Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl [Paperback]

John M. Chernoff (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226103528 | ISBN-13: 978-0226103525 | Publication Date: December 15, 2003 | Edition: 1

The prospects of a sixteen-year-old West African girl with no money, education, or experience might seem pretty depressing. But if she's got a hell of a lot of nerve and a knack for finding the funny side in even the worst situations, she just might triumph over her circumstances. Our heroine Hawa does, and she did. In the 1970s, John Chernoff recorded the story of her life as an "ashawo," or bar girl, making a living on gifts from men and her own quick wits, and here presents it in Hustling Is Not Stealing, one of the most remarkable "autobiographies" you will ever encounter.

What might have been a sad tale of hardship and exploitation turns instead into a fascinating send-up of life in modern Africa, thanks to Hawa's smarts, savvy, and ear for telling just the right story to make her point. Through her wide-open and knowing eyes, we get an inside view of what life is really like for young people in West Africa. We spy on nightlife scenes of sex and deception; we see how modern-minded youth deal with life in the cities in villages; and we share the sweet and sometimes silly friendships formed in the streets and bars.

But mostly we come to know Hawa and how she has navigated a life that few can even imagine. The first of two funny, poignant volumes, Hustling starts with an in-depth introduction by Chernoff to Hawa's Africa. From there the book traces her remarkable transformation from a playful warrior struggling against her circumstances to an insightful trickster enjoying and taking advantage of them as best she can.

Part coming-of-age story, part ethnography, and all compulsively readable, Hustling Is Not Stealing is a rare book that educates as thoroughly as it entertains.

"You can see some people outside, and you will think they are enjoying, but they are suffering. Every time in some nightclub, you will see a girl dressed nicely, and she's dancing, she's happy. You will say, 'Ah! This girl!' You don't know what problem she has got. Some people say that this life, it's unto us. It's unto us? Yeah, it's unto me, but sometimes it's not unto me. When I was growing up, I didn't feel like doing all these things. There is not any girl who will wake up as a young girl and say, 'As for me, when I grow up, I want to be ashawo, to go with everybody.' Not any girl will think of this."—from the book

Winner - 2004 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Chernoff, a longtime student of Ghanaian drumming and author of African Rhythm and African Sensibility, met the pseudonymous Hawa in Ghana in 1971 and started taping her stories in 1977. Born in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) in the 1960s, three-year-old Hawa lived with various relatives after her mother died, eventually joining her father's family in Kumasi, capital of the Ashanti region of Ghana. At 16, she refused an arranged Muslim marriage and started making her own life. Moving to Accra, she became an "ashawo" woman-variously described as a hustler, bar girl or "pay-as-you-go" wife. When economic conditions deteriorated in Ghana in the early 1970s, Hawa migrated first to neighboring Togo, and then to Upper Volta, when anti-Ghanaian sentiment mounted in Togo. While emigration was a survival tactic, Hawa also viewed it as an opportunity to see how other people lived and hear their tales. Indeed, there's a restlessness that pervades Hawa's stories, whether she's describing her girlhood, her girlfriends, the men she's lived with or people who've tried to get the better of her. In Chernoff's admiring eyes, Hawa is a classic trickster, cleverly resourceful at manipulating bad situations for her own ends. Her story is a "giddy celebration of her will to dignity." Hawa and her ashawo friends are poor, but they're "not about to let their poverty spoil their life completely." Chernoff follows his lengthy and insightful introduction with hundreds of pages of transcriptions of Hawa's somewhat repetitive anecdotes as well as a glossary. A second volume, Exchange Is Not Robbery, will chronicle Hawa's travels after Togo.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker

While studying West African music in the early seventies, Chernoff befriended Hawa, a high-spirited, illiterate Ghanaian woman whose street-smarts and garrulousness inspired him to record a series of autobiographical interviews, which he has transcribed and edited. From the time she leaves an unhappy arranged marriage at the age of sixteen, her life unfolds as a picaresque series of exploits that illustrate her ability to live by her wits as an ashawo—a "semiprofessional" prostitute—supported by the men she meets in the bars and discos of Accra and Lomé. A resourceful heroine and loyal (if capricious) friend, Hawa is also a connoisseur of local mores, and tartly observes the daily collision of this world with that of the European men among her boyfriends. Casually weaving urban folklore into her engaging tale, Hawa displays an eye for detail and a narrative exuberance that mark her as a gifted storyteller.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (December 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226103528
• ISBN-13: 978-0226103525
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #283,663 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Unique View from Inside, June 21, 2004

By 

Maxine Heller (Pittsburgh, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl (Paperback)

