Privacy a recent invention
by David Loftus
[This, the seventh and final essay from my
West Africa trip,
first appeared in the Roseburg
(Oregon) News-Review, November 19, 1989.]
One of the things my Africa trip impressed upon me (or reminded me from my college history studies) was the fact that privacy is a fairly recent invention in human history. It remains a luxury -- or perhaps more accurately, an anachronism -- throughout most of the world today.
In the United States, it is not very difficult to shut oneself away from other people nearly all the time. One may do the producing 8 to 5 and go home.
With the advent of personal computers and the Internet, the workplace is increasingly becoming the home again, reversing a trend of the Industrial Revolution that took work out of the home and away from the family. Except the home and the family are no longer the same.
Whenever Westerners are not working, they may immerse themselves in television, canned music, videos, drugs in various forms, gardening, fly tying, anonymous sex, and any number of methods to assuage (and thereby acknowledge and even reinforce) loneliness in the name of privacy and freedom of choice.
An unprecedented number of individuals live alone in the "developed West," myself included. That is something you will never see in Africa, or most of the rest of the world, save in the largest cities.
The apartments I rented in Boston
and Oregon were larger than most homes in West Africa: single-room mud
huts with thatched roofs in which families of five, seven, ten or more
people may live. [The fairly elaborate door to the right is on the entrance to the chief's home in a village in central Mali.]
This is what most homes looked like through human history, and most of them still do today. I remember one of my literature professors noted that the corridor was a 19th century (upper class) invention; before that, rooms just opened into one another.
The introduction of corridors into domestic architecture made secrets within families possible: One could come and go without other people knowing. (My professor's point was that this probably did a lot for the development of the novel.)
When large families inhabit one-room homes, when there is no surplus income to spend on leisure activities and toys and books (assuming you are literate in the first place), what meaning or value can privacy have?
Very little of life goes on indoors, anyway. People cook, eat, and socialize outside their mostly dark, one-room homes. Whether or not a family squabble takes place indoors, the neighbors are likely to hear it, so the community may have an investment in ensuring domestic tranquillity, stepping in to referee what we could consider purely personal matters.
It is not just that Africans have next to no privacy; they have little concept or need of it, either. Just about their sole source of entertainment is talking with and about other people.Thus, there was a constant stream of visitors at all hours of the day at my friend Paul's house in the Gambia. (Most of them were friends of his Gambian housemate, Fanding.)
Small talk, what sociologists call "phatic communication" (conversation intended to pass the time and express fellowship and community more than to convey actual information), is plentiful. Greetings between longtime acquaintances can go on for several minutes, with pro forma inquiries about the family, health, village, references to God or Allah, etc.
When I was in the throes of intestinal mayhem in Guinea-Bissau, sweating in bed and making regular runs to the bathroom, my host was away at work but that didn't stop the continual traffic through his house of neighbors and children. Their "invasion" of "my privacy" and loud talk, even though it wasn't to me, got on my nerves and I finally closed and locked the front door -- another capability most homes do not have in Africa.
From their perspective, they were
not invading anything. One is apt to have more visitors than usual when
one is sick because Africans believe that is the worst time to be left
alone. Also, illness is not a unique condition: The average African misses
at least 25 percent of his or her workdays because of malaria attacks,
viruses, and other run-of-the-mill interruptions. [At right, the village sorceror's home, central Mali. The many holes are for birds to nest in.]
Lack of privacy would account for the fact that most marital sex is reportedly brief and furtive. People who want to carry on affairs, or teens who are exploring, tend to head out to the bush.
A Peace Corps medical volunteer told me about a woman who continually came to him saying, "I have a headache." He gave her everything; nothing seemed to do the trick, but she kept coming to him.
One day when he was out walking he happened upon the woman in the embrace of a man other than her husband, and he realized she had been using her visits to his "clinic" as a cover story.
The next day when she came anxiously to see him, he assured her he would not reveal her secret, but he would no longer be her alibi. He would not lie for her.
Soon after, she disappeared from the village with her lover. Cameron looked out the window and saw her husband coming toward the clinic. Oh no, he thought, this man knows everything now and will blame me. What shall I do?
The man came into Cameron's hut and said, "I have a headache."