I hope you understand that when you and I spoke-that excellent open-air restaurant Busch Gardens overlooking the waterfront, (my favorite on Lamu), you on one side of the table, me on the other--I was weak, woozy, sluggish, from battling giardia and from the side effects of the powerful antibiotic I was taking, but I was also fully coherent, completely rational and sane. The transformation I experienced, starting in Nairobi and finishing on Lamu, is genuine. In brief, it happened as follows.

The night of Wednesday, December 20th, our last night in Nairobi before the scheduled move of the festival to Lamu, I was sitting in my hotel room, listening to music, awake for yet another night (the ninth). Since my arrival in Nairobi on December 12th I had failed to sleep more than two or three hours a night at best, and had in fact meant to hunt down some sleeping pills. I attributed the insomnia--I suppose that is the right word, insomnia, although the word feels wrong, feels foreign to how I felt-to the combined effects of jet lag, extensive teaching preparations, too much hanging out (I had actually cut back on that), and pure excitement about the Kwani conference and all of the interesting and inspiring people I was meeting and vibing with. I know today but didn't know then that I was fully infected with Giardia-contracted from using tap water to brush my teeth, having done so since my first night in the country. I had failed to take serious notice of the symptoms-I was far more concerned that I was had somehow become manic, although my thinking and actions were normal to both myself and others. I was exhausted but rational. So, medically speaking, this parasitic infection was almost certainly the cause of my insomnia.

In any case, this final night was more of the same, with the difference that I had not been able to fall asleep at all, but was sitting there, biding time, hoping to kill the hours separating me from the morning transport to the airport, and so hoping, sat listening to music-Goodie Mob? Soriba Kouyate? Blind Lemon Jefferson?-when the thought came to me, quite spontaneously, out of the blue, the thought, "Your ancestors are trying to get your attention. That's why you can't sleep."

I noted the thought, found it interesting, but didn't wonder much beyond that.

The ancestral call had begun almost a week earlier, the previous Thursday, if memory serves me, during the first Kwani party at Club Afrique where I found myself being drawn into the circle of dance-(Le General) Jack Nyadundo, The King of Ohangla-with other Africans from around the continent and the world. (London represented. South Africa. The Congo. Uganda. Kenya, of course. And the finer distinctions of region and people.) So the boy from New York (by way of Chicago), the boy from the Diaspora, was being drawn in, welcomed back, home. I'm shy and almost never dance. And I had never danced the circle (not the same thing as our "Soul Train line" or "Bus Stop" as I discovered that night). Jack and his band ended their set, but I was drawn into dance again not much later when Ntone began to DJ-what an incredible cat!, the smart, brilliant, laid back brother from Cape Town by way of the Cameroon, editor of the amazing journal Chimurenga-with a selection of African music from around the continent and throughout the Diaspora, hitting us with one joint after another-Fela, Marvin Gay, Ray Barreto. And my last night in Nairobi, Wednesday, December 20th, several hours before the manifestation of the "thought," I was drawn into the circle of dance again, thanks to Jack and his band.

I arrived in Lamu on the morning of December 21st, not knowing much about the island, thinking that it would be a typical tropical resort setting, with people enjoying drinks on a pristine beach and all that. I stepped off the plane, welcoming the 80 degree weather. "I will sleep now," I thought. "The heat will do it for me."

I soon discovered Lamu-the stone town with narrow streets, the one main street, the shops, the donkeys and donkey dung, the open sewage flowing through gutters in the street, and the people. Lamu, a world of another time, bygone yet here. And a people, this particular group of the Swahili-I had been to Zannibar in July and found it largely boring and tourist-driven-unlike any I had ever encountered. They were honest, content, often friendly when not indifferent to the foreigner-no haggling; well, except for the "beach boys" who are actively involved in the trade of drugs and sex, and the boat owners looking to transport you to a neighboring island, or take you on a fishing excursion--and perfectly at home with themselves. They were having a good time, living their lives, despite the poverty and constant power black outs. (As far as I can tell, no one starves. My entire stay there, a single beggar approached me day after day, seeking a few coins. And the mentally ill go about, apart but a part.) And Lamu was safe. Never in the world had I been in a place-with the possible exception of Zannibar-where I felt completely safe. Where else in the world can you walk through a narrow street during a black out and know that no one will attempt to harm you? Even "Satan"-you know the fellow, as everyone on the island does-will even guide you to your destination if you get lost.

