A Good Village

Extract

It is possible to live years m Africa before making the discovery that direct and simple phrases, apparently referable to everyday, material objects with the ordinary surface meanings of the individual words employed, may have totally unexpected values. Indeed, one may live many years in Africa and never make this discovery. Witness the view accepted by so many as to the ‘poverty’ of the African's vocabulary and its ‘incapacity to express abstract thought’. We are too much at the mercy of uninformed opinion crystallized into conventional small talk; uninformed opinion that has accepted and then transmitted through books, or through lectures, or simply through conversation, views that are false, until a body of conventional belief has formed across the surface of the true situation so smotheringly as almost to defeat every effort of the facts to get to the surface. It is like the situation produced by oil on the surface of a pool that so deprives the life within the pool of air that it dwindles and dies beneath the oily curtain. In the home and roadside talk of Africa there lies an unguessed world of meaning, just beneath the surface, waiting to be released.