Feeling integrated: being the white girl in the village
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 16/Dec/2010 10:14, 34 days ago
A few weeks ago I was at an in-service teacher training day for the teachers from my zone. When my national volunteer and I arrived on our bikes we went round and greeted everyone with a handshake (this is imperative: meetings are often stopped if someone arrives late so that they can go round the room shaking hands) and my national volunteer went and sat on a bench. I was ushered to a plastic chair right in the middle of the circle of teachers that had been specially vacated for me.Plastic chairs are high status items in Maga: they have to be bought in from Maroua and are mainly owned by rich people as normally everyone sits on mats on the floor. There is a general belief that white people never sit on the floor:“What would your mother say if she could see you now?” exclaimed the Inspector once in horror when he saw me sitting on the floor of the Inspection. Because of this people often go to a special effort to make sure I can have a chair even if I insist I don’t need one; they go round and borrow one for the neighbours or bring me one from their house if they see me standing in the street. I drew the line when they tried to throw a sick child out of a chair at the hospital so that I could sit down.When the time came to go into the classroom and start the training I went and sat on a bench between two teachers. The headmaster, a man I’ve worked with for over a year, came in and saw me sitting on the bench. He left the room and came back with a plastic chair which he placed on its own right at the front of the room, facing all the teachers. “Mischa, come and sit here,” he ordered. It took me several minutes to explain in front of everyone that I was fine on a bench and I didn’t mind sitting with everyone else.A couple of hours into the training the headmaster called my national volunteer outside for a private talk. The school was providing lunch for the teachers but they’d only made couscous with sauce. Cameroonian couscous is not the same as Algerian couscous: it’s more like a starchy lump of boiled dough. The headmaster was worried: surely it wasn’t appropriate to serve couscous to a white girl. My national volunteer assured him I wouldn’t mind and wouldeat what everyone else ate but he wasn’t convinced.Sure enough, when lunchtime arrived, I was sent into a classroom on my own to eat doughnuts. Not only was it considered wrong for me to eat couscous; it was also considered wrong to make me eat with the other teachers. This was partly a way of avoiding the gender problem of whom I should eat with: women and men eat separately (the female teachers often have to serve the male teachers before they can eat) but as a white female I have‘semi-man status’ and am often expected to eat with the men.I made my national volunteer come and eat doughnuts with me so I wouldn’t be completely alone and as we were eating she told me that people often come up to her and tell her what a strange white person I am: I do things like talk to the villagers, stay in the village when there’s no electricity, and go out on my bike in the sun. This is considered to be very eccentric white person behaviour.There are certainly a lot of misconceptions about white peoples’ lives: a couple of weeks before the teacher training the Inspector hadcalled a big meeting of all the directors to discuss poor teacher attendance and the lack of enthusiasm and vocation for teaching among the teachers at Maga. Someone pointed out that it was difficult for the teachers who came from the South because the living conditions in the Extreme North are very difficult. The Inspector pointed at me, "Look at Mademoiselle Mischa," he said. "She comes from England, and not just from any old town. She comes from London,London. She is of a noble family and her father is a Big Man in politics. Before she came here she had never walked anywhere on foot in her life, and she had to learn to ride a bicycle to be able to do her job here. And she never complains." My father is in fact an architect and I’ve been riding a bicycle since I was six years old! I was torn between embarrassment and trying not to laugh.The good news is that attitudes and beliefs about white people are changing. When the Inspector was a boy his grandmother told him he should never look a white person in the eye, because if they pointed their finger at you they could magically make metal maggots appear in your flesh.