum had told me the hospital was just down the road from the mine and sure enough, the street ends in an entrance to the site. As if on cue, a dump truck lumbers out of great puffs of dust on the dirt road.
Mum told me that in her day, the mine ran most everything in the town and that seems to still be the case. The mine logo is featured on signs on a school, various fences and the sport complex – a swimming pool and clubs for rugby, football, squash and tennis built for expats decades ago and still operating. Isaac notes that the mine, which is now run by a private consortium, runs things better than the government.
We drive through the shabby shopping district. It’s just one main street, similar to what Mum and Dad had described. Dad had told me there was one grocery store, run by a Lebanese guy named Mike, who sold pot out the back. I study the row of shops, but it’s impossible to say which one it might’ve been. We head to the other side of town, driving along the perimeter of the mine. Operating 24/7, it offers gigantic testament to man’s industrial might. The mine itself is underground, but a massive labyrinth of steel pipes and structures – the smelter, concentrator and refinery – tower against the skyline. Smokestacks belch clouds of god-knows-what into the air. A mountain range of black tailings, the waste product from the refining process, disfigures the landscape.
In the lee of the tailings lies a neighborhood of small, densely packed concrete houses shaded by the shiny leaves of banana trees. This is where the African mine workers lived. The difference between their homes and those reserved for whites couldn’t be starker. Guilt and embarrassment nip me. Thankfully, the colonial era is long over.
We stop at another hospital. This one is run by the Ministry of Health, and we can drive in. It’s a cramped campus of brown buildings, some two stories. This must be the hospital that in colonial days was reserved for Africans. Mum worked here, too, taking a bus from the other hospital.
Isaac asks me where my parents lived, but I don’t know. Mum lived in nurses’ quarters near the hospital and Dad in mine housing for single men, but they didn’t remember the street names. Isaac’s keen to show me the golf course, which my parents had also told me about although neither played. We drove around in circles a few times and asked for directions that led us in more circles until finally I see a sign. We drive up to a white cement building, the clubhouse, which looks new, and beyond it the sun-dulled green. Sprinklers tick as they spray water. It appears under construction. Earth is heaped everywhere, and workers rest in the shade. It’s a beautiful spot. I wonder if many people play golf here.
We head back to Ndola in late afternoon’s golden glow. Meshing what I’ve just seen with my parents’ stories, I imagine their life in Mufulira. Despite the remote location and heat, it would have been comfy. Each house was bigger than the average English home and would’ve had several servants. Parties and dinners formed the web of social life, as well as the Flying Club, the main bar. My father, Bill, could often be found there drinking with Eamon, his Irish mate, and the rough South Africans who made up most of the expat mine workers, or he’d be holding court in his flat’s front garden where African miners would come to drink beer and listen to his stories in the evenings. The air would have been redolent with the dusky odor of sweat and fruity laughs and the rhythm of log drums from the African side of town. On payday, Africans walked home from the mine balancing buckets of beer on their heads as part of their salary.
I picture my mother Dorothy, crisp in her nursing uniform and cap, checking the time on the upside-down nurse’s watch pinned to her apron as she flitted among wards and operating theaters, delivering babies and setting bone breaks from drunken brawls. She worked with a Belgian doctor who had fled the recent revolt against Belgium’s rule in Congo and several Belgian nuns. I imagine her discussing with them the latest case of a strange fatal wasting illness, which decades later she thought could’ve been early instances of HIV, then after her shift getting gussied up for a kneesup at the Flying Club or a cocktail party.
But I also see how the expat enclave would have been an insular world, where gossip was probably even more popular a past-time than drinking and sport, the reason why Mum, after discovering she was pregnant with me, arranged a quick wedding in Nairobi. My parents later left for New Zealand so I could be born there. Both Mum and Dad had fond memories of Mufulira. They brought Africa with them wherever they went afterward, and their stories became woven into my childhood along with the artifacts we lugged from country to country: a large map of Africa made out of different woods, Ashanti stools and Kente cloths, malachite ashtrays and bead necklaces, carved wooden animals and figures.
The following day, I fly south to Livingstone and Victoria Falls on the Zambian border with Zimbabwe, where my parents had gone on their honeymoon. Since it’s dry season, only a fraction of the normal volume of the Zambezi River plummets over the cliff, leaving large sections of the gorge exposed as dry rock. Still, there’s enough water hitting the river below to send up a roar and a cooling mist that coats my skin for just moments. It evaporates almost instantly in the baking heat. I take a photo of myself in front of the large statue of David Livingstone, in the same pose as a picture of my mother holding a sunhat.
