The African Lie

...And what I think it means about time

You might expect this (slightly overdue) piece to be on the lies of corrupt politicians or the false promises doled out by aid organisations. If you clicked through to read a red-hot expose of a continent-spanning scandal of lies and deceit then I’m afraid this may disappoint.

I’ll save investigative journalism to the investigative journalists.

No - this piece is about something far less serious yet far more infuriating. Also, I must caveat my ramble with the disclaimer that this is based on my experiences in Eastern and Southern Africa, although anecdotally I think it is probably the case throughout the continent.

I want to write about lies.

Not the lies that tangle themselves like vines around intimate love affairs.

Not the lies that prop up dynasties of nepotistic governments.

Not even the lies that red-eyed teenagers tell their parents when they come home stinking of bush weed.

I’m talking about the white lies that can only exist in a society that allows them to flourish. A society where nobody with any real power is ever actually responsible for anything. Responsibility is merely passed down like bad genes here. I thought this might have been an East African phenomenon, but I have found the same frustration in Malawi and Zambia.

Let me give you a few examples of how this plays out. We arrived at the bus station in Lusaka at 9am for a 9:30am departure. We were told, without prompt, that the bus would be just a few minutes - it was filling up at the petrol station, you see. No problem, we thought. 9:30am passes…

Then 10am…

Then 10:30am…

Then 11am.

No sign of the bus, which was ironically called ‘Shalom’. I never said hello to the bus, and it brought us the opposite of peace.

Whenever we asked about its whereabouts we were told that it’ll be “just 10 minutes.” After 2 hours, we left the office and found another bus. We were told that this one would depart at 11:30am. Then, at 12pm, I asked why we still hadn’t departed.

“How long do you think?” I asked, “5 minutes?”.

He looked me dead in the eyes and said something that I’ve never heard an African man say, before or since:

“I don’t want to lie to you… I’d say more like 15 minutes.”

Ah, I thought. That’s a first. Instead of smiling and agreeing with what I wanted to hear, he told me the truth! Now here’s a man I can trust.

The driver arrived and we slowly departed, 90 minutes later, at 1:35pm.

There hasn’t been a country on this continent where we haven’t encountered this. When receiving directions I may be told “just 10 minutes” or “100 metres” and find myself staggering in the mid-day heat for half an hour. Every dish on a menu is vegetarian if you ask, even the beef stew. That is until it arrives…with beef. Now, I know that if we booked five-star hotels and took part in luxury tours, we would not have this problem. It appears that if someone has little skin in the game and they can get away with it, they will lie. If their job is on the line, they will not.

It’s become so frequent that it no longer induces anger, we just hum the chorus of Shakira’s “Waka Waka” - Welcome to Africa.

I’ve been trying to understand this blood-pressure raising idea and I’ve come to a few conclusions.

First of all, I considered the simple reality of our place on the continent. We’re tourists; workers here will want to please tourists so that they get their tips, so they tell us what they think we want to hear, which is shorter delays, more availabilities and lower prices. But this makes no sense. When we realise that the delays are longer, there is less availability or the price is per person rather than per group, we’re angrier and therefore less likely to pay a tip. So I ruled out this possibility.

Then, I thought, maybe people here know less about their jobs than we give them credit for. My limited context led me into old history classrooms, scouring for a post-colonial reading of my travellers’ frustrations. Maybe there is something in this. As countries were handed over by domineering control-freaks, the leaders followed suit. This passed down from politicians to business owners to middle managers to porters and teachers and guides and any other profession. Maybe this is a continent ruled by megalomaniacs who hoard both knowledge and power so that the people below them simply lack the knowledge or skill to do their job.

No. That feels too lazy. It doesn’t account for the differences between colonial situations and it gives the western colonists far too much responsibility. I think it goes back further than this.

What I have settled on is this. African culture is just fundamentally incompatible with Western notions of punctuality, organisation and service. Let me be clear, this is not me saying that our cultures cannot mix, get on, or work together. This is me saying that at their core, people have a different order of values here.

It’s not worse, just different.

For example, time is not something to be mastered here. It is merely something to exist in. If you move quickly through a crowd, people will look at you like you have three heads.

“Where are you going, mzungu?”

“You have somewhere to be?”

”Why the rush?”

Hurrying is viewed with contempt. As if you think you’re better than them because you want to be on time.

For many people here, if they say you’ll get there, you’ll get there. It doesn’t matter when.

If we zoom out a little bit, this has a broader application. These cultures, multi-faceted, varied and tribal as they are, do not have a strong sense of past, present and future. Ancestors live as spirits in the present, the present is about pleasure and survival and the future is of little concern.

Now, this is different in the big cities like Nairobi, infected by western punctuality, but if you head 10-20 miles outside of these urban centres, things look pretty much the same as they always have done.

African music, for example, is about maximum feeling, passion and movement. It’s about squeezing every ounce of energy from the present moment. Commerciality is an afterthought.

I must be careful here so as not sound like a colonial settler, admonishing local populations for their lack of ambition, urgency or willingness to be ‘more European’. Things still work here. The connection to the land is stronger, the sense of community is more pronounced and they sure know how to have more fun than we do in the West.

Instead, as has been the conclusion with most of my newsletters on the African continent, the only way to live here is to become more African. Don’t book connections, give yourself a full day to make a long journey, don’t take what anybody says at face value.

Be present.

There really is no alternative.