I’m in Parakou at northern Benin’s Camp GLOW, the girls’ camp, which will be going on for the rest of this week. I brought two of my students, both fourteen years old.
Christianne lives in the house behind mine; every day she carries home several massive basins of water and she greets me in English every time she passes by. Her father teaches primary school and had no problem with his daughter coming to Camp GLOW.
Reine lives on the edge of the poorest quartier in the village. Her father is a farmer. When I explained to him what Camp GLOW is about—encouraging promising girls to stay in school and choose their own course in life—he refused. This was not a message to which he wanted his daughter exposed.
I talked to my landlord, Anatole, a school principal and one of the most respected men in the village. Two of his daughters went to Camp GLOW in years past.
“Well, she’s going to go,” he said.
“But her father refused.”
“But she’s going to go.”
We hiked back out to her house, him tall in his flowing robes, booming out greetings to everyone in Nagot, and me trailing meekly behind. Reine’s father, wide-eyed, hurriedly brought us the only two chairs in the house. For twenty minutes Anatole laid down the law in Nagot, and then we left, signed permission form in hand.
And that is how we got here. I’ll try to post about the camp before I leave for my village on Saturday.
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I was sitting in my house, reading and listening to music on the ipod speakers I’d brought back from America. In came a few little kids who like to hang out and color or look at picture books or beg for candy. As soon as they heard the music—it was Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending”—they all sat on the ground around the speakers and sat there, silent and still for half an hour, all the way through that song and then through “Dives and Lazarus”. When the music was over they got up and walked out without a word, all thoughts of picture books and candy forgotten.
I remembered when the violinist Joshua Bell, who sells out concert halls at $100 a seat, set up as a street musician in a metro station in Washington, D.C. (You can watch the video here.) He made $32.17 in tips. Nearly everybody hurried past Bell and his priceless Stradivarius. The only group who wanted to stop and listen were the small children—none of whom, it is safe to say, had ever heard of Joshua Bell or a Stradivarius—before they were hurried along by their wiser parents.
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(A leftover story from the dry season)
I tied my jug to my bike and rode to the water pump. I was glad to see that there were only three old women sitting there, and that they did not appear to be waiting to take water. I opened the jug and put in under the spout. The old women burst into cackling laughter.
“What?”
One of them pointed at the pump’s handle. It was chained to the ground, so that you couldn’t pump water.
“Who locked the pump?” I said.
They didn’t understand French. I starting walking toward the health center nearby to find out what was going on. They burst into more rasping mirth and motioned for me to stop. One of them managed to get out a sentence between gasps.
“There’s…no…water.”
I understood enough Nagot to understand that. I looked at the spout and the drainage ditch. They were both bone-dry. The pump had been bringing up some murky stuff recently and it had finally gone dry. I sat down and stared at the dry spout and the chained handle, not thinking anything and feeling very thirsty. If God really had a sense of humor, I thought, those three old crones would be knitting.
After a while I persuaded myself I was not going to die and rode over to another pump I knew of. I heard it before I saw it—there were at least fifty women mobbed around this pump, each with her attendant basin or jug, and they were all arguing in Nagot. I looked over their heads and saw that water was flowing from the pump. It would take a while, but I would get my twenty-five litres.
“Monsieur!” someone shouted. “Ici!”
A girl, one of my students, was waving from her spot next to the pump. She yelled at all the women in Nagot and they passed my jug to her. She then pushed aside the basin that was currently under the spout and filled my jug, all while arguing loudly with the owner of the slighted basin. The jug was then passed back to me.
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Catching the eye of a Senegalese soldier in the French army in Morocco, George Orwell realized that
This wretched boy, who is a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feeling of reverence before a white skin. He has been taught that the white race are his masters, and he still believes it.
Do they still believe it now? It depends on the person. There’s the fuck-you-and-the-donkey-you-rode-in-on crowd, the people who will do everything they can to make your life miserable because you are white. They don’t believe it, or maybe they do and hate themselves for it. Beyond that small group, ordinary people here seem to believe it to varying degrees. Most people I talk to believe that Africans will need Western significant help for a very long time or permanently. Some want to return to colonial rule, or at least to import a lot of Westerners to administer the country on behalf of the elected government. (I’ve never heard this last opinion from someone who’s old enough to remember the colonial days.)
