F-orth Mayor

Passing through DFW airport, I heard the greeting to the travelers by the Fort Worth, TX mayor on the PA system. I heard, ” Hi I’m Mattie Parker the F-orth mayor.” This brought to mind the rural administration titles I dealt with in Central & West Africa.

Going up the Ibenga River from Enyelle, I once saw a sign marking the narrow forest waterway to “Paris, Congo.” It was late afternoon so we pulled in and spent the night on this this tiny piece of dry ground sticking out of the swamp with 3 huts on it.  The titles of officials representing the rural municipalities where I worked in the Central African Republic (CAR)had similar delusions of grandeur. The division of jurisdiction followed the French system. Here is Wikipedia on Paris administrative districts, “The twenty arrondissements (French: ‘rounding’) are arranged in the form of a clockwise spiral, often likened to a snail shell, starting from the middle of the city, with the first on the Right Bank (north bank) of the Seine.”

These CAR villages did not spiral around a center. They were situated in a straight line along a dirt road no deeper than a mud hut on either side of the road. When passing through. It did not look like a village at all.  They went on for miles. When working at a random spot in such an area inevitably, someone would pop up and say, “I am the mayor. How dare you stop here without contacting me.” The next week someone else would pop up in a spot down the road and say that he was the mayor.  It was confusing until I learned that like the numbered “arrondissements” of Paris they had the 1st mayor, the second mayor, third mayor etc. When the mayor of Fort Worth, TX said she was the F orth Mayor, that is what I thought of. 

It was different in the Congo and in Senegal. The head of a village in the Republic of Congo was elected and had the title of PRECO: “president committee villagois.” I am not sure about rural Senegal, but in the city we lived in, each neighborhood had a “delegue du quartier.”  In all three countries, the man in charge would be the only one with his country’s flag flying in front of his house. Down the street from our house in Thies, Senegal, a homeowner let the bougainvillea grow up his front wall an onto the electric line. It was so thick, I thought it would bring down the line and we would lose power. I mentioned this to the delegue du quartier and someone cleared the line the next day

I don’t want to give the idea disputes with neighbors always get resolved so quickly. In the Congo, I was in many seemingly endless land disputes. Swa, a man living next to one of our church properties put up his own boundary and after that we could not find the original cornerstone boundary marker from the 1960’s. This gave him 15 meters of our property.

We called in the government agency that surveyed and registered the deeds. They showed us where to put the cornerstone. This was a public spectacle. The youth group from church attacked Swa’s improvised boundary marker. Swa attacked us all with a machete. He backed down, but his improvised boundary marker had such a massive subterranean concrete anchor that we could not destroy it with the tools we had with us.

Days after the incident, someone removed the new legit boundary marker and the case is still pending 25 years later. I never felt like the church executive committee was aggressive enough on the case. I made a sign like the one pictured above and wanted to plant it at the site in view of the whole world.  The sign is probably still in the church office. They would not agree to post it.