"From the moment you open your mouth, you sound like one of us," explained a friend a few years into our life in Africa. This was contrasted with those who learn French in France and arrive in West Africa "sounding like the oppressor."
To that point, I was blind to how deep the colonial resentments still run or how our choices decades after independence were sifted through those resentments. Since we are not French, our African friends started talking about the past openly, and we listened intently. This wasn't our fight; the heartache our friends expressed reverberated in our hearts as well. It was a slow process of hearing another worldview and understanding how something so foreign to what I understood about history was also true.
I was a new level of perplexed when I heard the Muslims were still mad at us for the Crusades. How could this be? I had never identified myself with historical events of the Middle Ages, nor had I considered the consequences of that time period could still be with us nearly a thousand years later. Wow, what a long memory. By the time this was explained to us, though, I was sifting history through love for the Africans sitting right beside me rather than defending my Western worldview. Living in Africa did not prepare me for today's societal conversations about race relations, but I do feel primed to listen, particularly in pursuit of reconciliation among people of faith.
Another culture shock was the continual ethnic sparring among our African friends. Our West African friends had ongoing jests about who should be whose slave, depending on the dominance of their respective people groups. As you can imagine, it was incredibly uncomfortable coming from our culture to hear friends yelling back and forth, "No, you are my slave!" Eventually, they explained how this ethnic ribbing saved them from a civil war. A neighboring country with similar ethnic tensions but no culture of jests disintegrated into violence after years of simmering tension. Therefore, our friends liked to keep the issue in the open and light-hearted. Just like this, actions that offended us at first were appreciated by us once we understood the stories behind them. We just had to leave our worldview to live in theirs.
Our years in West Africa opened us to seeing beyond our worldview, to believing stories that contradict the limited scope of what we've been taught, and to loving the people on the other side of those stories. It's not the same here because we are counted among the oppressors, but because the West Africans let us sit among them and trusted us to see another side, we enter conversations today with the same humility and honest curiosity. I hope you do, too.
