17. Experiencing American Culture among Strangers: A Study of African Students at Cleveland State University

Kabir Bello

This study examines the experiences of African students as strangers in an environment radically different from their own cultures. The basis for this chapter is the analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with six African university students. Over the course of these interviews, they described in detail various aspects of their experiences and the mechanisms of adjustment they developed in order to cope with the problems they confronted as students in an American university. Following a description of the research design, the chapter focuses on stereotypes the students held of the United States before their arrival in order to ascertain their initial expectations. The way in which they established relationships, the individuals with whom these relationships were developed, and issues they encountered as they formed relationships is the focus of the next section. The African students’ comparisons between their own and Americans’ moral values, especially with respect to family and crime and, most particularly, the use of guns, are explored in the following section. The subsequent section describes norms about punctuality and respect for laws, which differed radically from those operative in the African countries from which they came. Finally, even as they pointed to moral decline in the United States, they were well aware of the advantages that accrued to them as students in an American university, advantages that had not been available to them or other students in their home countries.

Method

The analysis of six interviews conducted with African students at Cleveland State University is the basis for this chapter. The main sampling technique employed was the snowball strategy. The umbrella organization of African students known as African Students’ Association (ASA) provided contacts and arrangements between the researcher and the respondents. The researcher interviewed four graduate and two undergraduate students. All of the respondents were male. Their ages ranged from 22 to 37 years. In-depth interviews were conducted with them for 1 to 2 hours and took place either in the respondent’s office or in his apartment. All of the respondents interviewed had spent at least a year in the United States— except for the youngest, who had spent less than a year. Pseudonyms have been used to ensure confidentiality. The interview schedule was used only as a reference guide to avoid turning the interviewer into conventional self-administered questionnaire. The interview schedule was carefully constructed before going to the field and contained the issues to be addressed, including prior experience of American culture, sources of information, stereotype, technology, language problems, friendship, weather problems, and experience of the university environment. The initial goal of the study was to find out the extent to which African students experience culture shock in a new environment. However, the responses changed the direction of the study to make it more comprehensive.

Findings

Stereotype Sources and Content

At the beginning of the study, the main focus was to establish the stereotypes these students had developed about American culture prior to coming to the country. All of them stated that their sources of knowledge about America were numerous and included television (mostly CNN), magazines, movies, newspapers, sports, radio, and, the least common, friends who had been to the United States before. New communication systems with satellite capability made it possible to turn the world into a small village where everything is transmitted immediately. Africa has not missed out with regard to the effects of these global changes.

The content of the stereotypes included assumptions that America is a morally bankrupt society wherein everybody is rich and where there is freedom (i.e., it is a free world) that allows people to do whatever they want to do and be whatever they want to be. In addition, each tended to stereotype America as a highly individualistic society where citizens had no respect for the law but where there were human rights. These stereotypes came mainly from the sources enumerated earlier.

Hospitality, Interpersonal Relationships, and Language Difficulties

African cultures are known to be hospitable to strangers. In most African societies, it is a common practice in cities for a stranger to knock at a door of a house and ask for permission to stay for one or two days until he locates a particular person or his tribe/country men. In addition, a stranger is free to stop anybody on the street to ask a question about anything. Because of these orientations and expectations, the African students found it very difficult to understand anything deviating from this. Being in American society was very different; what they saw was a lack of cooperation, a lack of concern, and a lack of acceptance as they interacted with the Americans.

The mechanisms of adjustment they developed, however, were not so different from that which they would normally adopt in any strange environment. As strangers in a country with such significant cultural differences, they immediately tried to locate people from their own country—sometimes going to great lengths to trace those who shared their culture, language, and traditions. Even in African cultures, there is tremendous diversity. Finding themselves immersed in American culture, most of these African students tried to establish ethnic/country associations that would provide support to new members. What these associations provided included shelter, food, clothing, help in securing a job, and emotional support to help the new arrivals feel more at home. Only after they had succeeded in this quest did the students focus on ways in which they could integrate into the new host environment.

Concerning hospitality, American culture was described as less hospitable as compared to that of Africa. According to Zabir:

At times, even if you want to talk to people, they are not ready to talk or listen to you. It is easier to get friends quickly in Africa than in America. Here is an individualistic society…here, as I noticed, it is quite different. Everyone is on his own, as nobody cares about another person.

