“I don’t think we are going to get back to Africa.” My father did not mean this physically. He meant the Africa of our imagination, that glorious Eden we conjured up as exiles, a place without the Mayflower, Founding Fathers, conquistadors, and the assorted corruptions they had imposed on us. That Africa could no longer even be supported in his imagination because the corruption was not imposed at all but was in us, was part of the very humanity that had been denied us. That is where his skeptical searching landed him—not on the shores of a lost utopia but in the cold fact of human
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