| In the many countries in Europe and North America
where Africans (and particularly Anglophone Africans) study,
Germany is not among the most attractive. There are historical
and practical reasons for this, and they have to do with long
and concrete associations through colonialism and language.
But there is another, altogether less sentimental, reason for
the European nation’s lack of the easy attractiveness
which Britain or France or the United States and Canada afford
to the aspiring African scholar or immigrant: it has to do with
the aggressively mono-cultural reputation of Germans, a tendency
which easily and often violently translates into the kind of
racism and racist attacks which has set Germany apart since
the Holocaust. For this reason, I approached Osman Sankoh's
Hybrid Eyes, an account of his experiences as an African student
in Germany, with some trepidation, not to say uneasiness. At
the end of my first reading, much of my fears were confirmed;
but so nuance and subtle is this book that I also emerged with
a far deeper appreciation of the various levels of humanism,
of the kind of broad-mindedness and kindness of heart among
a good number of this much-maligned people. The book opens with
the author, from the impoverished West African state of Sierra
Leone, finding himself in a very wealthy Germany. The wide-eyed
observations he makes about his new surroundings are appropriate;
the metaphor he uses are crisp and fresh, the language superb.
He is in a large room with another Sierra Leonean student named
Hudson Jackson. The room’s many “rectangular boards
of different colours were neatly joined together to form a beautiful
pattern.” And he compares this room, much too favourably,
to his “whitewashed concrete” one at Njala University
College in Sierra Leone. Looking through the window, he sees
beautifully organised rows and rows of houses reminding him
of “pictures I used to see in geography textbooks”;
there is a “clean grey street whose long back was covered
with a make-up of bright straight white lines and arrows.”
There is no self-absorption here, and one of the book's appeal
is the author's remarkable sense of appreciation for his new
surrounding, a foreign country. But it also means that the intensity
of feelings and emotions which come with such self-absorption,
the kind that helped create great leaders and great autobiographies
(Gandhi, Nkrumah), are rather ruefully absent: there is only
a man vacillating between appreciation and outrage, not taking
a strong position, whining when there is a xenophobic terror,
in effect pleading to his hosts for a better understanding and
appreciation of Africans and other immigrants; a very normal,
intelligent man out to make a good life for himself and others
close to him. This is not a world-changing view, but it is no
less worthy for it being limited. It is a sound vision, and
to show how sound it is, let us look at how another “Third
Worlder” recounted his days as a law student in Europe.
The Story of my Experiments with the Truth, Mahatma Gandhi,
India's great nationalist leader, recounts his experiences
as a young man studying law in Britain. He went to England
at the age of 19 in 1888, when he was already married for
6 years. The long journey was by sea, but nowhere in his account
does Gandhi describe anything seen or heard that did not relate
to him personally. There is no description of the sea or the
ship; though Gandhi spent three years in England, no London
building is described, no street mentioned, there is no observation
about the weather (a favourite pastime in England). But at
the time that Gandhi arrived in England, London was the capital
of the world, the greatest city on earth, surely something
that would not fail to impress a young man from a depressed
little town in India. Gandhi's inward concentration was total,
his self-absorption fierce. Three years after he arrived in
England, Gandhi suddenly becomes a lawyer; the adventure is
over: “I passed my examinations, was called to the bar
on the 10th of June 1891, and enrolled in the High Court on
the 11th. On the 12th I sailed for home.” There is what
V.S. Naipaul has called a “defect of vision” in
Gandhi's whole worldview: the failure to absorb other experiences,
to appreciate other cultures, to open up to a changing world.
It is the quintessential caste mentality. But this was the
foundation of his greatness: the small man in the calico dress,
a near-naked man, highly opinionated and bespectacled, bringing
down the British Empire.
Osman Sankoh is certainly not Gandhi, and he does not pretend
to be so. Still, there are moments of superb engagements with
the higher issues in Sankoh’s Hybrid Eyes. In his interesting
review of the book, Sheikh Umarr Kamara has referred to Sankoh’s
technique of dialogue, which allows for the “breaking
of the barriers of ignorance and fear that breed prejudice.”
