Africa Askew

by Peter Boehm

  That’s why Professor Lam warns so vehemently against western development. In “The triumph of Maat”, Baraa, at the end of his time studying in Paris, writes to a friend in Senegal that, “People’s coldness and the individualism here are in the process of suffocating and slowly killing people. If that’s development, then I’d far rather have our underdevelopment. After all, despite our material privations, we have virtues and qualities without which people wouldn’t be people.”

  Of course, not everything about the “human warmth” of the African societies is perfect either. But this doesn’t concern Baraa/Lam. For him, it’s a question of organising reality in such a way that you can bear it. It’s about patting yourself on the shoulder, about reinforcing your feelings of self-worth.

  Professor Lam had no objection, himself, to the comforts of “western development”. After the interview, we left his office together, and he gave me a lift in his car to a crossroads where it would be easier for me to get a taxi. Professor Lam drove a Mercedes. It wasn’t the newest model. But it was a Mercedes.

  The westernmost point (Dakar city centre – Pointe des Almadies)

  It wasn’t far to the westernmost point. Dakar is on a peninsula, and I only had to drive out of the city centre, at its southern end, and head towards the tip of the Almadies headland, in the far west. That’s where the continent projects the furthest into the Atlantic Ocean.

  I first travelled by minibus through the city’s outlying districts, which were much as you might have found in Europe too. There was block after block of seven and eight-storey apartment buildings, similar to those built in huge numbers back home in the 1960s. Then we turned off onto the narrow Almadies headland, which is the preserve of the wealthy Dakar residents.

  There was just one road on the headland, lined with villas with huge balconies, bay windows and ornamental façades. There was also an upmarket hotel, and the premises of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). On the hotel’s golf course some grey-haired women, wearing trousers that were too short, were enjoying their afternoon round of golf, with red tail-coated caddies in tow.

  At the tip itself, the wind was very strong. In good weather, it’s a popular destination for a day trip, particularly for Dakar’s expatriates. On the narrow sandy beach, two white families were playing and paddling with their children. By the beach there was an African craft market, a boat hire kiosk, and outdoor tables and benches where you could eat grilled crabs, fish kebabs and salad, or just drink a lemonade.

  Virtually parallel to the road – so almost exactly due West – a jetty jutted out into the sea......the long-awaited westernmost point!

  It was built on huge boulders, which had been sunk into the shallow water and secured with concrete, it had a neatly curving sandy path, like one you’d find in a back garden, and at the end there was a new-looking lantern, enabling boats to also moor there at night.

  But just as I was walking out there, wanting to feel the wind in my hair, someone stopped me. “Excuse me, Sir”, I heard him say. “The jetty is private. I’m sorry.”

  When I looked up, I saw that the man was wearing a green uniform. He was standing beside a small house and a barrier. He was a security guard.

  Of course! It was the property of the holiday resort, which I’d read about in my guidebook but hadn’t yet seen. The guard informed me that the jetty wasn’t accessible to the public. It was just for Club Med guests.

  Of course, I could have gone in through the front entrance and shown the manager my press ID. I’m sure that, after my five-and-a-half-month trip he’d have understood my wish.

  But at the same time, I knew – I wasn’t allowed out there. It was much better that way. No-one knew exactly where the continent’s easternmost point was. Perhaps at Cape Hafun, but perhaps not. You could only find out more precisely using satellite images.

  The westernmost point, on the other hand, was occupied by a chic French holiday resort, and could only be accessed by relaxation-seeking holiday makers and their pampered offspring.

  But between the two, there’s an awful lot of sand, many, many tears, and the certainty that enlightenment and its consequences are going to face a really tough battle there.

  ARRIVAL

  Strange expatriates III – Peter‘s departure

  You may have wondered that, throughout the whole book, I have consistently referred to myself as a white person. Well, I would have wondered about that before I moved to Africa, believe me!

  I didn’t know that I was white. Or, rather, I wasn’t aware of it.

  If someone had asked me before I set off, “What’s your skin colour?” then I’d have said “Well, white, isn’t it?”

  But no-one had asked me. After all, the question simply didn’t make sense. Why should it? Everyone was like me – white.

  But in Africa this was suddenly different. I was white, but the others weren’t. And I remained white, no matter what I did.

  That was the great shock awaiting me when I moved to Africa. But it wasn’t a shock which overcomes you like being given bad news on the phone, but rather it was a gradual one, which slowly seeps into your consciousness, like raspberry sauce in warm semolina pudding, and this makes it all the more lasting.

  I was white!

  It took me a while to understand it, but once I’d got there I could recognise it everywhere.

  As though I had my something attached to my belt which emitted smoke, wherever I appeared I immediately radiated a mysterious aura, visible to everyone apart from me. This removed all doubt – everyone knew for certain that I was white. I didn’t belong there. I was a foreigner.

  Even though African expectation of white people is almost always positive, I still had to get used to it. I was no longer an individual, but I belonged to a group – the whites – and this was the case with everyone, each and every time, at every encounter.

