Fifty years ago I religiously watched re-runs of Tarzan the Ape Man and the star, Johnnie Weismuller, presided over my initiation to exotic Africa. Unlike the recent tongue and cheek incarnations, Weismuller’s Tarzan was sincere. On Saturday afternoons we moved expeditiously through the jungle swinging on a network of vines. Our physical prowess was matched by our profound practical knowledge. For information we read the forest floor and conversed with elephants and chimps. Our intimacy with the environment was unsurpassed and together as super-primal-men we patrolled the jungle and enforced the natural law. Once we witnessed a fiendish native execution. To the wild beat of sweaty drummers, native villains bent and tied two adjacent saplings to the ground to form overlapping arches. Next, they hung a victim upside down in the heart-shaped crotch, one leg lashed to each young tree. The drums reached an unsustainable fury and stopped. A machete rose in the frame. It fell, severing the ropes that bound the saplings ripping the man in half. Cruelty like this was not in the natural order of things, so Tarzan and I called the elephants and directed them to trample the fiends. Africa was my manliness.

Like many small cities, there is a statue in the park. In the middle of Gaborone near Parliament, there is a likeness of the first democratically elected president, Sir Seretse Khama. Fortunately for Khama and his young country, diamonds were discovered in Botswana in the late 1960’s only a few years after independence. Khama returned this new wealth to the people by building basic infrastructure and a free educational system. Today, Botswana has a literacy rate near 80% and by African standards, supports a middle-income economy. Botswana was a British Protectorate instead of a colony, so the land was never apportioned to white settlers, but remained in the hands of the original population. Today, the government offers citizens free land, provided it is used for farming or housing within three years of taking ownership.

Forty-five years ago I was sitting in the pew of an Episcopal Church in Kentucky waiting to drop an envelope of cash in the offering plate that was being passed. A picture of an African child with flies was printed on the envelope. The stomach of the boy was round but his limbs were very skinny. His eyes were enormous in his boney face. He sat cross legged on a patch of dirt and looked up at me, as if I were standing above him deciding his fate. Africa was my righteousness.

Botswana is a consumer society. The River Walk Mall in Gaborone offers a good cup of Americano and a quick internet connection. I bought an organic cotton shirt at Woolworths, hiking socks at the Cape Union Mart and the best oranges I’ve ever eaten at the Pick and Pay. At a local fast food restaurant, I had a good piece of chicken for about the cost of a meal at Colonel Sanders. But food isn’t as cheap for the Batswana as it is for working Americans. The minimum wage here is a 50 cents an hour, so a fast food meal would cost a low wage earner a full day of labor.

Thirty years ago I saw a PBS special that presented the African landscape as an epic novel crowded with well-drawn characters. The adventure began with an aerial shot of the open Savannah; abundant game moved across the plane. The camera moved in and I was so close. Right there. I felt as ruthless as the hyena, as graceful as the antelope, as defensive as the water buffalo, as stealthy as the python and as flamboyant as the flamingo. Africa was not a foreign place. It belonged to humanity. It belonged to me. Africa was my heritage. My teenage cousin felt the same and collected plush lions and monkeys for her bed.

Domestic life in Botswana is the usual. There is a solid home-owning middle class that commutes to work five days a week and comes home to feed the kids and goes to bed only to start up again. Unlike the West, however, where homes are segregated by degrees of grandness into neighborhoods of varying degrees of exclusivity, suburbs in Gaborone are mixed income. Very modest homes with swept earth yards are situated next door to…

upscale homes with well tended gardens. This is in part due to the free land policy of the government. As a result the eclectic suburbs give the impression that Botswana is largely a classless society.

Although there is an egalitarian spirit, the majority of home owners believe in the adage that good fences make good neighbors.

The family I am staying with has a small child who is cared for by mom, dad, aunt, uncle, grandma, grand uncle and baby sitter. Even the gardener takes a turn watching over her. This extended family model is typical of Botswana and it is a very sane way to raise children. Paradoxically, homes are walled and guarded, but family networks are extensive and fluid.

The repetitive work of keeping house is the repetitive work of keeping house. But there are interesting difference in the details of keeping an African home. Brooms, for example, have no handles. To use it one bends at the waist and moves across the floor like a gleaner in a Millet painting. But the stiff bristles are very effective on packed earth yards and low nap carpets.

Fifteen years ago there was genocide in Rwanda. I read about the political and social forces behind the killing, but the causes did not stay in my mind as clearly as the effects. I remember the hackings and severed limbs and a river full of bloated corpses bleached white. I remember a building full of people set on fire. Africa was my psychopathology.

Last week a black African man with whom I had a polite conversation, was compelled, after I left his company, to say that all white people care only about money and that they will do anything for it. He wasn’t, I am told, speaking specifically about me, but my presence was enough to elicit this bit of racism.

Ten years ago I started collecting African music both traditional and Pop. Since I was a teenager I’ve listened to all forms of African inspired music like Soul, Jazz and R and B. So collecting African music was a natural direction. When I need a break from painting, I put on a track from Africando or even the wildly sexy, Jamaican homophobe, Buju Banton, and dance with abandon. Africa was my rhythm.

Today, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” opened in Gaborone. Now Africans can watch the movie and together with Americans, Europeans, Asians, and everyone else go to the exotic world of Hogwarts.