The Politics of Cultural Knowledge

The Politics of Cultural Knowledge

The Politics of Cultural Knowledge Edited by

Njoki Wane, Arlo Kempf and Marlon Simmons Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada

SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM/BOSTON/TAIPEI

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6091-479-9 (paperback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-480-5 (hardback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-481-2 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands www.sensepublishers.com

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2011 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the seekers of alternative forms of knowledge.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................................. ix Njoki Wane, Arlo Kempf and Marlon Simmons Foreword .................................................................................................................. xi George J. Sefa Dei 1. Introduction: The Politics of Cultural Knowledge ..............................................1 Njoki Wane and Marlon Simmons 2. African Indigenous Feminist Thought: An Anti-Colonial Project .....................7 Njoki Wane 3. Circulating Western Notions: Implicating Myself in the Transnational Traffic of ‘Progress’ and Commodities.............................................................23 John Catungal 4. The Race to Modernity: Understanding Culture Through the Diasporic-Self....................................................................................................37 Marlon Simmons 5. Remembering the 1947 Partition of India Through the Voices of Second Generation Punjabi Women .................................................................51 Mandeep Kaur Mucina 6. Moving Beyond Neo-Colonialism to Ubuntu Governance...............................71 Devi Mucina 7. Being Part of the Cultural Chain .......................................................................83 Yumiko Kawano 8. North African Knowledges and the Western Classroom: Situating Selected Literature.............................................................................................93 Arlo Kempf 9. What Might We Learn if We Silence the Colonial Voice?: Finding Our Own Keys .................................................................................................111 Donna Outerbridge 10. A Conversation About Conversations: Dialogue Based Methodology and HIV/AIDS In Southern Africa .................................................................121 Imara Ajani Rolston

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

11. The Politics of African Development: Conversations with Women from Rural Kenya ............................................................................................137 Njoki Wane 12. Conclusion .......................................................................................................155 Arlo Kempf Notes On Contributors ...........................................................................................161

viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work emerged from classroom discussions in Njoki Wane’s graduate course SES 3911: Cultural Knowledges, Representation and Colonial Education: Pedagogical Implications, at OISE/UT. We thank the students and the contributors for the many conversations, which informed this writing. We have learned much from this project, and indeed this work would not have materialized without our spiritual relations. Arlo and Marlon would like to thank Professor Wane for the opportunity to co-edit this collection. We are indebted to Amadou for the detailed job and care with the copyediting. We also like to thank Zafar Shamsi for his thorough work with the formatting of the manuscript. Njoki Wane Arlo Kempf Marlon Simmons

ix

FOREWORD

Emerging debates about the “inclusion” of multiple forms of knowledge and the search for diverse representation of bodies in the academy show hopeful signs. But we caution that “inclusion” can be anything but equal. One can be included while still existing on the margins. For many Indigenous and colonized peoples, the call for the renewal and affirmation of Indigenous and local cultural knowledge emerges out of recognizing the value and relevance of such knowledge in their own right. There continues to be alarming concerns about the general erasure of Indigenous identities, ideological [mis]representations of the colonized experience and the colonial encounter that simply enhance on-going colonial and colonizing projects. Coupled with myths that conveniently either deny or forget the roots of the colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands, we see the continuing presence of colonial and imperial racism today. Racism has always been a product of colonial and imperial relations. Colonial tropes and “technologies of representation”, the normalizing gaze of the colonizer, disciplining around the borders and boundaries of what constitutes “valid knowledge” and how such knowledges should be produced, interrogated, validated and disseminated are all, in fact, more than Foucauldian forms of institutional surveillance. These significant acts and practices both reveal and constitute fundamental contestations about power, representation, and how we come to claim the authenticity of voice and experience. These acts and contestations also help us recognize the power of the colonial [racial] dominant irrespective of the intersections of difference or how we come to terms with the diffused nature of power and/or the asymmetrical relations of power. Colonial racism has appropriated, and continues to appropriate, Indigenous lands, languages, and cultural resources. The racism of globalization today can be found in the commodification of Indigenous cultures and their knowledge ostensibly to serve the needs of Capital. In effect, the imperial ambitions of Western capital seem to be “running amok” but also in a “grand style” as far as the colonial oppressor is concerned. Challenging the ideological, material, political and symbolic effects of erasure and negations of Indigenous histories, identities, experiences and, in particular, cultural knowledge has come at a huge cost to critical Indigenous and racialized scholars. We risk losing what it means to be human in the never-ending battle to contest and lay bare the race, class, gender, [dis]ability, and sexual domesticizing of spaces. In current times it is refreshing to see [more so in the academy] the level of myriad intellectual engagements that are helping to destabilize the complacency and dominance of particular ways of knowing masquerading as universal. A discussion of cultural knowledge is important as part of the interrogation of dominant and hegemonic procedures of knowledge production, validation and dissemination globally. For someone who has been writing about Indigenous knowledge since the early 1980s, I have come to realize the connections between questions of Indigeneity and cultural knowledge as powerful and insightful in the politics of intellectual decolonization. Writing from the North American and Canadian context, I also xi

FOREWORD

acknowledge that I am able to speak of Indigenous and local cultural knowledge as a way to pay homage to my ancestral knowledge while acknowledging the context and politics of my physical location on Aboriginal lands. For many in a similar situation we speak of Indigenous and cultural knowledge to highlight the relevance of articulating multiple systems of knowing as a way to challenge the dominance of Eurocentric ways of knowing. We must welcome and encourage any moment and politics to claim Indigenousness as a space to subvert hegemonic knowings, and also to affirm both the particularities and the shared connections of the colonial experiences among oppressed, colonized and Indigenous peoples everywhere. Consequently, I have no intellectual appetite in devoting my energies and intellectual capital simply pointing to the complicities of colonized bodies thus leaving the disaster of Eurodominance ‘off the hook’. This is not to say I do not welcome such scholarship. It has its space. I simply have no desire for it and do not crave to undertake it. Cultural knowledge speaks to the dynamism of cultures, a significance of a rootedness in place, history and culture. Colonial narratives have long subverted the power of local cultural knowings. But it is a testament of the power of such knowledge that they have survived and continue to offer guidance to human existence. A critical study of local cultural knowledge systems reveals that they are often well-woven together with theoretical explorations and they foreground local voices and the experiential reality. Hence, the study of cultural knowledge entails the understanding and writing the experiential into a theory of social existence. It requires that our analysis become lucid and laced with clearly delineated systems of thought and not necessarily engaged in a search for definitive answers. The authenticity of experience and voice implies taking the experiential as an entry into theory. In naming the acts of resistance and decolonization, a study of cultural knowledge must pay attention to those moments when acts of resistance simply insert the oppressed body into colonial, hegemonic spaces and relations. Cultural knowledge is also about healing and reconnection and so it is also important to note that not all healing is about resistance or social activism. The experience of knowledge as healing can be individualized and the challenge for us is to move into an understanding of healing as collective politics. We must engage cultural knowledge from the heart, making the connections of body, mind and soul. Claiming the ‘Indigenous’ today must seek to repair the damage caused by colonialism and colonial relations. Indigenousness concerns a search for holism and the repair of spiritual, emotional, physical material damage to oppressed communities through colonial practices. We must focus on commonalities and differences in knowledge production noting that for example, spirituality is not the same everywhere for all Indigenous communities. It is important to recognize how power and relations of colonialism and re-colonial relations have scripted and continue to script us differently. The anti-colonial presence has been well historicized. These histories tell us the anti-colonial is about praxis and about being able to self-determine through critical consciousness. The authors in this collection broach cultural knowledge through an anti-colonial framework, which works to critique dominant forms of knowledge that continue to provide an articulating tool to express the emerging conditions of the human. Such forms of knowledge exert a particular disciplinary pressure on xii

FOREWORD

oppressed and colonial subjects by subjugating our different cultural forms and expressions. The affirming of our cultural knowledge allows us then to offer a counter-hegemonic reading, which works to disrupt the production and dissemination of colonial knowledging endemic to civilizing narratives of what it means to be human. Cultural knowledge positions identity and, by extension, identifications as historically constituted and laden with politics. Aptly, this collection reminds us that we can no longer continue to allow identity as constituted through the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and religion to be shaped and formed simply through the contours of economic materialism. The Politics of Cultural Knowledge takes up the problematic of colonialism as historically informing the human condition and searches for ways to work with and outside the constraints of Euromodernity. In claiming cultural knowledge the authors are faced with some key questions, such as: How is difference, heterogeneity, shared experiences and collective histories understood through our complicated locations? And how might this reading diverge and converge from contemporary readings of cultural knowledges as a site for decolonization? Ultimately, The Politics of Cultural Knowledge edited by Njoki Wane, Arlo Kempf and Marlon Simmons, challenges the mainstream oeuvre of cultural critique. George J. Sefa Dei Toronto, June 2010

xiii

NJOKI WANE AND MARLON SIMMONS

1. INTRODUCTION The Politics of Cultural Knowledge

This collection is an outcome of teaching a course on cultural knowledge and colonial education for eight years. The course has created space for critical dialogical engagements with educators, learners, activists, and students involved in the process of reclaiming their Indigenous knowledge or making sense of their Indigeneity. A key to the many dialogues during class discussions has been to move the learning debates beyond the halls of academe or beyond goals of bringing about change that focus on issues of cognition, inclusion, discrimination and integration, to an emphasis on critical self-reflexivity that would allow for the interrogation of individual beliefs, values, biases and hence, work towards uncolonizing the mind. The dialogues have taken into account the social, political and cultural changes that impede transformation, and have called for a rethinking of the dominant seductive ideologies that serve to marginalize other people’s ways of knowing. The course readings have pointed to different ways of conceptualizing and engaging in transformative learning and uncolonizing procedures. The readings attempted to challenge the status quo and offer alternative ideas and interpretations that allow for the dismantling of the persistent ambiguous connections between the known and the unknown; the self and the constructed other. The terms “transformative” and “uncolonizing” have often been assigned different meanings, which have contributed to the messiness and contradictions evident in the different discussions on transformation and uncolonizing. One of such contradictions has to do with the contestations on who should be carrying out the transformative and uncolonizing work. In the course, we took the position that all humans are implicated in the process. However, the extent of individuals’ involvement differs significantly considering the societal hierarchies and power structures we find ourselves in. As a result, we argue that transformation is about creating spaces and possibilities for excluded and oppressed individuals, groups, and communities to define themselves, create/recreate and claim/reclaim their taken for granted and appropriated values, meanings, and purposes independent of any external ideological or cultural impositions. These spaces could be created through the media, schools, work places, communities, healthcare avenues, ecological spaces, policy making, etc. This requires that we all consciously and responsibly reflect on how we make meaning of our world. In Cranton’s (1996) words, such transformative learning would entail a rethinking and interrogation of our preordained assumptions, perspectives and expectations, and working towards empowering the disempowered. N. Wane et al. (eds.), The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, 1–6. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

WANE AND SIMMONS

The essays in the reader are informed by experiential knowledge and research findings. They reflect different perspectives that are informed by diverse histories, cultures, voices and narratives, which offer a critical interpretation concerning our understanding of the uncolonizing process and reclaiming one’s Indigeneity. This approach yields significant questions with regard to transformative learning in the contexts of cultural knowledges; colonial education; spirituality; ecology, feminist anti-racist and queer pedagogy; popular culture; globalization; critical pedagogy and cultural studies. As a result, the essays will generate creative tensions that inform, interrogate and expand our views of what we have come to take for granted as knowledge and the possibilities of transformation. More importantly, the essays will acknowledge the divergences and similarities of Indigenous ways of knowing and help with disentangling the tensions in the different un-colonizing processes. These connections are important because they challenge us to have dialogue among ourselves in an effort to understand how to deal with the colonial ethos, post-colonial or neo-colonial thought. Although as authors of this reader, we may not have directly experienced the first way of the colonial past, that of, violence, famine, poverty or genocide yet, we are aware that colonization never stopped and a discussion of decolonization is a constant reminder that, we are constantly confronting these realities at our doorsteps, inside our own homes, and through normate procedures of the media. As a result, we are confronted with this sense of place and belonging because the self is inextricably bound up with these colonial histories that confront us on a day-to-day basis. We can no longer ignore the violence in distant lands because we are intrinsically connected. The oppressions taking place in various parts of the world have colonial and neo-colonial histories. By engaging in critical transformative dialogues with these histories, we would be encouraged to seek responses, or rework our ways of knowing, spiritualities and cultures that could contribute to the disrupting of the power and politics that perpetuate the divide between the ‘we’ and ‘them’; the ‘self ’ and the ‘other’. We, the contributors of this reader, come from different histories and communities, however we have a common goal, to unlearn and learn from each other and our communities of learners. We are endeavoring to transform our damaged cultures and recreate traditions that speak both to our situation as educators. It is important that we take on the responsibility to assert our knowing and processes of learning and teaching. Consequently, this reader reflects on important differences in the values, histories and relationships of the different groups in our society. The book attempts to draw people together with the hope that such an exercise will be an opening to individual and institutional transformation. Although some people might argue that we are moving on and developing; it ought to be remembered that the process of recolonization persists. For example in Africa, the idea of economic development and establishment of social conditions conducive for all parties was unanimously supported by rulers of ex-colonial states without paying attention to the voices from the grassroots. These grassroots voices, which were at the forefront during the struggle for independence, were silenced either through military force or through poverty. For most African people then, political independence was nothing but a divisive tool for exclusion and discrimination. 2

INTRODUCTION

As we engage in these dialogues, it is crucial that our engagement is holistic. We should ask ourselves, what it is that we want to achieve; do we want to engage in a dialogue as an exercise to stimulate our intellectual abilities, play with words and discourses or do we want to write a counter-discourse on transformative uncolonial learning? In the transformative and uncolonial educational thought, our goal is to search for ways of dismantling both the tangible and intangible forms of colonialism. We need to find ways of dealing with psychological traumas that have been colonially imbued. We need to ask ourselves how colonialism as a theory, a project, a praxis, a discourse has managed to produce itself: politically, socially, culturally, materially and ideologically? We need to find ways of dealing with spirit injury. And above all, we need to ask ourselves how we can move beyond further colonial desires that favor individualistic material gain over community needs. Through multiple interpretive prisms this reader attempts to address these broad questions. Colonization, oppression and systemic discrimination that disoriented Indigenous peoples remain a significant challenge today. This trauma, suffering dispossession, violence, discrimination and pain persist. Colonization has detached Indigenous peoples from their cultural ways of understanding their experiences. They have been separated from their spiritual and physical relationships with both humans and nature (land, water, resource and territories). Such de-linking is further evidenced through the exclusion, silencing and negation by the educational system of Indigenous peoples. In this volume, our goal is to respond to the dialogue of transformation through engaging in learning/living as a process of uncolonizing one’s self. The voices and disparate narratives that have been shaped by colonial and neo-colonial procedures, whether tangible or intangible, move beyond overworked metaphors of integration, multiculturation or cohesive living. Together, we explore the various discourses, theoretical frameworks and ideological proclamations that have been employed to analyze, critique and also interrogate the everyday assumptions of transformative learning that enable individuals to un-colonize themselves. We encourage readers to engage in critical dialogues that will interrogate, challenge and disrupt the power and politics that perpetuate societal hierarchies and divisions. This broad mapping points to the diverse ways of dialoguing, evoking, and practicing transformative learning in multiple contexts. LOCATION OF ESSAYS

We begin with Njoki Wane’s chapter, African Indigenous Feminist Thought: An AntiColonial Project. Wane, in her discussion, questions and identifies some of the limitations of Western educational thought that did not speak to her lived moments as an African woman. In doing so, Wane engages with the experience of African feminism in order to better understand how the lives of African women can be transformed. Through the context of a feminist discourse, Wane’s intention is to make meaning of the myriad ways dominant relations of power and knowledge come to govern men and women in our societies. John Catungal’s, Circulating Western Notions: Implicating Myself in the Transnational Traffic of ‘Progress’ and Commodities, is concerned with the particular 3

WANE AND SIMMONS

items that immigrant communities in Canada send to their families in other parts of the world. He discusses the role of these mobile objects in producing cultural meanings and transnational affective relations. Catungal utilizes autobiographical stories that he shares with his transnational family as a way to explore how and why immigrant communities send gift packages, parcels and letters. He is also interested in how these transactions can inform our understandings of care, culture and commodities. Catungal argues that these stories of transnational circuits have much to tell us about the role of these transported items in cultural and knowledge productions, especially in the context of the present fragmented but connected transnational community formation. He tells us that such stories enable us to interpret how the circulation of these items among transnational social units functions in a duplicitous way. In thinking about questions of care and the complexity of cultural meanings in these transnational stories, Catungal foregrounds how immigrant communities come to occupy and navigate a difficult space somewhere between transnational modalities of caring and of complicity. Marlon Simmons, in his The Race to Modernity: Understanding Culture through the Diasporic-Self, discusses the experience of the Diaspora and the necessary communicative strategies for survival. Simmons is concerned with questions of identity as identity comes to be regulated and simultaneously formed through the Diaspora. In particular, he is interested in the way Diasporic culture becomes governed through the socio-historical formations of Euromodernity. The matter of race centers his discussion to help with disentangling the way space comes to be constituted through bodies of the Diaspora. In Remembering the 1947 Partition of India Through The Voices of Second generation Punjabi Women, Mandeep Kaur Mucina explores the experiences of seven, second-generation Punjabi women raised in Canada to families that were impacted by the Partition of India. In doing so, Mucina delves into themes of honor and everyday resistance in the lives of Punjabi women. She inserts her own stories and perspective as an insider to the issues explored, and at the same time, Mucina brings the voices of these women together to speak about identity, intergenerational memory, and the complexities of growing up in Canada as second generation women. Altogether, Mucina draws from the myriad ways Punjabi women resisted expectations placed on them from the private and public spaces of their lives. Devi Mucina’s Moving Beyond Neo-Colonialism to Ubuntu Governance is an exercise in ‘remembering’ what is shared common Ubuntu knowledge for an informed Maseko governance within the Ubuntu worldview. Mucina amplifies the importance of the land for Ubuntu peoples, and also the way in which Inkatha (unity) reflects the knowledge formed through the lived experience of Ubuntu peoples. He is interested in thinking of the Diaspora through Maseko Ngoni identity. His intention is to find ways in which Ubuntu languages could come to form lived possibilities for Africans such as Maseko Ngoni. Ultimately, Mucina hopes to regenerate and revive Maseko political entities and governance through historic-cultural memories and knowledges that centre the African through Ubuntu identity. Yumiko Kawano’s Being Part of the Cultural Chain locates colonialism in the context of Japan and points to the different ways in which colonialism comes to be 4

INTRODUCTION

experienced within myriad social geographies of Japan. She makes us aware of the colonization projects directed at Indigenous groups in Japan and in other geographies of Asia. She speaks to the various ways whereby Japanese Indigenous knowledges have been marginalized in public and educational institutions. Yumiko discusses the ways in which she can re-visit and gather her fragmented history so that she can reclaim and pass down embodied Indigenous knowledges. Arlo Kempf ’s chapter, North African Knowledges and the Western Classroom: Situating Selected Literature, provides a succinct theoretical framework and rationale for introducing North African knowledges into high school curricula in the Ontario context. Kempf ’s paper surveys some of these North African knowledges in concise reviews of three key works in critical ‘ancient’ history: Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Molefi Asante’s The Egyptian Philosophers and Maulana Karenga’s Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt. Kempf then presents two sample assignments that integrate critical historical perspectives, ancient African knowledges and existing government expectations, to be utilized in upper level secondary philosophy and classical civilizations courses. Donna Outerbridge’s chapter, What might we learn if we silence the colonial voice?: Finding our own Keys, engages with the importance of being responsible and accountable. Outerbridge queries the governance of colonialism through the context of education. She identifies the significance of thinking through an anticolonial discursive framework to come to understand the denial and erasure of black identity. Moreover, Outerbridge stresses the importance of not signing off once the research is completed, that to do so, would be committing the same atrocity as our Western counterparts. Instead, Outerbridge tells us that we must adapt the principle of reciprocity and feedback. Imara Ajani Rolston’s A Conversation about Conversations: Dialogue Based Methodology and HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa speaks about the necessity for dialogue as a transformative method for social justice. Focused in particular on United Nations Development Programs (UNDP) and Community Capacity Enhancement Program (CCEP), Rolston posits that, in discussing the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the approach must be grounded through the lived experience of the local communities, that community based-dialogue can come to transform intra-community dynamics, resist dominant knowledge paradigms, and create a platform for communities to learn and strategize for their own empowerment. He draws from different examples in the context of Southern Africa, with a particular interest in Botswana and South Africa. Njoki Wane provides us with another chapter in which she is concerned with the question of development. In The Politics of African Development: Conversations with women from Rural Kenya, Wane articulates the way in which rural women in Kenya understand development. She notes that the misconception of African values on the part of the implementers of the modernization paradigm has destroyed the very fabric of African cultures, African ways of knowing and any aspect of progress. Wane searches for alternative ways for meaningful growth by returning to rural African communities to reclaim local Indigenous voices. Arlo Kempf, in the Conclusion, engages the historical materialization of culture and speaks about how these historical specificities present themselves in our 5

WANE AND SIMMONS

contemporary epoch as some accepted given. He reminds us of the need to decolonize the self within the governing neo-colonial era. He discusses the sociological implications of coming to know culture through the dominant’s interpretation and offers possibilities for a different humanism through alternative ways of knowing culture. Importantly, Arlo recalls the need for transformation of the curricula by education through praxis. REFERENCE Cranton, P. (1996). Types of group learning. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 71, 25–32.

6

NJOKI WANE

2. AFRICAN INDIGENOUS FEMINIST THOUGHT An Anti-Colonial Project

INTRODUCTION

African feminism must be located in the teaching of African spirituality, that is, African Indigenous ways of knowing and, in particular, on the issue of creation where Africans are taught that man and woman were created simultaneously; none came before the other … Also the importance of complementary roles both female and male play in both domestic and public spheres–I am not sure where this superiority of men came from, it does not exist in my culture …. (PW, 2007).1 African feminism is part and parcel of African women’s lived experiences. African feminism is about African Indigenous ways of knowing which are holistic and not compartmentalized into neat piles but more fused together. African feminism is not exclusionary in terms of how gender participates and derives its impetus and meaning from particular historic-cultural specificities. African feminist thought is embodied through collectivism and collaboration (Wane, 2002). African feminism is about decolonization. The process of decolonizing the self led me to a form of reflexivity where I am faced with questioning the politics of Western educational thought that did not speak to my experiences as an African woman. The continued experience of decolonizing has informed my research work among African women in the Diaspora and among Embu rural women in Kenya. In this paper, I discuss the meaning of African feminism and how African feminism translates in the lives of women on a day-today basis. My goal is to better understand how feminist knowledge or lack thereof impact the lives of women and men and also reveal ways in which relations of power and knowledge come to intimidate men and women in our societies. African feminism is complex and difficult to engage. As an educator who teaches Black feminist thought, I need to work with a body of knowledge that decolonizes the self, as well as an anti-colonial tool for anchoring my work and my activism respectively. This paper draws from my research among Embu rural women, my teaching experiences and my community activism as well as my on going work on African Feminisms. The paper concludes with a discussion on feminist strategies that may inform culturally specific moments in teaching and researching community activism. N. Wane et al. (eds.), The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, 7–21. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

WANE

INDIGENOUS THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AS AN ANTI-COLONIAL TOOL

There is a need for an approach that is anchored in a retrieval, revitalization or restoration of the African senses of Indigenousness (Wane, 2005). That is, African people must reposition their cultural resource knowledge in order to appreciate the power of collective responsibility to tackle social issues. In this paper, I take an Indigenous theoretical framework as an entry point for my African feminist discussion. I argue that Indigenous knowledge is a living, constant experience that is informed by the ancestral voices, past, present and those to come. This point was articulated by Gatty, one of the research participants. I have been treating people of all kinds of diseases. I learnt the trade from my grandmother. She learnt it from her grandmother. My grandmother emphasized the importance of not giving up. I remember as a young woman, my friends would always laugh at me because they said I came from a witchdoctor’s family. That is why I dropped out of school, and I do not regret doing that, because I was able to learn more about herbal medicine. I have assisted many people who cannot afford to go to hospital. Yes, it was a struggle–from the Wazungu (Europeans) to our own people …. I do not see this as women’s movement as you are calling it … I see it as resistance. My classmates would laugh at me because of the knowledge that my family had on different cures. The Wazungu’s did everything to ensure that the community turned away from my family and their knowledge that had been passed down generation after generation, my parents did not condemn me when I dropped out of school. They were glad that one of their children would carry this knowledge to the next generation. Today, my grandchild (pointing to Keen) is my doctor. People have come to believe in her skills …. It is a struggle, but my child, we must resist the temptation to turn our backs to our ways. They are good ways. George Dei (1999) describes this type of knowledge as Indigenous Knowledge and a worldview that shapes the community’s relationships with surrounding environments. It is the product of Indigenous people’s direct experience with nature and its symbiotic relationship with the social world and, as such, is crucial for community survival. This knowledge, ancient, proven, and based on cognitive understandings and interpretations of social, physical and spiritual worlds, encompasses concepts, beliefs and perceptions of local peoples and their natural human-built environments (Dei, 1997). Capp and Jorgensen (1997) note that Indigenous knowledge is generally transmitted orally, experientially, and is not written, but is learned through handson experience and not taught in an abstract context. Its parameters are holistic, nonlinear and reflect a qualitative and intuitive mode of thinking. Rather than rely on explicit hypotheses, theories and laws, Indigenous knowledge is spiritual, cumulative and collective knowledge that is constantly renewed. Traditional knowledge tries to understand systems within a framework of wholeness rather than isolate interacting parts (Capp, 1997). To put it concisely: Indigenous Knowledge is an Indigenous cultural synthesis. I draw from African Indigenous knowledge to build on anti-colonial thought as conceptualized through African feminism. I draw from African Indigenous 8

AFRICAN INDIGENOUS FEMINIST THOUGHT

knowledge as a strategic tool to articulate different ways of interpreting African women’s ways of knowing, teaching and learning within traditional education systems. As well as, I engage African Indigenous knowledge to challenge the institutional powers and imperialistic structures that have prevented many African women from realizing the importance of dismantling the colonial patriarchal structures left behind by colonizers after the attainment of political independence, and also, to articulate the historical depth of African feminism as a way of knowing rooted in historical Indigenous knowledges of African peoples. HISTORICAL ROOTS OF AFRICAN FEMINISM

In Africa, feminism did not develop in an academic setting, but in the villages where the inclusion of women was evident in the social, economic, ritual, and political spheres (Steady, 1989: 5–8). As noted by Awapa, one of the participants: African feminism is about people, their children, their work, their day to day experiences, their stories of the past. Women, in particular, get involved in every aspect of the community … they participate in placing the food on the table, weddings, political rallys etc. They know their community …. Women carry this knowledge and they share it with all the children. The children learn from the women how to organize. They are taught at an early age the importance of being an active member of the community–for me this is feminism–not in the sense that you women from those far lands talk about. The nature of African village life was one of collectivity not autonomy. By virtue of the collectivity, African feminism developed through the bonds women had with other women, and this meant feminism emerged as a unified collective thought. That is, African feminism place value on a sense of communalism and cooperation. It is also based on survival strategies that women develop over time as frameworks for self-reliance, self-determination and empowerment. When African women were oppressed through enslavement or colonialism, they were forced to develop techniques that ensured their survival. Struggling against oppression was not a singularly, individualistic task; rather, these women utilized their collective framework for support. In their struggle to overcome different oppressions, African women were the original feminists who sought to emancipate themselves from the bonds of servitude, inequality, and racial discrimination (Steady, 1989: 20–21). Raudiraudi explained how women in her community were supportive of each other: Women … assisting women … women being there for each other …. Women uplifting each other … women caring for wellbeing of other children … they are my movement … When I know Marie will have a good home, a cow for her children’s milk; utensils with which to serve her food from … she can read and write … that is my movement. We do not go very far to look for things to do to assist other women. We have concentrated contributing something at the end of the month and give to one person. W’re ten women in this group–and there are many groups in this place …. We agree on what the money will be used for. We want everyone here to have basic necessities … I am not 9

WANE

a feminist … but I like women to have a say in their homes … they cannot do it unless they have something of their own … not necessary big properties, but things around the house … some of the groups started with nothing, today, they own land … that is our goal for my group … that is my feminism (laughing). The roots of African feminism therefore are found in the features of most African societies that stress the communal, rather than individual, values and the preservation of a community as a whole. This theory is embedded in Indigenous theoretical framework and captures the complexities of socio-cultural relations of women and their counterparts. African feminism is a philosophy that comes from the lived experiences of African women before colonization. This theory, then, is rooted in a long history that predates other feminisms foreign to the continent. However, during colonialism, African societies, and in particular African women’s lives, changed drastically. Traditional systems were disrupted, while those reinforcing inequality were cultivated. For instance, in Algeria, the colonial administration felt that to destroy “the structure of Algerian society and its capacity for resistance, [they had] first of all to conquer the women … go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight” (Fanon, 1963). However, it was this colonialist’s frenzy to unveil the Algerian woman that provoked the resistance of the colonized subject. Algerian women, like other African women, fought side by side with men during the liberation wars. There was a rebirth of a new kind of African feminism that emerged in the face of oppression (Steady, 1989)2. Susan Ardnt (2002) views this form of feminism as a theory that addresses oppression and marginalization of women within the African societies. The problem with Ardnt’s (2002) articulation of African feminism is that she does not see African women as agents of change or advocates of their own destiny. The women that participated in my research saw themselves as holding destiny in their hands and not waiting for others to rescue them. Anene explained: I have always been involved with political issues in this village. I organize for meetings so that the prospective candidates can meet other women. I do not do it for money, I do it because I want women to hear it from the horse’s mouth and decide for themselves …. The women from the community are very smart; they know a good politician from a bad one. Some of the older women feel cheated by all the governments …. Past and present …. Their generation lost a relative, a husband or son during the fight for independence. These women were very active … however, they have not seen any results of their involvement with politics. That is why my organizing is different–I feel that if the women are informed, they are in a better position to make decisions whether to support a politician or not … many women go and vote and most of them feel their vote is being wasted on men who will bring no democracy or social justice to the country … I feel helpless sometimes because although I am not young, I am young as compared to my parents who are now in their seventies … Oh I learnt organizing skills from my grandmother … I would

10

AFRICAN INDIGENOUS FEMINIST THOUGHT

call her a feminist if she were alive today. I am not a feminist myself … I would not call myself that. There is an assumption that African women are helpless and passive and under the terror domain of their African men. These arguments about African women and their feminism fail to reflect the social, ideological and ontological realities of African people in terms of gender relations and gender roles (Sudarkasa, 1996). In the New World, African women have taken up activism and resisted exploitation. Their forms of resistance have taken historical methods as articulated below by Jullie, one of the participants in this study: I can still recall like it was yesterday. My father had left us to join the fighters in the forest, my mother and some other women had left early to go to fetch nippier grass for the livestock and others to collect water of firewood. However, on this particular day, the firewood they brought was made of coffee plants–and there were whispers of we had to do it, we had to do–we cannot be working for a government that only thinks of themselves and their families in those far away lands. These women did not call this feminism–they did not call it any name–but these were acts of defiance–these were their ways of sabotaging the Colonial economy. These forms of resistance had been passed down generation from generation; they had to employ the means available to them, ways that would hurt most …. Your question of our benefiting from the coffee proceedings … coffee was not part of our daily food and planting it had meant we had less land for our family food …. Yes, we have used this strategy again and again even as late as 2001. During my interaction with the women, I did not go to the rural village and ask them to describe their anti-colonial movement. Instead, I asked them to explain how the community participated during the fight for independence as well as during the hard days of post-independence government. From the above quotation, Jullie, who was 80 years old, still recalls the strategies the women employed in her community. These anti-colonial strategies, to some extent, played a key role in driving the economy of the colonial government at the time as well as some of the governments that took over from the British in 1964. These arguments are echoed by Steady (1989) who states that the exploitation of Africans through enslavement and their appropriation through colonization, imperialism, and apartheid meant that African women had to fight to ensure the survival of their families, thus giving rise to another aspect of African feminism within the anti-colonial discourse–a discourse that is grounded in both the contemporary and historical lived experiences of a particular society or group of people. In this renewed feminist discourse, African women have called upon their spirituality and self-reliance skills as tools to deal with domination and exploitation and have continued to play the drums. As an African woman, it has, therefore become important for me to centre my decolonizing efforts on the traditional teachings of my grandmothers, which have come to play a great role in my feminist theorizing. In almost every African society, a network of relationships connects people. These connections bring about harmony and well being of the community. This focus on 11

WANE

community is prevalent in all African societies. This is articulated by Anastasia, a 75 year old participant: Women in this village gather for every occasion, birth of a child, death, naming or wedding ceremonies or even whenever there is a crisis of any kind. We assist each other during harvest, cultivating land or even when we need to raise money to send a child to school–like the way we did for your brother when he was going to America. We also gather for rituals, prayers or even for tea. These meetings could be impromptu or they could be structured on a monthly basis or when the need arises. What was apparent was the fact during a major crisis, such as when raising money to send a child to school, the women leaders would be consulted as to how best to go about it, and also these women would have been identified by community members as elders, or women of counsel. There is evidence from oral traditions that many female leaders guided their states through periods of crises. Although it would not be right to generalize the commonalities or differences of women organizing or community activism, there are some elements that were quite obvious from written work as well as rural women’s voices. Although the polarities of thought on African feminism by scholars suggest more differences than commonalities, closer examination reveals the intersections that traverse the differing perspectives. Theories that intersect provide a firmer foundation for a collective and united understanding of African feminist thought. While the titles of the following authors suggest differences, their contents reveal similarities of thought that serve to merge African feminist thought. Ama Ata Aidoo’s The African Woman Today, Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi’s Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality, and Difference, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie’s ReCreating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations, Zulu Sofola’s Feminism and African Womanhood, and Filomina Chioma Steady’s African Feminism: A Worldwide Perspective provide both historical and contemporary context for the rise and development of African feminism and its emphasis on humanistic inclusiveness/orientation. One of the fundamental themes, however, which continuously arises in the writings, is the multiple oppressions that African women face. Multiple oppressions of race, sex, class, and culture crush the voice and spirit of African women until survival becomes their only escape. Race, a socially constructed term, shackles people as social norms and values are ascribed to a person’s skin color or hair texture. African women, whose race condemned them, became part of enslavement in which approximately fifteen to twenty million Africans were shipped abroad (Steady, 1989: 9). In Africa, women are the first to be unemployed and given low work wages (Steady, 1989: 13). Being subjugated to years of exploitive work conditions, African women identified their struggles and rallied together for support and to voice their dissension (Steady, 1989: 17). African feminism identifies the different oppressions, depending on the context. Many have voiced their discontent and disagreement over the discourse of “feminism”. Some African women argue the inadequacy of the term to wholly 12

AFRICAN INDIGENOUS FEMINIST THOUGHT

represent their issues. One argument is the word itself is of foreign importation, that is, feminism as a discourse comes to be constituted through the lived experiences of white European women (Aidoo, 1997: 46; Hudson-Weems, 1998; Nfah-Abbenyi, 1997: 9). Accepting the word is tantamount to submitting to imperialistic conquest (Nfah-Abbenyi, 1997: 9). When “… appropriated and defined by the west, [feminism] has too often become a tool of cultural imperialism” (Kishwar, as cited in NfahAbbenyi, 1997: 9). These views are captured by Motito who stated: I am not a feminist; however, I do a lot of work to raise consciousness among women. For the last 15 years, I have been gathering women in my home so that we can discuss the issues of HIV/AIDS and how we can care for our orphans. We have an organization called Self-help Women Group. Most women here have very little, but we give what we can. We identify those who can look after the children. We identify those who can be sent to government offices to request financial support for the children. We identify those women who can mobilize others to cultivate for grandmothers who are too old to work in their farm and are looking after their orphaned grandchildren … Yes, I am a primary school teacher, but no one said I am a feminist or even called me a one … I am not sure what this feminism you are talking to me is all about … I am just following my mother’s footstep. She was a great community leader, just like her mother. Both of them are in the spirit world, but their spirits are with me. That’s why I believe we can overcome this HIV/AIDS challenge. The oppression experienced by African women cannot be identified within the paradigm of Western feminism. While Western women struggle against patriarchy and work equality, Black women are struggling to obtain the most basic needs, such as water and food, for survival (Emecheta, cited in Nfah-Abbenyi, 1997: 11). Oppression for these women is not founded upon patriarchy but on the inequality established by colonialism. WHAT IS AFRICAN FEMINISM?

I am not a feminist in the way you describe it or the way I hear people talking about it in the radio. What I know is that I am a healer and a traditionalist. I have delivered over two hundred children in this community alone. All the young people who pretend they do not know my name or they have forgotten our language I have a message for them, what will happen to their children, their women … people without roots … what makes us who we are is in us [pointing to herself]. When you cut us off, how will you know how to respond to our drumbeats … our organizational strategies as women … how to respond when husbands or wives or even politicians are out of step with cultural rhythms? My generation cannot read and write as you do, but we have much to share with you. I see some of you young people remove clothes when you protest–those clothes mean something to you where you come from … those straps you wear around your breast are not part of my culture – that is why when you talk of this movement of women–I cannot relate to it (Rigitari, participant: 2007). 13

WANE

As I have argued at the beginning of this chapter, as well as elsewhere (Wane, 2002, 2005), African feminism has been conceptualized in various but similar ways. Filomena Chioma Steady (1989) sees African feminism as an epistemology that enables African women to theorize their gendered status in society. Steady explains that African feminism combines racial, sexual, class, and cultural dimensions of oppression to produce a more inclusive brand of feminism through which women are viewed first and foremost as human beings rather than sexual beings. She notes that it is a body of knowledge that encompasses freedom from oppression based on the political, economic, social and cultural manifestations of racial, cultural, sexual, and class biases. Nnameaka (1997) views it as an ideology that evokes the power of African women and their identities amid the obstacles that confront them. Importantly, one of my participants stated, “Feminism should not be reduced to gender binaries. African feminism is about how African women see the world from their perspective and those ideas also encapsulate issues that affect men and also women themselves. African feminism is not about women issues, but about societal issues.” Elsewhere (Wane, 2002) I have indicated that African feminism is a framework that emphasizes the saliency of colonialism and imperialism and the continued marginalization of women. It is a framework that can be used to rupture the power embedded in the bodies that produce and validate knowledge. The framework challenges the institutional powers and imperial structures that have kept African women and their Indigenous knowledges buried under the weight of modernity. African feminism also identifies with women’s emancipation struggles from a global perspective. African feminism broadly defined then, is a struggle for the liberation of women, and encompasses epistemologies, methodologies, theories, and modes of activism that seek to bring an end to the oppression and subordination of women by men. African feminism draws much of its inspiration from historical, anthropological, and political evidence of African women’s leadership, of women’s mobilizations, and of dynamic and disparate gender relations. The conditions giving rise to feminism in Africa include the history of ancient civilizations as well as colonial rule and imperialism, women’s involvement in nationalist struggles, and contemporary social movements. The term African feminism covers a diverse array of politics centered on the pursuit of more equitable gender relations. However, proper documentation and analysis of the various manifestations of African feminism and the manner in which these have changed over time in different African contexts needs to be researched and documented. As a result, the debate around African feminism and feminism in Africa remains highly contested and difficult to pin down. Even in the era of nationalism, many African men and women have rejected the word outright, considering it as “unAfrican”. Others have displayed varying degrees of acceptance and tolerance, generally around the emancipation and enfranchisement of women, and supporting the inclusion of women in hitherto male-dominated institutions and development. However, African women who identify themselves as feminists have devoted much effort to the reconceptualization of feminism, as evidenced in the plethora of publications generated under the broad rubric of gender and women’s studies carried out in African contexts since the 1980s. In addition, there has been work that has 14

AFRICAN INDIGENOUS FEMINIST THOUGHT

tried to excavate the histories of women’s movements in African societies. African feminists often draw from the history of African women’s leadership in Africa. African women leaders exercised their authority often in a manner that spanned spiritual, political and cultural realms, which has worked to inspire feminist ideas not only in Africa, but all over the world. Women’s movements in Africa reflect the traditions of organizing that have characterized spiritual and material life in Africa as far back as recorded history goes. Examples of women organizing may be found in Kenya, where women organized in work parties as well as in various social and welfare groups. In Nigeria, Igbo women organized around patrilineage and governed through women’s counsel. All through West Africa business has long been conducted through market women’s associations and trading networks, and these were periodically activated in defense of women’s economic interests as well as political ones. It is, however, important to point out that female leadership does not necessarily bring about a feminist or egalitarian society. It is also important to note that women, like men, gained these positions due to their status as members of a certain family. In other words, the existence of female leadership does not imply individual ordinary women had equal rights (Mieke Maerten, 2004). Ordinary women gain their status after their reproductive years are over. African women have been writing to challenge colonialism. Indeed, generations of African women writers have built their careers on intimately interrogating the micro- and macro-effects of colonialism and resistance strategies undertaken within their communities. For example, Flora Nwapa, through her fiction [see her earlier novels, Efuru and Idu] depicts the struggles of Nigerian people as they try to make sense of their exploitation by colonialism and capitalism in the midst of civil war and authoritarianism. Nwapa, like other women authors, exposes the hegemonic order in a society wrapped in a history of colonialism and patriarchy. Although Nwapa repeatedly denied being a feminist, much of her work does address questions of tradition and transformation for women. Nwapa skillfully weaves together traditional Igbo folklore stories to provide a complex analysis of women struggling for independence in their societies. However, within the confines of patriarchal cultures and an emphasis on nationalism that limits women’s agency, women’s voices are fewer and far between. Yet African women are the guardians of traditional knowledge and leaders in resistance struggles. Women’s art of traditional teaching through storytelling, riddles, proverbs and idioms is as ancient as the people themselves. Most African societies acknowledge the fact that oral traditional teachings facilitate the inculcation of socially desirable values such as hard work, honesty, thrift, and wisdom (Aliyu, 1997). Through narration, women pass on knowledges of African cultures and ways of knowing. For instance, Aliyu provides an excellent analysis of how Hausa women in Northern Nigeria act as keepers of knowledge despite the disruption, through colonialism, of traditional ways of teaching. She states that colonialism introduced money, taxes, and wage employment, which destroyed the traditional infrastructure and dragged the Hausa community into the dominant capitalist system. Although there was no specific legislation forbidding traditional ways of teaching, the introduction of the capitalist systems brought tremendous changes into Hausa societies. 15

WANE

This, of course, is not unique to Nigeria, but it is very common in colonized societies. The examples given in this paper demonstrate that despite the efforts of colonizers to disrupt Indigenous practices, women’s role as traditional teachers has never ceased. They have continued their feminist work in different ways so as to end their silence and speak their truths, as they know them. African feminism therefore complements African indigenous knowledge; calls for the acknowledgement of historical and contemporary contributions of African women in knowledge production and dissemination; establishes African a belief system (Badejo, 1998) in restoring African women socio-cultural standpoint; and serves as a convergence for both men and women’s struggle for emancipation from the colonial yoke. DECOLONIZATION AND RESISTANCE: THINKING THROUGH A FEMINIST LENS

The women in this community act–they do not sit and watch their children starve …. We have seen how the price for coffee and tea has gone down. The government does not provide reason for the low prices–they say it is the Wazungus. When shall we stop blaming other people? And that is why you find a lot coffee plots had been cleared. Women who have coffee and tea plots have cut them down and used the trigs to ignite their morning fire. I support these women and their men’s actions. My husband and I were the first to cut our coffee trees. The chief was very angry with me; however, when other families followed suite, he did not know what to do or say. This is my feminism … the movement you keep referring do–although I would not call myself a feminist (Faring, participant: 2007). Amina Mama (1998) makes meaning of the many African feminists who are interrogating and reconceptualizing gender relations by situating the discussion in a historical and social setting. She also emphasizes that we should not lose sight of the fact that Africa is a collective: [B]eing conquered by the colonizing powers; being culturally and materially subjected to a nineteenth-century European racial hierarchy and its gender politics; being indoctrinated into all-male European administrative systems, and the insidious paternalism of the new religious and educational systems … has persistently affected all aspects of social, cultural, political, and economic life in postcolonial African states (Mama, 1998: 47). Feminism can be approached cross-culturally through time by examining all aspects of human life and black women’s struggles for liberation in such diverse areas as race, gender, religion, culture, sexuality, and class (Terborg-Penn, 1989). It is a framework that African feminists, such as Ama Ata Aidoo, have drawn from to confront the problematic representation of Africa and its people: I grew up knowing that Europeans had dubbed Africa ‘The Dark Continent’ … That expression was first used in the Nineteenth Century. Since then its ugly odor has clung to Africa, all things African, Africans and people of African descent everywhere, and has not faded yet. … I am not a psychologist or a 16

AFRICAN INDIGENOUS FEMINIST THOUGHT

psychoanalyst. However, I do know that it has not been easy living with that burden. Africans have been the subject of consistent and bewildering pseudoscholarship, always aimed at proving that they are inferior human beings. Even when there was genuine knowledge it was handled perniciously: by anthropologists and social engineers, cranial and brain-size scientists, sundry bellcurvers, doomsday, medical and other experts (Ama Ata Aidoo, 2000). African women struggling on behalf of themselves and of the wider community are very much a part of African people’s heritage. Many African feminists such as Aidoo try to demystify the fallacy of feminism as a Western or borrowed ideology. They emphasize the centrality of African women’s gendered consciousness in relation to society’s liberation and education. AFRICAN FEMINISM AS ACTIVISM

The African women’s movement has been strongly influenced and shaped by activism against colonial rule as well as the let down by neo-colonial governments. Although women were highly implicated in the struggle for independence, their efforts were not rewarded in the same way as the men. After the struggle for independence few women were accorded politically responsible positions in the new governments. In the 1980s, African women understood that they were paying the highest prize for the political and economic instability in their countries. The rising poverty and different forms of marginalization within their own countries created a new feminist consciousness. In the aftermath of UN decade of women, many “Women in Development” organizations were founded with both national and regional divisions. These organizations met with a lot of resistance from their national governments (Mieke Maerten, 2004). Therefore, African feminism cannot be discussed separately from the larger context of repression and exploitation of both men and women. This has given rise to a renewed feminism and activism aimed at changing social and humanitarian conditions of both men and women. Women have been paying the price for the failure of male multiparty politics or state nationalism, the coups, military dictatorships, economic instability and the pushing of western-steered development programs. The consequences are quite noticeable in the living conditions of women and children and especially in rural Africa. A large number of women suffer from malnutrition and are infected with HIV/AIDS. The women activists, therefore, are caught between supporting the states in resisting western development paradigms and, at the same time, fighting the gender hierarchy in these states. However, it is important to note that, due to the pressure women organizations are placing on their national governments, male politicians feel pressured to rewrite political agendas that include the interests and needs of women. The revitalization of African feminism has been the direct outcome of women’s response to political leaders who have attempted to partially manage recent crises by further limiting and exploiting women. During economic restructuring and democratization, male politicians sought to convince women that their interests were served by the current politicians, while at the same time they would deny any benefits to the women. This is another reason why 17

WANE

women have been bold in addressing the economic and political elements that determine and affect their status (Mikell, 1997). Many African feminists have broken the silence imposed during colonialism and neo-colonialism to speak of their struggles and their realities and tell the truth not spoken about before. They have demonstrated against dictatorships, imprisonment of their children without trial. They have organized macro-enterprises (merry go round, bought buses, cows or goats for milk) to break the circles of poverty; they have organized to uproot coffee trees (usually considered a male crop) and instead have planted food crops to feed their families; they have organized to raise money through a collective effort to send their children to school. Many of these feminist experiences have not been written about or even named as feminist efforts. African feminists and activists as well as writers are astutely aware of advocating a feminism that speaks to the many specific realities and locations of African women, thus placing us at the center of analysis. The politics of privilege, power and especially the power of self-definition and self-determination are fundamental to our liberation and empowerment. As it is crucial to highlight the specifics of African feminist consciousness, it is important to note that this theory also espouses the importance of challenges to each other by being self-reflexive and to acknowledge our privileges and the sites where we may oppress others who do not possess such privilege (Wane, 2002: 47). CONCLUSION

From the voices of the women as well as the literature that has been reviewed, African feminist theory or approach is quite viable as it lends itself to a historically based theoretical framework. It is an approach that can be applied to the study of African women’s lives through an analysis of their networks at local, national and continental levels. It places African women in the centre, a vantage point from which they can create a web of their lives that takes into consideration their experiences, class, sexuality, cultural norms and values. It is a tool that is can be used to analyze the lives of African women today. African feminism is a contested movement. Almost all the women who participated in this study indicated that they were not feminists and did not see themselves as feminists. What this calls for then is that African feminism must revolve around the necessity of building a movement for African women, which reflects and is supportive of the diversity of African peoples. African feminist intellectuals need to create theorizing spaces for African Indigenous women who speak from the grassroots. Many African women intellectuals do not share to a large extent the burden of having to worry about basic necessities of life (food, shelter, health, education). From the voices of the women in this study, their feminism was action oriented and was grounded in an Indigenous knowledge framework that emphasized collectivism, sharing, holism and interdependency with the environment. African communities, whether current or past ones, are not immune from patriarchy. Women have played central roles in organizing political rallies as well as different forms of resistance; yet socially, they occupy very subordinate roles in 18

AFRICAN INDIGENOUS FEMINIST THOUGHT

society. Take for example, the male child versus female child and the centrality of the male figure in a home – speaking out and giving equal treatment to girl child in a home is bound to be contested by male figures. For instance while carrying out my research in Kenya among Embu women, it was not uncommon to hear the following response when a homestead was visited by strangers: “There is no one at home”–Many times I would turn round and ask the women after the visitor has left– what do you mean, why do you say, there is no one at home and you are here–and the response would be: well, baba so and so is not at home – (meaning “the father of so and so”, that is, the husband is not at home). Women therefore have been socialized not to call themselves people in their own homes but as property of the owner of the home–I cannot honestly speak to the root of this practice–however, my assumption is saying partly colonialism and partly some cultural practices. Such practices have inspired African feminists to fight not only for political space or social space, but for justice that goes right to the core of male egocentrism, the fallacy of male superiority and female subordination (Marren Akatsa-Bukashi, 2005). There is a significant number of women researching, writing and theorizing as well as involved in feminist praxis to conclude that African feminism as it was practiced in the past is very much part of the lived reality of African peoples. Critical feminists working within the academy, including Ayesha Imam, Patricia McFadden, Hope Chigudu, Amina Mama, Bisi have been actively writing and organizing in the last two decades or more. African feminists have drawn from this theory to show how the particular constellation of issues affecting them is part of issues affecting women’s emancipation struggles globally. African feminists are dealing with the dilemma of trying to achieve a consensus among themselves about how to respond to the persistence of gender hierarchy in ways that are personally liberating as well as politically constructive. They are seeking to reconceptualize their roles in ways that allow them a new cultural attuned activism (Mikell, 1997). Finally, I would conclude by stating that African feminist is alive and well, what is required is the continued renewal of local cultural knowledge to fecund the lived experiences of African peoples. NOTES 1 2

Quote from research participant interviewed. For more debates on African feminism, refer to Clenora Hudson-Weems, 1997; Aiwa Thiam, 1986; Amina Mama, 1998; Carlene Dei, 1997; Lisa M. Glazer, 1997; Eryn Scott, 1995.

