22 January, 2009
A meeting with the Rotary Club of Garoua / Une reunion avec le Rotary Club de Garoua
On January 12, I had the pleasure of attending with Emily a meeting of the Rotary Club of Garoua at the Hotel la Benoué. Emily and I were warmly received by the club President Njialeu Blaise and all of the other members. I shared information about how I was using my Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship, and they in turn told me about the club’s activities, which include some great work with an orphanage and rural schools. After the meeting, the club treated us to dinner at a nearby restaurant. Emily and I were both extremely grateful to be able to spend the evening with such friendly and generous hosts. I will now translate this into awful French.
Le 12 janvier, Emily et moi, nous étions ravis d’assister à une réunion du Rotary Club de Garoua à l’Hôtel la Benoué. Le président du club, NJIALEU Blaise, et tous les autres membres nous sont rendus très confortable. J’ai partagé des renseignements sur mon bourse de Rotary et mes études au Ghana. Ils nous ont parlé des projets du club. Ils travaillent avec une maison des enfants abandonnés et des écoles rurales. Après la réunion, les membres du club nous avons offert un repas à un restaurant proche. Emily et moi, nous étions très heureux de passer une soir avec des gens si gentils et si généreux. Maintenant, je vais traduire ceci en français horrible.
Le 12 janvier, Emily et moi, nous étions ravis d’assister à une réunion du Rotary Club de Garoua à l’Hôtel la Benoué. Le président du club, NJIALEU Blaise, et tous les autres membres nous sont rendus très confortable. J’ai partagé des renseignements sur mon bourse de Rotary et mes études au Ghana. Ils nous ont parlé des projets du club. Ils travaillent avec une maison des enfants abandonnés et des écoles rurales. Après la réunion, les membres du club nous avons offert un repas à un restaurant proche. Emily et moi, nous étions très heureux de passer une soir avec des gens si gentils et si généreux. Maintenant, je vais traduire ceci en français horrible.
20 January, 2009
18 January, 2009
Christmas en brousse (in the bush)
It’s about 650 miles from Douala, Cameroon’s commercial hub and main port, to Garoua, provincial capital of the Région du Nord. Another 45 miles to the border with Chad. The road network between Cameroon’s lushly forested south and arid, sahellien north is in poor condition, making the route one of Africa’s most expensive transport corridors. (According to the Institute for Food Policy Research, it costs 11 cents / km to transport goods by road between Douala and N’Djamena, Chad. The comparable rate in the US is estimated at 5 cents / km; in Pakistan, it’s 4 cents / km. To make matters worse, Douala’s is West Africa’s most expensive port.) Consequently, most people and goods go north by rail, that is, by the government-owned, French-operated CAMRAIL train running daily between Yaoundé, the capital, and N’Gaoundère, about 200 miles to the south of Garoua. It’s a 15 hour ride, a red-eye leaving at 6 in the evening.
The Midnight Express disgorged me, red-eyed and rubber-legged, under the concrete fin of the N’Gaoundère train station a little after noon on December 21. I was lucky to wedge myself onto the first bus leaving for Garoua, where I was retrieved by my girlfriend Emily, a radiant vision in an African print skirt, bronzed skin, lugging the bulky helmet that the US Peace Corps requires its volunteers to wear whenever they travel by motorcycle taxi (moto). As I caught sight of her from the window of the bus, all of the time between when we said good bye in Philadelphia and the present collapsed.
Cameroon was one of the first countries to receive Peace Corps volunteers after the Corps’ inception in the early 1960s. Agroforestry, Emily’s sub-program, is, however, a much more recent endeavor, opening operations in Cameroon’s three northernmost provinces in 2000. Emily is posted in a rural village called Bamé, about 30 miles southeast of Garoua. As a Peace Corps volunteer, she wears many hats (headscarves, actually): ambassador of goodwill, student of culture, cultivator of foodstuffs. But essentially, she’s there to peddle trees. And she’s got a good product to push. Trees do everything but tuck you in at night. They generate income. Emily is helping some of her neighbors to acquire gum Arabic trees, the sap of which is in high demand for its industrial applications. Trees offer shade, a luxury easily forgotten until you get stuck without one in the 125F heat. Fast growing trees provide sustainable sources of firewood and construction materials. They can improve crop yields by fixing nitrogen and furnishing green manure. They say no to erosion and desertification, critical functions for a region on the doorstep of the Sahara.
Bamé is a sprawling classroom with a faculty of approximately 3,000. Mbroro pastoralists, Toupori famers, Muslim Fulbés, Christian Mafas, and a half dozen other ethno-linguistic groups are scattered across the dusty plain. The diversity is at once fascinating and a bit daunting. For instance, a matter as simple as saying hello becomes complicated in such a cosmopolitan environment. Use French and you run the risk of being that nassara (foreigner) who hasn’t taken the time to learn any of the local languages. Don’t use French and you may be implying that you don’t think your interlocutor has had much formal education. Use fulfuldé, the lingua franca across Northern Cameroon, and you may offend non-Fulbé, some of whom carry a historical grudge dating to the Fulbé jihad’s of the 19th Century and don’t appreciate being addressed in the conqueror’s language. Even if you do select the culturally appropriate greeting, it’s likely to touch off a chain of rapid-fire pleasantry exchanges, a dizzying call and response that Emily navigated effortlessly but which left me feeling like I knew even less of the language than when I started.
