In the languages of southern Africa, the word “person” is in a particularly interesting category. A German linguist noted in the nineteenth century that many languages of Sub-Saharan Africa used the same word for “person”: muntu in the singular, and bantu in the plural. He called these languages “Bantu” and, by extension, the people became “Bantu people.” This is strange because he seemed to be saying, quite literally, that this group was called “the people people.” I remember an mbira player, a Cameroonian called Francis Bebey, whom I met in Denmark. I asked him if he played Bantu music and he laughed at me and replied: “My friend, the Chinese are as Bantu as we Africans.”
In any case, the idea of a person has a different origin in Africa, and has evolved differently from the European concept, which is now global. In African philosophy, each person exists because he or she is all the others, and this collective identity is arrived at through the family.
We are like a Makonde sculpture of the extended family; we are a branch of that huge tree that gives us body as well as shade. In contrast to the norm nowadays in Europe, we view modern society as a network of extended family relations. As we shall see, this vision has two sides to it: a positive side that makes us accepting and leads us towards that which is universal, and a parochial side that confines us to our home village. The idea of a world in which we are all relatives of one another is very poetic, but it is often not practicable.
We all know the attitude of the average Mozambican: the government is our father, and we are the children of those who are powerful. This family-based vision of the world can be dangerous, for it invites us to accept the social order as natural and immutable. Modernity is whispering something very different in our ear, which is forcing us to make a radical break with our own tradition. Unlike our parents, whom we can’t choose, we can choose our leaders. The company or the institution don’t consist of a group of cousins, uncles or brothers-in-law. The logic they follow in order to function is impersonal and is subject to criteria of efficiency and economic yield that have no time for ties of kinship. We can wear shoes with or without frayed socks. But it’s hard to put one’s socks on after one’s shoes.
We have to think of ourselves as living in a world of rapid transformations. The speed of change in modern society has the effect of making some professions obsolete quickly. In Brazil, for example, computerization in the banking sector has reduced the number of jobs by 40 percent in the last seven years. This implies dramatic changes with serious impacts on society. We are on the crest of a wave of changes that are not limited to technology. Cellphones, for example, have stopped being merely utilitarian. Cellphones have become part of us, so much so that when we forget to take them with us, we feel empty, unarmed, as if we had left at home a limb we didn’t know we had.
This subtle occupation extends beyond our private lives. Organized crime, for example, is now directed from inside prisons. News reports following the trial of those responsible for killing the journalist Carlos Cardoso shows us what others already knew: a prisoner isn’t the one behind bars, a prisoner is the one who doesn’t have a cellphone.
Even distance is no longer measured in terms of kilometres. We want to know whether there is cell reception where we are going. The end of the world is where one’s phone stops working.
It’s true that the new technologies don’t stitch holes in our underwear, but they do alter the social networks with which we make our lives. In many African languages, the word for “poor” is the same as for “orphan.” Being poor is losing one’s family networks and web of social alliances. The person who has lost the support of the family lives in poverty. In the very near future, the true orphan will be the person who doesn’t have a computer, a cellphone, or a credit card.
We live in a society that glorifies the individual but denies the person. It seems like a contradiction, but it isn’t. There is, after all, some distance between these two terms: an individual and a person. An individual is an anonymous, faceless being, without any existential contours. The history of each one of us is that of an individual on a journey towards personhood. What makes us into people isn’t our identity card; what makes us into people is that which doesn’t fit on identity cards, is the way we think, the way we dream, the way we are others. So we are talking here about citizenship, about the possibility of being unique and singular, about our ability to be happy.
One of the problems of our age is that we have lost the capacity to ask important questions. School taught us just to give answers, and life advises us to keep quiet. A question that may be important is this one: what hinders our transition from individuals to people? What do we need in order to be fully integrated persons?
I won’t assume that my answers are the right ones. But I get the feeling that one of the main problems, one of the biggest holes in our sock is thinking that success isn’t the fruit of work. For us, success, in whatever field, comes as a result of what we call “good luck.” It comes from having good patrons. Success comes from who one knows rather than what one knows.
This week one of the editions of the newspaper Notícias opened with an item on Monte Tumbine, in the province of Zambezia. In 1998, about one hundred people died there as a result of a landslip. There was a landslide because the forest on its slopes had been cut down, and the rains caused the earth to slip. Reports were written and their recommendations were very clear. The reports vanished. The forest went on being cut down and people once again settled in dangerous areas. What remains in Monte Tumbine are the voices, which have another explanation. These voices insist on the following version of events: there’s a dragon that lives in Milange, on Monte Tumbine, and it awakens every five years to go and lay its eggs out at sea. In order not to be seen, the dragon creates chaos and darkness while it crosses the skies unnoticed. This mythological animal is called Napolo in the north, while here in the south, it goes by the name of Wamulambo.
This interpretation of geological phenomena contains a powerful, poetic force. But poetry and spirit ceremonies are not enough to guarantee that another tragedy won’t be repeated.
My question is this: We here in this meeting, are we so removed from such beliefs? The fact that we live in cities, surrounded by computers and broadband internet connections, does all this exempt us from having one foot in a magical explanation of the world?
All we have to do is take a look at our newspapers to get an answer. Next to the international exchange rates, we find the advertisement of a so-called traditional doctor, that generous character who offers to solve all the basic problems in our lives. If you look down the list of services offered by traditional doctors, you will see that they include the following (I shall omit the miracle cures they produce):
making you get on in life;
helping you gain promotion in your job;