Where the white man can’t win: A English, of course, is not the Ghanaian’s mother tongue. There are more than 50 tribal languages in Ghana, and the child naturally learns his tribal tongue first. Hence his tribal accent when he is compelled to speak English. Most West Africans—whether in the cities or in jungle villages where bare breasted women and naked children stare impassively as a car goes by—know very little about the outside world. City swelling West Africans have formed their image of America largely from the movies they have seen. In Abidjan, Ivory Coast, a cab driver asked me to send him “a belt like the shooting cowboy wear.” For whites, it’s “wa-wa.” The few whites who live and work in West Africa have a phrase that expresses their frustration. It is “wa-wa.” It means, roughly, “West Africa wins again—the white man just can’t win.” A housewife sighs and says “wa-wa” when she has told her native cook again and again to wash the salad greens in a disinfectant solution and finds that he has done so—and then has washed them again at the water tap in the yard. A businessman says “wa-wa” after he has waited an hour or more for a West African clerk to cash his check at a bank. A traveler says “wa-wa” when he has been charged anywhere from 28 cents the first time to $2 the second for the same 10-minute taxi ride. As an American looks at West Africa, he cannot fail to be impressed by its economic potential. There are rubber, gold and diamonds in Ghana, coffee and cocoa in the Ivory Coast, oil in Nigeria, plus mountains of iron ore. A mass—in parts. Moving along the Guinea Coast—that great arc bordering on the Gulf of Guinea—a traveler sees West Africa as a mass of primitive people broken up arbitrarily into small countries, independent and in ferment. This part of Africa was “Balkanized”—cut up into small territories by the British and French when they ruled the area. Now these territories are tiny countries, each with its own government, or about to get its own, each with its own brand of explosive politics. A day’s drive from Lagos, Nigeria, to Accra, Ghana, takes a motorist through two other countries, Dahomey and Togo, on the way. Split up as West Africa is, it is hard to believe that it can ever amount to much politically. Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah wants to unify under one flag the whole area—all of Africa, for that matter—with himself as boss. Others, like Felix Houphouet-Boigny, President of the Ivory Coast, and Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa of Nigeria, want a loose federation with a customs union and a common market, if anything at all. “No strings, please.” West Africa’s leaders have this in common: All want as much as they can get from both sides in the “cold war.” And they loudly proclaim that they want “no strings attached,” that they will be “neutral.” This “neutrality” takes strange forms. In Ghana—where Russian technicians are suspect—it is a pro-Soviet sort of neutrality. But in Ivory Coast, President Houphouet-Boigny says this: “If we Africans be naive enough to sever relations with the West, in the end we will be invaded by the Chinese, and the Russians will impose Communism on our Country.” The overwhelming impression, after a tour of the new nations of West Africa, is that, if this area is ever to reach political and economic maturity, it is the white man’s skills that must do the job. But then, this question arises: How can the white man ever understand or cope with this Africa of witchcraft and black magic, of tribal secrets and primitive customs, of mud huts and “wa-wa”? Source: U.S. News & World Report (10 April 1961) Original link Read More goo.gl/3OFr8W (y) ✍comment ☏share
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 23:29:10 +0000
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