Warriors and the rest of us

While in Nairobi at the home of a bibliophile friend I picked up Gerald Hanley's Warriors. The book is a memoir of Hanley's stint in Somalia as an officer-administrator during WWII. I only made it about a third of the way through before I had to leave, but the book's understated yet searing descriptions of this work have stayed at the forefront of my mind as I trek around Juba.

Hanley describes privations most Westerners today would find insupportable: a year at a remote outpost training a group of Somali soldiers with nothing but a bi-annual (if he was lucky) alcohol ration that he'd too-eagerly quaff in a few short days to break the monotony and the heat. Finally, a full year in, he received the order to descend to Mogadishu, dreaming all the while of the books and alcohol he'd stockpile, and the vegetables he'd demand, for his next posting, which would start some three weeks later and last another year.

Critiques of colonialism abound, and many are full of merit. But I find myself chastened by Hanley's experiences. Few today would travel across the earth to endure such trials. (To be fair, many of Hanley's compatriots went crazy or fell ill under the stress.) In my evenings with UN folks, I'm continually amazed how quickly the conversation turns to the vagaries of job privileges: if one has classification x, what kind of R&R policy does one fall under, and what are the salary implications? Should one's generator fuel be paid for by the organization? and so on. These are smart people spending long hours packed in converted shipping containers, writing reports and organizing logistics and coordinating meetings. Many of them appreciate the idealistic goals of their work. In mentioning their interest in parsing privileges (puzzlingly dull to an outsider), I don't mean to critique -- I think that kind of exchange is an inevitability, and useful, when working for large bureaucracies in which merit may be less important to success and remuneration than skill navigating rules. And I fully include myself in the category of those gone "soft" -- I enjoy running water as much as the next person, and wifi even more. But I do rather wonder how future generations will view us, our work, and our accomplishments in places like this.

Getting around in Juba

As a foreigner in Juba without an INGO/UN cocoon, I spend a lot of time getting up to speed on the workings of public transport. Private taxis -- often posh SUVs -- are prohibitively expensive. This leaves three options: foot, matatu (minibus), or boda-boda (motorcycle taxi).

[An aside: this city is run by foreigners, and I'm fascinated to see how that affects language -- which words overheard on the street are taken from English (anything NGOish), which from Arabic (numbers) and which from Ugandan street talk (boda boda, of which all the drivers hail from the land of the crested crane).]

As one boda driver observed, laughing, yesterday, "You are fearing!" It's true -- I don't feel very safe on the careening motos. The young drivers wear dark sunglasses even as the gloaming turns definitively to dusk. They take the bumpiest, narrowest, most-rutted and soccer-playing-children-filled dirt tracks so as to avoid the traffic police, who can always find some infraction with a boda driver. When walking is not possible, I prefer matatus. Matatu parks are always a mess: the minibuses jostle, bodas dart, hawkers ingratiate, and would-be passengers stay alert to the alternating squishes of mud, dust, and garbage underfoot as they scope out and push for a seat on the next bus home. They're Hans Monderman on speed.

Here's what I really like about these situations: being forced to rely on strangers for navigational aid often reaffirms my faith in humanity. Usually someone will see my confusion and help me find my way, taking on my cause as her own. (Three times people -- who I'd barely had time to say hello to -- offered to pay my fare. That has never happened to me in CAR.) Here's what I don't like: getting dumped in a far-off marketplace just as it's emptying for the night and discovering that, kindnesses of strangers or no, I am miles from my intended destination.

On dowries and contradictions

While in Bangui last December I attended a dowry ceremony for a cousin of my friend Pichou, Bangui’s best events photographer. The family’s house was in the bustling quartier near the airport, and the yard was already full of people finding spots among old friends and relatives in the rows of white plastic chairs rented for the occasion.

Pichou introduced me to everyone on her side of the family. At one point we met a toddler. “And this is…” Pichou leaned back to think for a moment. “She’s the daughter of my sister so…my daughter! She’s my daughter.” Then we turned to give bises to a vibrant, designer jeans-wearing youth. He died a few months later while working on the electoral census in the Southeast. (The circumstances of his death are a bit murky.)

