Hustling is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl. John M. Chernoff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 496 pp. $65.00, cloth. $22.50 paper.
It is hard to decide what to call this remarkable book, the first of two volumes. It is for the most part a collection of stories told by a West African bar girl,"Hawa," to John Chernoff in the mid 1970s. She tells about her life as a girl in a Muslim village and as a young woman in Accra, Lomé, and several other places, the lives of her fellow bar girls and about the men (mostly European but also African) she encountered, took from, gave to and left.
Chernoff transcribed the taped stories as literally as he could to retain the pungent immediacy of Hawa's narrative. The stories are presented here with enough footnotes so that even someone unfamiliar with West Africa will follow the vernacular. When you read these stories you hear an extraordinary voice: Hawa's quick tongued wit is in every phrase. But in Hawa's distinct voice you also hear - if you have spent any time at all in West Africa - the sounds of that region. When Hawa uses a shorthand, "he said this and that" to describe a gossip session, I recall the same locution in the Manjaco I learned in Guinea-Bissau. Likewise, when Hawa says that she began to "hear" German while living with an expatriate in a timber cutting enclave in Togo, I recognize immediately the same word in Manjaco for "understand." In short, the stories are Hawa's, but they are also a tour de force in culturally sensitive translation-sound and sense in seemingly effortless tandem.
So, the stories reflect Chernoff's talents and skills as well as Hawa's, although he downplays the work he must have done in order to give Hawa full credit. Chernoff is an anthropologist and musicologist who lived several years in Ghana and elsewhere studying traditional drumming extensively enough to become an accomplished percussionist himself. He also spent considerable time with urban African youth in Accra-people on the margins who make or dance to music that is as modern yet as African as the talking drums that speak the language of traditional funerals and other ceremonies. Chernoff liked Hawa very much. He admired her verbal virtuosity and keen intelligence. He knew first-hand her friends and the places she frequented. When he listened to her stories, he heard a kindred spirit capturing and communicating a place and a people. The stories he collected could have become the raw material for a novel, as Chernoff's colleagues in America suggested, or they could be read as an autobiography, a sort of memoir. We could just as well say that Hawa is a picara and that the stories are an oral picaresque. But Chernoff wants the reader to approach Hawa's stories as "an ethnography done by an illiterate."
Ethnographies differ from novels and memoirs in only one crucial sense. A novel or a memoir can celebrate a person's uniqueness and can be fact disguised as fiction or fiction dressed up as fact. An ethnography, no matter how much it appears to dwell on the personal and idiosyncratic parts of a life, always uses that life to represent something more encompassing about people and places. What then do we learn by reading the stories Hawa tells given that she is at once the author and subject of her ethnography?
She begins by describing herself as a child as remarked upon by her elders: "They thought, all of them-they knew-that I was a bad girl." Hawa is bad because she disobeys, because she's trouble. Her relatives tend to spoil her because her mother is dead and they worry Hawa will follow her mother into death. They scold her when she talks back or refuses to do what they tell her, but only perfunctorily. Yet, they also find it hard to put up with her, so Hawa is passed around from aunt to aunt. Because she's a motherless daughter, she has been given over to the protection of a tutelary spirit. The spirit requires that they let her hair grow long and tangled "like Bob Marley," her tangled knots of hair festooned with coins that one day will be cut out to pay for a thanksgiving sacrifice at the spirit's shrine. To illustrate her badness, Hawa tells us how she surreptitiously cuts the coins out of her hair and uses them to buy candy for her childhood friends. In general, her badness makes her a skeptic about everything traditional. Do spirits really guard the sacred forest against the trespasses of little girls? Hawa crawls through the weeds to get close enough to find out.
If we are to read Hawa as an ethnographic subject, then we get a glimpse into the pervasiveness of skepticism and routine transgression in village life. "Bad" in rural West African societies when applied to a child means mischievous, strong-willed, contrary, obstreperous. Yet bad in this sense can also be good or admirable. Bad boys and girls stand out because they stand up for themselves. They are celebrated even as they are criticized. Society conspires to make bad girls as much as it makes good ones. So, when Hawa later marries and is the junior wife who refuses to do the demeaning chores her senior wife tells her to do, and or leaves her husband to go to the city and make her own way, we should also read this trajectory of badness as a typical trajectory. It is as much a part of the fabric of so-called "traditional" life as the stories of junior wives who stay home and generally do what they are told.
