Urban Dreams

Transformations of Family Life in Burkina Faso

Claudia Roth, Willemijn de Jong, Manfred Perlik, Noemi Steuer, Claudia Roth†, Willemijn de Jong, Manfred Perlik, Noemi Steuer

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785333774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Claudia Roth's work on Bobo-Dioulasso, a city of half a million residents in Burkina Faso, provides uniquely detailed insight into the evolving life-world of a West African urban population in one of the poorest countries in the world. Closely documenting the livelihood strategies of members of various neighbourhoods, Roth's work calls into question established notions of "the African family" as a solidary network, documents changing marriage and kinship relations under the impact of a persistent economic crisis, and explores the increasingly precarious social status of young women and men.

PART I

Ethnography and Reflexivity

CHAPTER 1

Culture Shock, Power and Knowledge

Negotiating Boundaries in Ethnographic Fieldwork

Claudia Roth

Encounters with foreignness are initially accompanied by culture shock. From a psychoanalytical point of view, we are confronted with the foreignness within ourselves and thereby faced with our own boundaries. Through this encounter we are forced to question our own image of the world and our own practice. After this initial shock there follows the search for new orientation, and this journey is accompanied by repeated upheaval in the ways in which we usually understand the world, and ourselves within the world. It is these upheavals in our self-conception that enable us to get to know people from different cultures in the first place and begin to understand them. Hence, culture shock is not a unique event that can be overcome once and for all but, instead, becomes a part of the unending analysis of the relationship between self and other.

Furthermore, encounters with that which is foreign take place within a power structure. We get to know a foreign culture through relationships. Hierarchies between participants’ societies as well as hierarchies within a society – such as the power relations between age and gender – contribute to these relationships.

I shall reflect upon both of these aspects of encountering foreignness by drawing upon my field research in Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso. Such encounters are always also a confrontation with oneself.¹

Culture Shock

Cultural Patterns of Controlling Fear

For a total of fourteen months (over the course of three visits between 1989 and 1992) I lived in the compound of the Sanou family, an extended family of Zara in Bobo-Dioulasso. The household contains three generations – thirty adults and the same number of children. In 1995, I visited the family again for one month, and in early 1997 I returned and conducted another two months of research there.²

How did I meet this family? This was in part due to chance and in part due to luck, I believe, as well as the good impression I had during my first encounters, which outweighed the fears that were to appear later.

In 1988 I spent three months in West Africa for the first time with a good friend of mine, mainly in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso. Towards the end of our visit we met Isaac, a student of sociology, on a train journey to Bobo-Dioulasso. He invited us to come and visit his family – an evening that turned out to remain unforgettable.

One year later I travelled to Burkina Faso with the intention of conducting research in Bobo-Dioulasso. On my very first day I met Isaac again by chance and told him about my plans. He wanted to ask his father to help me: if the elders of the family were to agree, I would be able to live in his room because he was residing in Ouagadougou at that time. I noted in my diary: ‘I am happy and excited yet also anxious and fearful that “the wagon has begun to roll and I cannot control its direction”’.

Later I meet Isaac again and say, ‘You do know that I want to rent the room, don’t you?’

His reply: ‘No, that is out of the question’.

Me: ‘But it’s important for me. It’s not actually up for discussion. I can only take the room if I’m allowed to rent it’.

Isaac looks at me with incomprehension and says, ‘You’re acting out of place’.

Me: ‘Possibly, but this is important to me. I feel freer if I can pay rent’.

He laughs: ‘Ah, la liberté! That’s typical. But we have a culture here that doesn’t recognise that as a central concept. It’s different here’.

I cannot acquiesce and tell him, ‘I understand your point of view but that doesn’t change my point of view’.

He: ‘My father will decide whether or not you can pay rent’.

Me: ‘No, I have already decided!’

And I note in my diary: ‘I clearly feel the fear of being dropped into something, the fear of being at someone’s behest, and that I would not be able to act; the fear of losing control’.

The elders then decide that I would be allowed to move into the compound. The friend with whom I had visited Burkina Faso one year before accompanies me. We wait for Isaac to have the time to come to Bobo-Dioulasso and introduce us to the family. On our first visit, Isaac’s father cordially welcomes us; surrounded by his children and grandchildren he asks me whether the room would be acceptable. I say, ‘Yes, it’s perfect, I like it a lot’. But I cannot resist mentioning the matter of rent. He laughs: ‘You will be staying in Isaac’s room so you must negotiate with him about this. But you are most welcome here’. I realise that I will have to come up with a different solution to this problem.

