I found this out when I recently decided to browse the first sentences of travel books about Africa. I have always been interested in first lines -- the way they are maps at a frontier. What would my fellow writers' first sentences tell me?

I started by looking at the travel books about Africa that I owned. To my surprise this small sample revealed striking similarities. I set off for the research library at the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the prominent collections of Africana in the world, and spent the day doing an informal shelf search in the DT section (DT is the Library of Congress designation for African materials). The travel books there backed up my hunch. Intrigued, I prowled through several used bookstores and the local super-bookstore, rapidly pulling and shelving dozens of books. I then dragged a friend to a travel bookstore and asked her how much she would give me if I could predict the topic of the first sentences of their books about Africa. "Nothing," she said wisely, and even I was surprised when I was right four out of five times.

Most travel books about Africa open with the author alone, carried along by some vehicle, looking down over some landscape and feeling anxious.

If I were a critic, rather than a practitioner of the genre, I could start right in with a long essay on this finding. I can't do this, however, because I am distracted by my dismay. To be an utterly "conventional" writer, open your book about Africa with yourself arriving. Let me admit it then: I am guilty as charged.

My first book opens with me on an airplane at an airport in Africa. I express feelings of anxiety and doubt, and then view the city through the window of a taxi. Only one part of my opening can I claim as unique; certainly it is not the confusion at the airport, nor the haggling with porters at the airport, nor the taxi ride away from the airport. If I wanted to, I could approximate my opening by cutting and pasting lines from other books by foreigners about Africa, right down to the mention of the conveyer belt. Voila. My plot, if not my phrasing.

This uncomfortable observation must be underlined by noting that I haven't even looked at the remaining pages of these travel books. What other similarities might I have found if I had addressed more than opening lines and paragraphs?

The question remains to be asked: How is it possible that our books open with such common objects (vehicles), images (vistas) and emotions (vexation)? Is it simply that our experiences were so similar? Even if we were to state that, for the sake of argument, all non-Africans' experiences in Africa are exactly the same, why do we structure our telling of these experiences in the same way? For instance, why didn't I start my book in the middle of my journey and use flashbacks? Why didn't I write my book as a series of character sketches? Why didn't I cluster various experiences by topic instead of chronology? Why didn't I set any part of the book in the United States?

Simply put, because that's not how travel books about Africa are written. That is, when I write I am subject to conventions that I am unaware of at a conscious level. In fact, I was quite proud of the opening of my first book precisely because I thought it was unique. But even I, who grew up in Africa and therefore was not so subject to the travel form, started my autobiography in the standard manner of travel books about Africa -- with the heat, the hubbub and a rickety vehicle. I started my book on Africa just as hundreds of others had.

Don't just take my word for it, though. Let me show you how the openings of travel books about Africa are so similar as to be almost redundant.

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