While I was working toward my Master's Degree at Western Illinois University, I was engaged for a while to a man from Southern Sudan. With two youngsters to raise, a graduate assistantship to fulfill and the rigors of full-time graduate course requirements, I had precious little time to call my own. But what I had, I gave to hanging out with people from other countries, especially from Africa, as about a quarter of the students on that campus were from somewhere other than the U.S. and, as far as I was concerned, this was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. It was very exciting and eventually even gave birth to my thesis, which was on Social Distance Between Africans and Black Americans and the Attitudes of White Americans Toward Both Groups.I met Martin through a couple from Botswana. He was massively intelligent and exquisitely articulate. And his voice was like velvet, barely above a whisper. Our conversations were beyond seductive to me, so hungry for news of the real world outside our borders, so ravenous for analysis of power relations more in depth than what I was wont to get on average. I often stopped by his apartment for tea on my way home from class in the afternoon. Sometimes he would cook a chicken. We ate with our fingers and, for special occasions, peanut soup with fufu. He told me tales of his homeland, of acres and acres of mahogany; of hundreds of oil wells already dug and capped, waiting for later; and of chunks of gold lying on top of the ground in a region where people didn't value metals as much as family. But most often, he spoke of missing home.
