Chinese

[Author's note:  There is possibly politically incorrect content to this story.  To those who may be offended by this, I offer this humble suggestion:  get over it!]

About 15 kilometers from my village was another village called Goudump.  Goudump was near the road, and so got more visitors than Bafata, which required a 2 hour walk through the brush to reach.  In Goudump was a wealthy fellow who liked to help his society in various ways.  One of those ways was to host a group of agronomists from the People's Republic of China.  They spent 3 months working with local villages and introducing a new strain of rice that had double the production volume of the native strain.

When I say "native strain," I am taking a liberty.  Rice is not native to Africa, it was brought by the colonizers.  The native grain is millet.  Millet is much more nutritious than rice, and was the staple of the Senegalese for a long time.  But the european colonists felt that rice was better and so foisted it on Africa, with the result that malnutrition and infant death rates rose.

But there is rice, and there is rice.  The strain that the Africans had been growing produced 2 harvests per year.  The Chinese strain was nutritionally richer, and produced 3 or 4 harvests per year, with greater yield in each harvest.  It was clearly better than what they had been growing.

As the westerner in the area, I was often an honored guest of this wealthy fellow (whose name unfortunately escapes me now.)  During one visit, he introduced me to the 15 member Chinese delegation.  I had dinner with them that evening.  Only one of them spoke French, and he spoke it badly and with a terrible Chinese accent making him very hard to understand.  

Breaking one of the many lulls in our attempts at dinner conversation, I commented, "I can say something in Chinese."  Years earlier, I had tried to learn Chinese out of a book and had mastered exactly one phrase.  I had no idea whether I was pronouncing it properly.  Chinese is a tonal language, and I'm somewhat tone deaf.  I'd never been able to practice with anyone who actually spoke the language.

He asked what I could say.  I uttered my single Chinese phrase, and was delighted and amused when every single person at the table turned around to look at the door.  Obviously, I'd said it correctly.  You see, the phrase I'd learned was, "There is a man at the door."

During most of my time in Senegal I had a very large, very wooly, very red beard.  This was an oddity in Senegal.  I'm hairier than most westerners, but the Senegalese have almost no body hair and none of them have beards.  One day, in an effort to impress a certain young lady tourist I'd met and who had taken my fancy, I shaved my beard, exposing lilly white skin that contrasted starkly with the rest of my face, which had been exposed to the African sun for the past couple of years.  

I thought that when I went back to the village, the villagers wouldn't recognize me.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that they did.  I commented to one of them, "I'm surprised you recognize me.  I thought that all white people looked alike."

He replied, "It's true that toubabs look a lot alike, but we know you pretty well, so I think we would recognize you anywhere.  But do you know who really looks the same?"

I had no idea.  "Who?" I asked.

"The Chinese!" he said.