Stereotyping Africa. Surprising Answers to Surprising Questions: Surprising Answers to Surprising Questions

Crime

60 Emmanuel Fru Doh and so people do not care about getting lines installed in their homes any longer. Yes, cell phones are everywhere and in virtually every hand, as is the case anywhere else on earth. There is this joke about cell phones being so common that even hard working market women (buyam-sellam they are called locally), have their phones with them even as they chase vehicles with fresh loads of grocery items from the fields which they buy to turn around and sell for profit. It is the same with those who practice subsistence agriculture for survival and are always in the fields working; everybody laughs at the changes when ever once in a while a cell phone rings in the farms where a few years before landlines for phones did not exist. 25. Does “black” stand for evil in Africa too? In many cases it does, and this is because the language and worldview “gunned” into Africans during the colonial era belonged to Europeans who passed them on along with their biases. There are moments in Africa, however, when “white” stands for evil. People, for example, always talk about one being “white” when one is seriously sick and anemic as a way of showing the gravity of the situation, and it is also common to paint the image of an evil ghost appearing all in white. Leon E. Clark must have found this out before entitling a chapter of his book “Too White, Like a Devil” (vol. 1), and before going on to observe forcefully: “Bear in mind that white skin is a sign of illness in Africa, and that evil spirits are often depicted as white” (1: 123). This notwithstanding, the association of black and evil is predominant. Of recent, however, Africans have begun modifying English as a language such that it communicates Africa also and not Europe only. Crime 26. Are there murders in Africa like we experience them here in the US? Before the ills of capitalism and the rat race, crime was incredibly unusual, and this is because of the intimate nature of most African societies. These societies were usually so small that every member of society knew the other. As a result, before any tension, 61 Stereotyping Africa: Surprising Answers to Surprising Questions misunderstanding, or illness (mental), escalated to a point that it led to any kind of crime, it was resolved beforehand. Another deterrent to crime was the fact that the deeds of an individual had repercussions way beyond the sphere of the individual alone onto that of his or her entire family. Because of the need to protect a family’s integrity, therefore, it was really difficult to hear of serious crimes such as murders, rape, pedophilia, and the like. A person is never an individual within the worldview of most African societies; he or she is always a member of a tight family and an equally tight ethnic group, although the latter is changing today with more inter-ethnic marriages taking place. The result is that people always thought of the consequences of their deeds on their families before doing anything stupid, because society was very drastic in the way it treated certain actions considered taboo and/or criminal, for example, child molestation, suicide, and murder. In most cases, the punishment was exile from the community. Someone (an adult) who committed a serious crime like sexually abusing a child, for example, a rare crime in most African cultures, was not only exiled from the community, but had his family at once stigmatized, because nobody would let members of his or her family have anything to do with the family of the offender. One could therefore go for decades, or even live one’s life to the end without hearing of murder, incest, and crimes of that nature. With colonialism came contacts with other strange cultures and judicial systems that made excuses for such offenders. The result was that some of these crimes became more frequent than my grandfather could ever have imagined. Things are still changing and not for good; murder is now more commonplace than before, and most of the time it has to do with robbery. 27. Americans hate lies; is it the same in Africa? Yes, it is the same in Africa, even though things are beginning to change, as is the case with much else on the continent. It is very African to say a man does not lie to his son (Achebe, Arrow...