Poor...or Not -- a Matter of Context
I am currently reading a book by Sidney Poitier titled "The Measure of a Man". If you've watched "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", you'll know who I'm talking about. This book is essentially a story of Poitier's life, his thoughts and feelings as he grew up. It is a very interesting book - each part holds its own fascinations...his life growing on Cat Island in the Bahamas, when he moved to Nassau, and his life in the U.S. when he moved there and struggled to make a career in the movie business, the challenges he faced being a black man in the 50's and 60's in that country.
Well, back to what I wanted to write about. Poitier mentions that growing up on Cat Island, life was simple, preindustrial...they had no plumbing or electricity and...in a word, they were poor. But poverty, he said, is very different from poverty in the industrial world where everything is tangible and characterized by concrete. He said that poverty on Cat Island didn't preclude gorgeous beaches with hundreds of coconut trees, a climate like heaven, cocoa plum trees, cassavas, sea grapes, many other fruit, and bananas growing wild. Unlike in the West, you didn't grow up bombarded by lots of things you couldn't understand but were expected to make sense of, thousands of contravening images on TV, ads all trying to make you think you needed things and sell them to you when you didn't even have a job yet, radios, thousands of mechanical gadgets, telephone, etc. No, he didn't grow up with any of that stuff. But see, the interesting thing is that, that didn't translate to poverty in his vocabulary. He grew up to just the stimulus that he needed for survival; he wasn't bombarded. He said: "what's coming at you is the sound of the sea and the smell of the wind and your mama's voice and the voice of your dad and the craziness of your brothers and sisters --and that's it." You watched the behavior of your parents and your siblings and gradually their voices and actions started teaching you something. As to what was safe and what was not, you pretty much learned that by interaction. When you wanted to eat fruit, say off the sapodila tree, you soon found out that there were wasps' nests in that tree. If you weren't careful, they will come out and sting you and that hurt. Of course, your mum would fuss over you when you came back home crying, but she'll put on some herbal medicine and give you some bitter aloe vera to eat, and soon you'll be just fine. And after being stung like that a couple of times, you soon learnt that if you climbed high up in the tree and shook the branches so that the ripe fruit fell to the ground, and then climbed down to eat your belly-full, instead of crawling under the limbs of the tree to pluck the fruit, you could avoid the wasps finding you and stinging you. But that is how you learnt, from natural stimuli, to keep away from what was dangerous. You went fishing, you learnt how to swim, you learned how to fetch water from the streams in the same way....observation and exposure to these stimuli was all you needed. That way, each day you knew generally what was going to happen. Say Sunday: church, then home. Your mom cooks rice and chicken, then you play with your friends, then you all sit out on the front porch and your mom and sister fix the vegetables....and so on until bedtime.
A lot of what I have said above is from Poitier's book, but it reflects exactly what we have back home in Cameroon. Are we justified in saying that we are poor? Granted, resources aren't always put to the best use, corruption upsets the balance of things,... but at the core of the matter, if we have what we need, can we really say we are poor? I personally don't think so. A culture such as ours: rich in family values of respect, love, devotion to family members, a culture where people will say hello to their neighbors as they go by their homes, and run out with a stick if their neighbour cried "thief" in the middle of the night. A country where there is an abundance of food, everyone has a place to put their heads down at night, and most have a piece of land to farm or build on, rivers and springs to get water from, lush vegetation. A place where people always find time to visit with one another, broke a kola nut together, share a cup of water, and where the people come together to figure out the solution to a neighbour's problem .
I know that when one looks at the country now, poor leadership and poor management of resources has led to an outer appeareace of destitution and desperation. But at the core of its peoples lies a richness, one that the sophistications of colonialism and industrialization need not complicate....Yes, I believe that its pure nature holds far more appeal.
There is a family friend of ours, actually the father of my dear friend, Sahar, his name is Kamran. Uncle Kamran has all kinds of fond names in Cameroon having lived there for close to 30 years now. In my area, he is fondly called Pa Ngwa. He once said to me, in relation to something else, that when we are too close to something, we fail to see its majesty. He said that when you live at the foot of a mountain for instance, you don't see how mighty it is, but if you were to move away several kilometers, you will be able to appreciate the full range of the mountain in all its majesty. I see that pattern in my life today and that of many other Cameroonians. Most of us who have left our country to seek out better education and job experiences in the West, we never cease to talk about the rich aspects of our culture. We miss it. It didn't mean much when we were still in Cameroon because it was so ordinary, and now when we are thousands of miles away, we are often reminded of those wonderful things about our people, our culture that we can't find here.