John M. Chernoff's Hustling is Not Stealing is a unique and highly enjoyable insight into a woman who too often would be viewed in stereotypes or lost in statistics about the hand-to-mouth existence of people in what used to be called the Third World. Chernoff focuses upon the life of one woman, Hawa, describing her as small, cute, and a gifted storyteller. She becomes vividly real as she tells her tales of life as a bar girl, doing what she needs to do to survive -- and with great humor and style! Chernoff begins with a comprehensive and fascinating introduction, which places Hawa's experience in the broad context of African realities, also explaining his own years in Africa as a student of ethnomusicology and of the social milieu in which Hawa's adventures take place. The reader is drawn in, sometimes laughing, sometimes appalled, often both at the same time. Hawa is often hassled by poverty or by those seeking to exploit her. But she laughs her irresistible laugh -- hee hee hee -- and gets her own back. She is no victim! As she travels through Ghana, Togo, and Burkina Faso, one gets a sense of excitement and fun, despite the hard times and dangers. Hawa comes off as a very admirable woman, and Chernoff's book is a real pleasure. His valuable scholarship is matched by his humanity. As you peek into Hawa's world, she comes vividly and unforgettably to life and becomes a friend. This book is priceless! I loved it!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hustling is Not Stealing, February 15, 2004

By 

Margaret Clay (West Mifflin, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl (Paperback)

Read this book in two days. Couldn't put it down. The main character lives in a culture with few options for women. While the choices she makes may be appalling to the typical American, and while her profane language may at first cause dismay, once you get to know her, her intelligence, a certain grace, sense of fairness, sense of irony, strength and courage make you love her in spite of her chosen life. All the while you are intrigued and trying to understand her, she is slying educating you on the realities of current West Africa in a way that a textbook never could. Excellent book. Don't miss it.

4.0 out of 5 stars The Life and Stories of an Ashawo Woman, October 28, 2011

By 

Jenny Rebecca Scott - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl (Paperback)

"Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl" by John M. Chernoff is a compilation of interviews with a woman named Hawa living and working in 1970s Ghana, Togo, and Burkina Faso as a bar girl, or prostitute. The book provides an in-depth and distinctive look at her experiences in the sex trade. Merely from reading the 300-plus pages of interviews that the author conducts with her, the reader gets an intimate sense of Hawa's personality and character. Contrary to the stereotypes one might associate with members involved in the sex trade, the reader finds her to be humorous, amicable, and an overall light-hearted person.
The book starts with Hawa recounting the years after her mother's death when Hawa was only three years-old. Throughout her childhood and adolescence she is in constant rotation between her (sometimes abusive) relatives' homes. You can tell by the way in which she narrates the stories of her childhood and the exchanges between relatives that take place during this time that from the beginning Hawa has never been anyone's fool. Although she seems to have always been a free spirit, extremely assertive and in complete control of herself and her surroundings, one cannot help but wonder how, in light of all of this, hustling is the route that Hawa ended up on. Surely, she had greater aspirations. As she explains in one section of the book entitled "What No Girl Says", "`There is not any girl who will wake up as a young girl and say, "As for me when I grow up I want to be ashawo, to go with everybody, to do this and this." Not any girl will think of this.' " (Chernoff 203) Obviously, Hawa never planned nor aimed to become a bar girl yet she has still fallen into this line of work.
In Chernoff's interviews, Hawa reveals not only her character but also the climate of living and working as a bar girl in 1970s West Africa. The stories she tells are more akin to what you might read in someone's diary rather than what you would find someone telling a relative stranger. The recounts of beatings, sexual escapades, and power struggles in the ashawo community are all told so enthusiastically and with such detail and fervor that you feel like Hawa is actually a close friend, not some voice recorded on tape by an ethnographer in the 1970s.
Besides a lengthy 118-page introduction, the reader doesn't actually hear anything from Chernoff; the rest of the book is solely Hawa's interviews. Personally, this was a pleasant surprise. I would rather read the stories as they were told, straight from the source, rather than have her memories sorted, sifted, and possibly altered for the ends of the author. However, since Hawa's stories are what comprise virtually the entirety of the book, it is surprising that she is not given more credit for her contributions.
Overall, "Hustling Is Not Stealing" was a remarkably entertaining, refreshing look into the life of a woman whose livelihood would normally be stereotyped as depressing, dead-end, and destructive. Not to say prostitution is none of those things, I wholeheartedly agree that it is in most cases. However, as an individual, Hawa and her stories give at least this reader the hope that although hustling is nothing to be celebrated nor condoned, neither is it a death sentence.