East Along The Equator

I have been planning to blog about this book for several weeks now because although East Along The Equator: A Journey Up The Congo And Into Zaire was written about Zaire in the mid 1980s, so many of the realities of Brazzaville-Congo in the year 2011 (the sleepy village across the river from Kinshasa) are reflected in the descriptions of Zaire at that time. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or, here in Central Africa, conditions often change for the worse. Take education as an example.

The author, Helen Winternitz, describes the campus at Kisangani- a branch of the national university and one of Zaire's three seats of higher learning- like this:

"The university's courses were being taught without any textbooks, because there were none available. The professors had either to mimeograph information for their students or read them notes in class for copying, a procedure exhausting to both teacher and learner" (page 146, 1987 edition).

L'Ecole Nationale Supérieure (ENS), the teachers' college in Brazzaville, follows the same model- providing extremely few and consistently outdated textbooks to young minds. My observation is that the novel the students are currently reading in class, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman a 1971 novel by Ernest J. Gaines, has been photocopied from the professor’s original copy yellowed and frayed by repeated use.

Students are required to copy professors’ notes from decades past and pay for the copies from their meager student stipends, which are often paid two to three months late by the government. Professors can’t afford to buy their own computers or access the Internet in a country where the digital divide yawns widely. Without this access, university educators are shut out of the information age.

On the days I have planned workshops for future Congolese English teachers at ENS, there was no electricity in the classroom. Two chalkboards on the wall are so scratched and scarred by time that it is difficult for the students to read what I write there. The soft chalk often breaks in my hands, and the front of the classroom where I teach is covered with snowy dust that coats my clothes and hair.

I understand why the students' English pronunciation is mangled and morose. When I did a needs assessment with them the first day I arrived at ENS, they begged me to ask the U.S. Embassy to help the school purchase equipment for a nonexistent language lab where they could wear headphones and imbibe the accent of native English speakers into their own ears.