In American culture, if a person would like to pay someone a visit, that person is expected to inform the individual he intends to visit ahead of time. This sounded strange to the respondents due to the importance attached to strangers in their cultures. Often visitors come unexpectedly and to tell any of your family members (extended as opposed to nuclear) that they have to give notice before a particular visit is considered ridiculous. Africans take the issue of comforting strangers as a traditional and religious obligation because they are expected to treat strangers with maximum respect and as much hospitality as possible. The respondents, as African students in America, understood the problem of the new value system in which they now found themselves. They felt compelled to make the necessary adjustment by finding fellow Africans in their midst, because they could not ask an American to provide them with shelter, clothing, or whatever other form of assistance they might need.

All six respondents found difficulties in establishing relationships with Americans, especially interpersonal relationships that could develop into friendships. Each found barriers in communications to be a serious dilemma, both as a problem of understanding what was being communicated to them and being sure that what they desired to communicate was understood by Americans. With only slight variations from one person to another, all of the respondents said that they experienced this problem. It should be noted that Africans have their own native/indigenous languages in addition to the ones left to them by their former colonial masters. All six of these students came from former British colonies where they learned the British style of English. As noted by one of the respondents:

I believed we have been colonized by the British and brought up in British English system. When I came here, I thought “My English was good. I will not have difficulties with the Americans.” But…when I first went to class, I realized that they have different words, which are strange to me …Whenever I talk…I have to come back and reconstruct my English the American way before they get [understand] me.

The Africans, as strangers, had to learn how to speak the Americanized English. This process involved trial and error as well as internalizing some of the words that proved different. The differences between the two cultures, in terms of language, meant that the respondent had to make necessary adjustments. When the respondents spoke to Americans, what normally followed were phrases such as “sorry, I don’t understand,” “come again,” “say it again.” At times, when asked to continue to repeat what they had already said, anger and frustration abounded, as Aliu said:

The way the Americans talk at different occasions I find frustrating encounter…you are requested to keep on repeating yourself. There is gap in the language. I try as much as possible to catch up with the way they talk so that we can understand each other.

Due to the claim that Africans possess a different accent and in order to facilitate the process of communication and better understanding, these African students began a process of decoding some of the key words that were of common/ordinary usage. Although the Americans, too, had to devise a way of listening in order to understand what the Africans said, the African students were in a new culture and were the ones who needed to adjust to the demands imposed on them by the host community.

The development of their ability to decode was explained by the respondents in different ways. According to one of them, “As I began to relate I was able to decode some words like ‘rest room,’ meaning ‘toilet’ in my country, ‘yea’ as in ‘yes,’ ‘hi’ as in ‘hello,’ ‘RSVP,’ etc.”. Another student said he was able to understand the meaning of “nap,” which referred either to siesta or a small rest as in sleeping for a short while. During this transition, communication was very slow, which inevitably affected the opportunity to cultivate friendships.

When the question of whether the respondent found it easy to have American friends was raised/asked in the interview, all of them indicated difficulty in making friends with Americans. Respondents approached this issue in different ways. Some of them focused on the lack of hospitality in American culture, while others emphasized individualism and that the culture is ‘fast,’ that is, based on time. Talking about the effect of individualism, Timothy had this to say:

In general, Americans are highly individualistic in nature. They teach [their] children the philosophy of being on their own. They are sometimes difficult people to deal with if one considers that he comes from Africa where there is the spirit of communality, cooperation, and mutual assistance of each other in many things that are done—from the level of the family to the societal level.

Not only individualism, but the concept of time, which the respondents described as built into the American culture, was identified as having an impact on the development of friendships between the Africans as strangers on the one hand and the Americans as hosts on the other. It was not necessarily seen as the fault of the Americans, but more of how the American system works. Kassim acknowledged this when he asserted that

In America, you are on your own. The system is always busy. It is not that people do not like to talk to you, as I understand, but because they don’t have the time to do so …You don’t expect people to offer help or assistance like it obtains in Africa. In America, they encourage people to be independent.

The concept of time was seen as fundamental to American culture. Because this philosophy is so different from what one obtains in Africa, these African students found it difficult to cope with the demands of the new culture. In Africa, friendships develop mainly through face-to-face contact with people and there is room for interaction between people in their daily activities as well as specific times for such kinds of relationship to develop. According to one of the respondents, the issue of time was so important in America that, with everyone trying to manage his/her time effectively,

it is not very easy to make friends with them [Americans] because of time.

Everyone is busy and in America everyone has his or her own time. It is difficult to have a long time to spend with one, to cultivate friendship, but you can talk to someone on phone, and can spend a lot of time talking. You don’t have to see each other. Seeing someone everyday will be difficult. You can only meet once in a while.

