Episode #8
My Expatriate Years, Part One
In January of 1975, Robert Philipson lay on top of a defunct water tower in the Central African Republic, high on grass and dazzled by a full moon. Next to him lay a handsome young Central African English teacher who worked at the same high school. It was the first of several cross-cultural friendships — charged with an attraction he was too filled with shame to acknowledge — that would carry him through two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Philipson navigated a colonial world he hadn't asked to inherit: a servant named Jacques, preferential treatment as a white man, an expatriate society he found dull next to the friendships he built in town. Letters from his mother in California traced a family working out its own complicated destinies from half a world away. Of the four siblings, both sisters came out as lesbian while Philipson kept his own desires carefully unspoken. Then, sitting on the side of a dirt road in Cameroon, an idea took hold: he would study African literature — and return to Paris to do it. But first came The Great African Odyssey — five months solo on a motorcycle he named Black Betsy, crossing the Sahara by truck, outrunning elephants in Niger, watching sunrise break over Algeria's Hoggar Mountains. Part One ends with Philipson on a ferry crossing the Mediterranean, still uncertain of almost everything except one thing: "I have to create my own home."