REFERENCES Aidoo, A. A. (1997). The African woman today. In O. Nnaemeka (Ed.), Sisterhood: Feminisms and power. From Africa to the Diaspora (pp. 39–50). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Aidoo, A. A. (1994). To be a woman. In R. Morgan (Ed.), Sisterhood is global (pp. 258–265). New York: Anchor Books. Aliyu, S. (1997). Hansa women as oral storytellers in northern Nigeria. In S. Newell (Ed.), Writing African women (pp. 149–158). London: Zed Books Ltd. Amadiume, I. (1997). Women’s achievements in African political systems: Transforming culture for 500 years. In Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, religion & culture (pp. 89–108). London: Zed Books Ltd. 19

WANE Arndt, S. (2002). The dynamics of African feminism: Defining and classifying African feminist literature. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Badejo, D. (1998). African feminism: Mythical and social power of women of African descent. Research in African Literature, 29(2), 94–111. Capp, J. C., & Jorgensen, C. (1997). Traditional knowledge: Don’t leave home without it. Paper presented at the 62nd North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, Washington, DC. Dei, G. J. S. (1999). African development: The relevance and implications of Indigenousness. In G. J. S. Dei, B. Hall, & D. Rosenberg (Eds.), Global context: Multiple readings of our world (pp. 1–27). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dei, G. J. S. (2000). Rethinking the role of Indigenous knowledges in the academy. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 4(2), 111–132. Few, A. L. (1999). The (un)making of martyrs: Black mothers, daughters, and intimate violence. Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, 1(1), 68–75. Grillo, T., & Wildman, S. (1997). Sexism, racism, and the analogy problem in feminist thought. In J. Adleman & G. Enguidanos (Eds.), Racism in the lives of women: Testimony, theory and guides to anti-racist practice (pp. 171–178). New York: Harrington Park Press. Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press. Hoodfar, H. (1996). Development, change and gender in Cairo: A view from the household. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hudson-Weems, C. (1997). Africana womanism. In O. Nnaemeka (Ed.), Sisterhood: Feminisms and power. From Africa to the Diaspora (pp. 149–162). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Kabira, W. M., & Nzioki, E. A. (1993). Women’s groups movement activities: Achievements and obstacles. In Celebrating women’s resistance (pp. 41–66). Nairobi: African Women’s Perspective. Maerten, M. (2004). African Feminism. Factsheets, 34, 1–8. Retrieved October 17, 2010 from http:// www.escueladefeminismo.org/IMG/pdf/34.pdf Mikell, G. (1997). Introduction. In G. Mikell (Ed.), African feminism: The politics of survival in subSaharan Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mullinix, B. B., & Akatsa-Bukachi, M. (1998). Participatory evaluation: Offering Kenyan women power and voice. In T. J. Edward & Y. Kassam (Eds.), Knowledge shared: Participatory evaluation in development cooperation. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Nfah-Abbenyi, J. M. (1997). Gender in African women’s writing: Identity, sexuality and difference. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nnaemeka, O. (1997). Introduction: The rainbow. In O. Nnaeneka (Ed.), Sisterhood, feminism and power: From Africa to Diaspora (pp. 1–35). Asmara: Africa World Press. James, J. (1999). Shadowboxing: Representations of black feminist politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Mama, A. (1998). Sheroes and villains: Conceptualizing colonial and contemporary violence against women in Africa. In M. J. Alexander & C. T. Mohanty (Eds.), Feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures (pp. 46–63). London: Routledge. Nwapa, F. (1966). Efuru. Johannesburg: Heinemann Publishers. Nwapa, F. (1970). Idu. London: Heinemann Publishers. Ogundipe-Leslie, M. (1994). African women, culture and another development. In Recreating ourselves: African women and critical transformations (pp. 21–42). Trenton: Africa World Press. Steady, F. C. (1989). African feminism: A worldwide perspective. In R. Terborg-Penn & A. B. Rushing (Eds.), Women in Africa and the African Diaspora (pp. 3–24). Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Sofola, ‘Zulu (1997). Feminism and African womanhood. In O. Nnaemeka (Ed.), Sisterhood: Feminisms and power. From Africa to the Diaspora (pp. 51–64). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Sudarkasa, N. (1996). The “Status of Women” in Indigenous African Societies. In R. Terborg-Penn & A. B. Rushing (Eds.), Women in Africa and the African Diaspora (pp. 73–88). Washington, DC: Howard University Press.

20

AFRICAN INDIGENOUS FEMINIST THOUGHT Terborg-Penn, R. (1995). Through an African feminist theoretical lens: Viewing Caribbean women’s history cross-culturally. In V. Shepherd, B. Brereton & B. Bailey (Eds.), Engendering history: Caribbean women in historical perspective (pp. 3–19). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Wane, N. N., Deliovsky, K., & Lawson, E. (Eds.). (2002). Back to the drawing board: African-Canadian feminism. Toronto, ON: Sumach Press. Wane, N. N. (2005). Claiming, writing, storing, and sharing African Indigenous knowledge. Journal of Thought, 40(2), 27–46.

21

JOHN CATUNGAL

3. CIRCULATING WESTERN NOTIONS Implicating Myself in the Transnational Traffic of ‘Progress’ and Commodities

Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan, di makararating sa paroroonan. (Traditional Filipino Proverb, in the Tagalog language) People who do not look back to their origins will not reach their final destination. (Translation in English) INTRODUCTION

The establishment of effective and efficient ties of communication is an important cultural and political process for emigrant Filipinos. This is necessary for a number of reasons, including a personal and practical one, which is that this process allows for Filipinos to stay in touch with relatives and friends and to maintain a constant flow of news, information, moneys and goods between the Philippines and the diasporic Filipino communities throughout the world. The ties that bind Filipinos across political border spaces and across oceans are especially strong during the Christmas season, an important time for the majority Christian Filipino population both ‘at home’ and abroad. It is around Christmas time that many phone calls are made to loved ones back home. It is also around this time that Filipino-style care packages called ‘balikbayan’ boxes (literally “returnee’s boxes”) are sent home. These are filled with an assortment of goods ranging from lotions, soaps and magazines to canned foodstuffs and new and used shoes and clothing. My family is very much involved in this transnational community building process. My parents, originally accountants from the Philippines, decided to seek permanent residence and eventually citizenship in Canada during the 1990’s. After a few years of processing, my father’s legal papers were granted in 1997 and he moved to Canada in the spring of that year. The rest of the family, including my mother and three younger sisters, followed him to Canada in 1999. We settled in the Greater Vancouver area, where some of our relatives (including my maternal aunt) have been living since the 1980’s or earlier. This extended family we have since established in Vancouver is active in this transnational flow of goods and moneys through the regular sending of remittances and the seasonal delivery of balikbayan boxes. Despite being now the senders of these goods and moneys, in the past, my family was positioned as a privileged recipient of these boxes and remittances from our relatives in North America, particular those with whom we now share an extended N. Wane et al. (eds.), The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, 23–36. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

CATUNGAL

family in Vancouver. In this paper, I would like to employ the method of autobiographical story to examine the theoretical, political and personal impacts of my involvement both as recipient and sender in this transnational commodity and financial flow. My overall goal is to elucidate the complex and multifarious cultural politics (Mitchell, 2000) involved within this story, particularly as they relate to the mappings of meaning and representations (Jackson, 1991) onto cultural objects, including remittances and commodities. In so doing, I would like to tease out how the traffic in Western commodities and moneys through such transnational flows as the above also relate to the transnational exportation of Western ideas of progress and modernity that are very much at the heart of the colonial process both in the past (Domosh, 2006; McClintock, 1995) and at present. This paper is guided by one central thesis: that the immigrant communities who are involved in the traffic of the Western notion of progress through their sending of commodities and moneys are anxiously positioned subjects, in that the benevolence and goodwill of their actions are also, at the same time, creating a flow of the idea of progress that aids in neocolonialism. This anxious positioning, I believe, is exacerbated by the fact that the possibilities for action are rendered quite limited by the conditions that are set by colonial and neocolonial regimes. This argument was inspired in part by McClintock’s (1995) analysis of the meaning that soaps acquire as a technology of colonial subjugation and is forwarded not in order to demonize and demoralize the actions of these well-meaning diaspora communities–my family is, after all, included in this category. Rather, what I aim to do is situate these actions within a broader apparatus of neocolonialism that creates a map of the world through the geographical imaginations of the civilized/savage and the developed/dependent (Said, 1978). Having said this, it is important to note that I owe my theoretical foundations to various post-colonial and anti-racist scholars, particularly Anne McClintock (1995), Linda Smith (1999) and Sherene Razack (2002). I am particularly inspired by the ways that these scholars frame the role of socio-spatial knowledge creation in the voracious though incomplete success of colonialism. These scholars echo Said (1978) in making clear that the discursive construction of the world as divided between good/bad and civilized/savage relies upon knowledge productions via the systems of cartography, the economy, educational institutions and the law. This paper seeks to both be a contribution to and an engagement with the arguments of these scholars that deal with the strategies, rationalities and justifications that are mobilized to construct Western knowledges about the world as superior to other knowledges and ways of living. As an examination of the role of transnational commodity flows in the literal circulation of Western notions of progress, this paper is as much a critique of the tendency of Western knowledges to demoralize non-Western ways of knowing as it is an opportunity for me to explore what role I play in this process. I use vignettes from my own personal story as well as the story of my transnational family–a kinship space divided between but connected in a multitude of spaces, from the Philippines to many parts of Canada and the United States–to illustrate moments where the Western idea of progress becomes a central theme in how I understand commodity flows. 24

CIRCULATING WESTERN NOTIONS

My use of autobiographical vignettes in this paper follows from my belief, following feminist and anti-racist scholars, that the personal is political. The way I tell my story from my now privileged position as a Filipino-Canadian academic reveals how I understand my position in the world, as a member of a transnational community of Filipino immigrants, as a privileged male academic and as a gay man of color. It also allows me to ground how I understand political and moral conflicts– about, for instance, which knowledges are considered valid and which ones are devalued–in my own experiences. In her inspiring book Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Smith (1999) writes that storytelling as a method allows us to locate and claim a space for our own voice (143–144), to remember histories and memories of happiness and pain (145–146) and to contribute our own individual narratives in a re-reading of the West (149). Moreover, critical race theorists have elevated storytelling as a method to an esteemed political tool in that it can be used by people of color and other oppressed peoples to “analyze the myths, presuppositions and received wisdoms that make the common culture about race and that invariably render blacks and other minorities one-down” (Delgado and Stefancic, 2000: xvii). It also allows me–using my own stories–to contribute to the transnationalism literature, which, while strong, has often missed out on theorizing how immigrants make sense of their existence as they defy conventional definitions of borders and national containers (Kelly and Lusis, 2006). Before I set off to make my case, I would like to return to the quotation with which I began this paper. Embedded in this quote are particular Indigenous Filipino ways of making sense of temporality and spatiality. We can see, for instance, how the interplay between the past (one’s origins) and the future (one’s final destination) is mediated by how one acts in the present, and especially how or if one remembers to look back and reminisce. One’s origins as understood Indigenously are not just about one’s past in the strict sense of a personal history, but, even more importantly, are about one’s locations in a complex web of social relations. That is, one’s origins are determined through being located as, say, a son to immigrant parents or a resident in a tight-knit community, as in my own story. My origins are determined by my recognition of the importance of these social relations to how I now understand myself in relation to others and to how I understand my future to be shaped by these social relations. So, in many ways, this paper is my attempt to forge connections between where I want to see myself in the future, how I understand myself in the present and what I recall from the past. The rest of this paper goes on in three parts. First, I outline the literatures that I engage with and contribute to. In this section, I address post-colonial perspectives on modernity, which is characterized by consumerism and the unfailing belief in progress and its attendant institutions, and critical race theories on the embeddedness of racial and neocolonial thinking in these systems. Second, I offer some personal vignettes that I want to use to jump into a discussion of my role in the transnationalized transmission of ‘progress’ that implicates Filipino diaspora communities. These include stories about my memories of letters and photographs sent by overseas relatives, care packages containing shoes and other goods from North America and my current positioning as a sender of these knowledge forms and commodities. 25

CATUNGAL

I want to use these memories as segue ways into a discussion of the transnational flows of images, knowledges, myths and meanings about the world and its divisions. Third, I end by discussing how these transnational flows call to task the following related themes: (1) the emergence of a ‘new imperialism’ (Tikly, 2004) and (2) the difficulty of decolonization. In this section, I look at how the institutionalization and normalization of these transnational flows of goods and moneys are used to construct a map of the world that positions the developed world as a space from which the ‘underdeveloped world’ can be ‘rescued’. Immigrants are anxiously positioned in this map of the world as they find themselves unwittingly enrolled as new intermediaries in the production of this global space. MODERNITY AND POST-COLONIAL PERSPECTIVES

Modernity as an illusory social condition rests in a couple of important presuppositions, both rooted in the West’s belief in its superiority and, concomitantly, in the inferiority of those who are not of the West. The first of these presuppositions has to do with the idea of ‘progress’. This is the belief, for the lack of a better term, in the idea that human civilization is in the path of constant betterment towards enlightenment and moral superiority and towards economic self-capacity. The second of these presuppositions has to do with the unfailing belief in the role of science, democracy and liberal institutions such as education, the law and the economy in fostering subjectivities that are conducive to progress. This second presupposition elevated the individual as the sole proprietor of knowledge and ideas and therefore disengaged knowledge production from its rightful social context. Knowledge systems that are communitarian or shared in nature, as in most Indigenous ways of knowing, were devalued in favor of institutionalized knowledges in the academy (Smith, 1999). Science, as a vehicle of progress, supported by the liberal institutions mentioned above, is particularly key to the normalization of the idea of progress. The evolutionary stance supported by scientific knowledges have been applied not only to botanical and zoological systems, but also to social systems in the form of Social Darwinism and the so-called ‘family tree of man’ in which the White European male is placed at the apex (McClintock, 1995). There are, of course, strident post-colonial critiques of the modernist stance, particularly in relation to the explicit link between modernity and imperialism. Of importance to note here is the way progress was accompanied by the physical, spiritual, material and spatial subjugation of non-White peoples through the linked Western systems of religion, economy and education. In this vein, Stoler (1995) puts forward the argument that the making of progressive European bourgeois subjectivities relies, in huge part, on the imperialist activities of European nations and on the need to construct non-European ways of being and knowing in opposition to so-called more enlightened knowledges and subjectivities. The representational project that accompanied the social and political construction of the West as a superior civilization required also a particular mythmaking strategy that represented such counter-progressive and ‘abnormal’ bodies as Sarah Bartmann (the Hottentot Venus) (Gordon, 1992) and the generalized savage ‘other’ (Sibley, 1995). The display of 26

CIRCULATING WESTERN NOTIONS

these peoples as a comparative trope, a way for the ‘civilized’ to come to know him/herself as civilized through the measures of contrast, is a crucial part of the construction of progress as an ideal. Viewed in these lights, the idea that progress is a path towards which everyone is headed can be deconstructed as a myth, or even more strongly, as an illusion or fallacy. Given the way post-colonial critics have commented on the need for progress to construct savagery and backwardness as a barometer for the West to understand itself, it becomes clear that progress is a condition meant to describe only the West (Said, 1978). There is, of course, also a post-colonial geographical argument to be made outside of Said’s (1978) important notion of geographical imaginations of the Orient. After all, those who have taken up Said’s work have also noted that Orientalism does not reside only in the realm of imagination and discourse, but that it is accomplished most effectively through material means. In this vein, it is important to note how such geographical imagination of the Orient was also accompanied by actual establishment of imperial centers and colonial peripheries through geographical expeditions, voyages of so-called ‘discovery’ and the religious missions in the 1500’s and beyond. Viewed in this light, the construction of the West as an enlightened space can be said to be accomplished through a markedly military and geopolitical expression, that is, in the form of such imperial expansionist projects as that of the imperial ‘superpowers’ Britain, France and Spain, and to a great extent, also the United States. There are important material consequences to this spatialization of colonial modernity. The first has to do with the way that colonial governmentality relies on changing the very conditions of Indigenous ways of living through the introduction of foreign knowledges, material cultures and practices (Scott, 1995). For instance, in Canadian and American contexts, as well as in other spaces of colonial encounter, this meant the forced material seizure and confiscation of Indigenous lands and resultant displacement that this entailed a total reconfiguration of the social systems, of relations between the land and its people and among people (Harris, 2002). Moreover, this process was also most effectively accomplished through the use of murderous violence, of Indigenous peoples and their ways of knowing (Smith, 1999). This has massive implications, for instance, in the way Indigenous conceptions of land and property were configured and replaced with socio-legal understandings of property that have its origins in European legal systems (Blomley, 2004). Since the land is crucial to how knowledges are passed on between generations, this also adversely affected the intergenerational transmission of Indigenous ways of knowing. It is important to note that a part of the illusion of colonial modernity has to do with the performance of colonial benevolence. By this, I am referring to the way that Western imperialism was often discursively constructed and justified through the discourse of help and rescue. In alluding to this, I am not, in any way, giving praise to the imperial project as a moral project. On the contrary, the supposed benevolence that accompanied imperialist expansionism existed only because of the ideological construction of the “white man’s burden” (Berger, 1966), which is the socalled divine-given duty to spread Western progress onto other parts of the world. This ‘burden’ had many dimensions, including religious and educational ones, but also, in the 1800’s and the early 1900’s, this shifted towards economic expansionism 27

CATUNGAL

that relied upon of commodities and their transfer from Europe to the rest of the world (McClintock, 1995; Domosh, 2006). The role of commodities and the transfer of economic knowledges and concepts as part of the imperialist project have been analyzed in some depth by both McClintock (1995) and Domosh (2006). These scholars have pointed to the way that commodities, including soap in McClintock’s analysis and agricultural and domestic technologies such as sewing machines in Domosh’s, are attached with particular meanings relating to the pursuit of Western progress and modernization. Both also deal with the way commodity cultures restructure gendered relations in colonial peripheries through the introduction of new understandings of Western domesticity. Their scholarship has been extremely useful in elucidating the role of shifted economic geographies and sociologies in the colonial context, though because their scholarship has been limited to historical time periods, there is a particular paucity of contemporary forms and impacts of colonialism as manifested through economic objects and processes. This, right here, is a particularly strong silence in these analyses and forces us to ask questions about the way modernity, consumption and colonialism continue to exist in voracious ways today. There are strands of research that do acknowledge the role of consumerism, particularly American consumer culture, in globalization (Haugerud et al., 2000), but these are often limited to critiques of the hegemony of American firms in the world. I find that what is often missing in these critiques of global consumerism are two things: (1) there is often a refusal in these works to consider how globalization and the continued dominance of Western economies are a continuation of the colonial process, masked in economic terms, but also continuing to reproduce the superiority of the West as a particular geographical space, and (2) there is also a paucity of postcolonial analysis that treats transnationalism, as a symptom of globalization, as a contributor to neocolonial processes, particularly the traffic of the idea of ‘progress’. The rest of this paper considers the limits of the above literatures. I use personal stories to shed light on the neocolonial geographies that are produced by the global flows of commodities and finances and the circulation of the idea of Western progress that accompanies these flows. In the next section, I put forward some stories about shoes, foodstuffs, moneys and other objects with neocolonial meaning to shed light on my dual role as an immigrant in the transnational reproduction of the idea of ‘progress’ as embodied and located in this cultural objects. AN IMMIGRANT’S STORY: IMPLICATING MYSELF IN TRANSNATIONAL FLOWS OF PROGRESS

Filipinos have long been involved in what can be considered a state-sanctioned building of transnational lives, landscapes and livelihoods. This transnationalism is state-sanctioned insomuch as the previous four presidential regimes have supported via legislation, government programs, tax exemptions or nationalistic discourse the export of particularly gendered Philippine labor to other countries, particularly as domestic workers in Canada and Hong Kong, as oil field laborers in the Middle East and as immigrants to Canada and the United States (Pratt, 2004). Accompanying this transnational formation of social and economic relations is an important shift 28

CIRCULATING WESTERN NOTIONS

towards a Philippine economy dependent on the entry of foreign moneys and goods via remittances and care packages. In 2003, Filipinos living overseas sent over $7.5 billion in cash remittances alone, along with over 300000 balikbayan boxes containing foreign goods (Ly, 2004). Statistics like these have allowed scholars like Tolentino (1996) to note, without hyperbole, that “[t]ransnational space keeps the Philippine economy afloat” (49). My family is part of this well-established chain of migration and transnational space, creating for us a place in an expatriate Filipino community still connected in various ways to our motherland. I was born in the Philippines in 1984, to two young start-up accountants who then managed to make a comfortable life for me and my three younger sisters. All of us children were sent to private Catholic schools established by the Spanish Dominican Order of Priests, where we acquired both Catholic spiritual beliefs and a liberal education with English as a primary method of instruction, owing to the onslaught of American imperial conquest after the SpanishAmerican War of 1898. We then moved to Vancouver from the Philippines in 1999, following relatives who in previous years settled in the city and close by (e.g., Seattle). The reasons for our immigration have to do with a particular future that both my parents desired for their children: a better quality education, economic standing in an economically and politically stable country and a healthier physical environment. This short list of reasons already alluded to here refers to a particular political economy of immigration that includes the role of a political instability and economic uncertainty in the face of globalization and the realization that the future in the Philippines for us is not as good as what it could be in North America. There is, then, already a reproduction of the myth of North America as the land of ‘milk and honey’, which, while true in comparison, serves to mask the structural racisms that make immigrant living in North America difficult as well as the colonial discourses and practices that position the West as a superior space to begin with. Photographs of Progress Because of our immigration to Canada, we have now positioned ourselves as senders of goods and finances to relatives back home at least once a year in the case of Balikbayan boxes, but more often in the case of remittances. Before we moved to Canada, however, our family was particularly active in the receiving end of the transnational remittance of goods and moneys from relatives in North America. As a child of around age 7 to 8, one of my most vivid memories of the existence of my transnationally-placed family has to do with the sending of photographs by relatives. One particular photograph that stuck vividly to my mind depicts my now-deceased Aunt Norie, my father’s first cousin, posed in front of an endless row of red tulips when she took part in Washington State’s annual tulip festival in Skagit Valley. The North American landscape depicting rows of tulips, along with my knowledge that she is a highly mobile woman who is able to include extensive personal travel as part of her recreational activities, suggested to me that North American spaces are beautiful in that they offer encounters with landscapes that are not available, because of ecology in the Philippines. It also suggested to me that it is her position 29

CATUNGAL

as a resident in North America that afforded her the luxury to enjoy these landscapes. As a middle class citizen in the Philippines, my family was well-to-do enough to enjoy a comfortable living, certainly in comparison to our neighbors and other relatives, but not well-to-do enough to travel even to tourist sites in the Philippines, much less abroad. As a child, I longed to enjoy the landscapes that my aunt in Vancouver enjoyed. I wanted to partake in her invitation to my parents–and implicit in the photo captions–to come to Canada to experience what it has to offer. This invitation, as well the flow of messages and images through the sending of letters and photographs and the making of telephone calls, are some of the ways that chains of migration are sustained in transnational spaces. More than that, however, these forms of transnational linking also situate immigrant Filipinos and those residing in the Philippines in a global flow of goods and services. The aunt that I refer to above joined our other relatives in Canada to send those of us in the Philippines (when we still resided there) goods that continued to portray, as in the photos, just how structurally better life is in Canadian and American cities. While I recognize the multiple meanings attached to these letters–that, in the first instance, they serve as forms of maintaining kinship ties and family histories, and that they too serve as a means of transnational financial support in an age of economic risk–I also want to foreground how, from a cultural politics perspective, these transnational flows of information, goods and moneys carry with them particular world maps that divide the globe into haves and have-nots and into independent and dependent nations (Said, 1978). What this does is the positioning of immigrant communities, who, while well-meaning, are also implicated in the circulation of this geographical imagination of the divided world where North America and Europe are positioned as ideologically and materially superior to the rest of the world. In this sense, photographs and letters echo the function of the soap in McClintock’s analysis: they work to disseminate ideas about which subjectivities are conducive to progress and offer recipes for working towards this subjectivity. My relatives already residing in Canada were accompanied by their stories, told in the form of letters and telephone conversations, about the happiness of being able to enjoy travels, of being able to acquire fresh fruits for cheap, and of being able to enjoy the fresh air and nature of the Vancouver landscape. As objects of representation not unlike the texts analyzed by Said (1978) and the National Geographic magazines analyzed by Luts and Collins (1993), the letters and photographs crossed borders to tell stories about the superiority of the North American way of life. In a lot of ways, they function to entice us–to seduce us into complicity–to buy this representational geography that puts North American space front and centre and in opposition to the dismal and uncertain future that the Philippines beheld for us. Photographs and letters, as cultural objects with meaning and narrative, position immigrants in an uneasy space. These objects serve pedagogical and kinship functions: they allow relatives divided across global space to continue to learn about each other’s lives and, in so doing, allow diasporic communities to work against the friction of distance that accompanies the setup of transnational familial relations. They are about knowledge production insofar as they also contain with them emotional investments in memory-making and in the transfer of familial knowledges across 30

CIRCULATING WESTERN NOTIONS

generations. As a child before my teenage years, I remember the letters and photographs sent my relatives, those recollections of their own childhood pasts and their memories of me and of our family when I was still young. Yet, these texts, as I had shown, also carry with them particular messages that recreate colonial geographies, positioning the West in a privileged position while, at the same, disseminating these same messages to those in the colonial peripheries of the Global South. A common theme that I remember in these letters is the telling of a particular form of spirit injury–that of helplessness–as a result of the so-called meltdown of the Philippines’ economic and political life. Even now, when we in our extended family in Vancouver try to recall why it was necessary for us to relocate here, the constant refrain always has to do with the fact that our families were left with few choices. Emigration as a particular form of insurance for a better future was and continues to be constructed as the only reasonable trajectory to escape the dismal conditions of the Philippines. In these texts of recollection, the political economy and colonial networks that created these dismal conditions–including the ‘rape of the land’ in the Philippines as a result of transnational corporations and the American military presence as well as the problematic economic policies engendered in the development work of such institutions as the IMF and the World Bank (Enloe, 2000) – are rarely, if ever, mentioned. The erasure of these things renders the structural reasons for the “need” (rather than the ‘want’) to immigrate particularly invisible. My family still continues to send letters and photographs and make phone calls to our remaining relatives in the Philippines. We do this out of our desire to maintain familial relations, to listen to stories about our homeland and to claim our membership in our Filipino community even as we are far away. We also serve, inadvertently and perhaps subconsciously, to propagate notions of progress. There are moments of escape from this transnational traffic of ‘progress’, however, and I have seen this recently in the way my parents communicate to our relatives in the Philippines. They have begun to voice the difficulties faced by us and other immigrants in our new homes. They have also started speaking about the discrimination that people of color face in the Canadian job market as well as in schools and other institutions. In so doing, they contribute to a disruption of the myth of progress as mapped onto North American cities. Branding the Self Through Imported Goods I had the privilege of attending two prestigious Catholic private schools in the Philippines: the Espiritu Santo Elementary School and the University of Santo Tomas High School. Both these schools are run by local chapters of the Dominican Order of the Roman Catholic Church, an easily recognizable and strong remnant of the days of Spanish colonialism. In fact, I remember that the University of Santo Tomas is older than Harvard University and constitutes one of the most successful importations of Spanish educational institutions to the Philippines in the 1600’s. Attendance to both these schools marked me amongst my peers as a privileged subject given that private education in the Philippines is prohibitively expensive for the majority of the population. To add to this, a Catholic education colonized me in 31

CATUNGAL

many senses: after all, colonialism and the spread of Christianity in the Philippines went hand-in-hand (Rafael, 1993). More than anything, however, my positioning as part of a privileged few to attend these schools was accompanied by even more pressures within these spaces to, recalling Butler (1990), “perform” specific subjectivities through the marking of the body with particular brands of clothing and shoes. My classmates, many of whom are connected to transnational and diasporic networks of capital and money, performed these subjectivities really well because they were either able to afford these brands or were sent these brands by relatives from elsewhere. This situation was especially acute during my two years at the University of Santo Tomas High School, which mandated so-called civilian clothing on Wednesdays (with other days requiring the use of uniforms). As I recall, either one wears branded clothing, especially Nike shoes, shirts and accessories, or else s/he cannot claim membership in the elite group of peers. I was easily able to partake in what I now see as an extremely elitist and neocolonial ritual of high school life because of my family’s positioning in a transnational network of relatives. This worked for me especially after my father left the Philippines in 1997 to work in Vancouver, two years prior to the rest of the family joining him in 1999. I was able to grab a toehold on progress by requesting branded goods from relatives in Canada and the United States. I remember once calling my father in Vancouver to ask him for a pair of Nike basketball shoes, not because I played basketball (I, in fact, loathed the sport) but because wearing one would establish me as a having a particular classed subjectivity. The shoes arrived at around Christmas that year as part of a balikbayan box that he and my aunts sent our family back home. My memory of the shoes, as well as the other goods that were included in these balikbayan boxes, were as much about my childlike fascination with presents as it is about the fact that these cultural objects were foreign objects, and foreign goods, particularly Canadian or American ones, are particularly esteemed in the Philippines because they bestow about the owner particular classed subjectivities. Yet, it would be unjust to be content with a class analysis of these memories, for they have as much to do with neocolonial formations. Of particular importance here is the political work that the esteeming of American brands do to render them markers of good and moral identify formation. They also symbolize a particular belief in the notion of progress, which is said to be available through the consumption of particular Western consumer goods, such as, in my case, Nike shoes. In her analysis of the role of soap in the shift from scientific racism to commodity racism, McClintock (1995) notes that the colonizing function of consumption has to do with its ability to create the illusion that the spaces of the economy levels the playing field between people, regardless of race. Through the use of consumer goods such as the soap, one is able to try and become civilized, with ‘try’ being an operative word. After all, McClintock (1995) goes on to note that while soaps can offer the illusion of whiteness through the importation of hygienic practices, they nevertheless fail–and imperialists know this–to endow the ‘Other’ the subjectivity of whiteness. Returning to my own experiences, my love affair for shoes and other branded goods–symbols, to me, of my claim to Westernness–were tied up with my own positioning as a member of a transnational family. By this, I mean two things. 32

CIRCULATING WESTERN NOTIONS

First, the shoes and other goods were, to me, tied up with Western ways of being, and so my ability to wear them signaled to me that I could, even in a small way, also garner the respect and high esteem that my peers accord to those who have claims to Westernness. Secondly, and in relation to the function of photographs and letters exemplified above, the shoes and goods were made available to me in huge part through my membership–and their circulation–in a transnational flow of Western cultural objects accomplished through such practices as the remittance of balikbayan boxes. In this sense, the consumer goods that come within these balikbayan boxes also act as geopolitical signifiers, coding the world in ways that elevate the location of these goods–North America and Europe–as being in a higher and more important place than the rest of the world. For it is identification with these white spaces that accords these goods particular importance. My special request for shoes aside, the contents of these boxes are actually often ordinary, at least to North American residents. Ly (2004) notes that balikbayan boxes often contain mundane things such as microwavable popcorn, jars of instant coffee or inexpensive cosmetics. In my family, the most commonly sent items include such things as Spam luncheon meats, canned tuna and corned beef. For most North Americans, there is nothing particularly extraordinary about these objects; however, for those of us who know the meanings attached to these goods outside of North America, they are particularly important symbols of identity and standing. In my experiences on the receiving end of these boxes, the sight of luncheon meats and toys from the West was most often received with fanfare because they are both a symbol of the transnationalization of familial care–the provision of goods becomes hence a transnationalized act and performance of affect–and also a form of representation of the West and its ways of living. Thus, the act of gift giving as exemplified by balikbayan boxes are uneasily positioned performances. They are benevolent acts, performances of caring, that continue to bind families even as they are scattered globally. At the same time, these acts are also implicated in the circulation of the idea of progress and of a better Western way of life. They–and the people who participate in this transnational flow, including my family–are thus put in a political double bind where one’s act of caring can also lead to the reproduction of a Western-centric ideologies. The potential role of these acts in reproducing a neocolonial global map thus needs to be challenged, but whereto shall one go? Does one abandon these transnational relations of caring and, in so doing, challenge the embeddedness of colonial meanings within these commodities? The circulation of Western embodiments of culture and economy immanent in these commodities makes for a difficult situation to theorize, because in severely criticizing it, perhaps one comes too close to demonizing immigrants and blaming them for the veracity and continuation of the discourse of a superior Western ways of being. I turn, then, to David Scott (1995) to theorize the role that colonial governmentality plays in the maintenance of a popular geographical imagination that positions the West as ideologically apart from and superior to the rest of the world. Scott’s (1995) theory of colonial governmentality rests in the idea that one of the most important methods for the West’s maintenance of its supposed intellectual, 33

CATUNGAL

moral and political superiority is its mobilization of discourses and strategies that limit the possible courses of action that one might be able to take in order to wriggle free of the binds of colonialism. This was accomplished in two ways: first, through the displacement of Indigenous conditions and ways of understanding and connecting with the land and with the economy, and second, through the replacement of these ways of being “by the inducement of new conditions based on clear, sound and rational principles” (Scott, 1995: 199). Recalling in the first example of letters and photographs the notion of spiritinjury in the form of helplessness, one can see how the double bind of immigrant participants in this transnational flow has a lot to do with the way alternatives to such things as immigration or to understandings of the cultural meanings of commodities are oftentimes limited because they have been demonized or displaced by the actions of colonial and neocolonial institutions such as the above. Moreover, Indigenous ways of understanding such things as footwear or clothing have been replaced by a more pervasive understanding of these commodities as conferring upon the owner a particular status or class. IMPERIALISM’S CONTINUATION AND THE UNEASE OF DECOLONIZATION

Any form of colonialism is bound to leave a mark of some kind. (Wane, 2006: 87) In this paper, I have drawn from my recollections and experiences to theorize the role of transnational flows of commodities (such as shoes) and texts (such as photographs and letters) in the continuation of imperialism and colonialism. I dialogued with my stories as a first-generation Filipino gay male immigrant living in, and now a citizen of, Canada to place myself in the constructions of these transnational spaces of flows. This method is important for me for a couple of reasons. First, in offering my own stories, I provide myself with an opportunity to reflect on and come to know my experiences and how these experiences have affected how I understand myself as a person today. It also allows me to see myself in relation to other people with whom I share my experiences, particularly members of the Filipino diaspora community. Second, these stories allow me to talk about colonialism and neocolonialism as lived experiences, as something that happens to people, as something that is done to people. Part of my impetus and spiritual inspiration for writing this paper has to do with my frustration at myself for being involved, consciously and subconsciously, in the subjugation of my people’s cultures and knowledges. In cataloguing some of my complicities in a somewhat recollectional and confessional form, I hope to, at the very least, own up to my lived experiences of colonial and neocolonial regimes as both a victim of it and perhaps even an unwilling perpetrator of these processes. My argument centered on the role of immigrant communities and the transnational flows of goods and finances of which they are an active part. As a Philippine-bornand-raised Canadian citizen with relatives still in the motherland, I use my own experiences as both sender and receiver of these flows to argue that immigrants are anxiously positioned subjects, caring for their relatives across transnational space 34

CIRCULATING WESTERN NOTIONS

while at the same time potentially propagating a world map that locates the West as a central and privileged space. The examples that I use both have to do with the construction of the paradigm of helplessness, what I am calling a particular form of spirit-injury, wherein the possibilities for one’s actions are rendered quite limited by colonial processes. In the Philippines, the histories of colonialism by both Spanish and American imperialists are still present in how I came into my personhood, having been taught in an American-style, English-language liberal educational institution founded by a Spanish Catholic religious order. This shows, in a very personal way, that the history of colonial subjugation has never really ended. If anything, the impacts of these histories are still felt and, to a great degree, even exacerbated by the normalization and institutionalization of Philippine dependency upon foreign (Western) aid because of the neocolonial and neoliberal economic policies of the IMF and the World Bank. This constitutes for Tikly (2004) a new world order in which “new imperialism”, characterized by the fusion of global economic interests and state formation, is the order of the day. These conditions are also some of the conditions that, following Scott’s (1995) notion of colonial governmentality, set limits on what actions are possible to the colonized. The need to decolonize is a difficult task, given that limits are set on what is possible for the colonized. The dependency of the Philippines on foreign remittances and the government’s institutionalization of immigration and labor exportation as an economic development policy (Pratt, 2004) are some of the limit-conditions that determine the formation of transnational flows of goods and moneys, as are such legacies of Philippine-American colonialism as the institutionalization of English as an official language. The normalization of these colonial and neocolonial legacies through institutionalization makes difficult the project of decolonization, for I see in the cities of the Philippines a very successful defamation and erasure of Philippine ways of knowing. The institutions set up to continue neocolonialism in the Philippines–including legislations, education systems and the heroic, nationalistic discourse around immigration–create a system of constant oppression, where the possibilities for advancement are seen by many to be accomplishable most effectively through immigration. My family is one of many to be enticed by the material gains of immigration. Our uprooting from our homeland is something that I, personally, do not regret, because my tenacity is something that I have learned from my parents. The support systems we have for each other, as well as the ties we keep with our transnational family involving Philippine, Canadian and American locations, constitute some of our own methods for fighting for the survival of kinship ties and familial memories. My story is a long and continuing one, involving first and foremost my own recognition that my history, my present and my future are tied up in a bigger story about the world and how it is constituted as a space of difference. It is my hope for this short reflection to be the start of a longer personal journey for me to come to understand the processes that constitute my location today. My voice in these stories may be pained, but it certainly is not hopeless. My telling of stories and my invocation of memories are some of the ways that I am attempting to claim for myself a voice 35

CATUNGAL

with which to speak, even as this voice is limited by the colonial process. In seeking to speak and asserting my claim to space, this is my own way of celebrating my journey and recognizing that this journey towards decolonization maybe be difficult, constant and without end, but certainly not impossible. REFERENCES Berger, C. (1966). The true north strong and free. In P. Russell (Ed.), Nationalism in Canada (pp. 3–26). Toronto: McGraw-Hill. Blomley, N. K. (2004). Unsettling the city: Urban land and the politics of property. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (Eds.). (2000). Critical race theory: the cutting edge. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Domosh, M. (2006). American commodities in an age of empire. New York: Routledge. Enloe, C. (2000). Bananas, beaches and bases: Making feminist sense of international politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gordon, R. (1992). The venal Hottentot Venus and the great chain of being. African Studies, 51(2), 185–201. Harris, C. (2002). Making native space: Colonialism, resistance and reserves in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press. Haugerud, A., Stone, M. P., & Little, P. D. (Eds.). (2000). Commodities and globalization: Anthropological perspectives. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Jackson, P. (1991). Maps of meaning: An introduction to cultural geography. New York: Routledge. Kelly, P. F., & Lusis, T. (2006). Migration and the transnational habitus: Evidence from Canada and the Philippines. Environment and Planning A, 38(5), 831–847. Luts, C. A., & Collins, J. L. (1993). Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ly, P. (2004, December 24). Money is not enough at Christmas. The Washington Post, p. B05. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial context. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, D. (2000). Cultural geography: A critical introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Pratt, G. (2004). Working feminism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rafael, V. L. (1993). Contracting colonialism: Translation and colonial conversion in Tagalog society under early Spanish rule. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Razack, S. (Ed.). (2002). Race, space and the law: Unmapping a white settler society. Toronto: Between the Lines. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism: Western conceptions of the Orient. New York: Vintage Books. Scott, D. (1995). Colonial governmentality. Social Text, 43, 191–220. Sibley, D. (1995). Geographies of exclusion: Society and difference in the west. New York: Routledge. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. New York: Zed Books. Stoler, A. L. (1995). Race and the education of desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the colonial order of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tikly, L. (2004). Education and the new imperialism. Comparative Education, 40(2), 173–198. Tolentino, R. B. (1996). Bodies, letters, catalogs: Filipinas in transnational space. Social Text, 48, 49–76. Wane, N. N. (2006). Is decolonization possible? In G. J. S. Dei & A. Kempf (Eds.), Anti-colonialism and education (pp. 87–106). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

36

MARLON SIMMONS

4. THE RACE TO MODERNITY Understanding Culture Through the Diasporic-Self

INTRODUCTION

In the much popularized postmodern context, race has often been framed as complex, sophisticated, and shifting, making way for the discursive ground of culture, ethnicity, and Diaspora. Needless to say, within the present globalized transnational epoch, one is faced with different questions concerning Diasporic identity (Hall, 2005, 2007a, 2007b). Yet race, culture, ethnicity, identity are not distinct moments, rather they come to be discursively constituted, working in some protean way to form these different transnational identities. What I am interested in, is the experience of the Diasporic body concerning these contemporary questions of identity, as they come to be historically shaped through the social conjunctures of the many cultural formations of modernity. I am asking: How do Diasporic peoples come to understand their lived public space? How does race, as a way of knowing, form integrative spaces for Diasporic bodies? And how do Diasporic peoples build a working cultural register to strategically engage their everyday lived social? These are some of the burgeoning questions that I am thinking through as I engage this discussion. So, in what is to follow, I will talk about race, culture, Diaspora and identity in the context of modernity with the intention of opening up what I think are spaces to help disentangle some of these soundly hidden dominant–subordinate relations. My intention is to bring critical discernment concerning the ways in which space independent of bodies comes to be reified through race, keeping in mind space is always already constituted through bodies. In that, I would like us to think through culture to understand how colonizing spaces of Euromodernity become localized to a particular Diasporic body. From the outset, let me say that the purpose of the discussion is not to challenge the way in which this category of Diaspora has been historically conceptualized, that is to say, what constitutes some valid displacement, dispersion, exile, exodus, or movement of a given people. I am more concerned with the socialization processes through different Diasporic bodies, to understand the communicative strategies and contemporary mannerisms, the particular modes of interacting that facilitate the everyday engagement of peoples in a new place. When I speak about Diaspora, I do not mean in a sum total way, dislocation of a people, though in some sense dislocation is what is experienced, nor am I speaking about a totalizing experience of exile, though these are all part and parcel of the Diasporic experience. In a sense then, I am not speaking about the Diaspora as a sum classifying system, while at the same time I am. Yet with working with these entangled overtones, I am more N. Wane et al. (eds.), The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, 37–50. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

SIMMONS

thinking of the movement of people to different geographies, a movement whereby people come to know themselves through the margins of their contemporary public sphere. I am more concerned about identity, citizenry and the relationship with the state and in what way this sense of nationalism is approached through the Diasporization of peoples. I am less occupied with what constitutes a legitimate Diaspora, or to historically trace the trajectory of movement of particular peoples, or why one moves to a different geography, nor will I attempt to pin down the Diaspora to a historic time frame, space, geography or to some body. Instead, I am more speaking from my lived experiences with the intention of engaging in a self-reflexive dialogue in which Diasporic bodies can come to interpret their respective experiences. CITIZENSHIP AND HUMANISM

I begin at March/11/2008, Glossop Road, Sheffield, England. It was the designated reading week for most graduate schools here in Ontario. I had the opportunity to listen to a thesis defense at one of the academic institutions in Sheffield. But while in Sheffield, what got my attention was what was the popular debate in the mass media public sphere (Habermas, 1991; Appadurai, 1996; Fraser, 1992; Brantlinger, 1990). From newspapers to television, what was shoved in my face was the question of Britishness. Some of the headlines were, “What does it mean to be British? Is allegiance to the Queen enough to be British? And is Britishness, Englishness?” I was a bit taken back with these conversations, in particular the way in which the question of citizenry, and what constitutes the authentic citizen were still troubling ingredients for public sphere talk. The conversations I felt were in some collective way, hooked on some fixed category of identity. In fact what was being invoked into these mass media debates was how to inject more Britishness into British. Much of the debate was centered on the question of: In this globalised society how do we begin to think of what it means to be British? And is pledging allegiance to the Queen and country sufficient to produce citizenry? But for me, concerning here from Glossop road, is the question of Diasporic citizenry, insofar as how this particular form of humanism comes to be constituted in the interest of nation-state, through the surveillance of mass media public sphere (Shapiro, 2005; Gilliom, 2005; Brantlinger, 1990). My interest concerns the way in which cultural conditions form and re-form themselves through the governance of what I call Enlightened subjectivities. I am querying how this newly everyday Diasporic citizenry rewrites the cosmopolitan through these colonially imbued Enlightened subjectivities (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). From Glossop road, I was experiencing Diasporic citizenry not to say forming itself as some new counterpublic (Dawson, 1995; Gregory, 1995), but Diasporic citizenry as being located in a way whereby the Diasporic-self had to conform or adapt to the particular historic colonial conditions of citizenry. So from the beginning the Diasporic self was always already presupposed as being outside the realm of what it means to be a British citizen within the Euro-Anglo context. More so too, there was a particular push and pull activity happening, and if I can articulate this moment as being the turbulence formed when the primacy of cultural knowledges as an ontological raw resource of the African Diaspora interacts with the cultural 38

THE RACE TO MODERNITY

register of modernity (Foster, 2007; Everett, 2002), allowing for a shift and at the same time stabilizing these inherently pure, singular categories of let us say British, English or Canadian. For me, Glossop road brought up some of the tensions the Diasporic-self experiences when communicating within Euromodernity. Glossop road reminded me of ways in which racialised bodies come to be discursively positioned and interpreted in conversations. Glossop road moved me to think about how the lived experiences of the Diasporic-self come to be nuanced, through some of these historic-colonial narratives. What Glossop road did, was really to push me to think about what it means to communicate in a public space with multiple historic specificities or multiple modernities (Habermas, 1998), Glossop road pushed me to think about the way in which difference comes to organize around, if I can say, a particular fixed singular triumphed form of origin, while at the same time being grounded to a certain historical primacy. Britishness then in a sense, as circumscribed through the colonial scripting of the body, coalesces with emerging Diasporic modernities. Central to this debate concerning Britishness is pondering whether to include or not to include, to defend or not to defend the colonial will of British modernity. THEORIZING CULTURE, DIASPORA AND KNOWLEDGE FORMATION

