Rascifascifarians

Thangs dun picked up ‘round hurr. Megan is teaching two courses at l’Université Catholique de Bukavu: logic and numerical methods. Because professors only get paid $500 a month, it’s typical for courses to be highly compressed; for example, Megan teaches from 9a-5p, M/W/Sat for four weeks. That allows profs to teach at other universities and to consult to supplement their salaries. Megan is no exception. She’s also working on a report on climate change in Uganda for the World Bank, and she’s acting as an interim financial guru for a social enterprise called The Peace Exchange. TPE consists of about twenty women who sew cloth napkins for export to the USA, along with two administrators. The founder lives in California.
On my end we finished the endline survey of an evaluation of a program to increase agricultural productivity in South Kivu. We sent seven teams of five people each to 94 villages to interview approximately 900 households about their farming practices and standard of living.
One thing that our jobs have in common is the need to create discipline and order without acting like a racist fascist (i.e. a racifascifarian). One of Megan’s classes is for freshpeople (first-years), the other for sophomores. The difference in behavior between the two is remarkable; freshpeople have a much harder time sitting still and shutting up (a colleague who also teaches at the university estimates that 60% fail). There are about 60 students in each of Megan’s classes. So far she has asked two to leave for talking during class. And she’s refused entry to several who were 10 minutes late coming back from a classroom break.
In her other job as financial guru, one of her main tasks is to find out the “real” prices of goods and services around here. As in, are the Congolese employees reporting prices honestly, or are they inflating them and pocketing the difference? Or are they reporting prices honestly, but paying more than necessary? Megan has found some discrepancies, and confronting the employees with them has not been fun.
The research assistants I’m supervising are paid by the day, so they have an incentive to take longer than necessary to complete surveys. The ways in which the time required to complete a survey can be extended are surprisingly many. Perhaps transport wasn’t available – there were no motorcycle taxis around to reach the village. Or maybe there was a taxivan headed to the village, but it took three hours for enough passengers to arrive to fill it up. Or, once at the village, the chief is not cooperative. Or the chief is cooperative, but many of the villagers are already at their fields and so aren’t willing to be interviewed. All of this could happen. But did it really happen yesterday? How the hell am I supposed to know? The options seem to be: trust them, or go racifascifarian. It’s not a pretty picture.
In our last survey, one of the (white) supervisors accused one of the (Congolese) research assistants of conspiring with the parish where we were staying to inflate the price of a room. Let’s call them Scarlett and Randy. Megan had seen Randy take the parish-keeper aside just before he, the parish-keeper, “remembered” that the price of rooms was actually twice as high as he’d initially said. A couple days later, just as we’d arrived in a village to start work, Scarlett accused Randy. She did it in front of the other research assistants and the villagers. Needless to say, it did not go over well.
The next morning, after word of the incident spread throughout our teams, one of the research assistants sent me a text informing me that everyone refused to work until we had a meeting with all 35 research assistants. Foolishly, neither I nor the other supervisors guessed what it was about. Therefore none of us objected to the idea of Scarlett skipping the meeting to catch up on documenting our expenditures. We, the supervisors, were by now sleeping 45 minutes away from the parish because we needed electricity to charge the tablets each night. We drove back to the parish.
Everyone was waiting by the time we arrived and it felt tense. I greeted each research assistant individually in an effort to lighten the mood. Then I sat down cross-legged in the grass instead of on one of the chairs they’d saved for me. That helped a little. They wanted me to start the meeting. I said, too brusquely, “You all demanded this meeting, not me. Let’s hear what you have to say.” I was annoyed at the thought of losing an entire day of work.
One of the research assistants stood up and read a page-long declaration that they’d written collectively, expressing their unhappiness at the disrespect shown to them. Then, one by one, the other research assistants elaborated, explaining that they are people worthy of respect – mothers and fathers, university graduates, intellectuals. They don’t deserve to be accused like criminals. They’re not here to steal. They’re not even primarily interested in their salaries; they’re interested in research and helping the country.
I tried to gently defend my co-supervisor, asking them to imagine what it’s like to be a white woman in Congo, where people are constantly, day in and day out, morning to night, either asking you to pay more than what the Congolese pay for a good or service, or simply asking for money as charity. This culture of having to negotiate every single transaction can wear a sister (and a brother) down. And in addition to that there are the cat calls, the shouting of “muzungu!”, the laughing at you for being white. Now at this point in my little speech I felt precariously close to someone like Bill O’Reiley whining that white male American Christians are discriminated against more than minorities in the USA, so I added that none of the above justifies the fact that the supervisor accused the research assistant so bluntly, and in public.
With my shoddy French, I’m used to people grimacing while I speak, so it was hard for me to discern to what extent the 35 faces around me were scrunched up in reaction to the syntax or the semantics of what I’d said. Fortunately, in any case, our Congolese supervisor then gave his own speech, stressing the importance of harmony and goodwill, and asking for us to move forward. It was brilliant; the tone was perfect, he cracked jokes, and he sympathized with both sides. The research assistants seemed satisfied, but they wanted to have another meeting, as soon as possible, with Scarlett present. And some said that they wouldn’t continue working unless Scarlett went back to Bukavu.
The second meeting happened the next evening. Scarlett had been quite emotional leading up to it, probably feeling like the whole group was against her. When it came time to begin, she composed herself, quite admirably, I thought, and read a short statement in which she both apologized and defended herself. The loudest reaction from the research assistants was that the apology was “too European.” It didn’t come from the heart. I wanted to explain that S had been in tears for most of the previous 36 hours, but I didn’t. There followed a lot more back and forth about the need for respect. The meeting ended with an agreement to keep working together, but some tension remained. Until…
…a couple nights later, when we organized a party to celebrate the fact that (1) our Congolese supervisor had purchased a very large fish and (2) there were only a few days of fieldwork left.

After some speeches and eating, someone turned on the radio in our SUV. The group insisted that Megan and I initiate the dancing because we were the only couple present. We obliged:

I don’t know if the shouts of “C’est incroyable!” were ironic or not. In any case, the real magic followed soon thereafter, when the accused asked his accuser to dance. Scarlett really had no choice given the yells of encouragement from everyone present. She and Randy began a sort of slow motion waltz. Randy, who is an unbelievable ham, slowly moved his hand from Scarlett’s back down to her butt. Scarlett slapped it away. The audience roared with laughter. Randy tried a couple more times; Scarlett successfully defended each time. The audience loved it. And then the dance was finished, and harmony was restored. I had visions of Gorbachev and Reagan fox-trotting. Bush and Saddam doing the Charleston. Malcom X and Margaret Thatcher learning how to Dougie. Bob Marley hosting an anti-rascifascifarian jamboree with Rush Limbaugh. No receipt, no cry.