En route to Namibia last week, I had a daylong layover in London. Chastened by the increasingly unfavorable dollar-pound exchange rate and burdened with two carry-ons, I decided to engage in my favorite London-based transit activity: going to the Tate Modern but not paying the three-pound suggested donation for entry, and checking my luggage but not paying the two-pound suggested donation for the coat room.

While finishing off my espresso from the Cafe — for which I did not pay the suggested 1.5 pounds — I laid eyes on what I took to be the perfect symbolic start to my time in Africa: an enormous subterranean chasm. For those of who you haven’t been, Tate’s Turbine Hall is usually adorned with cutting-edge sculptures and conceptual pieces. Currently, however, this iconic space simply has a big crack in the floor, courtesy of Doris Salcedo.

If you ask me, Salcedo’s work Shibboleth was most likely the result of her dropping something during installation, damaging the floor and not wanting to pay for it. On the other hand, if you ask her, she’ll likely tell you about how the Shibboleth — by virtue of its crack-in-the-flooredness — “asks questions about the shaky ideological foundations upon which Western notions of modernity are built.” In particular, as a shibboleth is a “custom, phrase or use of language that is used to exclude others,” Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism that she believes underlies the modern world.

After I satisfied my urge to squeeze my body into this huge crack, I realized that the work of art was pretty deep. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress resulted in the destruction of native cultures, and the roots of our prosperity are tainted with the horrors of slavery and colonial exploitation. Moreover, our own time remains defined by the existence of over one billion people who live on less than one dollar a day. In fact, what draws many people to focus their studies and development efforts on the African continent is the feeling that our oppressive footprint has never truly been lifted.

Aided by a fairly large amount of KY jelly, I withdrew myself from the chasm, my vigor and excitement for the law school’s international human rights clinic refreshed, renewed and smelling like cherries. After fully digesting the import of Salcedo’s monumental crevice, I was filled with rage against all colonialists, post, neo and garden variety, and determined to effect change.

Orientation week passed, and next week we start work. Among the 10 of us, we have four projects: helping judges more easily access relevant precedent in order to legitimize and standardize the common law system, representing HIV positive women who have been involuntarily sterilized by the government, drafting legislation to implement the Convention Against Torture and helping to establish a legal clinic to provide inexpensive legal services and inform citizens of their rights.

Of course, our very presence in Africa has its own underlying problems. Our hotel is in a ritzy part of the capital in which coloreds weren’t allowed during the apartheid era, and we’re surrounded by an electric fence that — as I can tell you from personal experience — is live 24/7. Our dishes are washed, beds made and floor mopped by a staff that is, without exception, black. We have wireless Internet access in our apartments. Thus, independent of what we hope will be said about our accomplishments in Namibia, one could just as easily look at our set-up as a bunch of Americans who are willing to help out in Africa just as long as they don’t have to actually live there.

If you asked me for my thoughts — which is what you implicitly do by reading my column religiously — I’d say that every endeavor to help humanity is problematic in one way or another. The public-interest-minded among us engage in our work with an unwavering commitment to protecting the vulnerable and empowering the weak. Yet at the same time, we must be self-aware enough to understand our own limitations and deep motivations. To play with an old canard, the road to a hellacious reincarnation may be paved with good intentions, but so is the road to redemption.

In Namibia? Let’s hang out! You bring the KY Jelly, I’ll bring the malarone — vishnus "at"

stanford.edu.