Before I begin, a quick note to my dearly beloved, obviously copious readers:
As you are avidly following my blog, I assume that you’ve discovered that Tuesday is my regular posting day. In order to spare you any unnecessary and unpleasant surprises, I find myself duty-bound to inform you that you will not be hearing from me next Tuesday, as, providing that I effectively navigate transportation including sept-place taxi, pirogue, 4WD, and donkey cart, I will be at that time engaged in viewing some mangroves, which, while theoretically lovely, are unlikely to have internet. Do please attempt to sustain yourself until the following Tuesday, as I would hate to lose any of my readership to dramatic death for lack of my dulcet words.
Anyways:
“Africa is not a good place to live.”
Oh. Okay. I’m not really sure what to say to that, actually. My reflex, of course, was to go for the standard response to any comment that could be interpreted as self-deprecating, something to the effect of “oh, no, that’s not true,” etc. I clamped my teeth over that one, however, when I realized that the barely more than one month for which I’ve lived in Africa pales to the point of translucence before Aziz’s eighteen years of residence here. I settled with an unassuming “why?”
“People here are thieves,” he said. In fairness, I should probably mention that he had recently had his cell phone stolen, and may therefore have not been reflecting his normal opinion of his homeland during the course of this conversation. After he spent several minutes on quite unflattering commentary on the subject of Africa and Africans, I asked if, given that he found it so bad, he planned to try to leave.
“No,” he replied, and when I once again asked why, he paused.
“In the U.S. they set you free at eighteen, right?” he said. I hadn’t exactly heard it phrased that way before, but I told him that, essentially, yes: at eighteen many people still go to school and depend on their parents, but you’re an adult under the law. You have the right to do (almost) anything you want, and you bear the legal responsibility for your actions.
“It’s not like that here,” he said. “Here, even when you grow up, you have to do what people tell you to do. Leaving just isn’t done.”
The age of civil majority in Senegal is eighteen. I just checked this on Wikipedia, to make sure I’m not giving out false information (obligatory comment about the reliability of Wikipedia here… look it up yourself if you’re really concerned). There’s no denying, however, that, even when the laws are essentially the same, the functional reality of adulthood is very different.
My daily life as it’s been transplanted across the Atlantic provides something of an example. I’m a twenty-year-old college student. In the United States (at least, in my social stratum of the United States) this means that I’ve lived away from my parents for two years. I attend school in an environment composed almost solely of my own peers, and it is my basic expectation that I will be able to go wherever I want whenever I want and no one can or should tell me to do otherwise. After I finish college, I’ve habitually assumed that, barring a miraculous lottery victory allowing me to do a bike tour of European chateaux – which would be particularly miraculous given that I don’t buy lottery tickets – I will get an apartment, either alone or with other people my own age, in a city nowhere near my birthplace and family home, and work to support one single dependent: me. I will visit my family on holidays and talk to them on the phone. Certainly, no one in my family would dream of offering any commentary stronger than advice on the subject of my choice of career, residential location, or spouse. If I do get married, which may or may not happen at all, it will certainly be a decision based on an assessment of my personal pleasure, it will likely be to someone of at least somewhat different ethnic and religious background from me, and it will probably be after I’ve attained a post-college degree, aimed myself towards a long-term career path, and generally laid down the blueprint of my own personal life plan and gained enough diverse experience to feel comfortable in the continuity of my individual character. It feels odd even to write this out: of course this is what’s going to happen. It’s never really been something I’ve felt the need to express explicitly. It’s what my parents and most of my adult role models did, and it’s what the vast majority of my friends and acquaintances of my generation are assuming they’ll do, with a few minor tweaks here and there.
Given this set of expectations, my life here feels occasionally like High School Redux. I get up, get ready, and descend to wait for some combination of my yaay, Sokhna, and the other maid Awa to get me bread and tea for breakfast. I go to school, stay there for the day, and then return to the house, where there are people who will comment if I deviate significantly from my normal time of arrival and ask me routine questions about the pleasantness of my day. I don’t go to a library or coffee shop to study, but instead sit as often as I can in the family room with my readings and colored pens, trying to turn off my ears to the extent that the TV won’t distract me (it’s much easier when they’re watching Wolof rather than French channels, since those are essentially incomprehensible and therefore rarely interesting) but not to the extent that I can’t pick up the sound of my new Senegalese name when someone tries to address me. I eat dinner with the family, on the family’s schedule, and dutifully put at least one bite of whatever they give me into my mouth, even when, as is often the case, I have no idea what it is and suspect that I might prefer to keep it that way. I am accountable for explaining my plans to someone in advance: today I have choir practice after school from 8:00 to 9:30; I’m going to explore the Institute Leopold Sedar Senghor with classmates and won’t be back for lunch; I’m going out.
