Africa: A Native Informant, I Presume - the Legacy of David Livingstone

18 September 2013
ThinkAfricaPress
opinion

Henri, a Congolese abstract painter, disdains artistic projects undertaken by Westerners that spotlight his marginalised compatriots. For instance, he scoffs at Kinshasa Kids (2012), a film about a rag-tag group of slum children who rise above poverty by (spoiler) performing a rap song on the street.

The film was directed by Belgian filmmaker Marc-Henri Wajnberg, and screened at high profile outlets like the BFI London Film Festival and the New York Film Festival in 2012.

"I know 'Bebson de la rue', one of the characters from the film. There is no such thing as street music in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. The film poses as a documentary but deals in stereotypes, pure fiction. Anyone who knows the first thing about this city would discern that his sample population is contrived," he insists tersely.

His opinion contradicts reasonably positive reviews of the film, which also acknowledge it is staged in documentary style, but appreciate the apparent authenticity with which it portrays Kinshasa's juvenile delinquency problem. Henri, however, believes that the film was misleading. "They like to select the villagers, the illiterates, because that way they can put words in their mouths and sell it back to their own."

He has a point: it is common for writers, filmmakers and artists to expatriate themselves to foreign countries to discover phenomena and market them to an audience back home.

For the African continent, the most iconic association would be 19th century Scottish explorer and medical missionary, David Livingstone, who spent years seeking the source of the Nile river in the central interior of the continent when it was considered dark and thus unknowable except through the interloper's gaze.

A contrasting example is African-American writer Maya Angelou's All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), an autobiographical account of her brief stay in Ghana, a motherland she never knew.

The most important distinction is that her work is not so much an external discovery of the country, as much as an internal discussion about her relationship to it. In Traveling Shoes, Angelou neither purports to fully explain or understand Ghana's people, history, or cultures, regardless of her ancestral link to them, which is a feat of scruples and self-awareness.

The Africanists

An alternative approach is to assume that through sheer fascination or love for a foreign culture, one can unearth privileged information about it. There is also the belief that a number of years spent in the field confers expertise to the external observer.

The first time I heard the term 'Africanist' was in a smoky concert hall in Kinshasa where a Belgian woman coolly introduced herself to me as such. Her justification was that she had been conducting research in Kinshasa on and off for a decade and regularly attending conferences about African culture and media in London, Ottawa, and other cities.

Fair enough, but I had never heard that term used without the prefix 'Pan-' and its association to Marcus Garvey and his controversial 'Back to Africa' movement.

Secondly, the local academics I know who have spent lifetimes exploring themes specific to their country describe themselves plainly as sociologists and anthropologists. I asked Freddy Mata, the head of Journalists for Human Rights, for his view on the word and he had a similar reaction.

"What, you mean the Pan-African movement? People who believe in common African values?"

"No, Freddy. I mean people who strictly research themes and topics related to Africa."

"Ah, you mean people like you," he laughed.

Again, fair enough.

Typical is the 'native informant' encounter. This is when the indigenous subjects of study - the street kids, the struggling artisans - facilitate the repurposing of their stories by misrepresenting or vilifying their own culture to concur with the hypotheses of outsiders.

The benefits are reciprocal in that the subjects can pocket incentives and deliver their stories hassle- and nuance-free, while the researchers who court them can walk away with authenticated data.

After all, there are book deals to be signed, editors to satisfy, and theses to defend, the pressure of which might tempt some to jump to easy conclusions and validate their assumptions by exploiting the 'Other'.

Assisted listening

Once, upon my request, the programme director of a local HIV/AIDS organisation arranged for me to interview three sex workers, two men and a woman. We met in relative safety and anonymity on an avenue in Matonge, a bustling neighbourhood of Kinshasa, but the HIV worker insisted on shepherding us down a few winding streets to a venue of his choosing.

Under his vigilant eye, the interview started out candidly as they shared their experiences with ease - maybe a little too much. Very quickly, the sex workers' responses began to seem mechanical, punctuated by furtive glances to the HIV worker, almost as if coached. If this was the case, I can only guess that it might have been to provide a 'satisfactory' session. Anyway, I never used that transcript.

Then sometimes, very astutely, the prospective subject will halt any sort of manipulation in its tracks. On another occasion, I met a Congolese lesbian with a compelling story to tell: a multi-part family saga involving the national police, a bribe, and a diaspora girlfriend. As soon as she learned about my interest in documenting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) experiences in the DRC, she was understandably reticent to talk about it.

"You always leave," she said. "In the past, I've been approached by at least three other foreigners who research the stories of gay Congolese people, and you always leave.

I never hear back and don't know what happens to my stories." I couldn't fault her and admired her prescience. It would have been disingenuous for me to claim that I intended to spend more than a few years in the DRC. After all, just like every other 'Africanist', I have my own story to live.

Valérie Bah is a Haitian-Canadian freelance journalist who focuses on marginalization and human rights with a particular interest in gender and LGBT equality. She works at the UN's refugee agency in Kinshasa and secretly plots a debut in creative non-fiction.

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