In the Livingstone Museum, which I tour with the help of my phone flashlight because the power cuts out, I find a display case detailing a story Mum has often mentioned: an Englishwoman whose car was set on fire by Africans protesting colonial rule as she drove on the Ndola-Mufulira Road. She later died and the perpetrators were hanged. It happened in 1960 shortly before Mum arrived in Mufulira, rattling the expat colony. Again, I feel a jigsaw piece of my history fall into place.
Since I’m now on established tourist territory, I run into fellow travellers. A South African woman who was working in an orphanage in Malawi and is driving solo to Cape Town, an American nutritionist working for a hunger-relief NGO in South Sudan, a young Fulbright scholar interning for a microfinance NGO, a Dutchman whose aunt lives in Lusaka, the Zambian capital. There are also a New Zealander, an American and a German here for whitewater kayaking on the Zambezi. These are people who value experience over comfort, who have a rugged sense of adventure and discovery. They are like me.
I tell Hamish, the Kiwi, about my African quest. ‘Everybody who comes here has a story. It’s unlike anywhere else I’ve travelled,’ he says. After I tell him I was born in Oamaru, he tells me he’s from Cromwell. I nod, assuming it’s somewhere on the South Island. This is another conundrum I often face because of my peripatetic childhood. I was born in New Zealand, but I only lived a few years there as a small child, so I don’t know it well. I can’t really lay claim to Kiwihood. Same with Australia. I considered myself an Aussie until I went back two years after we moved to the America, and everybody told me how American I was. It was disappointing and painful. I realized then I didn’t belong anywhere. After that, I thought I just had to be American, so I focused on papering over the vital part of myself that wasn’t American.
The nutritionist asks where I grew up after I say I live in Los Angeles. She must’ve picked up my odd accent. I note that she didn’t ask, ‘Where are you from?’, the question I dread since I have no real answer. I tell her how much I appreciate the phrasing of her question after I tell her my story. Later, I realize that maybe she’s given me the answer to my perennial dilemma of what to say when people ask where I’m from. I can just say, ‘I grew up around the world,’ or ‘I grew up in many places.’ I don’t have to be ‘from’ anywhere at all. Change a few words and my lifelong angst is resolved. The simplicity of it astounds me. Why didn’t I think of this before?
Todd, the bright-eyed Fulbright, asks me about my travel wish list. We discuss places then I say, ‘Actually, there’s really no place I wouldn’t go. I’d go anywhere.’
‘I feel the same way,’ he says. ‘I’d go anywhere, too.’
Kindred spirits. No one questions why I travel alone, why I chose to go to Africa, how I pronounce certain words. As we swap travel stories, the warmth of acceptance and understanding fills the chasm inside me. It’s a rare feeling. I revel in it since I know it’ll be fleeting, such is the nature of encounters with the relentlessly curious. We are always moving. But in these brief intervals in these pockets of wilderness, I find solace in people like me.
MY TRIP ENDS WITH a stopover in Qatar, where my cousin’s daughter lives with her family. Nicki takes me on a tour around Doha. The city is filled with space-age architecture and over-the-top things like bollards that spew cooled air into the street and a department store that looks like a palace.
Nicki and her husband AJ, who are both from New Zealand but met in London, live in a compound of expats from all over the world. As we sip gin and tonics in the late afternoon with their neighbor, the Australian ambassador, their three young children stream in and out of the house with friends from France, Switzerland, and Australia in tow like ribbons.
As I watch the two girls and boy, their white-blond hair tangled from swimming like corn silk, I see myself and my sister and brother playing in our front garden in Sydney, our bare feet caked with dirt as the neighbors’ pet cockatoo screeches.
‘They go to an international school,’ Nicki tells me. ‘It really focuses on teaching them to be global citizens.’
The world needs more global citizens. People who can bridge the divides of language and culture. People who value difference over self-righteousness. People who instinctively include not exclude. But all that goes against the primal human need to belong and to find superiority in that belonging. It can be a difficult thing, I have found, to be a global citizen, but it will likely be easier for these kids. I’ve discovered there’s a name for us children shuttled around the world because of parents’ jobs. We’re called ‘third culture kids,’ and now there are books and studies and counseling to help kids with the emotional journey that comes with the geographic one.