Glossop road speaks to the ways in which not only how Diasporized bodies and Diasporic geographies come to be encoded and textualized but also the aestheticization of these cartographies that produced what Fanon (Fanon, 1967: 11) calls the ‘epidermalization of inferiority’, a culturally inscribed schema, which operationalizes scaffold imbued relations onto society. So we have relations being formed where culture now becomes starting points for conversations. wa Thiong’o tells us that “culture carries the values, ethical, moral and aesthetic by which people conceptualize or see themselves and their place in history and the universe, that these values are the basis of a society’s consciousness and outlook” (wa Thiong’o, 1993: 77). Diasporic culture then as formed through these particular knowledges, and as posited in overdeveloped countries cites itself in ways whereby it is always speaking in relation to colonial narratives of the past and present alike. I say past and present for there is this ongoing re-shaping and re-writing of historic colonial narratives as it is experienced through the Diasporic-self. But what is this re-shaping and re-writing of colonial narratives by the Diasporic-self ? Is it not the capacity for the Diasporicself to experience other ways of knowing, other values, customs, practices, and knowingly or unknowingly participate in its everydayness? More so, experiential knowledge, embodied as one’s own by the Diasporic-self, might be taken up in a synchronic way, as in the now, disconnected from histories, time and space. Or in another context, some of the experiences of the Diasporic-self might be engaged with the conscious knowing of colonial histories. For though culture can be understood through space and time, we still experience culture through its embodiment. In that, bodies do not operate in vacuums, they form relations, compartmentalized or bound; culture then has the capacity to traverse through these once impermeable membranes. Incommensurable as it were, culture is very much dependent on the body, which has caused all sorts of problems for contemporary debates concerning citizenry. 39

SIMMONS

Diasporic culture as it reveals itself through bodies of difference, comes to converge and diverge at different moments, such that the identity of the Diasporic-self is revealed and marked in ways where meaning and experience are understood through this omnipresent historic colonial narrative. Grand and ontologised as it were, and popularized through the chosen image, the Diasporic-self is invited to participate in certain spaces through spontaneous performances in order to strategically maneuver nation-state imperatives, imperatives that more so give guidelines on how race, gender, space and time ought to be engaged (Goldberg, 2002; Balibar, 2002; Dei, 2006; Collins, 2000; Wane, 2007). Time here though accompanies itself with this cultural register of modernity (Habermas, 1998), which continuously updates itself with particular currencies on the re-marked Diasporic-self. Importantly then for the Diasporic-self as located in the contemporary West is identifying marked spaces where the colonial aesthetic come to reside, that is, being cognizant of the dominant encoded currency within one’s governing social space. In that, the Diasporic-self becomes encoded in a way that accords mobility through the myriad inter–intra cultural relations. Difference, in a sense then, form de-symmetric relations operating tangential to these colonial inscribed meanings as popularized by mass media. Fluid, dynamic, transformative as it were, culture, though spatial, comes to be represented through the Diasporic-self. Culture has these transformative and mutable components, resulting in the ever-transcendental Diasporic-self. Transcendental as they may be, identities are neither separated nor fixed to particular historical domains. Differencesameness of culture, at times, is more so negotiating, or cognizant of each other’s anachronistic spatio-temporal (see also Horkheimer & Adorno 2002: 20), that is, those moments of coming to recognize or placing the different geographies of historical mannerisms and expressions on one’s cultural register. So as difference emerges through multiple historical geo-domains, the Diasporic-self then comes into a social reality, where continuously meaning, as constituted through difference, transforms itself in ways that there is no fixed historical locus. But the Diasporic-self is not independent of history, that there is always already some lineage to a particular time, space and geography. On the same note, it is not that these histories are bringing a fixed homogenous reading onto the Diasporic-self, for within these histories, heterogeneity is very much central to the experiences of the Diasporic-self. What we are left with is that culture now has slowly shifted from the manner in which it were accorded currency through the Enlightenment knowledge of modernity (Horkheimer & Adorno 2002; Foucault 2007), not that it has disengaged with the prototypical colonial production, but it is this colonial edifice that has re-shaped and re-formed itself in order to be congruent with the neo-colonial/globalized particularities of our cultural present. ETHNICITY AND QUESTIONS CONCERNING CULTURAL RESOURCES OF THE DIASPORA

Here in Canada, there is also this pledge of allegiance to the Queen for Canadianness. Canadianness has become a major terminal for Diasporic communities to take up the designated position of Enlightenment. But taking up the oath of allegiance has its own 40

THE RACE TO MODERNITY

complicity. I often think of: What does it mean for one to have come from a land that has been historically colonized, to a space where one is in a position to benefit from nation-state violence, that is, how does one negotiate these unfreedoms, that of citizenry, nation-state and Diasporic subjectivity? (Hall, 2007b; Wynter, 2001; Walcott, 2003; McKittrick, 2006). So if Diasporic subjectivities come to culminate with proximity to modernity’s Enlightened subject, what does it say then for the African Diasporic community that have been historically determined through colonialism? How does the Diasporic-self that emerged from a colonized geography, one placed within the heart of the supposed Enlightened space, work with these debasing histories as a raw resource? In that, immanent to Diasporic movement, movement that ought to supposedly bring this better way of life, there is a particular performance by Diasporized bodies, one that attaches itself to modernity and simultaneously distancing itself from those spaces assigned as less than to colonial geographies. This lived experience of Diasporized peoples as determined through colonial inscribed sub-human categories and spaces has become the omnipresent reminder for African Diasporic consciousness, the omnipresent determinant for post-human relations (Weheliye, 2002). In a sense then, Diasporic bodies always already have to be constantly glancing back to make sure the sub-human does not catch up or is not too close. But even this glance back by Diasporic bodies to confirm progress is to understand that this sub-human distancing is part and parcel of the post-human. The question of injecting more Britishness in British, in a sense though, can be positioned as a determining act of coming up with different ways to inculcate this Enlightened humanism. How Britishness is taken up in the public sphere, is as if, collectively by nature’s plan, we had a shared understanding of what is authentic Britishness. So then, if for now we can think of Britishness as historically determined through particular knowledges, State formation and legitimized violence, we can begin to problematize this singular pure authentic origin of Britishness. We can also push back with questions concerning how Britishness comes to be marked through the African Diaspora. Yet, within our governing epoch, ethnicity has come to be discursively deployed in a way that works to situate, and at the same time stabilize, the Diasporic-self through particular historical conjunctures. What then does it mean to talk about British as being ethnic? If then, from the racialized ‘Other’ to the black spatio-temporal, one is forever ethnic, what then are the constitutive determinants of ethnicity? Let us for the moment think through the discourse of Canadianness to understand the loci of particular bodies, think about what it means to be Canadian in the context of nation-state, Diaspora and transnationalism (Walcott, 2003; Appadurai, 1996), think about the historical social formations and the ensuing trope of Canadianism as contextualized through the interstices of ethnicity. Where then are the spaces for black Diaspora, spaces that have come to be written out of the institutionalized text? What I am struggling with is the manner in which the discourse of difference, and at the same time the discourse of ethnicity, comes to be invoked within the civic sphere of public life. From the dominant location, from State to media, ethnicity extends across the horizon of the Diasporized ‘Other’ to those outside the construct of Britishness (Hall, 2007a). But within black geographies there is talk about ethnicity 41

SIMMONS

from the dominant position, but also within blackness there is talk about difference from within, which I think, at times, could be troubling, that there is a particular danger we need to tease out, in that, historically, alterity as a material good, as embedded through time, through particular social categories, worked to organize the conditions for colonial relations. In the contemporary setting of the West, these colonial relations very much languish in everyday conversations concerning identity, difference and ‘Other’. As these conversations come to be discursively framed and represented through particular media images and different locations of ethnicity, there exists this localized mobility within the discursive terrain of the Diasporized ‘Other’. Let us for the moment think about blackness as homogenously conceptualized through hegemonic relations of Canadianness, let us for the moment think about blackness as a fixed reducing reading on a particular body that has been rooted historically to colonization, that this reading forms the conditions of existence, that this reading forms the conditions of limitations and possibility for the Diasporized-body. We also need to talk about the body as geography as well, to consider how the archipelago that we come to know as the Caribbean, comes to be determined through different bodies lumped as the ‘Other.’ What are the implications for the Diasporic body as located in the Caribbean and as being co-determined through this historical collective conjuncture of ethnicity? The question of blackness has discursively moved itself from the Negro of plantation life, to the contemporary people of color, to the politically correct racialized minoritised, the African Canadian, the African American and black British. Inserting self into the ethnic terrain is the brown discursive, becoming particularly vibrant within the North American context, though for the most part in Britain, the black discursive has historically engulfed the body of the ‘Other’, be it Asian, South-Asian, African or Moslem. Given then the different histories that are spatially steeped in colonialism and shared dialogues of resistance, what is the experience of resistance when, let us say, in the context of the West, the mobilization of racialized peoples comes through particular moments, such that these shared experiences of colonial histories separate itself as distinct or singular moments within the classification of the ‘Other’? What then are the consequences for the different voices of the oppressed when the politics of identification, the politics of ethnicity work to dissipate the voice of shared colonial histories? How might we speak about ethnicity, difference and culture, and not dilute the responsibility of speaking about racism? (Dei, 2009; hooks, 1992; Opini and Wane 2007). At the same time, we need to speak about ethnic difference beyond the racialised ‘Other’, to include the dominant body as ethnic, to ask new questions concerning power and privilege (Hall, 2000; Dei, 2008). Ultimately, these questions reside along the lines of citizenry, nation-state representation and the contingencies of globalization. MASS MEDIA SURVEILLANCE OF THE DIASPORA

Concerning the flotsam of modernity, the question that continues itself here is that of: How do we dialogue with each other and come to understand different ways of knowing in order to move beyond tolerance or a practiced partitioned form of respect? Yet as the African Diaspora move towards emancipating its public sphere realities (Everett, 2002; Gregory, 1995), communicating then calls for the ability to 42

THE RACE TO MODERNITY

read the governing domain of statements, that is, the mutable yet fixed regulating group of statements that circumscribe the body. So understanding space here is important, for it is not as if these bodies come to know themselves or come to form relations in a vacuum. Public sphere has this temporality of socio-historic specific constituents that come to mark identity, that come to give one’s way of knowing, that is, our communicating capacities thrust and direction. Be it Britishness or Canadianness, I think African Diasporic communities are surveilled (Shapiro, 2005; Gilliom, 2005), not only from the State, but also by self, from within the local communities. See, the glance back by the Diasporic-self allows one to be aware of the previous sub-human experience, an awareness that culminates in this constant inventory check on life structures from earlier geo-historical settings. So the aligning and distancing of each other within the African Diaspora come to be nuanced in ways which might not necessarily fragment Diasporic communities in a sum totalizing way because yes, there exist heterogeneity, that the Diaspora is constituted through different bodies, different identities, different experiences. What I am arguing for, however, is that if we are talking about the African Diaspora, then we ought to acknowledge shared histories of enslavement and a particular shared racial experience, so this is not some prescription for some homogenous or fixed experience, but more so I am saying that the aligning and distancing which situate itself through Diasporic exchanges work to bring a particular tangentiality within local Diasporic relations. But it seems to me, as I locate myself as a body of the Diaspora, that this knowledge production through the everyday surveillance of that which comes to be designated as sub-humanism, that the particular way in which this knowledge comes to govern the lived Diasporic experience, lend to mark spaces of freedom and unfreedom for Diasporic peoples. So what happens here is that the discursive geo-project of modernity becomes propertized by local Diasporic communities, be it intentional or not, when Diasporic bodies come to distance or align themselves with each other, this interaction works to re-write the discourse of what it means to be this Enlightened subject. For me it seems like I can never extricate myself from the Fanon question: How do we extricate ourselves? (Fanon, 1967: 10). Yet with the need for Diasporic peoples to constantly have to glance back, I think it is not only about Diasporic peoples attempting to stay ahead of plantation life, I think it is also about the everyday question of what to retrieve from the past, more so too is the sense of how one’s daily Diasporic journey comes into some sort of dialogue with this omnipresent flotsam of plantation life, that is, being conversant with cultural artifacts and expressions as a particularized way of life and as historically determined through plantation procedures. What comes up here is the question of: What are the ways in which plantation life reveals itself today in this Diasporic contemporary, where disenfranchisement has reconfigured itself within contemporary globalized geographies through everyday spaces of freedoms and unfreedoms? Also, as these everyday spaces of freedom and unfreedom come to mark the determining limits of Diasporic social interaction, the challenge here then is in utilizing these same said limits to transform the Diasporic-self and at the same time not be bound to some historic pre-configuration of the Diasporic body. What I have experienced, in a sense, that is, through remembrance, I have always had this longing for home beyond the 43

SIMMONS

physicality of some fixed geographic location. I have had to find ways in which to inscribe my everyday social space, or let us say introduce particular modes, ways of communicating within Diasporic public sphere life (Appadurai, 1996), where I can still centre my experiences through which I come to know myself. With this in mind, I am thinking more of enunciation, diction as it emerged from plantation life as an Indigenous sensibility, where I think in a very strategic way, enunciation comes to be a tool for communicating through Diasporic public sphere life, Diasporic life which has been burdened with histories entangled in colonial violence, through let us say, the dominant/subordinated coordinates of Enlightenment. But what is this Enlightenment and modernity that so many scholars have dwelled on? Understanding these classifications is a continuous process. One of my interests is trying to understand the experience of the African Diaspora, through the variable social approaches toward modernity as it plays out within the social reality of the Western cosmopolitan. But for the moment I want to think through some of the intertextual experiences concerning modernity and the Enlightenment. MODERNITY AND THE GOVERNANCE OF ENLIGHTENED SUBJECTIVITIES

So Foucault refers to the Enlightenment as: An event, or a set of events and complex historical processes, that is located at a certain point in the development of European societies. As such, it includes elements of social transformation, types of political institutions, forms of knowledge, projects of rationalization of knowledge and practices, technological mutations that are very difficult to sum up in a word …. (Foucault, 2007: 111). He also talks about the attitude of modernity: Modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least as a set of features characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be preceded by a more or less naïve or archaic premodernity, and followed by an enigmatic and troubling “postmodernity.” And then we find ourselves asking whether modernity constitutes the sequel to the Enlightenment and its development, or whether we are to see it as a rupture or a deviation with respect to the basic principles of the eighteenth century (Foucault, 2007: 105). For me, presently the local public sphere is that of Toronto. At the moment it is scripted as cosmopolitan, officially categorized as multicultural by the State. But if Foucault positions the Enlightenment as the “set of events and historical processes located at certain points in the development of European societies,” I then would like to mark these moments to think about formations and transformations of enslavement, Indentureship, plantation life, the archipelago known as the Caribbean and let us say, the historic monstrosity of a relationship formed through Africa, the supposed New World and the Anglo-Euro continents. I am more interested in forms of thinking, that is: How do Diasporic peoples historically determined through colonialism come to make sense of their lived reality? I am more interested in how the myriad cultural 44

THE RACE TO MODERNITY

expressions come to be embodied differently in order to negotiate the newness of Diasporic realities. And how is communicating within Diasporic public sphere vectored through this vestigial memory of colonization? (Hall, 2007b; Appadurai, 1996). Concerning here too, is how this vestigial memory of colonization comes to be this ubiquitous signpost of Diasporic freedoms and unfreedoms. It is almost another form of electronic surveillance, instead more so too, the surveillance itself becomes self-regulated in and through the said Diasporic-self. What comes out of this relationship, is this regulation of cultural memory, a type of governance imbued specifically through the Diasporic cultural register. With this Diasporic cultural register, much needed here, is familiarity with the cultural discourse in practice within the contemporaneous public sphere life, only then can one take up a strategic position of communicating. With Diasporic peoples forming strategic positions of communicating, what ought to be understood, is to say how cultural currency circulates through particular power–knowledge points, that is in an overarching way through race, class, gender, and sexuality and ableism, and also, how these colonial categories come to be positioned by particular structures and institutions in framing the popular discourse of public sphere talk. Yet aligning and distancing from Europe and plantation life by Diasporic peoples as a form of resistance and survival is very much real. I mean we could talk about people not being appreciative of their Diasporic Indigenous culture, or thinking their Diasporic culture as less than, that it warrants a shift away from the minoritized cultural space, or we could talk about the recognition by particular groups of their cultural currency and the strategic investments within this cultural space. See, what happens here is that Diasporic culture in a sense becomes commodified/marketized, and mobilized within this popularized cultural space allowing for what I am calling, communities of compartmentalized solidarity. So if for the moment we were to think of this public sphere space as the property of modernity’s Enlightened subject where difference come to coalesce through collective histories and shared experiences, we could then understand the way in which plantation governmentalities (Scott, 1995) play out in present day experiences of African Diasporic peoples. We could more or less think of the mutability of plantocracy governance within Diasporic public sphere in order to understand how the social transformation of Diasporic bodies come to organize and mobilize their everyday social reality through the limitations of these same said historically determined plantation governmentalities. Another interest of mine is to think of modernity through the governing historical process of plantation enslavement in relation to the development of European societies, in particular, the subject formation as located to the geographies of freedom and unfreedom, and also the nuances coming out here with that of nation-state, nationalism and citizenry in this neo-colonial globalized epoch. So to return to Glossop Road, to the mass media debate over the question of Britishness, I think what was absent with public sphere talk here, were the delimiting historical determinants where race formed the constitutive elements of this geography of freedom which we come to know as English. Culture, as it reshapes itself through Diasporic relations, has very much re-written the national discursive. In the past, to think of being British, English or Canadian would have conjured up Anglo-Euro images. But globalization 45

SIMMONS

and the ensuing transnational currents have shifted the cosmopolitan schema thereby troubling Euro-modernity nation state discourse. Yet, I am more concerned with the forms of thinking immanent to Diasporic communities when it comes to culture, and how this thinking becomes the raw resource to make meaning and engage public sphere dialogue. So in returning to Glossop road, no longer is there this one authentic ‘Truth’ citizenry constituting nation-state. Instead what we have are multiple subjectivities, which in and of itself, work to contest this imperial nation-state narrative. But how does this play out in a mass media public sphere where what it means to be British always already ought to propagate the dominant narrative of Euromodernity? If we think about belonging, then this brings a host of problems for Diasporic communities, for in relation to the historic nation state-discourse, we find a counter-public citizenry discursively forming itself, resulting more so in the transformation of what it means to be let us say be this British or Canadian. Yet, implicit in the question of what it means to be British is this homogenous orientation to the cryptic script of nation-state citizenry. To belong then for the Diasporic-self, means to take up particular codes as endowed through Euro-modernity and perform them as one’s own. But there is a complexity here for the Diasporicself, in that, culture and self are continuously transforming. Is not to say that the Diasporic-self can choose cultural closure, for even in this closed state culture has already reshaped itself as governed by that space and time. How then does the Diasporic-self come to negotiate with the culture of modernity and simultaneously negotiate with the culture of Diasporic Indigenous history? This is a bit complex here, that is teasing out the intersections and points of departure of these cultural spaces. I think very much here it is important to have a conversation about modernity and the Enlightenment in relation to enslavement, plantation life and Diasporic movement, in a sense, to understand the historical processes which constitute the ‘Other’ as sub-human and at the same time transforming Anglo-Euro geographies into what we come to know as the human. If presupposed to the Diaspora is social transformation, then Diasporic cultural knowledges be it counterpublic or not, ought to inform this debate of Britishness. But the national narrative concerning British citizenry is very much controlled through the nation-state discursive formations (Hall, 2000, 2007a, 2007b). To communicate one’s sense of citizenry, of what it means to belong to a particular time and place within mass media public sphere, is more so vectored through Anglo-Euro modernity’s discursive search for this subject of Enlightenment. What then is the place for Diasporic cultural knowledges in rewriting its own citizenry, on its own terms within the governing mass media public sphere spaces? And how can this counterpublic cultural knowledging work to invoke a sense of the posthuman for Diasporic peoples within contemporary cosmopolitan tropes of nation-state? If we are thinking social transformation here, then from a knowledging position Diasporic culture as an important raw resource more or less ruptures modernity’s Enlightenment. So when Foucault asks if “modernity is the sequel to Enlightenment,” as mentioned before, I am more understanding this as part and parcel of each other, as constitutive, as operating in continuum, whereby these Diasporic cultural knowledging bring the much needed, what Foucault calls “deviations with respect to the 46

THE RACE TO MODERNITY

basic principles of the eighteenth century” (Foucault, 2007: 105). Much of this basic eighteenth century principles relied on the “stitching together of Scientific positivism and the development of States” (Foucault, 2007: 50). Here, with this relationship of Scientific positivism and the State, I am pondering how through this relationship the Enlightened subject was rationalized into being, that is, how is it that positivism and the State organizing procedures come to formulate what it means to be human? And how this understanding of the human legitimized the inscription of particular bodies as this universal citizen? PERMANENCE AND FLUX: THE EBB OF TRANSNATIONAL CULTURE

As Diasporic culture continues to shift and reshape itself, and as it moves through the time and space of the West, I think there is this constant negotiation with self, that is, the Diasporic-self constantly asks what historic ways of life, aesthetic forms, expressions, diction, food and music to name some, could come to provide some form of currency to take up the challenges of communicating within this governing mass media public sphere. For some Diasporic peoples, all culture as it emerged from lands that were colonized were knowingly forgotten, moreover it was an act of forgetting which really ought to usher in Enlightened subjectivities. Instead what was utilized, as a substitute, was the Enlightenment culture of modernity. For some Diasporic peoples, it was important to not only maintain their culture but to actively pursue the Diasporic Indigenous ways of doing things, a manner that can be interpreted as being pure, absolutist or even close. For some peoples of the Diaspora, much depends on the flux of the present, that is, culture as it forms itself today and differs the next day, wherein one can decide, to say choose which form of expression to take up as one’s own. However regarding this choice, I think what is coming out of these geo-positions that situate themselves within Diasporic communities, is the need for a strategic engagement of their transnational globalized epoch. We can ask then: How do Diasporic peoples come to align themselves through the politics of culture to engage their daily lived social? And how often does the cultural register of modernity called upon, when dialogue concerning these Diasporic raw resources, tacitly mediate conversations? The thought of Diasporic peoples constantly ongoing, as an everyday surveillance method, that is, the glancing back and forth to the cultural registrar of modernity is real. From cultural representations, to institutionalized knowledging, to the popularized public sphere mass media discourse, we seem to all at some point in time become experts in understanding how the space and time dynamics of the West come to universally culturally encode our lived reality. Indeed, the Diaspora today has brought some complexity to this cultural register of modernity. Universalized Self and ‘Other’ classifications allowed for compartmentalized geographies of solidarity, where the phenotype of the Diasporic-self comes to be perpetually bound to particular geographic locations. Out of this classification came, what I would like to call the geo-subject, where bodies in a discursively totalizing way were organized and inscribed as inferior knowledge. So this omnipresent cultural register of modernity (see also Foster, 2007) now tangling with a public sphere whereby the Diaspora is not to say centered, but has shifted its locus from the 47

SIMMONS

margins, has to more or less, let us say, recalibrate its coordinates for difference. Imagine the difficulty here; for the Diasporic-self has fluidity, it is not, for the most part, contained in this permanent rigid category. So the way we come to know bodies, geographies, and citizenry pushes against histories of colonial singular classifications. See I think this here is the struggle at Glossop Road. And I think it concerns the relationship with knowing what it means to be British through these permanent homogenous categories of citizenry and nation-state. So it is no longer an easy check off mark for Britishness when it comes to the cultural register of modernity. Diaspora has ushered in a cosmopolitanism where public sphere talk, be it through mass media or not, has to now take up the nuances with difference, culture and citizenry (Habermas, 1991). Is it then, that in rekindling the debate about Britishness with questions concerning to pledge or not to pledge allegiance to the Queen, a means, or an attempt to return to a colonial, singular, pure origin of nationalism? Or is it that Diasporic communities that come to form itself as a counterpublic, more so now in a material way, seriously opening up spaces for pluralism within this fabric of Englishness? This becomes a bit of a worry here, when we hear the Western world resides supposedly in the time of a democracy, as trumpeted through the governing neo-liberal humanitarian discourse. Yet as the counterpublic challenges this space of freedom and unfreedom, that of Britishness, and as the cultural register of modernity discursively recalibrates itself to re-mark the illiberalness of Diasporic communities, I think my concern here, is with how Enlightened subjectivities come to reshape itself as it embodies the Diaspora, and how so this reshaping come to be mobilized through what were previously illiberal spaces for the Diasporic-self. So coming out of this entangled relationship with Diasporic communities and Enlightened subjects, is this sense of flux where permanent spaces of freedom and unfreedom are now reclassified, not so much by the State or mass media public sphere, but more so now by the residing Diasporic counterpublic, which materializes through its own discursive growth and finds itself now being taken up by the same mass media public sphere as their own, as always already belonging in some pure Enlightened form to the State. CONCLUSION

Returning to Glossop Road, we notice as the Diasporic counterpublic tries to ensconce itself within Euro-modernity, the emerging rumble here concerns the newly reconfigured permanence and flux of what it means to be a British citizen. I think some of the problematic that the Diasporic-self is bringing, is that of: How can modernity will itself to new forms of citizenry and simultaneously secure the trope of Enlightenment? How can Britishness retain its Englishness and still allow for Diasporic communities to have voice? The cry though to maintain allegiance to the Queen, the historical cord to Enlightenment subjectivities, I think, allows for a post human, where pre-supposed, is the liberal harmony of the Enlightened subject and Diasporic communities, all in the name of continuing the will of modernity. But as the State and mass media work in tandem to secure its hold on historical formations of citizenry, and as the Diasporic counterpublic reshapes itself through cultural 48

THE RACE TO MODERNITY

ways of knowing and newly found Enlightened subjectivities, what we have then is a relationship in which the colonial encodings of British citizenry come to engage the protean presence of the Diasporic-self. Materially then, what does this relationship reveal itself as? Is it that as Foucault reminds us, we need to look at those “events with complex historical process that are difficult to some up in words, those with technological mutations, those which include social transformations, those that locate themselves within political institutions, those projects of rationalization of knowledge and practices?” (see Foucault, 2007: 111). So be it the Diasporic body pledges allegiance to the Queen, or as we question the classification of Britishness and Englishness, and as the Diasporic posthuman takes up its newly found place in the West, I think what Glossop Road gives us then, is more so, a means to question how we come to know and understand the ensuing humanism of the Diasporized-self. REFERENCES Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Balibar, E. (2002). The nation form: History and ideology. In E. Balibar & I. Wallerstein (Eds.), Race, nation, class: Ambiguous identities (pp. 86–106). New York: Verso. Brantlinger, P. (1990). Mass culture, postmodernism, and theories of communication. In Crusoe’s footprints: Cultural studies in Britain and America (pp. 166–198). New York: Routledge. Collins, H. P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge. Dawson, M. C. (1995). A black counterpublic?: Economic earthquakes, racial agenda(s), and black politics. In The Black Public Sphere Collective (Eds.), The black public sphere: A public culture book (pp. 199–227). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Dei, G. J. S. (2006). Introduction: Mapping the terrain–Towards a new politics of resistance. In G. J. S. Dei & A. Kempf (Eds.), Anti-colonialism and education: The politics of resistance (pp. 1–23). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Dei, G. J. S. (2008). Crash and the relevance of an anti-racism analytical lens. In G. J. S. Dei & S. S. Howard (Eds.), Crash politics and antiracism: Interrogations of liberal race discourse (pp. 13–23). New York: Peter Lang. Dei, G. J. S. (2009). Afterword: The anti-colonial theory and the question of survival and responsibility. In A. Kempf (Ed.), Breaching the colonial contract: Anti-colonialism in the US and Canada (pp. 251–257). New York: Springer Press. Everett, A. (2002). The revolution will be digitized: Afrocentricity and the digital public sphere. Social Text, 20(2 71), 125–146. Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press. Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press. Foster, C. (2007). Blackness & modernity: The colour of humanity and the quest for freedom. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Foucault, M. (2007). The politics of truth. LA: Semiotext(e). Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gilliom, J. (2005). Resisting surveillance. Social Text, 23(2 83), 71–83. Goldberg, T. D. (2002). The racial state. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Gregory, S. (1995). Race, identity and political activism: The shifting contours of the African American public sphere. In The Black Public Sphere Collective (Eds.), The black public sphere: A public culture book (pp. 151–168). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press. 49

SIMMONS Habermas, J. (1998). Modernity–An incomplete project. In H. Foster (Ed.), The anti-aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture (pp. 1–15). New York: The New Press. Hall, S. (2005). New ethnicities. In D. Morley & K. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies (pp. 441–449). New York: Routledge. Hall, S. (2007a). The global, the local, and the return of ethnicity. In S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert, & K. Thompson (Eds.), Modernity: An introduction to modern societies (pp. 623–629). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Hall, S. (2007b). Fundamentalism, diaspora and hybridity. In S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert, & K. Thompson (Eds.), Modernity: An introduction to modern societies (pp. 629–632). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Hanchard, M. (1995). Black Cinderella?: Race and the public sphere in Brazil. In The Black Public Sphere Collective (Eds.), The black public sphere: A public culture book (pp 169–189). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. Boston: South End Press. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, W. T. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. California: Stanford University Press. McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Opini, B., & Wane, N. N. (2007). When race structures “Beingness”: The experiences of African Canadian women in a place they call home. In N. Massaquoi & N. Wane (Eds.), Theorizing empowerment: Canadian perspectives on black feminist thought (pp. 177–198). Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education. Scott, D. (1995). Colonial governmentality. Social Text, 43, 191–220. Shapiro, M. J. (2005). Every move you make: Bodies, surveillance, and media. Social Text, 23(2 83), 21–34. Walcott, R. (2003). Black like who? Writing black Canada. Toronto: Insomniac Press. Wane, N. N. (2006). Is decolonization possible? In G. J. S. Dei & A. Kempf (Eds.), Anti-colonialism and education: The politics of resistance (pp. 87–108). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Wane, N. N. (2007). Canadian black feminist thought: Re-imagining new possibilities for empowerment. In N. Massaquoi & N. Wane (Eds.), Theorizing empowerment: Canadian perspectives on black feminist thought (pp. 296–309). Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education. wa Thiong’o, N. (1993). Moving the centre: The struggle for cultural freedoms. Oxford: James Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Weheliye, A. G. (2002). Feenin: Posthuman voices in contemporary black popular music. Social Text, 20(2 71), 21–47. Wynter, S. (2001). Towards the sociogenic principle: Fanon, identity, the puzzle of conscious experience, and what it is like to be “Black”. In M. F. Duran-Cogan & A. Gomez-Moriana (Eds.), National identities and socio-political changes in Latin America (pp. 30–66). New York: Routledge.

50

MANDEEP KAUR MUCINA

5. REMEMBERING THE 1947 PARTITION OF INDIA THROUGH THE VOICES OF SECOND GENERATION PUNJABI WOMEN

INTRODUCTION – HISTORY, MYSTORY, OURSTORY

Partition is a word that I grew up knowing so little about, yet enough to understand that when it was spoken in my family, a daunting wall of silence would materialize and the discussion would quickly shift or be further silenced. I learned to recognize that this word carried a great deal of baggage that was not to be unpacked, as the material inside would bring about feelings of shame for the storyteller, as well as the listener. Yet those rare moments when my grandmother, father, or mother would take on this far off look and reminisce about stories “before Partition or after Partition”, I would hold my breath hoping to hear just a little bit more, knowing that moment could end instantly. As a young woman I learned quickly how to understand what could and could not be spoken in my household. Stories of the Partition were one of these topics, along with female sexuality and anything related to the opposite sex, particularly with men outside of my racial and ethnic community. If I were to raise these taboo themes, the word Izzat (honor) would be thrust forward, as an explanation for what one could lose if these boundaries were crossed and the silence broken. These topics and stories accumulated into a list that I carried with me everyday, knowing that they were not to be discussed and as a woman understanding that there was much significance in the silence surrounding them, without ever knowing the details or questioning why. As curious as I was, periodically I would peruse this list in my head, daring to question these truths and searching for answers that would resolve all the silence in my family. These questions could not be broached to others without feelings of shame and guilt in doing so. Furthermore, much of this knowledge was passed down through symbolic messages spoken in metaphors; somehow I knew how to read these messages and translated them as territory I was not to enter. It was only recently that I began to connect all the stories and themes compiled in this “list” and understand the silence that surrounded them, which occurred when I launched into researching the history of my family and community. For the first time in my life I re-encountered historical stories of the Partition. Upon my journeys into Partition narratives I came across the writings of Urvashi Butalia, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin. These writings were separated from the politically driven, patriarchal writings that dominated Partition history. These esteemed, South Asian, feminist scholars were the pioneers to N. Wane et al. (eds.), The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, 51–70. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

MUCINA

uncovering a feminist historiography of India’s Partition and shed light on the stories of the women that had been silenced in the collective memory of the nation. As I began exploring the marginalized history of the women, children, and the Dalit1 community, I was confounded by what little I knew of this side of the Partition, but also haunted by how much I was impacted by this literature on a personal level. The most influential element of these readings were the narratives of the women and the analysis that accompanied it, which illuminated how women were symbolized in representing the Izzat of their family, community, and nation. As a result of this symbolizing, women’s bodies became the site of violence that ensued during the Partition. Women were brutally raped by rival groups; young girls and their mothers were forced to commit “martyr” suicide for the sake of family honor; numerous women were abandoned by families after being brutally raped and forced to marry the perpetrators of their assaults; and many of the children were displaced, kidnapped and sold to brothels and landowners (Butalia, 1998; Menon & Bhasin, 1998). One of the first passages I came across that exemplified women’s reality during the Partition, was by Kabir (2005) who articulated, “… as in other moments of collective violence, it was in the systemic rape of women that trauma and body were most obviously linked. Women were raped and mutilated during the mayhem of partition because their female bodies provided a space over which the competitive games of men were played out (Das, 1995)” (p. 179). These games and the violence perpetuated on women were many times in the name of Izzat, (or honor) the same word that I so often heard being used in my family, a word that I had embodied into my identity so far back I could not recall the very origins of when and where I first heard it. The word Izzat can be loosely translated in English to mean honor, reputation, and/or the responsibility of an individual to his/her community, family, and at times their nation. As a second-generation Punjabi Sikh woman I grew up hearing the word Izzat to refer to how my actions are read by my family and community; how my body is read by others and the implications of this for myself and my family; how the community responds to my family’s choices; and even when speaking to the honor of our ancestral nation, India. The words of my mother, grandmother, and aunties ring in my ears when I think of Izzat and how the word and its complex meanings were passed down to me as I was growing up: “Ghar dhi Izzat kuri dha nhar rahndhi hai” (The Izzat of the household sits with the daughter of that household). As we will see later on in this essay, these words ring true for not only my upbringing, but for that of many other South Asian women. As I read stories of the partition I was triggered. I felt the women’s stories so deep inside my soul that I could not distinguish whether I was in sorrow for the women I was reading about, or for myself. Images and stories of my own upbringing resurfaced, but in different shapes, distinct colors and the memories took on different meanings. Linkages were being made to ideas I had not thought about before. I was connecting to these women’s narratives, because many of the values and beliefs that led up to the violence that was perpetuated on their bodies, including the concepts of Izzat, are still evident in my family and community within the Diaspora2 today. As a result the following questions emerged, suggesting a necessary area of research that warranted attention: What are the experiences of second-generation 52

REMEMBERING THE 1947 PARTITION OF INDIA

South Asian women, living in the Diaspora, who were born and raised in homes that survived the 1947 Partition of India? Layering this question emerged thoughts of how the traumas of the Partition have been transmitted into our identities? This stimulated specific themes primarily from my own experiences, such as Izzat and values of sexuality, questioning how have these values been passed down to us and how have they remained preserved in the Diaspora? Trying to understand what impact they have had on our identity and relationship to the spaces in which we negotiate daily? Finally, getting to questions of survival in the everyday world and understanding how, as second-generation women, we are resisting and balancing the legacy of the Partition with the conflicting, many times racist, environments in which we are raised? These questions lead me to the ultimate endeavor, which is to explore the effects of the Partition on the second generation of South Asian women born in the Diaspora, by understanding how the legacy of Partition has impacted their identity and sense of self. This paper is a result of my Master’s thesis research, where I conducted interviews with seven second generation South Asian women living in the Diaspora, whose families migrated from Northern India. During our time together, we explored their family stories of migration, stories of the Partition, stories of growing up in their home and outside environment, and most importantly the stories of negotiation in everyday life spaces. Essentially this paper will be divided into three parts. First I will be speaking to my location in this research, this paper, and the importance of reflecting on my insider voice. The second part will explore some of the narratives of the women I interviewed, and begin looking at Izzat, a cultural knowledge that played a distinct role in the lives of women during the partition, as well as today, connecting the past and the present through their voices. Finally, in the third part, we will be exploring how women are resisting and reclaiming for themselves what it means to be second generation and the negotiations they make in their everyday lives in order to survive. As a woman of color, as an insider to my community, and as an individual who sits in a chasm between two cultures, my social location is integral to this research; therefore in the next section I will be reflecting this as well as the complexities of speaking about this topic in my community and in the Western world, and how this research can be taken up in both worlds. PART I – CONTENDING WITH THE INSIDER VOICE

… Insiders have to live with the consequences of their processes on a day-today basis for ever more, and so do their families and communities. (Linda Tuhiwahi Smith, 1999, p. 137) Mind and heart full of light, this is the literal translation of my name, which is a combination of two Punjabi words–Mun (passion, mind, heart) and deep (light, candle). Kaur is my middle name, which translates into princess and was bestowed on me and to my Sikh sisters who come before and after me, by our Guru Gobind Singh-ji, who said, “You are my beloved princesses, my daughters. You must be respected. How can this world be without you?” reminding us of the honor we hold 53

MUCINA

in our community with this name.3 My name is a part of who I am and reminds me of my Sikh Punjabi identity and was given to me by my parents who were both born and raised in Himachal Pradesh, India, until they migrated to Canada, where my siblings and I were born. I am a part of the Sikh Punjabi, North Indian community, as well a part of what is considered the South Asian Diaspora. As a researcher and someone who is personally connected to this research, I see myself as an insider to these communities. Insider research is a term used by Linda Tuhiwahi Smith (1999) and supported by feminist researcher methodologies, to describe someone conducting research from within the community. The contrast from insider to outsider creates a distinct environment for the research and the researcher. As an insider I am confronted with the research outcomes and implications in divergent ways to that of an outsider, ways that connect my personal to the political. As an insider, every word that I write connects me to my ancestral country, to the land on which I was born and raised, to my Punjabi community, to my family, and to myself. With the power of the written word comes great responsibility to these communities that I am privileged to be a part of, and with this power comes great risks. From the beginning of this research, I struggled with the challenges and possible consequences of conducting research that involved my family, community, and people. Smith (1999) speaks to how research is embedded in a colonial history that most colonized countries have a devastating relationship to, since those who have been “researched” have usually been seen and described as the “native other”. Generally, a researcher is accountable for providing ethical, respectful, critical, reflexive research to the community being researched, as well as the larger institutions to which they are representing (Creswell, 1998). Yet, for an insider researcher, who may be an Indigenous person and/or person of color, there are many more challenges to conducting research that meets the above criteria and addresses the complicated ways our research can be taken up or interpreted in dominant Western discourses. My accountability goes beyond that of the academic institution, it is to my community, our culture and values, our history, and to my own identity and voice. The challenges that I am proposing involve a history of colonization of my people, they involve the dominant discourses that currently speak as “expert” voices about my community, and they involve my social location and relationship to my community. Pioneers such as Edward Said (2003), who wrote the renowned book “Orientalism,” spoke to these expert voices as the “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority of the Orient” (p. 3). Through these discourses that situate strong counter distinctions between the East and West, the people, customs, and identities of anyone who is different from the Western body, become defined as the “Other”. In this section, I highlight the complexities of doing research that has the risk of being taken up in destructive ways. I also focus on creating knowledge and undertaking research that does not perpetuate colonial mindsets and perceptions of my family, community, and people. As an insider, I am faced with the challenge of writing about South Asian women’s experiences in the Diaspora. Research that speaks to the experiences of South Asian women living in the Diaspora, as well as women in South Asia itself, depicts a strong binary between the values of the East as being barbaric, repressive, 54

REMEMBERING THE 1947 PARTITION OF INDIA

usually religious views, that are generally understood as significantly more oppressive than the values of the West. In contrast, the West portrays itself in opposition to this, as inhabiting feminist, egalitarian ideals and values that treat women as equal to men. Therefore, South Asian women are defined as victims to their culture and religion and they are seen as needing to be saved from the clutches of this barbaric culture and its influences. This sentiment has been articulated by Puar (1994) when she describes the most common portrayal of second generation identity is an “either/ or approach” where the woman is portrayed as inhabiting polarized identities, “she is either repressed by her patriarchal culture or co-opted by a racist white society into benefiting from the so-called freedom of the west, despite the loss of familial support and protection.” (p. 26). These dichotomies are taken up through various forms of media and academia to further marginalize immigrant communities and support the ideas of assimilation when it comes to the “adjustment” of immigrant children to Canada (Handa, 1997). Therefore, as a researcher, I am challenged by these current perceptions, yet I can begin to resist these discourses by giving space for the women to speak to their experiences, and to begin breaking down these dichotomies so that we can begin defining ourselves, with our own voices. As an insider I am faced with the challenge of writing about universal yet contested topics, such as violence against women and patriarchy, in the same breath as “South Asian women”. By doing so, I run the risk of these subjects becoming a symptom of my culture concerning issues that are specific to the Punjabi people. Paola Bacchetta (2000) articulates the risks of researching a topic that is so opinion laden with stereotypes in the West. In her writings, Bacchetta suggests that books, such as those written by Menon, Bhasin and Butalia, confront controversial topics of violence, religion, and how the lives of South Asian women during the Partition were impacted by values of patriarchy. The challenge of writing these important texts is that many uninformed Western audiences may interpret them in reductive ways, thereby running the risk of creating stories that become essentialized and seen in binary terms. Furthermore, these ideas are thought of as coming from the culture, rather being understood as universal issues that women experience globally, regardless of which culture we are examining, including the West. Topics of violence against women are associated strongly with particular cultures and religions, yet very rarely understood as global issues that are perpetuated by power and control, which is so evident in the patriarchy that exists in a majority of the world. Therefore, it is important that we recognize that the themes of violence, patriarchy, power and control are not a symptom of the Punjabi culture or of South Asian people, but are a part of a global issue. Menon and Bhasin (1998) effectively support this claim in the following quote, when they begin to address the challenges of resurrecting topics of violence in the South Asian community: As Pradeep Jegananthan writing on ethnic violence in urban Sri Lanka says, the “form and content of the extraordinary is deeply embedded in the history of the everyday, but nevertheless also stands outside the everyday”. So, moments of rupture and extreme dislocation, extraordinary as they are, underscore the more daily doses of violence against women and enable us to see them as part of the continuum–and despite the shudder of horror, part of the consensus. (p. 60) 55

MUCINA

In this research, I am exploring how the issue of violence against women has historically impacted my community and the way this has impacted the secondgeneration Punjabi women in Canada, because this is an important topic our community is currently experiencing and requires dialogue from within. Yet, my aim is not to define violence as being a part of my culture, but focusing more on how we can begin to dialogue about these issues within our community, without fear of the larger dominating Western perspective understanding it as a cultural issue that is only unique to our religion and nation. As an insider, when untangling and addressing the issues embedded within my community, while engaging in a discussion about second generation South Asian identity, not only do I run the risk of supporting the claims of the dominant orientalist discourses, but may also be questioned on my legitimacy and authenticity as a researcher. This position has been supported by the writings of Smith (1999) when she states, “the notion of ‘authentic’ is highly contested when applied to, or by Indigenous peoples, authorities and outside experts are often called in to verify, comment upon, and give judgments about the validity of Indigenous claims to cultural beliefs, values, ways of knowing and historical accounts” (p. 72). The questioning of authenticity serves to legitimize dominant views of the larger society (i.e. Canada, or North America), or those in power within the community being researched (i.e. Elders or politicians in the Punjabi, Sikh community). The result is a silencing of marginalized voices in both the larger societal perspective and the community itself (i.e. Women and children during the Partition). Researchers such as Potts and Brown (2005) speak to the privilege an insider researcher holds, “that is the privilege insiders have since they have lived experience of the issue under study” (p. 264) and how this privilege opens space for an insider that outsiders are not privy to. Therefore, as a woman, who has endeavored to research my community, I am aware that my privileges embedded in my social location, have opened access for me to conduct this research. In addition, as an insider I have an understanding of the issue that goes beyond the political into the personal and perhaps the access I have to my community outsiders are not privy to. Yet it is vital for me to identify that my experiences and interpretations do not represent all the women from the Punjabi community. Furthermore, I am aware of the power and control the researcher role can confer, particularly in the world of academia where my words may be taken up either as expert knowledge, or can be interpreted as challenging the status quo, therefore questioned on their legitimacy. Hence it is essential that I am clear at the outset that my intentions for doing this research were to give voice to Punjabi women and to discuss our experiences, our oppressions, our identities through our own voices, rather than through the expert voices of the powerful and privileged inside and outside our community. As may be apparent, my voice is central to the entire paper and I have taken the liberty to speak in an inclusive voice throughout the entire piece by using the term “we” and “our” to define the struggles and everyday realities of second generation South Asian women. As I have spoken to, in the discussion on insider research, I am embedded in the community that I speak about; not only have I researched phenomena that impact my generation, but I live these phenomena everyday, as much as 56

REMEMBERING THE 1947 PARTITION OF INDIA

the seven women I have interviewed. Therefore, when I began the writing process I could not extricate myself from it, and if I did I would be not only insulting my own sense of integrity, but also my community. By not including my own story, I question then from what position I would be informing this research. Therefore, I have spoken unconventionally for second-generation Punjabi women in this research and have made it explicit throughout the written piece. This research is the beginning process of speaking to concepts and a history that our community has silenced for a long time. It is about uncovering realities that are uncomfortable and require change in order for second-generation South Asian women to be heard and understood. When I step forward to create a dialogue amongst my community, I am a much stronger voice when I have women who have similar experiences behind my voice and we are speaking together; otherwise in my community’s eyes, I am just another “academic” who wants to “change” her people and customs–essentially regarded as an unwelcome voice. Thus, the use of the word “we” and “our” is encompassing not only the seven women who are in this study, but it is also unifying other second-generation Punjabi women who may be living these realities in their everyday lives and through the process of doing this, I hope that this study will encourage more South Asian women to speak out and be a part of creating change from inside our communities. Therefore, before continuing on, it is important to highlight that this research is for second-generation Punjabi women who live in the Diaspora to have the space to speak about their experiences openly. It is for readers, who may or may not be social workers and academics to begin listening to these voices. It is for the women of the Partition whose stories and lives have yet to be mourned. It is for our grandmothers who have memories of the Partition that they carry with them, many times in silence. It is for our families, who have a history of displacement and questions of belonging that started in 1947 and continued into their migrations to Canada and live in their children today. Finally, this research is intended to begin shedding light into the depths of my own identity and life experiences and perhaps through that process impact many other women who have similar experiences so they can be a part of the telling of my story. PART II – OUR VOICES

Our Understanding of Izzat The word Izzat, in all its abundance, can be found in most languages spoken in Northern India including Urdu, Punjabi, and Hindi. The English translation of the word has often been referred to as the honor or reputation of a person, organization or institution (Nayer, 2004). However, this translation is limiting, as it does not encapsulate the layers of significance this word holds for a South Asian household. Many South Asian women would recognize hearing the phrase, “Ghar dhi Izzat kuri nar rhandhi hai” (The honor of the home lives with the daughters), from their mothers, grandmothers or aunties; however it is not through these words that we first learn of Izzat. The memories of Izzat are so profound that we cannot locate when it first entered our awareness; there is a sense that it has always been present. The memory of 57

MUCINA

Izzat is not only strongly embedded in the identity of many South Asian women, but is also a value we are expected to uphold by the family, community and as we saw during the Partition, by the nation. Evidence of the way Izzat became a destructive force can be found as far back as the Partition and has become a frequent occurrence in the media here in Canada. Similarly, the function Izzat has in the lives of South Asian women in India and Canada also has a varied history. Many of our sisters have been highlighted in the media in recent time, with pictures and stories of women being killed by their fathers, husbands, mothers, all in the name of honor. Stories of domestic violence having an inevitable end. Stories of the new generation’s confusion with who they are and where they belong. Yet, the way that Izzat is portrayed in the media and in the literature is contrary to how we understand it and live with it. The many layers of Izzat that we have memories of and live in our everyday lives are much more complex. Many themes emerged in the greater research; however in this section of this paper, I will be focusing on how women were constructed as symbols of their family, community, and at crucial times, the nation during the Partition and in the Diaspora today. For this theme I will be connecting stories and narratives of the Partition, taken from Butalia (1998) and Menon & Bhasin (1998), to narratives of the seven women I interviewed, ending with memories triggered of my own life that connect with both Partition history and the narratives of the women. Honorably Dead then and Now We descend to my dad’s room again and help him wrap the weapon away. It is smooth and cool to touch, as death must be. Then, with his hand on my head, he tells my brother, “If the Muslims come and your sister is in danger, you must shoot her rather than let her fall into their hands.” My breath comes fast when I hear this, and I feel his hand on my head like the kukri must have felt the chicken-seller’s pudgy gentle hand reaching into her cage. I look at my brother. But my brother looks only at my father and he says, “I will”. I want to shout at them–I am your daughter. I am your sister. But my tongue has turned slow, slow as a monsoon slug I once saw Inder flick from our scrap of garden into the dust of the street. I look at my aunt Chandini’s miniature face and then at my father’s. The small face of a woman whose name is never mentioned, and the set face of a man who has upheld his family’s honor. A plane roars over the house and, for the first time, I feel no rush of fear; far more is the danger from those within …. (Baldwin, 1999, p. 26) I open with this excerpt from the short story, Family Ties by Shauna Singh Baldwin, as the story is depicted from the eyes of a young girl, who in a moment that may have lasted five minutes faced a multitude of emotion. The shock of hearing her father order her brother to kill her in the name of his honor, bewilderment of her 58

