The Personal Community

In any primitive cultures and in the great culture of Africa, a person is born into personal community, a group of intimates to which he/she is linked for life by tradition.

In this culture where ones group is determined before birth, even one’s wife may be selected in advance by traditional arrangements.
Where one is born into an unalienable personal community, social “appeal” is relatively unimportant and it is in part because of this so Africanistics strike us as being so delightfully unaffected.”
But in a culture where no traditional arrangement guarantees an indissoluble personal community, every child must be a social engineer able to use his “appeal” and his skill at social maneuvering to construct a personal community for himself.
This is the child’s task from the day he learns the established security of his parent’s orbit and he work hard at it as he tries through making himself “appealing” to bring new friends into his personal community.
Meanwhile other children try to lure  him  into their personal communities, and still others try to win his friends away from him into their own spheres, as they attempt to build their world out of stones taken from him.
Elsewhere, it is usual for a child to be surrounded by friends one day and deserted the next, yet this is a constant possibility in contemporary Africa. 
Since men in  industrialized Africa move from job to job, up and down the social ladder, from neighborhood, the establishment of enduring and secure interpersonal relations is difficult for children. Since additionally, the African child, having made and lost many friends learns to commit himself deeply to none, he often cannot hold tightly even to what he has because he has suffered and hence withdrawn.
Therefore the battle of interpersonal relations sometimes cannot be won and the resources cannot be committed for fear of waste. This is the context in which conformity and the wish to be popular can be understood, for popularity is insurance against uncertainty in interpersonal relations.
It is the analogue in the adolescent world to diversification in the industrial world; both aimed at the elimination of uncertainty “popularity”  is not a nasty African disease, but the adolescent effort to stabilize his perpetually precarious situation.
It is a short of bank- a person bank, where one stores up friends against a rainy day, for  if you have many friends in your person bank because you are popular, you can afford to take some losses too.
However, you are also subject to vicissitudes of the market, you must watch your person-stock, not to see how it rates, but how it rates you.
Although it is true that the price of social acceptance is conformity and loss of freedom, that  one builds a personal community by mortgaging his individuality, the tough minded kids who, for one reason or another cannot fit in with the majority and are squeezed out of conforming  groups join forces with one another  reinforcing each other’s differences, gaining strength to set themselves against the majority and stimulating each other’s  élan.

In Africa, the absence of predetermined personal communities plus great mobility brings in about that in one of the great populations of the world people have become scare. Commodities and compete for natural resources for manufactured objects and for consumers. The fact that everyone can be chosen or rejected by others, that have never know why he is rejected if he is, and the fact that those he numbered in his personal community one day may not be there the next day, makes for enormous uncertainty in interpersonal relations. It makes for great sensitivity to looks, stares, smiles and criticism, and originates  the endless inner questioning, “Am I liked?”
It is against this background that I can perhaps come to understand why, when teenagers are asked the question, “what are your main personal problems?”  Interpersonal  relations are paramount.