I can’t help but wish my parents had enrolled me in international schools, especially when we moved to New Jersey. Instead, I went to the local public high school. It was like being thrown into the deep end and having to learn to swim. I went from an exclusive private girls’ school in Sydney, where not wearing a hat with your uniform off school grounds was a demerit, to a New Jersey public school where teenagers made out in hallways and came to class stoned. It was an awful four years. The most I can say about it was that it strengthened my resilience.
EARLY THE NEXT morning I’m in Doha’s airport to catch my sixteen-hour flight back to Los Angeles. It’s Sunday, a workday in Qatar, so the place is bustling. I pass a tall, bearded man dressed in a thobe, a long white tunic, with a hooded falcon perched on a leather gauntlet on his forearm. I pass women cloaked in black abayas, their faces mysterious behind their veils, lost-looking Westerners backs bowed under the weight of backpacks, giggling Asian girls snapping selfies with a massive teddy bear. I hear snatches of English and Arabic, French and German, Russian and Japanese, and languages I can’t identify. I feel expanded again, that inner connection to myself. As a little girl, I loved international airports. I still do. They are the modern crossroads of the world.
I reach the gate for my flight. Flowing from airport to airport, country to country, continent to continent on this trip, I realize I feel most alive and fulfilled when I’m heading into the unknown. It’s not always a comfortable feeling, but I’m comfortable feeling it because I grew up with it. I trust that things will work out. I don’t fear that they won’t. Perhaps I’m lucky to have this sense of adventure, this embrace of change, this restlessness that keeps me searching and learning. My childhood, I realize, will always mean that I’m a perennial outsider, forever the hexagon trying to squeeze into a round hole, and that will make me lonely at times. But it also means I can do something that most people are afraid to do. I can go beyond.
The urge for beyond has led me to quit jobs to live in three other countries as an adult (Spain, Guatemala and Venezuela) and to report from fourteen countries as a freelance foreign correspondent in Latin America. It has led me to take risks instead of shrink from them, to trust instead of fear, to seek out difference instead of judge it, to see that we humans are really all the same and to appreciate difference as idiosyncrasy that makes us interesting. Gaining all this has come at a cost of roots, of physical home and sense of belonging. It has meant the loss of relationships and many favorite things. But on this trip, I learned that I have a home, albeit not a traditional one. There are bits of it scattered around the world, but I carry the complete mosaic of it inside me, and I will keep adding pieces to it. It’s completely unique and it’s me.
I stare out the plate-glass window at the tail wings of aircraft and do what I have done since I was little: Guess which countries the planes are from. Then boarding for my flight is announced and I join the queue.
My destination, the provincial capital of Ndola, appears. It’s smaller than I thought it would be, gridded with only a few macadam streets. Most roads are ruts of red dust, bordered by shoe-box cement houses, their corrugated metal roofs glinting in the harsh midmorning sun. As at the ABBA museum, I suddenly feel myself expanding like a desiccated sponge sopping up water. I am again reaching my true self, the self I have had to retract for so much of my life as I tried to belong. Tears simmer in my eyes from the unexpected gush of elation at reaching this remote, wild and beautiful outpost of the planet – and of myself.
We land at Ndola’s small airport and clank down the metal staircase onto the tarmac. A rush of hot wind greets me, lifting my spirit even higher. Estelle from the guesthouse where I’m staying picks me up in an SUV. As we drive, I tell her that the following day I want to visit Mufulira and why. ‘Is there a bus?’
‘You can go by bus, but it is cumbersome. You have to change at Kitwe. It is better I arrange a driver for you. I will make some inquiries.’
When we pull into the guesthouse driveway, the high wall topped with electric wires reminds me of the indurate poverty here. The big metal gate squeals open. Estelle drives in with a wave to the security guard. We park and walk by a pavilion of tables decorated with pastel floral arrangements.
‘Is that for a wedding?’ I ask.
‘A kitchen party,’ Estelle says.
I assume it’s akin to a bridal shower. After I check in, the DJ starts up. I lie on the bed as upbeat percussive notes float through the open window and into my memory.
