I kept seeing Africa refracted through the prism of African' s experience in the U.S. Every impression I had in the Delta came to me on a slight time delay. The poor villages in the mangrove swamps seemed like the small black hamlets in the back of beyond on a southern Bayou. The local fish diet: catfish and shrimp is the kind of food I have enjoyed in Mississippi and Louisiana.

The Winners Chapel Pentecostal church offered a joyful noise similar to that which can be heard in any black church in America. So much of Africa has survived in the social DNA of African-Americans. I had to keep shaking those impressions off. The truth is Africa, at least this part of it, is unique. It is an ancient peasant culture slightly elevated to modernity by gas-powered electric generators. It is untouched by America except as a recipient of hand me downs. There was an amazing array of third hand American t-shirts and fourth hand American oil equipment in the region.

I don' t know how much longer this unique Niger River Delta culture will survive. The MSF team operates in an area that has only been slightly touched by the oil companies. But on my last day on the river I watched an enormous barge plowing up river. In front was an oil drill - the massive multi-bit head pulled out of the water like the ramming prow of an ancient warship, trailing behind was a coil of floating pipeline. The barge stopped a hundred yards short of a cluster of mud huts and a small dock. Kids were swimming in the river while adults worked the shoreline in dugout canoes - checking their shrimplines for the day's catch. The barge began to moor itself in place. It was hard to imagine that village surviving for long in the face of the drilling that was about to begin.