Now this is not a story about the perfections of my country and the inperfections of other countries, because that is not the case. Every place holds its own appeals and has its own problems... every place has its own comparative advantage. I mean, that's why I am in the U.S. right now. But this account is just to remind myself that I came out of something rich, and I should not forget it.
Well, back to what I wanted to write about. Poitier mentions that growing up on Cat Island, life was simple, preindustrial...they had no plumbing or electricity and...in a word, they were poor. But poverty, he said, is very different from poverty in the industrial world where everything is tangible and characterized by concrete. He said that poverty on Cat Island didn't preclude gorgeous beaches with hundreds of coconut trees, a climate like heaven, cocoa plum trees, cassavas, sea grapes, many other fruit, and bananas growing wild. Unlike in the West, you didn't grow up bombarded by lots of things you couldn't understand but were expected to make sense of, thousands of contravening images on TV, ads all trying to make you think you needed things and sell them to you when you didn't even have a job yet, radios, thousands of mechanical gadgets, telephone, etc. No, he didn't grow up with any of that stuff. But see, the interesting thing is that, that didn't translate to poverty in his vocabulary. He grew up to just the stimulus that he needed for survival; he wasn't bombarded. He said: "what's coming at you is the sound of the sea and the smell of the wind and your mama's voice and the voice of your dad and the craziness of your brothers and sisters --and that's it." You watched the behavior of your parents and your siblings and gradually their voices and actions started teaching you something. As to what was safe and what was not, you pretty much learned that by interaction. When you wanted to eat fruit, say off the sapodila tree, you soon found out that there were wasps' nests in that tree. If you weren't careful, they will come out and sting you and that hurt. Of course, your mum would fuss over you when you came back home crying, but she'll put on some herbal medicine and give you some bitter aloe vera to eat, and soon you'll be just fine. And after being stung like that a couple of times, you soon learnt that if you climbed high up in the tree and shook the branches so that the ripe fruit fell to the ground, and then climbed down to eat your belly-full, instead of crawling under the limbs of the tree to pluck the fruit, you could avoid the wasps finding you and stinging you. But that is how you learnt, from natural stimuli, to keep away from what was dangerous. You went fishing, you learnt how to swim, you learned how to fetch water from the streams in the same way....observation and exposure to these stimuli was all you needed. That way, each day you knew generally what was going to happen. Say Sunday: church, then home. Your mom cooks rice and chicken, then you play with your friends, then you all sit out on the front porch and your mom and sister fix the vegetables....and so on until bedtime.
A lot of what I have said above is from Poitier's book, but it reflects exactly what we have back home in Cameroon. Are we justified in saying that we are poor? Granted, resources aren't always put to the best use, corruption upsets the balance of things,... but at the core of the matter, if we have what we need, can we really say we are poor? I personally don't think so. A culture such as ours: rich in family values of respect, love, devotion to family members, a culture where people will say hello to their neighbors as they go by their homes, and run out with a stick if their neighbour cried "thief" in the middle of the night. A country where there is an abundance of food, everyone has a place to put their heads down at night, and most have a piece of land to farm or build on, rivers and springs to get water from, lush vegetation. A place where people always find time to visit with one another, broke a kola nut together, share a cup of water, and where the people come together to figure out the solution to a neighbour's problem .
I know that when one looks at the country now, poor leadership and poor management of resources has led to an outer appeareace of destitution and desperation. But at the core of its peoples lies a richness, one that the sophistications of colonialism and industrialization need not complicate....Yes, I believe that its pure nature holds far more appeal.
There is a family friend of ours, actually the father of my dear friend, Sahar, his name is Kamran. Uncle Kamran has all kinds of fond names in Cameroon having lived there for close to 30 years now. In my area, he is fondly called Pa Ngwa. He once said to me, in relation to something else, that when we are too close to something, we fail to see its majesty. He said that when you live at the foot of a mountain for instance, you don't see how mighty it is, but if you were to move away several kilometers, you will be able to appreciate the full range of the mountain in all its majesty. I see that pattern in my life today and that of many other Cameroonians. Most of us who have left our country to seek out better education and job experiences in the West, we never cease to talk about the rich aspects of our culture. We miss it. It didn't mean much when we were still in Cameroon because it was so ordinary, and now when we are thousands of miles away, we are often reminded of those wonderful things about our people, our culture that we can't find here.
Now this is not a story about the perfections of my country and the inperfections of other countries, because that is not the case. Every place holds its own appeals and has its own problems... every place has its own comparative advantage. I mean, that's why I am in the U.S. right now. But this account is just to remind myself that I came out of something rich, and I should not forget it.
Labels: Reflections
posted by Ambe @ 8:46 AM
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