Hawa is not only an ethnographic subject; she is also an observer, an ethnographer. Like all ethnographers her observations are partial, skewed, but also enlightening. Most of her stories are about her encounters with European expatriates working in newly post-colonial Ghana, Togo and Burkina Faso. These stories are about post-colonialism itself and they have that funhouse mirror flash-making strange familiar, making familiar strange-that the best ethnography should always have. A man takes her to his place and asks her if she "knows French love" which is to "suck a man." She's disgusted and refuses; the man throws her out of the house. She goes to the cops to complain. The cops, rather than roust her as an "ashawo," or prostitute, take her side, forcing the man to make things right with her by paying for her torn dress and getting her a taxi, not to mention paying a fine which may or may not go into their pockets.
On another occasion Hawa, is living somewhere upcountry with "Nigel," an official at "Bagabaga" college with a beer belly. She listens to the ex-pats gathered around the swimming pool and remarks that "English never make three together" without having a disparaging conversation about Africans and their primitive habits or corrupt ways. When she's with Nigel she has a couple of run-ins with the white wives and girlfriends of the men. The women are at first nice to her. They ask her to teach them how to make palm oil sauce. But the veneer of conviviality wears away fast. In one typical instance, a woman accuses her of using juju to win at the country club sponsored "Tombola." To humiliate her antagonist Hawa uses her winnings to "dash" the woman a carton of cigarettes, the gift intended to show how beneath Hawa the English woman is.
What Hawa conveys through these vignettes is that uneasy and ongoing moment in postcolonial West Africa where ex-pats are everywhere, where ex-pats live lives that unconsciously mimic the lives of their colonial forbearers, but where they also occasionally are taken to the mat for their prejudices. It is not a pretty picture, though the general tone is comic. Indeed, it is a portrait that would not be far off the mark even today among the various Europeans who work in Africa, lounging in outdoor cafés and talking with thrilled condescension about the rumors of this or that upcoming coup.
Ethnographies have target audiences. According to Chernoff, Hawa told these stories to her peers as they sat around the cooking pot in the quiet of their own homes. But this context to me only counts as ethnographic if that term is to be understood metaphorically. An ethnography by an illiterate is, after all, an oxymoron. Ethnographies are texts; they have authors. And while Hawa tells the stories, and Chernoff transcribes them as faithfully as he can, preserving her cadences in Ghanaian English, Chernoff is ultimately the author of the text you read.
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Chernoff speaks for himself and to his target audience in a 100-plus page introduction where he makes a case for the ethnographic value of the stories and for Hawa's significance as a storyteller. This part of the book is an attempt by an anthropologist who loves Africa to use Hawa to reframe and refocus the issues outsiders most commonly read about the continent. Chernoff argues that this audience tends to see an awful Africa, a sad, sick and disgusting Africa-a place suffering from imponderable poverty and corruption: the vampire state and all of that. For them, Africa is a place dying en masse of this famine or that guerilla war or from Ebola or Aids.
Rather than learn about Africa through those sad stories, Chernoff wants his readers to listen to a bar girl. She makes a living, such as it is, by allowing men to give her money, buy her drinks, pay her rent, and buy her clothes- all in exchange for a little affection, status and sex. What she does isn't quite legal. What the men want from her is often what she doesn't want to give. They are physically strong or otherwise powerful. She is weak, or so it would seem. Stories of bar girls and sex workers are often used to represent precisely the kinds of degradations that makes those awful statistics into an awful portrait. But Chernoff, through Hawa, wants to give us something else: the laughing face barely contained on the book's cover-someone to respect, someone cunning, mischievous, "a trickster"-not a victim but a witness and a participant. Above all he wants us to recognize in Hawa a way of appraising the world and communicating it that is as artful and as tinged with tradition as the tales elders used to tell in the cool evenings of the villages. Hawa embodies the Africa Chernoff came to love.
Eric Gable teaches anthropology at the University of Mary Washington. He has done research in Guinea-Bissau and in Indonesia and is the author (with Richard Handler) of The New History in an Old Museum, Duke University Press, 1997.
