Yves and Robert - A Cross-Racial Friendship

In January of 1975, I was lying on top of a water tower in the middle of Africa. It was a fine, warm night. A full moon had scrubbed the sky of its spangle of stars. Stretched out next to me was a handsome African man, one month younger than I. His name was Yves D-, a Central African English teacher at the high school that used to be serviced by the defunct water tower, which served as our perch. We were both stoned on grass I had purchased over the Christmas break in Bangui, the capital of the country where I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I too was an English teacher at Bossangoa High. Though English was our shared teaching discipline, Yves and I spoke in French, the language of business, education, and occasionally friendship in the Central African Republic. Sango, the lingua franca, served most often as the language of intimacy, but intimacy with the Central Africans was difficult to achieve. Most of my relations with the people surrounding me were conditioned by a colonial past I had known about only in theory. The master/servant dynamic dictated by my race never ceased to disorient me, even as I made my accommodations. I had surrendered to the deference shown to me by shopkeepers, bus drivers, and public servants. I had my own servant, Jacques, who came every day except Sunday, whom I had “inherited” from the site’s previous Peace Corps Volunteers. I was on good terms with the other Central African teachers at Bossangoa High, but nothing developed beyond a collegial level.

With Yves, it was different. He had lustrous skin, dark, regular features in a wide oval face topped by neatly cropped jet-black hair. His brown eyes sparkled with intelligence and humor. I found him arrestingly good-looking, and I enjoyed the banter we exchanged in the shabby little room that passed as a teacher’s lounge. Several months into my first year, I asked Yves to help me perfect my French. The Peace Corps paid for lessons. Thus, through this mutually beneficial arrangement, our friendship formed. The evening on top of the water tower was the first time I’d gotten a Central African stoned. Drugs had none of the glamour for the locals that my youth culture had invested them with in the sixties. Smoking grass was considered low-class. But Yves, even though he had never left the country, was drawn, like all ambitious young men, to the glitter of the West. I asked him as we were lying next to one another, dazzled by the moon, if he had wanted to do something big.

“I wanted to be a pilot,” he replied. “Even growing up in the bush, I saw the planes flying in the sky and going to places like Paris and New York.”

    “How did you end up as an English teacher?”

  “It was a strategic choice,” he replied with a hint of sadness. “I was enrolled in the science series in high school, but I couldn’t make the necessary grades to stay afloat. I was in danger of flunking out, so I switched to series C.”

“The humanities series.”

“Yes,” Yves replied. “Much easier than Series A.”

By this time, I had absorbed enough of the French educational system to understand the difference between the various tracks (A, B, C, D) and where they were supposed to lead. The Central African school system, an exact copy of what reigned in the former colonial power, was ruthlessly efficient in cutting away all but the brightest students as they strove toward a middle-class berth that promised ease and power in a country where the gross per capita income scarcely matched the two-month salary of a factory worker in the West. The goal of the Central African system of education was to narrow the field of candidates for the limited number of jobs in the civil service. Yves saw that he was in danger of falling through the net and specialized in English, a foreign language in the C.A.R. This allowed him to get on the rolls of the state as a high school teacher, and America, anglophone America, glowed on the horizon like a full moon rising. At 24, Yves had married and fathered a baby girl. As a rare source of revenue in a peasant economy, he was already supporting a household of six, including two young cousins who were also attending high school.

“How sad,” I wrote in my journal, “that he had to give up on his dream so early! A real-life counterpart to Bigger’s frustrated desire to pilot the plane he sees flying over Chicago. I wonder if I can find a French translation of Native Son for him the next time I’m in Bangui.”

I was very literary in my journal. What I didn’t write – what I didn’t dare write and barely acknowledged – was that I was strongly attracted to Yves. There was a powerful erotic component to our friendship – on my side only. Friendship between men was well understood in African culture and often included a physical dimension that sometimes delivered an enjoyable surprise. Occasionally, an African would grab my hand, and though I had to smother the impulse to pull away, the gesture would fill me with pleasure and sometimes a powerful excitement. I let none of this show. Homosexuality was even more distasteful to cultivated Africans than drugs. They acknowledged it only in the context of white perverts who paid for their sexual pleasure with Black men. “La maladie des blancs.” As for myself, I was confounded by the unruly nature of my desires and filled with internalized homophobia.

Yet my attraction to men powered my friendships in their direction and helped me break through the bitter historical shell that separated Blacks from whites. Once, during a reception at the high school principal’s house, I went to fetch Yves on my mobylette, a French motorized bike that provided Peace Corps Volunteers with a rare mobility in the African bush. As I rode into the principal’s compound with Yves’ arms around my waist, the one female student who had made it into the upper grades and who was preparing the meal remarked in Sango that I seemed to be really fond of Yves. Yes, the principal replied, also in Sango, he’d never seen that kind of friendship between an African and a white person before. Yves told me about the conversation, and I flushed with pleasure.