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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
As you tour to promote the book, are you encountering a lot of ignorance about Africa, and is that really frustrating?
Fisher: We feel that the Western world is really misled about Africa. The press and the exposure on television and radio is always the bad news -- the wars, the politics, famine, drought. Africa has had some amazingly bad and horrific situations, but behind that, it is an enormous continent, and you're really hearing only about the small pockets of disaster areas. There are hundreds and hundreds of cultures that aren't suffering from these at all, and are leading probably more prosperous, in one sense of the word, lifestyles than we are in the Western world. In Africa, the sun is always shining. And on top of that, people really enjoy laughing -- I mean, people really laugh every day. There's a sense among many cultures and different communities of how to enjoy what you have and how to balance what you're able to take on and what you're not able to take on. Sometimes a slightly simplified life is a more enjoyable life.
And when you don't have a thousand things happening at once, people get terrific enjoyment. They have great times in the markets selling butter and grain; they have wonderful times when they're herding cows. There are hard times, too, of course, but they've actually learned to really enjoy whatever is offered to them.
We feel that most Westerners have never really had a chance to be exposed to this part of Africa -- unless they've actually traveled there themselves -- so people think, "Oh, my God, you've been in such an incredibly dangerous environment," or "This must have been so difficult to do," or "Africa is going through such torment at the moment, we would never go there." But Africa is a huge continent and we can benefit so much from seeing other ways of living, from having our eyes opened. Our Western way of living is wonderful, but there are other ways that are also wonderful. There's creativity that's completely different, and there are people who have actually managed to exist in terrains that we in the Western world couldn't survive a day in. And how they've done it, and the calculation of all the things that one has to be very sensitive to -- the elements, and the rains, and the seasons, what cattle can actually take on and what they can't, and how often you have to visit a well and water animals, how long an animal can go across a desert, how long a camel can last without water. These things are very, very finely tuned by people, and it's very much a deep experience to see it.
Did you ever despair?
Fisher: I despaired once over the size of Africa. It was in covering the Sudan in doing "Africa Adorned." Sudan is by far the biggest country in Africa, and one could spend one's entire lifetime doing a book on Sudan. And when I realized that I'd taken on a project to record adornment across Africa, the despair inside of me was a confusion and an overwhelming [feeling] of "Where do I turn next?" I realized that I'd actually come to a point in southern Sudan where I couldn't figure out whether I should go north, east, south or west; the continent was just too vast. So I sat for a couple of days and then I thought, "You just have to make a stab at it." And ironically I went south across Zaire and met Carol in Niger, recording "Nomads of Niger." As it turned out, at that moment she needed a Suzuki jeep, and so the jeep that I'd been driving through Eastern Africa and southern Sudan and then across Zaire and West Africa changed hands -- and she went off in it back into Wodaabe land to record the Wodaabe people. So moments of despair, I think, have been moments only. One has had them and one has realized that in life, if you can't see an answer, you just have to sit for a little bit until it comes, and if it doesn't come, just make a stab at it. Africa's too big to think about too long; it's better just to keep going and trust that something will happen -- and something great always did.
Beckwith: I despaired when I saw the amount of need that Africans had, and how much of it was being met by world organizations that imposed what they thought was best for Africans on Africa. For example, when I was in Niger, I watched a $17 million aid program being set up for nomads, and the nomads came to us and said to us, "We've never been asked if this is going to work. But because we have a policy of hospitality and politeness toward outsiders, when they ask us if we like this project, we always say yes. We always say, 'Yes, of course in your project our cows are producing more milk,' because they need to hear the yes. They word the question in a way so that we have to say yes, but in fact, with our knowledge of the grasses and pasture, our cows are producing more milk, and we're using a system that's thousands of years old."
When I looked into this, I realized how much was being spent on this project, and how the nomadic peoples were not being asked what they needed, and how the project was setting up a dependency on the aid organization. And I felt that even though I could help the nomads in a very small way, I could make sure that any well that we raised money to help the nomads dig would belong to the nomads: "He who digs the well owns the well." He who digs the well knows how many people can come to the well before the water's depleted, and how much pasture there is around the well to support the animals. So that well was calculated to meet an exact need, as opposed to a well that costs 50 times more to serve everyone, and within a month there's no pasture left and everyone abandons the well. And since everyone is from different clans who don't get along with each other, you have to set up a police system at the well, too.
I despaired at the amount of "good" being brought into Africa that never succeeded in meeting need, and thought it's better to reach people successfully in a very small scale as a way of addressing need you see in Africa, rather than taking a monumental scale and not having it succeed. And I believe that it's most important to consult the elders, because the elders in every society are the repository of wisdom. They understand wisdom on so many levels, and one is survival. And if people go in and speak to the elders, they give such wonderful guidelines about how to help with survival, or how to leave people alone and let them get on with survival. That was my moment of despair.
You're both clearly so passionate about Africa. Is there a particular pinpoint for your passion that you can think of -- an incident, an encounter, something that was the doorway for your passion into Africa, or that embodies what you feel about Africa?
Beckwith: I think contact with people. In traveling across Africa, we encounter people who have very different belief systems, very different lifestyles, whether they're living in a rain forest, whether they're desert nomads, whether they're traditional animist people with traditional beliefs in the powers of the sacred forest and in nature or whether they're Amharic Christians who have a thousands-of-years-old belief system. What's extraordinary is that in living with people who are so different from us and each other, you come to realize that you're all sharing a common essence, that you all in the end have the same needs in life, the same challenges, the same questions, that your emotions are all shared.
Here you are with a Surma woman who's wearing only a large lip plate and a leather skirt and who lives in the forest. You think initially you could never find anything in common with her -- and then you're sitting side by side sharing the world together, sharing feelings about men, and about children, and about nature and survival and decoration, and about the ceremonies to come and what each stage of life is like. You feel incredibly bonded with people who are so different from you, and you somehow wish you could share with the world how possible it is to look at someone you might even think is your enemy in the Western world and realize how close you really are, and how much common ground there is between you. That happens in Africa when you open yourselves up and people open themselves up to you.
