If you take the bus from Sarospatak toward
Viss and get off at Halisten Part stop, you'll
come upon something surprising - an African
village rising from the green Hungarian
grassland.
The village, which stands on a 35-acre site at
Katona Tanya, is more than mere whimsy, however.
It is a practical experiment of the 35 students
in Eotvos Lorand University's African Program and
their professor, Geza Fussi Nagy.
If you ask the neighbors, an old couple living a
kilometer away, you'll find out that a year ago,
on weekends, a bunch of young people led by an
imposing guy wearing a huge hat, started to hit
wood pillars into the earth, knitting ropes
around them, making a net of branches and filling
it with stones.
The couple nosed to see what was this. Hearing
that the roof would be made of grass, they had a
good laugh and they bet that nothing would come
of it. The plan to build many huts in the styles
of different African tribes, startled them. It
was intriguing that these people, living in a
city, students and a real professor, came here
and started to do such crazy things.
Now that the wall is plastered with mud, it's
stale news for them, said Laszlo Koszegi, one of
the "mason" students who got stuck in
this place where the choir of birds stops
chirping in the evening, and you can listen to
the crickets and deer calls in the darkness.
"Here you can breath freely," he
added." It's a totally different story than
your everyday activity in Budapest where you have
to run around streets trampled by boredom. It's a
fantastic feeling, especially when we work with
mud. After a life time of parental warnings of
'Don't you dare get mud on your clothes', now
they plaster the wall by making mud lump throwing
contests. The girls mold the mud with their feet
and are up to knees in it in tribal dances."
Szabolcs Fussi Nagy, a horticulturalist who owns
the village site, says it's only natural that
girls outnumber boys."Since this is an
African village, women have to work more than
men, no?" he said.
The idea for the village was Dr. Fussi Nagy's. He
thought that besides listening stories about the
material culture of Africa, students should do
some practical things too, for it feels different
when you can actually touch, let's say, a Massai
spear, then when you see a picture of it. |
The students hope to become African Studies
researchers. The ELTE program covers the
continent's history, ethnography and literature,
languages, mainly Swahili. Students attend
lectures offered by other departments, such as
geography, cultural and social anthropology.
"When we got the land I had already spent a
long time in a Tanzanian fishing village, named
Kunduchi, 30 km from Dar-es-Salaam," the
students' leader said. There he watched them
building and it looked so simple to make that he
was sure that it could be reproduced here.
Other aims of the experiment are to help students
to exercise their practical skills and to
interact. They have to learn to put up with each
others' foibles for a longer time, if they want
to succeed in their planned trip to Africa.
This should be the third event for Hungary, after
the Hungarian Scientific Africa Expedition in
December 1987 - June 1988 that celebrated the
centennial of the first Hungarian expedition of
Samuel Teleki in 1888 by following the same route
up to the Turkana Lake in north-west of Kenya.
This group of students forms also the nucleus of
the Hungarian Africa Society (Magyar Afrika
Tarsasag, MAT), that has its 100 members
affiliated with the British Royal African
Society.
They would like to go to East Africa, where
Swahili is one of the official languages. They
hoped to go last fall in a group of 20, and spend
a month on Mount Kilimanjaro. "But our
sponsor changed his mind at the last minute. We
don't give up our hopes, we look for sponsorship,
for this is not for fun, we need $38,000,"
adds the professor, "It would make a big
difference for our students to go there instead
of sitting here doing long distance theory "
The Budapest Sun, Summer 1994 |