In Africa, people are happier

With just four weeks to go in Sierra Leone, we’re rapidly getting through our delivery schedule to make sure we either getting projects delivered before we depart, or ensuring that they are at a good enough stage to hand over to the second cohort of volunteers.  We’ve also been planning our last weekends in detail to ensure we get maximum exposure to Salone.  We’re just back from a weekend visit to Black Johnston beach which is equally beautiful and unspoiled - we were the only people there and the food, drink and entertainment (mainly beach football) was excellent.  Next weekend we’re in Freetown, Bo and Kenema, delivering classes to the CBF managers in those regions on some of the projects we’ve implemented in Makeni.  Our second last weekend we’ll spend in Makeni and we’ll have a bit of a party as well as a rematch of our football game against the coaches on the artificial turf in Wusum Field.  Hopefully my fitness will have improved by then.  We’re going back to the beaches for the last weekend…if you’d seen them, you too would find them irresistible! 

But while Salone’s natural beauty is undisputed, it’s not why we’ll all be sad to leave.  In the last few weeks I’ve found myself comparing the cultures of what I’ve seen of sub-Sahara Africa and home.  The reason we’ll miss this part of the world is because it has been such a fresh air in terms of the people we’ve encountered and the cultural norms we’ve observed.  Below, I’ve outlined four ways in which I believe the local culture is superior to that in the West.  Clearly Africa has lots of problems, but that’s not to say that it’s unambiguously a worse place to live in.  Apologies in advance for the overuse of stereotypes. 

Africans are more religiously tolerant

There is a lot that the rest of the world could learn from religious tolerance in Salone.  With the population split roughly three quarters Muslim and one quarter Christian, you could be forgiven for thinking that religious tensions were either a factor in the civil war or a source of on-going tension here.  Neither is the case.  Islam and Christianity exist in a very peaceful and complementary way in Sierra Leone.  Christians and Muslims intermarry freely here.  Apparently at a wedding with a mixed couple, the celebrants say all prayers, follow both customs and no one is put out by compromise.  Also, every public meeting starts with a prayer, and everyone takes a moment to say a prayer in their own religion.  I was at a CBF education session on the perils teenage marriage this week and the speaker started without suggesting that everyone take a moment to pray.  A Muslim boy, no more than 13, interrupted, and said he’d like to pray before the meeting started.  The speaker apologised and the boy led a short prayer session and everyone joined in, praising Allah.  At that point, I had just assumed it was a fully Muslim class as everyone responded to his prayers.  But then the speaker asked for someone to lead a Christian prayer, and a girl down the back volunteered and started a verse of Our Father – which everyone also joined in for!  This kind of behaviour is way above tolerance; it is full-on embracement of each other’s religious affiliations.  Which also neutralises any feelings of threat and removes the “us versus them” mentality that dominates religious debate between the West and the East.

We were recently invited to the New London Mosque by the local Imam.  It's just a short walk from our house and it was such a warm invitation it seemed rude to turn down.  We began, as all Muslim's do before prayer, with ablution.  We carefully cleansed our bodies (and our souls!) just as the Prophet did: Right hand three times, left hand three times, right arm three times, left arm three times, face three times, head three times, nose three times, ears three times, feet three times.  Each time right side before left side.  Islam has rules for everything which are based on how Mohammed lived his life and for this short period, we were following them to the letter.  After reciting a short prayer, we entered the Mosque, a peaceful and cool environment, mentally a long way from the intense heat and street life outside.  We sat in a circle and listened to one of the elders read verses from the Quran in Krio and English.  When finished about a dozen readings we were offered food and drink, in accordance with the Islamic tradition of treating your visitors better than your family.  We then discussed the Deen (which I was already familiar with), which is a Muslim’s way of life and its three pillars: Imam (faith), Islam (self-surrender to the will of Allah) and Ihsan (spiritual excellence).  It was a warm and enlightening experience, but one done without any expectation that we would “convert” or start going to prayer readings.  They just wanted to inform us on what they do and share a little of their time explaining Islam to Westerners.  I awoke the next morning as usual to the call to prayer but unusually it was accompanied by harmonious bells from the local Christian church.  Both religions singing in harmony to mark the beginning of a new day in Salone.  I haven’t come across this anywhere before.