REMEMBERING THE 1947 PARTITION OF INDIA

brother’s unquestioning response, and newfound fear of the men in her life that are dearest to her. This story is set in India during Bangladesh’s struggle for Independence from Pakistan, essentially the second Partition of India, with similar bloodshed and trauma, yet located in Eastern India. It was during this time that memories of the Partition became real again for those who survived it in 1947. These memories brought back the same defensive mentality that led to the mass killing, and rapes, abductions, and what has been termed martyr suicides, of the 1947 Partition. Many of the communities of Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus, lived amongst each other in harmony before rumblings of Partition occurred; however each community– particularly in the rural areas–had a minority, whether they were the Sikhs, Muslims, or Hindus. As minorities, the fear of being outnumbered by a local enemy, who days before was more like a son or brother, led communities of Sikhs to make communal decisions about their Izzat that had dire consequences on the women. One method in which the men of the Sikh Punjabi community resisted this foreseeable attack was to kill, or as it is termed in our community “martyr,” the daughters and young women of their family or community. There is a strong memory of these women as martyrs who understood the importance of their family and community’s honor and “offered” themselves for the killing. The voices of these women have become silenced even in their deaths, due to this collective memory. As we see in the opening quote taken from Baldwin’s story, the author has elected to challenge the view that young women were obediently willing to martyr them selves in the name of their family and community honor during the Partition. Just by questioning the trust the young girl in the story has of her father and brother, suggests that this decision was not made in isolation from doubt. Ultimately, we begin to question whether the women had any choice in the decisions made on their bodies. Butalia (1998) and Menon and Bhasin (1998) go further to explore the realities of these killings from the perspective of the women and came across stories of women who choose not to jump into the wells, or choose to run away from their families when these killings were going on, or choose to defend themselves in the migration to the new and “independent” India, regardless of what came in their paths. The stigma they lived with or received from the community was just as difficult as the decision to walk away from the choices placed on them from their families and community. These stories began to ring a similar tone here in Canada, with stories of women of my generation, who had the potential for dishonoring their family through the choices they were making on their own bodies. We see parallel ideas in our community of women sacrificing their choices for the sake of their family honor. How is it possible that even today we are asking our daughters to martyr themselves, whether in literal or symbolic ways, for the honor of their family? “Leave him or else we will disown you”. “You cannot leave the home from this day forward”. “You are dishonoring our family if you pursue this decision”. These words and phrases ring true even in my own life story. Is it possible that others are hearing the same statements, and if so is this a memory of that bleak time in our history? Discussing our relationship to Izzat, we emerged onto the shores of honor killings and how we understood this in relation to our history and our own lives. One of the women in particular spoke to stories of the Partition in her family that had been 59

MUCINA

passed down to her by her aunt. The way she began retelling the story exemplified how the memories of this sacrifice have been crystallized in her family memory: The funny story that I would like to share is actually my Phua-ji my dad’s younger sister, her father-in-law, actually shot his wife (laughs). Because at that time, somehow it started off that one Muslim guy maybe had raped one girl. I’m just predicting what might have happened, and you know the Punjabi people thought, all Muslim people are doing it, so let’s retaliate, let’s start taking their girls and torturing them, and it’s just this whole all out warfare. And at that time what his wife said was rather than me being disgraced like that or dishonored like that, I’d rather have you kill me than have to go through that, so he took his shot gun and shot her and killed her. (Dalwinder) The use of the word “funny” to describe this tragic event was a shocking moment, I was taken aback by this descriptive word to describe such a horrific event, yet wondered if the use of laughter generally followed the telling of this story. I began to question the way this woman’s sacrifice was remembered and why. Could it be that those who have maintained the story are the men in her family? Is it possible the story does not stop there and in order to remember it less as a tragedy and more as a minor event, laughter and humor was utilized in the telling? However, as we carried on in the conversation we begin to see the impacts this story has to Dalwinder’s understanding of herself and what Izzat can lead a community and person to do: It just makes me think if you were in that situation how could you make that decision that I want to die rather than the possibility of being raped. Okay, it’s not necessary that you were going to be raped, because my Dadi [grandma] wasn’t, she walked over, and nothing happened to her, so nothing could have happened to her too right? What state of mind could that lady have been in to decide okay I just want to die, she didn’t even know that this was definitely going to happen to her right, scary thought … for her to make that decision I don’t think it was just her own decision, I think people said certain things that made her decide that, it could have been people were pressuring her and saying it is such a burden for you to be there … we have so much other crap to deal with, why do we have to deal with you, bringing you over … For me I think the woman was not considered a person that was worthy enough for them to fight for. Why did they have to decide ‘okay let’s shoot her’. For the husband to actually shoot her that’s a big deal too, because he’s committing murder, so for him to do that just on the possibility that she will be dishonored, doesn’t really make sense to me … It’s very hard to understand that and its very hard to understand why she couldn’t just fight for her rights, but if I was in that situation maybe hearing what other people have to say or hearing the stories going around, maybe I would have decided otherwise too … it’s difficult …. As Dalwinder described her understanding of this woman’s story, I could hear in her voice and see that she could relate so effectively to this woman’s predicament. This was so inherent in many of the women’s stories when they spoke of Izzat then 60

REMEMBERING THE 1947 PARTITION OF INDIA

and now. Izzat is so deeply engrained in our minds and bodies that the language of it is so well understood. Therefore, placing our selves in those situations is easy. These moments are happening on smaller, many times symbolic levels in our experiences today. The most impacting discussions about honor killings came about when the women articulated the relevance these stories have to the lives we live here and now. When we carry these memories of honor killings, particularly in the ways women are remembered in these tragic stories, we see the women connecting to Izzat in a distinct way. The way the community and family remembers those who were honor killed for their Izzat, does not always fit with how we conceptualize Izzat for ourselves. Thus, a fear of how this can transpire in our own lives becomes real, as is so eloquently expressed by Amrita: Then to be honest there is also a sense of fear. Like, looking at my brother and father and my cousins, if this situation were to come up how would that play out now, because they still carry those things in different ways, it’s muted in the way that it might have played out in the Partition and it’s changed given our cultural circumstances, but the underlying premise is still there. So what does that mean for me? And what does that mean when if I transgress those boundaries where I’m allowed–the spaces that I’m allowed to go–what does that mean for the way that they understand me. So yeah there’s definitely that element of fear … an edge of fear with men in general … but it was different to feel it in this particular way with my brothers and my father. Many of the women related to these moments by contemplating what actions their fathers or brothers would take with them if these moments were to transpire for them here and now. Harbinder spoke about a particular conversation she had with her father, testing to see how he would respond: I find it interesting because I read some stories on how fathers were forcing their daughters to throw themselves in the well, even like feeding them poison … I think we were watching a Hindi movie called Pinjar, I don’t know if you have seen it, but there’s a part when she goes back home and they wouldn’t accept her and it really got to me, it was really emotional, and I was like dad that’s disgusting did that actually happen? And he was like oh yeah, that is why women killed themselves, and I was like would you ever do that to me, would you accept me if we were in that circumstance? and my dad was like, I don’t care what society thinks that’s disgusting … and I trust him because he grew up in that environment and he can say, I know what it was like but regardless I would accept you as you are. In this story, Harbinder was very confident that her father would not express the same perspective that the generation of men before him did, however as we carried on in the conversation I asked her how her mother would have responded to the same question she posed to her father: That’s interesting because you know what I would never ask her that, I’m sure if I were to ask her now, clearly she would be like I would accept you. 61

MUCINA

The way my mom is now she’s so strict even with me. She says don’t go out because I don’t want it to effect your future Rishtay’s (marriage prospects) and stuff. So based on that she’s so concerned about what people think and how late I stay out, I’m sure she would also care what society thought of her daughter coming home after three days of being with a Muslim … so I don’t want to bad mouth my mom, right, just because of her views, but she does care about what people think, she does care about what society has to say about her, so I think if we were in that position with my mom, I don’t think she would, which is very interesting … well you never know maybe she might have. One of the first questions that formed in my mind when we had this discussion, was why would a woman agree to honor killing more than a man? Why would she believe her mother was a stronger enforcer of her Izzat than her father? However, I began to realize that during the Partition women were first hand witnesses of the potential atrocities that a woman could experience at the hands of a man and therefore become stronger enforcers of Izzat and boundaries surrounding their daughters, as can be seen in the Baljit’s story: I remember when I was going out to play, I was about 10, and my nani said, “enu bhar kali na shadi” (don’t leave her outside by herself) my mom said “ehay bhar kalun-e jandi-ha” (but she always goes outside by herself ) she said “nay” (no) mom said “ehay shoti ji tha hage enu ke hona? Kethay dhur tha jan nay lage” (but she is young, what is going to happen to her) ma said “nay enu nay pajana, enu ki shoti nu wi kathay nay pajana, apne aka, nazar nu na chaday” (no we are not sending her, even if she is young, we will not let her out of our sight) and her face, I didn’t understand at that time what she was talking about, later I found out she had watched children being raped and this is why … when you get that protective of children around men, there’s that sense of what’s appropriate, it’s only people who are aware of having seen that, that you develop that sense and my grandmother definitely had it, she was very, very, very careful in a way that she wouldn’t have been with children that young. I could see that in her eyes and recognize it for what it was years later, that she had watched children being raped, but that was something she had never talked about, never …. The memory of this moment and other moments that Baljit shared, where her grandmother’s fears impacted her upbringing and instilled a sense of fear in men and their potential for harm, is very real in this story. Yet, this fear was not only of strange men, it was of all men and what they could do with their power over our Izzat. Stories of honor killings in Canada began to emerge as well; one in particular dominated all the stories of the women. The story of Jassi Sidhu,4 a 25 year old woman that was murdered by her family when she chose to marry a man they did not approve of. This story was broadcast all across Canada and India and most recently a movie was made based on the events that led up to Jassi’s death.5 Jassi’s death has been termed as modern day honor killing and is a story that all Punjabi South Asian women can relate to and connect to the events that led up to her death. The boundaries that we are given and allowed to cross are distinctly dictated to us by 62

REMEMBERING THE 1947 PARTITION OF INDIA

our family’s sense of Izzat and the consequences of crossing these boundaries or spaces is demonstrated on the bodies of women. As eloquently described by Amrita, these themes are still expressed in our communities today: To a lesser degree it’s practiced in every family, like women who are punished if they transgress the boundaries, if they break the rules, those killings are extreme examples of norms we all abide by, are unspoken, and also verbally spoken of in terms of you are not allowed to go out without my permission and you have to tell me where you are, so much so that younger brothers can impose that on their sisters, their older sisters. All of the women had a relationship to the destructive side of Izzat and spoke to how this has impacted their own identity and life. Most of their responses to these events have instigated an instinctual desire to create distance from this side of Izzat, such as in Amrita’s narrative: I don’t know how to, its really hard for me to sort of take that in, because on one hand I look at these men that I love and respect in my family and again that sense of “could this happen to me?” there’s an edge of that. I remember reading that story of that woman who was killed by her father a couple of years ago … he had killed her because she had run away with her White boyfriend … there was just this complete sense of I don’t want to buy into this, I don’t want to participate in supporting this in anyway, so if my parents have to suck it up and deal with the fact that I want to live my life the way I do, then they’re going to have to, because even by me abiding by things marks my complacency in it. So abiding by societal rules and norms that my parents place on me, who I marry, when I get married, what I can do with my life, what are acceptable professions, you know just things like that. I just remember feeling this sense of fuck it, I don’t want to participate in this in any sense or way because we’re dying, we’re being killed and it’s acceptable and to that extreme form there’s this sense of outrage … but I mean it happens in relationships between spouses and that’s accepted. Parents are like, he beats her, but oh well they’re married. So I’m really torn, like I feel on one hand this desire for complete rejection of anything that has to do with supporting that framework, that structure, on the other hand seeing the beautiful parts of it, the beautiful elements of it, the beautiful people, and this sort of back and forth internal struggle of where do I find my path along with that. (Amrita) The most profound element in Amrita’s story was the element of hate and love that were strongly embedded in many of these narratives, as well as a strong awareness of where these ideas and beliefs come from. As much as this value and essence of our culture and community has the potential for becoming a destructive force in our lives, they are still our families and communities. It is in between these lines that we begin to see the resisting elements embedded in the women’s stories, where the multidimensional sides of Izzat are truly exposed and expressed. It is here that we begin to challenge how we choose to have Izzat become a part of our lives. We begin to hear about stories of survival where a negotiation of space becomes the instrumental tool in the struggle to find a fine balance between hope and despair. 63

MUCINA

Claiming Space for Our Intersecting Identities The last theme I have chosen to include in this paper focuses on how the women described finding a sense of agency in their life, while balancing the responsibilities of Izzat, family and community as a part of their identity. We begin to see how women continue to survive and thrive, while not compromising their family, community or their selves and, most importantly, challenging the pressures of “choosing” between their ethnic identities and communities, and the wider mainstream society, which promotes (or advocates for) an “independence” and a “freedom” that is misleading. We begin this discussion with the concept of living a double life. Living a Double Life Many of the women described living in many worlds, when speaking about their sense of self and the balancing of responsibilities, and many times this came down to learning to fit into each of the worlds we enter. This living in many worlds was an experience that all seven women could identify with and describe it as an everyday reality, as articulated by Inderjeet: I don’t know, I guess you learn to, like the story of a lot of South Asians; you learn to have two kinds of lives. Because when you’re at home it’s all about speaking Punjabi and that whole culture, the etiquette everything, and you learn that’s not always the most appropriate outside of the home, so you learn to fit in outside of the home. Living in two worlds is how we are able to negotiate for ourselves which part of our identity is allowed to emerge and which to suppress, for every distinct space or time we move in and out of. Many times the negotiations and compromises that are made to keep these lives distant from each other involve keeping certain aspects of our identity a secret, or lying to our parents in order to save what our parents believe encompasses their Izzat, which the following narrative illustrates: ... It’s two different worlds, it’s like you’re living a split personality. It’s not like I don’t act the same way I do at school as I am at home, but I’m not as open about what is going on in my life, to this day we don’t ever have dinner together, so it’s never that conversation “oh so how was your day honey?” (Laughs). It’s just like they assume that she’s just at university so she must be in class studying and hopefully not doing other things. But my dad says sometimes, he’ll say things like “you should only go to school for classes, not beyond that, because I know some kids do that” he doesn’t say openly, “oh I know you do that too”, but I’ll just be like okay, “I don’t do that dad, don’t worry”. This need to keep certain worlds a secret from our parents has as much to do with protecting them, as with protecting ourselves. The spaces we occupy in the Diaspora are fraught with contradictory messages from the private sphere of the home, to the public sphere of society. Keeping these secrets come with their own consequences. The sense of responsibility to maintain the rules of Izzat is so strong; guilt is a very common feeling that the women identified experiencing. 64

REMEMBERING THE 1947 PARTITION OF INDIA

… The guilt comes in and it is difficult, but you learn to live with it and you learn to deal with it and you don’t always think about it. It’s there, it’s in the back of your head, but it’s not in the forefront where you’re always thinking about it. This is what is expected of me but I’ll still go and do something stupid that they wouldn’t approve of, but it’s not considered stupid in our culture–the generation we’re brought up in–but to them it is stupid, so I’m just like hey whatever, if they think it’s stupid, then it’s stupid, I just won’t tell them. This sense of lying can also be understood as a form of “passing”,6 where the women integrate and choose to express certain elements of their identity in each space. This becomes a form of survival that allows for the women to navigate through their intersecting identities and to live in the many worlds that they appreciate and respect, even if these worlds are unaware of each other. Furthermore, in the process of keeping these worlds apart, there is the underlying fear of all these worlds colliding and the impact this has for our families and communities. Many times when we compare the family spaces and the outside spaces of the women’s lives, there is this underlying belief that the outside space, which many times encapsulates the North American value system, is the one that women are drawn to and the one that brings the greatest source of freedom. However, some of the women spoke about experiencing oppression and racism and the lack of belonging in those spaces, and having as many complexities as the family space. Many times this involves defending our cultures and the people and having to explain the actions of our family and community to the wider society: So I represent Punjabi-ness for people, and their understanding of what Punjabi culture is, so I become the spokesperson and/or mouthpiece unwittingly for so many people …. So having to play that role, and the role that women of color often play having to support and protect their men in a really racist, xenophobic society, where they’re only allowed in certain spaces and places to succeed and they’re not seen as whole men or given the power to succeed in the same way you would if you were White Canadian. So the role we have as women to play and support men and look and recognize their issues around their struggle around that, but not necessarily having them play that same role with us. So that role we women end up playing definitely is a second-generation piece of it. All the women had ideas of how they have resisted, how they have carved out spaces for their selves in the many worlds they maneuver in and out of. As Inderjeet alludes to in this narrative, going to school and moving out are the ways that she sees herself finding the space to allow certain aspects of her identity that she has hidden from her parents, to emerge. All the women spoke to similar tactics and choices that they used to find a sense of agency over their identities. As Dalwinder states in the following narrative, by having the space to exercise parts of herself that are suppressed in the home, she is able to think more positively about herself and her family: Because taking so many blows to your self esteem, thinking that you’re not independent is not a good thing, you have to try to find ways, … because 65

MUCINA

even though parents think they’re doing things for the best, they’re saying no for good reasons or whatever, it does hurt the child, right. You start thinking, okay what’s wrong with me that I, especially in my household, since my brother is allowed to do everything and I’m not, you start questioning, okay just because I’m a girl all of these things are being thrown on me and if you keep thinking that way, my thought is you go into depression. So the best thing you can do is to find ways to deal with it or run away. There is a story of survival and negotiation that is so clearly a part of the women’s everyday world. Carving themselves the spaces to allow for their intersecting identities to emerge becomes a way to resist the patriarchy and control that comes from their family, community and from the wider mainstream society. These particular elements of control in their lives have certain expectations that when they come together, a collision of all their worlds occurs. However, living in these different worlds as separated from each other is a way to exercise a sense of agency and control, yet doing so has the potential to create a sense of disengagement from either world. So, as much as this is a form of survival, it comes with its own challenges. So, how are the women carving out their spaces, and why? What do they get from these worlds that allow them to carry on holding tight to these ideals? How are they able to live in these contradicting worlds and the values that charge them? We begin to see through the voices of the women in the next section, how they are creating spaces for their selves in both worlds and beginning to challenge the way they are defined in all these spaces, and by doing so, asserting their agency and control over their identities and, in essence, redefining and reclaiming Izzat. Finding a Balance: Respecting Our Parents and Reclaiming Izzat When I first set out to explore how women were “resisting” against the patriarchal forces in their lives, I realized even within myself that resistance and everyday survival are not always the same thing. Many times the resistance comes through compromising certain aspects of the self, but always staying true to the core of one’s self. The women spoke a lot to moments in their lives where they were challenging everything and anything their parents wanted from them, and resisting against their culture and practices, believing that the “other side”–that being Western values that dominate the public culture–was better. However, upon reflection, these binaries only create a sense of dissonance from within, which is effectively illustrated by Amrita in the following passage: … When I was younger I used to think of it in those terms. I used to think of White culture and Canadian culture (Canadian meaning White), and Punjabi culture, and my family culture, and I don’t see it that way anymore. My exposure to alternative ways of being in the mantle of Indian-ness, the mantle of Desi (Punjabi) has really exploded that and I want to challenge that. Those are the constructions that have been imposed on us that Indian people control their women, that Indian people do this, that Punjabi people are like this, you know. Even within India, there is this understanding of what Punjabi people are like and how they are. I do think that it’s different values systems, but I think 66

REMEMBERING THE 1947 PARTITION OF INDIA

it’s important for me to make a distinction of how those value systems come across. It’s a part of capitalism, the way that patriarchy works … there could be Punjabi families that are trying to challenge those systems and it’s few and far between, but it’s like that everywhere, few and far between families that are trying to challenge that system altogether. So I do see it as a different sense of values, but I do see it as creating a binary of Canadian-ness and Indian-ness or Punjabi culture. Achieving the appropriate balance at the end of the day is about taking the aspect of your identity that comes from the family, community and culture, and balancing that with living and breathing in a world that is drastically different from the one of our parents. The balance is about respecting the elements of our identity that come from all the intersecting worlds we are a part of and then finding ways to carve out spaces for our selves that reflect our sense of self. As Jaswant states, these elements of your self are important and the fear of losing that is just like losing a part of our identity: But at the end of the day I try to make the best balance that I can, like I still go to all the family functions, I still go to the Gurudwara once in awhile, not all the time. A part of me worries that if I move out I’ll lose all my connections and become completely Whitewashed, you know, if I do, there’s a lot of issues there, I’m barely connected to the Indian side, my parents are that connection and if I leave them behind do I lose that connection? The fear of losing her “Indian side” is clearly just as important to her, as it creates challenges for her. Therefore, it is unfair to think that choosing becomes the easier road, since both worlds encompass a part of our selves. It was also a matter of understanding where our parents are coming from, the values that are very important to them and the transitions that they have had to make to come to a new country and raise children. Many of the women spoke to coming to this understanding later on and knowing that there are certain things they just cannot expect from their parents that Western society suggests they should expect: … In a sense it seems like a double life, not really, it’s just, my family coming here, the fact that they came here since 78 and even longer than that, doesn’t mean they are fully immersed in the western culture. So me being the person that I am, I am in the middle of two cultures, now I’ve embraced both, but I still have to think about even though I have embraced both, where do I find the balance and my sense of that balance is to make sure I don’t come home and say to my mom oh mom why don’t you become like that White mom over there! I don’t go home and make her change, I’ll try to respect where they are coming from. I’ll try to respect when they’re making that decision they are taking into consideration all the knowledge that they have. They are making that decision to the best of their abilities, right, so I won’t go in and impose my own views on them. So that’s what I try to do, but sometimes you have to rebel because it goes beyond your threshold of resistance, then sometimes you have to just blow up. (Dalwinder) 67

MUCINA

In essence, we are finding ways to resist but also finding ways to survive, while still respecting our selves and our families and communities. Embedded in our relationships with our family and community is a sense of our identity. Within this identity is the embodiment of Izzat, in the multidimensional ways it lives in our lives, yet it is still a part of who we are and with this part of ourselves comes great responsibility. As the women have stated here, we may have attempted to cast away this part of ourselves, but the history of Izzat goes back farther than we can imagine and our memory of Izzat is so deeply engrained in our family and community and selves that we always come back. Always working to strike a balance within our selves is a way to move beyond the belief that these aspects of our culture and community are wrong, and to also embrace the aspects of our identity that are unique to being born in the Canadian Diaspora. The following words of Dalwinder encapsulate this eloquently: Be respectful of yourself and be respectful of your parents and meeting that balance for your self is difficult because your sense of respect for yourself is different from how your parents perceive it, but if you find that balance, it will make you happier in life, I guess. CONCLUSION

Throughout this paper, I have explored how the concepts of Izzat became an integral part of women’s existence during the Partition. When exploring narratives of South Asian women in the Diaspora, we see evidence of the legacy and memory of Izzat. This legacy can be observed in the everyday life of second generation South Asian women; it has even been demonstrated in extreme cases that have appeared in Canadian media; and it has been used as a tool to include and exclude women on a community level. All such examples identify the importance of exploring Izzat for Punjabi women and their community. As we see in the voices of the women, the way we are surviving and living our everyday life in the Diaspora becomes about resisting the expectations to be contained in one culture and identity, reclaiming our values of Izzat for ourselves, and selectively choosing which elements of each culture we take in and which we resist. Even though these are the pieces that emerged from the findings that can be concluded as being the significant element to this research, the most valuable message that I hoped to portray and express is the element of voice. As much as it was important for me to have the women’s voices central to this research, my voice was as much a part of this, and I merged in and out of the research, as an insider, an outsider, a story gatherer, and story teller. In my efforts to convey the impact the stories of the Partition had on my understanding of my self and of my community, I shared my story and the struggles I have experienced in life thus far. My reasoning for doing so was threefold. First, I wanted the reader to join me on the journey of researching, writing and exploring elements of secondgeneration South Asian identity and stories of the Partition, and understand this on an intimate level. Second, I wanted to convey how vital it was for me to do research as an insider to my community and, in effect, encourage further research to come from inside our community to issues that impact us personally. Finally, I carry with 68

REMEMBERING THE 1947 PARTITION OF INDIA

me memories of the Partition, memories of violence, and memories of survival. When I think about the experiences I have had in my life so far, I cannot extricate these memories from my story. The act of doing this research has allowed me to not only write a chapter of my life, but to close that chapter and start the many new ones that are to come. In this process I have mourned for the martyred women of the Partition, I have mourned for my grandmother who has experienced so much loss in her life, and I have mourned for my personal losses that came as a result choosing to place my understanding of Izzat before any others. Therefore, I am encouraged that perhaps our history, the stories of the women and my story may impact other second generation South Asian women who are struggling, surviving and living their everyday lives in the Canadian Diaspora. NOTES 1

2

3

4

5 6

In the Indian caste system, the Dalit community is referring to the scheduled casts, or untouchables, also termed as Harijans, who are considered the lowest of the caste system, according to Hindu religion (Butalia, 1998). By using the word Diaspora, I am following the work of Avtar Brah (1996), who defines it as dispersion from the centre of a home. This term is originally associated with Jews after the Babylonian exile. Brah goes on to dissect the word and its use by various ethnic communities today. In his analysis Brah suggests that one needs to consider questions of who, when, how and what circumstances led to the dispersion from home? “What socio-economic political, and cultural conditions mark the trajectories of a specific Diaspora? What regimes of power inscribe the formation of a specific Diaspora?” (p. 182), when using the word in relation to a group of people. For this thesis, I have elected to use this word to define the Punjabi, or South Asian community that lives in Canada, as a Diaspora, since these questions are a part of the story of the immigrant South Asian journey to Canada. The history embedded in this name can be traced back to when the Sikh Punjabi community was struggling with social inequalities, particularly on the basis of a class and gender hierarchies present in the social systems at that time (17th Century). Guru Gobind Singh-ji used the name Kaur to create solidarity and equality between males and females. Because a woman’s surname was given to her by her father at birth and her husband when she was married, Guru Gobind Singh stated, “You don’t have to take anybody else’s name. You are an individual, you are a princess, and you keep Kaur as your last name.” Therefore, women are encouraged by the Sikh faith to use Kaur as one’s surname, in effect moving towards the abolishment of the caste system. However, as is apparent in my own name, parents generally give their daughters the name Kaur as a middle name. Website dedicated to the memory of Jassi Kaur Sidhu, which has all media articles included: www. justiceforjassi.com Murder Unveiled (2005). Passing is a concept explored by scholars such as Sara Ahmed in her article ‘She’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a Nigger’: Passing through Hybridity (1999). Ahmed examines racial narratives of passing for a White person, when in fact Black. The notion of passing that I am alluding to here speaks to the idea of passing off one identity for another, which becomes about lying to those who we are trying to preserve our identities to, such as the family, or peers.

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. (1999). ‘She’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a Nigger’: Passing through hybridity. Theory, Culture & Society, 16(2), 87–106. Bacchetta, P. (2000). Reinterrogating partition violence: Voices of women/children/Dalits in India’s partition. Feminist Studies, 26(3). 69

MUCINA Baldwin, S. S. (1999). English lessons and other stories. Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane. Baldwin, S. S. (2000). What the body remembers. Toronto: Vintage Canada. Brah, A. (1992). Difference, diversity and differentiation. In J. Donalds & A. Rattinsi (Eds.), Race, culture and difference. London: Sage Publications. Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting identities. New York: Routledge. Butalia, U. (1995). Muslims and Hindus, men and woman: Communal stereotypes and the partition of India. In T. Sarkar & U. Butalia (Eds.), Women and the Hindu right: A collection of essays. Delhi: Kali for Women. Butalia, U. (1998). The other side of silence: Voices from the partition of India. New Delhi, India: Penguin Books India. Butalia, U. (2002). A necessary journey: A story of friendship and reconciliation. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 27(2), 147–164. Creswell, J. W. (1998). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five traditions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Danieli, Y. (Ed.). (1998). International handbook of multigenerational legacies of trauma. New York: Plenum Press. Das, V. (1995). National honour. In V. Das (Ed.), Critical events: An anthropological perspective on contemporary India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Handa, A. (2003). Of silk saris and mini-skirts: South Asian girls walk the tightrope of culture. Toronto: Women’s Press. Handa, A. (1997). Caught between omissions: Exploring “culture conflict” among second generation South Asian women in Canada. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada. Kabir, A. J. (2005). Gender, memory, trauma: Women’s novels on the partition of India. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 25(1), 177–190. Kamra, S. (2002). Bearing witness: Partition, independence, end of the Raj. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Menon, R., & Bhasin K. (1998). Borders & boundaries: Women in India’s partition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Nayar, K. E. (2004). The Sikh Diaspora in Vancouver: Three generations amid tradition, modernity and multiculturalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Potts, K., & Brown, L. A. (2005). Becoming an anti-oppressive researcher. In L. A. Brown & S. Strega (Eds.), Research as resistance: Critical, Indigenous and anti-oppressive approaches. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Puar, J. (1994). Resituating discourses of “whiteness” and “Asianness” in northern England. Specialist Review, 94(1 & 2), 21–54. Said, E. W. (2003). Orientalism. London; New York: Penguin Books. Sarin, V. (Director), Bennett, S. (Writer), Smith, M. R. (Writer). (2005). Murder unveiled [Motion picture]. British Columbia, Canada: Force Four Entertainment. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. London; New York: Zed Books; Dunedin; New York: University of Otago Press. SobtƯ, K. (1979). ZindagƯnƗmƗ. NayƯ DillƯ: RƗjakamala PrakƗĞana.

70

DEVI MUCINA

6. MOVING BEYOND NEO-COLONIALISM TO UBUNTU GOVERNANCE

I have even come upon a small revelation-and as I proceed daily to recall and reflect, and lay out on the page, it is with an increasing conviction of its truth, that if more of us told our stories to each other, where I come from, we would be a far happier and less nervous people. M. G. Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003 p. 1). INTRODUCTION

My telling of our Maseko Ngoni1 stories through an Ubuntu perspective is an effort in decolonization, that is, to come to understand the self beyond historical colonial values and beliefs which undermine my culturally informed sensibilities and practices about being Maseko Ngoni. I do not want our future generations to know Africa through the forced accumulation of colonial spirituality, governance and dominant forms of education. It is only through the telling of our stories that we gain a sense of self, which is rooted in our local histories. Any other way of being will only allow us to be consumers of foreign modernities and this phenomenon never allows us to have creative and reflective time for the creation of our own modernity. Yet, my storytelling only gives us one story from a possible many stories. My single story invites engagement from multiple Maseko Ngoni perspectives and arguably this could be the strength of Ngoni oral history. This is so in that it allows for each speaker’s context and position to be highlighted with equal merit and respect. The diversity of oral history has always created intense discourse and debate as it highlights the complexities and contradictions of being human among other humans. The aim of this chapter is to highlight how we, Maseko Ngoni, can dialogue with a shared knowledge from our collective past to find solutions to our mutual contemporary present. I argue that we regenerate Maseko Inkatha (which loosely translates to unity, strength and arguably nationhood), that Maseko Ngoni as represented through the Inkatha, can resuscitate our cultural customs of unity. Maseko Inkatha comes from sharing our memories (knowledge) about how to live an informed Ngoni life that is nested within the larger Ubuntu context. Reviving our memories reminds us of a fecund oral tradition of Ubuntu cultural histories, which invites social harmonization towards the Maseko Ngoni people as a whole. I articulate these moments through chingoni (as being inclusive and as based on care for land and people). I hope this sharing of cultural historical knowledge will work to foster a better understanding of how our Ubuntu ways of knowing are relevant for addressing our future. N. Wane et al. (eds.), The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, 71–81. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

MUCINA

TOWARDS UBUNTU INDIGENOUS PHILOSOPHIES

We, the Maseko Ngoni, have been forced to abandon our local knowledge of interacting with our environment and ourselves through the imposition of colonialism (Mutwa, 1969 and Alfred, 2005). We must understand colonialism so that we do not perpetuate its diversionary procedures against our own Ubuntu peoples. Colonial governance has its own masters, who long ago established that their objective was to destroy all that is Ubuntu (Conrad, 1995; Hochschild, 2002 and Gourevitch, 1998). Colonialism and its institutions are about conquest and exploitation. Liberatory practices must be informed through traditional actions of empowerment and governance. Thus, for us, revitalizing and regenerating all that is respectful and caring, for all that is Maseko Ngoni, without undermining or disempowering all that is Ubuntu, is about working towards giving voice for reviving actions to decolonize colonial procedures deeply embedded within the lives of Ubuntu peoples. I value that other Ubuntus may not share my approaches when trying to attain the Ubuntu philosophy of preserving life; hence I do not impose my approaches on other Ubuntus. I only hope to inspire them, as I have been inspired to stand for that which historically speaks to us as Ubuntu. Invariably, my actions as well as the actions of other Ubuntus will affect all of us, as we are all interconnected to all that is Ubuntu through our lands. The land has a tacit way of reminding us that as Ubuntu we share in a collective history. Maseko Ngoni have been interpreted through theories of nationalism. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) conceptualizes the nation-state as “an imagined political community– and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” Indigenous Ubuntu philosophy speaks about Maseko Ngoni governance as not based on “imagined political communities”, but rather our political cultures are buttressed within Ubuntu lived experience, that is, within a set place/space while dialoguing through Ubuntu languages to encode meaning. Inkatha reflects the Ubuntu knowledge that has been formed through the land and the lived experience of the Ubuntu. The key is with breaking the colonially imposed silence on local Ubuntu knowledge. Yet as Anderson reminds us of the Euro-centric definitions of nationalism, Maseko Ngoni in particular invites a subversive reading to the dominant perception of nationalism. Almost always, nationalism in Africa has been studied in relation to European colonialism. Ania Loomba (1998: 158–159) captures very powerfully the problem of borrowed Western theories of nationalism when she quotes Chatterjee’s Nation and Its Fragment. He argues thus: If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americans, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistant and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized (1993: 5). 72

MOVING BEYOND NEO-COLONIALISM

With the growth of Diaspora studies we face the question of: Is Maseko Ngoni constitutive of a Diaspora? Gabriel Sheffer in Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad (2003: 9) informs us that: Among those who are aware of the origin of the term, [Diaspora] it is widely believed that the term first appeared in the Greek translation of the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament, with reference to the situation of the Jewish people–“thou shalt be a diaspora in all kingdoms of the earth” (Deut. 28, 25). Sheffer in the same book identifies what he terms as “Problematics of Diaspora.” Interestingly, he points out how Indigenous peoples do not fit in his diaspora. By his own admission, he states: In this context it is essential to note that although the entities dealt with here are of ethnic origin, not all dispersed ethnic minorities and groups constitute diasporas in the sense proposed in this book. Thus, not discussed here are native nations and other indigenous ethnic tribes and the groups who, after their permanent settlement in the territory that they came to regard as their homeland, did not migrate to other territories (2003: 13). Sheffer notes that the Ubuntu cannot be a Diaspora because we have never left our homelands, we have just moved around our lands. So how do we engage our own Ubuntu knowledge? Here are some fragments of Ubuntu knowledges that I am engaging as I journey through my decolonization process. I hope my discussing here can inspire us to share our individual action of living an informed Ubuntu life. OUR SPIRITUALITY, OUR RITUALS, OUR CUSTOMS AND TRADITIONS

Maseko Ngoni spirituality encompasses the knowledge of Umkulumqango (The Great Deviser or The Great Spirit), Unkulunkulu (The Greatest of All) or Umnikazi we Zinto Zonke (The Owner of All Things) (Mutwa, 1969; Nwaezeigwe, 1997; Lugg, 1975 and Read, 1970). Maseko Ngoni do not believe that human beings can commune with Unkulunkulu because we believe that individuals cannot understand or comprehend Unkulunkulu (Mutwa, 1969). We believe that the Maseko Ngoni that died long ago, but are still remembered by us, are the ones that commune with Unkulunkulu. We therefore pray to the amadlozi (our ancestors who are beyond the living realm as we understand it) to act as go-betweens with Unkulunkulu, the source of power, health, rains, victory, and protection against plagues. The oldest remembered amadlozi is the closest to Unkulunkulu but all amadlozi are seen as guardians who can assist in times of epidemic natural disasters and during great warfare (Nwaezeigwe, 1997). Certain life-forms for Ubuntu cannot be harmed as these creatures represent the amadlozi (spirit) of our ancestors and as we say ‘a person cannot harm a creature or natural object that is his/her totem or namesake’. Baba always said to me: If a creature or natural object is your namesake than it is your duty to protect it, just as the amadlozi protect us. Because we believe that we’re in a cycle of

73

MUCINA

reincarnation, the way we treat other creatures may revisit us in one of our other life form stages (Baba, Personal Communication, 2003). Thus, the Maseko Ngoni have knowledge and respect for the environment, but through the imposition of colonialism, we are forgetting this relational knowledge which helps maintain the balance of our interdependence for a sustainable future. Unfortunately most of our people are no longer using Maseko Ngoni rituals and practices. The memories of Baba show how important our ways are for fostering our Ngoni identity: I remember the circumcision ritual; it was not a pleasant experience, yet I feel a sense of pride for having overcome it. There was something good in knowing that all the boys and girls in my age set shared this experience with me. To this day, I cannot explain the ways we are all connected. Besides I cannot tell you the secrets of our experience, you just have to live it. When you recognize a face that shared this fate with you, there is no need for words; just laughter will do (Baba, Personal Communication, June 2003). Baba conveys a sense of community based on a bond of shared age set experiences as the common denominator for building strong unity among the Maseko Ngoni. The circumcision itself seems unimportant and arguably can be seen as the tool for encoding unity based on shared experiences. Ubuntu life would not be life without the guidance of our amadlozi (ancestral spirits); they guide every facet of our life from politics, religious ceremonies, social interaction, economic activities and the practice of medicine. Nothing can be done without first communing with our amadlozi. One can commune with one’s amadlozi at any time and in any place. The contemporary changes of Ngoni life and rituals are reflected in the dialogue I have with Baba, which speaks to the small shifts that take place when we engage each other: Baba: We have lost the fighting spirit, no one wants war, we only want to make money and hear the word of God. Devi: I thought we only waged war as an effort to preserve life when all else had failed? B: You have spoken well and there is truth in what you say, our ways of life extend much more beyond the wars. D: I hear Christians lump your work of nyanga yemithi (medicine man or herbalist) as evil witchcraft practice. Does this mean you have stopped your work? B: Hear me well, I am not a nyanga yemithi, I help where I can, using the knowledge of our ancestors and I have never asked to know what I know. Sometimes I dream of a plant, I am told where the plant is, what time to approach it, how to use it and before or after I get it someone arrives needing its services. I never question it because this is our ancestors at work but I believe God guides this work as well. All Ubuntu Christians understand this. 74

MOVING BEYOND NEO-COLONIALISM

D: I have stopped being a Christian and only pray to our ancestors. B: I understand that but I will still pray for you to find your way back. D: Could it be possible you are lost in this one area. B: Remember your place; I am your father (Personal Communication, June 2003). For me the above dialogue exemplifies that even Baba who lives an immersed Maseko Ngoni life has been colonized, meaning that, in our own family, we all need to do some form of decolonizing. We must resist foreign forms of spirituality because they undermine our own forms of spirituality. Christianity will always undermine Ubuntu spirituality because it has been presented as the only viable civilized way forward (Chanock, 1985; Fraser, 1914 and Elmslie, 1899). Thus, Ubuntu cannot be Christians without being co-opted and colonized. Colonialism is all encompassing; hence, our resistance must be all encompassing. Yet it is also important to acknowledge that for the most part, Baba’s actions reflect historic Maseko Ngoni knowledge, which can benefit all Ubuntu. Baba speaks, Zulu, Nyanja, Shona, Africaans, English and other local Ubuntu languages, without receiving formal schooling. His knowledge of ancestral Ubuntu history and world contemporary issues is impressive to say the least. His competence with Ubuntu cultures always leads people to assume that he was born in their community. This is the kind of knowledge we ought to welcome, local knowledge that brings a sense of cohesiveness to Ubuntu peoples. OUR LANGUAGE

It is also important to understand that Maseko philosophy occurs within an Ubuntu worldview. Therefore, Maseko perception-shaping experience must be understood within the context of Ubuntu languages and symbols that first encoded meaning onto the local experience. Through the study of Linguistics, we know that some important concepts do not translate from one language to another without losing meaning (Waters, 2004). This does not begin to account for cultural difference between religion, values, geographical location and sacred historical senses (Waters, 2004). Even when a non-Ubuntu learns Ubuntu languages they may still not understand the Maseko philosophy because they lack experience within the Maseko cultural context, which in its fullest expression is Ubuntu. The Maseko individual therefore makes sense of herself in relation to land and community. Voice comes from the shared experience of relationship as established within the boundaries of community. This Ubuntu interaction leads to the development of shared symbols as a way to convey meaning within the boundaries of place. This triangular relationship of voice, place and symbols creates individual identity, which is interpreted and understood from within the community (Waters, 2004). Without a shared community to confirm our identity, existence would be meaningless and unexplainable, thus the diversity and commonality of Ubuntu languages is essential for Maseko identity and survival. In 1998, the Revival Association was established and its objectives were as follow: – to revive the language which is not being passed on from their forefathers to younger generations; 75

MUCINA

– to bring unity to the Ngoni from both central and northern regions; – to foster Ngoni identity (Kishindo, 2002: 10). The Ngoni Revival Association’s efforts to save Ngoni identity and language has not grown as expected, for the Maseko Ngoni situation is complex and when we take in consideration the issue of an Indigenous tongue this already complicated situation is further compromised because historical readings tells us that the mothers of most if not all Maseko Ngoni children were from different ethnicities and spoke little to nothing of the Chingoni languages. Pachai in The Early History of Malawi notes: “The Chewa collaboration of this theme is the often heard statement ‘we defeated them with our women’ (1972: 247).” One of the dilemmas that the Ngoni Revival Association faces is that we, as Ngoni, have multiple identities. Thus, can we highlight one identity without sacrificing our other identities? But even bigger than this is the fear of our other Ubuntu sisters and brothers. They surely must be questioning what it means when some Ngoni choose to stand distinctly on their own. Do we wish to threaten the Ubuntu unity that exists within Malawi? Pascal J. Kishindo’s (2002) Flogging the Dead Cow: The Revival of Malawian Chingoni speaks to this position but, arguably, it also serves to reassure the other Ubuntu that there is no chance that the Ngoni will again change the social fabric of our Malawian Ubuntu family. So in response to these concerns and others we state: Yes, we are continuing on from where Ngoni Revival Association left off. Yet, we should make it clear that the revival of Chingoni need not be seen as a threat to replace other Indigenous languages. On the contrary, the efforts to revive Chingoni tell us that all Indigenous languages are important to the acquisition of specific Indigenous knowledge as created in those languages. This knowledge is important for the regeneration of Ubuntu ways. The Chingoni language has the ability to express our ancestral knowledge of cultural traditions and practices. If it is true that language carries the symbols to express meaning, then without our languages we have lost some meanings of our world (Avruch and Black, 1993). Our goal is to help our community reclaim our ancestral language through educating the self, which for us means communicating through the Ngoni language as the primary language of early schooling (grades 1 to 7). In order to generate interest and sustainability, I think it is necessary to schedule a day of the week like every Friday afternoon as story telling time; this must be done by an elder who tells the story in Chingoni. All Ngoni ceremonies must also be performed in Chingoni. We are aware that ‘Zigwe pano nzatonse’ (Whatever happens here will affect us all) and we are sure that social unity will arise from this exercise for all. HOW MASEKO GOVERNANCE ADDRESS CONTEMPORARY LIFE

I am advocating a self-conscious traditionalism, an intellectual, social, and political movement that will reinvigorate those values, principals and other cultural elements that are best suited to the larger contemporary political and economic reality (Alfred, 1999, xviii).

76

MOVING BEYOND NEO-COLONIALISM

Maseko Ngoni governance allows for genuine Maseko Ngoni participation. Genuine participation gives us the drive to promote local governance for future generations. “We believe that our ancestors provided a living legacy of good governance. We believe that they offer spiritual guidance from the world beyond about how to create institutions that will serve us best (Baba. Personal communication, 2003).” The Maseko Ngoni struggle for traditional governance is dependent on embracing our past, and understanding our present as a guide for the future. Our ancestors governed with us in mind and in death they guide us. We need then to find ways to speak with and listen to them. We are the next generation’s amadlozi in the same way our ancestors are our amadlozi. The way we govern now is the history we leave for our future generation. To ensure these traditional ways are carried forward, we need to educate the Maseko Ngoni regarding how our traditional governance can serve us while honoring all our relations. Maseko Ngoni governance satisfies the needs of the people through five principles, which are based on collective power: – It depends on the active participation of individuals; – It balances many layers of equal power; – It is dispersed; – It is situational; – It respects diversity (Alfred, 1999: 26–27). In the Ngoni context the practice of collective power is exercised by individuals who identify as being Maseko while also actively participating in Maseko Ngoni governance. An important part of this is respecting all Ubuntu spiritual ways, as the beliefs and practices of other Ubuntu, allows us to understand that power resides in many places and things. We therefore acknowledged that power could manifest itself in many ways and through many things. For example, when trying to grow crops, the arrival of rain is not within our power, nor are natural disasters. These events and other happenings inform us that there are different forms of powers all functioning in different contextual settings. Hence, we, as Maseko Ngoni, believe that power is situational. We have also learned that place teaches different people different things. Baba puts it this way: “All Nguni are related but we do some things differently in our lands” (Personal communication, 2003). The words of Baba remind us to be respectful of the diversity within the Ubuntu philosophy because it reflects the elements that connect us all as Ubuntu while also validating our unique identity as Maseko (Mutwa, 1969). Invariably, the participation in colonial governance perpetuates the fragmentation of our Ubuntu languages, our Ubuntu identities and our Ubuntu customs as colonialism reduces us to beasts of burden, neo-slaves, whose only use is being instruments of labor. We need to abandon these colonial institutions and embrace our responsibility to regenerate informed local Maseko governance. Inkosi ya Makosi Gomani II illustrates the importance of local education for the future of Maseko Ngoni through his exchange with two Ngoni teachers. “How is your school?” “The classes are full and the children are learning well, Inkosi.” “How do they behave?” 77

MUCINA

“Like Ngoni children, Inkosi.” “What do they learn?” “They learn reading, writing, arithmetic, scripture, geography and drill, Inkosi.” “Is that education?” “It is education, Inkosi.” “No! No! No! Education is very broad, very deep. It is not only books, it is learning how to live. I am an old man now. When I was a boy I went with the Ngoni Army to the war against the Bemba. Then the mission came and I went to school. I became a teacher. Then I was chief. Then the government came. I have seen our country change, and now there are many schools and many young men go away to work to find money. I tell you that Ngoni children must learn how to live and how to build up our land, not only how to work and earn money. Do you hear?” “Yebo, Inkosi.” (Yes, O Chief ) (Recorded by Read, 1968: 2–3) UNDERSTANDING WHY WE MUST LEAVE COLONIALISM

Frantz Fanon (1963) conceptualized colonialism as a foreign people or government, which imposes its will on the original inhabitants. Other writers (Conrad, 1995; Chanock, 1985; Fraser, 1914; Hochschild, 2002; and Meredith, 1979) describe how the colonizers established their business of colonization: through force (gunpowder) and later through religion which created spiritual fear; both worked to enslave the Maseko Ngoni physically and mentally. The colonizer was seeking the interest of Indigenous resources, lands, spiritual control and dominance through what they termed European ‘development’ and ‘civilization’ (Achebe, 1971). Colonialism/neocolonialism have worked to disarticulate historical memories of Maseko Ngoni. Problematically, the African effort to correct this injustice was called the fight for independence. In present times we call it the fight for democratic reform yet all this fighting is done within the colonial structures. Audre Lorde’s reminds us that the master’s tools can only lead to the creation of the master’s house. Similarly, colonial structures will only lead to the creation of neo-colonialism. This means in Maseko Ngoni geographies where colonial British power structures remain intact, we are allowing Western colonial masters to exercise indirect rule through the collaborators of the African elite. CONCLUSION

Using traditional philosophy as the foundation of the new movement for Indigenous governance will help us restore the lost harmony between the Indigenous people’s social and political cultures. If political legitimacy flows from harmony between a community’s cultural values and the values imbedded within its political institutions, than this deep traditionalism is the key to 78

MOVING BEYOND NEO-COLONIALISM

overcoming the divisions and fractionalization that characterizes Native politics today (Alfred, 1999, 44). To engage in Ngoni Inkatha we must eradicate the neo-colonial forms of governance and instead replace them with our local forms of Indigenous governance. The neocolonial and Euro-centric forms of governance promote the exclusion of Ubuntu peoples, while Ubuntu forms of Indigenous governance are augured in inclusivity. Part of reclaiming Ubuntu heritage is dependent upon centering Ubuntu Indigenous philosophies within the everyday lives of local peoples. The Maseko Ngoni of amaZulu, Swazis and baSotho were synonymous with political protests when historic ways of the local society were colonially violated. Forms of protest included the readiness to articulate Ubuntu beliefs, or migration to a distant land; this was designed to protect the values of the local society and to enable the collective to reproduce itself peacefully and amicably. Our personal and collective memories are important ways to nurture oral tradition. Our liberation is in our history and we can only access it through sharing our Ubuntu teachings. Baba Mukulo conceptualizes Ubuntu philosophy as the act of preserving and respecting all life. Yet when our ability to practice our Ubuntu ways of living are undermined and forcibly stifled through exclusion based on race as created by the colonial powers, then we are forced to create local practices as an oppositional knowledge to that which tries to annihilate us. We posit that it is time to revive our shared collective memory of action. If the Maseko Ngoni heart knows the local Indigenous ways, can we afford to ignore it, and if we do what does that say about us as a people? All that needs to be said has been said, but all that needs to be done has yet to bear fruit. NOTES 1

Concerning Maseko Ngoni, I am speaking about the Ubuntu ethnic people, who have a memory of being in northern Africa, central Africa, and are presently in southern Africa. In this work, I am focusing on the Ngoni who are in present day Lizulu in Malawi.