I had first come to Kenya in July-my first trip on the African continent--and was largely disappointed with what I found. In Nairobi and outlying areas (Lake Nakiru), I was surprised to find so many people smiling and seemingly happy, amidst the poverty, the A.I.D.S. crisis, structural corruption, and various other ills. Where was the anger? I was looking for anger, that mode of thinking and response that African Americans so often have had to employ in our history, particularly in the urban centers of the North. So, had Kenyans simply acquiesced to their suffering, been brainwashed to accept it, grinning like some fool Stepin Fetchit. This is essentially what I left the country believing. (Where was the anger, the hatred?)

On the night of December 22nd, sitting in my room at Petley's Inn, Lamu, in a cage of mosquito netting, the Kenya of then (July) and now (December), the significance of the "thought"-meaning of it all struck me-an epiphany-after having witnessed for two days the wonder that is Lamu. The people of Lamu were happy. I have all of the material comforts that Americans so often strive and sacrifice for, but I was profoundly unhappy. Laughter was a natural expression of this happiness, a state of being which the residents of Lamu, and Kenyans as a whole, know and live. They express humor because humor is a natural part of life, an unhindered acceptance of one's place in the natural order.

And-importantly-I realized that I could let it all go, the emotional shackles which have hindered me all my life, let go the anger, the hatred, the feelings of alienation that defined my life as an African American-an African in America, cut off, generations removed-responses, a mode of thinking, that was radically unnatural, reactive rather creative, foreign rather than felt.

The knowledge, awareness, hit me and I began to sob uncontrollably for twenty minutes or more, then I went to sleep an entire night for the first time since my arrival in Kenya.

Beyond any romanticism, I see Lamu-the people, the people as part of the place, the place as a place in a specific history-as a carrying on of tradition, an ancestral past unchanged even as it changes to adapt, account for certain aspects and objects of modernity-you must have a cell phone, and a motor on your dhow-the people as a community, the individual as part of the whole, defined by it and defining it, whatever problems the community faces. This is what was so amazing, what got my attention, what "my ancestors" wanted me to see.

How well I understand. Humor. Laughter. "Laughing Africa" poet and novelist Terese Svoboda, another instructor in the Kwani festival, calls this condition, giving one of her books this title. (Some twenty years ago, she lived with the Nuer and got to know them.) Laughter as the genuine expression of our shared dignity, our common humanity, as the continuing of ancestral tradition, all this bound up in a sense of community, of self in a community, and the immediate enjoyment of the most basic pleasures of life-not the fixation on materialism, material comfort, that so many of us in America wrongly believe is the source of security and happiness. Laughter as that which shows the soul is intact, even if we've suffered, even-in certain cases-if we've been violated and brutalized. (Yes, the brutal shadows of the East Africa slave trade which flicker just out of visual range behind the sun.) So Langston Hughes reveals with his aptly titled novel, Not Without Laughter.

I fear that many of us in America, many of my fellow African Americans are not intact. I wasn't. We are the people that slavery cut off from any direct form of connection to the continent, our lost homelands. The people that the Middle Passage and the Diaspora re-did, re-made, torn from inside out and every which way. A people unlike the people of Lamu. The intact soul is the one "Africanism" that did not survive our passage to the New World. Or so we have been led to believe. Have come to think that our life must be a sickness because we are black and because we have suffered and still suffer. But at Lamu, I discovered otherwise. (What Robert Hayden meant in his famous poem, "Middle Passage" with lines such as "singing as they went under." The soul singing, no matter what.)

This "revelation"-whatever term is appropriate-was in marked contrast to how I felt as the giardiasis worsened. Indeed, during the last day or so of the sickness, before a strong antibiotic had me feeling better, I found myself not only getting sicker but feeling on the verge of delirium. (I remember vaguely thinking that my masseuse had magical powers, was curing me of the giardia, of healing me of that and whatever other ills, with her hands, aromatic oils, and spontaneous shouts of Halleujah!")

And there is so much more to the story, and one day I'll have to tell it. Structure it into an extended essay or a work of fiction, a short novel. So much else that happened. So much. (Christmas: For the past three days, I had been taking the pills and syrup that the chemist recommended,, but I was experiencing my greatest discomfort, only getting sicker, and now scheduled to go with the group to a dhow ride to observe mangroves. Fortunately-thank god-another person in our group, having traveled extensively in Africa, offered to provide me with an antibiotic which would kill the parasite; I took the pill, and within twenty minutes felt so much better. I got on the dhow, but later almost drowned, trying to swim to the shore of a mangrove swamp, unaware that the currents were brutally strong, drifting away, but calm, determined that I would not die, that I have too much to do, to live for, to experience, accomplish, give.)

I am happy for the first time in my life. I look forward to each day, to enjoying life. And I will fight to better the lives of others.

I've said my two cents. So I'll stop here. Understand, all of what I say above, in these few pages, is expressed with total honesty. I believe every word, because I lived it…

Jeff Allen