“Out where?”
“To a concert.”
“Where’s the concert?”
“At a club called Just 4 U.” Please believe that the interior of this location is significantly less tacky than the name and indeed even reaches the benchmark of fairly un-tacky.
“Oh, all right. I know that place. It’s safe – just make sure you take a taxi right to the door, keep your money hidden, and stay with your friends.”
“Yes, maman.”
“What time will you be back?”
“Um… don’t wait up.”
According to my Wolof teacher, a talkative young man who is easily distracted by questions about Senegalese culture, I’m lucky to even be able to pull “I’m going to Location X” as a statement. Normally, he said, that’s a question, and the answer might well be “no,” for no better reason than “because.” Even at my age? Yes, especially – and here he did look very slightly apologetic – for girls. As long as you live with your parents, you have to do whatever they tell you.
And, by my standards, that’s a long time. Every local person I’ve met who’s my age, even up to six or seven years older, lives with their parents or relatives, except for the subset of students at Suffolk who come from other West African countries and have no family within hundreds of miles. Last week, I had stopped at the gas station on the way to campus to see if they had yet restocked on sugared peanuts, a local product that may be becoming seriously detrimental to my health and my pocketbook, and was asked by a young woman there if I was a Suffolk student and if I wanted a ride the rest of the way. Cars are air-conditioned: was this really a question? The be-skinny jeaned twenty-something hopped into a vehicle driven by her be-headscarfed yaay, with whom she arranged a pickup time upon our arrival. Again, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmingly reminded of early high school.
I’m not trying to say, actually, that people here grow up slowly. Indeed, people here, on average, stop school sooner, start earning money earlier, and marry younger than people in the U.S. There’s certainly no way that Sokhna or Awa’s days spent in hard household labor could be called childish, and they’re still in the equivalent of middle school during the academic year. No, the thing is that, here, growing up is not synonymous with independence.
When I think about becoming more of an adult, I often think about pulling further away from my family. Don’t get me wrong: I adore and miss my family. But I felt more grown up when I got my drivers license and didn’t need to be driven to school, when I made up my bed in my college dorm room, when I lived in Bethesda this past summer and commuted into work and play, accountable to nothing but the intern coordinator, the metro bus schedule, and my personal whims. I felt grown up getting on a plane to an entirely new continent, plunging for the first time out of easy cell phone reach of my parents and friends and into an adventure that I had decided that I wanted to do for my own growth as a human being. And I plunged into a place where exactly what I did “just isn’t done.” Here, you’re a dependent of the family until you’re a provider for the family. Leaving, or even disobeying, constitutes a betrayal of everything your family gave you. If your parents tell you to do something – be back at a certain time, go buy them a baguette, get married to a second cousin to keep the tribal blood pure – you do it. You’re always a child with regards to the elder generations, and, with regards to society, you’re a child until you get married, which is something you have to do in order to be taken seriously in the public sphere. You live where you were born, sometimes even exactly, though this is much less common in an urban center like Dakar where there isn’t space to keep adding new houses to the family complex.
In short, the phase of life that I have generally assumed I’ll occupy for the next ten years or so simply does not exist in Senegalese society. There is no such thing as an independent young adult working solely towards his or her own self-improvement. Here, you don’t ever stop being a member of a family unit; you simply move between prescribed roles within the unit into which you were born. This unit comprises the most important bonds you will ever have, and breaking these bonds is possibly the worst social sin one can commit. Divorce has started to happen here, but it’s very uncommon – the general strategy involves older members of the family dictating a solution to the problems of any unhappy couple. The Wolof language does not have a word for “step-siblings” – the nearest term, which I attempted to use with slightly humorous results, is “doomu baay” which designates the children of another of your father’s wives within a polygamous marriage – and, even in French, it took me some time to get my yaay to understand that my brother and I spend half of our time at home living with our father, who is no longer married to our mother, our step-mother, and our step-mother’s three sons from her previous marriage who are not blood-related to me in any way.
