Editor's Letter

Into Africa

If Christopher Hitchens's contribution this month is a bit longer than his usual "Cultural Elite" essay, it's because we asked him to cover a topic of some magnitude: the African continent. His extraordinary dispatch, "African Gothic," on page 92, is idiosyncratic and impressionistic, infused with a rich detail and texture that

convey the epic vastness of his subject. Accompanied by photographer Ed Kashi, Hitchens spent five weeks in seven different countries, traveling more than 7,000 miles by plane, jeep, and helicopter, beginning at the Horn of Africa, crossing the continent at its tip, and then heading back up the western coast. Along the way, he was reminded how wrong many of the stereotypes can be. "People are always referring to 'the Dark Continent,' " he notes, "but the first thing that strikes you is how beautifully lit it is. And though a lot of its people are ground down, Africa is also the first place where our species walked upright."

As he points out, "Africa today is relayed to the rest of the world ... by brief and sad or shocking images that stay for a moment on the retina before fading away again." The swollen infant, the careless pile of bodies, the red-eyed slum dweller. But, with a combination of empathy, outrage, and wit, Hitchens manages to widen the lens, to return to the nations he visited their singularity—whether the singularity of despair or, less frequently, of hope.

One of his concerns, he recalls, was "whether it made sense, in a continent so big as to have Nelson Mandela's inauguration and the slaughterhouse of Rwanda in the same month, to write about Africa as a discrete subject." Does anything bind the degraded cesspool of Mobutu's Zaire to the goodwill and sanity pervading newborn Eritrea? Or a sober gathering of Kenyan intellectuals to the sacred crocodiles swimming alongside an enormous basilica erected in the bush by Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the Ivory Coast's late despot? Hitchens found that "in fact there is an idea of Africa, and I think it's still alive as an idea." He also discovered how self-critical Africans are. "They talk about Africa the way outsiders do, with the same vocabulary of questions and doubts. All important ideas about development, democracy, tribalism—in effect, the choice between Mandela and Rwanda—are very alive in African minds. We should be in closer touch with the people having these discussions." This month, thanks to his article, Vanity Fair readers have that opportunity.

Editor in chief