Nigerian Hospitality
If there is anything I have
learned during my 30 years in Nigeria it is hospitality. Nigerians have been so generous to us when it
comes to hospitality, as they are to their own people. One can drop in on
Nigerian friends and you are immediately invited to join them in a meal if that
happens to be their agenda at the moment. This is true not only of the
well-to-do, but just as much of the poorer among them. Now, there is a downside
to that. Extending such hospitality to an unexpected guest can be at the
expense of family members who may have to do with leftovers, especially
children.
Any Nigerian who reads the
above paragraph may object to it. Nigeria is a square box containing 400
different nations, cultures and languages. There is no way you can say anything
about traditional culture that will hold for all of these cultures. Expatriates
who have lived in other parts of the country sometimes marvel at our stories
from the country’s Middle Belt. They have not always experienced such
hospitality. But for us, we have always
been deeply impressed by that cultural feature.
And, of course, after being
exposed to that for 30 years and having benefited from it so many times, it
could not help but rub off on us. My
wife and I have also become very hospitable, so much so that the people among
whom we now live in Vancouver, Canada, are amazed at how open our door is and
how readily we have people we did not expect join us at our table. Thank you,
Nigeria, for teaching us such a Christian virtue.
Western Hospitality
Yes, hospitality is a
Christian virtue, though not only
Christian. Plenty of other people share that virtue. But Nigerians tend to laugh at us in a kind
of derisive way. They joke that, according to their experiences in the Western
world, we are so inhospitable that if we want to visit our grandmother, we have
to make an appointment at least two weeks in advance! I had become somewhat estranged
to Western ways and denied that “accusation.”
However, upon our return to the
West, more specifically, to Vancouver, I found they were not that far off.
Since I immigrated from my birth country, The Netherlands, at age thirteen, I have
had little experience with my own grandmothers during my adult years. None
whatsoever in Vancouver. However, I was surprised at how inhospitable Vancouver
really is. Vancouverites will entertain you, but very seldom in their house. It’s
just about always in a café or restaurant by which we are totally immersed here
in downtown. It’s even true of the near-by church we attend, though, I am happy
to report, not of my other church, the Christian Reformed Church.
And not only Vancouver. When my wife and I were RV-ing through the
American South and attended a city church, they welcomed the guests among them
and assured us that they were very hospitable. If we needed a good restaurant
for dinner after the service, all we would have to do is ask and they would point
us to the good ones in town!
Hospitable? Yea, right! In contrast, when we attended a rather
conservative Reformed type of church in BC’s “Bible Belt,” we ended up at the
dinner table of a large family of seven children. We had never had any contact
before.
Dutch Hospitality--Stories
Why do I write of
hospitality in this post? Because of the “extreme” hospitality we experienced
in Lutjegast, my birth village in The Netherlands (NL) with a population of
around 1,000. It’s a follow-up to the
previous post that I feel compelled to write; it was that surprising and
extreme—but not everything extreme is negative. My parents lived in Lutjegast
from 1929-1951. My father ran a barbershop, while my mother ran a growing family
and, for a few years, a hair salon for ladies. I was thirteen when we emigrated
to Canada in 1951. By 2016 pretty well
all memories of our Boer barber family had been erased in the village except among
the elderly.
Two days we wandered around
in Lutjegast, partially by car, partially on foot. We came to the church where
I was baptized as a baby and met someone living near it. We introduced
ourselves, but he had never heard about us. Nevertheless, he invited us into
his house for a coffee. There we sat in the dining room, surrounded by the
entire family, drinking coffee and chatting about past when we lived there.
That was the first one. An hour or so later, as we were looking for a niece
who, I had reasons to believe, lived in the town. In the course of the search,
we knocked on someone’s door. A lady opened the door and, after our brief
introduction, again invited us inside for a tea with her and her husband. They
had vaguely heard of some Boer family, but that was all.
Our second day in the village,
a Saturday, we were supposed to meet a cousin of mine who lived elsewhere. We
would meet at the church in the centre of Lutjegast. We arrived early to find a
spot where we could visit, but did not find anything. The only thing open was a
hair salon. We entered to ask them about a place in the village where we could
have a coffee. The lady told us that the village really does not have a
suitable place for that, but she immediately invited us to visit with our
guests around the table in her shop and she would serve us coffee! We did not accept the invitation since it was
not really a suitable environment for the kind of visit we envisioned. But it
was another amazing hospitality event.
Soon my cousin and husband
drove into the church yard. The custodian met us and after the by now customary
introduction, he not only showed us the inside of the renovated church but also
invited us for a coffee and cooky in the church hall, where we could sit as
long as we wanted.
Personally, I think that
pattern of hospitality to strangers is remarkable. My appreciation for my birth
village soared. I am in the process of writing a more detailed report of this
hospitality in the Dutch language to be published in the local village paper to
express our appreciation not only, but also to make sure they enjoy a positive
self-image. They are not just some village duds as some city slickers may
think; they display the image of God in their hospitality.
But we ran into this trait
throughout our trip. We had three main
hosts in three different parts of the country and all went far beyond the
normal standards of hospitality. Two of these were friends from different phases
of our history, but they were absolutely superb. One of them housed us for ten
days and nights. The most unexpected was the owner of Hotel Friesland. He took
a liking to us and several times invited us privately for a tea and cooky. A hotel owner!
Concluding Comments
All in all, I am still a bit
dizzy about all this hospitality. Can’t get over it. That’s why I write about
it in such glowing terms. Thank you, my
Dutch friends, both old and new. And to my Nigerian friends I can only caution
them that whatever unpleasant experiences they may have had in the West, their
description of hospitality certainly does not resonate with my Dutch
experience. I should probably close with a preemptive admission that race may
at least partially account for the difference.
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