In 1977, a South African hit musical called Ipi Tombi arrived in New York. My parents, delighted at the rare appearance of something African, took us to see it and bought the soundtrack album. I loved the pounding drums, the stamping feet, the rich-throated chants. Four years later when I was a student at Boston University and sharing a flat with two friends, I played the Ipi Tombi soundtrack one Saturday afternoon. One of my roommates marched into the living room, turned off the stereo then marched out. I was stunned, but even more so, embarrassed. I’d put a smidgen of my difference on naked display, and I was rejected, for some reason with anger. I took off the record, slid it into its sleeve and never played it again.
It was far from the only ‘switching off’ incident I’ve experienced over the years. A few months after I’d arrived in the United States, a girl at school snapped at me for using the word ‘properly.’ ‘Why can’t you just say, “You didn’t close the locker right?”’ I never said ‘properly’ again. Once I told a boyfriend about my mobile childhood and he accused me of making it up. More often, people looked at me blankly, then flipped the conversation to another subject, as if I hadn’t said anything at all.
In retrospect, these were petty incidents caused by youthful insensitivity. I absorbed them personally because I didn’t know not to. Still, all these years later, I remember the sting of not being accepted as I was. That feeling stayed with me. Decades into adulthood my stock response was ‘New Jersey’ when anyone asked about my background. But there in Ndola, no one is turning off my music and I realize it was never turned off inside me. The music frees the tears I had frozen into a shield of numbness to protect me from rejection. I get up from the bed and with tears sliding down my cheeks, I dance to the music. With every step I shed all the criticism, the invalidation, the dismissal I have felt as an outsider. The hurt, the self-denial, the loneliness. I dance for all the experiences that gave me my uniqueness. I dance to celebrate me.
THE AIR CONDIDIONER cuts out in the wee hours. It’s the dry season and in countries reliant on hydroelectricity that means power rationing. Awakened by the stuffiness, I get up to open the windows. They’re hinged at the side, like old windows in England. I push them open with the attached metal rod and fasten them by placing a hole in the rod over a peg in the sill. Then I unfurl the mosquito net over the bed, tuck the hem under the mattress to make a tent and crawl under it.
Satisfaction surges in me over my competency with the windows and nets. So often my past has felt like an appendix, originally there for a reason but now devoid of use and meaning. If I were to excise all the bits and pieces of my knowledge from where I’ve lived and travelled, it would make no difference to my present. But lying in my netted cocoon, I realize these things are meaningful because they form part of me. A symphony of croaks and chirps from invisible frogs and crickets wafts in on the breeze. Night in the tropics is abundant with life.
At breakfast the next morning, I meet Isaac, the driver Estelle has arranged, as he butters bread at the breakfast table. He’s bony with grizzled grey hair and wearing a sweater. It’s probably in the mid-eighties, but I suppose this is cool for Zambia, climate being as subjective as beauty. There are two roads to Mufulira, he informs me. We’re taking the new asphalt highway that cuts west to Kitwe, then we’ll turn north to Mufulira, which lies twelve miles south of the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. The other road, although shorter in distance, would take longer because it’s unpaved. That was the one Mum would take to Ndola. Almost sixty years later, it’s still dirt.
We head out in the guesthouse SUV. Isaac isn’t chatty but he tells me he used to work at the Mufulira mine with no further detail. Again, I feel the comforting touchstone of familiarity. I grew up with rock samples around the house and hearing about things like tunnel-boring machines. Mining is foreign to most people, but everyone here knows it.
Sunday morning plays out on the roadside. Women sell onions and tomatoes. Boys kick a soccer ball. Men loll on crates in scraps of rare shade and drink bottled beer. Every so often there’s a church and a clutch of well-dressed people, or a group of girls wearing knee-length Sunday school uniforms with white ankle socks and buckled shoes. We pass sandy villages of mud-brick huts and herds of goats, which probably haven’t changed in centuries.
Driving through Kitwe, I spot the blue cursive script of the Atlas Copco logo bannering a building. I tell Isaac that my father worked for Atlas Copco. He nods. ‘You know it?’ I ask. ‘Oh yes,’ he says. I smile. Another stamp of validation.
A convoy of eighteen-wheelers rumbles in the opposite direction. They’re heading to South Africa, Isaac says, taking cathode sheets from the mines: 99.9 percent pure copper panels about forty square inches, maybe three-quarters of an inch thick. Each trailer carries only three stacks of maybe five cathodes, strapped down with nylon belts, but each sheet weighs about 320 lbs.