  The African children danced and ran happily around my legs when they saw me. The often shouted out the word for “white person” in their language – “Chawatscha” in Arabic, “Bature” in Hausa and so on. More often than not it was the first word I learned in the new language.

  The taxi drivers, luggage porters, tourist guides, petty criminals and anyone else working in the streets wanted to do business with me. After all, I was white!

  The poor and needy wanted help – aren’t aid workers white? – and the traders demanded double the normal price. But they, too, had their reasons – I was white!

  Everyone had some kind of expectation of me, was almost automatically overcome with greed when they saw me, suddenly remembered their sick child at home, or their life-long dream of owning a car.

  You see people in a different light when, like one of my Kenyan acquaintances, they suddenly ask you from the passenger seat, with no irony or warning, “But when you go back to Germany, you’ll leave your car here for me, won’t you?”

  Even if I didn’t fulfil these expectations, they still remained. As though I was currently simply lacking the necessary understanding and that, after a while, I’d develop it quite normally, just like everyone else did.

  I remained a constant puzzle for the taxi drivers outside the block of flats where I lived. It was beyond their realm of understanding, that a white person should walk to a kiosk, or get a bus into the city.

  Although they must have got to know me in the end, every day one of them would still call out to me – “Taxi, Mister?” – even though I hardly ever got one. I was hurt by the way they kept asking me, as though I were a tourist who could be exploited without repercussions, and never accepted me as a resident of their city.

  It was a very informative lesson for me, about the significance of skin colour. I was shocked by the way my surroundings changed so much, just because of the way I looked.

  My pale skin always seemed to me to be an ideal mask, so perfect that you couldn’t imagine a better one. It suited me so well, that other people could see only it, but not what lay beneath it. Yes, for them it wa
sn’t a mask at all, but reality.

  I’d originally gone to Africa because I was interested in the continent, and perhaps partly also because I’d had enough of my own. Like the young Arthur Rimbaud, I was happy to be going somewhere where things would be bound to be different from here.

  And, like him, I didn’t anticipate any problems. After all, I wasn’t racist. I was unprejudiced. I was a modern, well-informed traveller. Yes, for me there was nothing less imaginative or more repulsive than being racist – someone who needed to compensate for his own obvious defects by hating others.

  Besides this, I was also open to experiencing a different life. At least, that’s what I thought at the time. After a while, however, I had to admit that I wasn’t quite that open – I couldn’t be that open.

  Can someone who, in the long process of developing into an adult – if all goes well – had become accustomed to good manners and escaped a belief in the supernatural, and a blind respect of seniority, suddenly break free of all this in a foreign country, as though it were simply a superfluous piece of luggage?

  In the end, however, after a while in Africa I had to admit that I’d been deceiving myself. I’d become like the other white people around me astonishingly quickly. When I’d chewed khat in Nairobi, or visited a dirty cinema or a dingy bar, this was something unusual for a white person, but at the end of the day it was simply an occasional trip into a foreign world which wasn’t, and couldn’t be, mine.

  In general, I lived just as the other white people did, protected and screened from those scraping by. I lived in an expensive, safe area, with security guards at the gate, and a black servant who did my housework.

  Of course, the segregation between black and white people in Nairobi was extreme. The Kenyan highlands had been one of the central pieces of the British colonial empire in Africa. Many white settlers lived here, and some still do. The colonial setup of white masters and willing black servants has survived here, albeit in a slightly modified state.

  In West Africa, this post-colonial continuity is not as strong. But the principle remains. This was something which I could look at from as many different angles as I liked. But I could no longer close my eyes to it. I’d ended up somewhere I’d never wanted to be. And it was perfectly clear to me that, from the outset, it had been bound to be like this, and that I’d been naïve to believe I could have avoided it. I was white! And there was nothing I could do about it.

  Then, when I returned to Germany after almost four years, the next shock was waiting for me. I came back to a country which was foreign to me, one I no longer knew. I’m sure that it hadn’t changed significantly while I’d been away. No, something else had happened. It was my image, my perception of myself which had changed.

  When, in Africa, I’d cursed the broken telephones, and the public transport which operated without any kind of timetable, I’d always longed for Germany – for clarity, order and structure.

  But now, on my return, I noticed that Germany wasn’t all that efficient and reliable – at least, not as efficient as I’d remembered. It had just become so in my idealisation – because of the contrast.

  And there were more unpleasant surprises. In place of the streets thronging with children playing, with traders and people just scraping by, the constant noise and bustle of people and animals, which I’d left behind, just a seven-hour flight away, I was suddenly confronted with almost deserted boulevards.

  When I drove through a residential district of my small South German town in the mornings, the only people in evidence were glum-looking pensioners, carefully – like sentenced prisoners – taking their rubbish to the bins in their front gardens.

  And when I drove past these astonishingly agile zombies – that’s how I saw them, in any case – I instinctively took my foot off the accelerator, so that my car’s slipstream wouldn’t sweep them off the pavement.