The only religious perspective not embraced seems to be atheists / agnostics, which is the category that the Makeni Four fall into.  But there’s a pretty simple message here - the next time you hear about the “good work” religions are doing in the developing world, remember that non-believers are here too.  Just because we don’t have an umbrella organisation with the resources of Rome doesn’t mean that humanists aren’t as active as belief groups.  And unlike religious affiliated charities and NGOs, we do encourage the use of condoms, we don’t judge people based on their sexual orientation and we don’t tell lies about HIV transmission. 

Africans have a stronger sense of community spirit

Community spirit is a hard topic to define, but you know it when you see it.  And you see it every day in Salone.  I saw it when my taxi broke down on the way to Freetown.  I saw it when the poda-poda on the way back got a puncture.  I saw it when a school bus crashed.  I saw it when one of our managers mothers was taken ill and his co-workers took over his responsibilities.  You see it many days when one family is low on food and they are sitting outside their neighbours, sharing the only food they all have.

A lot of this community spirit stems from basic human needs and a very narrow margin for error.  People just don’t have savings, houses often wash away in the wet season, and almost half the population don’t get their requisite number of calories on a daily basis.  While the community spirit here may have imminent disaster as a backdrop, it fosters much stronger and deeper relationships.  In addition, life in Salone happens outside the house.  People spend all of the day in the company of others.  They know more people.  They build stronger relationships.  We call ourselves social in the West when we go to a pub and have yet another conversation with someone we’ve known for 15 years.  But here, everyone knows everyone else.  Everyone looks out for everyone else.  They go out of their way to introduce themselves to strangers.  To include everyone in every activity.  You can touch and feel the strong sense of community.  Very unlike our concrete jungles populated with neighbours we’re embarrassed to say hello to and total strangers we share a train seat with every day. 

Africans are happier

Despite all the problems people encounter on a daily basis, for the most part, they walk around the streets with a smile on their face.  It’s incredibly powerful to observe people with ragged clothes and little opportunity joking and having fun.  There is always a game being played or a song being sung.  Occasionally you’ll come across something quite random, like the time Will and I went out to the local radio station to get some beers (they have a generator so they can actually keep beer cool, unlike most stalls or shops) and there was 30 or 40 elderly ladies in full traditional clothing dancing just for the hell of it.  African’s celebrate their love for life on a regular, almost daily basis, through song and dance.  This isn't just a romantic view I hold of a people and a place I am enjoying either...the World Values Survey recently reported that Nigerians were the happiest people in the world.

I don’t want to compare this to home with examples for the moment.  A lot of people are having an incredibly rough time, immigration is draining our talent, our health and education systems are totally under-resourced, unemployment is sickeningly high and our politicians seem utterly incapable of allocating resources to solve any of these problems.  But no matter how bad you day has been, there are hundreds of millions of people in Africa who can’t even dream of our standard of living.  And yet they are happier people.


Africa is safer and more forgiving

What?  Are you serious?  What’s in the water over there??  Yes, I’m serious.  Sierra Leone and Ghana are safer than the UK and ROI.  I can’t prove this empirically but I see less violence, I feel less threatened and I have experienced less crime in Sierra Leone and Ghana than when I lived in London, Dublin, Limerick or New York. 

I think it stems from the level of respect people have for each other here, the sense of community, and the fact that everyone has your back – and is also there for you if the worst happens.  It means that the incentives to steal are quite low, even when people have virtually nothing.  Violence is also low.  Yes, tempers are often short here and you see plenty of arguments around town, but Africans have amazing powers of forgiveness and once an argument is done, it’s done.  How else does a people, one third of whom ended up in refugee camps during a bloody civil war, move on and create a well-functioning society only 10 years later?  There is less evidence of a Civil War in Sierra Leone today than there is of one in the USA from 150 years ago!

I’m not in any way trying to say that life in Africa is better than life in the West, I’m just saying it is not all one-way traffic.  Despite much war, corruption and turmoil, African communities have somehow managed to keep hold of strong values, many of which have been diluted by the commercialism, materialism and pace of life in the West.  For each one of the four categories I’ve mentioned above, there are one hundred problems; lack of opportunity, gender inequality, corruption, infant mortality, poor healthcare, inferior human rights, phoney democratic structures, lack of freedom of the press, voodoo religions and dangerous infrastructure are the ones to come to mind.  And there are many more.  But the only way I can reconcile the happiness I see here with the lack of progress in development is to believe that African’s optimism and outlook are the biggest factors in their enjoyment of life.  And there is a lesson for all of us in that.