For a whole year once we were Missionaries. Actually not real Missionaries, but we taught in a Mission school. In West Africa. Little country called Liberia that has since scored newscopy for the unrelenting bloodletting that goes on there. But twenty years ago it was quite peaceful, and known only because it was the cheapest place in the world to register shipping. We were short term workers in a school teaching African kids run by this International Missionary organization.

Real primitive too. I mean snakes in the outdoor toilet, two hours of electricity per day, and plentiful water only in the wet season. You know what one of the great threats to mankind is in Africa? To be caught in this standalone loo, with its walls of corrugated metal when a cricket started chirping. It’s usually harmless twittering was transformed by that metallic chamber into a high pitched frequency that caused the occupant, who by definition had to remain at their wee task, to go insane before they managed to break free.

But I digress from my main point, which is to say how being Missionaries takes all the answers off one. Just leaves you with, well, I was going to say questions. But I’m not even sure it leaves you with questions. If anything, it leaves you with the emptiness of the ways things are. Graham Greene wrote far more eloquently than I ever could about West Africa and Liberia, and the situations and errors that could be traced back to well meaning, tired men.

It seems almost impossible to write about that great continent without being paternalistic. Today’s images of poverty, famine and war are painted daily on the West’s television screens. For a while this raised the contribution level as hearts were stirred, but I suspect people are tiring of seeing those wasted bodies, those endless statistics. If I can believe Newsweek, that stalwart of truth, the masses are more interested in the private domestic disputes of British royalty and seminude photos of them taken through cracks in the fences of their villas in St. Tropez by the ever vigilant paparazzi.

But the dust of Africa, in the words of my humourous Irish friend in Liberia, gets between your toes.

So we went there as school teachers. Young schoolteachers too. Full of idealism. Sort of ‘the world will be a better place when we leave’ kind of visions. After all the adventure of entering Africa, a wearying tale told anew by any traveller of those parts, we landed at this school. One hundred pupils aged between 12 and 25 years old of both sexes.

And started teaching them American history.

Right at the outset I knew I would be in for a bad time with this kind of entree. Literature was also American. Now I don’t have anything against the good old U.S. of A. Far from it. Some of my best friends have been there. But I think the point is fairly obvious. Those African kids out of the village struggled with understanding Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, while I struggled with the relevance of it all.

But could we get this across? No way. When we started to raise questions on this with the older Missionaries, they threw their hands up in the air. What else could be done, they asked? And when we turned to the locals, they looked at us as if we were odd. I must confess, not too many conversations were held about the value of teaching Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders to poor African sons of peasant farmers. It was just a plain case of cultural oppression, much as I dislike using that phrase.

I guess it goes something like this. How would you feel if you were approached by a people from Mars, all of whom were extremely wealthy, and understood modern technology to an enormous degree, and who could fly back to Mars anytime they liked? And you couldn’t. You might be pretty impressed by that. Your thinking might even be influenced. Horrible thought, but you might even think they were superior. Even when the Martian was at desperate pains to tell you no, no, that isn’t so. You wouldn’t like Mars at all, the traffic is terrible, and the wall surround Multimedia virtual reality inhouse cable TV entertainment is boring, and the rent for a plain old 5 level self cleaning, robotized condominium is through the roof. You would simply hate it.

And, as my analogy turns back to our real contrast, the poor African looks around at his mudbrick house, and the dirt road, and the kids running around in rags, and thinks ‘who is he trying to fool?’

Let me tell a story. One day I was with this guy. I had this sudden urge to cut a whole lot of cane or bamboo down and make things, you know natural furniture or something. To show the Africans how important their environment was, and how much better it was to use recyclable materials. I was green you see. Out to show them the future. So he says I know where to get some, and he leads me off into the forest. We go down this track for a while and sure enough, eventually we get to a stand of cane. Wow, this is it, I tell him, all excited.
He’s looking at me wondering how long I will be in this ridiculous mood. I want to cut some down. I go to climb into the thick of this stuff. No, let me do it he tells me. Afraid I will probably break an arm or kill myself in the middle of it. Quite a likely move actually. So up he goes, and with very little effort slashes away at pieces and brings down some beautiful straight long shafts. About ten of them.

This will be difficult to get back to the compound I tell him. But if we take an end each, and rest often, we can make it. Wait a minute he says. Then he looks around, selects a branch of a tree. An ordinary branch about half an inch thick. With his machete, he slices around the branch, cutting through only the outer bark. Getting a purchase on this bark, he peels it in one piece off the branch. A three foot length. Did this twice, and had two pieces of natural rope. We gather the cane together, then he loops this bark strip around one end and shakes the whole bundle of cane together so it is tight. Ties a knot so one end is very secure. Does the same to the other end. I’m open mouthed, saying nothing.

Then he wanders over to a patch of a certain type of grass, puts his hand into it, and winds it around and around. In about five seconds he has pulled a turban like crown of grass together. He places this on top of his head. Then he hands me his machete. Wordlessly he stoops and picks up the whole bundle of cane, lifts it up and balances it on the grass cushion on his head. And off he goes. Walks clear back to the clearing carrying this. I had never seen any such natural use of materials at hand, so casually put together as though it were the most simple unthinking thing to do. All the way down that track I was raving to him about this. But he couldn’t understand what I was getting at. It was an act of no value. It was a nothing. I was blown away. I am sure he thought I was a nutter.

I loved teaching those kids geography though. I really did. It was my University subject, and we were surrounded by it. Geography wherever you looked. Started teaching them about rainfall and rivers. Taught me a thing or two about perceptions also. When you start drawing maps on a wall, you cannot assume anything. I did to start with, but then learnt later. What is a map on a blackboard but a funny squiggle of lines? Then this foreign teacher tells you it is the shape of Africa. Well they have lived in Africa all their lives, and it never looked like that. But because you are the teacher, they shut up and try and make sense of it.

I figured it out one day. I drew this map of Africa on the board, and drew a line on it indicating the Nile river. Now, dear reader, on a map of Africa, the Nile river starts in the middle and goes straight up to the top. Then I asked these senior students one question. “Which direction does the water flow in the Nile river?”

Start with something they understand. They understand water flows in rivers. They have seen it. Silence in the class however. No answer. Apprehensive eyes look at me. Then the board. Then me again. “Come on,” I say, “have a guess.”

Finally, tentatively, Sam, twenty year old Sam, raises his hand. “Down,” he says, indicating the river must flow from the top of Africa down to the middle. In other words, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Kenyan highlands. Nobody laughed. They all waited with bated breath to see if Sam got it right. I stood there, not laughing either. Sam, in his hopeful grasping for understanding the white man’s world had taken a stab, had exposed himself to failure and to banter, an immense risk in such a communal society. I thought briefly through the theory of knowledge and understanding. How do we communicate concepts, but through analogy, through openness? How do we convey perceptions of the world through the various hazes of our own culture, let alone someone else’s?

Then I turned and grabbed the blackboard. It was nailed to the wall. I pulled it off the wall. (This is quite an attention grabbing exercise should you be facing a bored class one day.) Then I laid it down flat on one of the spare desks. Now Africa was flat. Like ground is flat. Then we went through it again, explaining and building up the centre of Africa into some mountains. Then I asked, “if I poured some water onto here, the centre where this raised piece is, which way will it run?”

And Sam’s eyes lit up. “That way,” he said with pride. Understood. And so did I. Anyone could have seen that if I poured water onto the vertical map of Africa, it would run down the board. Every time. Of such are the small victories of life.