(Transcript from a talk entitled “Stereotypes of Africa,” presented as part of African Awareness Week on the Okanagan campus of UBC, February 28, 2011)
Zikomo kwambiri amai ndi abambo chifukwa chakubwera kwanu.
Ndzina langa Davide. Ndinapita ku Malawi 1997-8. Ndinagwira nchito mphunzitsi ku Nkhotakota Secondary
Ndinakuziwa Chichewa pang’ono pang’ono.
I lived in Malawi for two years in the late 1990s. I taught English in a government secondary school. I lived in a house. I talked with friends while seated on their couch. I bought fresh beans and mkwani and tomatoes in the market. I came to see myself as part of a continuing past.
I have lived in Malawi, but I am not African, and so I am somewhat uncomfortable providing this welcome and opening. Once again, people like me, white folks, represent Africa. I want to share some critical perspectives on the “idea” of Africa that have influenced me to question my own assumptions and biases and informed my decision to take up research that seeks to expose, and hopefully undermine, colonialism and imperialism as ongoing material and cultural projects. In part, this week of events seeks to challenge the stereotypes of Africa that continue to be so prevalent on this campus and in this community. As a non-African I do not seek to speak for Africa, or even to speak about it – for instance, to celebrate the diversity of African cultures; that will happen in other events. Rather, I seek to take up the responsibility that I think non-Africans have to challenge our role in perpetuating stereotypes of Africa. When I am asked to speak at events like this, I typically just try to speak – to riff on point-form notes, but today I will primarily read, because most of these words are not mine. I utter the words of a number of African writers today not to appropriate their ideas – to present them as mine – but to bring forth from my tongue words that help me to understand my relationship, as a non-African, to Africa.
When I lived in Malawi, often, children would greet me, on my way. They would say hello, or ask me for one kwacha, say “How are you?” or ask my name. A few times, children called to me: What’s my name? What’s my name? I didn’t know their names. It was kind of awkward.
I suspect you know this name: Chinua Achebe.
Chinua Achebe tells a story of a German judge who had accepted a position as constitutional consultant to the Namibian government. He was given a copy of Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, and read it on the flight. After reading it, the judge was no more innocent – that is ignorant – and so decided not to take the position. Achebe asks: “How was it that this prominent German jurist carried such a blindspot about Africa all his life? Why did this novel have such a profound effect upon him? My own theory,” Achebe writes, “is that he needed to hear Africa speak for itself after a lifetime of hearing Africa spoken about by others” (53).
Chinua Achebe
A child, standing among the cassava mounds, at the side of the road, asks: “What’s my name?”
Do you know the name Binyavanga Wainaina?
Binyavanga Wainaina wrote a “How to” manual for non-Africans who want to write about Africa.
He counsels:
“Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.
“Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these.
“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country…. [Actually] Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.”
Binyavanga Wainaina
Another child, a different child, says, once I have passed by down the road, “What’s my name?”
Do you know Chimamanda Adichie?
She says: “When I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading. All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. (Laughter) And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.”
“I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my “tribal music,” and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. (Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
“What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her, in any way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility of a connection as human equals.”
Chimamanda Adichie
From a UBC Okanagan media release: Nursing Students invited the public to join in song in support of needy women in Ghana.
From a speaker during Kelowna’s Global Citizen week: My name is ____, I’m a student at UBC, and I’m making the lives of dozens of poor African children better.
A group of children sit in the drainage ditch making lorries out of clay and bottle caps. As I ride by, a child sits up, yells, “What’s my name?”
Chinua Achebe:
Achebe writes: “This perception problem is not in its origin the result of ignorance, as we are sometimes inclined to think…It was in general a deliberate invention devised to facilitate… the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Africa…. This centuries old obsession with lurid and degrading stereotypes of Africa has been bequeathed to cinema, to journalism, to certain varieties of anthropology, even to humanitarianism” (79-80).