After Kitwe, we zoom along a lonely swath of road where the shaggy bush abuts the asphalt. I wave at the few pedestrians. Their faces light up and they wave back. A small boy races us in bare feet that scarcely touch the ground, his chest pushed forward and legs striding wide like he’s hurdling the air. Then concrete buildings, fences and signposts emerge. Mufulira. Within a few minutes, I feel like I’ve been dropped into an English town in the middle of the African bush. Bungalows with chimneys and gabled roofs line the streets. Hedges rim large lawns.
‘This is where the whites lived,’ Isaac says. ‘Their houses are made of brick. We don’t have brick anymore in Zambia.’ He mentions this several times as we drive around. It seems to be a big deal.
Decades ago, the mine built the houses for its expat employees. The mine was then owned by the Rhodesian Selection Trust, a British company. After the mines were nationalized following independence in 1964, the foreigners left, and the houses were sold to locals. Many of the gardens look slightly unkempt with patchy grass and weedy flowerbeds. The houses could do with a lick of paint and repairs to doors and windows. ‘It used to be a nice area,’ Isaac says, oddly echoing Joseph’s words about Rycroft Road in Lagos.
He pulls into the gated driveway beyond which a sweep of verdant lawn is studded with white low-slung buildings. The Mopani Copper Mine Hospital. This must be where Mum worked. There are no people or even cars on the manicured grounds, and I wonder if it’s even functioning. I get out to take a picture, but a security guard pops up like a jack-in-the-box and says photos are not allowed. Unlike Joseph, Isaac doesn’t argue. Mum had told me the hospital was just down the road from the mine and sure enough, the street ends in an entrance to the site. As if on cue, a dump truck lumbers out of great puffs of dust on the dirt road.
Mum told me that in her day, the mine ran most everything in the town and that seems to still be the case. The mine logo is featured on signs on a school, various fences and the sport complex – a swimming pool and clubs for rugby, football, squash and tennis built for expats decades ago and still operating. Isaac notes that the mine, which is now run by a private consortium, runs things better than the government.
We drive through the shabby shopping district. It’s just one main street, similar to what Mum and Dad had described. Dad had told me there was one grocery store, run by a Lebanese guy named Mike, who sold pot out the back. I study the row of shops, but it’s impossible to say which one it might’ve been. We head to the other side of town, driving along the perimeter of the mine. Operating 24/7, it offers gigantic testament to man’s industrial might. The mine itself is underground, but a massive labyrinth of steel pipes and structures – the smelter, concentrator and refinery – tower against the skyline. Smokestacks belch clouds of god-knows-what into the air. A mountain range of black tailings, the waste product from the refining process, disfigures the landscape.
In the lee of the tailings lies a neighborhood of small, densely packed concrete houses shaded by the shiny leaves of banana trees. This is where the African mine workers lived. The difference between their homes and those reserved for whites couldn’t be starker. Guilt and embarrassment nip me. Thankfully, the colonial era is long over.
We stop at another hospital. This one is run by the Ministry of Health, and we can drive in. It’s a cramped campus of brown buildings, some two stories. This must be the hospital that in colonial days was reserved for Africans. Mum worked here, too, taking a bus from the other hospital.
Isaac asks me where my parents lived, but I don’t know. Mum lived in nurses’ quarters near the hospital and Dad in mine housing for single men, but they didn’t remember the street names. Isaac’s keen to show me the golf course, which my parents had also told me about although neither played. We drove around in circles a few times and asked for directions that led us in more circles until finally I see a sign. We drive up to a white cement building, the clubhouse, which looks new, and beyond it the sun-dulled green. Sprinklers tick as they spray water. It appears under construction. Earth is heaped everywhere, and workers rest in the shade. It’s a beautiful spot. I wonder if many people play golf here.
We head back to Ndola in late afternoon’s golden glow. Meshing what I’ve just seen with my parents’ stories, I imagine their life in Mufulira. Despite the remote location and heat, it would have been comfy. Each house was bigger than the average English home and would’ve had several servants. Parties and dinners formed the web of social life, as well as the Flying Club, the main bar. My father, Bill, could often be found there drinking with Eamon, his Irish mate, and the rough South Africans who made up most of the expat mine workers, or he’d be holding court in his flat’s front garden where African miners would come to drink beer and listen to his stories in the evenings. The air would have been redolent with the dusky odor of sweat and fruity laughs and the rhythm of log drums from the African side of town. On payday, Africans walked home from the mine balancing buckets of beer on their heads as part of their salary.
