Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl

Hustling Is Not Stealing is the first volume of stories told to John Chernoff by a Ghanaian/Haute Voltaique prostitute/bar girl about her experiences in the 1970s. (The second volume, also from the University of Chicago Press and equally lengthy, is called Exchange Is Not Robbery.) As such, it has a certain picaresque flavor deriving from the adventures of "Hawa" (a name given to her by Chernoff to conceal her real name) in several West African countries: Ghana, where she grew up and worked; Togo, where she worked for a time; and Upper Volta as it was called then, where her family came from and where she also worked.

In some ways the stories are predictable. Hawa tells of constant efforts to assert her autonomy by fleeing the control of her husband, her father, her cowives and senior female relatives, as well as certain friends, male and female, European and African—to say nothing of the state in the form of the police. Her goals are to maintain her independence and support herself, to obtain certain prestigious consumer goods, to avoid menial work for others, to sleep late, and to indulge her addictions to alcohol and marijuana. Along the way she helps her family and friends when possible but not without complaint, demonstrates kindness to sister workers on occasion, and charms a variety of men who support her in various ways and help her to circumvent the law. They also embroil her in some risky ventures.

Many of the tales she recounts are complicated, and all vividly illustrate the perils of a life led at the boundaries of cultures (she has many liaisons with Europeans) and laws. Some of her stories are funny, some pathetic. One that shows the tragic-comic nature of many of them concerns a porn scandal in Togo in which a Swiss man photographed young girls in sexually explicit positions and sold the pictures. This landed him, along with his business associates and their local girlfriends, afoul of the law. The upshot was that one of the Europeans committed suicide upon being deported, the rest were expelled, and the local women and girls were reprimanded in some cases, jailed in others.

Hawa's strength is as a storyteller, framing her life as a series of episodes, often in the interests of self-justification, but seldom with a conventional moral attached. Her characters are mainly amoral, struggling to survive in whatever ways they can. Some cheat their friends as well as their customers, but others are more scrupulous. Altogether they present a fascinatingly textured palette of experiences and qualities that challenges any simplistic attempts at generalization. These are the strengths of this book.

Unfortunately, the weaknesses are also many, to the point that this source should be cited only with extreme caution. First, although Chernoff opted to publish this as a scholarly work, it manifestly does not meet current scholarly standards for ethnographic work in terms of methodology. We are not told many things necessary to establish the reliability of the text. It takes considerable deduction, for example, to figure out that the stories were originally told to Chernoff in English, but why was English chosen for this purpose, given Hawa's multilingual facility? We are informed only obliquely of Chernoff's own background, qualifications, and training for doing this work, never of his biases or relationship to Hawa (he abstracts himself completely from the account in calling it an "autoethnography" [94]). There is no bibliography and few references; we are not told how many interviews took place or given any specific information about either transcripts of tapes or tapes themselves, nor where the tapes are on deposit and whether they are available for other researchers who might wish to use them.

Second, Chernoff does not give Hawa credit for authorship; he is listed as the sole author, not the editor, which is confusing to the reader. Presumably, therefore, she does not receive royalties. We do not even know whether or not she gave permission for this account to be published or what her position is/was on the issue of her name's being used. Chernoff disguises both the names of protagonists and the specific places involved to preserve anonymity, but we are not told if that is the way Hawa wanted it. Informants in my experience have taken many different positions on this issue, which should be respected, as well as their rights to royalties. Perhaps he should have followed the manuscript readers' suggestion of publishing the account as a work of fiction, especially since he does not address the vexed issue of "speaking for" in the context of the great status and cultural differentials between himself and his subject. And he purposely withholds knowledge about where Hawa is now, surely something of great interest to most readers.

Third, there is a very long (118 pages out of a total of 468 of text) and repetitive introduction by Chernoff that not only leaves out the critical information listed above, but also offers sententious homilies on a variety of topics with no new insights for a scholarly audience. In fact, it is not clear who the audience is supposed to be: critical omissions and platitudes lessen its value for scholars (who, he says, should ignore most of it anyway!) and for the general public as well. It is most useful from page 45 on where he finally provides some key details about the generation of the text. The best writing—an eloquent section about AIDS— seems to be the most recent, but that is irrelevant to Hawa, whose account dates from the 1970s.

The homilies take the form of disquisitions on a variety of topics, each one occupying perhaps five pages or more, telling us inter alia what we should think about Hawa's account. Under the guise of imparting wisdom, Chernoff gives us trite gems such as this one from the longest disquisition (eight pages) on the topic of culture: "If you want to see culture in Africa, you have to see it in the life of everyday people" (42). He seems to have only scorn for historians and social scientists; they can shed no light on real people's experiences, given that they just look at statistics, a contention that led this reader to wonder how extensive his knowledge is of such sources. In the introduction we discover, further: (1) that he views this account as a true story, indicating lack of familiarity with a great deal of the contemporary literature that might cause hesitation in making such a claim about a partial representation; (2) that he views Hawa's ready laughter as indicating humor at all times, even though laughter can mean many things in any given culture and different things in different cultures, and some of it was undoubtedly provoked by status differences between himself and Hawa; (3) that precolonial farmers did only subsistence farming; and (4) that Hawa's own background was not worth discussing until a third of the way through, and then only superficially (there is relatively little ethnographic analysis, with no discussion, for instance, of how being motherless at an early age may have affected her experiences, nor of the implications of the fact that prostitution in her case was practiced without pimps).

Although by now there is a large life-history literature about African women, none of it is cited—Chernoff even claims that it is difficult to find a good "slice-of-life drama" out of Africa (33). Apparently he is unfamiliar with the abundant literature on African women, including studies of prostitution, his only references being two relatively dated sources written by white men (86n). When he points out some key differences between Hawa's themes and those of important African novelists, he omits any references to women novelists. Finally, although he has a section including feminism in the title, he ignores the extensive corpus of scholarship on the interior workings of male dominance—he simply equates "family" authority with that of men (75). Indeed, the monumental omissions from the introduction suggest that the well-attested form of male dominance that involves withholding knowledge is being practiced right here. That in the present climate such a long, undisciplined, and relatively uninformed editorial effort can be published by a prestigious press is puzzling; one can only speculate that the topic of prostitution was thought to make it marketable.

Hawa, wherever she is, deserves better. If Chernoff has brought us stories that should be heard, our ability to hear them is profoundly impaired by serious scholarly concerns.