The ceremony itself involved the groom’s family, represented by a cracking-voiced teenager with an often-malfunctioning microphone, who presented large quantities of household goods, food, and clothes (“two pairs of women’s sandals”; “one liter of cooking oil”; “two sleeping mats…”) to the bride’s family, whose job it was to act miffed at the poor quality of the offerings. Some plantains that the goat had taken a bite out of got a loud laugh. Finally, he handed over an envelope of cash. Now the derisive comments started flying in earnest from the bride’s side: “You want her to walk to the hospital when it’s time to give birth…?” (complete with pantomime of the offensive possibility). One by one people came forward to augment the total. Finally, they’d put together somewhere between three and four hundred thousand (a bit shy of US$1000).

I left early, my exit smoothed by the fact that Pichou, too, had to leave. She had to head on to the airport to take photos of a family friend who was returning in a coffin. The friend had gone to Cameroon to give birth since the hospitals are so much better there. But she’d died anyway. I was headed in the other direction, toward town, and I managed to hitch a ride with one of President Bozize’s sons. (Bozize has many sons. I prefer not to mention which of them was my chauffeur.)

He drove a Hi-Lux kitted out with darkly tinted windows. In the gloaming last minutes before total darkness we traversed the market, which was full of kids running around to fulfill their parents’ final errands of the day. A tiny baggie of cooking oil, a Maggi cube. I was sure we’d hit those darting shadows, but somehow we avoided disaster.

After the held-breath market crossing, we started making small talk. I talked a bit about my research. After an awkward pause, I asked, “So what do you do?”

He hemmed and hawed a bit. “I was a soldier, but, well, I mean, I was in the army for a while, but…” Finally he blurted out, “You know that the president is my father, right?”

I did. I waited for him to continue.

He explained that he was setting up a Christmas fair next to the stadium. Something about selling drinks, and music; and also teaching the youth about peace and democracy.

As we navigated a roundabout at the edge of town he turned to me and asked, “Have you been following the news?” I hadn’t heard anything since the day before. “About Ivory Coast? Gbagbo held his own inauguration today! Mais ca, c’est vraiment trop!”

Bozize’s son then launched into a diatribe about the failings of African executives. He and his friend, in the back seat, agreed that Ouattara would have been the better choice. “Ouattara is open. He’s for the West. Gbagbo is too much of a nationalist. You see what I’m trying to say?” Then he shifted fully into lecture mode: “We Africans, we have a problem. We like power too much. There are people who, once they grab power, stay there for thirty years! Est-ce que c’est normal? Non! Do you think you could see such a thing in America, or in Europe? No way! The problem here is the nepotism and the corruption.”

I nodded and murmured in hopes that he would continue this fascinating speech. To me, these seeming contradictions are the most thrilling moments during fieldwork. Here my interlocutor had gone from describing himself through reference to his father’s power (and remember that Bozize took power in a coup, and the last elections were far from free and fair) to decrying nepotism, all in the span of ten minutes. As we arrived at my place, the conversation had turned to President Biya in neighboring Cameroon, now in power for more than thirty years. “C’est pas normal,” the president’s son clucked, shaking his head.

I’ve been thinking about this interaction as I write a chapter about militarized anti-poaching in CAR. I’m struggling to describe how anti-poaching militia members who can fluidly espouse conservation rhetoric in conversation with me – and not just espouse, but really advocate, with heart – and then turn around and hunt and fish and otherwise break all the conservation laws they are meant to enforce. The cynic might say, “They’re lying,” and move on. But I think that believing one thing and doing another is actually a very human tendency, and to describe it simply as lying misses much of what is interesting about it. Anthropologists might talk about such apparent contradictions using the language of performance: the guard is performing his mastery of the Western conservation dictates, demonstrating that we’re on the same team, so to speak, but it’s just a show put on for potential donors. This evokes some of the emotions at work, but it nevertheless seems lacking. Embedded in the idea of a performance is that it’s fake, a show, a façade. And isn’t that just a way of saying it’s artful, ritualized and entertaining lying?

And thus a dissertation speed bump arises.

