USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Burkinabe Man By Kara Garbe Balcerzak

If you were a Burkinabe man, one of the good ones, you alone would bear the weight of responsibility. You would take charge of growing food for your family, from the planting to the harvesting. You must decide when to plant: early enough to reap the first rains of the season, but not so early that your seeds lie blankly in dormant earth, exposure and hungry critters sucking away the promise of fruition. When the seeds sprout, you must keep your rows of corn and millet free of weeds, giving them a monopoly over the soil's weak nutrients.

If you were not lucky, you would walk (not bike) five or six miles to your fields at dawn, then make the return trip at sunset. You would do everything by hand, hunched over rounded rows of crops with the foot-long hoe crafted in the village from wood and steel, sweat soaking your thin t-shirt, dirt covering your flip-flopped feet. You would work every day but Sunday, which is God's day, and you would know this because of the Catholic mission that came from Belgium fifty years ago, before you were born.

- Kara Garbe Balcerzak

Read the rest here:

https://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/pastissuestwo/brev38/Balcerzak38.html

I would be curious to get the reaction of folks upon reading this piece. I found myself conflicted. On the one hand I enjoyed the prose and I found it engaging. On the other hand, I thought it was patronizing, as if written by yet another know it-all liberal, this awful sense that brown people are cute mimic-humans. And then also this other thought, why is this attitude still so prevalent, even in the 21st century? Do we bear any responsibility in this?

- Ikhide

 

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