REFERENCES Private Information. Informant, Baba, Personal Communication, 1980–2006. Informant, Baba Mukulo, Personal Communication, 1981–1982. Informant, Mama Mukulo, Personal Communication, 1980–1982. Informant, Professor J. Bertin Webster, Personal Communication, August 2005. Achebe, C. (1964). Arrow of God. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1962). No longer at ease. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1971). Things fall apart (The New Windmill Series: No. 162). London: Heinemann Educational. Alfred, T. (1999). Peace, power, righteousness: An Indigenous manifesto. Don Mills, ON; New York: Oxford University Press. Alfred, T. (2005). Wasase: Indigenous pathways of action and freedom. Toronto: Broadview Press. Anderson, B. R. O’G. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

79

MUCINA Avruch, K., & Black, P. W. (1993). Conflict resolution in intercultural settings: Problems and prospects. In D. J. Sandole & H. van der Merwe (Eds.), Conflict resolution theory and practice: Integration and application (pp. 131–145). New York: St Martin’s Press. Ayittey, G. B. N. (1998). Africa in chaos (1st St. Martin’s ed.). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache (1st ed.). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Brazier, C. (2001). The no-nonsense guide to world history. Oxford London: New Internationalist Publications; in association with Verso. Bryant, A. T. (1949). The Zulu people: As they were before the white man came. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter. Chanock, M. (1985). Law, custom, and social order: The colonial experience in Malawi and Zambia. African Studies Series, 45. Cambridge Cambridgeshire; New York: Cambridge University Press. Conrad, J., & Watts, C. T. (1995). The heart of darkness. London: Everyman. Elmslie, W. A. (1899). Among the wild Ngoni: Being some chapters in the history of the Livingstonia Mission in British Central Africa. [S.l.]: Anderson and Ferrier. Fraser, D. (1914). Winning a primitive people: Sixteen years’ work among the warlike tribe of the Ngoni and the Senga and Tumbuka peoples of Central Africa. London: Seeley Service & Co. Ltd. Fraser, D. (1970). Winning a primitive people: Sixteen years’ work among the warlike tribe of the Ngoni and the Senga and Tumbuka peoples of Central Africa. Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press. Gourevitch, P. (1998). We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publishers. Gowariker, A. (2004). Swades: We, the people. 210 min. India: UTV Communications. Hochschild, A. (2002). King Leopold’s ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. International Defence and Aid Fund (1977). Zimbabwe: The facts about Rhodesia. London: The Fund. Kishindo, P. J. (2002). Flogging a dead cow: The revival of Malawian Chingoni. Nordic Journal of African Studies, 11(2), 206–223. Kunene, T. (2002). Zimbabwe votes: Matabeleland. British Broadcasting Corporation [cited 02 December 2005] Kungoni Centre of Culture and Art, Chamare Museum & Research Centre. Introduction to the Ngoni spiritual world. Retrieved December 9, 2005, from http://www.kungoni.org/images/pdf_files/ngoni.pdf. Kuper, H. (1952). The Swazi. International African Institute. Lessing, D. M. (1950). The grass is singing. New York: Crowell. Linden, I. (1971). Some oral traditions from the Maseko Ngoni. The Society of Malawi Journal, 24(2), 61–73. Loomba, A. (1998). Colonialism/postcolonialism: The new critical idiom. London; New York: Routledge. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. Lugg, H. C. (1975). Life under a Zulu shield. South Africa: Shuter & Shooter Publishers. Malamula, F. (2005). Uniting force behind Gawa Undi. The Malawi Nation Online. Retrieved November 25, 2005. Martin, R. (1999). Great Zulu shaman and elder credo Mutwa: On alien abduction & reptilians. The Spectrum Newspaper. Memmi, A. (1965). The colonizer and the colonized. New York: Orion Press. Meredith, M. (2002). Our votes, our guns: Robert Mugabe and the tragedy of Zimbabwe. New York: Public Affairs. Meredith, M. (1979). The past is another country: Rhodesia 1890–1979. London: A. Deutsch. Murdock, G. P. (1959). Africa: Its peoples and their culture history. New York; London: McGraw-Hill. Mutwa, V. C. (1969). My people, my Africa (1st American ed.). New York: John Day Co. Nwaezeigwe, N. T. (1997). Ngoni. The Heritage Library of African Peoples (1st ed.). New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. Pachai, B. (1972). Early history of Malawi. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Phiri, D. D. (1973). Malawians to remember Inkosi Gomani II. Blautyre: Longman Malawi Ltd. Pike, J. G. (1968). Malawi: A political and economic history. London: Pall Mall Press. 80

MOVING BEYOND NEO-COLONIALISM Pitts, L. (2005). Toxic word has made it all the way to Africa. The Miami Herald. Retrieved September 19, 2005, from http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/ Read, M. (1968). Children of their fathers: Growing up among the Ngoni of Malawi. Austin, TX: Holt Rinehart & Winston. Read, M. (1970). The Ngoni of Nyasaland. Read, M. (1956). The Ngoni of Nyasaland. London: Oxford University Press. Schapera, I. (1966). The Bantu-speaking tribes of South Africa: An ethnographical survey. London: Routledge. Schneider, H. K. (1981). The Africans: An ethnological account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Sheffer, G. (2003). Diaspora politics: At home abroad. New York: Cambridge University Press. Spear, T. (1972). Zwangendaba’s Ngoni, 1821–1890: A political and social history of a migration. Madison, WI: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin. Waters, A. (2004). American Indian thought: Philosophical essays. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. Wiedner, D. L. (1962). A history of Africa: South of the Sahara. New York: Random House. Wilson, M. H., & Thompson, L. M. (1969). The Oxford history of South Africa. New York: Oxford University Press. Woods, D. (1978). Biko. New York: Paddington Press. X, Malcolm (1967). Malcolm X on Afro-American history (1st ed.). New York: Merit Publishers.

81

YUMIKO KAWANO

7. BEING PART OF THE CULTURAL CHAIN

INTRODUCTION

Though European countries did not colonize Japan, Eurocentrism has been imposed through the educational system and has actively worked to negate Indigenous knowledges of Japan and those of racialized minoritized groups. In particular, since the Meiji period (1868–1912), there has been a certain intensification of whiteness within the governing socio-cultural fabric of Japan. This intensification has located Indigenous peoples of Japan tangentially to the cultural fabric, in that many of us are unable to transmit local Indigenous knowledges within our governing communities. Eurocentric ways of knowing within the educational system, language, daily practices, the calendar system, foods, and medicine have gained prominence and perpetuate the dominant notions of cultural superiority and inferiority. In this paper, I will trace the historical conditions of the Meiji period to understand the ways in which the educational system, come to be governed through colonial ideologies of whiteness. I also discuss how Indigenous knowledges such as language and ethnomedicine have been silenced in the educational system, but have played an important part with my understanding of the self. ANTI-COLONIALISM AND INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES IN EDUCATION

Since the Meiji period, educational institutions have been one of the central sites where Eurocentric ways of knowing have come to be reproduced and, at the same time, Indigenous ways of knowing have come to be devalued and marginalized. This procedure has been led by the Japanese political and academic elites. With the idea of social Darwinism, Europeans labeled the peoples of Japan as the ‘half-civilized’ yellow race (Kowner, 2000). The experience of colonialism in the context of Japan intersects with colonialism as materializing within Africa, in that, the Japanese tried to “improve the race” in order to overcome this sense of racial inferiority and achieve the same intellectual ‘level’ as Western countries by mimicking their political, economical, cultural and educational styles. Moreover, as Wane (2006) states, decolonizing the self is a difficult process due to the fact that most Indigenous people subjected to Western education come to be the ones to reproduce Western ideology. Japan is not the exception. While various scholars write on the influence of whiteness on Japanese political, economical, cultural and educational practices, few discuss whiteness through an anticolonial perspective. In fact, the terms that are usually favored are “westernization” or “modernization.” I am also emphasizing that Japan is one of the countries which N. Wane et al. (eds.), The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, 83–92. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

KAWANO

have never been a part of European colony (Fieldhouse, 1989). It might be said that the imposition of European ideology since the Meiji period in social, political, economical, and educational aspects is imperialism rather than colonialism in that, as Young (2001) describes, imperialism is an ideology and colonialism a practice, or, as Loomba (1998) mentions, “imperialism can function without formal colonies (as in the United States imperialism today) but colonialism cannot.” (p. 12) However, she also states the distinction between them is “defined differently depending on their historical mutations” (p. 11). Moreover, she alerts readers that the different understanding of colonialism and imperialism complicates the term “post-colonialism.” In addition to Loomba, Dei (2006) problematizes the term, which suggests that colonialism is over and thus ignores the ongoing struggles of oppressed people. Moreover, Dei (2006) states: [a]nti-colonial is defined as an approach to theorizing colonial and re-colonial relations and the implications of imperial structures on the processes of knowledge production and validation, the understanding of Indigeneity, and the pursuit of agency, resistance and subjective politics. (p. 2) In thinking through an integrative anticolonial framework, I understand the imperial and the colonial as being constitutive, as being part and parcel of each other, as not being disjointed or fragmented. The challenge for the anti-colonial thinker is extricating these socio-historical conjunctures. Thus, by querying the imposition of Eurocentric ways of knowing in Japan within the anti-colonial framework, I am able to engage the discussion concerning marginalized Indigenous knowledges in the Japanese educational system and the role of Japanese colonialism regarding other Indigenous communities within Japan and other geographies of Asia. As a colonizing procedure, it was necessary for Western countries to firstly control the Japanese mind. wa Thiong’o (1986) states that economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. Dei (2008b) notes that colonialism cannot exist without imperialism supporting it politically, militarily, culturally, and economically. Eurocentric values have been imposed on Japanese Indigenous knowledges at the individual, institutional and systematic levels with the “support” of Japanese elites. It is difficult to draw lines between individual, institutional, and systematic colonialism, due to the fact that these levels are interconnected for the purpose of economic and political benefits. Systemic imperialism is difficult to dismantle. As argued by many anti-colonial scholars who examine decolonization of education such as Dei and Kempf (2006), Wane (2006), Smith (1999), wa Thiong’o (1986), I understand the ongoing colonialism in the educational system as reproducing the colonial imprint and perpetuating whiteness, that colonialism prevents the learner from critically engaging in the process of decolonization. I recognize my complicity within the governing colonial process. Within an integrative anti-colonial discursive framework, Indigenous knowledges play an important role for decolonization. According to Robert (1998), “Indigenous knowledges are accumulated by groups of people, not necessarily Indigenous, who by centuries of unbroken residence develop an in-depth understanding of their particular place in their particular world”. They have been passed down from 84

BEING PART OF THE CULTURAL CHAIN

generation to generation in the form of proverbs, stories, myths that contain wisdom and experiences of our ancestors (p. 59). As Wane (2006) states in colonial education, Indigenous knowledges have been marked as “primitive” and “inferior” compared to Western ways of knowing. Moreover, the notions are internalized into people’s mind. As Dei (2008a) notes, “claiming Indigenous knowledge in the western academy is an anti-colonial struggle for independence from exploitative relations of schooling and knowledge production.” (p. 10) Thus part and parcel of the decolonizing project is to position Indigenous knowledges within conventional schooling. IMPACT OF WESTERN IDEOLOGIES IN JAPAN

Japan today is often described as a world-leading, modernized, or developed society in terms of material development such as medical technologies, economy, and science. Despite these developments, there are increasingly serious problems such as environmental destructions. It is often said that the Meiji period and post World War II were turning points of Japan in terms of “modernized progress” and westernization both internally and in terms of foreign relationships. During the Meiji period, modernization was equated with westernization. The minds of Japanese political and academic elites were consumed with Western colonial ideologies. Reforming policies regarding education, women’s rights, private business, and agriculture needs were embedded with imperial Western tropes. Moreover, the inhumanity of the colonial endeavors, which subjugated the Japanese were imposed onto different Asian people and Ainu people in Japan (Yaguchi, 2000; Knapp & Hauptman, 1980). Ching (1998) has commented that the successful adaptation of the Japanese to Western ideology was more successful than that of people in other Asian countries, and that this adaptation therefore justified the imperialism in those countries. In fact, the Japanese elites and intellectuals started labeling other Asians as “un-civilized” while the Japanese as a group were labeled by Europeans as “half-civilized”. According to Ching, it was when the “yellow” Japanese made their “anomalous imperialistic entry” into the world of colonizers that they were positioned in between the margins of “white” and “black”, and the “colonizer” and the “colonized”. At this point, for the Japanese elites, “protecting” other Asian countries from Western imperialism and other perceived threats was the mission of their “superior” race. Ching (1998) notes, “caught between the contradictory positionality of non-white, not quite, and yet-alike, Japan’s domineering gaze towards its colonial subjects in the East had to always invariably redirect itself, somewhat ambivalently, to the imperialist glare of the West” (p .66). While there were elites who advocated Westernization as a way of surviving the world capitalist system, there were some Japanese scholars who reconsidered Japanese traditional culture. However, their reconsideration led to ultra-nationalism, which was exclusive in that the diversities of other cultures were not considered but the “superiority” of Japanese culture within and outside of Japan was emphasized. Therefore, both groups of elites, who were either caught by Western ideologies or who advocated a nationalist Japanese traditional culture, were still caught in the dominant notions of “superiority” and “inferiority” (Kawano, 2010). 85

KAWANO

THE CHARACTERISTIC OF JAPANESE INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE

Japanese traditional knowledge is embedded in the worldview that everything has a soul or spirit, and emphasizes living with oneself, others, other creatures, nature, and the universe in harmony, often called “animism”, as E. B. Tylor originally coined. He suggests that animism contains the core of spiritualistic philosophy and that this is the primitive form of religious. However, his naming, categorizing, and defining of the belief might be problematic. His perspectives ignore the complexities and diversity within the worldview. It is not a primitive form of “religion”. This Indigenous worldview is embodied in our daily life as ecology. These knowledges as aforementioned are accumulated within a particular space for a long time, and passed down from the ancestors to the next generations. People also gain these knowledges not only from interactions with human-beings, but also through the observation or “communication” with animals and plants, and dreams. There are also similarities between Indigenous worldviews of Japan and the other Indigenous communities all over the world. Battiste and Henderson (2000) describe the belief system of First Nations communities in Canada: “Indigenous people’s worldviews are cognitive maps of a particular ecosystem” (p. 40). In relation to the Japanese Indigenous worldview, “Shinto” (way to the Creator) as a belief system, is often interpreted, as a form of “religion” by many scholars today. However, a systematized and bureaucratized “States Shinto” was strategically brought in the Meiji period. In the late nineteenth century, as the Meiji restoration started, the Japanese government imposed restrictions upon the localized and diversified forms of Shinto known as “Ko-shinto” (old Shinto or folk Shinto) and Shrine Shinto, expressed and seen, for example, in the various local festivals, arts, forms of healings and so on. According to Clammer (2000), the Japanese government sought to unify people’s consciousness in order to aid their fight towards global competitiveness, socially, politically and economically. Thus, a belief system was used to create the national collective identity. LANGUAGE AS A POWERFUL TOOL OF COLONIZATION

Language is about history, experiences, and relationships with others, nature, and the universe. Language is about spirituality and communicating and carrying culture. People understand themselves in relation to their social, cultural, and natural environment (wa Thiong’o, 1986). In relation to language and colonialism, Fanon (2007) also states that “a man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language” (p. 18). According to wa Thiong’o, for the colonizer, controlling language is crucial in order to be able to dominate the mental universe of the colonized and thereby control the tools of self-definition. Thus colonialism led to the destruction or defamation of the Indigenous culture and the conscious elevation of the language of the colonizer. But how has language played a role in the context of Western imposition in Japan, given that although Japanese were racialized for political and economical exploitation, Japanese were not forced to lose their language? While many colonized countries have been forced to abandon their own languages, the Japanese language 86

BEING PART OF THE CULTURAL CHAIN

has not been replaced with European languages such as English, French or Spanish. In the Meiji period, Some Japanese elites including the Minister of Education suggested abolishing Japanese completely and adopting English in the educational system. The minister of education at the time, Ainori Mori stated: The spoken language of Japan being inadequate to the growing necessities of the people of that Empire, and too poor to be made, by a phonetic alphabet, sufficiently useful as a written language, the idea prevails among us that, if we would keep pace with the age, we must adopt a copious and expanding European language. The necessity for this arises mainly out of the fact that Japan is a commercial nation; and also that, if we do not adopt a language like that of the English, which is quite predominant in Asia, as well as elsewhere in the commercial world, the progress of Japanese civilization is evidently impossible … (p. 51–52). The minister was concerned that the peoples of Japan could not consume the ‘sophisticated cultures’ through the medium of Japanese language; because Japanese writing and spoken system were very complex, it was thought of as being difficult to transform into a communicative tool (Coulmas, 1990). Coulmas cites Nishi’s (1874) explanation about Japanese language: In our letters at present … it is improper for us to write as we speak as well as improper to speak as we write since the grammars of speech and writing in our language are different (p. 74). However, there was quite an outburst from scholars including Westerners against the minister’s suggestion. In addition, Japanese scholars could deal with the transition from spoken language into a writing system. Thus, the Japanese language, especially as a carrier of culture, seems to remain without much damage. Furthermore, the Japanese government also utilized the Japanese language as a colonial tool to govern Indigenous communities within and outside of Japan, in particular this governance materialized by way of the Japanese elites learning and implementing colonial policies from European countries. However, concerning language, despite the fact that Japanese has remained widely spoken in Japan, English particularly came to be more important and a fashionable marker of status, bearing dominant notions of inferiority and superiority. For example, people who can speak English are seen as “cool” or “fashionable”, particularly among younger generations. Further, cultural capital of the English language gives rewards and punishment. Those who have the capital have better opportunities to higher education and the possibility of getting a better job in Japan. My experiences as an international student at two Canadian post secondary institutions, particularly in terms of language ability, have reinforced my unconscious notions of the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of “the other”. For example, language, specifically English, came to be more than a communication tool for me. It became instead a tool for evaluating myself, through my abilities to speak that language. In my obsession to use English fluently, I came to internalize notions of who was inferior and superior. Just as Fanon (2007) describes, mine is a clear example of how those who want to be white will become whiter as they gain “mastery of the cultural tool”, that is language. 87

KAWANO

POWER OF WORDS AND THOUGHTS

It is emotionally difficult for me to affirm my language heritage in Canada, and importantly, concerning the power of words, Japanese Indigenous knowledge helps me with embracing my local Japanese language to acknowledge the self. There is a particular Japanese Indigenous knowledge called “Kototama,” in which the ancestors in relation to our everyday lives come to be understood as the spirit of words. But Kototama is not only about the spirit of words, it is also a cosmology and belief that Kototama, with its 50 rhythms (the vowels, and their combination with consonants), produces life (Shimada, 1993, 1995). Before spending some time with Kototama, I will briefly talk about how this knowledge relates to the existence of Japanese Shinto Shrine and the notion of the Creator. Ancient Japanese people considered words as the creator, which produces life. In fact, a bell in a Japanese shrine is often said to be the instrument used to call for or get the attention of the creator and any divine heroes. The other role of a bell and the other reasons why the bell exists in shrines, however, are not often explored. Shimada (1993) explains that it is related to Kototama. The shape of a bell is the shape when we open our mouth. When we shake a bell, the sounds come out of the “mouth” of the bell. When we open our mouth to say something, we, like a bell, produce a vibrating energy, which in turn produces life. Our words, and bells like those found in Shinto Shrines, represent the mechanism of Kototama. In relation to the notions of the creator, there is a mirror set in every shrine in Japan. The reflection of the individual looking into the mirror is believed to represent the creator. In other words, the creator is you. A creator is not something to be apart from you, but it is indeed yourself. The mirror in Japanese is called a “ka-ga-mi”. When “ga” (translated as “ego” in English) is taken away from the rest of the letters, “ka-mi” is left. “Kami” translated into English means “the Creator”. It is not something that we could learn at school today. While many younger generations today have not learned why we call a mirror “Kagami” in Japanese, this complex language system and relationship with our ancestor’s worldview is something that I could connect to and learn from my ancestors. According to Emoto (2005), “Kototama” is the sounds and the energy we are always producing, such as a form of speaking and thinking. In other words, the material world is the manifestation of vibrating energies. Vibration is also called “Shindo” in Japanese. Emoto (2004) asserts that the original meaning of the word “Shindo” 㖾╤) is “Shinto” (䯭拢), the ways of the Creator; “Tou” (拢) can be also called “do” ╤) depending on its combination with other words. In other words, ancient Japanese believed that everything begins with vibration; vibration is a life itself. These vibrations include both the heard and unheard sounds and the energy we produce by speaking and thinking. The ancestors knew the power of written and spoken words with their dynamic relationship with our thoughts. In the experiment by a Japanese researcher, Emoto Masaru, water crystals were shown to change depending on what one said or thought towards the water, which captures some of the characteristics of “Kototama.” In fact, his experiments show the difference between languages. As wa Thiong’o (1986) emphasizes, a language itself is an 88

BEING PART OF THE CULTURAL CHAIN

expression, a history, and a relationship with others; moreover, these others include animals, nature and universe. For example, “Arigatou” in Japanese can be translated into “Thank you” in English. However in his experiments, each word creates differently shaped crystals. In my experience, while some of my generation call parents “Mama” (Mom) “Papa” (Dad) because of the influence of English it has made it “fashionable”, my parents did not allow me to refer to them in that way. I was taught to call them “Okaasan” (mother), and “Otousan” (father) in Japanese because they knew that language and words make a difference. Because it is known that fifty five to seventy percent of the human body is composed of water, a spoken and typed word with its vibration can influence our body, feeling, way of thinking, mind and soul. Japanese elders know and understand the power of words and the different methods of healing. Some scholars disagree and argue that Emoto’s study is not acceptable; they reject the interconnectedness between human beings and the ecosystem. Battiste and Henderson (2000) also emphasize, that “eurocentrism rejects the idea that the human mind can understand ecology” (p. 36). Scholars insist that “water” cannot be affected by our words and mind, which to me seems to be a limiting condition of reading Indigenous ways of knowing through a materialist point of view. ETHNOMEDICINE

Japanese Indigenous knowledges have been forever devalued. However, the knowledges are not completely gone; they are still alive and passed down through generations by family members. My Indigenous knowledge is, as Wane (2006) notes, “an outcome of interactions that occurs among families and communities and is alive and holistic” (p. 99). Concerning my experience with Indigenous healing methods, I was raised by parents who taught me the importance of understanding illnesses holistically; not only perceiving the symptom but also its context, the healing power of nature, and the traditional ways of healing. They believe that there is a reason when one gets ill, and that one should pay attentions to the roots of an illness holistically. As much as possible, they kept me from using the western medicine that many doctors recommend today. For example, I have been struggling with eczema since I was a child. As a child, I don’t know why my parents did not allow me to use western medicine, which could release me from itchiness at the moment. They knew that it has a quick effect but it would also cause harmful side effects in the long run. Instead of using western medicine, we preferred using such remedies as Japanese vegetables, fruits, Japanese or Chinese herbs, Kikou (Qigong), and acupuncture. I also realize almost all of us younger generations today go to see a doctor trained with Western medical knowledges because we believe it is the only effective treatment. What I am concerned with here, is to what extent is this the result of internalizing and reproducing the dominant notions of inferiority and superiority? Even when one can deal with an illness using Indigenous knowledge, he/she might go to see a doctor due to his/her “anxiety” or “uncertainty” about the symptoms. In addition, when I have used traditional ways of healing rather than Western medical methods, some of my friends have viewed it as “old fashioned” or “not cool” or 89

KAWANO

even “weird”. Traditional healing often comes to be considered “not reliable” and only used for less serious illnesses or injuries. I came to realize that I was living in a contradiction. Even though I knew that I was comfortable using traditional ways of healing illness, cold or injury using my inner ability with the help from food, tea, and plants that my parents passed down to me, I started hesitating to use and talk about these methods outside of home because I was worried about what others thought. I did not want to be a minority in my school and be bullied by my friends. I played different roles in different places in strategic ways to survive in the school system and the society. Even when the commercialized traditional medicine or healing methods that I knew came to be popular or people talked about these methods in public, I still pretended that I did not know about these methods. At the same time, I wondered why people were so surprised as though something new had been discovered. Throughout those experiences of schooling and education and outside of my home, I knew what I could and could not talk about in order to manage everyday life. CONCLUSION

Some of the Indigenous knowledge that my ancestors passed down to me is alive without losing the historic-specific meaning. It is my responsibility to be a part of the cultural fabric to guide subsequent generations. In the Mi’kmaw community, an Indigenous community in North America, “adults are responsible for other children. When someone notices something happening, the person cannot walk away with the thought “they aren’t my children” but rather that person has the responsibility to intervene” (Battiste and Henderson, 2000, p. 54). Similar to the principle of the community, there was a time when community members raised children together in Japan; adults had a responsibility to educate and guide the youth, independent of official guardianship. Notably, if elders found children’s behavior to be problematic, they addressed these moments through Indigenity with respect and care for the youth. People understand their world through relationships with others by way of the social and cultural interactions. Many Japanese families today are nuclear families. During the era when extended families were the most prevalent family unit, family and communities were the central way for knowledge to be passed down to younger generations. However, I wonder, in present-day Japan how youth can find ways of accessing the knowledge from elders on a daily basis. I am asking then: How can we centre the body of the Elder within schooling and education to retrieve embodied knowledges? This work has significant meaning to me. It is based on collections of my fragmented story. It speaks to my journey, the search for my culture, history, and my family. It speaks to the search for the self. Through recalling and unpacking my local history, I have come to know and understand the importance of personal narratives as voiced through my Elders as an embodiment of knowledge. I understand embodied knowledge as central to the decolonizing process. In resisting systemic forms of colonialism as imbued through schooling and education, I wish to share my experiences with all who, in solidarity, take up the myriad challenges of social 90

BEING PART OF THE CULTURAL CHAIN

justice work. I seek to extricate and reclaim the space and time where Elders are positioned as part and parcel of the knowledge systems within contemporary schooling and education. Through local Indigenous knowledges as located within the geography of Japan, I write for social transformation. I write through an Indigenous voice to come to know and understand the self, to make sense of my lived experiences as historically governed through colonialism. Through writing to decolonize the self, I hope to open up possible spaces for Indigenous knowledges of Japan within conventional schooling. REFERENCES Battiste, M., & Henderson, Y. (2000). Protecting Indigenous knowledge and heritage: Global challenge. Vancouver: UBC Press. Clammer, J. R. (2000). Japan and its others: Globalization, difference and the critique of modernity. Oregon, OR: Trans Pacific Press. Ching, L. (1998). Yellow skin, white masks: Race, class and identification in Japanese colonial discourse. In Kuan-Hsing Chen et al. (Eds.), Trajectories: Inter-Asia cultural studies (pp. 56–75). New York: Routledge. Coulmas, F. (1990). Language adaptation in Meiji Japan. In B. Weinstein (Ed.), Language policy and political development (pp. 69–86). Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Dei, G. J. S. (2008a). Indigenous knowledge studies and the next generation: Pedagogical possibilities for anti-colonial education. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 37, 5–13. Dei, G. J. S. (2008b). Learning to divide the world-cultural dialogues. Lecture presented in SES3911H. OISE. Dei, G. J. S. (2006). Introduction: Mapping the terrain–Towards a new politics of resistance. In G. J. S. Dei & A. Kempf (Eds.), Anti-colonialism and education: The politics of resistance (pp. 1–24). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Dei, G. J. S., & Kempf, A. (Eds.). (2006). Anti-colonialism and education: The politics of resistance. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Emoto, M. (2004). The hidden messages in water. Oregon, OR: Beyond Words Publishing, Inc. Emoto, M. (2005). The true power of water: Healing and discovering ourselves. New York: Simon & Schuster. Fanon, F. (2007). Black skin, white masks (7th ed.). New York: Grove. Fieldhouse, D. K. (1989). The colonial empire. London: Macmillan. Kawano, Y. (2010). Fanon’s psychology of the mind, the “Yellow” colonizer and the racialized minorities in Japan. In G. J. S. Dei (Ed.), Fanon and the counterinsurgency of education (pp. 157–176). Rotterdam/ Boston/Taipei: Sense publishers. Knapp, R. G., & Hauptman, L. M. (1980). Civilization over savagery: The Japanese, the Formosan Frontier, and United States Indian policy, 1895–1915. The Pacific Historical Review, 49(4), 647–652. Kowner, R. (2000). ‘Lighter than yellow, but not enough’: Western discourse on the Japanese ‘Race’ 1854–1904. The Historical Journal, 43(1), 103–31. Loomba, A. (1998). Colonialism/postcolonialism: The new critical idiom. London; New York: Routledge. Memmi, A. (1991). The colonizer and the colonized. Boston: Beacon Press. Mori, A. (1872). To William D. Whitney. 21 May 1872. Letter. Kawasumi, 47–51. Roberts, H. (1998). Indigenous knowledges and western science: Perspectives from the pacific. In D. Hodson (Ed.), Science and technology education and ethnicity: An Aotearoa/New Zealand perspective (pp. 59–75). Proceedings of a conference held at the Royal Society of New Zealand, Thorndon, Wellington, May 7–8, 1996. The Royal Society of New Zealand Miscellaneous Series #50. Shimada, M. (1993). Kototama no Hanashi; Nihonjin to Nihongo no Genten (Story about Kototama; Origine of Japanese people and language). Tokyo: Souei Publication. Shimada, M. (1995). Kojiki to Kototama (Kojiki and Kototama). Tokyo: Kototama Association. 91

KAWANO Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books. wa Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonizing the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Heinemann. Wane, N. N. (2006). Is decolonization possible? In G. J. S Dei & A. Kempf, A. (Eds.), Anti-colonialism and education (pp. 87–106). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Yaguchi, Y. (2000). Remembering a more layered past in Hokkaido–Americans, Japanese, and the Ainu. The Japanese Journal of American Studies, 11, 109–128. Young, R. (2001). Colonialism and the desiring machine. In G. Castle (Ed.), Postcolonial discourses: An anthology (pp. 73–98). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

92

ARLO KEMPF

8. NORTH AFRICAN KNOWLEDGES AND THE WESTERN CLASSROOM Situating Selected Literature

INTRODUCTION

Although anti-colonial readings of history, as well as “people’s” histories (see Anderson 2007, Spivak 1996, Rodney 1972, Zinn 1999, Parenti 2003, Kempf 2009, and many others) have begun to bring to light the inaccuracies of dominant history as well as the cultural, racial and political-economic motivations underlying these inaccuracies, very little information from these suppressed and marginalized histories and knowledges has made its way into Canadian classrooms. A knowledge gap persists (and is maintained) between the prevailing narratives that dominate the Eurocentric Canadian educational system, and the actual histories of the peoples who populate Canadian classrooms and communities. It is crucial to ask whose stories are absent from our curricula? Whose ancestors are remembered and how? Who speaks for Canada as we remember the national past? How are the brutal stories of genocide and conquest, which underwrite Canada’s nation building project told or not told to our children? What do our children learn of the thriving trade of enslaved people whose cessation was resisted so vehemently by the early elites? What are the formal and informal limits of tolerance, inclusion and multiculturalism as articulated by our teachers who are the nation’s front line cultural workers? The quick and popular answer to these questions is that despite being the combinedmajority people of color, women, working class communities, people with disabilities and those with non-dominant sexual identifications have been marginalized within formal schooling in Ontario specifically and Canada more broadly. Although there are increasingly exceptions to this marginalization, the story of Canada is too often a celebration of a dominant minority group and its narratives: of wealthy European men situated within a heteronormative structure of colonial and family relations. Although it is key to sustain a criticism of this bundle of strategic omissions (which we might for convenience term colonial Eurocentric hetero-patriarchy), it is also important to engage with alternative, multicentric approaches to understanding the past, present and future. While history is better understood as a dialogue than as a monologue (Kempf, 2006), as an interrogation rather than a rhetorical polemic, the results of the interrogation must materialize as actual history curricula, not simply as critical historiography. Such theory must not be understood as a companion to history, but as constituent of history itself. Although the task of critical and revisionist historians is ongoing, the revelations of non-dominant and indeed resistant knowledges N. Wane et al. (eds.), The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, 93–110. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

KEMPF

must, where possible, be centralized within various current curricula. This chapter offers an examination of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization; Molefi Asante’s The Egyptian Philosophers and Maulana Karenga’s Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt in service of a multicentric approach to curriculum design, implementation and delivery. This is neither a comprehensive examination of these texts nor a rigorous look at all of the possible applications of these works to the Ontario schooling context. It is instead an attempt to situate these works for subsequent curricular integration and investigation. This chapter works from an anti-colonial framework, conceptualizing the colonial as anything imposed or dominating (Dei, 2006), and the anti-colonial as all resistance to imposition which centers notions of accountability; knowledge production and legitimization; and the de-operationalization of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, ethnicity, language and geography as sites of oppression and/or privilege. Formal education is among the key mechanisms through which colonial epistemic programs proceed. Mainstream schooling socializes and indeed formalizes inequitable relations along lines of race, gender, ability, language, anti/religion, class, sexual orientation and geographic status (see Apple, 1978, Willinsky, 1998, hooks, 2003, Kempf, 2009 and others on education and domination). Critical historiography has an important role to play in the anti-colonial approach. Many academic and activist investigations of ancient knowledges have focused on the appropriation, misrepresentation and discrediting of the people and ideas in question (see Bernal, 1985, Olela, 1998, Said, 1979, James, 1990 and others). Such work is critical as an entry point for contestation, recognition and reconnection – it is a crucial first step. Other works have taken this further and have, with great respect, provided a detailed explication of many suppressed histories and knowledges–not for the sake of contrast or conflict with dominant histories but to bring these important knowings into view (see Asante, 2000, Sardar, 1989, Dewdney, 1975, Dickason, 2002, Wright, 1992 and others). It is now incumbent upon educators, curriculum writers and parents to bring these knowledges (not just these contestations) into the classroom and its resources. As a response to many (but not all) of the colonial and impositional elements of formal schooling, multicentric curriculum design is best understood as a process of decolonization. Why do students and classrooms need these knowledges? The obvious response to this question is accuracy. An equally important answer is strategy. In Ontario, like many colonial contexts, education is simultaneously arresting and transformative. For many students, it serves to both stifle and suppress non-dominant cultural knowledge (while celebrating and universalizing dominant cultural knowledge) and at the same time floods students with Eurocentric epistemological and axiological norms. The dominant has, for centuries, written the dominated out of the historical material process. The works of leading European thinkers (like Bacon, Descartes, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Smith, Ricardo and others) from a variety of fields (such as politics, mathematics, science, philosophy, economics and others) serve as a modern foundation and prescription for the suppression and delegitmization of non-dominant knowledges and peoples (see Shiva, 1997, Wolff, 2000, Bishop, 1990, Joseph, 1987 and others). The effects of such thinkers are present in educational practices in 94

NORTH AFRICAN KNOWLEDGES AND THE WESTERN CLASSROOM

many colonial contexts. Educational imperialism is a crucial element of colonialism, with profound effects on the colonized and colonizer. Introducing students to the deeper roots of many so-called European knowledges (like philosophy, mathematics, psychology and others) serves at least three crucial purposes. First, it contributes to a more accurate, complete and varied story of human history. As individuals, we are driven to our pasts–this journey should be assisted for dominant and non-dominant bodies alike in our educational systems. Second, it reconnects many students to their past (and therefore present and future). When students do not see themselves or their histories reflected in their education, disengagement understandably follows (see the work of Dei, et al., 1997). Easy self-location within one’s education can facilitate engagement. Third, given the Eurocentric underpinnings of our educational systems, such presentations and representations of history can serve to rupture the colonization-in-progress with which we are all faced. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Smith (1999) writes: “(s)chooling is directly implicated in this process [of colonization]. Through the curriculum and its underlying theories of knowledge … schools redefined the world and where … people were positioned within the world” (p. 33). In many cases, non-dominant people have been located outside of the world deemed worthy of study. It is thus incumbent on educators to integrate both critical histories and the many suppressed ancient knowledges into classrooms and curricula. While the texts discussed here are important for the decolonizing of education, they are not the only tools appropriate to this task. The works discussed here are a beginning sample of the myriad possibilities for anti-colonial curricular integration–resistance based multicentric curricula. ON LOCATION ...

I am a white educator in Ontario, currently teaching in a pre-service teacher education program and a sociology department at two universities in Southern Ontario. Before teaching at the post-secondary level, I was a high school teacher for six years. As a social sciences teacher and department head, I was asked to teach a colonizer’s history. I was educated in Ontario and Quebec–inundated with the tautology of Canada’s multiculturalism while taught the glories of only certain peoples’ ideas, struggles, epistemologies and ontological perspectives. My own children sit daily in Ontario classrooms with (in the Toronto District Schools Board’s tribute to empire) a picture of England’s queen, always in view. They come home with the ‘discovery’ stories of early colonial invaders and tell me about the Underground Railroad. When I told my daughter that a great many African-Americans went back to the US after finding Canadian racism intolerable, she found it hard to believe me. To contest dominant history is for me, a professional, personal, academic and family undertaking. Most of my time as a high school teacher was spent teaching philosophy and Greek and Roman history. In both the grade 12 Philosophy (HZT4U) and the Grade 12 Classical Civilizations (LLV4U)1 courses offered in Ontario, the governmentmandated curricula exclude ancient African peoples and ideas. In the case of the philosophy course, which focuses heavily on early Greek as well as modern European 95

KEMPF

ideas and thinkers, the omission is glaring, as such philosophy pulls both directly and indirectly from East, North and West African ideas. The curriculum identifies Greece as the birthplace of philosophy and the Socratic Method as the quintessential epistemological principle upon which European thought has developed. Europe is understood as the oven in which philosophy was baked to perfection. The official Ontario Ministry of Education Expectations for Grade 12 Philosophy make over forty-five references to philosophers, only five of these are to non-Europeans, and none are to African thinkers (Ministry of Education 2002, pp. 188–125). The Classical Civilizations course excludes Africans almost altogether, despite the broad designation inferred by the course’s title. It focuses entirely on ancient Greece and Rome, ignoring not only Afro-Asiatic contributions to these societies (despite the overwhelming evidence that such contributions are abundant) but also omitting African and Asian societies as a whole (as well as the peoples of the Americas and elsewhere). The few mentions made to non-Europeans refer to Asians (Persians) and Africans (Carthaginians) as the unworthy casualties of the Greek and Roman marches to civilization (Ontario Ministry of Education 2000a, pp. 27–32). Obviously a strategic diversity of perspectives is needed. To facilitate a concurrent interrogation and refashioning of these histories and ideas, both critical analytical and explicatory approaches are necessary. A critical approach to our interrogation of history cannot be limited to the European context. The fact that the ancient wisdoms discussed here are African does not make them good. Indeed a close reading of ancient Egypt requires the same scrutiny as that of ancient Athens, with oppression no more justifiable in one than the other. In place of idealized retellings of any society and its ideas, we need accurate history which considers the historiography involved in its traditional transmission, and which offers the most accurate possible information to our students in support of their critical thinking. With this in mind, this chapter reviews Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Molefi Asante’s The Egyptian Philosophers: Ancient African Voices from Imhotep to Akhenaten and Maulana Karenga’s Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt–A Study in Classical African Ethics. It is my hope that teachers and students will be among the first to ask the challenging and critical questions of the ideas presented in these important books. Each of these works takes a decidedly political and strategic look at ancient African histories and knowledges. This chapter then offers two sample assignments that integrate critical historical perspectives, ancient African knowledges and existing curriculum expectations to be used in the grade 12 Philosophy and Classical Civilizations courses. A short conclusion follows. MARTIN BERNAL’S BLACK ATHENA

Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilizations, Volumes One (1987), Two (1996) and Three (2006) are controversial works which, for many thinkers, revolutionized modern conceptions of classical civilizations (understood here as the study of the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilizations). Bernal’s claims led to an international debate, numerous journal articles 96

NORTH AFRICAN KNOWLEDGES AND THE WESTERN CLASSROOM

(and special editions) for and against the piece, a book entitled Black Athena Revisited edited by Lefkowitz and Rogers (1996), and numerous documentary films dealing with the work and the controversy surrounding it. Although works such as James’s Stolen Legacy (1990) and Meyers’s The Oldest Books in the World (1900), have argued successfully that Greek civilization both learned from and appropriated North African cultures, Bernal goes further, recasting a demographic theory long denied by Eurocentric scholars. As its title implies, Bernal’s Black Athena Volume One, argues the Mediterranean’s first conquerors, as well as those responsible for that region’s cultural renaissance, were Egyptian and Phoenician. This view, which he terms the ‘Ancient Model,’ stands in stark contrast to the ‘Aryan Model,’ popularized in the 18th and 19th centuries by European scholars. The Ancient Model argues that the Aegean’s first inhabitants were the Pelasgian Peoples alongside various other ethnic groups. These groups, Bernal argues, were “civilized” by the Egyptian and Phoenicians who invaded and settled the area during the Heroic Age (Bernal, 1987: 56). The Aryan Model on the other hand, argues that civilization in and around the Aegean was the result of a variety of cultures assimilating after the invasion and conquest of Northern IndoEuropean (early Greeks) in the pre-Hellenic period. Bernal argues that the Ancient Model dominated most scholarship (in Northern Africa, Greece, Egypt, and other places) until the mid-eighteenth century. The Aryan Model was popularized by scholars working under the “ethnic principle of science” (Bernal, 1996: 9). He writes: For [eighteenth century scholars] the Ancient Model was a delusion. Just as ‘scientific’ historians had to discount all Greek references to centaurs, sirens and other mythical creatures that offended against the laws of natural history, the Ancients’ view of Greece as having been civilised by Egyptians and Phoenicians had to be removed because it offended against the laws of ‘racial science’ (1996, p. 10). Bernal’s analysis walks the reader convincingly through intricate historical evidence supporting his propositions. Volume One of Black Athena is an important example of critical historiography in that a great deal of the work is devoted to the racist historical misappropriation that since the 1700s has dominated the study of classical civilizations. For students of history and philosophy, Bernal’s work provides both fresh historical accounts, and an analysis of the ways in which Eurocentric academics have suppressed these histories and accounts. In Volumes Two and Three of Black Athena, (originally there were to be four volumes in total) Bernal provides detailed archaeological and linguistic evidence to support his claims about ancient history from Volume One. In a new introduction, he argues that additional research has further validated his original claims. Bernal also reflects on the international response to Volume One, saying that his work has been well received by scholars and activists of color. He adds that of all the refutations of Black Athena, few have questioned Bernal’s characterization of European scholars as racist and thus biased. This, he argues, was adequate justification for continuing with the project. The research presented in Volumes Two and Three constitutes a powerful empirical addition to, and extension of, the critical historiographical investigation begun in Volume One. For example, Volume Two draws 97

KEMPF

conclusions from archaeological evidence on the island of Crete. The island has long been considered an appropriate starting point for the high school course on Ancient Greece. Bernal argues that beginning in the Neolithic period (approximately 10700 to 9400 BCE) contact had taken place between people on Crete, and people in Africa and Asia. Bernal demonstrates that the famed architectural achievements from the period were modeled on Near Eastern buildings elsewhere. Indeed the famed Palace at Knossos (studied in the Ontario classical civilizations course) was likely reflective of concurrent Egyptian architecture. Crete, the jewel of early Greece, was likely so remarkable because of African influences (Bernal, 1996: 56). Bernal traces the Egyptian influence on Boeotia and the Peloponnese, touching on among other things, farming, religion, land management, social and political structures and literature. His work details a broad spectrum of connections, contacts and influences between African Peoples and early Greeks. Bernal outlines the achievements of African and Middle Eastern Peoples in areas as disparate as commerce, religion, military strategy, art, politics and architecture. Bernal assembles nearly 1500 pages of evidence for his important contribution to critical historiography. In sum, Bernal argues that African knowledges and culture have been displaced within the European historical record. Through the academic formalization of classical studies, African and Semitic culture and knowledges have been distanced from the European epistemic project. Bernal argues that for centuries the relationship between Greece and Egypt (the former influenced, connected to, and inspired by the latter) was widely understood as part of historical trajectory, which recognized none of today’s continental boundaries. In the 18th and 19th centuries however, the emergence of classical studies as an academic discipline revolved in part around the notion that Greece had not relied on Africa (neither the Egyptians nor the Phoenicians) and had instead produced discreet early European culture, philosophy, architecture, mythology and art independent of any influence from African civilizations. As mainstream history moved from the first model to the second, this represented the substitution of Greece for Egypt as the source of European civilization. For Bernal, the dominance of the latter Aryan Model follows the emerging epistemological doctrine of white supremacy, which underpinned the development and content of the European university. For students and teachers of ancient history and philosophy, this line of argument is crucial to anti-colonial conceptions of civilization and knowledge production. Additionally, the evidence presented in volumes two and three constitutes an argument in and of itself: African history is knowable, and this knowledge does not rely on Eurocentric understandings and conceptions of civilization. The sheer breadth and depth of the research suggests that where Edward Said (1979) and others may have implied that the ‘other’ is unknowable and un-representable, Bernal attempts a documentation and thus representation of North African culture which answers and counters the misconceptions of the ‘other’ to which Said was responding. Bernal’s work is by no means objective, it has a clear and identified political project (the re-visioning suggested by its title) and this is perhaps as close as an author can ever come to an objective place from which to write. Further, his politics are grounded in a quest for historical accuracy in the face of dominant 98

NORTH AFRICAN KNOWLEDGES AND THE WESTERN CLASSROOM

mischaracterizations of the past. So, while he does not escape the trap of politicized narrative, he attempts a representation and documentation of the other which seek to value previously marginalized knowledges and culture, and which simultaneously seek to rupture dominant epistemological approaches to these histories. Although Bernal does not claim to be addressing questions of colonialism (or to be taking up an anti-colonial or post-colonial project) his analysis of the development and disciplining of European conceptions of African knowledges and their relationship to Europe supports the idea that dominant historical understandings of Europe and Africa are indeed forms of colonial discourse. His attempts at a more accurate historical understanding, as well as an unearthing of the race politics of mainstream scholarship are thus anti-colonial in posture and represent an important achievement within the historical record which recognizes the interconnected and multicultural nature of ancient culture and philosophy. The continued reliance upon ‘Greek’ philosophical traditions and ideas offers an important entry point for teachers to begin a critical conversation about race, colonialism and power within the confines of the required curriculum. Before moving on, it is relevant to mention briefly the work of Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986). Scholar, historian, and activist, Diop was a Senegalese writer best known for his early Afrocentric research into the history of Egypt. He was the first to argue academically that ancient Egyptians had actually been Black. Although his thesis was rejected for almost a decade, it was eventually accepted by much of the academic community. Diop was one of the first writers to identify the racism and bias in mainstream presentations of African history and culture. Although his research continues to be controversial, mounting evidence supports his numerous claims. Bernal extends the work and discursive project of Diop, and indeed the tremendous controversy surrounding his work (few history books are made into movies which centre the author) are testament to the race politics of African history and Egyptology (a problematic distinction in itself ). Bernal’s work has from the onset been challenged by mainstream Egyptologists. The fact that work which dares to point to a rich intellectual and knowable African history continues to be viewed with an asterisk beside it in the annals of history, speaks to the Eurocentric underpinnings of how we understand the past.2 At a recent exhibit of King Tut in Toronto, the 30 minute guided tour made no mention of Africa, while of the six maps on display, only two identified Egypt within a labeled African context. An IMAX 3D film did, however, tell of heroic European explorers (who were guided to sites by locals) saving Egyptian history from local robbers and thugs. This extra-curricular site of formal learning (the Art Gallery of Ontario) serves as a powerful corollary to the in-school curriculum described above–reaffirming the absence of Africa, African knowledges and nondominant agency. MOLEFI ASANTE’S THE EGYPTIAN PHILOSOPHERS

