MOMENTS OF CULTURAL CONFUSION FOLLOWED BY GRADUAL UNDERSTANDING. OF A SORT.
Shamrock hotel reception desk, Kumbo:
"‘Morning, Agnes.”
“Good morning, sir. Did you sleep well?”
“Like a baby. You?”
“I slept in the blood of our lord Jesus Christ and am very well, thank you.”
There’s a smile that I know crosses my face in situations like this. It’s the same smile I flash when, say, a crazy man tells me the end of the world is coming and I better repent.
I’m not saying Agnes, the front desk girl at the Shamrock, is crazy. Far from it; she was the picture of kindess itself, and intelligent to boot. And like a lot of Africans, she is very, very religious. Religious in a way that makes many Americans seem kind of secular, and Europeans downright heathen-ish. For many Africans, God is taken literally and immediately; no fuzzy interpretation of a universal spirit that manifests as a shared spark across a metaphysical cosmotic abstraction. God is God, and He either died for your sins or His only profit is Muhammad.
And yet…Africa maintains her own. Agnes’ friend Patricia was showing me around Kumbo the previous day; in a dusty amusement park where the pool was empty and the playgrounds rusted into red spiderwebs, we paused under a hill.
“You cannot built on this hill! It is the center of town. The witchcraft here is very powerful. Any team that builds there is losing two souls!”
‘Witchcraft,’ in this context is a bit difficult to define; not being an expert, I can only decide from context that it refers to both magic that people cast and the inherent magical properties of certain places/things/etc. A lot of Africans are embarrassed about their continued belief in withcraft; in a garden outside Bamenda, a statue of Africa portrayed as a chained woman was hung with sings like, “Corruption. AIDS. Witchcraft.”
But plenty of Africans still believe in those old powers. In some ways, it seems they worship Christianity and Islam with such fervor because they believe the ‘withcraft’ of those religions sublimated the witchcraft of the old ways; after all, how powerful could native spirits be if the followers of Jesus and Allah subdued their homeland?
Or maybe it’s the need to believe in some Power in a land where power – and here I define power as the ability to change the external environment to suit my needs – is both abused and out of your hands. Nothing happens just because you want it to happen here, which I find is much more relatively the case in the West. Back home, when I want light, I flick a switch. I miss a friend; I call them. I want to know about something; I google it.
Here, the electricity is often out. The internet only works on a spotty level (it’s taken me three tries to load typepad). Traveling 60 miles can take five hours. The roads are often a mangled mess, and the police are corrupt.
This is the zeitgeist I have always felt the most in the developing world, the main difference between here and the West: things don’t just happen. Life is not in your control. To the contrary; in any givens scenario (broken bus, busted water, police bribe) the end result is you much more likely accepting than changing the situation, so better to accept fate and hope for change. In that vein believing in God, or witchcraft, or both (depending on your theology), beings not only beyond power but influential over it, entities that might listen to you and have direct bearing on your day – well, it makes a lot more sense.
MOMENTS OF UTTER CULTURAL DISJUNCTION
Scene: Foumban, Western province. Me and a few African guys sitting around a house -- specifically, the house of Adamaoua's cousin, Abdel. </p><p>Abdel, who is studying theater, likes to sing, and we've been going through a hit list of African standards and French and American hip hop and R&B.
R. Kelly, Akon, TI, Brick and Lace, Diddy, Fiddy, the rest; the guys sing along and look hard, in sports jerseys and kangol caps.
And then...those seagulls. The distant waves. That sort of pan pipe. And Celine...
"My Heart Will Go On," plays for the third time today, and everyone of these African men, who frankly look like they could chew razor wire for tea, is singing along, and not just mumbling the words, but lustily belting out the lyrics. Abdel in particular seems to be experiencing communion with the French-Canadian Gods of Song and Lyric Themselves.
"Celine Dion," says Adamoua afterwards approvingly, smiling at what I realize is my usual terrified smile flashed in nervous situations (see above). "The Mother of Love."
MOMENTS OF COMPLETE CULTURAL CONNECTION AND, DARE I SAY, UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD, WITH AN EMPHASIS ON 'BROTHER'
Earlier that day I had met Adamoua's fiancee and one-year old daughter. I have to say -- both were beautiful and both seemed kind of...mad (that baby wasn't smiling at candy). Adamoua, you see, lives in Doala where he is, well, a handsome graduate student, while his girl (and their baby girl) stays in Jakiri, the small, provincial dustpit where Adamoua went to high school.
In the living room, with the guys (after the above Celine Dion incident), I asked Adamoua what his plans were.
"Well, she is my fiancee..."
"Will you move back to Jakiri?"
"Ech!" he said, falsetto and guttural all at once. "There is nothing for me there."
"Will she move to Douala?"
"Tch." A little less emphasis and lot more resignation. A short quiet descended over all assembled.
"I think," Adamoua said after awhile, "she is angry because I stay away from home and want to be in another place."
"I looked at him and said, dryly, "Probably."
"The immediate outburst of laughter amongst all the men in the room was followed by shared looks that said, in so many words, "Yeah, dude," a look that I have found works any and everywhere, from the Andamans to Zimbabwe (I'm not just making a cute A-Z comparison either. I mean that -- I've talked about women problems with guys in Port Blair and Vic Falls, and my conclusion is: of all the bonds that connect our common human soul, the ability to sigh from your toes and say either "Men" or "Women" in your respective language is perhaps the strongest).
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