Camera Phone

OK, so remember how I said I hated taking photos ?

It’s still true.  

Every time the camera comes out, everyone around me focuses on it.  Take pictures of that!  Take pictures of me!  Hey, why haven’t you given me copies of the other pictures you took!  Hey, look at me!  Let me see!  Give it to me!  

And that’s just with people I know and like.  

With strangers, I seem to get an equal mix of: Take my photo NOW! and  Don’t you DARE take my picture.  That, mixed with a good sprinkling of “Give me your camera, whitey,” and general staring, pointing, and kung fu poses.   It’s a great way to draw a crowd.  But I’m not exactly short on ideas for drawing  a crowd of curious spectators.  I prefer a little more originality.  For example, last week, I pretended to steal a goat.  That was 100 times more fun that getting out a camera.  

Guineans, on the other hand, have not generally been shy about taking my picture, and I often get requests to pose with complete strangers while their friends take pictures of me with their cellphones.  I would like to point out that I have not once demanded copies of these pictures, or asked these people to give me their cellphones.  

But no one prints out the grainy photos from their cellphone cameras.  Sure, you might ask someone to send you copy via Bluetooth, but that’s free.  You can do it hundreds of times.  And eventually someone’s little brother will accidentally erase your memory card, and you’ll lose all your photos of friends and family, but that’s life.  Time to take more pictures. 

You see where I’m going with this, right?

Yup.  I’ve finally started using the camera on my cellphone.  It’s great.  No instant mobs, no requests for hundreds of copies, and no demands that I give my camera to strangers—the truth is, my phone is not that exciting.  It is a lovely 2-SIM Hitel with memory card slot, many steps above the bottom-rung 1-SIM phones that only make phone calls and let you play Snake until your battery runs out (Manimba, the bigger one in this photo, showed me her skill with the Snake game (she calls it mboodi, the puular word for snake), on her mom’s secondary phone).

 However, the youth of Guinea are miles ahead of me in technology.  One afternoon at Mariama’s restaurant in Sebhory, a 19-year-old thought I looked homesick and pulled up the latest Alvin and the Chipmunks movie on his cellphone, in English with Chinese subtitles.  During Ramadan, I was spending an evening at Mr. Sacko’s house, chatting with his two sons and watching Lord of the Rings when the power went out.  In the dark, one of his sons struck up a rather one-sided conversation about the causes and outcomes of the American civil war.  I was impressed.  Then he showed me he was reading off a website, accessed via his cellphone.  Meanwhile the other brother was messing around with his gigantic 3-SIM phone.  Clearly I’m outclassed.  My little Hitel, a very popular model, is known more for its battery life than for its social cachet.

 

It’s also sturdy.  That means I can hand it over to this munchkin without worrying that she’ll drop it, hit her sister with it, or pry the buttons off.  I drop my phone all the time—it’s fine.  So while I was hanging out on Mariama’s terrace, roasting corn on the cob, we had quality time with the camera.  

You might have guessed that the first photo in this post was taken by Hassanatou; she’s not so good at holding still while she shoots.  Manimba, though, has it down—she took the motorcycle photo, among others.  The pictures are tiny and the focus length is short, but I kind of like the dreamy watercolor look this camera gives to everything in the distance.  It fits, particularly in rainy season, when the edges of everything really are softened by wind and rain.  Roads reshape themselves, mudbrick walls crumble and melt, trash sinks into muddy roadside culverts, and green weeds hide the sharp edges of rusting cans and broken bottles. 

The other thing I love about my phone?  It has Bluetooth—so that means I can copy Guinean music from my friends’ phones, and pass them American and Nigerien and Malian music in exchange.  It’s also how I got this nice picture:

Every time I’m browsing someone’s cellphone photo file and I come across another Obama picture, my heart warms.  I’m so proud of our country—we’ve changed so much in the last century, in so many ways, but I’m particularly proud that our ideas about race have changed so fundamentally.  Dalaba specifically, but all of West Africa, bears the heavy imprint of colonialism—we walk every day on roads cut by forced labor, not the labor of strangers, but the parents and grandparents of the people I work with today.  We walk past the ruins of colonial hospitals that served the French soldiers but not the locals, the ruins of a school for the illegitimate children those soldiers left behind.  We work in offices set up in the French system; we work in their language, and so, whether we want to or not, we work with the shadow of their culture.  But which culture?  Like the US, France’s attitudes towards race, colonialism, globalism, and economic development have changed radically since those roads were cut and that school was built.  My neighbors here in Dalaba live in a global world, chat with relatives in Turkey and Paris, complain about the harsh winters of Montreal and the difficulties of doing business with the Chinese. They build new homes with plush sitting rooms and large televisions, shiny tile floors and solar power systems.   At the western edge of Dalaba, Villa Jeanine, the vacation home of the colonial governor, faces the setting sun.  The windows are broken, the paint peeling, the ceilings are slowly decaying and falling in.  Swallows swoop through the gallery, where the governor’s pool used to be.  Seykou Touré, Guinea’s first president, had it filled in and redecorated the room with vinyl sectional sofas.  Now their seams are ripped, the upholstery spilling out.  Does time move too slowly or too quickly here?  Where is Guinea headed?  Where are we all headed?  It’s got to be somewhere better than the days when Jeanine, the governor’s daughter, swam alone in this pool overlooking the hills of Dalaba, while American kids swam in segregated public pools, and the Dalaban kids played in the muddy rivers of the valley below.  Now, as often as not, they’re inside instead, watching Alvin and the Chipmunks on someone’s cellphone: the kids of Dalaba, the kids of my hometown, kids in China, too, I’m assuming from those subtitles.  Is this what we meant by global brotherhood?