In Africa, everywhere you turn there is rhythm.  You hear it, and you feel it.  Not just in your ear, or even in your soul.  You feel it in your thorax.  The pulse is primal; the beat is cardiac.

Ubiquitous harmonies are simple and richly balanced, whether sung by a church choir, a class of kids at school, or a pair of adolescents walking arm-in-arm through the market-place.

The light melodies, oozing joy, belie the seeming harshness of everyday life.  The Dionysian rhythms command psychic confidence in the face of a raw cosmos.

But don’t even pretend to tell these folks how hard their lives are compared to ours.  The sweet songs of their ancestors and the pounding cadences of their culture are a garrison within which they celebrate the mere gift of being alive.

Zambians, like folks in many nations of Central Africa, are warm, courteous, welcoming people – at least to foreign guests.  There are probably few places in the world where visitors are treated with equal courtesy and grace.  People on the town streets and rural by-ways are generally polite and helpful, even pleased to meet Westerners.  Sure, a portion of this automatic goodwill comes from generations of deference to British or Dutch overseers from whom their ancestors learned Western protocol at the penalty of harsh recrimination if it were absent.  Sure, some it is prompted by recognition that Westerners have money to spend in the local economy and, like anywhere, folks want their fair share of the potential largesse.  On the whole, however, Zambians are just friendly folks who feel honored when foreigners come to visit.

Experiencing this universal charm, it came as a confusing incongruity to gradually realize that virtually all of the private homes (and many businesses) are surrounded by walls.  There are walls around free-standing homes; there are walls between adjacent homes; there are walls in front, and there are walls in back. Often, the only ways into the dwellings are through huge steel gates.  Not only is this a walled civilization; atop the walls, before the concrete congealed, large, jagged shards of upstanding broken glass were implanted creating a threatening, ghoulish specter.  Broken bottles of soda, beer, household amenities – anything that will deter unwanted entry – greet any newcomer, whether expected or unwelcomed.

The glass shards function like barbed-wire, only cheaper and more plentiful.  The desired deterrence is usually effected by simply viewing the top of the wall.  However, some unfortunates have learned more visceral lessons in un-wantedness by attempting to scale and mount the wall tops.  Since that is a lesson not usually needing to be repeated, walls topped with shards of glass are even more commonplace in Central African neighborhoods than fences are in suburban America.  Lately we have electronic security systems, which only rarely are necessary because the signs in our yards announcing their presence preempt most malicious intentions.  Thus, they have the same relative effect as glass shards on top of walls.

There is a kind of cognitive dissonance in all of this.  We desire to live in community, but not too close.  We seek friendship, but not with everyone.  We extend the hand of welcome, but only to some.  We seem to have a deep yearning to be connected with our fellows, but only on our own terms.  We enjoy meeting new friends, but generally behold strangers with suspicion.

When you are the stranger, the world looks different.