Once you’re a member of a family, you stay there always. You don’t try to “find yourself,” but rather add to the communal identity, building on what your ancestors gave you and guarding the sanctity of what you have. I talked last week about how “property” doesn’t quite work in the same way here – well, we seem to be parting with “liberty,” too, a full two thirds of the Lockian conception that’s formed the bedrock of my worldview since I’ve had a worldview at all. Though, again, as I think about it: it’s not that liberty and property don’t exist here. They just don’t apply to the individual as much as to the family or communal unit. The family has property, and the goal is for the family to function as well as possible – an individual who tries to assert his or her own liberty or property at the expense of the family is undermining this higher-order aim. And, as I said, it’s awfully incongruous to be in the middle of this when the very fact of my being here represents my assertion of myself as an individual at – let’s face it – some expense to my own family, who did, after all, pay for my plane tickets and the small pharmacy under my bed.
Here, you’re not, as an individual, precisely free, at eighteen or ever. You’re not expected to prove your independence from your natal support network. You will always have that bedrock of people to help and guide you, financially as well as psychologically, as long as, in exchange, you play your designated part by obeying those higher in the hierarchy and sharing what resources you do get with the family. And now we’re starting to sound like Locke again, like this is a contract. Only, this isn’t a contract with the government, with the entirety of the nation, but with a small community. Aziz is fiercely loyal to his family, even as he’s willing to categorically disparage his fellow Africans and his government. It doesn’t quite ring right to say that Americans have high confidence in their government, but I’m starting to see that there are definitely standards that I take for granted at home that people don’t expect to get here. I assume that I will not be stopped for a minor traffic offense and have to pay a huge bribe to the police to avoid jail. I assume that my elections will be carried out in accordance with the law. That represents a lot of confidence in my government, actually. It’s more than people have here – and Senegal is one of the most politically stable countries in Africa, with fairly functional public services and a track record of non-violent power transfer.
This past Sunday marked the eight-year university of the sinking of the Joola. We learned – or, I should say, I learned, as everyone else knew it already – a song commemorating this in the local choir I’ve joined. After spending several whirlwind minutes meditating on the fact that Wolof is much harder to sight-read than French, I took advantage of the director’s focus on the errant bass section to ask the woman next to me what the words meant.
“Do you remember September 11 in the United States?” she said, which was not precisely the response I had been anticipating.
“Yes,” I replied.
“September 26 is our September 11.”
The Joola was the largest maritime disaster in history, according to the special the family watched on TV on Sunday night, counting many more victims than the Titanic. I had been making valiant efforts to study for an upcoming test, but, aside from the fact that it was utterly tragic, and was, unusually, commanding the full attention of every family member in the room, this program was in French and therefore comprehensible. The worst part about the whole thing, according to the commentary from both within and around the television, was that this was a government transport, and, eight years later, the government still has not satisfactorily investigated the tragedy. At this point, the anger seems to have stilled to a bitter acceptance of the government’s lack of desire to do right by the victims, their families, and the country.
“Africa is not a good place to live,” Aziz said. No one trusts in Africa. But they do trust in each other. Our program director once laughed at the memory of someone who noted that there’s no social security in Senegal.
“Of course there is,” he had responded. “It’s your parents and children and aunts and uncles and cousins and neighbors.” You’ll never be left in poverty any worse than that of any other member in your family, however old or decrepit you become, which, incidentally, is much better than Americans can say about our own social security in the upcoming years. The family’s property is yours, as yours is the family’s. You will not get your own apartment or spend the first thirty years of your life discovering who you are and what you want for yourself. You may not choose your own career or your own spouse with nearly the same degree of freedom I’ve always thought it my basic right to have. But you will never, ever, be alone.
Is that a worthwhile contract? I don’t think I can say: the ideal of life, liberty, and property has already steeped too deeply into my skin. I’m not sure that I can leave my structure any more than Aziz can. But, just as my ideals tell me I should, I’m trying to test that limit for myself anyway.
