Basic HTML-Version
Cont rol ler
magazin 4/98
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
WITH OTHER CULTURES
by David
Gill,
Oxford
David Gill gives a talk on Monday and Tuesday
evening - atmut
45
minutes - in our Seminar
"Controlling & the Controller'. The participants
appreciate it.
Glossary
hedgerows - Baumhecken
on equal terms - unter gleichen
Bedingungen
buttercup - Butterblume
home leave - Urlaub in England
tribal tradition - Stammestradition
took the line - vertrat den Standpunkt
veneer - äußerer Anstrich
turned up - tauchten ... auf
from Scratch - ganz von vorne
ripples - kleine Wellen
family-mindedness - Familiensinn
bedevilled - verhext
warlords - Kriegsherren
bush warbler - japanischer Singvogel
hubbub - Getöse
selfconscious - verlegen
bobbing up and down - sich auf und ab
bewegen
carnations - Nelken
tentative - provisorisch
insult - Beleidigung
Some say that travel broadens the mind.
I have an old friend who before the age of
40 had hardly travelled 40 miles from bis
native village just outside High Wycombe,
a small furniture making town between
Lx)ndon and Oxford. Düring that time he
had cyded to Oxford University and ta-
ken a degree in Philosophy, visited the
capital once and had become an expert
on the hedgerows around bis neighbour-
hood. He is the broadestminded man I
know. However, for my part, I have found
travel an enriching experience, and by
travel I don't mean tourism but actual-
ly living abroad among people whose
culture is different from my own.
For example, if I hadn't travelled to Afri-
ca as a young man to teach in an African
school I would never have feit I was a
European. I thought I was English (pos-
sibly British, if my passport was to be
believed), but for my two years in Ugan–
da, I was definitely classified as Euro–
pean. The local people didn't make any
distinction between Brilons, Germans,
Americans, Greeks and other white
people working among them. However,
since the national language was, and
still is, English, il was easy enough to
communicate with educated Ugandans.
Cross-cultural communication took pla–
ce in the classroom, but it was some-
how false and certainly not on equal
terms. Behind me was power and glory
of a British curriculum controlled and
examined by academics in Cambridge.
The secondary school students had to
read novels by Jane Austen and plays by
Shakespeare (they liked the political dra-
ma of Julius Caesar, which another Juli–
us (Nyerere) had translated into Swahi–
li); in Biology they had to analyse the
buttercup, a flower that doesn't grow in
Uganda and had to be imported by
desperate science teachers returning
from home leave. Whether they noticed
it or not, their own culture was being
replaced by something very different.
One of the curious things was that thou-
gh most of the students were much
more politically aware than English se–
condary school pupils of the time, and
argued fiercely against neo-colonialism,
it never occurred to them to attack Cam–
bridge University And why not? Becau-
se the Cambridge School Certificate was
their passport to a white-collar job in
Kampala.
Between two worlds
Not all my students feit that the British-
style education was better than local
tribal traditions. Many were the lively
debates on marriage, religion and me-
dicine. I remember one older Student
from Ankole (his friends called him
'mzee' - old man) who took the line that
there were lots of advantages in poly-
gamy and that Christianity was a poor
religion for not understanding this. He
also spoke warmly about native medi-
cine and thought that European doc-
tors had much to learn from it. His
essays showed a man trying to reach a
synthesis between traditional African
and modern European cultures. The in-
tellectual struggle was very impressive.
Uganda in the early days of Indepen-
dence was a largely Christian country,
more so than the mothercountry she
had just cut loose from. It seemed to me
that the European religion (nobody no–
ticed that it all started in the Middle
Fast) had the appeal of a powerful tribal
leader (Jesus) and plenty of magic (re-
surrection, miracles). Under the veneer
of modern science and rationalism
(thank you, Cambridge) the old beliefs
in magic persisted. When word got
round the school that there were Con-
golese in the local township selling
magic pens that would guarantee good
exam results, half the students disap-
peared in a doud of dust. Had I persi–
sted with Rutoro, the local Bantu lan–
guage, I might have got my gardener to
explain why the Congolese were the
greatest magicians in Africa.
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