Bandits, etc.

My review of Saïbou Issa's Les Coupeurs de route: Histoire du banditisme rural et transfrontalier dans le bassin du lac Tchad was just published in Politique Africaine. Available here (ungated) under the heading REVUE DES LIVRES.

Now there's really no excuse for me not to finish the chapter I'm currently working on, which compares robbery like that Issa describes to roadblocks, two techniques of governance with similar outcomes. And yet.

p.s. A happy post-script, for once: Patrick got his passport!

A passport to nowhere

A few weeks ago I received an anguished message from my friend Patrick, my co-investigator in matters religious in Bangui, as I mentioned in my last post.

Patrick works for an international humanitarian NGO that, with the exception of a horrid (but largely covered-up) sex scandal, has become one of the most steadfast of the aid groups present in northeastern CAR. The job was Patrick's first for an aid group, and thanks to the mentoring of his former boss and his own helpfully-inflated sense of pride in a job well done, he became one of the organization's most-trusted employees. He now has a dream: to work, just once, as an ex-pat. Partly, this is because he yearns to see some of the world. And partly, it is because he has noticed that expatriate employees earn exponentially more than national staff, and just one posting abroad would be enough to secure his dream of building a farm for himself and his family in the southwestern countryside.

Pride, excitement, and not a little apprehensiveness mixed in his demeanor as he told me that his bosses had nominated him to attend a workshop on gender violence in Nairobi. It would be his first trip outside the region. For my part, I was purely thrilled. As someone who has always adored going to new places, perhaps I over-value things like trips. But even if that's the case, I was happy that Patrick would get a chance to see a bit more of the world and expand the knowledge that would help him contrast his Central African experience with those of people elsewhere. Not everyone desires (or has the privilege of) this kind of anthropological perspective, but Patrick does. He put himself through college by spending evenings at the airport, where he could use the streetlights to do his homework while earning money watching travelers' cars in the open car park. Now he too would be taking off.

After a three-week work stint in the far Northeast, Patrick returned to Bangui to take care of passport formalities in advance of his trip. For the past two or three years, CAR has been in the process of switching out its old passport facilities for a new, biometric system. (Apparently, the US has pushed for these changes.) This has meant that the passport authorities have been shuttered for more than two years. The only passports obtainable during that time were those purchasable (illegally) at PK5, Bangui's big market. (The existence of such a large black market in passports is part of why people say there are more Central African diplomatic passports than regular ones.) If your passport expired during the past two years, tough luck. If you never had a passport before (like Patrick), also tough luck.

Fortunately, the new biometric facilities opened at the end of June. Unfortunately, the minister and his adjoint responsible for managing the office went en mission to Ndjamena shortly thereafter. These two lead the process of convening an audience at the presidency, and this commission decides whether the person should be granted a passport. In their absence, Patrick's completed dossier languished. His plane to Nairobi came and went. He remained in Bangui, and the passport officer remained in Ndjamena. “L'Afrique c'est le monde le plus compliqué, comprends” (“Africa is the most complicated place, you understand”), he wrote, and then refused to talk any more about it – the memory was too bitter.

Thus I found myself in the perhaps contradictory position of lamenting the injustice that one person could not go en mission and the injustice that another had gone en mission. A friend who used to work for an international organization in Bangui complained that she would continually get calls from headquarters asking her to name a Central African delegate to a global conference. (These junior staffers are judged on whether they manage to round someone up from every country.) She finally refused when the request came for a representative to the world conference on tigers in St. Petersburg last year: with no tiger within thousands of miles of CAR, why should some functionary be plucked from his office – where ostensibly he has work to do – to spend several weeks (given the paucity of planes into Bangui, any trip quickly becomes a long one) on a per diem-paid vacation like that? There is a small conference class in Bangui that trots around the world to round out attendance statistics. (One friend who is part of this select group admits that most people just show up each morning to sign the register and claim their per diem and then depart, a practice he decries) But for everyone else, even just being allowed to obtain the documents necessary to be permitted to leave the country requires a massive feat of organization and lobbying. (And let's not get started on the travails of those seeking visas to North America or Europe...) Everyone is shooting for those narrow holes – the “conference gaps” in the global immigration system. What would it take to figure out and make new openings?

