Black and white
We’re four months in to the six-month dry season and water is becoming a problem. Cisterns are long empty and wells are going dry or bringing up water that’s more accurately described as thin mud. Now I have to get water for drinking, showering, dishes, and laundry from a manual pump about a kilometre from my house. Much of the village is in the same predicament. In the evening, when the day’s heat begins wearing off, it’s a continual procession of girls walking by with bowls and basins, laughing and chatting as they leave, and then the grim concentration on their faces as they return balancing enormous loads of water on their heads, and some slopping down onto their dresses, and them stopping for a moment to let the water settle down before going on. But the labor and inconvenience is nothing because it tells one thing: that the pump still gives water. The pump’s water has grown murkier over the past couple weeks. It’s not a good sign.
I carry water from the pump in a 25-litre jug strapped precariously to the rack of my bike. Once the jug is full, the bike can’t support my weight too. I walk it back to my house, dragging the reluctant contraption uphill through the dusty sandpit that people call a road. Twenty-five litres at a time.
Throughout Benin it’s common for people, especially children, to shout “white” in their tribal language if they see a white person. This is a continent of children — they’re half the population — and it’s difficult to walk far without encountering a mob of children reminding you of your skin color. Just in case you forgot. And you never forget that there is nothing in this world more important than the color of your skin. People are excellent and dividing themselves into categories, and there is no more useful division than skin color. You don’t need to read, or think, or even talk. You need only look. What you see tells you all you need to know.
When someone I don’t know sees me, he sees everything he has ever heard about white people and about Westerners, which to his mind are the same thing. What else is he supposed to see? He’s probably never talked to a white person before. He knows them as a concept, a category — and one with centuries of pain and scars trailing behind it. He sees a walking category.
And then he sees me dragging my bike with the water. A water jug on a bicycle? What a ridiculous idea! Here is the white man, who with his power and wealth claims to tower over the black man, doing the work of women and children, and doing it in the most absurd way! Ha! –And now that I’m weighed down and can’t get away, he yells — Ouibo! Ouibo! White man! White man! It is an accusation and a verdict and I don’t know what it means because I don’t know what he sees and whether he loves it or hates it.
—–
The committee on doing something
Last week we had a teachers’ meeting at my school. These happen at random intervals and without advance notice. The Director (Principal) was out of town, so the Censeur (Vice-Principal) presided. The subject of the meeting, the Censeur said, was that our school would in the near future be entering into some sort of athletic competition with two nearby schools, and that it was therefore necessary to form a committee on this matter. The committee would consist of a President, Secretary-General, Treasurer-General, and Honorary President. This last person would have no duties, “but he will be there.”
Someone asked if these would be paid positions. The answer was no. No one wanted to do it. Someone nominated the absent Director for Honorable President. A lengthy discussion ensued. The Censeur asked me what I thought. I said that, since the position had no responsibilities, it didn’t seem to matter who did it. Everyone laughed at me.
At length it was decided that the Director would fill this position. Then came the posts that purportedly did have responsibilities. After an extensive discussion of nothing in particular, someone volunteered to be President. We all clapped for him. Some time later, another person offered to be Secretary. We clapped for him too.
And then came Treasurer. Everyone wanted to be Treasurer. People were yelling at each other, and then standing up and yelling at each other, and then standing up and walking to the other side of the room to more effectively yell at the people there. Amid it all you could faintly hear the Censeur’s pleading voice: “Chers collègues… chers collègues… s’il vous plaît…”
I took a book from my bag and stealthily positioned it under the table. I was reading No Exit by Sartre. I soon came to the play’s most famous line: “Hell is — other people!”
An election was proposed as the proper way to settle the dispute. We debated this for some time. When it was decided that an election would, indeed, take place, we debated whether it should be by hand count, verbal count, or secret ballot. This intractable question occupied us for at least twenty minutes. The secret ballot won out. Hurrah.
Someone began writing the candidates’ names on the board. This revealed some disagreement as to who, exactly, the candidates were. The standing and yelling recommenced.