It’s easy for an outsider to see Bamé for what it doesn’t have. It doesn’t have a paved road. It doesn’t have a secondary school. It doesn’t have running water. It doesn’t have electricity, even though high tension wires run right through the middle of the village. I was struck, however, by what it does have. Friendly people welcoming to visitors and supportive of Peace Corps’ mission. A great weekly market. Lots of fat, tasty looking ducks. And, of course, Emily. That’s more than enough to lure me back.
The Midnight Express disgorged me, red-eyed and rubber-legged, under the concrete fin of the N’Gaoundère train station a little after noon on December 21. I was lucky to wedge myself onto the first bus leaving for Garoua, where I was retrieved by my girlfriend Emily, a radiant vision in an African print skirt, bronzed skin, lugging the bulky helmet that the US Peace Corps requires its volunteers to wear whenever they travel by motorcycle taxi (moto). As I caught sight of her from the window of the bus, all of the time between when we said good bye in Philadelphia and the present collapsed.
Cameroon was one of the first countries to receive Peace Corps volunteers after the Corps’ inception in the early 1960s. Agroforestry, Emily’s sub-program, is, however, a much more recent endeavor, opening operations in Cameroon’s three northernmost provinces in 2000. Emily is posted in a rural village called Bamé, about 30 miles southeast of Garoua. As a Peace Corps volunteer, she wears many hats (headscarves, actually): ambassador of goodwill, student of culture, cultivator of foodstuffs. But essentially, she’s there to peddle trees. And she’s got a good product to push. Trees do everything but tuck you in at night. They generate income. Emily is helping some of her neighbors to acquire gum Arabic trees, the sap of which is in high demand for its industrial applications. Trees offer shade, a luxury easily forgotten until you get stuck without one in the 125F heat. Fast growing trees provide sustainable sources of firewood and construction materials. They can improve crop yields by fixing nitrogen and furnishing green manure. They say no to erosion and desertification, critical functions for a region on the doorstep of the Sahara.
Bamé is a sprawling classroom with a faculty of approximately 3,000. Mbroro pastoralists, Toupori famers, Muslim Fulbés, Christian Mafas, and a half dozen other ethno-linguistic groups are scattered across the dusty plain. The diversity is at once fascinating and a bit daunting. For instance, a matter as simple as saying hello becomes complicated in such a cosmopolitan environment. Use French and you run the risk of being that nassara (foreigner) who hasn’t taken the time to learn any of the local languages. Don’t use French and you may be implying that you don’t think your interlocutor has had much formal education. Use fulfuldé, the lingua franca across Northern Cameroon, and you may offend non-Fulbé, some of whom carry a historical grudge dating to the Fulbé jihad’s of the 19th Century and don’t appreciate being addressed in the conqueror’s language. Even if you do select the culturally appropriate greeting, it’s likely to touch off a chain of rapid-fire pleasantry exchanges, a dizzying call and response that Emily navigated effortlessly but which left me feeling like I knew even less of the language than when I started.
It’s easy for an outsider to see Bamé for what it doesn’t have. It doesn’t have a paved road. It doesn’t have a secondary school. It doesn’t have running water. It doesn’t have electricity, even though high tension wires run right through the middle of the village. I was struck, however, by what it does have. Friendly people welcoming to visitors and supportive of Peace Corps’ mission. A great weekly market. Lots of fat, tasty looking ducks. And, of course, Emily. That’s more than enough to lure me back.
13 December, 2008
The family in cross cultural perspective
I was required to take a course in sociology this term, African Social and Political Systems. The idea of it didn’t excite me. I felt like I knew the basics of the subject already (my willingness to profess “basic” knowledge on topics of which I am completely ignorant is at times a bit alarming) and I was meekly opposed to the prospect of studying “traditional” Africa or Africa as a unitary whole (perhaps a tenuous position given the fact that I’m seeking an MA in African Studies). I won’t say that all my concerns were unfounded. Most of the basic texts were written by colonial era anthropologists, who, despite being formidable intellects and earnestly desirous of accurately recording observations of African societies, were still very much embedded in the project of politically subjugating the subjects of their research. The bias isn’t too hard to point out when terms like “primitive man” are pepper the text. In any case, while I didn’t have a transcendent academic experience, the course did drive home an important point: the basic concepts we use to organize our social world are not universal concepts.
Family, for instance. If you asked me the difference between an African family and an American family a few months ago, I probably would’ve mumbled something about there being no such thing as the typical African family, and then given the same response that would go at the top of the Family Feud board: African families are larger. Far be it from me to correct popular wisdom. I think on average they probably are. A more interesting question is why. The standard response there is land abundance/labor scarcity has been a defining feature of African history; consequently the ability to mobilize labor has often translated into the capacity to accumulate wealth, acquire political power, and even to survive. Tracing who has rights to whose labor is a fast way to discern the distribution of power in any social system. Does a wife’s trading enterprise generate enough income over which she can maintain control to grant her a degree of autonomy from her husband? That example starts to take us into differences in marriage, like the fact that most married couples keep separate accounts and a large portion of Akan couples don’t live in the same household [in a matrilineal system, a person’s ties to his or her mother and siblings often take precedence over ties to a spouse], but we won’t follow that rabbit hole here.