I picture my mother Dorothy, crisp in her nursing uniform and cap, checking the time on the upside-down nurse’s watch pinned to her apron as she flitted among wards and operating theaters, delivering babies and setting bone breaks from drunken brawls. She worked with a Belgian doctor who had fled the recent revolt against Belgium’s rule in Congo and several Belgian nuns. I imagine her discussing with them the latest case of a strange fatal wasting illness, which decades later she thought could’ve been early instances of HIV, then after her shift getting gussied up for a kneesup at the Flying Club or a cocktail party.
But I also see how the expat enclave would have been an insular world, where gossip was probably even more popular a past-time than drinking and sport, the reason why Mum, after discovering she was pregnant with me, arranged a quick wedding in Nairobi. My parents later left for New Zealand so I could be born there. Both Mum and Dad had fond memories of Mufulira. They brought Africa with them wherever they went afterward, and their stories became woven into my childhood along with the artifacts we lugged from country to country: a large map of Africa made out of different woods, Ashanti stools and Kente cloths, malachite ashtrays and bead necklaces, carved wooden animals and figures.
The following day, I fly south to Livingstone and Victoria Falls on the Zambian border with Zimbabwe, where my parents had gone on their honeymoon. Since it’s dry season, only a fraction of the normal volume of the Zambezi River plummets over the cliff, leaving large sections of the gorge exposed as dry rock. Still, there’s enough water hitting the river below to send up a roar and a cooling mist that coats my skin for just moments. It evaporates almost instantly in the baking heat. I take a photo of myself in front of the large statue of David Livingstone, in the same pose as a picture of my mother holding a sunhat.
In the Livingstone Museum, which I tour with the help of my phone flashlight because the power cuts out, I find a display case detailing a story Mum has often mentioned: an Englishwoman whose car was set on fire by Africans protesting colonial rule as she drove on the Ndola-Mufulira Road. She later died and the perpetrators were hanged. It happened in 1960 shortly before Mum arrived in Mufulira, rattling the expat colony. Again, I feel a jigsaw piece of my history fall into place.
Since I’m now on established tourist territory, I run into fellow travellers. A South African woman who was working in an orphanage in Malawi and is driving solo to Cape Town, an American nutritionist working for a hunger-relief NGO in South Sudan, a young Fulbright scholar interning for a microfinance NGO, a Dutchman whose aunt lives in Lusaka, the Zambian capital. There are also a New Zealander, an American and a German here for whitewater kayaking on the Zambezi. These are people who value experience over comfort, who have a rugged sense of adventure and discovery. They are like me.
I tell Hamish, the Kiwi, about my African quest. ‘Everybody who comes here has a story. It’s unlike anywhere else I’ve travelled,’ he says. After I tell him I was born in Oamaru, he tells me he’s from Cromwell. I nod, assuming it’s somewhere on the South Island. This is another conundrum I often face because of my peripatetic childhood. I was born in New Zealand, but I only lived a few years there as a small child, so I don’t know it well. I can’t really lay claim to Kiwihood. Same with Australia. I considered myself an Aussie until I went back two years after we moved to the America, and everybody told me how American I was. It was disappointing and painful. I realized then I didn’t belong anywhere. After that, I thought I just had to be American, so I focused on papering over the vital part of myself that wasn’t American.
The nutritionist asks where I grew up after I say I live in Los Angeles. She must’ve picked up my odd accent. I note that she didn’t ask, ‘Where are you from?’, the question I dread since I have no real answer. I tell her how much I appreciate the phrasing of her question after I tell her my story. Later, I realize that maybe she’s given me the answer to my perennial dilemma of what to say when people ask where I’m from. I can just say, ‘I grew up around the world,’ or ‘I grew up in many places.’ I don’t have to be ‘from’ anywhere at all. Change a few words and my lifelong angst is resolved. The simplicity of it astounds me. Why didn’t I think of this before?
Todd, the bright-eyed Fulbright, asks me about my travel wish list. We discuss places then I say, ‘Actually, there’s really no place I wouldn’t go. I’d go anywhere.’
‘I feel the same way,’ he says. ‘I’d go anywhere, too.’
Kindred spirits. No one questions why I travel alone, why I chose to go to Africa, how I pronounce certain words. As we swap travel stories, the warmth of acceptance and understanding fills the chasm inside me. It’s a rare feeling. I revel in it since I know it’ll be fleeting, such is the nature of encounters with the relentlessly curious. We are always moving. But in these brief intervals in these pockets of wilderness, I find solace in people like me.