We move to the compound the next day. And what happens? Sud-denly I am gripped with stomach cramps and I throw up, get diarrhoea. And as I lie on my bed I realise that I am deeply afraid of what is to come – of the foreignness. I quickly recover and I am back on my feet by that evening.

Every society has its own ways to deal with that which is foreign. I was obsessed with the matter of rent payments. The rent would have correlated with a contract, which is a common way in Europe to order one’s relationship with strangers. By paying rent I wanted to banish my fear of the unknown; I wanted to confront the rising lack of clarity with a seemingly clear relationship.

The women and men of the compound also wanted a clear relationship but they relied on a different pattern: I was quickly integrated by them into their family system through kinship roles. I became the son, the daughter, the older sister. In the first week, I was given a name by the oldest woman of the household: Fatimata.

According to Maya Nadig (1993: 48), hospitality in non-industrialised societies introduces the incorporation of an outsider, who thus becomes indebted to their host and therefore can do their host no harm. The circle of reciprocal gift-giving aims to integrate by creating mutual dependencies. We – my hosts and I – reacted in opposite ways: they wanted to integrate me (the outsider) whilst I wanted to create distance from that which was strange to me.

I began to contemplate how I would be able to show my gratitude for their hospitality and which kind of countergift would be appropriate. In this way I also began to think about the exchange of gifts and countergifts, about giving and taking – and about money. I will return to this theme below.

Recognising my own fear did not suffice to banish it – it culminated in a stomach disorder – but it did enable me to move to the compound despite that fear. The fact that my friend accompanied me and stayed on for ten days served to calm me down. This situation is similar to a child’s first day of school: the mother who accompanies her child into the unknown represents the connection to that child’s own, familiar world.

Disorientation

Relationships with people from a different culture begin with culture shock. The encounter with strangers ‘seems like an encounter with the ultimate unknown itself – death, the eradication of the self’, according to Christina von Braun (1989: 16, my translation). Mario Erdheim and Maya Nadig (1979) refer to ‘social death’ in this context: the systems of roles that support one’s own identity and guide one’s perception are shaken by confrontation with foreignness. This then leads to a restructuring of experience.

The thought processes of ethno-psychoanalysis that have been made available to social scientists by Georges Devereux (1976) and Maya Nadig (1985, amongst others) allow us to recognise ourselves as part of the observation process – that is, to perceive one’s own fears, aggravation, discomfort, insecurity and irritation as providing information on the relationship between oneself and a stranger. By attempting to evade projections we can achieve a more direct type of access to a foreign culture. Maya Nadig (1985: 107, my translation) states that ‘self-observation serves to keep open the path to reality’. However, just like ethno-psychoanalysis itself, this does not provide us with a guarantee against misinterpretation or projections, ‘even if it increases our readiness and opportunities to recognise personal or cultural influences and to interpret their occurrence as relevant data’.

Some scenes from the early period of my field research will serve to illustrate the first phase of culture shock. At the beginning I felt like a child. Numerous women, men and children came to greet me and to discover who this stranger was – there were many faces for me to encounter. And when I asked ‘Who is she? Who is he?’ I was told ‘that is my mother, my brother. . .’. Are all the women mothers,³ all the young men brothers? My confusion was great, and I only knew that I did not know anything at all.

I remember my first meals: millet gruel with gombo sauce – unknown food for me, and I was embarrassed to see that I was eating like a two-year-old: the sauce ran through my fingers and down the back of my hand when I moved my hand to my mouth.

I remember the Dioula greeting that the children tried to teach me in my first days: I only heard sounds instead of syllables, and was unable to remember a single word of it.

I remember the first time I walked through the courtyard to the washroom: I had wrapped a hip scarf around myself and was carrying a heavy cauldron of water – everybody was excited and there was laughter and comments such as ‘Ah, look, she’s going off to wash herself!’ The walk was interminable and I was afraid that the hip scarf would come undone and I would be standing there naked, because that was the way that I felt: exposed.

