LET US BUILD OUR TRUE WEALTH.

It is astonishingly striking that humanity is not fully aware of its true wealth.

That statement is as brutal as it is true.

I can already make out the wry smiles and the remarks along the lines of: “What is this person on about?” Others might add: “I know the exact amount of my bank holdings, which gives me a clear idea of my true wealth.”

It is at that precise moment that I allow myself to smile in turn. Such statements amuse me, because they seem to flow directly from the conditioning we have known and continue to undergo. The origin of that conditioning is complex and tangled: it comes from Western society, from capitalist ideology, from the contemporary world, and even from the education we received. But it can be summed up simply, even simplistically, like this: for many people, wealth is synonymous with a quantifiable holding, measurable in material goods or in bank balances.

No, we have it all wrong.

I would also like to set aside here the spiritualist or Judeo-Christian logic according to which “Christ is my supreme treasure,” as found in Philippians 3:7-8: “I count all things as loss… that I may gain Christ” — a statement that is not false in itself, depending on the angle you take. Or again the idea that it would be enough to believe in God to receive all the riches of this world, as expressed in Matthew 6:33: “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness; and all these things shall be given to you as well. ”

For the purposes of this article, we will work with a deliberately simple understanding of wealth:
the total of the good deeds others have done towards us, minus the total of the good deeds we have done towards others.

In other words, the difference between what others have done for us and what we have, in our turn, done for them.

That realization profoundly redefines our perception of true wealth. And the question that follows from it, as uncomfortable as it is logical, is this: am I wealthy or am I overdrawn? Do I have savings or am I in debt?

Let us stop here and think about it for a brief moment…

With a little hindsight, I am firmly convinced that many people, like me, would come to face the obvious: they have not done as much good as they have received.

The good I am referring to here has nothing to do with the amount given. For example, if one person gave me $100 and another $25, and I in turn give $200 to someone, that does not entirely settle the matter. I would still have one act of kindness left to perform, because I received two and have returned only one.

For my part, when I was younger, I went through genuinely hard stretches when money was often short. I do not come from a family where milk and honey flowed freely. The family purse could afford us good schools, the supplies we needed and enough pocket money to cover our essential needs. What we did not have was superfluous luxury or staff at our disposal.

That form of austerity marked most of my adolescence and carried on into adulthood. After my baccalaureate in Togoville, my father funded my studies in Senegal, where my older brother already was. In those days, shouldering two sets of international-student fees and two monthly rents weighed on him heavily — and understandably so.

To give an idea of the gap: what cost little in Togo became several times more expensive in Senegal. Every expense, from tuition to housing, weighed heavily. Those difficulties made my stays complicated… but they also revealed the generosity of others.

And yet, in those moments, certain people appeared like angels. I sometimes received spontaneous invitations to share a meal with my friends’ families. I remember one evening in Dakar when I was hungry. Pockets almost empty. I had 600 FCFA left, which I went off to spend in a little tangana.

In Senegal, a tangana is a small street canteen for ordinary folk where you eat quickly, heartily and for very little. You share a wooden bench and table with other customers. It is the kind of place where you would rather not be seen, and whose memory you would like to erase once you have left. That sort of eatery was unfortunately my refuge during several stays in Dakar. And often, at the very moment I was resigning myself to it, a friend would call to invite me to dinner. I remain deeply grateful for those moments.

But this is not only a matter of one-off financial support. There is also the help that reaches us through what some would call Providence.

In 2014, while I was in the middle of my immigration process for Canada, I was asked to provide a police record for every country where I had lived more than six months over the previous ten years. Senegal was obviously one of them. I looked, in vain, for a way to send an envelope to Dakar. The post office, DHL, FedEx: either the delays were too long or the costs too high. I could not afford that luxury.

After several fruitless days, at the end of my patience, I got up one morning and went to the airport without the slightest certainty. Deep down, though, I was convinced that my envelope would leave that day. After a few passengers had turned me down, I met a flight attendant from the airline ASKY who agreed to take it with him. Thanks to some coordination with a friend in Dakar, I was able to obtain my police record in time.

When things like that happen, you realize that you owe the universe. You understand that you are in debt. And you condition yourself to do good in your turn. You want to be, you too, in the right place at the right time, for someone who no longer knows which way to turn.

If you have ever lived through a situation where unexpected help pulled you out of a dead end, you will grasp the deep meaning of this true wealth. Even if we have already helped a great many people, it remains essential to keep up our efforts, because managing to give as much as we have received is an aspiration that is hard to reach.

By becoming aware that our wealth is not measured by our bank balance but by the invisible debts we carry towards people who have sometimes vanished from our lives — or towards those passing angels — we strengthen our resolve to do more good.

Our ultimate goal, as human beings, should be to accumulate this true wealth, so as to end our life with the more or less accurate feeling that, failing to have given more than we received, we at least gave as much.

Again and again, let us build our true wealth, for our heart is rich in nothing else.

M. Z.