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Kenneth ClarkKenneth Clark
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Session:         Page of 763

Clark:

Aside from South Africa, none of the African countries. I stopped for about three or four hours in Nairobi on my way back from Johannesburg, and was terribly disillusioned about the uncleanliness of the airport. (I sound like my mother, I must say.) I was angry at the fact that the airport in Nairobi was unclean, unswept, cobwebs around the pictures of Kenyatta. You know, they had about four or five pictures of Kenyatta in a relatively small space, and it seemed to me just damned ironic that they wouldn't at least get the cobwebs off of the pictures. Unpainted, just...

Now, they tell me that Nairobi, if you went into it downtown, would be better than the airport, but why the hell wouldn't they have the airport more positive?

I guess I'll be going back to Africa, in regard to business.

I know what I'm just telling you about myself. I mean, I know that I'm telling you that there's a lot of my mother and my father in me, in which, even as a social scientist, I'm impatient at signs -- negative signs, -- when people could remedy them. You know, it wouldn't take any great deal to clean that airport, to get it swept. And the fact that the people are black is, to me, no excuse for the fact that the damned place was unclean. Well --

This is a very important recurring theme, for me, as a social scientist and as a black -- that, while I can understand oppression, I've been socialized not to use oppression as an excuse for (not) remedying things that you can remedy with minimal effort.

Q:

These European trips -- were these primarily business or were they primarily vacation?





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