I’ve been reading British journalist Richard Dowden’s book Africa this week, especially his two chapters on Uganda. Dowden’s first experiences in Africa were in
Uganda, and he sees in the country everything quintessentially African.
He writes about the frustration that greeted Westerners in
the Edenic Uganda,
keen to bring the Christian virtues
of progress, civilization and hard work to the Baganda [an early British
visitor] protested that they had little need to work, since nature provided
food with minimum human effort. They spent
their days, he complained, drinking beer, dancing and gossiping. This pious visitor was infuriated that when
God had cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, he had somehow allowed
this charming but good-for-nothing people to remain. Meanwhile, his Chosen People, obviously the
hardworking, God-fearing Protestant English, had been dispersed to a wretched
faraway island to suffer the miseries of British weather (Dowden 15).
Dowden channels the racism and religious chauvinism of his
source—he certainly would not call the people of Uganda
“good-for-nothing”. But the point I take
is that Uganda is in many ways an Arcadia, a “beautiful rich, temperate …
paradise on Earth” as Winston Churchill called it. The traditional values of family prevail,
where children refer to all adults as their fathers and mothers, and where
relations that Americans could scarcely comprehend are as close as Aunts and
cousins. Western individualism is foreign to Ugandans, and many Africans in
general. Dowden quotes the Kenyan writer
John Mbiti as revising Descartes’ declaration of existence “I think therefore I
am,” as the more appropriately African, “I am because we are, and since we are,
therefore I am” (21).
My favorite part of
Dowden’s chapter “Uganda I”, is his image of the relationship between Africa
and the West. Africans want desperately
to develop their economies, to break the bonds of poverty, to live as Europeans
and Americans do. But in pursuit of this
dream, they seem ready to blithely discard all that seems valuable to us in
their culture. And Westerners look to
Africa to reclaim all that our cultures are abandoning—tradition, nature,
family, elders, etc. Dowden says that
Africa and the West are like two people, arms outstretched, running towards one
another. It looks like they rushing to embrace, but they are ,“instead looking beyond each other
at a mirage and missing each other completely” (32).
As I think about
service and culture, the wealth of the West and the poverty of Africa, I wonder
what it means. Don’t we give the gifts
that we ourselves desire? How do you
raise a people up without removing them from their world? Can the west keep its wealth, and still seek
meaning? Can Africa keep what is
meaningful, and find health and prosperity?
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