There are differences as to the kinds of experience these African strangers had with respect to friendship. Respondents who had been in America for more than a year had started to develop some friendship networks that included Americans. This shows that the process of developing friendships is gradual and that American culture does not easily allow relationships to emerge out of spontaneous encounters, as is the case in Africa. This, however, differed for the respondent who had come to the United States only a few months prior to the interview. He said, “I was able to cultivate friendship with other foreigners compared to the U.S. citizens…I have three from France, one from Chile, and some guys from different countries, and I can’t say I have an American friend”. When he made an attempt to explain why this was so with the Americans, he had no reasonable explanation. He added, “But when it comes to the old people, they are very easy to make friends with. And [I] have majority of them as friends…so I think making friends, the older ones are more approachable”.

African students, as strangers to a new environment, related more in the university than outside the university, that is, with American people in general. Within the university, relationships did take place among students through various associations and organizations, although acquiring relationships was sometimes slow. These students claimed that relationships outside were limited because they did not share anything in common with those outside community. Relationships were established only when the students went off campus for religious and tribal association meetings. Within the university, as students, they shared many things in common with other students, such as taking classes together.

Moral Issues and Crime

Although ostensibly one cannot judge another culture from the perspective of his or her own culture due to the differences in value systems and expectations. Nevertheless, the African students did, based on what they experienced in American culture. All of those interviewed stated that there were remarkable differences between the two cultures in terms of moral values. Comparing what one obtains in African cultures to their experiences in the United States, they concluded that there was moral decay in American culture. What they emphasized was that someone raised in an African culture is likely to give greater respect to traditional and religious institutions, which has an impact on marriage and family. Because the family structure is extended, there are communal relationships that ensure strong social bonds among members; this type of bonding is lacking in a nuclear type of family structure such as that found in American culture. To the respondents, the failure of the nuclear family system to bring members together has been responsible, at least in part, for what they saw as the moral collapse in American society. Most of them used the phrase “everybody is on his own” to describe how American social structure isolates the family and marriage as well as other life endeavors. Because there is such a strong emphasis placed on individual freedom and the propriety of living life based on what the individual has chosen for him or herself, everyone does whatever he/she feels is the best rather than what the society, family, or any other institution expects.

In the African societies from which these respondents came, the head of the family, who is normally the eldest, is the authoritative voice on most issues that involve discipline and decision-making and has the final say in these matters; that decision is binding to all members of the household, even if they themselves happen to have a family. In some societies, village communities are still based on the elders’ decisions. Thus, due to the respect for traditional and religious institutions, the level of marital breakdown was not considered an issue because men married one or more wives and lived together as long as they were alive. This has only recently begun to change. In Aliu’s country, as well as in most of African societies:

There is high respect to the institution of marriage. There is greater social bond and is forever. In America, I noticed that people may decide to stay together, but not married. This is a taboo in my country. This staying together without marriage is causing problems in leading to high rate of divorce. Single parenthood is on the increase, which poses threat to the institution of family in general.

Being raised in this way, these African students felt that such things as respect for traditional values and religious institutions were absent in America. These values did not exist, at least from what the African students saw. They argued that moral values develop when people develop close familial relationships. In Africa, people relate cohesively with each other in friendship, family, schools, etc.; in America, as is evident from various media sources, nearly half of marital relationships end in divorce. In America, the respondents observed that people seemingly changed partners daily. It seemed common to discover that a man or a woman had married two or three times but was currently living alone.

Other respondents noted that part of the reason for the moral decay in American culture was the absence of parental disciplining of children, as noted by Timothy;

I need to say without remorse that the morals here are far below what obtains in my country…people do whatever they like. This makes discipline to be very low. Personal discipline is becoming less. In terms upbringing of kids, I noticed…children are allowed to know things that are far above their age, due to freedom, not just in terms of adult movies they watch, but some things…ideas. If you discipline your child by beating him/her the government may run after you. This is not to be found in my culture. Parents have absolute control over kids, no matter the age…that is why there is low morals in [American] society. I have American friends that have kids. What I observe is little respect for the parents. Kids are not properly controlled like what we have in my country.

Even in African societies, however, the institutions of marriage and the family are undergoing a process of transformation due to modernization. Issues like parenthood, divorce, disciplining of children, property inheritance, and other related aspects are still under the control of traditional and religious values. In all likelihood, the four married respondents emphasized these differences because they were conversant with marital role expectations, something with which they were very familiar before coming to America. However, one of the two unmarried Africans in the sample narrated his experience of moral decay from a different perspective when he said:

I think where I came from…we have a culture in the dressing aspect. People are more different here in the U.S…in terms of the people that walk around…they move half-naked…like when they put on short clothes at times. When I was eating, a student came to the dining room with “bra” and a “skirt.”

