REBECCA J. ROBERTS / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Friday, April 6, 2007 7:00 pm
(“Africa on Six Wheels: A Semester on Safari” by Betty Levitov, Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, 200 pages, $17.95). “How can you judge the relative sanity of someone who would take a bunch of college kids to Africa for a whole semester — twice?” Betty Levitov asks in her preface to this memoir of travel and teaching.
Readers may judge her sanity as they will, but they’re sure to enjoy this virtual tour as Levitov takes them on a sometimes wild, sometimes exhausting, always instructive bus ride from Kenya through Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.
In the fall of 1998 the professor of African studies and English and African literature at Doane College in Crete took her first group of students on a semester’s tour of Africa. Here, she focuses primarily on her second such trip, in 2002.
The subtitle is a misnomer — the group embarks on only a couple of safari excursions — but it’s a catchy lure for the armchair traveler, who won’t be disappointed. There are other adventures, too: whitewater rafting and bungee jumping at Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River; driving dune buggies up and down the vast Namib Desert; and living in backpacker hostels or camping in the backcountry.
But the main point of their travels is to make more visceral connections between worlds. Levitov’s lesson plan moves beyond the classroom, integrating a variety of lessons into their African experience. “What is true learning,” she asks, “if not to connect the self with other people and the world, to communicate one’s ideas, emotions, and thoughts with others?”
To that end, her students study African literature and Kiswahili, the language of sub-Saharan Africa. In Malawi, each student embarks on an apprenticeship with a local craftsperson, working side-by-side on everything from cooking to fishing to woodcarving. The lessons learned extend beyond the tangible accomplishment; as Levitov notes, “One person working closely with another can be a way of understanding the world.”
A few detractions: I would have liked some firsthand accounts of her students’ impressions of the African experience. And the occasional transitions in time, especially when she goes back to her 1998 student trip, are a bit abrupt (though understandable, as they expand the reader’s impressions of each place).
The excursion is not without its anxieties, which include robberies, injuries, marauding hippos, malaria and a near-kidnapping. The biggest inconvenience, however, is the hours of cross-country travel, on byways that are more rut than road, in the Wazungu (white) Whale — the lumbering, breakdown-prone van that serves as the group’s home base over months of travel.
Even the monotony of daylong bus rides, punctuated by the more-than-occasional flat tire, strengthens the bonds of the group, as they learn how to slow down to Africa’s pace, work together and make the most of the moment.
Her students learn to juxtapose the beauty of the places they visit and the people they come to know with the continent’s widespread poverty (“We realize by seeing up close that the life romanticized by images on TV and in National Geographic — beautiful people dressed in colorful cloth living a simple, natural life — is also desperately hard.”)
They also discover, in African villages, a spirit of cooperation and commitment over materialism; a prevailing sense of “we” rather than “I.” (“I am deeply affected by the generosity of spirit I see again and again among people who have so little,” Levitov writes.)
That said, this is more travelogue than educational epiphany. For that purpose alone, though, Levitov’s writing entices; one could plan an inexpensive itinerary through southern Africa based on her experiences, good and bad. Her descriptions of place — the cacophony of smells, voices and colors in local markets; the ever-changing, rocky cliffs of Victoria Falls; and, yes, the elephants, hippos, giraffes and more that hunt and play oblivious to safari sightseers — leave one ready to rent out the house, buy a backpack and experience Africa firsthand.
Any open-minded traveler can experience and appreciate the expanded sense of community that Levitov and her students bring home. For those without benefit of a transglobal plane ticket, “Africa on Six Wheels” brings the teacher’s lesson plan to a wider classroom, with hopes that its journey doesn’t end there.
“As when a pebble drops in a pool,” Levitov writes, “the concentric ripples expand out and out and out.”
Rebecca J. Roberts is the Journal Star’s nation/world editor. Reach her at 473-7305 or broberts@journalstar.com.