Last week I was in Africa for the first time. Before I left, I had heard that Africa gets under your skin and stays there. I didn’t really understand what people meant, but I understand better now. Although, I’m not entirely sure if it was Africa alone that created the impressions, or rather the contrasts with the society I come from.
It was in in connection with a book project that the trip went to Tanzania. I was going to visit Lovund primary and secondary school in Mbamba Bay. The Lovund school is solely built up with money from the Lovund community in Helgeland, with the sisters Aino and Maria Olaisen at the head. Classrooms, a boarding school, an administration building and teacher’s accommodation have been built.
The Lovund school is part of a larger project with origins in Botnhamn on Senja, where blessed Einar Johansen started with a fisheries project in the 90s. At the end of the project, Einar was unable to stop his involvement, not before he tragically drowned in Lake Malawi. By his side at the time was his daughter Hanne, who just hours before the accident had been introduced as her father’s successor in the project.
Despite a busy everyday life with psychology practice at Finnsnes, Hanne Renland and her helpers have done impressive work all these years, where they have contributed to equipping as many as 44 (!) schools with classrooms, toilets, boarding schools, teacher’s accommodation and everything needed for to run a school. Now they also work with teacher exchanges.
It is not space in this column to go into all the details of the project, but there is plenty of space to lie flat on your skin in abysmal respect for the effort that has been made. I had heard about the project several times over the years, but really had no idea how extensive it was, and how professionally the work was done. Swahili is spoken, and the work is done with respect for local culture and shoulder to shoulder with the population and authorities, not from the top down.
Well then; so was it the African experience. Before I left, I did my best to shake off School TV’s Africa from the 70s, with simple living conditions and an even simpler outdoor kitchen. I thought that today’s Africa is hardly like on TV. I could save myself that, because life in rural Tanzania is like on TV.
Because it was not an actor or a scenery that came wandering towards me during a walk in the early morning, it was a very real mother of small children with a whole armful of wood on her head. She had been out gathering, and the gods must know how far she had to walk before she got home to her outdoor kitchen. Right behind came a lady with what looked like at least 20 kilos of bananas, also on her head. She was probably going to the market to sell them.
It gives a lot to think about when you see something like this. You might wonder how you manage to balance a three-metre-long woodpile on your head? Or how is your neck? But the only thing I could think of was: What a capacity, what a courage, what a will, what a woman. And then: What would my people be capable of? I know what we were capable of, but what are we capable of now? It is impressive to see man’s actual performance slip past in perfect balance.
Later we were on school visits. We visited both primary and secondary schools. It was not free for me to sing and fool around with the children. As the first European in history, I set out to teach Africans to dance. I feel that it will be right to report home that it is not at all the case that everyone south of the Mediterranean is a natural dancer. He Ola Trefot can be found everywhere.
But funny – God, we had so much fun. I have never seen so much joy at being allowed to go to school, such willingness to learn and interest, and such rapture in the child’s body at being able to sing a greeting song together with a middle-aged, white man. And again the contrasts with the fatherland hit the back of the mind: here there was no disgruntled, hoodie-wearing teenage surpom at the back desk, who found neither the singing nor the dancing, nor life in general, to be bearable.
There is nobody reason to underestimate the challenges that daily life presents to the people of Mbamba Bay, and there is also no reason to romanticize anything based on what we saw and those we met – it was certainly the bright side, and well that, that came our way. But it is still now, for an old man, quite easy to recognize real smiles and real joy.
And that is nor to be mistaken when you meet people who have an inner life in stark contrast to my own rushed, stressed, timed head. It’s quite a long way from problem-oriented, Norwegian dirges to Tanzanian “hakuna matata” – it’ll work out. Although it often doesn’t work out, and although the Norwegian dirge can be both timely and accurate, I feel a kind of longing for a state of mind that is calmer, more balanced and, at the risk of oversimplifying, more African.
I think so must be this part of Africa – the smile, the joy and the hakuna matata – that has crawled under my skin. I hope all three stay there, for a long time.