I wanted to get to know the women and men and their way of life, and therefore I subjected myself to dependency – that is, to a social environment that was foreign to me. The simplest things such as eating became incomprehensible to me; my own values and expectations were no longer valid, my own frame of reference was suspended. I lived amongst the Sanou family and had no contact with other white people in Bobo-Dioulasso. In order to be able to orientate myself again I had to rely on the support of the women and men I lived with.

Their Offer for Integration: Kinship

The Sanou family integrated me through kinship roles. On one of the first evenings there, Isaac’s father told me: ‘You have now taken Isaac’s place. You are my son for as long as you remain here. This means that you can do whatever he can do: you may watch television with me every evening, you can come to me at any time and ask for my advice or for whatever it is that you need. I want you to feel at home here’.

I soon became an elder sister to the younger generation and a daughter to the older women. In this way, I – the stranger – was allocated a place in their structure. This offer of a role made me relax, especially in the early phase when I felt very foreign and lonely. It also made it easier for me to orientate myself in an unknown relationship network. I began to pay attention to the rights and duties of a son, a daughter, an elder sister, and so began to grasp the various kinship relations and the hierarchies of age and gender that structure their relationships.

There are two small incidents that illustrate this. An unmarried young man is washing clothes, and he calls out to me: ‘Actually this would be your task, as a woman!’ I reply: ‘Have you ever seen an elder sister wash her younger brother’s clothes?’ He laughs. Another young man gives me an orange: ‘You must peel it for me because you are a woman’. I hand it back to him, saying ‘You peel it yourself because you’re younger than me’.

I am happy whenever I am able to react in an appropriate manner; it is like a game – for them as much as for me. For example, while I was fetching water for myself the oldest woman in the household asked me whether I could wash her veil for her. I agreed, and she brought me three large white shawls that she wears when going to the mosque. While the shawls were drying in the wind she laughed and told me, ‘You really are a Sanou!’ That, however, only occurred on my second visit.

Communication

When abroad one must relearn how to communicate; and language is a key component in this. During my first visit I began to learn Dioula. The women urged me to do this and Raïssa, the oldest woman in the compound, was particularly strict in this: ‘You must learn it! Or else we will not be able to talk with each other!’ At home, in Europe, I studied Dioula intensively, and upon my second visit I was able to speak it. New worlds opened up for me, especially in regard to now having direct access to the women; and after a long conversation with Raïssa I was told: ‘Last time you were here you only looked and looked and looked. But now that we can talk together our hearts meet and we are equal. This is good!’

A crucial part of communication is the way in which one communicates or, more precisely, understanding who talks with whom, and in which way, because communication is embedded in relationship structures. Because I did not understand very much I asked many questions. The women and men in the compound laughed about this and would explain, but sometimes they simply shook their heads: ‘You ask too much!’ Asking older people questions is regarded as disrespectful, and as a person worthy of respect one does not ask younger people anything at all.

In a conversation with the young men about the differences that existed between us, I said ‘I ask you a lot but you never ask me anything’. They explained to me: ‘One can never know whether a question is acceptable to the other person. Because the older person is always right you are not allowed to impose yourself upon them. This is why we feel shame in asking questions. We are not used to it here’. During this conversation I suddenly remembered that I had not yet fetched water. They held me back: ‘Why don’t you send one of us? You never send one of us younger people on errands’. – ‘I can’t,’ I reply, ‘it’s difficult for me. I feel ashamed to do so’. – ‘See, you’re ashamed to have us run errands for you, and we’re ashamed to ask you questions’. And then they started to ask me questions: when had I left my parent’s home? Where had I gone? Who had paid for me? Why had my mother not worked outside the home?

I never stopped asking questions but I realised that there had to be other ways in which I could achieve better comprehension. I discovered that the most inspiring conversations developed when current events caused a stir amongst people. It was in such situations that I learned why something was talked about, and in which way.⁴

This was how I first encountered ‘joking relationships’. My host was in the company of a friend of his when I dropped by. ‘Look, she is a real Bobo!’ he said to his friend. ‘Her? A Bobo? I say!’ was this friend’s disparaging reaction. He looked at me and challenged me: ‘You don’t wear a hip scarf, your hair is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction. Claudia Roth’s Work in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso
• Part I. Ethnography and Reflexivity
• Part II. Negotiating Love and Marriage
• Part III. Elderly Parents and Their Children: Sharing or Living in Poverty
• Part IV. Youth: Dreams and Hardships
• Publications of Claudia Roth
• Index