MY TRIP ENDS WITH a stopover in Qatar, where my cousin’s daughter lives with her family. Nicki takes me on a tour around Doha. The city is filled with space-age architecture and over-the-top things like bollards that spew cooled air into the street and a department store that looks like a palace.
Nicki and her husband AJ, who are both from New Zealand but met in London, live in a compound of expats from all over the world. As we sip gin and tonics in the late afternoon with their neighbor, the Australian ambassador, their three young children stream in and out of the house with friends from France, Switzerland, and Australia in tow like ribbons.
As I watch the two girls and boy, their white-blond hair tangled from swimming like corn silk, I see myself and my sister and brother playing in our front garden in Sydney, our bare feet caked with dirt as the neighbors’ pet cockatoo screeches.
‘They go to an international school,’ Nicki tells me. ‘It really focuses on teaching them to be global citizens.’
The world needs more global citizens. People who can bridge the divides of language and culture. People who value difference over self-righteousness. People who instinctively include not exclude. But all that goes against the primal human need to belong and to find superiority in that belonging. It can be a difficult thing, I have found, to be a global citizen, but it will likely be easier for these kids. I’ve discovered there’s a name for us children shuttled around the world because of parents’ jobs. We’re called ‘third culture kids,’ and now there are books and studies and counseling to help kids with the emotional journey that comes with the geographic one.
I can’t help but wish my parents had enrolled me in international schools, especially when we moved to New Jersey. Instead, I went to the local public high school. It was like being thrown into the deep end and having to learn to swim. I went from an exclusive private girls’ school in Sydney, where not wearing a hat with your uniform off school grounds was a demerit, to a New Jersey public school where teenagers made out in hallways and came to class stoned. It was an awful four years. The most I can say about it was that it strengthened my resilience.
EARLY THE NEXT morning I’m in Doha’s airport to catch my sixteen-hour flight back to Los Angeles. It’s Sunday, a workday in Qatar, so the place is bustling. I pass a tall, bearded man dressed in a thobe, a long white tunic, with a hooded falcon perched on a leather gauntlet on his forearm. I pass women cloaked in black abayas, their faces mysterious behind their veils, lost-looking Westerners backs bowed under the weight of backpacks, giggling Asian girls snapping selfies with a massive teddy bear. I hear snatches of English and Arabic, French and German, Russian and Japanese, and languages I can’t identify. I feel expanded again, that inner connection to myself. As a little girl, I loved international airports. I still do. They are the modern crossroads of the world.
I reach the gate for my flight. Flowing from airport to airport, country to country, continent to continent on this trip, I realize I feel most alive and fulfilled when I’m heading into the unknown. It’s not always a comfortable feeling, but I’m comfortable feeling it because I grew up with it. I trust that things will work out. I don’t fear that they won’t. Perhaps I’m lucky to have this sense of adventure, this embrace of change, this restlessness that keeps me searching and learning. My childhood, I realize, will always mean that I’m a perennial outsider, forever the hexagon trying to squeeze into a round hole, and that will make me lonely at times. But it also means I can do something that most people are afraid to do. I can go beyond.
The urge for beyond has led me to quit jobs to live in three other countries as an adult (Spain, Guatemala and Venezuela) and to report from fourteen countries as a freelance foreign correspondent in Latin America. It has led me to take risks instead of shrink from them, to trust instead of fear, to seek out difference instead of judge it, to see that we humans are really all the same and to appreciate difference as idiosyncrasy that makes us interesting. Gaining all this has come at a cost of roots, of physical home and sense of belonging. It has meant the loss of relationships and many favorite things. But on this trip, I learned that I have a home, albeit not a traditional one. There are bits of it scattered around the world, but I carry the complete mosaic of it inside me, and I will keep adding pieces to it. It’s completely unique and it’s me.
I stare out the plate-glass window at the tail wings of aircraft and do what I have done since I was little: Guess which countries the planes are from. Then boarding for my flight is announced and I join the queue.
Christina Hoag is a former journalist. She is the author of the novels Law of the Jungle, Girl on the Brink and Skin of Tattoos. Her short stories and essays have appeared in literary reviews including Lunch Ticket, Toasted Cheese and Shooter, and have won several awards. For more information: https://christinahoag.com
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