The Egyptian Philosophers: Ancient African Voices From Imhotep to Akhenaten, by Molefi Asante (2000), provides a detailed and accessible guide to many ancient African philosophers, philosophies and histories. Asante is the founder of the theory 99

KEMPF

of Afrocentricity and is Professor, Department of African American Studies at Temple University. Although Asante points to the powerful role that the revelation of these knowledges can play in contesting dominant history, this is not his intention. This book instead aims to bring these knowledges to the forefront so that students of philosophy, when introduced to the subject’s founders, meet the Africans whose theories and practices provide the world’s earliest philosophy. Asante writes: [M]y purpose is not to prove any point except to introduce the reader to the wonderful joys of knowing ancient Egyptian philosophers so that their names will become as familiar as the names of Socrates, Plato, Confucius, Aristotle, and Mencius. (2000, preface) The Egyptian Philosophers begins with a chronology of ancient philosophers from around the world–stretching from Imhotep (2700 BCE) to Tzu (298). The author goes on to elucidate the notion of the African mind–a framework which was at one time not only unique to Africa but widespread across the cultural multiplex of the continent (2000, p. 2). The philosophies of the African mind, which underlie human interaction with reality, are described by Asante as: “the practicality of holism, the prevalence of poly-consciousness, the idea of inclusiveness, the unity of worlds, and the value of personal relationships. It is not trite for the African to say everything is everything” (2000, 2). This includes the important notion of an origin: a beginning for and to all things, to which everyone is linked. The beginning is characterized as the First Occasion, during which (among other things) God emerged. The First Occasion is also to be understood as a guiding archetype for behavior in which good triumphs over evil. These ideas guided, and still guide, many of the ethical, epistemological, metaphysical and political theories and practices of some African peoples (2000, pp. 3–6). Through fourteen detailed chapters, Asante outlines the beginning of philosophy. The early scientific endeavors of North African Peoples represent the birth of science as it is understood today, incorporating ideas of water and land management, human impact assessment, and social practice as related to the environment (within the Ontario philosophy course these are often credited to early Greek philosophers). Egyptian cosmology was similarly advanced, with philosophers as early as 1000 B.C. postulating four constituent elements in the universe: earth, mist, fire and water (a similar approach to that often attributed to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius). From their investigations into the sky above and the earth below, African thinkers were able to recognize various natural systems and cycles, understanding the spiritual and practical significances thereof as intrinsically related (processes attributed to Greek philosophers such as Thales). Almost 2000 years before Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Egyptian philosophers were contemplating the meanings of life and existence. They also theorized the embryonic development process, speaking in poetry about the transformation of one into two and two into four (2000, p. 19). Asante also traces the birth of reason, through Imhotep, the world’s first “multidimensional personality [whose] achievements stand at the very dawn of reason and science in the service of human society” (2000, p. 21). Imhotep, in addition to being an expert builder, pioneered medical science and worked (as would Socrates 100

NORTH AFRICAN KNOWLEDGES AND THE WESTERN CLASSROOM

almost a thousand years later) to integrate the inner and outer human realms–the mind and the world around us. All of these examples provide important opportunities for teachable moments wherein teachers can use these comparisons as entry points into multicentric discussions of ancient philosophy (the starting point for many instructors in the province). The Egyptian Philosophers describes important scholarship by such thinkers as Ptahhotep, around class and class politics, applicable to questions of social and political philosophy in both the classical studies and philosophy courses. Another important idea is that of the tri-part societal structure, comprised by three categories of citizens: a) the spectators, or those charged with directing the state; b) the athletes, or soldiers and c) the peddlers, or laborers and artisans articulated in the work of Ptahhotep. This idea re-appears centuries later as the basis for one of Plato’s most important ideas, the tri-part state/tri-part soul in which three groups of people were also identified: a) the philosopher kings, b) the soldiers and c) the artisans or general population. (Guthrie, 1960, pp. 82–85). Asante discusses a number of other ethical propositions which were not only valued and practiced, but also debated and revised in Ancient Egypt which are highly relevant to ethics portions of the philosophy curriculum. Asante outlines numerous theories of rhetoric, epistemology, ethics, class politics, and gender debates that still represent crucial locations for philosophical study. Particularly interesting here is the great degree to which these areas are related. In the Ancient Egyptian context, we cannot speak of science, epistemology or ethics, without looking at spirituality and reason, simultaneously. These knowledges, as well as the ways in which they were practiced and understood, have a lot to offer anti-colonial education in which addressing the intersectionality of histories, sites of oppression and experiences is paramount. Indeed the fusion of spiritual and religious belief with the social sciences and the humanities is common in western contexts, as demonstrated by the Christian underwriting of much of the western philosophical and legal canons.3 Finally, the utility of this work is not purely political. Teaching contestations, challenging dominant histories and indeed addressing what most teachers understand as the need to work across discrete strands of the curriculum (i.e. ethics and epistemology are difficult to fully separate) will support a stronger pedagogy and a more engaged student response. MAULANA KARENGA’S MAAT: THE MORAL IDEAL

Maulana Karenga’s Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt–A Study in Classical African Ethics (2004), provides a detailed explication of the complex ethical theories and applications of Maat, the Ancient Egyptian moral code. Like Asante’s work discussed above, Maat: the Moral Ideal is not written in direct reaction or reference to European knowledges, intellectual appropriation, or history. Professor Karenga is an ethicist and a Seba Maat (moral teacher of the recovered tradition of Maatian ethics). He offers Maat: the Moral Ideal in order to enrich existing dialogues around classical African cultures and knowledges. Karenga views the Maatian philosophy as instructive in the academic realm, where ethics is an increasingly prominent field, a trend reflected in an increased emphasis on ethics at the secondary level. 101

KEMPF

Although working with the findings produced by Egyptologists, Karenga challenges Egyptology itself as a discipline for having participated in what some have called the decapitation of Africa, whereby Egypt has been epistemologically situated as Euro-Asian rather than African. He also criticizes the focus within Egyptology on the archaeological aspects of Egypt and the degree to which this focus reads the ethical, religious and political systems of the region as pre-historical myth rather than legitimate historical phenomena. He writes, “In such a framework, ancient Egyptian culture is seen as principally a focus of archaeological study rather than a suitable subject for modern religious and ethical discourse” (Karenga, 2004, p. 13). In the Ontario context, the formal exclusion of Egypt as a whole from the classical studies panel as well as the exclusion of Egyptian philosophy specifically from the philosophy curriculum extends this pattern of discourse regulation, through manifest omission of non-European ideas (despite evidence from Bernal and others that Europe learned a great deal from Africa). The powerful survey of Maatian ethics provided by Karenga is philosophically and historically instructive. The book incorporates cultural theory, literature, philology and politics among other things. The work is definitive and as accessible as any other primary source text used for senior secondary level ethics instruction. Karenga begins by describing the Maatian ideal. Drawing from “Declarations of Innocence in the New Kingdom text, the Book of Coming Forth by Day, and other key ethical texts,” Karenga provides a conceptual framework for understanding Maat as a moral ontological system (ibid 2004, p. 3). Etymologically Maat is traced to notions of straightness and evenness. Drawing from a substantial literature on Maat, Karenga reveals its meaning as one signifying a guiding force, a cosmic order, truth, ideal wisdom, a metaphysical ideal and an epistemological ideal. As a wide-ranging concept, it expresses itself in four domains: 1) the universal–the totality of ordered existence; 2) the political domain–regulating justice and injustice; 3) the social domain–relationships and duty in the context of community; and, 4) the personal domain in which “following the rules and principles of Maat is to realize concretely the universal order in oneself ” (ibid 2004, p. 7). Chapters Two and Three of Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt, trace the important historical role of the Maatian ideal within the Old Kingdom (2650–2152 BCE) and New Kingdom (1539–1069 BCE) of Egypt, and within the subsequent Late Period (664–380 BCE). While Maat was a guiding force during some of the most important cultural development in world history over a period spanning two millennia, it gets no mention within a survey of ancient philosophy and civilizations in the Ontario curriculum. Chapter Four focuses on Maat’s theological elements, and provides, among other things, a list of translated maxims, which outline the Declarations of Innocence, of Maat’s followers (ibid 2004, pp. 143–145). Karenga demonstrates the importance of the notion of judgment in Maat, with its two corollaries, justification and immortality (ibid 2004, p. 170). Chapter Five analyses the metaphysical implications of Maat, by focusing on Maatian ontology. Karenga discusses the power of being as a central Maatian idea. The discussion naturally relates to the cosmological investigations of the time–many of which would later be attributed to Greek philosophers such as Thales as mentioned above. Chapter Six, in perhaps the most fascinating section of 102

NORTH AFRICAN KNOWLEDGES AND THE WESTERN CLASSROOM

the book, analyses the anthropological practices and theories of Maat. In it, Karenga highlights the relationship between free will and African cultural practices and knowledges (ibid 2004, p. 247). These provide relevant parallels (and precursor by hundreds of years) to the works of Kant, Bentham, Rousseau, Locke and others studied in the Ontario curriculum. Karenga also discusses the vital epistemological consequences of Maatian proverbs and archetypes, such as “The Wise Person and the Fool” (ibid 2004, p. 237). Chapters Seven, Eight and Nine illuminate the notion of ‘worthiness’ as a way of life (Chapter Seven), as a way of relating to those around you (Chapter Eight), and as a way of interacting and living well in time and nature (Chapter Nine). This last chapter addresses the notions of shared heritage, recovery and restoration (ibid 2004, pp. 393–397). Karenga’s literary curation (chapter selection, sequence and design) provides an applied biography of the notion of Maat which is accessible, clear, and presented in a way that allows for easy application to various school curricula. Although Karenga surely intends a holistic reading of the concept, time and curricular freedom may prohibit a complete reading of the work, in place of which subject-specific selections may be more realistic in primary and secondary schooling contexts. A selective reading is all that teachers are likely to afford any philosophical text or approach. Accepting that total Maatian ethical training is well beyond the scope of a high school teacher’s work (and education), like Asante’s work described above, there are some easily identified curricular entry points in Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt. With regard to political philosophy and the philosophy of governance, Karenga outlines the role of the indifferent civil servant who advises the chief ruler, following the principles of social justice as envisioned through Maat (ibid 2004, pp. 34–35). The focus on social responsibility is reminiscent of Kantian ethics and the idea of humans as ends-in-themselves. Indeed this notion would powerfully inform studies of Roman governance as outlined in the classical civilizations course. The book of Khunanpu, described by Karenga, offers the Story of the Eloquent Peasant as a moral narrative with regard to the distribution of wealth. The story features a peasant publicly confronting a wealthy businessman and winning his challenge. Karenga points out that such stories are meant as public correctives against exploitation of common people (ibid 2004, pp. 70–71). Narratives as moral teachings would be found in the Christian bible centuries later. Further, the political implications of such stories work powerfully alongside the study of Marx, and political economy in general. Karenga offers an analysis of gender inequality in ancient Egypt and identifies many of the misconceptions sustained by Egyptologists about the subjugation of women in ancient Egypt (ibid 2004, pp. 356–358). While by no means an equitable society, when placed in comparative and chronological context, ancient Egypt brings a great deal to the discussion of gender in the ancient world, specifically with regard to labor, property rights and marriage. In a final example, the Maatian conception of the human being as capable of understanding and practicing social harmony in her everyday life works powerfully with Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the human virtue and Telos or purpose (ibid 2004, pp. 215–216). Karenga provides a fecund source for relevant knowledge in support of multicentric (and subject appropriate) teaching and learning. 103

KEMPF

These are important historically and currently for the study and practice of Maat–a complex philosophical system that has been largely ignored and suppressed in western philosophical discourse. Karenga has written and documented an important philosophical text that we should by no means confuse with Egyptology. In the finest African tradition, this is contemplative and practical philosophy, which must be understood as such. Karenga’s work is intentionally African-centered and aims to challenge not only dominant historical wisdom (such as the myth of Greek invention of formal ethics) but also dominant Judeo-Christian historiography. Karenga thus brings an anti-colonial approach to an anti-colonial analysis of knowledge and knowledge production. The preceding sections have outlined a handful of historical moments, concepts and approaches which are of significant potential use to the creation of a multicentric approach to teaching both history and philosophy. The following section introduces and provides two sample assignments which attempt to formalize the curricular multicentrism described. ENGAGING ANCIENT KNOWLEDGES: ASSIGNING THE WORK

Below are two assignments that correspond (respectively) to the Philosophy: Questions and Theories, Grade 12 courses, and to the Classical Civilizations, Grade 12 courses. The official Ontario Ministry of Education expectations to which each corresponds are identified at the bottom of each assignment. The aim of including these is to recognize the need for accessible strategies for multicentric pedagogy which work within existing frameworks and which thus do not require inordinate amounts of extra time–something teachers do not have. The aim of these assignments is to facilitate an engagement with some of the African knowledges described above. This is an entry point for a decolonizing synthesis, wherein educators can bring marginalized knowledges into the colonial classroom. The notion of synthesis is precarious however, and must be undertaken respectfully. Non-dominant knowledge, as Sardar (1999) writes “needs to be acknowledged and appreciated on its own terms” (1999, p. 53). With this in mind, I have attempted to demonstrate the ways in which a handful of African knowledges can be introduced under and within existing Ontario Ministry of Education guidelines in a fashion that respects the importance and agency of the histories and peoples involved. These assignments can serve as examples for educators and as actual assignments available for immediate use. Each would of course be preceded by the necessary scaffolding to prepare students for the work assigned, as well as with clear explanations of evaluation criteria and strategy. This would include introduction and discussion of key concepts, questions and applications of the topics under study. Sample Assignment #1 Classical Civilizations (LVV4U) Egyptian Architecture and the Palace at Knossos

104

NORTH AFRICAN KNOWLEDGES AND THE WESTERN CLASSROOM

Description In this activity, students are required to explore the structure of the Palace at Knossus as well as the artifacts found nearby, and compare them to contemporary architecture and art in Egypt from the same period. Students may wish to use Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, Volumes One and Two, as well as other resources. Research should be summarized in a 600–700 word essay, accompanied by a visual component. The essay should address the following: the specific architectural and artistic trends found in Egypt around 2000–1500 BCE; the degree to which the Palace at Knossus is modeled on these structures; and finally, any possible conclusions to be drawn from this important cultural intersection. The essay should also discuss why Crete is considered European rather than African or Asian, given its near equidistance to each. The visual component should consist of either 4–5 color sketches, or 1 threedimensional model, through which the student is able to convey the similarities between Egyptian architecture and art, and Cretan architecture and art. Corresponding Ontario Ministry of Education Expectations4 – – – – – – – – – – –

identify a variety of styles and features in art and architecture; apply knowledge gained through the study of archaeological findings; identify correctly different architectural features and explain their functions; define architectural terms; demonstrate knowledge of some of the ways in which classical architectture influenced later building styles and engineering developments; describe various pottery styles; apply knowledge of history and geography to the materials studied in class; demonstrate an understanding of classical history and geography; demonstrate an awareness of cultures that were contemporary with those of ancient Greece and Rome; explain the impact of historical developments on culture; and show the relationship between the societies of ancient Greece and Rome and the societies of other ancient civilizations (e.g., Egyptian, Hebrew, Chinese, Mayan, and Indian societies) in a variety of projects.

Sample Assignment #2 Philosophy 12 (HZT4U) Adding up your Ethical Inheritance Description In this activity, students are required to investigate the ethics of one of their parents or guardians. Although our peer group is often our greatest environmental influence, our parents and guardians teach us a great deal and often 105

KEMPF

shape our ethics. This assignment seeks to discover and evaluate students’ ethical heritage. In many families, parents are not primary caregivers. If a grandparent, aunt, uncle, or other family or community member better fits the role, the student may choose to interview him or her instead of a parent or guardian. In Part One, the student will research the following ethical systems: the Egyptian Maat, the Yoruba ethical tradition, English Utilitarianism, and Kant’s central ethical propositions. This research should be summarized in a 500–600 word essay, which briefly explains the key maxims of each system. In Part Two, the student will interview his or her parent/guardian about the parent’s/guardian’s ethics. Students will create 15–20 questions designed to establish the ethical principles in which the parent/guardian believes and which guide his/her actions. After the interview, the student will evaluate the parent’s/guardian’s ethics in order to determine which system (from the four reviewed in Part One) best matches the parent’s/guardian’s ethics. The student should then state, in her or his opinion, whether or not the parent achieves the ethical standards (or is missing anything) from the selected ethical system. What might the parent/guardian learn from the other three ethical systems? Students can present their findings and thoughts in a 500–600 word essay detailing their evaluation and conclusions regarding the ethical positions of the parent or guardian. Corresponding Ontario Ministry of Education Expectations5 – demonstrate an understanding of the main questions, concepts, and theories of ethics; – evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of responses to ethical questions and moral problems defended by some major philosophers and schools of philosophy; – illustrate the relevance of philosophical theories of ethics to concrete moral problems in everyday life; – identify the main questions of ethics (e.g., What are good and evil? What is the good life? What is virtue? Why be moral? What obligations do people have to one another?); – evaluate the responses given by some of the major philosophers and major schools of ethics to some of the main ethical questions; – use critical and logical thinking skills to defend their own ideas about ethical issues (e.g., the nature of the good life) and to anticipate counter-arguments to their ideas; – demonstrate how the moral problems and dilemmas that occur in everyday contexts (e.g., in medicine, business, law, the media) can be effectively analyzed using a variety of different philosophical theories (e.g., virtue ethics, social-contract theory); – describe how problems in ethics and the theories that address them may be illustrated in novels and drama, and in religious stories and parables; 106

NORTH AFRICAN KNOWLEDGES AND THE WESTERN CLASSROOM

– describe instances in which philosophical problems of knowledge occur in everyday contexts; – demonstrate an understanding of some of the main questions in metaphysics (e.g., What are the ultimate constituents of reality? Does God exist? What is Being? What is the relation of mind to matter? What is the self ? What is personal identity? Are human actions free? What is the meaning of life?); and – formulate their own clear and cogent responses to some of the fundamental questions of metaphysics (e.g., What is the meaning of life?).6 CONCLUSION

The importance of cultural knowledges in and out of the classroom cannot be overestimated in colonial contexts. The introduction of such marginalized knowledges to students is an act that embraces both accuracy (as so much has been misappropriated and omitted) and holism (as students can begin to locate themselves and their histories in their education). The teachings offered by the literature reviewed above offer the reader, the student and the teacher a chance to connect and/or reconnect to those who have come before us. To truly knock the legs out from under that which has come to constitute dominant history we must ‘decenter’ our understanding of history itself (Hanlon, 2003: 29). This means looking to new/old locations for knowledge as well as validating sources often ignored by teachers, curriculum writers and other ‘officials’ on the subject. David Hanlon writes: History, it seems to me, can be sung, danced, chanted, spoken, carved, woven, painted, sculpted and rapped as well as written … primacy must be given to local epistemologies and the ways in which knowing and being in various locales differ from the pragmatic, logical and rational assumptions that western science makes about the world. (2003, p. 30) This paper is only a beginning. Related areas which warrant further study, but which fall outside of the scope of this paper include but are not limited to: work being done (and not being done) at the provincial level to change, enhance and improve related curricula; related work being done (and not being done) in pre-service teacher training across Canada; the role of oral histories in Ontario classrooms; educational self determination of cultural groups; the re-conception of history as an element within a continuum–neither locked in the past nor unconnected to the present and the future; relevant curriculum integration projects in progress in Canada and elsewhere; and finally, the responsibility of teachers to go beyond the curriculum to find and use some of the wonderful resources which do exist. NOTES 1

Each of these courses are ‘University Preparation’ level courses (the most academic of such determinations) and neither are compulsory for grade 12 students. The philosophy has a prerequisite grade 11 course, which follows the same Eurocentrism as the grade 12. The classical civilization

107

KEMPF

2

3

4

5

6

course has no specific prerequisite, but requires students to have taken a senior English or senior social science course. This has implications for understandings of contemporary Africa and the Diaspora. A recent New York Times editorial by Henry Louis Gates Jr., argues against reparations on the partial basis that a clarification of African history is needed before a clear idea of culpability can emerge (Gates 2010). René Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum argument was, for example, part of a larger work in which he sought to establish unequivocally the existence of a/the Christian god. From: Public District School Board Writing Partnership. (2002). Course Profile, Classical Civilization, Grade 12, University Preparation, LVV4U (pp. 24–25). Toronto: Queens’s Printer for Ontario. From: Public District School Board Writing Partnership. (2002) Course Profile, Philosophy: Questions and Theories, Grade 12, University Preparation, HZT4U (pp. 16–18). Toronto: Queen’s Printer for Ontario. Public District School Board Writing Partnership. 2002 Course Profile, Philosophy: Questions and Theories, Grade 12, University Preparation, HZT4U. Queen’s Printer for Ontario. (16–18.)

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (2007). Under three flags: Anarchy and the anti-colonial imagination. London: Verso. Apple, M. (1978). Ideology, reproduction, and educational reform. Comparative Education Review, 22(3), 367–387. Asante, M. K. (2000). The Egyptian philosophers: Ancient African voices from Imhotep to Akhenaten. Chicago: African American Images. Asante, M. K., & Abarry, A. S. (2000). African intellectual heritage: A book of sources. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bernal, M. (2006). Black Athena: The Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization, Vol. III: The Linguistic Evidence. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bernal, M. (1996). Black Athena: The Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization, Vol. II. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bernal, M. (1987). Black Athena: The Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization, Vol. I. London: Free Association Books. Bishop, A. J. (1990). Western mathematics: The secret weapon of cultural imperialism. Race and Class, 32(2), 71–76. Dei, G. J. S. (2006). Introduction: Mapping the terrain–Towards a new politics of resistance. In G. J. S. Dei & A. Kempf (Eds.), Anti-colonialism and education: The politics of resistance (pp. 1–24). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Dei, G. J. S., Mazzuca, J., McIsaac, E., & Zine, J. (1997). Reconstructing ‘dropout’: Understanding the dynamics of black students’ disengagement from school. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dewdney, S. (1975). They shared to survive: The native peoples of Canada. Toronto: MacMillan. Dickason, O. (2002). Canada’s First Nations: A history of founding peoples from earliest times. London: Oxford University Press. Ermine, W. (1995). Aboriginal epistemology. In M. Battiste & J. Barman (Eds.), First Nations education in Canada: The circle unfolds. Vancouver: UBC Press. Ezekwugo, C. M. (1992). Philosophical concepts. Enugu: Agatha Series Publishers. Gates, H. L. (2010, April 22). Ending the slavery blame-game. New York Times. Retrieved May 29, 2010, from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html Gbadehesin, S. (1998). Yoruba philosophy: Individuality, community and the moral order. In E. Eze (Ed.), African philosophy: An anthology (pp. 130–141). London: Blackwell. Giroux, H. A. (1983). Theory and resistance in education: A pedagogy for the opposition. Massachusetts, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc. Guthrie, W. K. C. (1960). The Greek philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle. New York: Harper and Row Publishers. Joseph, E. (1987). Foundations of Eurocentrism in mathematics. Race and Class, 3, 13–28. 108

NORTH AFRICAN KNOWLEDGES AND THE WESTERN CLASSROOM Hanlon, D. (2003). Beyond ‘The English Method of Tattooing’: Decentering the practice of history in Oceania. The Contemporary Pacific, 15(1), 19–40. Harding, S. (1996). Gendered ways of knowing and the epistemological crisis of the west. In N. Goldenberger, J. Tarule, B. Clinchy & M. Belenky (Eds.), Knowledge, difference and power (pp. 431–454). New York: Basic Books. Harpur, T. (2004). The Pagan Christ: Recovering the lost light. Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers. hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. New York: Routledge. Horton, R. (1967). African traditional thought and western society. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 37(2), 155–187. Karenga, M. (2004). Maat: The moral ideal in ancient Egypt–A study in classical African ethics. New York: Routledge. Kempf, A. (2009). Contemporary anti-colonialism: A transhistorical perspective. In A. Kempf (Ed.), Breaching the colonial contract: Anti-colonialism in the US and Canada (pp. 13–34). New York: Springer. Kempf, A. (2006). Anti-colonial historiography: Interrogating colonial education. In G. J. S. Dei & A. Kempf (Eds.), Anti-colonialism and education: The politics of resistance. Rotterdam: Sense. James, G. G. (1990). Stolen legacy. Trenton: Africa World Press. Lefkowitz, R., & Rogers, G. M. (Eds.). (1996). Black Athena revisited. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Olela, H. (1998). The African roots of Greek philosophy. In E. Eze (Ed.), African philosophy: An anthology (pp. 43–49). London: Blackwell. Parenti, M. (2003). The assassination of Julius Caesar: A people’s history of the Roman republic. New York: Knopff. Public District School Board Writing Partnership. (2002). Course Profile, Classical Civilization, Grade 12, University Preparation, LVV4U. Toronto: Queens’s Printer for Ontario. Public District School Board Writing Partnership. (2002). Course Profile, Philosophy: Questions and Theories, Grade 12, University Preparation, HZT4U. Queen’s Printer for Ontario. Meyers, I. (1990). The oldest books in the world. London: Kegan Paul. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2000). The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 11 and 12, Classical Studies and International Languages. Toronto: Queen’s Printer for Ontario. O’Sullivan, E. (1999). Transformative learning: Educational vision for the 21st century. London: Zed Books Ltd. Rodney, W. (1972). How Europe underdeveloped Africa. London: Tanzania Publishing House. Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York: Knopf/Random House. Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Sardar, Z. (1999). Development and the location of Eurocentrism. In R. Munck & D. O’Hearn (Eds.), Critical development theory: Contributions to the new paradigm (pp. 44–61). London: Zed Books. Sardar, Z. (1989). An early crescent: The future of knowledge and environment in Islam. London: Mansell. Scott, D. (1999). Refashioning futures: Criticism after postcoloniality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Spivak, G. C. (1996). Subaltern studies: Deconstructing historiography. In D. Landry & G. MacLean (Eds.), The Spivak reader (pp. 203–235). New York: Routledge. Spivak, G. C. (1991). Once again a leap into the postcolonial banal. Differences, 3(3), 139–170. Shiva, V. (1997). Western science and its destruction of local knowledge. In M. Rahnema & V. Bawtree (Eds.), The post-development reader (pp. 161–167). London: Zed Books. Smith, L. (1991). Decolonizing methodologies. London: Zed Publishers. Tedla, E. (1992). Indigenous African education as a means for understanding the fullness of life: Amara traditional education. Journal of Black Studies, 23(1), 7–26. wa Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonising the mind. New York: Heinemann. Willinsky, J. (1998). Learning to divide the world: Education at empire’s end. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wolff, R. (2000). About philosophy. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. 109

KEMPF Wright, H. K. (2004). A prescience of African cultural studies. New York: Peter Lang Publishers. Wright, R. (1992). Stolen continents: The “New World” through Indian eyes. Toronto: Penguin Books. Young, I. M. (1990). The ideal of community and the politics of difference. In. L. Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (pp. 300–323). New York: Routledge. Zinn, H. (1999). A people’s history of the United States: 1492–Present. New York: Perennial Classic.

110

DONNA OUTERBRIDGE

9. WHAT MIGHT WE LEARN IF WE SILENCE THE COLONIAL VOICE? Finding Our Own Keys

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, I discuss the importance of being responsible and accountable for the work we produce. I engage with the ways in which colonialism works through the educational system. I identify the importance of thinking through an anti-colonial discursive framework in order to understand the denial and erasure of black identity, by critically interpreting the colonial relations that have been, and continue to be, oppressive to specific groups of people. In addition, this chapter utilizes Indigenous knowledges which ground the discussion by way of holistic forms of living and learning that is non-linear and offer strategies for cultural resistance. Moreover, I recall Smith’s (1999) point of not signing off once the research is completed. To do so, would be committing the same atrocity as our Western counterparts, instead I am suggesting we must adapt the principle of reciprocity and feedback. As a body subjected to Eurocentric ways of knowing, I have reached a stage in my life where I have begun to purge myself from colonial particles, colonial ways of knowing, doing and conceptualizing. I am, according to Western texts, a ‘discovery’ story; my Bermudian history was built on erasure of culture, language and identity, a people with no history prior to colonization. This journey has been quite difficult. Bermuda’s colonial educational system, I posit, has de-culturalized Bermudian people by usurping our history and replacing it with a colonial history, leaving us culturally, emotionally and spiritually ruined. Similarly to Kaylynn Sullivan’s Two Trees, I locate myself at the crossroads of understanding, that: [by] birth, education and experience, my identity is shaped by a life spent at the crossroads–the place where cultures, ideas and beliefs collide and find both dissonance and resonance. I am most comfortable with those explorers and cartographers whose passion and life is the crossroads. There, at any given moment, what is alternative and what is standard, shifts places depending on where I stand. We are all on a journey of some kind; my journey is about making sense of my identity and to be mindful of my contribution to research. Enrolling in the course “Cultural Knowledges, Representation and Colonial Education: Pedagogical Implications” was very instrumental to my personal and academic development. Prof posed two very thought-provoking questions at the beginning of the class: “What are we N. Wane et al. (eds.), The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, 111–120. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

OUTERBRIDGE

seeking and why?” While we were meditating on these questions for a moment she presented another equally important question: “Why do we need to pay attention to cultures of the world?” These questions were not unreasonable but rather helpful as I began to consider my own research topic, “The Social Construction of Young Black Bermudian Males’ Identity”. The insight that I have gleaned from this course far surpassed my expectations; it opened up the proverbial door for me to begin a soul searching identity journey. With each new subtitle another door was opened, a new key was found. I began to envision a different kind of research, one that encompasses a holistic approach. My analysis will focus on the synthesis of course readings and how they have been influential in guiding me through the process of becoming more aware of my own positionality. It is from this location that I have chosen to re-visit three themes that spoke to my personal and academic development within the classroom: Cultural Representation and Resistance: Epistemological Issues; The Color of Theory, Knowledge and Colonial Education; and Decolonialization: Whose Project should it be? Towards a Liberating Pedagogy. CULTURAL REPRESENTATION AND RESISTANCE: EPISTEMOLOGICAL ISSUES

In preparation for my research, Smith (1999) has made me acutely aware that the term ‘research’ is considered problematic, unquestionably linked with European imperialism and colonialism. Smith (1999) notes that scientific research has been implicated as imposition of power that offends the deepest sense of humanity for many of the world’s peoples who have been colonized. Like Smith (1999), I shared the same contempt for Western researchers and intellectuals’ continuous assumptions about knowing everything based on a brief encounter with some of us (p. 1). According to Smith (1999) (and I concur), Westerners have made every Indigenous face a statement of social imperfection, inferiority, and have blatantly misrepresented the Indigenous culture. I support Smith’s (1999) concept of ‘researching back.’ It is synonymous with Dr. Asante’s 2007 speech “The Process of Freedom” where he emphasized the importance of reclaiming our own history. Smith (1999) alludes to the process, stating that it is “a ‘knowingness of the colonizer’ and a recovery of ourselves, an analysis of colonialism, and a struggle for self-determination” (p. 7). The fact that Smith’s (1999) article was written eight years ago, and that we are still having the same conversation shows we have much work to do. In my own work, I will ‘research back’ by looking at Bermuda’s course curriculum and how it constructs young Black Bermudian males’ identity. I will look for alternative ways of knowing that will facilitate the process of re-shaping and re-claiming the identity of these young Black males. My goal is to interrogate how education has played a major part in their social construction and how this has possibly been the underpinning problem with respect to their socioeconomic attainment and subsequent status. Accountability in ‘researching back’ is equally important. Smith (1999) raised a key point about researchers when she stated, that we need to do more than meet the academic requirements; we must adhere to cultural protocols, values and behaviors. 112

WE LEARN IF WE SILENCE THE COLONIAL VOICE

As suggested by Smith (1999), we must report back and share the knowledge we acquired with people who have contributed to our research. Most importantly, research should produce solutions, foster empowerment and ultimately improve the quality of life. Therefore, in our research, not only should we question imperialism and look at the effects of colonialization, but we should also interrogate our history so we can understand the truth. Smith (1999) sums it up when she stated that “[to] acquiesce is to lose ourselves entirely and implicitly agree with all that has been said about us” (p. 4). While I found Smith’s article insightful, I believe that she could have elaborated on her vision of decolonizing methodologies. She pointed out that Indigenous researchers cannot rely on colonial language and thoughts to define their reality and that decolonization does not mean a total rejection of all theory, research and Western knowledge, but she stopped short of telling us how we should proceed. The question remains: is decolonization possible? How do we proceed? Decolonization is possible and the process I was able to surmise was a combination of hope that I glean from both Smith’s (1999) article and a recent Ghana’s Golden Jubilee celebration that I attended. Guest speaker Molefi Kete Asante proposed that we should know and understand theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own purpose; that the first step toward decolonization begins with self, we must decolonize our minds. We need vision based on fundamental belief of African people. Our language must change. We must interrogate our own history for morals and values. In addition, when Indigenous people become the researcher and not solely the researched, the activity of research is transformed. As I digest Asante’s assertion, I am reminded of Peter Hanohano’s (1999) struggles with the plethora of literature about Native education being inferior and focusing on what was wrong with Native people, despite “Native people [being] known to have a strong sense of identity with a profound connection to their land, language and culture” (p. 1). Hanohano’s (1999) concerns spoke directly to my disquietness of how I struggle with the representation of racialized peoples and my colonial education. In the midst of his questioning, Hanohano (1999) reached an conclusion that his “purpose [was] not to replace the present educational system, but to introduce another perspective on how we may better relate to each other as human beings, to our Mother Earth, and to other creatures of this planet” (p. 2). In addition, Hanohano (1999) spoke of his experience of feeling alone and set adrift from the cultural moorings of his culture and community which also spoke to my own unsettledness. I was able to identify with his state of loneliness in the academe. I knew all too well how the academy has the propensity to silently reduce one’s passion while relegating them to a place of insignificance and devoid of intellect, a space I both despised yet welcomed. It was in my moment of unrest that I began to better understand what young Black Bermudian males may be experiencing when being constructed as failures. This feeling of failure academically and personally can have an adverse affect on an individual’s morale thereby creating a crisis in education. Makris (2001) builds on Hanohano (1999) and Purpel’s (1989) claims about education by taking it a step further to include the intellectuals who are in the position 113

OUTERBRIDGE

to effect change within the educational system. She emphasizes that the commonly accepted belief of postcolonial studies is that the British educational system is seen as a double edged sword. It provides a level of “respect and admiration for British values and culture that were essential for the smooth maintenance of a vast overseas empire” while simultaneously providing “Britain’s colonies with small group of native intellectuals with the knowledge and confidence to challenge British colonial policies” that will eventual assist in the de-colonization of their countries. (p. 1). Being reflexive on my research project, I recognize my taken for granted views of my colonial history. The literature chosen for my class course and the conversations within and outside the classroom have confirmed the importance of knowing my history and to recognize the temporality of my displacement and the subsequent displacement of the young Black Bermudian males. I am further reminded of my homeland Bermuda, and the fact that we are still colonized. Bermuda is Britain’s oldest self-governing colony, having been established since 1612. As Bermudians, I posit that some of us have not questioned our limited control for fear of the unknown. Some of us take comfort in knowing that we are still connected to Britain; it provides a safety net, a source of superficial protection, thereby exhibiting the same level of “respect and admiration for British values and culture …” that Makris (2001) mentioned. Some of us (Bermudians) embrace the colonial educational system unquestionably causing me to wonder why we still engage in this pseudo-romance with Britain. Has fear diminished our ability to be independent thinkers devoid of Britain’s influence? Makris (2001) extends her double-edged analogy of the colonial educational system by demonstrating how it “introduced students to the rich heritage of English literature” and simultaneously “relegated them to the margin of that heritage …, resulting in their feelings of truly belonging nowhere” (p. 1). This lack of sense of belonging, I believe, is part of the problem affecting young Black Bermudian males, particularly when there is no positive representation of them in the textbooks used. I asked my son what he recalled learning about his Bermudian identity when he was in primary school. He paused and stated that he remembered being taught that Bermuda was discovered in 1503 by a Spanish captain Juan de Bermudez who first sighted the uninhabited island that was eventually named after him. Beyond this sparse information, he did not recall being giving details about the colonists’ culture or their place of origin prior to being brought to Bermuda. His limited recollections intensify my curiosity to search the internet to see how Bermuda is being represented. The Bermuda4u website states that in 1609: “… a fleet of 9 ships owned by the Virginia Company of London sailed from Plymouth, England with fresh supplies and additional colonists for the new British settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. The fleet [was] commanded by Admiral Sir George Somers onboard the flagship, the Sea Venture. During a vicious storm the Sea Venture strays from the fleet and flounders on Bermuda’s reefs. Somers manages to land all 150 crew and colonists onshore without the loss of a single life. Somers and his crew manage to construct not one but two new ships; the Deliverance and Patience. The 2 ships set sail for Virginia leaving behind a couple of men to stake a claim to the island.” On arrival in 114

WE LEARN IF WE SILENCE THE COLONIAL VOICE

Jamestown they find the colony decimated by starvation, illness and attacks by Indians. The supplies they bring from Bermuda save the colonists. Somers returns to Bermuda on the Patience to collect new supplies. Unfortunately, he falls ill and dies on his second visit to the island. The Virginia Company sends a party of 60 settlers to Bermuda under the command of Governor Thomas Moore and lays claim to the island …” (http://www.bermuda4u.com/Essential/ bermuda_history.html) I venture to say that the online information is not unlike the information found in the history text books used in Bermuda’s school system. This mini-narrative on how Bermuda was discovered calls attention to the missing narrative of the people who were brought to Bermuda and points to the erasure of their/our culture; they were nameless and ascribed the title ‘colonists’. In the past, I would not have questioned the missing pieces or even found it peculiar that these ‘colonists’ had no names or history; however, the many conversations I had with Prof about my homeland and my feeling of fragmentation have prompted me to know and ask more. For instance, how was it that the crew was capable of building two ships and were able to supply other colonists when there was no mention of previous inhabitants? How do current Black Bermudians males see themselves in relation to their home and their white Bermudian counterparts. I have come to understand the importance of looking to my elders for the missing pieces and not relying solely on written text that either distorts or conveniently omit pertinent information. THE COLOR OF THEORY, KNOWLEDGE AND COLONIAL EDUCATION

Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua in Theory in the Flesh: Towards an Endarkened Epistemology, speak specifically to the issue of relying on theory only at a time when women of color struggled to find a space in United States academe, particularly on the intellectual landscape. They rebelled against the existing paradigms that imposed an erasure of their lived experience in order for them to be accepted as intellectuals both personally and publicly. Instead of conceding they fought back and “transgressed boundaries of genres, of methods, of content and of disciplines” (see Hurtado, 2003, p. 215). I admire their tenacity for fighting for what they believed in and for providing an alternative option to written theory: For example, Moraga and Anzaldua stated that “[t]heory … should not come from written text only, but from the collective experience of the oppressed, especially that of women of Color” (Hurtado, 2003, p. 215). Furthermore, “theory, … is for the purpose of ultimately accomplishing social justice that will lead to liberation. Theory should emanate from what we live, breathe, and experience in our everyday lives and it is only in breaking boundaries, crossing borders, claiming fragmentation and hybridity that theory will finally be useful for liberation” (Hurtado, 2003, pp. 215–216). I can relate to Moraga and Anzaldua’s reasons for transgressing boundaries and their unwillingness to be bound by existing paradigm that seek to erase their lived experience and identity as invaluable to the academe. It reminded me of my first week of graduate classes. I felt like an outsider, displaced by the color of my skin in a room filled with my white dominant counterparts. I felt nervous, inept and a bit 115

OUTERBRIDGE

frazzled. I wondered if I could really do this, and survive graduate school. I recalled one particular professor’s academic dialect overwhelming me, not because I did not understand the meanings but because of the precedent being set for “highfalutin” words, an indication that I had entered a different realm. My academic vernacular needed fine-tuning to fit into such a setting. My lived experiences seemed displaced, I had no long list of completed research, thesis or journal articles to speak of. Gripped with fear of inadequacy, I panicked. What do I boast about? What were my accomplishments other than making it to this point despite the odds; being a black single female with a child. When I reflect on my personal account in relation with the accounts of Purpel, Makris, Moraga and Anzaldua, I understand my experiences and feelings are similar to them. There is still a calling to disrupt existing paradigms that stands to discount our lived experiences and voices. In turn, I must remain committed to the long-term process of liberation, to be actively involved in the plan to conceptualize a future that will incorporate all peoples of the world. We need to disseminate knowledge beyond the academe. Our focus as intellectuals needs to shift, “we need to de-academize theory and to connect the community to the academy” (Hurtado, 2003, p. 219). There is validity to finding theories that include the collective experience of the oppressed, “that will rewrite histories using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders that blur boundaries – new kind of theories with new theorizing methods ….” (Hurtado, 2003, p. 219). When we are engaging in ‘high’ theory, what are our intentions? Who are our audiences? In order to reach the masses, we must “give up the notion that there is a correct way to write theory” (Hurtado, 2003, p. 219). In other words, the information should be attainable to a diverse group of people. Some of us get caught up in trying to impress our peers and lose focus of the real matter at hand: change and liberation. I take solace in knowing that “our claims are beginning ‘to be ‘whispered’ into major scholarly outlets” (Hurtado, 2003, p. 216). However, time has come to turn the volume up. Let our voices be heard, loud and clear. In the song entitled Get Up Stand Up, Bob Marley encourages us to stand up for what we think is right, to speak our voice in situations of both adversity and conflict. His song makes the claim that “Life is your right. We can’t give up the fight.” This reinforces that we have the power to change our way of thinking, we are no longer bound by physical shackles; we need to liberate our minds. In his most powerful song, Bob Marley gives us the remedy: “emancipate [ourselves] from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds.” Bob Marley sung about equal rights, justice and liberation. He was a revolutionary artist and an anti-colonial thinker. NgNJgƭ wa Thiong’o (1986) provided another means of claiming the self when he shared his remedy for survival that came from stories told in Gikuyu mainly about animals while sitting around the fireplace. Stories were told about the “[h]are being small, and weak but full of innovation wit and cunning, was [his] hero” (p. 10). These stories were filled with messages about struggles, victories and the ability of the apparent weak to outwit the strong. Just as wa Thiong’o (1986) learned to value words of the storytellers for both their meanings and nuances, I learned to appreciate Bob Marley’s lyrics that carried strong messages of de-colonialization and liberation. His words have suggestive power beyond the immediate and lexical meanings. In his 116

WE LEARN IF WE SILENCE THE COLONIAL VOICE

song War based on a speech Haile Selassie gave to the United Nations in 1963, he spoke about the contention between the races and its ramification proclaiming that: “until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior, is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned everywhere is war, me say war, that until there is no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation, until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significant than the color of his eyes, me say war, that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all, without regards to race, dis a war” (Marley, 1976). Bob Marley’s Rastafarian culture was a source of freedom that allowed him to speak out for past generations and make known the issues of injustice. His music was a product of his culture, beliefs, and experiences. Marley reached out through his lyrics to help people realize the harsh reality of prejudice in the world. Marley believed that when our differences are accepted and overcome, we could all sing songs of freedom. He spoke of two freedoms; us as individuals and us as a complete entirety. DECOLONIALIZATION: WHOSE PROJECT SHOULD IT BE? TOWARDS A LIBERATING PEDAGOGY

wa Thiong’o (1986) addresses the same issue of war in Decolonizing the Mind stating: “The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. … the former was visibly brutal, the latter visibly gentle …” (p. 9). I would like to draw from wa Thiong’o’s (1986) concept of violence to suggest that the reason the latter may have been visibly gentle was because it gave people the illusion of hope. Education was fashioned in a way to make us believe that we were included; we were one of them, on equal footing. So we brought into the conspiracy of the “school fascinating the soul” (p. 9). As I have demonstrated in this section, language is powerful: it can be seen as a source of liberation in Marley’s lyrics or a means of the spiritual subjugation in wa Thiong’o’s (1986) account of his educational experience. Accordingly, language is not a mere string of words, it was “the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul prisoner” (p. 9). This psychological imprisonment has produced two different outcomes important for my research: the continuous struggle of the Black man to find himself, his voice, his place in a white-dominated world and his forced assimilation. Some of white men’s quests have been to discredit Black achievement, to rob Blacks of their history by creating a pseudo representation of who they really are. Thus, Blacks’ worth and contribution to the world has been negated and falsified. Evident of this negation and falsification can be seen in the textbooks. According to wa Thiong’o (1986), “[l]anguage and literature has taken us further from ourselves to other selves, from our world to other worlds” (p. 12). This psychosocial and political battle has been ongoing despite the Black man’s resistance to forced assimilation into the dominant European world that still rejects him no matter how refined he has become. He is still considered unequal to his European oppressor. Time has come to question the fate imposed upon us by the colonizer. The “most important area of domination was the mental universe of the 117

OUTERBRIDGE

colonized, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world” (wa Thiong’o, 1985, p. 16). By acknowledging our history through course curriculum, we will begin to stake our rightful place in the world and only then will the process of mental freedom and liberation begin. I want to draw from Aimé Césaire’s (1983) poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, which called for Black people to acknowledge their history and challenge their future with Black pride. The poem stresses the necessity of questioning the colonial reading on the body imposed by the colonizer and the fact that we have every right to be here. This message is conveyed in the following stanza: For it is not true that the work of man is done, That we have no business being on earth That we parasite the world That it is enough for us to heel to the world Whereas the work has only begun And man still must overcome all the interdictions wedged in the recesses of his fervor and no race has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on strength (p. 7) The political implications for Césaire (1983) were that colonialism had to be overthrown and replaced by a new culture, a culture that embraced anti-colonial traditions, while encompassing the best that modernity has to offer. He engaged his poetry as an instrument to shape and critique many of the major ideologies and movements of the modern world, which seemed to fall short when it came to envisioning a genuinely emancipatory future for Blacks. Frantz Fanon (1967), similarly to Césaire (1983) declared that “A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language … Mastery of language affords remarkable power” (p. 18). In my research, I want to address the language in Bermuda’s textbooks and how it depicts young Black males. According to Fanon (1967), [e]very colonized people …. every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above the jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle (p. 18). wa Thiong’o’s (1986) personal account coincides with Fanon’s (1967) when he talked about his colonial education, and how it tried to force him to see the world from the colonial perspective. He further stated that the objective of the colonizer was to catch them young; so that the images of the world and their place in it would be firmly cemented in the minds, thereby taking years to eradicate, if at all (p. 17). Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1990) adds that the central issue for her “is not one of merely acknowledging differences; rather the more difficult question concerns 118

WE LEARN IF WE SILENCE THE COLONIAL VOICE

the kind of difference that is acknowledged and engaged.” Mohanty (1990) emphasized that “differences seen as benign variation (diversity), for instance rather than as conflict, struggle, or the threat of disruptions, bypasse power as well as history to suggest a harmonious, empty pluralism” (p. 364). Mohanty’s (1990) comment was made in the context of her feminist project concerned with revolutionary social change. However, her insight is relevant to my impending research where I will be looking at how young Black Bermudian males are being constructed and subsequently represented. It is not enough to acknowledge their differences; but how are their differences being addressed in the course curriculum? The point Mohanty (1990) made about knowledge being “the very act of knowing, [and how it] is related to the power of self-definition” (p. 366) is important. This act of knowing, I believe, requires these young Black Bermudian males to know the historical conditions of their identity, and to understand how they come to be represented in History and English literature text books. CONCLUSION

My journey to self has been necessary and at times painful. This journey has caused me to disrupt my colonial ways of thinking, to ask questions such as: what are the ways in which to think about the social construction of young Black Bermudian males’ identity that will be empowering and not confrontational? What is my starting point? What theoretical frameworks will provide vantage points? I have learned the importance of re-writing from my own location as I understand and research the self. I understand the complexity of interrogating Bermuda’s educational system and the need to offer alternative texts that do not subjugate or discriminate against other people but rather texts that de-colonialize their mind and create new ways to merge lived experiences with formal education, thus evoking alternative ways of doing education and fostering social growth. To reiterate my opening, remark taking the course “Cultural Knowledges, Representation and Colonial Education: Pedagogical Implications” was instrumental in connecting questions about my identity to the larger questions about how young Black Bermudian males’ identities are constructed. The class discussions and readings propelled me to ask more related questions, such as: Why is identity important in people’s lives? How much input do we have over shaping our own identities? Are we more certain about our identities now than in the past? Do gender, class and ethnicity offer some stability and security about who we are, or are there other structures that constrain our freedom to choose our own identities? Is it possible to forge new identities in these changing times? With the help of Indigenous knowledges, anti-colonial and de-colonizing discursive frameworks, I believe such a venture is possible, it has allowed me the opportunity to continue to decolonize the self through dialogue, to no longer give homage to colonial education that has been the impetus behind my fragmented self. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In closing, I give homage to anti-colonial thinkers before us, who lived and died for what they believe in, who envisioned a different way of knowing and living; people 119

OUTERBRIDGE

like Bob Marley for Redemption Song, Martin Luther King Jr., for his powerful speech I Have a Dream, Malcolm X, for advocating Black pride, economic selfreliance and identity politics, Aimé Césaire, for Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and last but not least, anti-colonial thinker Professor Wane. REFERENCES Césaire, A. (1993). Notebook of a return to the native land. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Dei, G. J. S., & Kempf, A. (Eds.). (2006). Anti-colonialism and education: The politics of resistance. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white mask. New York: Grove Press, Inc. Hanohano, P. (1999). The spiritual imperative of native epistemology: Restoring harmony and balance in education. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 23(2), 206–219. Hurtado, A. (2003). Theory in the flesh: Toward an endarkened epistemology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(2), 215–225. Marley, B. (1986). Rebel. Music Album. Marley, B. (1984). Legend: The best of Bob Marley and the Wailers. Music Album. Makris, P. (2001). Beyond the classics: Legacies of colonialism in C. L. R. James and Derek Walcott. Revista/Review Interamericana, XXXI(1–4), 1–17. Mohanty, C. T. (1990). On race and voice: Challenges for liberal education in the 1990s. Cultural Critique: The Construction of Gender and Modes of Social Division II, 14, 179–208. Purpel, D. E. (1989). Moral and spiritual crisis in education: A curriculum for justice and compassion in education. New York: Bergin and Garvey Publishers. Scott, N. (2006, November 20). Commissioning named advisor on black males to the Premier. The Royal Gazette. Smith, L. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. New York: Zed Books. Trott, T. (2007, March 14). Whites need to be made uncomfortable. The Royal Gazette. wa Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonizing the mind. Kenya: East African Educational Publishers.