This respondent’s experience might have been connected to a lack of exposure to the general public, even in his home country. He had little or no knowledge of what university campus life is like. Contrary to his assertion, there is evidence that some female students in African universities dress in ways similar to what he defined as immoral in an American university.

Another issue that the respondents raised when comparing the two cultures was crime. The African students noted that although there is crime in every society, the rate and the nature of crime differs from one society to another. In Africa, one would expect prevailing poverty and unemployment to be the major predictors of crime. Africans would wonder why there is a high crime rate in the United States despite the fact that it is one of the most affluent societies in the world. A source of concern to most of the African students in this study was the rate at which people are killed in America. In Africa, killings occur from time to time as a result of tribal or civil unrest, but not directly from crime. As Isyaku said:

In America, it is very common to find someone killed in his apartment [house] and without knowing who might have killed that person. There are a lot of kidnappings of kids, to keep as hostages, for money. That is ridiculous. This you hardly find in Africa. How can a human being kidnap or kill another person? You will hear every day [in the United States] about killings.

Another issue related to crime was the extent to which people were allowed to acquire guns and ammunition. In African countries, as some of the respondents pointed out, it is a felony even to see someone illegally possessing a gun or ammunition, even though a small fraction of people do have them. One’s status in the society often determines whether a person will have a firearm. In general, however, these Africans students were wary about the rate of homicide, which they found alarming. The respondents cited the uncertainty of who might be the next victim as one thing that scared them about being in America.

Punctuality and Respect for Law

The idea of respect for time was identified as something that fascinated the African students. Africans’ behavior with respect to time is well known. Disrespect for punctuality has earned different negative terms for them, within the continent as well as elsewhere. One of the most popular ones is that someone who is late to an event is described as being on “African time.” Most Africans, therefore, are accustomed to coming to an event after its posted starting time because they know very well that few people will arrive at the posted starting time. They delay their arrival in order to do other things rather than wait for long periods for others to arrive. This has become a habit rooted in the culture of Africans. In America, according to the respondents, expectations are different. As summarized by Muwazi:

The organization here is perfect, and things are done according to plans and schedule, compared to my own place…if I tell you to come by 9 A.M., you are to come by 10 A.M., but here [in America], things are well organized. Things are in order.

To the respondents, Americans seemed to value highly punctuality and to compliance with scheduled times. Events took place exactly as scheduled. Appointments were highly respected and were cancelled ahead of time if, for any reason, they could not be honored. Americans tried to extend this to all spheres of their life. In Africa, it is common for people to be late to the office or any place of work as well as to close shops at their own convenience. According to one respondent, “you cannot do that here in the United States. Nobody wants to do that because it touches on his/her integrity, and [he] can be fired”.

In addition, the African students noted that there was respect for laws. They reported that even traffic regulations, which are interpreted more as suggestions in Africa, tended to be rigidly followed. This was aptly put by one respondent who said,

The interesting thing that I saw that amazed me was the respect for traffic laws. In my country, people rarely respect traffic regulations. They tend to break it at their will. Sometimes I look through my window at different times of the night to see if someone will go on red, but you find it difficult to see one even as there was nobody watching…also, pedestrians are respected. At different times even if someone was on green, he normally stops for me to pass. I cannot remember how many times such has happened. Although there could be [another] reason for that, but, to me, is a sign of respect for the human.

The experiences these Africans had in America contradicted some of the stereotypes they held before coming to the U.S. They previously assumed that America was a free world and morally bankrupt society where everybody did what he or she liked. They found that, contrary to this, there were laws against prostitution, drug abuse, tax violations, and even smoking, as observed by one of those studied:

We assume that in such a society [United States], everything will be done freely, as people like, but that is not the case. You cannot be allowed to buy a cigarette until you reach certain age. As like in other things, people back home will be surprised at this.

Other Issues

Owing to experiencing decay in the provisioning of infrastructural facilities in African countries, all the respondents were surprised by how functional these structures were in America. During the interviews, they spoke of the efficiency and effectiveness associated with an advanced, functional infrastructure that increased convenience in everyday life. Americans, they saw, could not imagine waking up one day to find that they had no electricity or water in the tap. In Africa, most of these structures were not functional or, at best, could be described as near collapse; electricity, water supplies, hospitals, and educational facilities could not be taken for granted. In the United States, the level of technological development in computers and telecommunications has facilitated contact with various part of the world. In buildings, everything functions. Many of the African students had not seen ATMs (Automated Teller Machines) or credit card systems before coming to America. These technologies have simplified life. The use of credit card allows people to stay at home and make purchases online instead of wasting energy going to the store, which saves time to do other things. The ATMs have helped people because you need not to go to the bank to get money.

