Africa in five pictures

Five positive things about Africa in five images.

Only a fool would try to summarise the glorious variety of African culture in just five ways but there are some common themes you can find throughout sub Saharan Africa. All too often discussion of the continent revolves around negative issues, so I would like to concentrate on some of the many positive aspects that the media tends to ignore.  I’ve left out North Africa from this piece as it’s culturally distinct in many ways and deserves its own set of examples.

1. Enterprise

Africans don’t sit around wondering where the money is going to come from, they get out there and do something to earn it. This street scene in Benin is a prime example – you’re looking at a over a dozen businesses in just this one stretch of road.  Half are women selling food and drink that they have made themselves; the building on the right houses a mechanic and an electrical supplier; the cluster of shacks in the middle is two shops and a petrol station; finally the guy pulling the two wheeled trolley is a porter delivering goods for customers.

By dividing up commerce between a multitude of individuals and small businesses it keeps more people in employment, in what is a very difficult economic environment. Opening up a supermarket here would simply put people out of work.

Unsurprisingly there are high levels of unemployment accross much of urban Africa but even when you see groups of men hanging around seemingly doing nothing in particular, you may be missing how they are often acting as mutual support groups on the lookout for opportunities. Work isn’t going to magically appear sitting at home, you need to be out on the street ready to pounce when a possibility of earning money or fostering a useful connection comes your way.

2. Education

When I met these kids in Uganda they were being given an English lesson in an abandoned building by one of their mums, a woman named Mary. None of them could afford to go to school but like other children I’ve met in every country I’ve been to in Africa they didn’t need lecturing about the importance of education. Equally, Mary was no teacher but was doing whatever she could on a non existent budget to pass on her knowledge. She didn’t have the money to buy even any pens or paper and was just using some pages torn from an old text book to teach them. You’d have been hard pressed to see a happier bunch of kids when I returned later with a pile of exercise books and pens and pencils to help them out. They were jumping up and down, cheering at even such a modest boost to their education.

In other countries I’ve watched kids walk miles to school and back each day with the kind of enthusiasm any parent back home would be proud of. I’ve seen kids leaving the poorest of mud shacks in their best clothes looking forward to another day at school and others sitting under the one street light in a village late into the evening, doing their home work as it’s their only source of light. Sure, you can find young children forced to work, I’ve seen them doing everything from selling cigarettes to breaking rocks in a quarry but in all likelihood both they and their parents  would rather they were in school. Schools often have fees or require expenses for things like uniforms and for many, even the cost of feeding the family is a struggle, so getting kids to work is a reluctant obligation. Whatever the reason for an African child not being at school, it’s unlikely to be that they don’t think it’s worth while.

3. Honesty

Not far from the main road in the village of Djongo, just outside Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, sits this seller of charcoal.  This is by no means a well off area: the roads are mud; no sewage system; no mains electricity; minimal piped water supplies and most houses are simple one room structures of mud or blocks with corrugated iron roofs. Charcoal is essential for cooking, as bottled gas is too expensive for most. Each of these bags cost roughly $5, the equivalent of one or two day’s wages for many lucky enough to have proper jobs. At night the seller leaves it completely unguarded: there’s no fence or even any lighting nearby. Anyone so inclined could walk away with the stuff in the darkness completely unnoticed, yet no one does. Would anyone leave such a huge pile of valuable material outside where you live without security?

Even many colonial era accounts testify to the honesty of Africans – no mean praise given the attitudes of the time that often didn’t even grant them the status of humanity. If anything, it is Africa’s tragic encounters with the supposedly enlightened West that has eroded many positive, traditional values but as the above picture demonstrates they are by no means forgotten. Of course crime exists, as it does everywhere in the world, but to imagine that the relative levels of poverty destroy the typical African’s values is an insult to tradition.

4. Reverence for ancestors

This is a traditional home in northern Togo, known as a Tata Somba. The conical structures in front of the house are known as Tamberba or Dikinpoo in the local languages and each one shelters the soul or spirit of a family ancestor. The larger ones tend to be of males and the smallest ones of children. Western languages refer to them as fetishes but this is derived from an ignorant, colonial understanding of the objects.

Such an overt physical manifestation of one’s ancestors is not found everywhere in Africa but their relative importance is almost universal in traditional African beliefs.  Upon death, your soul transfers to the spirit world, which is not some vague, amorphous, distant place but something very real. Not only have your ancestors not gone as such  but they are your link to divine powers, vital for ensuring a good life in the material world.

Many African religions are essentially monotheistic, they have one creator god, albeit one mysterious and unknowable, who may rarely act directly in the lives of humans. There are a whole variety of beings that exist in the spirit world, who can act as gobetweens from humanity to God. Western misunderstanding and laziness has often mischaracterised all these beings as gods, hence classing all the religions as polyhteistic. In fact, these beings might sometimes be better thought of as similar to angels, without the binary good vs evil associations. The spirits of your ancestors are who you call upon to attain favour from God or these other higher beings. In the example pictured, offerings of beer or sacrificial animal blood are made to the ancestral spirits in the Tamberba as a means of gaining guidance or favour.

The conversion to Christianity or Islam by many Africans has not removed this reverence for ancestors, even if the religious practices have changed. Even so, many Christians and Muslims will still make offerings to the ancestors and talk to them as if physically present, regardless of how frowned upon that may be in orthodox interpretations.

5. Resourcefulness

This is Barry from the small town of Dinguiraye in Guinea, who repairs mobile phones. It’s next to impossible to get spare parts, as the only source would be the capital which is two bumpy days travel over some of the most poorly maintained roads in West Africa. So, armed only with a box of old, broken phones by his side for spare parts, he keeps the population’s communication network running on a shoestring budget.

You’ll find people like him all over Africa keeping every kind of essential device going, when we in the West would have long ago just chucked in the bin and ordered a new one from Amazon.  This level of recycling can often put our green initiatives to shame. Everything that can be reused is used, even if it has to be repurposed for the job. Often without access to the right materials, tools or training, resourceful Africans somehow manage to keep things functioning far beyond their usual life span.

Writing about negative aspects may well be unavoidable at times for a traveller in Africa because life can be demanding for the locals in many ways, let alone for soft wussy westerners. However, it never fails to inspire by virtue of the qualities of its people.