  The musty-smelling entrance halls, the complicated ornaments, made from a mixture of macramé, dried flowers and refined conventionality hanging on the entrance doors, and the front gardens with their trellises, pots and birdbaths, showed you uneuivocally: here lives family Müller-Meier-Heinemann[7]. They had built and maintained everything – this was their territory, and, no, you couldn't’t come in! And these are just a couple of entries from my long dictionary of discomfort.

  I was overcome with a deep and inextinguishable boredom for everything and everyone. But the fundamental thing which showed me that I really was an outsider was that I simply no longer understood the people. The constant mantra of my thoughts was that, if they had so much, if everything was obviously going so well for them, why didn’t they just enjoy themselves? What gave them any pleasure in such a joyless life? They had everything! So what was the problem? Why didn’t they do what every African would have done – party!

  My acquaintance from Togo, whom I told of my plight, tried to cheer me up. “Yes, I’d asked myself the same thing”, she said, and she wasn’t joking. “But I think it’s on holiday that the Germans really let go.”

  It was, again, just a case of admitting this to myself – the longer I was in Germany, the more I began to mourn my Africa.

  Oops!

  While I’d still been living there, it had never been “my” Africa, but always other people’s. But now I suddenly missed it – and how I missed it!

  It was the contrast with Germany which first made me realise that I must have changed while I’d been in Africa – that, although while there I was always the white man, I’d become slightly African myself.

  And I gained another insight here too – that there was no going back from here, and that I could no longer simply shake this feeling off, even if I’d wanted to.

  Admittedly, however, these insights also caused me a crisis of conscience. They meant that I asked myself, for a long time, how it could be that I missed Africa so much. How could I miss a continent where so many people were suffering, where so many people were so obviously trampled underfoot, one which had – in a word – experienced so much less impetus for civilisation than Europe had?

  Since I found it so hard to answer this question, I initially suspected “resistance”, as it’s known in psychoanalysis, or “where it hurts” in the jargon of football coaches.

  But it wasn’t that. I found the answer hard not so much because it touched a raw spot for me, but rather because it seemed rather unflattering.

  Besides, the first part of the question is easy to answer. The only suffering which can really cause you to feel pity is that which affects people with whom you have an emotional connection, people you know and like. It’s easy to detach yourself from the suffering of strangers. That is to say – it’s perfectly possible to live in Africa without thinking about hunger, war or AIDS, or of taking the slightest notice of them, in fact, just as you can live a carefree life in Europe, where you see these problems just in a couple of images on the evening news on TV.

  Another thing I certainly miss is the Africans’ spontaneity, warmth and openness, and everything you’d associate with this, and also, of course – even though I don’t like to admit it – my privileged status as a white person among non-whites.

  Of course, I liked the way almost all Africans greeted me so warmly, openly and spontaneously. But at the same time, I wasn’t blind to the ambivalence of these feelings. After all, the amateur ethnologists who return from Africa raving about the place usually forget to mention that Africans can also give you a damned grumpy, reserved and calculating greeting if you’re not white and are from the wrong ethnic group.

  No, I think the main reason why I liked it there so much was to do with far more mundane factors. The reason I miss it is related to my thirst for adventure and my love of discovery, rather than my noble feelings.

  I miss Africa because it showed me that I’m still alive, that my life isn’t over yet, that I can enjoy simple things, and that I don’t need an airbag in my car in order to feel safe.

  Sometimes I almost had the feeling – o
r so I seem to remember, anyway – that I was really living, that I had a life.

  Time seemed to pass far more quickly in Africa, as though each second were just nine-tenths of a second long. Unlike back home, I wasn’t constantly looking forward to the end of the working day, to Saturday evenings, or to my holiday in Morocco or Paris.

  Instead, excitement consisted of trips to the supermarket, or a walk to a kiosk. Something could always happen, a surprise was lurking around every corner. It was often life’s simple things which I enjoyed, and not my activities after work.

  But why was this? How did Africa achieve this? It’s quite simple – my time there showed me a new side of life, which I hadn’t known before.

  It was my wonderment at the foreign which created this new feeling – the desire to experience new things, curiosity about another world, the moment of surprise which had become permanent. So, in other words, exactly what I couldn’t find in Germany, because it was my country, my world, the world I knew so well but which I’d sometimes rather not have known.

  The feeling that, for example, on hearing a stranger in Germany utter just one sentence, I immediately know this person well – from the accent, choice of words, topic, tone and gestures – but this wasn’t something I wanted.

  You lose this when you’re in foreign parts. Of course, for Kenyans among Kenyans it was exactly the same as it was for me in Germany. But not for me with the Kenyans. And that’s the trick – to live in a place where you’re foreign, and to laugh about the people who live where they belong.

  But there’s still far more to it than this – freeing the final dimension of life, which still needs freeing, throwing off the last burden which life has inevitably strapped to your back. When you’re at home, you only ever look at the world through your kitchen window – whether you want to or not. All over the world. You need to distance yourself from your own observation post before you can see where you once stood.