Jon Lee Anderson, first steps of a politicized traveler

He is one of the great journalists of recent decades, in the grand tradition of the Polish Rysard Kapuściński, capable of combining the description of major social upheavals with a close-up of unknown protagonists, in a prose of great precision and political astuteness . We know him for his chronicles of armed conflicts, as a correspondent for The New Yorker magazine, where he has worked since 1998, and also for his biography Che: A Revolutionary Life , about Ernesto Guevara, published in 1997. Now we await a memoirist of his youth, while all of Africa strengthens its steps towards independence.

In 1970, still a minor, Jon Lee Anderson —born in California in 1957 and raised in various parts of the globe—decided to travel from Exeter, Great Britain, to Africa to reunite with his sister. With his newly obtained high school diploma, he first traveled to Marseille and from there to a continent he knew in childhood, to Togo. What he found was a continent in the process of freeing itself from European colonial regimes. In June, * Adventures of a Teen-Age Wharf Rat* was published by Anagrama. It chronicles his first solo trip and his initiation into a highly contrasting social reality, which simultaneously holds up another mirror of the West to him. Its culmination is an autobiographical account, and also a travel book. This was our conversation over Zoom a week ago.

–Reading you is like reconnecting with the legacy of the great library of British classics, such as Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, narrators of the "outer space" of the empire. But also with the American travelers of the Beatnik generation, such as William Burroughs.

–I agree with you on one level; I recognize my Anglo-Saxon identity. But I differ from the aforementioned authors in that I've spent most of my life in other countries ; that is, I grew up abroad and continue to live abroad. In fact, I live in England; beyond the English language, I'm an American. I grew up in that territory called the Third World. And I spend most of my time in what is now called the Global South. I identify perhaps more with those cultures, especially with Latin America, and secondarily with Africa and Asia, where I grew up. Kipling wasn't one of my own, although I obviously remember him. He belongs to the colonial era, while I am deeply influenced by post-colonialist perceptions. Conrad and Graham Green are my inspirations; as is Kapuściński.

–Do Bruce Chatwin from In Patagonia and Songlines , the Australian trip, resonate with you?

–I really like Chatwin, although he was a bit of a stickler, wasn't he? As a kid, I wanted to be an explorer, so I devoured history books and memoirs. As I grew up, of course, I also acquired political and social awareness , and I began to make distinctions around these much-admired authors' perceptions of the natives. As I told you at the beginning, living with those societies, in many cases, I identified with them. I saw those communities for what they were and what they are. And what hasn't changed at all since then is my thirst for adventure . And when I say adventure, this doesn't mean jet skiing down the Amazon; rather, I'm referring to that magic, to the feeling of discovery.

–Your personal requirement for magic seems to be distance, doesn’t it?

–The world can be rediscovered a thousand times over, as it depends on each person's perception. That's what I learned in my 20s, during my first wanderings through the Peruvian Amazon (Anderson was briefly imprisoned in Peru, eventually becoming a spokesperson for the prisoners; Editor's note). I began to understand what was on people's minds, that truly unknown thing. That's how my quest to understand people beyond their exoticism began.

Anderson left home when he was under 18, armed with $200 in cash and some traveler's checks your father gave him. It was 1970. The Beatles had visited a famous yogi's ashram in Rishikesh, India, in 1968; all popular music is marked by that initiatory journey. Another baptism of youth culture was the backpacking trip, a social immersion that evoked the journey Che Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado took on the Norton 500 motorcycle christened "Ponderosa," long before the Cuban Revolution.

–How did that climate of the time influence you? I think of the Beatniks, psychedelia, and drug exploration.

–Of course, the Beatniks paved the way for the hippies of the anti-Vietnam revolt, and then for the freaks... I belonged to the generation of their younger siblings. I looked up to the Beatniks; they were interesting, intellectually very curious and transgressive. They sought to explore the world and were very open to the possibility of value in other faiths and languages, other mysticisms, even in drugs. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg all lived and wrote during my adolescence, but they didn't speak to me as much as perhaps the younger, even more transgressive ones. Hunter S. Thompson, Timothy Leary, authors like Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, a Black Panther activist. All of this influenced me greatly. I was born in California but lived abroad until 1968, when our family returned to the United States. I was only 11, and that was the year Martin Luther King and Bob Kennedy were assassinated. It affected me deeply. That was my baptism into the American problem, and it motivated my search for perhaps angrier and more daringly rebellious authors.

– So you embraced the counterculture?

–You could say that, although we didn't call it that. They were those who saw the world through different eyes and rejected the established order. And I myself rejected the established order; I had no respect for the law or for governments. In my adolescence, I went through a very radical stage, during which I identified deeply with anti-colonialist struggles and pacifist movements, both in Africa and Latin America.

–With your deep knowledge of Africa, how do you think the Trump administration's cancellation of US aid programs (USAid) has and will impact it?

–It's very interesting because I suppose an Argentine or Bolivian knows USAID better than most Americans... Originally, this aid program was invented by Bob Kennedy as an arm of civic action abroad. It had a peaceful imprint, despite its shady history. While the CIA carried out paramilitary covert operations, USAID simultaneously deployed soft power , projecting this idea of ​​a great world power with its charitable side. USAID emerged in the midst of the Cold War. In the 1960s, its actions included the first free lunch program in public schools in Taiwan, for example. My father was also in charge of that, and I remember how proud he was. I don't think he was as proud of some other programs of the time, which we would now see as intelligence work . At other times, USAID funded opposition political groups. During the time of Samantha Power, the last administrator, they had a high-profile period with pro-democracy programs. But when we go back to the 1980s, we see that they were involved in more questionable things, frankly anti-communist activities. In Latin America, it's understood that there was an exacerbated anti-communism, which led to the dirty war in Argentina and elsewhere.

–You know Africa in great detail. Would you highlight any USAID actions?

In the Middle East and North Africa, they built schools and classrooms for girls, fertility clinics, and hygiene systems in remote and poor areas. There used to be everything. In many places, they were the main source of funding, along with the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, for the fight against endemic diseases and HIV. If you had access to condoms or HIV cocktails in Uganda, it was thanks to USAID funding; if you had access to water in the desert in Somalia or Chad, it was because USAID had paid for the well. In Africa, they worked alongside George Soros and his Open Society on issues of minimum housing and access to public health. In Latin America, USAID supported the independent press. At the same time, we recognize that there are organizations that aren't there for the public good but to line their pockets, right? I would say that USAID operated mostly to do good, although I myself criticized them for operations that, in my opinion, were poorly conceived. In conclusion, the United States was better for having created USAID; Destroying it for the sake of supposed savings for the Trump administration seems to me to be an abysmal mistake.