From Hannah Arendt onward, much thought has been expended over the plight of the stateless, who have no one to approach for a passport; but what of the state-d who nevertheless are denied the basic rights of citizenship?

All this reminds me: time to renew my passport. I sure am lucky.

How to be a Winner

Over the past couple of decades the number and variety of churches in Africa have seen a major expansion. Led by West Africans, and especially Nigerians, the pentecostal churches have quickly gained ground from the staid outposts of the previous century's Christian missionaries. The new churches are the object of much fruitful anthropological study (Birgit Meyer's work has been ground-breaking; my friend and colleague at Duke, Brian Goldstone, studies the prosperity gospel in predominantly-Muslim northern Ghana). The churches arrived late to CAR, but their presence has been growing, so I decided I'd go and check one out for myself.

I picked La Chapelle des vainqueurs (Winners' Chapel) because I remembered puzzling over its name when I saw it while living in Nairobi in 2004. I brought Patrick, a Central African friend who works for a humanitarian agency. We sneaked into Sunday morning's service a few minutes late. Inside, the hall had little adornment. Signs with one-word inspirational-moral prods (“prosperity,” “faith,” “supernatural,” “wisdom,” “healing”) marked the places where other churches might have depicted the stations of the cross. Here, I saw not a single cross.

At first I didn't recognize the preacher's language – his screaming and the microphone's distortion made deciphering words difficult. A translator quickly repeated his every phrase into crisp French. It dawned on me that the mysterious language was a heavily-accented Nigerian English. “Eh-ta-do!” became a clear “C'est fait!” in French. Only thanks to the French version did I figure out that the preacher kept repeating not “the war of God” but “the word of God”.

Despite the continual references to the word of God, God's actual words were notably absent from the service. I counted only two direct biblical references – to Matthew (Jesus as healer) and Romans. And we were treated to only one song. Instead, the preacher and translator worked themselves into rhythmic, repetitive incantations: “Heey-too!” “Il a pris!” “Heey-too!” “Il a pris!” The themes of health and wealth ran through it all.

Testimonials (my favorite part) punctuated the sermon. One man came forward and told how he had been preparing a dossier to submit for a Termes de référence (a contract bid). He lacked some of the required paperwork, but when he went to drop off the folder the person told him it didn't matter. And he got the contract! Everyone cheered and clapped. Another man told how he was en mission (the terminology used for trips outside the capital) to Paoua when he got in a car accident and broke his arm. He made it to a healer in Bossangoa, who set the bone and handed him a piece of string to tie around his wrist and protect him from the town's witches. He tossed away the man's string. And look at him now – his arm is fully healed, and no witches were able to come near him!

Later, the preacher asked “all the businessmen” to come forward. Patrick whispered to me curiously, “It looks like everyone is going forward.” Indeed, the pews had emptied. This is really strange in CAR, where there are very few businesspeople. The small salaried class all draw their paychecks from the state or aid agencies. Most of the businesses are run by expatriates – Chadians and Cameroonians in the markets; French, West African and middle Easterners in minerals; Lebanese in imports – to the extent that “businessman” is almost synonymous with “foreigner” here. I wondered if perhaps Winners' Chapel encourages people to think of themselves as entrepreneurs in order to attain wealth. If so, the arrival of these churches here can only count as a good thing, for an expansion of people's imagination of the realm of paid employment beyond the state is sorely needed.

Toward the end of the three-hour service, the preacher turned to public health. He called on people to avoid exposed food (flies can come and set up on it, he explained), turned that entreaty into a spiritual metaphor (you have a doctor in you!), and then finished on a bombastic note: “Destroy diabetes! Destroy AIDS!”

Once the service had wrapped up, all of us first-timers were invited to stick around and fill out cards with our contact info (I gave my real info and have yet to be contacted) and sip warm sodas. I guess even I won something.

Typo

One typo in my SWP Comments piece -- where it says "UN Peacebuilding Fund" it should read "UN Peacebuilding Commission."