120

IMARA AJANI ROLSTON

10. A CONVERSATION ABOUT CONVERSATIONS Dialogue Based Methodology and HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa

INTRODUCTION

This is a conversation about conversation. Conversation, voice, dialogue have arguably been at the center of all great social change and transformation. Present at the roots of resistance, social movements, political struggle, and grassroots mobilization are ideas born of conversation and dialogue. This conversation is about the power of conversation. There are countless articles, books, and journals that discuss numerous models and offer various explanations for the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in SubSaharan Africa. From each explanation, each model spring forth intervention projects and programs. Ultimately, the means to fight AIDS is grounded in the way the experience of AIDS is conceptualized. While approaches have differed in structure and process, many intervention schemes remain anchored to their theoretical beginnings, and even more importantly, geographical origins. As Catherine Campbell puts forth: Too often, the language of HIV-prevention has become the language of western science and western policy approaches, not mediated by an appreciation of the extent to which these are inappropriate for local conditions.1 Ruled by bio-medicine, cognitive psychology, and championed by international development agencies and donors, the discourse surrounding HIV/AIDS was originally dominated by those outside of the direct experience of the Sub-Saharan pandemic. The dominance of the western discourse was not happenstance, and was in fact, amongst other things, a byproduct of the historical imbalance between knowledge systems. This historical imbalance ultimately shaped who was deemed an expert and who was not. Who was qualified to suggest and in many cases prescribe change modalities and methodologies and those who would receive the suggested and, often times prescribed, change. The perceived validity of a knowledge system shaped whose voice would be heard and whose voice would not. The result has been HIV/ AIDs interventions paradigms that reflect this imbalance. Limiting HIV/AIDS intervention approaches is the result of the ‘dominated’ discourse. Communities and the people that are most infected and affected by HIV/AIDS stand as mere recipients of projects shaped by the above mentioned context–projects and programs that have for the most part proven unsuccessful.2 Spoken at and rarely heard, the voice of people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS is barely audible within the discourse.

N. Wane et al. (eds.), The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, 121–136. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

ROLSTON

Community knowledge remains subservient to the knowledge of international institutions and the knowledge systems they emerge from. This conversation is about a mode of intervention, and more importantly a mode of social change that moves beyond the limitations of traditional HIV/AIDS intervention. I intend to focus in particular, on a component of United Nations Development Programs (UNDP), Community Capacity Enhancement Program (CCEP). At the center of CCEP is the ‘Community Conversations’ methodology. The core thought of this paper is that HIV/AIDS has never been just about sexual behavior, choice, and interpersonal relationships. HIV/AIDS is about an intricately connected structure of violence that historically contributed, and continues to contribute, to HIV/AIDS prevalence in Sub-Saharan Africa. Any attempt to engage and militate against the pandemic must be grounded in an approach that begins with detailed and in depth knowledge of the lived reality of HIV/AIDS. This knowledge and detail resides within communities. I would argue that community based-dialogue can in fact provide the needed break with common practice and, in turn, challenge not only the ‘dominant discourse’ but provide an expansive and detailed understanding of the pandemic. My conceptual exploration of the dialogical method intends to bear witness to its potential, from its ability to transform intra-community dynamics, resist dominant knowledge paradigms, and finally create a platform for communities to learn and strategize for their own empowerment. While the “Community Conversations” methodology began in Senegal and Zambia, through UNDP and other international organizations it is now present in numerous communities throughout the continent. This paper will draw from various examples in Southern Africa with a particular focus on Botswana and South Africa. ‘STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE’ AND INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR CHANGE

For the purposes of our discussion, beyond Southern African facts and figures, structural violence is one of the most important considerations where context is concerned. Structural violence is an extremely important framework of thought when applied to HIV/AIDS. While structural violence was developed in the field of peace and reconciliation, it speaks directly to an epidemic that has drastically impacted peoples and communities dedicated to the margins by histories of oppression. Turray (2000) writes: Structural violence has been defined as social personal violence arising from unjust, repressive and oppressive national and international political and social structures. According to this view, a system that generates repression, abject poverty, malnutrition, and starvation for some members of a society while other members enjoy opulence and unbridled power, inflicts covert violence with the ability to destroy life as much as overt violence, except that its does it in a more subtle way. In the context of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa it is important to understand that the lattice work of structural violence is an intricate framework. It suits our conversation to imagine the structure as a pyramid with ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ levels of 122

A CONVERSATION ABOUT CONVERSATIONS

lattice work. At the macro level, policies and global imbalance create and reinforce violence via poverty and powerlessness in the lives of people throughout the region. The direct experience of violence via unbalanced and strained social dynamics is a result of the micro lattice work. In many cases these social dynamics are born and evolve within poverty. Within the framework of structural violence the bio-medical, behavioral model of intervention dangerously ignores ‘context’ and ascribes AIDS prevalence rates to choice. The use of a condom, sexual health knowledge, and reduction of partners become the tools to battle the pandemic. While biomedical and behavioral analysis most certainly have their place, it is clear that “the forces shaping sexual behavior are far more complex than individual rational decisions based on simple factual knowledge about health risks, and the availability of medical services.”3 Often associated with structural violence, neo-liberal policies and their contribution to the pandemic provide a full illustration of the interplay between macro and micro lattice work, neo-liberal policies being the macro, and the micro, the poverty of communities and social dynamics it recreates. Basu (2003) writes: HIV transmission is a background of neo-liberalism, a context where the rapid movement of capital is privileged over long-term investment and the ability of persons to secure their own livelihoods. Increases in forced migration are strongly correlated with some of the most significant increases in HIV transmission across Southern Africa, East Asia, East Europe and Latin America (although few members of the public health community have addressed this fact) and such migration most often occurs when rural agricultural sectors are destroyed after the liberalization of markets and the subsequent drop in primary commodity prices, which leads (mostly male) laborers to find work in urban centers and leave their families behind. (p. 13) In the gold mining region of Summer town South Africa, approximately 70 000 male migrant workers leave their homes and travel for miles to work in mines for unseemly pay and extremely dangerous circumstances. Migrant work and the mining of gold are a means to earn a wage and to support their families. Within the all male setting, a strong and rooted commercial sex work industry has expanded greatly. Women migrate to town to escape poverty. They erect shanty settlements and sell sex and alcohol to men in order to survive (Ibid: p. 12). HIV rates among the mineworkers were estimated at 22%, ultimately meaning that prevalence rates for women may in fact be much higher. HIV/AIDS prevention projects funded by international donors identified peer-education, condom distribution, and treatment and care as priority areas. While these are most certainly initiatives worth funding, they are funded at the behest of larger and more telling indicators related to prevalence. Never are the roots of poverty and migration addressed. The miners’ position in the larger economic environment reshaped their lives placing them ultimately in a high-risk environment. Even more important are the women whom in order to escape poverty, with almost no options, venture away from their homes to sell sex. In the case of Summertown, the micro-lattice work manifested through poverty and gender inequity is supported and strengthened through the macro-lattice work of national and global economic inequality. Yet individual behavior change remains the focus 123

ROLSTON

of prevention. Where systems of economic inequality clearly contribute to prevalence rates, prevention programs remain problematically focused on the micro lattice work of a much larger structure. Within a framework of neo-liberal thought, the violence of market mechanisms and consolidated capital are ignored and the complexity of prevalence is lost. PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR CHANGE

The understanding of AIDS in Africa lies in a complex mix of bio-medicine, behaviorism, a wider moral and political agenda, and the development, security, and human rights discourses of the past decades. (O’Manique, 2004: p. 17) The words of Colleen O’Manique are telling. HIV/AIDS within Sub-Saharan Africa was initially researched and conceptualized within environments far removed from the lived experience of those infected and affected by the virus. Western ‘medical science’ and more specifically, the field of bio-medicine dominated the response to HIV/AIDS ultimately shaping policy, practice, and research focus. Bio-medical enquiry and its bedfellow cognitive psychology launched individual behavior change intervention to the forefront of the fight as a status-quo/best practice. The placement of individual behavior change at the forefront of HIV/AIDS prevention internationally has a great deal to do with the power of professional institutions, and medically based expertise as western forms of knowledge production. Very few disciplines rival medical science in their ability to assemble a body of knowledge established through text, journal articles, and clinical studies (Ibid: p. 18). The power of the professional institutions as sites for knowledge production is an important component in this discussion. Set against the potential contributions of community based knowledge and experience, western based medical science has an overpowering presence in the lives of people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS. It has become the lens through which the pandemic is viewed. Billboards, t-shirts, and banners with the letters ABC’s (Abstinence, Be Faithful, Condomise) stand as an overt simplification of a much more complex issue. These sorts of simplifications can directly be attributed to historical assumptions and hegemonic power dynamics. While bio-medicine has offered a great deal to the understanding of HIV/AIDS what is of great concern is the power-laden relationship between localized knowledge systems and the knowledge systems of western medical science. In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal put forth that cultural influences have set up the assumptions with which we “pose the questions we ask; influence the facts we seek; and determine the interpretation we give the facts”,4 and by the beginning of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the 1980’s, science was widely recognized as a “socially embedded” activity (Stillwaggon, 2006: p. 133). The role of professional institutions, expertise and the knowledge they have produced in the global effort is embedded in a historically hegemonic position of western knowledge systems. Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes about knowledge production in the context of education systems, but her discussion is very relevant: Knowledge systems however were informed by a much more comprehensive system of knowledge which linked universities, scholarly societies and imperial 124

A CONVERSATION ABOUT CONVERSATIONS

views of culture. Hierarchies of knowledge and theories which had rapidly developed to account for the discoveries of the new world were legitimated at the centre …. Underpinning all of what is taught … is the belief in the concept of science as the all-embracing method for gaining and understanding of the world.5 Through histories of oppression, western medical science has stood dominant to all forms of Indigenous belief, knowledge, research, and experience. The historical power imbalance of knowledge systems was erected in the colonial period and continues to thrive within institutions that have not yet moved to make radical breaks with the past. Sub-Saharan Africa continues to be the “laboratory for western science.”6 When the pandemic began, the responses throughout Sub-Saharan Africa were greatly influenced by international professional institutions and their local institutional counterparts. The World Bank, UNAIDS, and WHO all provided technical assistance in the development of National HIV/AIDS Programs and strategic frameworks. Many of these institutions already stood as dominant figures in Sub-Saharan Africa’s postindependence period, ostensibly deconstructing social welfare systems through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and poverty reduction initiatives grounded in neo-liberal philosophy.7 The creation of knowledge in relation to AIDS prevention was generated at the center of these institutions only to be marginally amended with the input of local governments and civil society. The dominance of western medical science as a socially embedded paradigm rooted in histories of hegemony is most obviously apparent in international policy on HIV/AIDS prevention and its focus on individual behavior change. Eileen Stillwaggon engages in an expansive discussion that illustrates the way racial metaphor shaped the HIV/AIDS prevention paradigm. The most important aspect of Stillwaggon’s discussion is the examination of ways in which Caldwell’s and Caldwell’s early studies on fertility and sexuality in various parts of Sub-Saharan Africa served to influence contemporary institutional policy documents. John Caldwell and Pat Caldwell of the Australian National University wrote the articles widely cited in Africa AIDS social science and policy literature. In the 1980’s the Caldwells published articles that attempted to illustrate the way “African” religious values impeded the aims of population control programs. Caldwell and Caldwell while cautioning against value judgment, put forth that “The African system tends to increase the number of sexual partners’ and is vulnerable to attack by all coital-related disorders.”8 The observations of the Caldwells remained rooted in a racialist viewpoint that insinuates an orientation of thought based on a generalized construction of African systems of sexuality that somehow significantly differ from European systems of sexuality. The words of Caldwell and Caldwell stood as influential works that informed the development of western based AIDS knowledge in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa. In 1989 Quiggin used the Caldwell articles to illustrate the “social context of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. Ultimately the “African” fertility discourse of the Caldwells influenced one of the most influential policy documents of the 1990’s, the World Bank’s Confronting AIDS: Public Priorities in a Global Epidemic (1997). Despite recognition that many sources discounted the relevance of behavioral explanations for prevalence rates, the document’s overall plan was 125

ROLSTON

greatly focused on the behavioral approach.9 The document’s rationale for a focus on the behavioral approach in confronting AIDS specifically cites Caldwell et al. (1989). As professional institutions and their house experts developed global partnerships, they were not able to escape the social and historical contexts from which they came. A history of hegemonic knowledge systems and their grounding in racialist thinking ultimately created responses that, in their narrow view, reproduced the features of the structures of violence that influenced the explosion of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. Within this phenomenon, the voices, beliefs, and knowledge of communities based in various regions of the continent became subjugated to the machinations of western medical science, the institutions and experts that championed these systems of knowing. Proponents of individual behavior change, using their power, developed HIV/AIDS prevention initiatives that viewed community members as objects of change. The paradigm from which these initiatives sprang forth indicted a generalized “African” sexuality as a culturally unique determinant that greatly contributed to prevalence rates. This conception suggested that AIDS was self-inflicted, and not a result of oppression as expressed through structural violence.10 The greatest issue was deemed to be a lack of knowledge, lack of skills, and an overall lack of sexual discipline. From this perspective, the contributions of people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS at the grassroots were marginal in comparison to the “superior” knowledge of professional institutions and bodies. As a result, the role of communities has vacillated between that of mere recipients and more recently that of “participants” in change. COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION & PARTICIPATORY APPROACHES

Contemporary views of HIV/AIDS prevention have begun to place a great emphasis on ‘health-enabling communities’. This is evident in the international professional institutions’ attempt at developing policy and intervention that seek to impact the social and community context.11 As a result, ‘community participation’ and ‘community mobilization’ have become common intervention practices in prevention efforts. Often, terms such as empowerment, social inclusion, and even, in some cases, emancipation are concepts and potential outcomes closely associated with ‘participation’. While these approaches indicate a shift in thinking, they may still remain confined by the frameworks professional institutions create. Participation, as defined by professional institutions, provides an opportunity to examine the philosophical underpinnings of participatory interventions. The World Bank Participation Source Book was developed through the banks learning group on participatory development. The definition the Bank subscribes to is as follows: Participation is a process through which stakeholders influence and share control over development initiatives and the decisions and resources which affect you.12 In comparison, the United Nations Research institute for Social Development defines participatory development as ‘a capacity for influencing decision making processes 126

A CONVERSATION ABOUT CONVERSATIONS

at all levels of societal organization’. The UN Definition specifically goes on to evoke terms such as empowerment, social capital, capacity building, and social movements. These two approaches serve to illustrate the role of professional institutions in their construction of community members as either ‘objects’ or ‘agents’ of social change. Through the creation of frameworks for participation, institutions and experts become the gate keepers, so to speak. The sheer ability to create definitions for participation at the level of the professional institution is an action that expresses a complete and absolute power over the social change process. In the realm of participatory approach, communities find themselves placed along a gradation between object and agent. In many cases, it is the professional institution that dictates where the community falls as “partners” in the development process. While erecting these poles of ‘object’ and ‘agent’ may seem simplistic, it stands as an important consideration in light of the fact that many participatory initiatives speak of empowerment and emancipation. The historical power, privilege, and social context from which international institutions like the World Bank, USAID, and even the UN originate requires that concepts of participation as social change be critically problematized to ensure that mechanisms for change do not become frameworks for bondage that stand quietly in line with histories of oppression. In the realm of AIDS prevention, “participatory approaches” may be particularly problematic because communities are “empowered” to participate and mobilize within an already established hegemonic knowledge systems. In the case of USAID, a powerful partner in the global AIDS effort, the complexities of power and participation are very apparent. Family Health International has stood as one of the primary beneficiaries of USAID HIV/AIDS intervention funding and operates in numerous countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. The AVERT model, developed by Family Health International is a behavior change model that is quite reflective of conventional approaches. As Stillwaggon puts forth: None of the transmission models used by major organizations in the AIDS field takes into account ecologic factors or in any way reflects the population health of the regions under study. They assume very few factors in HIV transmission, all related to individual behavior change, and consequently incorporate only behavioral-intervention variables. (2006: p. 165) The AVERT model itself has extremely narrow population variables: occupation, type of partner, gender, partner gender, and HIV prevalence. Even more concerning are intervention variables: the average number of sex partners, average number of sex acts, prevalence of STD’s, and condom use. These variables are considered to affect transmission. Programs with these population and intervention variables are considered to be targeted interventions that are cost-effective. An intervention such as this would consider condom promotion amongst commercial sex workers as viable and a highly targeted intervention. Organizations like FHI place ‘community participation’ and ‘community mobilization’ at the center of their programming. Participation, in this case, is defined as communities participating in the final stages of intervention. The program is already planned, packaged and researched before it reaches the grassroots. 127

ROLSTON

In an account of the Summertown Project based in a mining community just outside of Johannesburg South Africa, Catherine Campbell identifies the limitations of participation as defined by professional institutions. Although ‘community participation’ is deemed to be an important part of the project, participation in the project level was confined to ‘peer education’. Community participants served as conveyors of knowledge and mobilizers of a project designed and developed far outside of the context of Summertown: In retrospect, having an outsider write the proposal was less than ideal for a number of reasons. The first was that it meant that local stakeholders had a limited sense of ownership of the original ideas of the Project. Although there was some consultation between the external consultant and some Summertown stakeholders in the development of the proposal, this appears to have been fairly superficial (Campbell, 2003: p. 39). Consequently, the project’s internationally based funding agency commissioned a London-based consultancy company to develop the Project proposal. Such accounts stand as clear examples that participatory approaches in the realm of HIV/AIDS prevention still remain within the control of the professional institutions that define these approaches. Within this approach, community members remain objects of change as distant ponds to be played on the landscape of AIDS prevention. Grassroots movements remain locked within the confines of dominant knowledge systems that negate the experience and knowledge of communities, functionally robbing communities of their power while speaking of empowerment and emancipation. As Michael Woost states: The poor (are allowed to) participate in development, but only in so far as they do not attempt to change the rules of the game … (It is like) riding a topdown vehicle of development whose wheels are greased with a vocabulary of the bottom-up discourse (Woost, 1997: p. 249). ‘COMMUNITY CONVERSATIONS’: A BREAK WITH CONVENTION

‘Community Conversations’ are a central piece in the United Nations Community Capacity Enhancement Program (CCEP), a program designed to encourage and cultivate grassroots leadership. The Community Conversations (CC) methodology was initially developed by Thebisa Chaava from Zambia and Daouda Diouf from Senegal in 1990’s.13 They both endeavored to develop forms of intervention that would lend to the communal African context of closely knit community, kinship networks, and collective decision making. Created within the context of civil society and community, the CC methodology inspired great change in their respective localities and offered a distinctly different approach to intervention. As they put forth: Communities immediately began to recognize for themselves the values and actions that would have to change …. Such awareness came about through community conversations. This series of facilitated dialogues stands in contrast to conventional approaches in which people are grouped together for awareness 128

A CONVERSATION ABOUT CONVERSATIONS

raising lectures, often accompanied by the distribution of pamphlets or posters. Such approaches often leave communities with bleak, prescriptive messages that deny them the benefits of dialogue on how the community could be affected. Communities are often times overwhelmed and feel a sense of hopelessness following such events.14 In 2004, the UNDP launched the community conversations in Botswana as a part of the newly developed CCEP program.15 Our conversation about CC’s potential begins here, with a focus on what CC may in fact mean to Botswana and HIV/AIDS intervention on whole. While the conversation will be mostly conceptual in nature Botswana will form the backdrop against which we explore dialogue as methodological practice. The purpose of dialogue, as it is defined in this context of CC, is a process that through facilitation ‘shifts power relations, strengthen ownership and responsibility for change, and mobilize local capacity and resources’. The process is intended to help ‘reshape relationships’ in line with the transformation dialogues prompts. As a mechanism for larger national intervention strategies, the process generates ‘data’ that is channeled into national strategic development plans. According the Chaava, Diouf, Gueye, and Tiomkin: Linking this data, and the community decisions that result from it, to these plans is critical to ensure that financial resources and infrastructure will be available and accessible to communities in a way that is institutionalized. Linking Community Conversations to these national processes does not mean that they will become bureaucratized.16 While this raises further questions our focus, is not on these data channels.17 Rather it is on the possibilities that dialogue holds for the communities besieged by AIDS and its contextual violence. The central question is how we can understand the power of dialogue, not only as a methodology for social change, but as methodology for empowerment within the struggle for health and equality? As a methodological practice, we can view the power of dialogue through three distinct and interlocking discourses–Intergroup dialogue, dialogue as resistance, and ultimately dialogue as empowerment. INTERGROUP DIALOGUE AND SOCIAL CAPITALS

Within the context of Community Conversations, an integral component of the methodology is relationship building, not only for the reinforcement of healthy behavior, but overall social change. Sexual behavior has always existed within the context of relationships, which are shaped by environment, power relations, and a myriad of social and economic factors. While behavioral interventions streamlined gender discourse into their frameworks, they still remain delimited by their approach. Gender, like sex, is a relational component of interpersonal and societal relationships. Power imbalance cannot be simply swept away. As Adeokum puts forth, “the process of negotiation between men and women, is often not sex but power.”18 Most important is Adeokum’s use of the words ‘negotiation’ and ‘power’. An important 129

ROLSTON

part of dialogue is that it creates a space for negotiation. It is the space in which all relationships are tested and challenged through the voicing of competing perspectives and experience. Dialogue is the space where ‘differences’ meet for the purpose of reconciliation. From the perspective of intergroup dialogue theory, dialogue, as a methodology, is intended to achieve just this. Nagda states: We can conceive of a learning community about and across differences that captures motivations to ‘co-learn’, fosters intentions to bridge intergroup differences and leads to reflection and reappraisal of the groups … research specifically on intergroup dialogue shows that [participants] break down ignorance and stereotypes, think more about their social group membership and build skills for communication and working across difference. (Nagda, p. 5) Intergroup dialogue engages communities’ members and learners in a “learning community” collectively bound by a desire to see social change. The negotiation of relationships and the power-laden differences that shape them, can only be fully and competently understood by the community themselves. Within conversation across difference participants critically examine and negotiate power relations and the way they are manifested in daily interactions. Lent to the context of HIV/AIDS intervention, this learning model is an important consideration specifically for adults. For the adult learner, the capacity to reason requires a less didactic relationship between teacher and learner. More preferable is a dialogical process that draws on the learner’s knowledge base. According to Preece and Ntseane, adult learning is typically context specific and accepts contradictions.19 This argument is based on the idea that adult life is infinitely complex. As a result, adults are capable of creating multiple solutions and reflecting critically on their actions and belief systems. Intergroup dialogue offers community members engaged in conversation, the opportunity to generate solutions and meet challenges based on locally shared knowledge and experience. Rather than recipients in waiting, community members through dialogue negotiate their own social change through the reconciliation of differences. Communities are the site for the negotiation of social and sexual lives and identities. Forming the local context, they play a key role in ‘enabling or restraining’ people from taking control over their health.20 The negotiation of relationships for the purposes of health enlists a community’s social capital in the fight against AIDS. Bourdieu places emphasis on the role various capitals play in the reproduction of unequal power relations (Bourdieu, 1986: 251). He argues that unequal social relations are maintained through a range of social processes that generate social inequalities through the phenomena of political, cultural, economic and social capital. From this perspective, social capital can conversely be harnessed for the purposes of mutually beneficial social networks. Through intergroup dialogue and the subsequent negotiation of relationships, social processes that maintain inequality can be transformed and enlisted in a positive process of social change that creates equality. Enacted social capital results in greater connectedness and mutual responsibility of the community to mobilize against HIV/AIDS. 130

A CONVERSATION ABOUT CONVERSATIONS

Within the Botswana context the relevance of social capital and intergroup dialogue is of great relevance. Bagele Chillisa states: Most African communities, with particular reference to Bantu people of Southern Africa for instance, view human existence in relation to the existence of others. Among views of ‘being’ for instance is the conception that ‘nthu, nthu ne banwe’ (a person is because of others) or ‘I am because we are.’ This is in direct contrast to Western views that emphasize individualism: ‘I think therefore I am.’ Most African worldviews emphasize belongingness. Chillisa suggests a radical break with Western bio-medicine and psychology and the placement of Setswana traditional beliefs and knowledge as the foundation for intervention practice instead.21 According to Chillisa, within the Kgotla–the traditional governance system based on dialogue and consensus–an open space system of communication is encouraged through the saying mmua lebe oa bo a bua la gagwe or ‘every voice must be heard’. Through this communication process, conclusions are reached through consensus. Within this context, intergroup dialogue and its influence on social capital may be considered a social technology that has a longstanding presence in the socio-cultural fabric of Botswana. This is an important consideration given the limitations of individual behavior change and the context from which it originates. Chillisa’s critique provides an important perspective on HIV/AIDS and the origins of intervention knowledge and practice. While dialogue expands the perspective of intervention and enlists communities in interpersonal negotiations that transforms social dynamics, so does it also create a platform for the creation of knowledge that is Indigenous and relevant to people’s experience. DIALOGUE AS RESISTANCE

As a place for community voices, dialogue provides an alternative space that radically challenges the Western knowledge paradigms. The dialogical methodology harnesses long standing traditions of ‘Orality’. Botswana, like many South African communities, evolved out of highly complex oral traditions that shaped knowledge and served to transmit and shape social dynamics within the community. Dei writes: Elders utilized the medium of (oral tradition) storytelling to bring families together to share historic and cultural information and to transmit the values of social responsibility and community services to youth … traditional education reflected the cultural knowledge and individual understanding … dialogue consensus and co-operation, and egalitarian interactions were encouraged among members of the community. (Dei, 1995: 154) In her writings, Chillisa specifically connects the failure of HIV/AIDS programs to their grounding in colonial practice and thought. Within this context, any approach that would further subjugate Indigenous knowledge would find little success in the Botswana context. With this in mind, any form of intervention must validate African resistance to neo-colonial techniques such as ABC (Abstinence, Be Faithful, Condomise) and find messages that emanate from within the African voice.22 131

ROLSTON

The connection between dialogue as a methodology and oral tradition creates space in Conversations where communities may bring their Indigenous selves to the fore. As a result, community members may be more inclined to contribute to the process. This is what bell hooks would call coming to voice, the point at which subjugated peoples begin to speak to power.23 The generation of knowledge that dialogue prompts forms a basis for resistance in communities that have been inundated by HIV interventions rooted in Western knowledge traditions. Initially ignored or not fully valued in terms of consent or consultation, the voices of community members find space to create understandings that value traditions and beliefs. Ultimately, the creation of new formations of Indigenous knowledge through dialogue may be viewed as resistance against what NgNJgƭ wa Thiong’o calls the “culture bomb”: The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environments, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and … it even plants serious doubts about the moral righteousness of the struggle.24 Dialogue becomes a means of creating knowledge about the communal experience of HIV/AIDS while it is written on and before it written over by western knowledge systems. It is in fact, an act of liberation. DIALOGUE AND EMPOWERMENT

Sandra Jovchelovitch suggests, power is not just “phenomena to be explained through intrinsic negativity but a space for possible action where community members strive for social change” (Jovchelovitch, 1996: 19). This is an important space in that whenever communities and community members enter this space on their own volition, they in fact enact their own power. Dialogue, as it relates to HIV/AIDS, is an exercise in power so far as it exists within, challenges structures of violence, and resists western intervention paradigms and expertise in the name of self-determination and liberation. The simple act of moving from being recipients of knowledge to creators of knowledge for personal movement and social change is powerful. Freire suggests that true social change cannot be achieved through depositing ideas into the mind of others. This is what he calls “banking education”, a learning process that holds people as objects of oppressive frameworks: Because dialogue is an encounter among men (people) who name the world, it must not be a situation where some men (people) name on behalf of others. It is an act of creation; it does not serve as a crafty instrument for the domination of one man by another. The domination implicit in dialogue is that of the world by the dialoguers; it is conquest of the world for the liberation of men (people).25

132

A CONVERSATION ABOUT CONVERSATIONS

Within the structure of violence, dialogue that is created through the participation of multiple voices at the grassroots may in fact articulate the sprawling complexities of HIV/AIDS and its determinants. Using such a methodology, various experiences of illness are illustrated through story and sharing. Some story may in fact identify issues that were not previously connected to HIV/AIDS. In a review of the outcomes of Community Conversations training of trainers in 2004, a number of HIV/AIDS related issues were brought up that may have, within traditional intervention practice, been considered unrelated: – Disintegration of Setswana values – Lack of youth interest in Kgotla (traditional governance system) meetings – Migration of youth to the cities – Shebeens (bars) scattered around the village26 Within individual behavior change intervention, issues such of these may in fact have been lost. Through the process of ‘naming the world’ for themselves, communities, through community conversations, may in fact create their own power, and in turn, become empowered. On a large scale, a number of the outcomes of discussion point to larger structural issues. The migration of youth to cities is a global issue. Rural flight has ultimately seen numerous young people throughout Southern Africa migrate to urban centers in search of jobs. Employment is often scarce in urban spaces, and young people are vulnerable and at greater risk of contracting the virus. The rural urban divide and the migratory patterns they encourage relate to neo-liberal policies that strangle rural areas in the interest of urban expansion. The disintegration of Setswana values relates to our earlier discussion of resistance and the domination of Indigenous knowledge systems. Such examples provide strong evidence of the importance of community voices in their role as leaders in HIV/AIDS intervention. Beyond the realm of interpersonal relationships and sexual behavior, the experience of communities speaks to HIV/AIDS and the responsibility of the world. If, as Freire suggests, naming is a means of liberation, then the naming that occurs within dialogue can in fact be the first step to dismantling the lattice work that has kept structural violence erect and present in the lives of people in Botswana and throughout Southern Africa. CONCLUSION

Throughout this discussion, there are many questions I have asked myself. I recognize that despite the promise of dialogue, more often than not, it is the way the conversation is shaped and the context within which it happens that may in fact dictate the outcome. I am by no means mystified by some of the potential limitations of Community Conversations as they are conceived within the context of the UNDP. If the shape and nature of UNDP stands in tandem with structural violence by way of salary rewards, flawed “participatory” practice, or simply the influence on the supports the methodology receives then, this in fact places the process in great jeopardy. I have indeed asked myself numerous questions, but the fact remains that this was a conversation about conversations. This was a paper about the potential of dialogue and the unquestionable power of voice. The AIDS pandemic has evolved 133

ROLSTON

within the context of structural violence. Poverty and malnutrition both related to neo-liberal policy and international practices are complicit in this reality. Therefore, any intervention that attempts to stem the pandemic must, by philosophy and function, stand in radical opposition to these structures. Individual Behavior Change interventions are reliant on western knowledge systems, and have required minimal participation of the people infected and affected by AIDS. As a result this methodology has been limited in its ability to impact the pandemic. With a focus on the negotiation of relationships and Indigenous knowledge systems, Community Conversations have the potential to signal a dramatic change in the way HIV/AIDS intervention is done. Community members are arguably the most powerful source for change at both the micro and macro level. Beyond the local context the contents of dialogues have already begun to identify issues that are rooted in global imbalances. While there may not be a direct connection made between the micro and macro lattice work of structural violence in the literature, it by no means indicates that these connections have not been made. Importantly, the power of dialogue has the potential to inspire and create whole new approaches to intervention. Through the sharing of Indigenous knowledge as it relates to HIV/AIDS and its coupling with local experience, dialogical methods hold the potential to inspire intervention programming that is truly holistic in scope. As dialogue comes into voice, and as voice disseminates knowledge, we may in fact see even more enlivened and emboldened South African grassroots that are self-empowered and free to fight AIDS on their own terms. NOTES 1 2

3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Campbell, Catherine. 2003. Pg. 5. Farmer, Paul. 2005; Campbell, Catherine. 2003; O’Manique, Colleen. 2004; Katz, Allison. 2002; Stillwaggon, Aileen. 2006. All suggest that a great deal of internationally generated HIV/AIDS intervention focusing on individual behavior change failed to address the root causes of HIV/AIDS and in turn have had little impact on prevalence rates. Campbell, Catherine. 2003. Pg. 7. Myrdal, Gunnar.1944. Pg. 92. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Pg. 65. Ibid. Consequently, the deconstruction of social welfare systems in the period of SAPs and the rise of the IMF and the World Bank meant that expenditures channeled to health and education were drastically cut in favor a neo-liberal framework that sought to integrate African markets (albeit at diminished and subjugated level) into international world market. (Katz, Allison. 2002. Pg. 128) Caldwell, Pat; Caldwell, John. 1989. Pg. 187. Stillwaggon, Eilleen. 2006. Pg. 155. Kidd, Ross; Kumar Krishna. 1981. Pg. 29. Campbell, Catherine 2003. Pg. 11. World Bank. (n.d). Chaava Thebisa; Diouf, Daouda; Gueye, Moustapha, Tiomkin David. 2005. Pg. 1. Ibid. Pg. 2. Before 2004 the community conversations were evolving within their original local context. In Zambia Thebisa Chaava worked as a part of the Salvation Army Zambia. The Salvation Army worked to implement frontline HIV/AIDS programs. Therefore the CC’s shift from civil society to the UNDP

134

A CONVERSATION ABOUT CONVERSATIONS

16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

has most likely impacted the evolution of the methodology. Both Chaava and Diouf stood as consultants and lead facilitators in the roll out the reframed UNDP CCEP program. While there are important questions to ask where this transition is concerned they would detour the direction and focus of the paper. Chaava Thebisa; Diouf, Daouda; Gueye, Moustapha, Tiomkin David. 2005. Pg. 3. One major question is what information (data) is channeled up into the UNDP and national strategic framework. Arguably UNDP and governments still have the power to choose what information they take up or ignore. These powerful bodies may in fact shape how the voice of communities influences national policy and intervention. This is very serious consideration to be taken up in a more technical exploration of the community conversations process itself. Adeokum, L.A. 1994. Pg. 33. Preece, Julia; Ntseane, Gabo. 2004. Pg. 8. Campbell, Catherine. 2003. Pg. 3. Chillisa, Bagele. 2005. Pg. 660. Reece, Julia; Ntseane, Gabo. 2005. Pg. 19. hooks, bell. 2003. Pg. 234. wa Thiong’o, NgNJgƭ. 1981. Pg. 3. Freire, Paulo. 1973. Pg. 77. UNDP Botswana. 2004. Pg. 60.

REFERENCES Adeokum, L. A. (1994). Gender differentials and household issues in AIDS. In P. Wijeyaratne, L. J. Arsenault, J. H. Roberts & J. Kitts (Eds.), Gender, health and sustainable development. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. Basu, S. (2003). AIDS, empire, and public health behaviorism. ZDNET. http://www.zmag.org/content/ print_article.cfm?itemID=3988§ionID=1 Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp 241–248). New York: Greenwood. Caldwell, J. C., Caldwell, P., & Quiggin, P. (1989). The social context of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. Population and Development Review, 15(2), 185–233. Campbell, C. (2003). Letting them die: Why HIV/AIDS prevention programmes fail. Indiana, IN: James Currey. Chaava, T., Diouf, D., Gueye, M., & Tiomkin, D. (2004). UNDP community capacity enhancement handbook: The answers lie within. Chillisa, B. (2001). Research within post-colonialism: Towards a framework for inclusive research practices. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 1–24. Dei, G. J. S. (1995). Indigenous knowledge as an empowerment tool for sustainable development. In V. Titi & N. Singh (Eds.), Empowerment: Towards sustainable development. London: Zed Books Ltd. Farmer, P. (2005). Pathologies of power: Health, human rights, and the new war on the poor. London: University of California Press. Farmer, P. (1999). Infections and inequalities: The modern plagues. London: University of California Press. Freire, P. (1973). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Seabury Press. hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to transgress. London: Routledge. Jovchelovitch, S. (1997). Peripheral communities and the transformation of social representation: Queries on power and recognition. Social Psychological Review, 1(1), 16–26. Katz, A. (2002). AIDS, individual behavior and the unexplained remaining variation. African Journal of AIDS Research, 1, 125–142. Kaufman, J. (2000). Leading counter-hegemonic practices through a postmodern lens. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 19(5), 430–447.

135

ROLSTON Kidd, R., & Kumar, K. (1981). Co-opting Freire: A critical analysis of pseudo-Freirean adult education. Economic and Political Weekly, 16(1/2), 27–36. Mydral, G. (1944). An American dilemma: The Negro problem and modern democracy. New York: Harpers and Brother. Nagda, B. A., Kim, C.-w., & Truelove, Y. (2004). Learning about difference, learning with others, learning to transgress. Journal of Social Issues, 60(1), 195–214. National AIDS Coordinating Agencies (NACA). (2007). National Strategic Framework. O’Manique, C. (2004). Neo-liberalism and AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa: Globalizations pandemic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Preece, J., & Ntseane, G. (2004). Using adult education principles for HIV/AIDS awareness intervention strategies in Botswana. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 23(1), 5–22. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. Stillwaggon, E. (2006). AIDS and the ecology of poverty. New York: Oxford University Press. Turray, T. (2000). Peace research and African development: An Indigenous African perspective. In G. J. S. Dei, B. Hall & D. G. Rosenberg (Eds.), Indigenous knowledge in the global context: Multiple readings of the world. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. UNAIDS. (2006). AIDS epidemic update: December 2006. Geneva. UNDP Botswana. (2004). Report on the Community Capacity Enhancement Process (CCEP): Training of Trainers workshop. wa Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonizing the mind. Kenya: East African Educational Publishers. Woost, M. (1997). Alternative vocabularies of development? ‘Community’ and ‘Participation’ in development discourse in Sri Lanka. In R. D. Grillo & R. L. Stirrat (Eds.), Discourses of development (pp. 229–253). London: Berg.

136

NJOKI WANE

11. THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT Conversations with Women from Rural Kenya

INTRODUCTION

Africa needs fundamental change and transformation, not just adjustment. The change and transformation required are not just narrow, economic and mechanical ones. They are the broader and fundamental changes that will bring about, over time, the new Africa of our vision where there is development and economic justice, not just growth; where there is democracy and accountability, not despotism, authoritarianism and kleptocracy; and where the governed and their governments are moving hand-in-hand in the promotion of the common good, and where [it is] the will of the people rather than the wishes of one person or a group of persons, however powerful, that prevail (Adedeji, 1990: 37). This chapter is based on an on-going research project concerning the role of rural Embu women in development. In this chapter, I seek to understand what constitutes development as conceptualized by rural women in Kenya. I engage in a broad discussion of African development. I broach the political context from which the ethos of development emerged by way of specific examples from rural Kenya. I also situate the meaning of development as articulated through rural Embu women in Kenya. This chapter will focus on the research question posed to the participants: How do you come to know and understand development? I am asking: Has there been a transformation that promotes growth in all sectors of African people’s lives, such as education, socio-economics, health, and governance? Is there accountability and equitable distribution of resources? Is there local community participation in decision making when it comes to development? Could we sit back and say, there is accountability and democracy within the nation states of Africa? Are the voices of the community reflective of all members or only the select few–the elite? Have community-based and community-driven development projects implemented by the World Bank been effective? Beginning in 1957, dozens of African nations, achieved independence from colonial powers. While each of these African nations celebrated its new status, many serious problems–political, social, and economic–followed the departure of the colonial powers. Many African states were in no position to mobilize people, generate capital, promote productivity, or effectively participate in international affairs or trade. Africans had been relegated for too long to the periphery of global power and production. Despite having gained independence, African states still found themselves dependent on Western countries for technology, foreign aid, and markets in which to sell their raw materials. N. Wane et al. (eds.), The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, 137–153. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

WANE

In response to this situation, many Western countries (the United States as well as most of the earlier colonizers), in conjunction with various international organizations (such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations) proposed a variety of “development models” intended to “lift up” Africa to the level of the industrialized nations. For example, in the 1980s the World Bank introduced Structural Adjustment Programs to facilitate measurable development in many developing countries of the world. To many Africans, most of what was being introduced by international organizations constituted neocolonialism (Rodney, 1972; Dei, 2000; Wilmer, 1993; Ogundipe-Leslie, 1994). Reflecting on these issues almost fifty years after the political independence of many African countries, some studies reveal that development based on World Bank community-driven poverty reduction models has not benefitted all the targeted members ((Pozzoni & Kumar, 2005). This argument is supported by a report published in 2002 and highlighted in a study by McPeak et al. (2009). Other studies (Sherburne-Benz, et al., (2005) and Rawlings (2005) argue differently by stating that there has been noticeable progress among impoverished communities of Africa. Over the past two decades, development scholars have recognized the need to employ “local knowledges” in addressing the question of African development (Dei, 2000). They have further argued that without such local input, African countries become increasingly vulnerable to decisions generated from outside their continent, especially decisions that result in situations that are detrimental to the well being of their populations. Scholars such as McPeak et al. (2009) have even engaged with local communities in Kenya and Ethiopia to find out whether there is congruency in development priorities among various stakeholders such as governments and local communities. THE ARTICULATION OF DEVELOPMENT BY RURAL EMBU WOMEN IN KENYA

In the 1990s and 2000s, community-based models of development dominated rural projects in Kenya. The government policies have emphasized decentralization and community participation. Funds have been deployed to all constituencies in Kenya for the members of parliament to allocate depending on community needs. However, there is little evidence that much has been done for the people. Many women that I talked to were very skeptical of both the meaning of development, its intent and the government policies that address community projects. When asked to comment on development, a Kenyan rural woman interviewed by Pala Achola (1976) explained: “During the anti-colonial campaigns we were told that development would mean better living conditions. Several years have gone by, and all we see are people coming from the capital to write about us. For me, the hoe and the water pot which served my grandmother still remain my source of livelihood. When I work on the land and fetch water from the river, I know I can eat. But this development which you talk about has yet to be seen in this village” (Achola, 1976: 13). 138

THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT

These words are supported by McPeak’s et al. (2009) study that reveals there is no systematic evidence by community members of accrued benefits of development projects in arid regions in Kenya and Ethiopia. This was also echoed by Muiru (an 80 year old woman and a participant in my research) when she said: Maendeleo [development in Swahili] … [means] having enough food to feed my family, good roads, respectable children and a good government. Maendeleo should have some meaning for us, such as clean drinking water, more schools for our children … otherwise development will only make sense to you young people–it may be development to you, but not to us (Interview with Muiru, 1994). As far as Achola and Muriu are concerned, development must focus on the satisfaction of day-to-day needs. However, these needs are only a very small aspect of what a community requires for meaningful growth. As Ogundipe-Leslie comments: When peasants or workers are excluded from all responsibilities in the production system, when scientific research is subjected to profit, when education patterns are imposed that make school children or students strangers to their own culture and mere instruments to the production process, when protest is reduced to silence by force and political prisoners are tortured, can it be thought that these practices do not hinder the goals of development and that they do not inflict an injury on society? (Ogundipe-Leslie, 1994: 102). Echoing the words of the rural Kenyan women, Ogundipe-Leslie argues that it is not necessary for Third World countries to imitate institutions, models, and structures that are characteristic of Western countries. I would also add that the misconception of African values on the part of the implementers of the modernization paradigm has destroyed the very fabric of African cultures. These voices further resonate with that of Ciarunji, a woman participant in her sixties: In the seventies and eighties … nineties our communities came together in the spirit of Harambee [Swahili word for “let us pull together”] and raised money for hospitals and schools. The propaganda was, if you raise the initial capital for these projects, the government will step in and assist you and complement your efforts. I am sure you have seen the number of incomplete and abandoned buildings as you drive around carrying out your research. In addition we sent delegations to our local member of parliament to do something about our impassable roads to no avail. We have to wait for many hours for transportation and many of our children have no access to education. Our needs are obvious … We require water, education, clinical services, good roads (interview with Ciarunji, 1996). As we’ve seen, each participant comments not only on the lack of the essential needs such as food and water, but also about the absence of adequate infrastructure. 139

WANE

HOLISTIC INDIGENOUS MODELS OF DEVELOPMENT

The section below features the voices of the women who were interviewed in relation to inclusive and holistic Indigenous models of development. It is important to note that many women felt that development, as it is conceptualized by those outside their community, cannot be understood as Indigenous to the location. Also, many noted that rural development projects do not translate to meeting the needs of the people. They explained that the result is that the outsiders draw the plans, provide the funds and try to implement what they think the community members require. Most of the women who participated in my study agree that Western development approaches need to be more inclusive and holistic in order to ensure a sustainable future, both for local peoples and the global environment. Many women were willing to meet with outside development planners in order to improve their Indigenous technologies. Njura, a participant in the study, explained: the Indigenous practices are time consuming and tedious … while modern technologies made work easier … we become lazy and dependent … it is important we sit and talk about technologies that are affordable, Indigenous and modern … something we are familiar with. That is, something from both worlds– something that makes sense to us and to you (interview with Njura, 1993). The challenge is to come up with a technology that is Indigenous, affordable, sustainable and efficient. What is important is to ensure that a technology is developed according to the needs of a community. As I have argued elsewhere (Wane, 2000, 2005), Indigenous technology is not static; it evolves and changes with communal needs. According to Gwendolyn Mikell (1997), women have sustained their communities despite their lower educational levels, subsistence agricultural activities, and high maternal and infant mortality rates. Women have evoked their traditional collectivism to address the scarcity of resources. Mikell, who advocates revisiting African traditions in order to mobilize women’s strengths and capabilities, also recognizes African women’s collective strength. Mikell (1997) provides an example of Kikuyu women’s interregional trading activities during the nineteenth century. According to Mikell, African people and their alliances need to redefine development using a cultural model that acknowledges that individuals are part of many interdependent human relations in a supernaturally ordained fashion. For Mikell, the goal of these cultural models is to maintain the harmony and well being of the social group rather than that of the individual. This model is common to most African societies; however, the operating mechanisms vary from society to society. Kothari (1987) notes that hope for the transformation of the world lies in Third World countries rather than in the industrialized nations of the West, with the impoverished rather than with the rich, with women more so than with men. Kothari understands societies that have had little exposure to Western civilization as societies with the greatest hope for transformation. These new paradigms must be people centered and work in harmony with nature. She disagrees with the idea of unnecessary professional specialization, as this inevitably leads to knowledge being held in the hands of a powerful few. 140

THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT

In an earlier work (Wane, 2000), I supported Kothari’s perspectives, agreeing that women, particularly Third World women, are a source of hope and optimism for our global future. I assert that modern women can learn a great deal from rural Third World women. These women endure an immense amount of hardship, yet they survive because of their wisdom. They have superb survival skills, both emotional and economic. I suggest that formal historical accounts of Third World women’s experiences would not shift the powerful positions within the political and economic spheres of society, but also inform strategies for change. If this project were realized, transformative strategies might be found in traditional knowledge systems as well as capitalism, socialism, or Marxist theory (Nontobeka, 1990 in Nathani, 1996). According to Wilmer, “When social systems and cultures are destroyed, people are destroyed, whether through direct or indirect means, whether by public or private violence, whether at the hands of others or self-destructing resulting from anomie” (Wilmer, 1993: xi). Thus, modernization, from the perspectives of Indigenous people, is an ideology that rationalizes their destruction because it destroys their social systems. In order to reverse this destructive trend, it is necessary to revisit the Indigenous systems that held societies together and whose knowledges were passed down through local peoples (Dei, 2000; Wane, 2000; Agrawal, 1995; Wilmer, 1993). With reference to a formal African-centered education system, Dei (1996, 2000) believes that the “spiritual and psychological aspects of teaching and the promotion of the social and emotional growth [of students is necessary] (114)”. Dei (1993a) recommends Indigenous knowledges as one way of confronting obstacles to sustainability. He asserts that Indigenous knowledge and skills have historically upheld the ideologies of sustainability. He argues that “modern” societies have a great deal to learn from Indigenous communities, and calls for a “renewal and revitalization of local Indigenous knowledge and traditions for social development” (Dei, 1993a: 105). Dei also states that development initiatives must be led by “socially responsible local facilitators who can best articulate locally defined needs and aspirations” (108). Dei (1993a) advances the theory that participation and Indigenization are the primary elements of sustainable development. He advocates an African centered development, explaining, “If a new wave of theorizing on ‘sustainable development’ issues in Africa is to be helpful in addressing human problems, it must be situated in an appropriate social context that provides practical and social meaning to the African actors as subjects of a development discourse” (97). Dei (1993a, 2000) further suggests that the African-centered approach is holistic. Social, spiritual, cultural, economic, political, and cosmological aspects are critical to African centered sustainable development. I support Dei’s contention that sustainable development is an all embracing global project. In another paper, I posit that there are several benefits, including the ability to attain one’s basic needs, self reliance, the promotion of human resource development, environmental protection, local control of resources, and progressive state programs that promote social justice. PATRIARCHY IN AFRICA

Ogundipe-Leslie argues that development discourse in Africa has traditionally been characterized by highly masculinized language. This was confirmed during my 141

WANE

research among Embu rural women. For example, it was not uncommon for women to say, “No one is at home” when my research assistants and I asked to interview a member of the family. On reflection, I realized that such a response was the result of many years in which husbands, fathers, and brothers, sons, and government officials were making women to feel invisible. To illustrate, the husband of one of my participants explained: My wives are children, because they belong to me. I control what they do and where they go. They cannot speak on behalf of the family because they are children … children cannot speak on your behalf (interview with Leman, 1993). He went on to describe how he controlled everything in the home, including the animals, insects, and even the air. For me, this represented ultimate patriarchal control. His words chilled me to the bone. Worse still, his wife saw fit to confirm his statement, explaining: It is true; everything here belongs to Leman. When I came to this home I did not have children … although I am not a child, that is the way women are treated here, like children … although we control the foods, we work on the land … these men do nothing, but sit with their friends and talk (interview with Siangiki, 1993). Another participant said: When I got married, my husband used to refer to me as his child, until I asked him why he did that. His response was that women and children are referred to as children, it is not meant to be an insult (interview with Nashibai, 1993). Challenging the social internalization of female marginality must become an important part of meaningful development. According to Ogundipe-Leslie (1994): “Women are shackled by their own negative self-image, by centuries of interiorization of the ideologies of patriarchy and gender hierarchy …. Women react with fear, dependency and complexes and attitudes to please and cajole where more self-assertive actions are needed … programs are needed to educate women about their positions, the true causes of their plight, and possible modalities for effecting change … both men and women need conscientization and this is an area where the UN and other bodies can be very useful” (114). Ogundipe-Leslie argues for the need to decolonize the mind, particularly the mind of a woman because women, historically, have been placed upon pedestals as goddesses, have been romanticized in literature and lyrics and yet have been imprisoned by domestic injustice as well as commercialized in life (Ogundipe-Leslie, 1994: 27). Ogundipe-Leslie concludes her argument by stating One might say that the African woman has six mountains on her back: one is oppression outside …; the second is from traditional structures, feudal, slavebased, communal …; the third is her backwardness …; the fourth is man; the fifth is her color, her race; and the sixth is herself (28). 142

THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT

Ogundipe-Leslie (1994) further notes that development should be critiqued not only in terms of the cultural imperialism and ethnocentrism it evokes, but also on the basis of the social cost of its effects upon individuals and communities. After years of being subjected to Western development initiatives, the plight of many Africans continues to deteriorate. As wryly noted by George Dei (1993b), thanks to development practices, the poor are “developing” the rich. Similarly, Galeano (1997), Ferguson (1997) and Wane (2000) argue that the poor are programmed to be sacrificial lambs on the altar of productivity. There is ample evidence that illiteracy is wide spread among many rural communities. My research revealed that violence against nature is such that women’s survival is threatened. In addition, recent efforts by donor agencies to integrate women into mainstream development theory and practice have constituted a serious threat to much of what the women’s struggle for freedom and dignity has represented (Simmons, 1997). Cucu, one of the participants in my research, explained: So much has changed, … so much has been destroyed and there is so much that is foreign, that you should be the one telling me why we never get enough rains, and if we do, so much of it pours that it takes away the little food that was left. You are the one who has gone to school, how can we explain all this? … By the time you are my age the world will be completely destroyed … your generation needs to halt or slow down the pace of destruction (Interview with Cucu, 1994). Cucu’s reference to environmental degradation, to poverty, and to the severed relationship between people and nature emphasizes the consequences of destroying the earth under the guise of development. Her analysis is grounded in the practical knowledge she has acquired as a result of her everyday experiences. When Cucu looked at me and asked for an explanation as to why the world around her–social, economic and political–was disintegrating, I could not answer. Her question was not directed to me in particular but to my generation, particularly those who have taken up the responsibility to develop the world. Her contention, that “you have all the education … you are supposed to know all this”, underlined the current crisis in modern paradigms of development and the urgent need to redefine development models. Cucu had witnessed the destruction of the virgin forests; she has seen projects being built on top of graveyards and sacred trees being cut down. Her perception of these various changes might not make sense to those who promote Western models of development, but in Africa her analysis speaks to the destruction of the environment and the creation of imbalances in the world (Wane, 2000). Should Africans try to go back to their traditional social systems? The damage is so enormous that this no longer seems feasible; nor is it productive to romanticize the past and live under the illusion that returning Africa to its unspoiled state would resolve the present development crisis. Numerous scholars from Africa have reacted to this reality by re-examining conventional development and pursuing viable alternatives. In the classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney (1972) envisioned a kind of holistic development that would involve both the individual and social groups. According to Rodney, 143

WANE

development ought to help individuals increase their skill as well as capacity to achieve greater freedom, creativity, self-discipline, responsibility, and material wellbeing. At the level of social groups, he also maintains that development should increase the capacity to regulate both internal and external relationships (Rodney, 1972: 34). It is quite evident that Western development models have not responded effectively to the impoverished masses whose needs they have failed to meet. In addition, the exploitative power system, which is largely based in the industrialized world and its annexes in Africa’s ruling elite have contributed to the failure of the modernization theory. The ownership of the means of production in one country by citizens of another has resulted in the wealth of Africa flowing outwards and into the hands of foreigners (Ogundipe-Leslie, 1994 & Wilmer, 1993). Development cannot therefore take place when production strategies are influenced by the demands of a world market that is determined almost exclusively by a pattern of production and consumption set in the West. The failure to take into consideration the views of the targeted population has resulted in numerous unsuccessful development projects. For example, the introduction into rural Africa of electric stoves that use solar energy seemed to be a great innovation, but this innovation has proved to be incompatible with the life patterns of many rural African women. Some of the participants in my study questioned the authenticity of a cooking stove that used solar energy. For instance, Wachiuma commented: This is a box standing up, and at the top, the fire comes out. How would I warm my legs! How can you use a standing box for cooking? How would I roast my yams, sweet potatoes? The fire [pointing to the three-stone fire/space], keeps me warm. When my grandchildren come to visit me, they sit there or where you are seated. They tell me about school and I tell them stories about our clan, our culture. Everything happens around the fire (interview with Wachiuma, 1993). The concept of a modern stove ignores such factors. Modern stoves that have been introduced into certain areas in Kenya and Sudan have failed because important variables have been overlooked. For example, stoves utilizing solar energy fail to account for the fact that women cannot leave their farm work to go home and cook in the middle of the day. Women do not reject such innovations out of ignorance but because they are unsuitable or impractical. In most cases, these innovations are also not affordable for rural families. As Rwamba puts it, I am not against modern technology or modern [innovation], or the new learning … what I am opposed to is the total rejection of the past without understanding what the past had to offer [the young] generation. We should learn from [them] and [they] should learn from us (interview with Rwamba, 1993). An unsuccessful literacy program offered to women in rural Kenya also serves to illustrate how wrong outside experts can be. The program in question was 144

THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT

unsuccessful largely because the classes were offered at times when most women either were busy working in their farms, or were engaged in one of their many domestic chores. Rather than recognizing the time constraints of these women that arose from their numerous responsibilities, the planners believed that the women were rejecting a free service. Waitherero, one of the participants in my study, explained the situation as follows: The government sends teachers to teach us how to read and write, but then they do it at the wrong time. Last year, two young people were here during the planting season. Many women could not attend for fear that they may be late in planting. When the government representative came to check the progress, he was disappointed and blamed us for refusing to take advantage of government programs. His final word was, women will never advance, and they will remain backward and primitive. They just spring us with these classes, and when we do not turn up, they think we are hopeless (interview with Waitherero, 1994). The failure of development projects is marked by the ruined remains of development sites across Africa. For instance, in Kenya, there are abandoned and broken generators, vehicles, irrigation machinery, and incomplete buildings. Colleges or hospitals that received initial funding have been closed, owing to either the lack of resources or the withdrawal of Western experts who had been sent to launch and implement the project. The women who participated in my research also complained about the insensitivity of development workers. Many women did not see the sense of initiating a project that had no cultural relevance for the people it aimed to benefit. They also questioned the validity of initiating projects that were obliged to rely upon outside expertise. Many women also felt that had they been consulted before implementation, many development failures could have been avoided. PERCEPTIONS OF DEVELOPMENT

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, modernization theories dominated development discourse and, to some extent, continue to do so. The modernization paradigm assumes that less developed countries are at an initial stage of development, and that they must therefore pass through subsequent stages of development a view is supported by appealing to European and North American history. But the reality is that these countries did not follow any of these stages of development. As mentioned by Seyoum, Bauer also contents that today’s developed countries did not develop by handouts. Rather than being dependent on foreign aid, development relies on people’s attributes, attitudes, motivation, and political arrangements involving voluntary change in the conduct, codes and motivation of millions of individuals (Seyoum, 2001: 97). Chambua (1994) asserts that modernization theory identifies, as the goal of development, what “modern” society has already achieved. It insists that Western values 145

WANE

and ideals must be imitated globally. Then, by implication, it overlooks and dismisses alternative societal models. It can be argued that modernization theories have spearheaded neocolonialism by insisting on the integration of Third World economies with dominant capitalist economies. As many development scholars have pointed out, Western development has been a major contributor to the current development crisis in Africa. Simply put, it considered income per capita as the chief indicator of a country’s rate of progress. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is also used as a conventional tool to measure rates of growth. Such measures, however, are misleading given that economic development involves far more than GDP growth for it to include both social stability and social welfare. Such limited concepts of development have raised questions about the nature, causes, and objectives of development, its theoretical adequacy, empirical validity and the basis of its assumptions and models (Asante, 1991). In short, in its earlier form, the term “development” was used exclusively in an economic sense, the justification being that a country’s economy was a valid and reliable index of those other social features (Rodney, 1972). To-date, mainstream Western paradigms of economic growth that dominated development discourse throughout the 20th Century have failed to engender sustainable human and environmental development in Africa. While the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other international development agencies have advocated their various approaches, the question of economic growth in Africa is yet to be resolved. Moreover, despite the fact that such issues as social justice, gender equality, environmental protection, power relations, and a more equitable distribution of wealth within societies are traditionally posited as key components in sustainable development, Africa still has not advanced in its struggle to improve the quality of life of its people. DISCUSSION

Development, as a concept, as a theoretical discourse, has been so widely accepted that it has become the taken-for-granted organizing principle for how we see, know, think, and talk about our world (Wane, 2000; Dei, 2000; Rahnema, 1997; 1996; Parpart, 1995; and Mueller, 1987). Over the past thirty years, land transformation in rural Kenya, resulting from development projects, has had a remarkable impact on the landscape. Most of the forests have been cleared because of various development plans. However, in certain so-called undeveloped areas, the land is bare, with little vegetation, and is marked by dry riverbeds. Women and children must carry loads of firewood and waterpots on their heads over long distances, since development “pushes” people further and further away from wood fuel and water sources. For the multinationals and the educated elite, the plantations that have replaced some forests are an indication of development. But does development mean “giving up” land for cash crop production or for industrial development? Does development have to entail the sacrifice of the well being of ordinary people in order that multinational corporations and local entrepreneurs can meet their forecasted production targets in the global market? It has been stated frequently that development as a 146

THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT

process will only be meaningful for the African people when it is perceived, executed, and implemented by Africans. However, I argue that to have a meaningful development, there has to be a shared vision among all the parties implicated in the development process. Many scholars have argued that “development” is a loaded word, and in their opinion, is doomed to extinction and that development, as it has been implemented to-date, has unleashed every kind of pestilence and has condemned two thirds of the world (including all of Africa) to subordination, discrimination, and subjugation. In addition, the exploitation and manipulation that have come to be associated with neocolonialism have distorted the original meaning of development (Dei, 2000; Shiva, 2000; Wane, 2000; Ogundipe-Leslie, 1994). Like Ominde (1988), I maintain that the term “development” in relation to Africa is a misnomer. I would argue that the ‘development discourse’ has been misrepresented to such an extent that the term should be replaced by a more appropriate terminology that would denote progress, prosperity, growth, and meaningful change. Clearly one of the problems in using the term “development” is that its referent is ambiguous, since different interest groups define it in radically different ways. Consequently, recommendation for how development is to be implemented also differs significantly. In the context of this discussion, I am obliged to use the same term. Most African people are never provided with an opportunity to explore the question of development, despite the fact that they experience the direct effects of various development models. Molara Ogundipe-Leslie (1994) explains that the voices of local peoples, workers, women, and children are particularly unlikely to be taken into account in the development process. It is quite imperative to recognize that the major obstacles to sustainable development are power issues, lack of resources, and political leadership. Power imbalances between the industrialized and Third World nations, the detrimental policies of foreign aid agencies, and undemocratic political leadership have all been identified as major deterrents to development. Thus, the continuing impoverishment of the African peoples can be attributed to the economic practices of industrialized countries and their African collaborators in the ruling classes (Ogundipe-Leslie, 1994). The politics of who controls and validates knowledge and technology, support power differentials between the industrialized and Third World nations. Dei (2000), Wane, (2000), among others, critique the West’s manipulation of knowledge production, and the manner in which this knowledge has been used to marginalize the socalled developing world. They argue that while Western scientific knowledge is promoted as the only legitimate form of knowledge on a global level, and in many cases local level, it is often irrelevant to Indigenous peoples’ basic needs (see also Pettigrew, 1992). In addition, Western technological innovations are rapidly transforming society. Many Westerners regard these technological changes as positive, accepting the consequential societal transformations without question. Vandana Shiva (1995) identifies the current technocratic state as completely at odds with struggles from sustainability, particularly in Third World nations. Shiva confirms the earlier critique of development, equating development with modernization and Westernization. She also identifies a fundamental defect in the process of global 147

WANE

Westernization, namely the exploitation of resources in the South for the sole benefit of the North. Shiva notes that while underdevelopment is associated with the absence of Western science and technology, underdevelopment is actually a precondition of Western science and technology. Industrialization simultaneously creates poverty and underdevelopment for one party, and wealth and development for the other. Dei (2000) and Shiva (1995) identify the centralization of resources and decision making power as problematic to development. The increased exploitation of the forests, mines, and seas by transnational companies has simultaneously victimized local people amid mass destruction. Furthermore, their share in profits is marginal at best. Money, resources, and power flow from the weaker developing countries to the developed stronger ones and from poor to rich people. Because women are among the poorest, and hold the least amount of power within most societies, these dominant systems have worked further to exploit and victimize them. I believe that the consistent and steady devaluation of women’s contributions to society can be attributed to “a universal ideological framework that regards women as inferior and which defines their work as the property of men” (Nathani, 1996: 40). The marginalization of women was worsened when Structural Adjustments Programs were introduced in African in the 1980s. The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and the IMF posed a major obstacle to women’s progress and development as a whole. Dei (1993a) views SAPs’ economic approach to development as non people centered. He asserts that the West and its agencies are preoccupied with capitalism and thus continue to promote underdevelopment through exploitative practices toward Third World countries. This process of underdevelopment has been sustained through trade and ownership of the means of production. In the case of the exploitative relationship between SAPs and Third World countries, the West, in a manner that entirely serves its own needs, sets the terms of trade (Rodney, 1972; Amin, 1975, 1990). Asante sums up the effects of the SAPs as follows, The programs fail to lay the foundations for long-term development or to reorient African economies away from the colonial era-structures that, because they were designed to benefit European economies, work to the disadvantage of Africa (Asante, 1991: 171). SAPs are not only exploitative, but also place the heaviest burden on women. For example, women have had to compensate for the loss of government services, especially in the areas of health and education brought by SAPs. (Asante, 1991) A documentary film and a manual produced by the Intercoalition Church of Africa and entitled, To be a Woman (Njoki Kipusi and Susan Riid 1991), identifies some of the strategies that can be used to counteract the effects of SAPs. The manual is written in accessible language and contains detailed role-play scripts appropriate for all players participating in the development discourse. It also provides examples of some of the tragedies that resulted from development. I have used both the film and the manual in graduate and undergraduate courses, and the students typically recommend that these materials be made available to people interested in addressing the development question. Although the film paints a bleak picture of the African 148

THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT

situation, the exercises in the manual provide a point of entry for discussion, analysis, and the creation of hypothetical development strategies. Most notably, the exercises reveal the flaws inherent in both the African and Western development models. The question of political leadership is another issue that needs to be critically examined. Over the past three decades, African states have been subjected to corrupt, power-hungry, male-dominated political leadership. The dictatorial rule that has characterized most states has been subjected to coups, the establishment of military regimes, genocide, unstable national economies, and imposition of controversial Western-mediated programs. The Western-mediated programs are implemented through the support of the elite or petty bourgeois who are frequently members of the same ethnic group that were favored by the colonial administrators (Wilmer, 1993: 52). In addition to the aforementioned challenges, the undemocratic policies pursued by most political leaders in Africa present another major obstacle to sustainable development. Ake (1996: 77) states that “[some in Africa have] failed because of corruption [and] [because] the political elite tended to see such projects not so much in terms of the compelling need for national development as in terms of accumulation, patronage, and power”. This kind of leadership has disempowered the local people and prohibited national development. The challenge is to transform the African leadership crisis. Would the transformation bring desired development for communities? Who are the role models in Africa today? When I carried out my research in Kenya, many women from rural Kenya felt there was no democracy in Kenya. The women felt the leaders had failed them “they promised us free elections–but would you call it free elections when people are getting killed if they oppose those in leadership? Again, how can we talk of democracy when 99% of our leaders are male.” In June 2007, I visited rural Kenya to make sense of the ways in which local women understand how the new government (coalition) was approaching the question of rural development. Many women hoped the new government would have space for rural women’s views on development. They stated that “getting rid” of KANU and NARC governments were steps towards democracy and meaningful development. Many rural women are optimistic that “real” development is going to take place. Others have an attitude of wait and see. However, many women did indicate to me that, this time round, they would not let their male counterparts or outsiders dictate their development. They would like to participate in decision making for any community project. The United Nations (UN) has recognized the need to concentrate on infrastructure in order to promote development in Africa. The UN advocates the improvement of transportation in order to promote social and economic cooperation both within and outside the African continent (United Nations, 2000). In addition, the UN has taken steps to address the issue of poverty in Africa. For example, to deal with this issue, it has initiated a program aimed at empowering the civil society in Sub-Sahara Africa by promoting dialogue between the civil society and national decision-makers. This program is intended to be implemented through observation, exchange between local peoples and women’s organizations, the raising of awareness, and the training of 149

WANE

decision-makers in government, cooperative agencies, and the media. It is hoped that this approach will empower grassroot organizations to define their agendas and priorities, and to improve both the micro and macro dimensions of development (United Nations, 2000, 1995). While this is a commendable initiative, it is unclear how the UN agencies will ensure that the voices of local women will not be muted by the voices of men and women who are currently at the forefront of development in Africa. Having said this, I fully support Ogundipe-Leslie’s statement that it is necessary for the UN to de-masculinize development and to find more androgynous and generic terms to discuss what concerns both men and women in society. CONCLUSION

There is hope for Africa. But first the development question needs to address the impoverishment that continues to be experienced by African people whose needs have not yet been met. Also, it is necessary to address the exploitative power structure of African ruling elite. The democratization of society is a necessary prerequisite for the development process. Asante quotes Adedej’s words on this as follows, For as Adedeji put it, the foundations of progress lie with the people, and that until the destiny of Africa is assured to be in the hands of the African people through the democratization of the African society and the mobilization of popular participation in the development process–economic progress will continue to elude Africa and even recovery will prove a will-of-the-wisp (Asante, 1991: 176). For any meaningful change to take place, it is necessary to democratize international trade. It would also be ideal if world economic reforms, especially those that directly affect the African continent, are discussed in an international forum where all the players are given equal charge to formulate and implement their development models. Finally, Africa requires fundamental change and transformation. For this to take place, it is important to promote renewed commitment from all players in the development paradigm. It is also imperative that all parties respect the space, views, knowledge and expertise of others in relation to the development issue. It is imperative to recognize the invaluable contribution made by local expertise from the outset of this process. As emphasized throughout this chapter, women’s input is also crucial when it comes to assessing needs, and designing and implementing development models (Asante, 1991: 12). The challenge is to provide a model that will meet the basic social and cultural needs of all members of a given society. In other words, we must create a model that is progressive, that speaks to individual and communal needs and that addresses the effect of colonization. The model should also acknowledge the importance of locals, and their centrality in creating a development. A sustainable model of development has to be holistic, Indigenous and progressive. It has to be inclusive, culturally sensitive and transformative in nature as proposed by Adedeji (Asante, 1991: 177). The model suggested–African Alternative Framework–can serve as a beginning and its fundamentals include: (1) a more vigorous pursuit of human-centered self-sustaining development strategy and process; 150

THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT

(2) a greater encouragement of production activities–in other words, a transformation of Africa from a primary exchange economy to a production economy; (3) a greater democratization of the development process and greater accountability by policymakers and public officials; (4) an effective mobilization of social and economic institutions for the task of adjustment and transformation; (5) a renewed effort to accelerate the process of economic co-operation and integration. In my opinion, sustainable development should not be in relation to other development models or measured in relation to other people’s needs. The ideal model should be conceptualized in relation to the needs of a particular community and should, at the same time, reflect a meaningful technological knowhow for local communities. REFERENCES Achola, P. (1976). African women in rural development: Research trends and priorities. Washington, DC: Overseas Liaison Committee, American Council on Education. Adedeji, A. (1990). The African charter for popular participation in development and transformation. In Part II, Arusha: Tanzania. Agrawal, A. (1995). Indigenous and scientific knowledge: Some critical comments. Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor, 3(3). Aire, J. U. (1990). Thoughts on African leadership. In O. Obasanjo & H. d’Orville (Eds.), Challenges of leadership in African development. New York: Crane Russak. Ake, C. (1996). Democracy and development in Africa. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Amin, S. (1990). Delinking: Towards a polycentric world. London, UK: Zed Books Ltd. Amin, S. (1975). Unequal development: An essay on the social formation of peripheral capitalism. Sussex, England: The Harvester Press. Asante, M. K. (1991). African development: Adebayo Adedeji’s alternative strategies. London, UK: Hans Zell Publishers. Chambua, S. E. (1994). The development debates & the crisis of development theories. In U. Himmelstrand, K. Kinyanjui, & E. Mburugu (Eds.), The case of Tanzania with special emphasis on peasants, state, capital African perspectives on development. Zimbabwe: Baobab. Chowdhry, G. (1995). Engendering development? Women in Development (WID) in international development regimes. In M. H. Marchand, & J. L. Parpart (Eds.), Feminism, postmodernism, development. London: Routledge. Dei, G. J. S. (2000). African development: The relevance and implication of Indigenousness. In G. J. S. Dei, B. Hall & G. Rosenberg (Eds.), Indigenous knowledge in global context: Multiple readings of our world (pp. 95–108). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dei, G. J. S. (1993). Sustainable development in the African context: Revisiting some theoretical and methodological issues. African Development, 18(2), 97–110. Dei, G. J. S. (1996). Anti-racism education: Theory and practice. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Dei, G. J. S., Hall, B., & Rosenberg, G. (2000). Indigenous knowledge in global contexts: Multiple readings of our world. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dei, G. J. S. (1993). Towards an African view of development. Focus Africa (Nov./Mar.), 17–19. Esteva, G. (1993). Development. In W. Sachs (Ed.), The development dictionary. London & NJ: Zed Books Ltd. Ferguson, J. (1997). Development and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. In M. Rahnema & V. Bawtree (Eds.), The post-development reader. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing Ltd. Frimpong-Ansah, J. H. (1993). The vampire state in Africa: The political economy of decline in Ghana. London: James Currey Ltd. Galeano, E. (1997). To be like them. In M. Rahnema & V. Bawtree (Eds.), The post-development reader. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing Ltd. 151

WANE Ihonvbere, J. O. (1991). Political conditionality and prospects for recovery in sub-Sahara Africa. Paper presented at Dalhousie International Symposium, Surviving at the margins: Africa in the new international divisions of labour & power. Jimu, I. M. (2008). Community development: A cross examination of theory and practice using experiences in rural Malawi. African Development, 33(2), 23–35. Kipusi, N., & Riid, S. (1991). To be a woman. A manual produced by Intercoalition Church of Africa. Kothari, R. (1987). On humane governance. Alternatives, 12, 277–290. Kwabena, D. (1997). Structural adjustment and mass poverty in Ghana. Aldershot: Ashgate. McPeak, J. G., Doss, C. R., Barrett, C. B., & Kristjanson, P. (2009). Community members share development priorities? Results of ranking exercise in East African rangelands. Journal of Development Studies, 45(10), 1663–1683. Mikell, G. (1997). Introduction. In G. Mikell (Ed.), African feminism: The politics of survival in subSaharan Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mueller, A. (1987). Peasants and professionals: The social organization of women in development knowledge. PhD Thesis, Toronto: University of Toronto. Nathani, N. (1996). Sustainable development: Indigenous forms of food processing technologies–A Kenyan case study. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, Toronto. Nontobeko, M. (1990). Gender analysis in social movements: The role of autonomous women’s communitybased organization. Paper presented during a workshop on Gender and Development Analysis and African Social Science. Ogundipe-Leslie, M. (1994). African women, culture and another development. In Recreating ourselves: African women and critical transformations (pp. 21–42). Trenton: Africa World Press. Olaniyan, R. O. (1996). Foreign aid, self reliance, and economic development in West Africa. London: Praeger. Ominde, S. H. (Ed.). (1988). Kenya’s population growth and development to the year 2000. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya; Athens: Ohio University Press. Onimode, B. (Ed.). (1989). The IMF, the World Bank and the African debt: The economic impact. London, UK: Zed Books Ltd. Pala, A. O. (1996). African women in rural development: Research trends and priorities. Washington, DC: Overseas Liaison Committee, American Council on Education. Pala, A. O. (1976). African women in rural development. Washington, DC: Overseas Liaison Committee, American Council on Education. Parpart, J. L. (1995). Deconstructing the development “expert”: Gender, development and the “vulnerable groups.” In M. H. Marchand & J. L. Parpart (Eds.), Feminism, postmodernism, development. London: Routledge. Pettigrew, B. (1992). The breast/bottle controversy: Women and development. Resources for Feminist Research, 22(3/4) 57–66. Pozzoni, B., & Kumar, N. (2005). A review of the literature on participatory approaches to local development. Washington, DC: The World Bank, Operations Evaluation Department (OED). Rahnema, M. (1997). Introduction. In M. Rahnema & V. Bawtree (Eds.), The post-development reader. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing Ltd. Rawlings, L. (2005). Operational reflections on evaluating development programs. In G. K. Pitman, O. N. Feinstein & G. K. Ingram (Eds.), Evaluating development effectiveness (pp. 193–204). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Rodney, W. (1972). How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Sahlins, M. (1997). The original affluent society. In M. Rahnema & V. Bawtree (Eds.), The postdevelopment reader. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing Ltd. Seyoum, H. (2001). Development, state and society: Theories and practice in contemporary Africa. San Jose, CA: Authors Choice Press. Sherburne-Benz, L., Rawlings, L. B., & Domelen, J. Van (2004). Evaluating social funds: A cross-country analysis of community investments. Washington, DC: World Bank.

152

THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT Shiva, V. (1993). Monocultures of the mind: Perspectives on biodiversity and biotechnology. London: Zed Books. Shiva, V. (1995). Biotechnological development and the conservation of biodiversity. In V. Shiva & I. Moser (Eds.), Biopolitics. London & New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd. Simmons, P. (1997). ‘Women in development’: A threat to liberation. In M. Rahnema & V. Bawtree (Eds.), The post-development reader. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing Ltd. Turok, B. (1987). Africa: What can be done? London, UK: Zed Books Ltd. United Nations Development Project Events. (2000). United Nations Initiative on Africa Booklet: Appendix. http://www.undp.orga/news/unsiaapp.htm United Nations. (1995). Human development report. New York: Oxford University. Wane, N. N. (2005). Claiming, writing, storing, and sharing African Indigenous knowledge. Journal of Thought, 40(2), 27–46. Wane, N. N. (2000). Indigenous knowledge: Lessons from the elders–A Kenyan case study. In G. J. S. Dei, B. Hall & G. Rosenberg (Eds.), Indigenous knowledge in global context: Multiple readings of our world (pp. 54–69). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wilmer, F. (1993). The Indigenous voice in world politics since time immemorial. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Wilkinson, P., & Quarter, J. (1996). Building a community-controlled economy: The Evangeline cooperative experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Yansané, A. Y. (1996). The development of development thinking in Africa: The theory revisited. In A. Yansané (Ed.), Development strategies in Africa: Current economic, socio-political, and institutional trends and issues. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.

153

ARLO KEMPF

12. CONCLUSION

All knowledge is embedded within cultural ways of knowing. The act of naming culture as such too often signifies difference, and a location of the cultural form in question as separate from mainstream, normal and unremarkable cultural forms. The familiar colonial refrain “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue … ” is a form of cultural knowledge. The US catchphrase “Lincoln freed the slaves” is cultural knowledge. Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous words “I have a dream” are a form of cultural knowledge as is the slogan “off the pigs” popularized by some early members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence. Our selection and solicitation of heroes and truths for our children are expressions of cultural knowledge. As Haraway (1988) and others have argued, knowledge is situated and contested in particular ways and places, and what constitutes dominant versus non-dominant knowledge changes over time as a result of these situations and contestations. The capitalist notion of a marketplace of ideas is as mythical as the freedom implied by the notion of the free market. Within most societies, and in particular in Euro/North American contexts, dominant truths and narratives are produced and reproduced to the exclusion of knowledges and cultural forms generated by and within marginalized cultural spaces and communities. Our mythical supermarket of ideas has categories of products with some ideas at the unremarkable centre and some at the named periphery. This is the case at my local supermarket, which sells both ‘food’ and ‘international food’. So too at my local toy store, which sells among other things, two sets of dolls marked as ‘family’ and ‘ethnic family’ respectively. The dolls identified only as ‘family’ are white and the ‘ethnic family’ is brown. This same story of centre and periphery is told in countless ways in our educational systems through multicultural food nights, welcome wagon programs teaching integration to ‘newcomer’ families and ethnic dress-up days to name a few. The distinctions produced and reproduced in these processes are all too familiar and are indeed a constituent part of the common sense of colonial epistemology. Within formal learning contexts, the required curriculum delineates the centre, whose truths are fixed, whose morals are unquestionable and whose lessons are universal. At the same time, non-dominant knowledge and culture are often reduced to special interest positions, and treated as concerns to be addressed or problems to be solved. Diversity initiatives, equity committees, social justice clubs, etc, stand in for inclusive mandatory curriculum in which the histories and expressions of women, racialized peoples, the working class, our queer and trans communities, people with disabilities and other marginalized groups are taught not as add-ons but as core material (in the regular food aisle). N. Wane et al. (eds.), The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, 155–160. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

KEMPF

The marketplace of ideas is a stacked deck of constrained choice, and formal education is only one expression of this domination. For example, most European and British Commonwealth countries celebrate some form of annual military remembrance, and Canada is no exception. On November 11 each year, at 11:11 am, students are asked to be quiet for sixty seconds, and people are asked to take the moment for reflection. Although a more solemn occasion than the daily frozen tag ritual assigned to the listening to and playing of the national anthem, the idea is much the same–this is a holy moment in our Christian secularist society. Teachers are expected to wear poppies to honor the dead, and society as a whole is implicitly expected to feel the same way about our collective holy silence. Last Remembrance Day, I was at a park in Toronto with my son when five bright yellow WWII era planes flew overhead in a skilful aerial display. I pointed them out to a friend of mine and his daughters, and we all watched for a moment. This was a little after 11am–right about the time designated for our prescribed Jungian moment of reflection on war, peace and memory. This piece of airborne public pedagogy drew the attention of everyone at the park. While the planes may have meant different things to different people (unnecessary pollution, a demonstration of skill, military prowess, something cool to look at, etc.) they were certainly intended to conjure specific public memories of specific events, informed by common understanding and common morality. Message one: The Second World War (and to a lesser degree its predecessor) was a tragic event in which evil (someone else’s evil), after a brief success, was overcome by good (our good). Message two: although necessary sometimes, war is hell and we should all keep that in mind (at least one day a year). Message three: there are some other wars in which people died and if we have a minute these should be duly noted. For me, the planes were caricatures. They were yellow but they might as well have been in black and white, or sepia-toned. Although many Canadians experience the ‘great’ European wars through relatives who served, many others (if not most) understand them through the projects of public memory and official histories. Within these narratives of villains and heroes, the complexity of domination and Euro/North American imperialism is lost. Indeed big, important pieces of information are lost (such as Canada’s anti-Semitic immigration policy which turned away Jewish refugees fleeing the very genocide we credit ourselves as having helped stop). While thinking about war (and about specific wars) is certainly important, the pretty planes neither pose questions about war nor inspire new interrogations of important histories. For me the planes are a total package meant to trigger a public tuning-in, whereby we logon/login to a particular colonial body of knowledge. The moment we see the planes, we know the official story–we know who the bad and good people were/ are, we know which violence we’re supposed to remember. And, we know we are supposed to remember, actively... but not too actively. Not so much so that we connect land claims in Canada to European racism, not so much so that we connect the rise of Islamophobia in Europe to the very transhistorical factors that fuelled the success of Nazism, not so much so that we understand European colonialism as genocide. As France recognized the 11th day of the 11 month, its official history 156

CONCLUSION

books were freshly scrubbed of any negative descriptions of its invasion, occupation and massacre of Algeria. Memory and education have their considered limits and indeed the moment of silence is often as much an act of strategic forgetting and unlearning as it is one of remembrance. That dominant cultural moments such as Remembrance Day provide more answers, rules, and discursive regulations than they do questions, complications and inquiry is troubling but not surprising. At the moment I pointed to the planes in the sky, Canadian military pilots (real ones) were no doubt somewhere in the air over Afghanistan in armed military aircraft (real ones). If we’re looking at the pretty yellow planes, struck by the sepia tone feelings they’re meant to conjure, then we‘ll not be looking at Canada’s colonial efforts in Southern Asia and the Middle East. Just what is the marketplace of memory implied by these mainstream affirmations of dominant narratives? Just what kinds of questions and memories does Remembrance Day demand and permit? Does it demand or permit students and teachers to question the actions of Canada’s soldiers in the field? Does it demand or permit a powerful opportunity for open dialogue on Canadian military policy? Is Remembrance Day a good day for a Tamil child to stand up in a Canadian school assembly and reflect on the murder of his mother at hands of a Canadian supported Sri Lankan military effort? Is it a good day to cry for, and talk about, children tortured at the hands of Canadian troops in Somalia? Is it a good day to look at Canada’s military role (currently and historically) in the destabilization of Haiti? Anyone who has endured a mainstream public school or secondary Remembrance Day assembly knows that these are usually not the stories or questions the school has gathered so solemnly together to hear. The colonial narrative of the Canadian project that emerges from these and other critical readings of history are not what the planes are meant to signify. The pedagogical value of the planes is instead that we remember incredible and moving descriptions and stories from certain veterans who understand war far better than nonveterans ever will. We are meant to be moved by the planes, poppies and paratroopers who tell the stories of the ‘great wars.’ To where, however, should we be moved? In what interrogation of war are we thereafter to engage (and by war I mean the making of war by individuals and systems rather than the execution of it by those trained to take orders)? Should we critique the confluence of race, class and religion that gives rise to violence around the world today as it did in Europe in the 30s and 40s? In our contemplation of the European genocide of the 1930s and 1940s, how are we encouraged (or not) to connect and relate these devastating atrocities to other European genocides including that of some 20,000,000 Indigenous people who died at the hands of the colonial effort in North America? Like multicultural food nights, international food aisles and ethnic doll families, the marketplace of memory is informed by constrained choice with some memories legitimate and centered (the British empire) and others illegitimate and marginalized (those murdered by the British empire). The preceding chapters of this work attempt a rupture of these strictures; a resistance based reading of the past, present and future which rejects the colonial underpinning of the way we know ourselves and each other. Frantz Fanon (1952/1967), as well as Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986) identify both latent and manifest forms of colonial discourse. Colonial discourse is a key theme 157

KEMPF

of this work, and indeed the notion of manifest versus latent forms of the colonial conversation is particularly relevant for the educational context. Education is by no means confined to formal schooling or even to formal learning. Although a binary of latent versus manifest discourses might be limiting (the notion of an interconnected and mutually reliant continuum may be more useful), the ideas run parallel to the notions of overt versus hidden curriculum as identified by thinkers as early as Dewey (1916) and more recently by Apple and King (1983), Giroux and Penna (1983) Contenta (1993) and others. The hidden curriculum refers to the moral and political content of our educational systems which may not appear overtly in curriculum documents but which socializes students (thus shaping society) in the service of particular political projects. The colonial aspects of schooling therefore involve manifest and latent (formal and hidden) curricular expressions. Anti-colonial education must thus attempt to rupture and resist both formal and informal oppression within education. This book explicates, analyses and situates a host of marginalized cultural knowledges in the service of a multifaceted anticolonial re-visioning of educational content at the manifest and latent levels. The chapters by Mandeep Kaur Mucina (Remembering the 1947 Partition), Njoki Wane (African Indigenous Feminist Thought and The Politics of African Development), Devi Mucina (Moving beyond Neo-Colonialism), Imara Ajani Rolston (A Conversation about Conversations), and Arlo Kempf (North African Knowledges and the Western Classroom) provide a set of analytic raw materials for multicentric approaches to curriculum and indeed for richer understandings of our world. The chapters by Marlon Simmons (The Race to Modernity), John Catungal (Circulating Western Notions), Donna Outerbridge (What Might we Learn if we Silence the Colonial Voice?), and Yumiko Kawano (Being Part of the Cultural Chain) offer critical understandings of the relationship between self and the socio-political world, revealing the connections between identity and community, identity and self, as well as the implications of social location for resistance and rupture of colonial regulations of individuals and communities. These offerings reveal, among other things, the need for a two-pronged approach to decolonization which involves upsetting and displacing the hierarchy of knowledge legitimization which privileges dominant teachings on one hand, and decolonizing the self (for both dominant and non-dominant bodies) in the pursuit of resistance based subjective politics on the other. The marginalized cultural knowledges offer the basis for formal or manifest re-visioning of curricula and knowledge production in general, while the discussions regarding the decolonization of self offer a look at the sometimes invisible or latent struggles that are needed within anti-colonial projects. This work offers dual resistance to the dual-track (latent and manifest) terrain in pursuit of an anti-colonial discourse which ruptures and works to correct dominant discourse, both formal and informal, within education. Additionally, the various contributions to this work provide, almost as an aside, an emerging archaeology of the colonial present, whereby colonial sites and processes are better understood through the cultural knowledge-based responses and ruptures suggested in this work. Understanding colonialism as a host of present-day phenolmena which are linked to the past and the future, multicentric cultural knowledges 158

CONCLUSION

possess a liberatory potential as tools for empowerment in the face of colonial epistemic hegemony. The works collected here have taken into account the social, political and cultural change that impede transformation, and together call for a rethinking of the dominant seductive ideologies that serve to marginalize other people’s ways of knowing. This book points to different ways of conceptualizing and engaging in transformative learning and decolonizing processes. We have attempted to challenge the status quo and offer alternative ideas and interpretations that allow for the dismantling of the persistent divide between the known and the unknown; the constructed self and the constructed other. Despite these contributions, the question of how to move from the experiences, findings and analysis offered here to the implementation of these knowledges to formal educational contexts remains a challenging one. Indeed, the ideas contained in this book do not matter simply because we as authors say so. We know that despite our arguments here and elsewhere, particular bodies will be positioned as the leading voice on African development while Indigenous peoples from the continent will continue to have their voices largely unheard. We know that teachers will for the most part continue to teach Greece as the birth place of European civilization. In sum, we know that dominant and non-dominant forms of knowledge and knowledge production will persist in the global South and the overdeveloped North. We also know, however, that the politics of knowledge are not static and that things change. We have seen the destabilization and rupture of many key narratives in Euro/North American contexts (e.g. Columbus discovery myths). We are now seeing an increase in the primacy of local Indigenous knowledges in the environmentalism movement in the new Latin American left. In the Canadian context, we are seeing curriculum development that challenges imperialist international narratives about genocide, aid and poverty. It is my belief that colonial narratives are facing a crisis of legitimacy, evidenced by knee jerk nativism such as that seen in Texas with the conservative textbook revisions, as well as Arizona with the state’s refusal to fund educational programs which teach counter narratives to the dominant story. In each case stories of resistance and oppression are being suppressed by political and educational authorities in a battening down of the hatches of the dominant discursive vehicle, precipitated by a rising anti-colonial storm. The centering of cultural knowledges within anti-colonial educational projects is a chance to pick up where the destabilization of dominant narratives leaves off. While we should certainly fan the flames of the legitimacy crisis of our dominant narratives, we must at the same time situate marginalized knowledge (which constitutes the vast majority of all knowledge) to supplant the crumbling colonial chronicles, which have for too long told the world’s stories through the dominant’s interpretation. The Politics of Cultural Knowledge is a small step in this long journey. REFERENCES Apple, M., & King, N. (1983). What do schools teach? The hidden curriculum and moral education. In H. Giroux & D. Purpel (Eds.), The hidden curriculum and moral education (pp. 82–99). Berkeley, CA: McCutchan Publishing Corporation. Contenta, S. (1993). Rituals of failure: What schools really teach. Toronto: Between the Lines. 159

KEMPF Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education (1966 ed.) New York: Free Press. Fanon, F. (1952/1967). Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press. Giroux, H., & Penna, A. (1983). Social education in the classroom: The dynamics of the hidden curriculum. In H. Giroux & D. Purpel (Eds.), The hidden curriculum and moral education (pp. 100–121). Berkeley, CA: McCutchan Publishing Corporation. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. wa Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonizing the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Oxford: James Currey Publishers. Young, R. J. C. (1994). Egypt in America: Black Athena, racism and colonial discourse. In A. Rattansi & S. Westwood (Eds.), On the western front: Studies in racism, modernity and identity (pp. 150–169). Cambridge: Polity Press.

160

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

John Paul Catungal was born in Manila, Philippines and grew up in suburban Vancouver BC, where he did his undergraduate degree at Simon Fraser University. He is currently a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Toronto, where he also completed his MA. He is broadly interested in the intensely spatial organization of social differentiation and inequality. His research is in three strands. The first theorizes the relationship between racial and sexual politics through an in-depth study of the emergence of ethno-specific HIV/AIDS social service organizations in Toronto. The second explores the politics of immigrant belonging in multicultural contexts through research on Filipino lives in major Canadian cities. The third examines the social exclusions of new policy and governance arrangements relating to Toronto’s urban cultural economy. His publications on these topics have appeared in Social and Cultural Geography, Geoforum, Urban Studies and Environment and Planning A. Yumiko Kawano is presently working towards a PhD in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her research interest includes Indigenous knowledges, anticolonial thought, antiracism, and education. Yumiko recently published “Fanon’s Psychology of the Mind, the “Yellow” Colonizer and the Racialized Minoritized in Japan,” in Fanon and the Counterinsurgency of Education (2010) edited by George. J. Sefa Dei. Arlo Kempf holds a PhD in Sociology of Education and currently teaches at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. His research interests include anti-colonialism and anti-racism in education as well as equity and equality in teacher education. His previous books include the edited collections Breaching the Colonial Contract: Anti-Colonialism in the US and Canada (Springer 2009), and Anti-Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Resistance – co-edited with George J. Sefa Dei (Sense 2006). Devi Mucina is a University of Toronto PhD candidate in Sociology and Equity Studies at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. His study interest concerns Ubuntu storytelling as a way of engaging and regenerating Ubuntu ways of life beyond colonialism. Devi positions stories as tools of healing spiritual injury while challenging us to ensure that colonialism is not repeated again. He holds an MA in Indigenous Governance and a BA in Human and Social Development (Child and Youth Care) from the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Mandeep Kaur Mucina is a practicing social worker, youth worker, and community worker. Mandeep aspires to bring awareness and contribute to the fight against violence against women. Mandeep is currently working towards a PhD in the Adult 161

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Education and Community Development program at OISE and finished a Master’s degree in Social Work, from the University of Toronto. Born and raised in a small community on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Mandeep finished a BA in Human and Social Development at the University of Victoria. Since arriving in Toronto in 2005, Mandeep has been active in the South Asian community, working as a counselor to provide therapeutic support and education to South Asian communities in the area of Violence Against Women (VAW). Currently, she is focusing her research on second-generation South Asian women and their experiences of honor-related violence, particularly exploring how second-generation South Asian women negotiate cultural knowledges, such as honor, in the Canadian context. Donna M. Outerbridge is a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education. She has participated in numerous conferences and has recently published “The Fact of Blackness: A Critical Review of Bermuda’s Colonial Education System” in Fanon and Education: Thinking through Pedagogical Possibilities. Donna is also co-editing Decolonizing the Spirit with Dr. Njoki N. Wane. Her research interests are in the areas of Anti-colonial, Anti-racism, Black Feminism, Indigenous Knowledges and Afrocentricity. Her research work will engage the ways in which African Bermudians can come to re-claim their history and conceptualize their identity through an African centered education. Imara Ajani Rolston is a MA candidate in the Adult Education and Community Development and Collaborative Program in Urban and Community Studies. (OISE) University of Toronto. Imara has been concerned with restorative justice, community mobilization, HIV/AIDS intervention, and anti-oppression. His local work in restorative justice focused on working with a locally based Toronto organization to promote alternative dispute practices for youth. His international work has focused on both HIV/AIDS and gender. Imara has worked for close to three years on HIV/AIDS initiatives in Botswana. His work placed him at different points in the national response, from national capacity building organizations, to community based family planning organizations, to a national faith based organizations implementing HIV/ AIDS counseling, to testing and OVC initiatives. Marlon Simmons is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. His current research interests include anti-colonial thought, issues of governance and self in the context of schooling, and educational reform. The foci of his thesis are about modernity and colonialism, with a particular attention to Diasporic experiences and the interplay in the context of the West. He recently co-edited Fanon and Education: Thinking through Pedagogical Possibilities (2010) with George. J. Sefa Dei. Njoki Nathani Wane, PhD (University of Toronto), is the current Director of Office of Teaching Support at OISE & Associate Professor, Sociology and Equity 162

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her teaching and research interests include: anti-racist pedagogy in teacher education; Indigenous knowledges; anticolonial thought; spirituality and schooling; Black Canadian feminisms; and ethnomedicine. Her most recent selected works include co-edited collections A Second Glance at Africa (Wane, N. et al., 2009), and Theorizing Empowerment: Canadian Perspectives on Feminist Thought (edited by Massaquoi, N., & Wane, N., 2007); refereed articles in Journals Race Ethnicity and Education (2009, 2008), Atlantis (2009), and Contemporary Issues in Education Curriculum Inquiry (2009); and book chapters in Fanon and the Counterinsurgency of Education (edited by Dei, G. J. S., 2010), Contemporary Asian and African Indigenous Knowledge and Learning: Essentialisms, Continuities and Change (edited by Kapoor, D., & Shizha, E., 2010), Alternative Counseling & Healing (edited by Moodley, R., & Sam George, A., 2010), The Contested Academy (edited by Wagner, A. E., Acker, S., and Mayuzumi, K., 2008), Doing Democracy: Striving for Political Literacy and Social Justice (edited by Lund, D. E., & Carr, P. R., 2008), Multicultural Education Policies in Canada and the United States (edited by Joshee, R., & Johnson, L., 2007), and Anti-Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Resistance (edited by Dei, G. J. S., & Kempf, A., 2006). She teaches both in Graduate School and Initial Teachers Education program.

163