There is Sankoh’s conversation with the old German lady,
which quickly takes the form of Sankoh patiently lecturing
the nervous woman on the issue of race, as well as his engagement
with the innocent, but already polluted, mind of a German
kid who calls him a "nigger" in a subway. These
are superb scenes, as much for their sustained humour as for
the educational value. They are also revealing of the kind
of man Sankoh is: diplomatic, non-confrontational, a patient
gentleman, and very, very clever. He is also very brilliant.
Germany's graduate programmes, unlike those of North America
and the UK, appear to seriously disrespect undergraduate degrees
from African universities. So that even though Sankoh had
graduated with a distinction in mathematics from the University
of Sierra Leone, he is forced to do all his undergraduate
courses all over again before he would be allowed into graduate
school--some of the courses he had himself taught at Njala.
Needless to say, he does it in style, graduating with very
good MSc. and DSc. degrees. In December 1998, he wins the
prestigious German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) prize
for “excellent academic performance and extraordinary
social engagements by a foreign student”, the first
African to be so honoured. If his performance does not indicate
to the Germans that Africans are not only just as good but
could be better, then of course there are more serious issues.
Sankoh is an ‘accommodationist’; with him there
is always another side to an issue. At the same time that
he dreads the brutal and racist German police, the racist
pranks of lumpen Germany, he also shows genuine gratitude
and affection for those Germans who are truly nice to him
and have a totally anti-racist worldview, people like Professor
Urfer and his wife Barbara who invites him to their home.
Initially a near-sceptic of German humanism, Sankoh’s
attitude changes dramatically after the painful affair involving
his daughter, Fatima. Fatima gets dreadfully ill, with a hole
in the heart, in war-ravaged Sierra Leone. A tabloid newspaper
campaign in Germany brings in all the help that he needed
to fly in Fatima to undergo surgery in Germany.
Hybrid Eyes is no doubt a brilliant narrative, highly readable.
There are many memorable passages. Sankoh’s descriptions
of the many strange things he encounters are often matchless
in their eloquence. Here is his encounter with a wooden lift.
The lifts here are different. They are small wooden cabins
for a maximum of two people at a time that roll continuously
up and down. I looked at them suspiciously, went a bit closer,
but gave up any attempt to use them. I saw one person come
off and another get on. I looked left and right, as if to
be sure that no one was watching me to see whether or not
I could make it. I moved closer, held tightly to the grip
on the wall, raised my foot and waited for the next cabin.
I then jumped in quickly.
The sentences build and add, every word belongs.
The high point of Hybrid Eyes is Sankoh’s lengthy reply
to his brother’s letter from Sierra Leone. The two letters
deserve to be read very carefully. Young Andrew's letter is
enthusiastic, sincerely irresponsible in some places, very
acute and sharp in others. The older Sankoh replies in a measured
tone, (characteristically) patiently lecturing his brother
about how misguided his views are about Germany as the “greener
pasture”, the drudgery of work he has to ensure to make
sure that the deutschmark (always the deutschmark: without
the deutschmark Andrew would not write the eloquent letter
for he probably wouldn't be at Fourah Bah College: the deutschmark
makes all the difference) keep getting to the family in Sierra
Leone, the racism he encounters almost on a daily basis, all
the worldly troubles. Clearly, Andrew would not be impressed
by this argument. In his letter, he kept coming back to the
ravages of the war in Sierra Leone, the fact that he may not
want to sit back all the time expecting to receive the packages
from his brother (fruits of the drudgery of work in Germany!).
Here, there are really no higher issues discussed; Sankoh
knows better than to lecture a sharp and perhaps hungry FBC
student about how to change the world.
In Hybrid Eyes, we see how incomplete “hybridity”
always is, how it is always a process, a precarious and often
painful condition, a process of unequal negotiation. Osman
Sankoh’s book is a treasure for its unabashed and fiercely
exact representation of this condition. |
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