These opinions come from the belief that in the fifty years since much of Africa became independent, black Africans have proven themselves incapable of running things. People look at Western countries and see a relatively low level of corruption and violence and a relatively amazing level of development, stability, and technological progress, and they often conclude that whites—i.e. Westerners, regardless of their color—are innately more intelligent, honest, and competent than black Africans. Even a villager who’s completely ignorant of the outside world knows that everything he uses except for the simplest tools—his cell phone, his radio, his motorcycle; perhaps his television, his electric lights, his water spigot—all came from the West. (Or at least he believes they did: the first known smelting of iron was in present-day Sudan.) He sees that all these things required significant brainpower to invent, and he begins to take for granted that white skin equals greater intelligence. He concludes that only foreigners and their big brains can make things better.
This is worse than nonsense. It makes people believe—or gives them an excuse for believing—that they can do nothing to improve their situation. When I complain about the labyrinthine bureaucracy, or the corruption, or the treatment of women, or the condition of the roads, I always get the same response: “Eh bon. Nous sommes en Afrique.” The notion that it doesn’t have to be this way is a minority opinion, and, as far as I’ve seen, almost nonexistent among the poor masses.
The most infuriating thing about this fatalism is the difficulty of countering it. Even the people who know better than to think that white people (=Westerners) have some natural superiority to black Africans cannot honestly express much hope that this place will significantly improve anytime soon, with or without Western help. The practical problems undergirding stagnant poverty—corruption, malnutrition, illiteracy, poor infrastructure, poor schools, poor healthcare, oppression of girls, top-heavy wealth distribution, byzantine bureaucracy, rapacious public officials and soldiers—are inextricable from one another. They are too big to tackle all at once, and attempts to work on one of them run up against all the others.
An example. I came here to teach but found that most of my students were functionally illiterate. They couldn’t find the point a paragraph or article, couldn’t write a coherent sentence of any complexity, couldn’t even converse above a basic level—in French. And they were supposed to learn English? They’d been passed along by a failing educational system and were irretrievably lost on the first day I taught them.
Another example. The village’s preschool is a fledgling affair because they have no physical school and have to use whatever classrooms the elementary school isn’t using at the moment. My friend Edouard, whose wife Monique runs the preschool, sums up the problem like this: “On voudrait construire une école maternelle à Kêmon, mais le Maire a refusé, parce qu’il a déjà boufée toute l’argent.” Or, “We would like to build a preschool at Kêmon, but the Mayor refused, because he’s already boofed all the money.” (The French verb “boufer” [to boof] is, I believe, supposed to mean “to eat rapidly,” but in Benin it’s used as a graphic euphemism for stealing public funds. I hear that in English slang it means “to ingest anally,” which would be even more accurate.)
Another example. Back in the day, the French built some railroad tracks here. One line goes from Cotonou northwest to Natitingou, another northeast to Parakou. The Natitingou line has since been ripped up; all that remains are the beautiful stone bridges it once ran across. The Parakou line is unused. All goods are transported upcountry via massive diesel trucks which clog the roads and frequently crash at high speeds, wiping buildings, cars, and people off the face of the earth. The government reportedly purchased some locomotives and related equipment, and last year a train was sent chugging off to Parakou. It derailed and thirty people died. A couple weeks ago they tried again. The train had almost got to Parakou when it smashed into a bush taxi, killing everyone inside. This was predictable: there were no signals at the junction of road and railway, and nobody knew the train was running. That driver would have been less startled if a flying saucer had come and shot his taxi with its zap guns.
And so on. It all leaves a lingering sense of futility. Nothing you do will do any good. And that’s the kicker: as if all those obstacles weren’t bad enough, they breed a self-defeating mentality. You internalize all the external problems and they become part of who you are, part of how you see yourself and your people in relation to the world.
Nothing significant can happen until that changes. Development isn’t something that Westerners can do to Africa. It isn’t even something that Africans can do without a fundamental change in how they view themselves.
