What, Africa Worry? Continent Laughs Through the Tears of Its Misery

Vibrant colors on the back of a ramshackle truck announced the driver’s motto: “Oh, Don’t Worry.”

They also could be the watchwords of much of Africa.

If anyone has cause to worry, it is Africa, short of food and cash, faced with lingering wars, harsh governments and economies that plummet while wealth accumulates elsewhere.

But visitors are struck by the blend of fatalistic stoicism and unabashed humor with which Africans face adversity. In the most tragic of refugee camps, children laugh, wave and mug for cameras.

“You won’t find this anywhere else in the world,” said Djibril Diallo, a New York-based United Nations official from Senegal. “This is a continent throbbing with life and humor and spirit.”

Raucous Nightspots

Mali, for example, has no shortage of hungry villages. But it also has Le Village, one of Bamako’s raucous nightspots in which Michael Jackson music blares so loudly that it virtually blisters the Day-Glo paint.

Besides drought and famine, Africa has thriving film industries, novelists and playwrights, stand-up comics and sit-down dinners with linen and silver in lavish restaurants.

The poor make do on almost nothing and joke philosophically about the “African miracle” that allows them to do it. A small, hard-pressed middle class works hard at enjoying what remains.

And a wealthy elite entertains lavishly, often commuting to second homes in London or Paris.

‘Enjoy What They Have’

“The Senegalese have nothing to learn from the West in getting the most out of life,” Diallo said. “They enjoy to the fullest what they have. And they don’t worry about what they don’t have.”

The same can be said for countries across the continent, from Mauritania to Mozambique. Even in South Africa, blacks held back by racial discrimination often find humor in their limited horizons.

Press controls in many countries do not stop Africans from looking hard at themselves and often pointing out failings with acerbic wit. Novelist Chinua Achebe recently published a slim volume called “The Trouble with Nigeria.”

He observed: “Nigeria is among the most unpleasant places on Earth. It is a measure of our self-delusion that we can talk about developing tourism in Nigeria. Only a masochist with an exuberant taste for self-violence will pick Nigeria for a holiday.”

Frustrations No Bother

In Africa, the maddening frustrations that irritate outsiders are simply taken as just part of life.

“This is Africa,” a saleswoman in Nairobi said with a throaty laugh to calm a fidgeting customer while she gossiped on the telephone with a girlfriend.

“That’s a TP--a Tanzanian Promise,” chuckled a Tanzanian office worker, suggesting to an American that a document he was expecting might not materialize when it was supposed to.

The same American recently rode the Ouagadougou Choo-Choo from Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to Burkina Faso. At 2 a.m. the train lurched to a halt, and it was only then that passengers learned that 50 miles of track had washed out weeks earlier.

Improvised a Party

Without a grumble, they jammed into a waiting bus and hurtled through pitch-dark cornfields. They improvised a party, singing “I Shot the Sheriff” along with music from the bus’s radio.

In places, hard times have stretched Africa’s traditional good spirits dangerously thin. In the slums of Kinshasa, Zaire, people sit despondently around bar tables filled with empty beer bottles.

There is little of the infectious merriment of years past.

“We drink to forget, and that’s all,” a young Zairean said. “Politics are taboo; there is no work. Our money goes only for beer.”

Airport Cafe

But even in Kinshasa, throbbing music wafts from doorways. In Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast, the day’s problems evaporate among peals of laughter at outdoor restaurants called maquis .

In towns too small for a bus stop, entrepreneurs name their bars Airport Cafe and enliven them with portable tape players held together with string.

Busy traffic doesn’t bother a bus driver on the Nairobi-Thika Road in Kenya. He has painted on his bus in huge letters: “There is No Hurry in Africa.”

Taxis and trucks also are painted with local wisdom. One Nigerian cab asks: “What will you gain from my downfall?” Businesses are named to fit the situation. Ghana has the Fiasco General Trading Co.

Outsiders Are Fed

Poverty is growing across Africa, but extended families and circles of friends form a cushion against desperation. When there is food or money in a community, most individuals have a chance at it.

Outsiders are fed and accommodated if they are in need. Relief workers find that such an open attitude toward sharing lessens the humiliation of massive outside aid.

Resourcefulness and hard work stretch the most meager of incomes. Children make their own toys, bending bits of wire and spools into elaborate trucks and aircraft. Teen-agers sell cigarettes, one at a time.

Western economists often despair at a general African reluctance to plan ahead. Both governments and individuals tend to spend surpluses quickly and worry as little as possible about deficits.

Recrimination Pointless

For people of all religious faiths in Africa, the prevailing feeling is that greater beings determine life’s twists and turns. Recrimination is pointless, and there is no cause for despair.

At San, on the Niger River in Mali, Mamadou Saku simply shrugged and smiled when asked about his crops.

“There is always famine,” he said. “But sometimes you can find something to eat.”