The election happened. The votes were counted. It had all taken 2 1/2 hours.
The good news is that I finished my book.
—–
Hurry up and wait
You spend a lot of time waiting in Benin, but not much time waiting in line. That concept hasn’t caught on here. The Beninese version of a school cafeteria is a thatched roof supported by wooden poles. Women carry baskets of food on their heads from the village and set up shop in the shade. There is no lunch line. It’s a lunch mêlée. A mob forms aruond each cafeteria lady, the kids screaming and kicking and clawing, siezing plastic plates and shoving them in the woman’s face. She swats these away as she shovels rice or couscous or corn mash onto a plate and tries desperately to verify that the hand holding the plate that she is filling and the hand offering her a 50-franc piece belong to the same person. If she messes up and gips somebody, all hell might break loose.
Teachers, understandably, send students to buy them food. More precisely, they send female students. I always send boys, to even things out. This irritates the boys to no end.
The only place I see people waiting in line is the bank. This is probably due to the automatic weapons in the room. Despite the appearance of a line, though, the mentality is not much different from lunchtime at school. People are always cutting in front of you. If I’m by myself, there isn’t much I can do about it. To bystanders, to guards, even to the people standing behind me in line, the only important fact is that this man is in front of me. That 30 seconds ago he was behind me is in the past, immaterial to the present situation.
One such gentleman, upon hearing my objections, took on a gently patronizing tone of voice. “Monsieur,” he said, placing a hand on my shoulder, “du calme. There’s no problem.” I insisted that his Jedi mind tricks didn’t work on me, that there was a problem. It didn’t do any good.
Which is why it helps to go to the bank with other Americans. A group of angry white people is taken more seriously. Just ask the Tea Party. My last trip to the bank, I was standing in line and talking with another volunteer. We were close to the teller, having valiantly defended our place in line. A bank employee came up and said, “Gently, gently, a little.” In African French this meant that we were talking too loud. We turned it down. He came back two more times, while saying nothing to all the happily chattering Africans. The problem wasn’t the noise. It was that we were talking in English, and consequently no one had any idea what were were saying. Not being able to eavesdrop really bothers some people.
My friend walked over to a table to write out his check. The way you withdraw money is by writing a check to yourself. I held our place in line. A Kalashnikov-toting guard came up and without saying anything compelled me out of line and through a back door. I tried to go back into the main room, but the door had no inside handle. I turned around. A man in a suit was smiling at me from behind a desk. He invited me to have a seat, which I did. He invited me to give him my check and identification. I did this too. He typed on his computer for a while, then opened a desk drawer and handed me my money. He pressed a button and my heavily-armed friend opened the door.
“Where they hell’d you go?” the other American asked. “We almost lost our place in line.”
—–
The dinosaur
I was laying in my house and reading and everybody started shouting outside. Somebody probably ran over a chicken, I thought.
“Michel!” my neighbor shouted. Michel is my name in French.
“What?”
“It’s a dinosaur!”
“A what?’
“A dinosaur!”
A dinosaur.
I walked outside, naturally. An enormous bird swooped low over my house. It was a dinosaur. I fell in the dirt and nearly shit my pants. Everyone would have laughed at me if they weren’t also on the ground.
“That thing can carry you away!” someone helpfully warned us. This seemed like a reasonable expectation.
It circled overhead. I laid on my back and watched. It was absurdly large, a latter-day pterodactyl.
It flew off toward a nearby hill and landed on a very sturdy tree. My neighbor and I walked closer to the hill to look at it.
“It carries off chickens and goats,” my neighbor said. “But it’s not a dinosaur.”
“What is it? A hawk?”
“No. An eagle.”
The eagle glided away and over the hill.
“Do you know about dinosaurs?”
“Yes. They lived a long time ago,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“Flying dinosaurs are actually called pterodactyls.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But they’re all dead now,” I said.
“Yes. The humans killed them all.”
“What?”
“That’s why they’re dead. Humans killed them.”
“Uh-huh.”
