Tales told by an idiot
One of the really fascinating things about many African countries is that they are wrestling with issues from Western Europe's past, in the modern world. For example, ‘tribalism’ of the kind that Western Europe hasn't known for 1000 years is a massive issue in sub-Saharan Africa. Botswana is lucky - as in so many things - in the fact that virtually all its tribes speak the same language and share a common culture. But in Kenya there is an enormous amount of antagonism between different tribes, and this flared up last time there was an election and will probably do so again in 2012. Everyone is very aware of even worse examples from Rwanda and elsewhere.
The question everyone is trying to decide on is: how much pride should one take in one's tribe, as opposed to one's country? For some people, tribe is massively important - they love to talk about it. In Botswana, each Tswana tribe has its own animal totem, and so if two members of the Bahurutshe for example meet in the big city, they can greet each other by saying ‘hello, eland’ and this has a huge bonding effect. But I remember asking one man in Nairobi what tribe he was from, and he became quite irritated and said, ‘I'm a Kenyan! What tribe are you from?’ I felt like a massive, neocolonialist twat.
The problem of course is that many African states have only been around for about 150 years, and usually the borders drawn up by the colonising powers corresponded poorly with actual tribal boundaries. There is a linguistic side to this too: those who want tribalism to disappear generally push for tribal languages to be abandoned in favour of a lingua franca, which is often a European language. When I visited Eldoret in Kenya, where Kikuyu and Kalenjin communities are living in self-imposed segregation, everyone recalled the good old days when children were taught together in Swahili and English - but now, in their separate schools, lessons have ‘lapsed’ back into the tribal languages, making the children far less employable in a wider Kenya.
It seems to me that these are problems which Europe must have gone through in its preliterate past (and much later than that too of course, in many areas), and so it's very fascinating to see it happening today and read letters to newspapers about it, and hear pop songs written about the debate.
I get this feeling with all kinds of things though, not just politics. The rather traditional sexual divisions, especially in rural areas, also remind me of historical parallels. I remember when I read this passage from Bessie Head's When Rain Clouds Gather I was very struck by how it seemed like something a certain kind of Victorian man might have felt and believed - although he would never have been able to express it:
Prostitutes, he was to decide, were the best type of women you'd find among all black women, unless a man wanted to be trapped for life by a dead thing. A prostitute laughed. She established her own kind of equality with men. She picked up a wide, vicarious experience that made her chatter in a lively way, and she was so used to the sex organs of men that she was inclined to regard him as a bit more than a sex organ. Not so the dead thing most men married. Someone told that dead thing that a man was only his sex organs and functioned as such. Someone told her that she was inferior in every way to a man, and she had been inferior for so long that even if a door opened somewhere, she could not wear this freedom gracefully. There was no balance between herself and a man. There was nothing but this quiet, contemptuous, know-all silence between herself, the man and his functioning organs. And everyone called this married life....
Hey, there's a reading I could use in December.
My Botswana films are going pretty well so far. Do you want to see some people dressed as baboons singing Shakespeare? Of course you do.