Advice regarding working in Africa: drink tea

I was asked to write about "my advice to others going to work in Africa." Here is what I wrote:



(photo: picture inside the train going to Dakar from Bamako)

It is perhaps a bit difficult for me to prepare someone for going to Africa, now. I have become almost too familiar with the continent and travel there has become habitual. Earlier this summer I did however meet a film crew who had asked to meet me to learn more about West Africa before going. The advise that I gave to them took me a while to develop and many anecdotal stories to present, but I did find a few things to tell them that they said were helpful.

They planned to take an atypical route, one that I myself had taken almost 4 years ago. This crew was hoping to find some interesting stories and so planned to take the ageing train from Dakar to Bamako. My first advise to them was to “take tea”. This has become my analogy for learning to sit down and relax. This analogy also implies that one should take the time to sit with people. Moreover I emphasized the social finesse involved in tea. If you are asked to sit for tea, this isn't an offer that should easily be refused.

The rituals may differ from region to region across Africa, or it may be coffee rather than tea, but the purpose and reasoning is the same. Like many things in West Africa, or in most parts of Africa, when you are asked to have tea it is because someone has something to ask, or say, or would like to learn more about you. A person under your employ might ask you to sit for tea so that they could find a delicate way to suggest something that they think you should know. During the course of a long conversation they might hope to slip in whatever is on their mind, usually through an analogy or story that on the surface seems entirely unrelated.

(photo: Women selling food at one of the many, many stops along the 1280 KM route from Bamako to Dakar)

This embodies the subtlety of African communication, much about nothing might be said, while little of great importance might hardly be heard. Tea, I instructed them, can also be a useful weapon. I myself accidentally discovered this tool. If ever you are say held up by immigration officials, one of the best ways to free oneself is through tea. By ordering tea one signals clearly that you aren't in a hurry. You sit, perhaps begin the ceremony right in front of their office and then slowly begin to sip your tea. Soon enough they will become nervous of foreigners near their desk and they might let you through. I did this while crossing into Senegal from Mali one time and I may have been one of few foreigners to have ever passed that check point without paying special “duties”. This also applies when negotiating in general. Either you are showing that you are interested in learning more of the other party or that you aren't in a hurry, in either case this sets you apart from most Westerners immediately.

I remember in my first week a guy saying to me: “You Westerners may have watches, but we Africans have the time.” I have heard that statement many times, in different languages or phrased in different ways, but that alone is the greatest difference in mindset between the North and the South.

This statement has echoed through my mind many, many times since. A lot of my advise, I suppose, generally centred around this subtlety of things in Africa that I mentioned before – again there is so much said but not spoken and we Westerners tend not to be listening for that which is not verbal.

For me I don't know how or when I started to hear these subtexts, or those that I now hear. I told this film crew one of my favourite stories. I had been working in a rural village in South-Western Mali named Yanfolila for about 18 months. We had originally gone to this village to assist on the project of another NGO. We ended up becoming more and more involved in the project and so we were spending considerable time in this village. Though considerable by our standards, by rural Malian standards we were barely stopping-in. We would drive the 6 hour trip early on one day, stay-over one night, work that evening than the next day work until 2 PM and rush back to Bamako before the sun set. We were normally there for only 24 hours. I later called this the commando approach (an approach that I may have learned when I was in fact a paratrooper in the army).

Our short stay was in part because the town really was somewhat too tranquil and our accommodations were less than marvellous. It was also that we had a lot of other work to do. Finally on one of my last visits one of the elders from the village who had many times before asked me to have lunch with him asked again. This time, realizing that this might be one of my last visits, I did. I even risked a late night return to the capital to have lunch that day.

We sat, I treated him with the same respect that I had learnt to provide my own elders at home. His conversation meandered but I could hear what he was telling me, he had recounted through other stories the story of the things that we had done wrong. His anecdotes about farming, or other things were clever metaphors. One story he told was how we had simply signed-up people for the network that we created and how we expected that they would pay for the service. The model that we were using forgot the context. He alluded that this area of the world had become used to charming NGOs into giving them what they wanted. He was indeed right, the mayor and other offices in that town never did pay. He ended the talk with another one of my favourite quotes from Mali, he told me, “You Westerners come to Africa to teach us, but in the end it is Africa that teaches you.”

He couldn't have been more accurate. That phrase again came back to me this summer when I was in Tanzania. Somehow over the past few years I had become a bit more melancholy about my work. I had become bitter and disenfranchised with the international development business. The politics, money absconding and incompetence can be difficult to not let it overwhelm you.

This summer, while explaining to my Tanzanian contact about my work, I described that my work has become more about educating Westerners about Africa than about educating Africans about Western ways. Afterwards I was quite satisfied with that description and evaluation of my work and I am again quite enamoured with my work. Kambe Sini Mali!