아프리카의 한 추억

Stephanie of Momella

Someone who has seen the movie of "Out of Africa" may have an easier time to read and understand my story.

The original heroine in the actual life, Karen Blixen (played by Meryl Streep) and the hero, Denys George (played by Robert Redford) had been gone long time ago.
But the spirit of the story played out in the East Africa is still living with me and some of us.

Most people probably watched the love story and ended there. I watched it from a different angle and left the theater with a different thought.

It was the 29th, December of 1988,
two days after the summit climb of the Uhuru Peak of Mount Kilimanjaro.
On the way to Nairobi, Kenya for the outwardbound flight out of Africa, we stopped for a night at the Oldonyorok Lodge, located in the Momella region near Arusha, Tanzania.

Under the shadow of two gigantic African volcanic mountains of Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru, it was more than an hour of rough mountainous drive by a four-wheel-drive Land Rover from the main highway connecting Moshi and Arusha.  
This area is in the same vicinity where the movies of "Hatari (John Wayne)" and "Out of Africa" were filmed.

We were just to climb the Mount Meru and tour the Arusha National Park, but had never expected to encounter the living replicas of Karen and Denys of the "Out of Africa" as if we had just entered into the movie set in real time.

By then, luckily, I had seen the movie already at home in America and I knew the whole story. What I remebered in the movie was not just a story of romance between a man and woman, but it was the life and the eventual fate of the European settlers in Africa away from their native homes.

Having lived most of my adult life in America in the similar shoes of theirs, the latter aspect of the story remained in my memory more than anything else. Without having had seen the movie, I would have been totally blind to the significance of the encounter and the lasting memory of it would never have come and been imprinted to live in me.

I saw Stephanie von Mutius, the lady-owner of the lodge, as the living contemporary version of the Karen Blixen, while our tour guide, Tom Ripellino, as the Denys George in the movie.

Stephanie was born between her French father and German mother who were the white Africans (meaning the Europeans living in Africa) then. She went to school at the city of Moshi, in the foothills of Kilimanjaro. She went back to Europe many times but, for some reason that I could not undestand, she decided to live in Tanzania for the rest of her life under the oppressing redtapes and discrimination by the native rules against foreigners.
Her British husband, Bert, was killed in an airplane accident (the similar one that killed Denys in the movie) about a year ago then. She was living alone as a white settler with her 2 and 5 year-old sons in a remote ranch about 100 km from Arusha (now the capital of Tanzania).
After the untimely death of Bert, she completed the unfinished construction of the lodge by herself and opened for business in March of that year. It was a mystery to me that she returned to Tanzania, having chosen not to live in Europe, then living here alone in the middle of the African blacks, and in a total uncertainty of the future.

Tom (as Tom of Zimbabwe in my journal) was an American who used to be a salesman of IBM computer in East Africa. For some reason, he quit the good job and decided to become a tour guide in the East and South Africa, wandering practically homeless. There and then, I could not understand why he had chosen his way of life.

In front of the fireplace till late in the night, I heard the story and the view of their life. I can not write them all here but they remained in my memory vividly for a long time. The choice of life they had taken was beyond my understanding then.

In the next morning, I left Momella and was out of Africa probably for good. I brought the memories of two persons and kept them with me for a long time.

As Tom was a man just like me, I never worried about him and he faded away from my memory very soon. But I remembered Stephanie for a long time afterwards. It was not that I missed her. She, having been neither pretty nor ugly, stayed in me as an undefeatable figure like my mother. In myself, I probably wanted to find the invincible spirit and the toughness that I saw in her and my mother. I always wished that she finds the life that she wanted, a better one than that of Karen Blixon.

Time went by swiftly and silently like the water flowing by the shore of the Ohio River where I ran my life. One day in the new century, after having retired and moved to Denver, I found a DVD set of "Out of Africa" on a store shelf.
I watched it, meeting Karen and Denys all over again there, and then remembered all about Stephanie and Tom.
I remembered the stange life of the four persons again. Then, slowly, I was realizing that I am still sitting in Denver away from my home as well.
After having done all those wanderings and finished my professional duties, why am I still here?
Shoud I have gone back to where I came from? Should I have closed the open loop in the circle of life?

I always thought that I knew what I was doing and where I was going. I always thought that I chose and guided my own direction of life. Did I really know and do that?
After it is almost over and done, I am not sure who pushed the remote control button on my life. At one time, I thought it was me but, now, I am not so sure. I thought that Karen, Denys, Stephanie, and Tom had chosen their own way of life and I could not understand why they had picked the much tougher one in the lonely and strange foreign land.
But gadually it came to my mind that theirs might not have been chosen by them. It probably came upon them without their being known or having chosen it.
And, after all, it seemed that mine probably played in the same way. I realized that theirs are not much different from mine (and us) except in the time, places, and circumstances. Now, I begin to understand why they had been in East Africa and why I have been in America. One way or the other, we were living in the same shoes. It does put all of us in the similar wanderings of life. Wondering what purposes it served and why, regardless if the questions were answered or not, the true meaning of the movie story and my African encounters seems to come alive and make sense.

After having passed a certain point in life, one day, we may realize what our destiny was meant to be. Then, we shall bravely proceed with no remorse, hesitation, or anxiety.
We shall try to fulfill our destiny, and try to find happiness in doing so.

Cheers, to the wandering souls and foreigners-in-eternity among us !