The Fula From America: An African Journey

Before Carlyle Brown left for Africa in 1981, his most vivid impression of the place came from Tarzan movies, which were filmed (he reminds us) in Florida. Crossing the Atlantic, he looks down from his plane and imagines the thousands of slave ships, with millions of Africans curled in their holds, sailing for hundreds of years "to make a nation that would make the myth of Tarzan." Then his real education begins. Brown tells about his casual search for an amusingly elusive West African named Foré; about his not-so-casual scrapes with bureaucrats who would throw him in jail for acting like an American spy before granting him a transit visa across (Soviet-aligned) Guinea; about what it means to be "African-American." The show loses energy after Foré has been found in Sierra Leone; but along the way it's a charming, varied, teeming traveler's tale. A taxi driver in Sierra Leone calls Brown a "Fula," short for Fulani -- an old desert tribe that once conquered the Yoruba -- but more details about his ancestry are (of course) lost, and his journey, in the end, works as a semisweet rediscovery of America.