Another way to approach the question of why the tightly circumscribed nuclear family is not the norm in Africa (again, in places in Africa it is) is to look at the terminology of kinship. I groaned and skipped this section of the course reading the first time around and only came back to it during my preparation for the final. It’s actually fairly interesting. The first point is that Americans tend to address their relatives according to their genealogical relationship. So my dad’s sister is my aunt, and my mom’s brother’s daughters are my cousins. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, though. Close friends of my parents become uncles and aunts, their children cousins.
A number of African societies employ what’s called classificatory terminology. Here the terms derive from social, rather than biological, relation. My dad’s sister might be called my mother (or even father). This reflects the fact that she’s in the generation above me [the same generational relation to me as my parents] and plays a similar role to that of my mom (or dad). In fact, I might refer to all the women in the community of my parents’ generation as mother, though our responsibilities to each other wouldn’t be the same as those existing between my biological mother and I. Just as in the example of my parents’ friends becoming kin, there are examples of establishing fictive kinship in African societies. According to my musty source penned in the 1940s, there are/were groups in the Transkei of northern South Africa which say that if a man drinks the milk of a cow belonging to a different lineage (broad family grouping), he becomes a member of that lineage and can’t marry any of its daughters. There are plenty of other interesting examples (a Shona man will refer to his mother’s brother, his mother’s brother’s sons, and their sons as his grandfathers), which may or may not apply now or ever have actually worked in the manner described by the authors. The general point, my brother/sister, is that classificatory terminology tends to broaden the scope of whom you look upon as kin and so can expand the size of your family.
For me, the real value of the course was to reinforce the pitfalls of transferring concepts willy nilly from my cultural context to another. Example: raising the income of the family breadwinner doesn’t necessarily raise the standard of living of all within the household. Needless to say, a typology sufficiently nuanced to capture the dynamics of my family remains to be articulated.
Family, for instance. If you asked me the difference between an African family and an American family a few months ago, I probably would’ve mumbled something about there being no such thing as the typical African family, and then given the same response that would go at the top of the Family Feud board: African families are larger. Far be it from me to correct popular wisdom. I think on average they probably are. A more interesting question is why. The standard response there is land abundance/labor scarcity has been a defining feature of African history; consequently the ability to mobilize labor has often translated into the capacity to accumulate wealth, acquire political power, and even to survive. Tracing who has rights to whose labor is a fast way to discern the distribution of power in any social system. Does a wife’s trading enterprise generate enough income over which she can maintain control to grant her a degree of autonomy from her husband? That example starts to take us into differences in marriage, like the fact that most married couples keep separate accounts and a large portion of Akan couples don’t live in the same household [in a matrilineal system, a person’s ties to his or her mother and siblings often take precedence over ties to a spouse], but we won’t follow that rabbit hole here.
Another way to approach the question of why the tightly circumscribed nuclear family is not the norm in Africa (again, in places in Africa it is) is to look at the terminology of kinship. I groaned and skipped this section of the course reading the first time around and only came back to it during my preparation for the final. It’s actually fairly interesting. The first point is that Americans tend to address their relatives according to their genealogical relationship. So my dad’s sister is my aunt, and my mom’s brother’s daughters are my cousins. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, though. Close friends of my parents become uncles and aunts, their children cousins.
A number of African societies employ what’s called classificatory terminology. Here the terms derive from social, rather than biological, relation. My dad’s sister might be called my mother (or even father). This reflects the fact that she’s in the generation above me [the same generational relation to me as my parents] and plays a similar role to that of my mom (or dad). In fact, I might refer to all the women in the community of my parents’ generation as mother, though our responsibilities to each other wouldn’t be the same as those existing between my biological mother and I. Just as in the example of my parents’ friends becoming kin, there are examples of establishing fictive kinship in African societies. According to my musty source penned in the 1940s, there are/were groups in the Transkei of northern South Africa which say that if a man drinks the milk of a cow belonging to a different lineage (broad family grouping), he becomes a member of that lineage and can’t marry any of its daughters. There are plenty of other interesting examples (a Shona man will refer to his mother’s brother, his mother’s brother’s sons, and their sons as his grandfathers), which may or may not apply now or ever have actually worked in the manner described by the authors. The general point, my brother/sister, is that classificatory terminology tends to broaden the scope of whom you look upon as kin and so can expand the size of your family.
For me, the real value of the course was to reinforce the pitfalls of transferring concepts willy nilly from my cultural context to another. Example: raising the income of the family breadwinner doesn’t necessarily raise the standard of living of all within the household. Needless to say, a typology sufficiently nuanced to capture the dynamics of my family remains to be articulated.
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