I applied to the Hertog because of my interest in political issues. I have been informed by various well-wishers that the future of politics belongs to those who have an international perspective on situations. I felt that immersing myself in American politics and Western culture would help me in creating this world view. I hoped to create for myself an understanding of the world whilst turning myself into a cosmopolitan being—an Afropolitan. The results have been wonderful, with a seemingly slight blow of culture shock, from which I am still recovering. Who I am because of the Hertog experience in Washington, DC. The question of who I am because of the Hertog experience carries for me two other ideas: who I was before DC and who I was in DC. What do I stand for now; what would I die for? As human beings we are always changing. I think the question of who we are requires not an answer that alludes to a stagnation but one that points to a perpetual process. It is a very huge question, yet I would like to give it a small bite. First and foremost, I was a black person in Washington, DC. I had never encountered as huge a population of African Americans as I did when I went to Washington. In an instant I realized I was black, but not their kind of black, and they were African but not my kind of African. I don’t even know what I mean by this, but I know that someone looked at me one day after we had a good laugh and some fun together and he said innocently but, I will also add, disconcertingly, “I don’t know why, but I get along with black people very well.” I did not know what to say and did not understand what he meant. Why was he making a distinction between getting along with one race of people, as opposed to getting along with people in general? I am not a stickler about race issues and I wish my entire experience was not somehow colored by this experience, but it was. His remark disturbed me, but I told myself to develop a thicker skin. The next day I discovered I was indeed black. Soon we were making a few remarks about my skin and I was laughing too. Soon I was not only a black person but a good-looking, buff, black young man—not so bad! I did not realize just how much all this was making me uncomfortable until I became self-conscious of my own accent, the sometimes inscrutable way I expressed myself in English, and some of my weird pronunciations. All of a sudden I had been moved from being a human being like everybody else, to being a black young man from Africa. Things had changed and they affected the way I thought. This is just one aspect of who I was in DC, but it cast so many things in a different light. I quickly began to sport some of the biases towards a certain demographic in certain policies we studied. I quickly began to notice where lines could be drawn between peoples – Jews, non-Jews, victims, non-victims, Anglo this, American this, American that (so many distinctions in this one), third-generation immigrants, etc. Even gender issues carried so much profundity and tension now than I had ever realized. All of a sudden someone had given me magnifying glasses in place of contact lenses. Politics suddenly seemed like being sandwiched between a rock and a hard place. One no longer had to look just at conservatives and liberals but also at ethnicities, skin colors, countries of origin, religious beliefs, and other small things that distinguish us fromone another other. This sounds like a paradoxical way of approaching and fostering unity among a people, in a country or in the world. I look back now and I am grateful for such an experience. It was not necessarily fun when I was in the heat of things, grappling with various cultural and personal issues, not to mention the political material we were encountering. Now, I am glad to say, I look in the mirror today and I smile proudly at the color of my skin. However, I am quick to reassure myself 5
Allen Matsika
that I am more than a skin color, religion, or denomination; I am more than a gender or a sexual orientation; I am more than a title I get from what I do, more than a future politician — I am more than what I do. I am a human being, but to me that simply means I am a work in progress, and the work goes on. I would love to say I am more than a human being, and that all creatures are my equals, but I am still working on that aspect of my own being. It might take another sixweek fellowship on Environmental Awareness in the Caribbean Islands to learn more about that.