Another important topic brought up by the respondents was how the relationships between students and between students and faculty differed from universities in Africa. Four of the six students were graduate students who had their first degree from an African university. They remembered and could compare what they had gone through with what they were experiencing at a university in the United States. The other two were enrolled for the first time in undergraduate study.

When confronted with the question of their relationships with other students, they gave reasons similar to the ones they gave in explaining the difficulties they encountered in making friends in America. However, they added that it was slightly different in classes because sometimes they were forced to work closely with other students when course assignments included group projects. Students felt forced to relate, especially those who did not want to talk to others. With respect to the professors, the African students said, they were very cooperative and there was hardly any room for victimization. They were always ready to help, unlike professors in Africa, where faculty maintains a distance from students.

Universities in Africa, based on the respondents’ experiences, differed significantly in other ways from those in America, as summarized by Aliu:

In the universities at home, I see a condition of backwardness…, but the picture is that of lack of basic learning and teaching aids in the classroom. [African universities] do not have laboratories and research is almost zero because there are no facilities to undertake them. Old and obsolete materials exist. The problem of overcrowding cannot be ruled out as the number who want to acquire education is increasing by the day. Here, most of the materials in use are new and students have access to them. One amazing thing I tell my people at home [is about] the campus computers that are given for loan up to four hours in a day. That is an important landmark that we don’t have in most of our countries in Africa. They [Americans] don’t use ten- to twenty-year-old texts like we do. You find that [in Africa] even the people that teach have no access to computers and modern internet.

The picture this respondent painted of the state of universities in Africa is like what the other respondents reported.

Discussion

This study examines the experience of African students as strangers in a cultural environment radically different from their own. The chapter is based on the analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with six African university students in which they described in detail various aspects of their experiences and the mechanisms of adjustment they developed in order to cope with the problems they confronted. It begins by focusing on prior stereotypes they held about American culture in terms of their sources and content. It was established that Africans found remarkable cultural differences in the new environment that made them uncomfortable and required that they develop mechanisms of adjustment that went beyond simply trying to stay warm in a decidedly non-tropical climate. Owing to the high level of hospitality within African cultures, these student-strangers experienced people’s refusal to open up immediately as neglect and found it challenging to communicate and establish friendly relationships.  They realized the need to learn American English, because it differed from the African style, something they had not anticipated. They soon realized that American culture respects time, punctuality, and laws. Even as they judged, from their perspective, that there was a moral collapse in American culture, they still concluded that the culture allowed them to understand diversity better and identify as well as tolerate differences between their culture and the host culture. They were also able to contrast universities their own country with a university in a developed society and see first-hand the differences with respect to student-faculty relationships and quality of teaching materials.

To be in a new environment, a different culture, involves experiencing anomie, at least at the beginning of immersion. These African students, as strangers, felt cut off from their roots in Africa. They had to start somewhere to accommodate to a new way of life. They realized that in order to live well, they had to understand the new culture and learn how to behave and speak according to different dictates. From the foregoing, we can infer that experiencing American culture was difficult and required a series of adjustments including learning a new although not entirely different English, weather hostility, and problems associated with a highly individualistic culture. Within the university, this pattern of relationship halted or made very slow development of interpersonal relationships. Culture shock also stemmed from living in a society that they felt was in moral decay. Moral values differ from one society to another. The respondents judged American culture using African culture as a yardstick instead of looking at the relativity of culture. Despite the criticism of the host culture, they were still impressed with punctuality and respect for appointment, law, and privacy, as well as the level of advancement the society had achieved.

Although undertaken to find out the experiences of African students as strangers in an American university, generalizing from the findings of this study is limited. Findings cannot be used as a basis for generalizing all Africans studying in the United States. Female students were not included, and their experiences would likely be very different. The respondents were all from former British colonies and majority of them were married. If similar research is to be conducted, it should take note of these discrepancies and address them by incorporating females and those who are not from former British colonies. Data should be collected from enough students to make it possible to compare the married and unmarried and to determine the effects of age. Nevertheless, the findings reported here provide some preliminary information about how students from Africa, who are earning degrees from universities in the United States, make sense of their experience as they contrast the norms and values that they take for granted in their home cultures with what is expected of them in the United States.