Chinua Achebe
Most of us know the name Hegel, but do we know what he wrote about Africa? I grew up in a city near Kitchener, Ontario. Do you know for whom that city is named, and what he did in Sudan? We study the work of Joseph Conrad, the anti-imperial novelist whose Africans yell and whirl and clap and stomp. You have heard of Craig Kielburger, I presume, whose job it is to bring Africa into the light. The list is a long one. When I lived in Malawi I realized that I am part of this continuing past. When I used to say I used to live in Malawi, people would say, “where?” When I say I used to live in Malawi, people say, “Madonna!”
A woman speaking in front of a gymnasium of children in a Kelowna elementary school is asked: Why are there so many wars in Africa? She responds: Because Africans don’t know how to get along with one another. It’s our job to help them learn.
Michel Chikwanine is asked about the causes of the war in Congo: He says, the war is being fought for the control of minerals: coltan for instance, which makes our technological existence possible. North American corporations support and abet the militias.
A woman speaking in front of a gymnasium of children in a Kelowna elementary school is asked: Why are there so many wars in Africa? She responds: Because Africans don’t know how to get along with one another. It’s our job to help them learn.
Perhaps those children know the name, K’Naan.
He says: “When they show Africa, especially in those programmes that come on late at night, pleading for help, they often show children. And when they show children, they often pan the camera to their feet, and it’s always dusty which is to portray poverty. But, I thought, I used to have those same feet… I wanted to call that child The Dusty Foot Philosopher, the one who is articulate about the universe, but doesn’t have anything.”
K’Naan
I feel so far away from Africa when I think about living in Malawi. In Canada, Africa seems so far away.
I know the name of my computer and the people listed on my cellphone. But not the names of the people who mine the coltan that makes those essential gadgets work. They are so far away. The names of those who slave in those mines or die fighting for control over them. I know the name of chocolate companies, but not the names of the people in Ghana who struggle for adequate compensation and decent working conditions, who struggle for their own human rights.
Do you know the name, Ngugi wa Thiong’o?
He writes: “Capitalism introduced plenty and possibilities of the conquest of hunger; capitalism ensured poverty and mass starvation on a scale unknown before. Capitalism and the development of science and technology introduced the possibilities of the conquest of nature: capitalism by its uncontrolled use and exploitation of natural resources ensured the virtual dominance of nature over man by way of droughts and desertification. Capitalism introduced a new medical science to conquer diseases: capitalism through its selective prescription of medical care, at least in the colonies, ensured a disease-ridden population who now lacked help from the herbalists and psychiatrists whose practices had been condemned as devilry” (66)
Ngugi wa Thiong’o
What’s your name?
In the film Bamako, the International Monetary Fund is put on trial in a residential courtyard in the capital of Mali. One man stands to testify. He gives his name, says that he was born in Dakar, 1953, and answers that he is a former school teacher. He stands at the microphone but does not speak. The silence becomes uncomfortable. And then Samba Dakite turns and returns to his seat.
What is your name? Where were you born? What is your occupation?
Sometimes I would walk along the beach and children would point out upon the blue waters and yell, nyanja! I would turn and look inland and shout back kuti? Kuti? Sindiona Nyanja! straining to see this lake they spoke of. It made me feel like Dr. David Livingstone I presume, standing on the shores of the same lake on 17 September 1859, with his guides, scribbling in his journal a discovery, Lake Nyasa. Or, Victoria Falls. Dr. David Livingstone, breaking the silence of the interior of Africa.
Marlene Nourbese Philip was here in Kelowna last year for WordRuckus
She writes: “Out of my dreams, Dr. Livingstone – go inhabit your own dreams – your own silences. I become obsessed – oppressed – impressed? perhaps, with you – a seeker like you you – in your footsteps – or is it you who follows me – each becoming a mirage to the other. I am determined to cure myself of you, Dr. Livingstone
- of this obsession
- with silence
- with the word – your word – engorging itself on my many, yet one, silence, sucking it dry – the paps, the dried dugs of my silence that haunt your turgid phallused word -” (27)
Marlene Nourbese Phillip
Do you know the name Oyeronke Oyewumi?
She writes: “The imposition of the European state system, with its attendant legal and bureaucratic machinery, is the most enduring legacy of European colonial rule in Africa… One tradition that was exported to Africa during this period was the exclusion of women from the newly created colonial public sphere. In Britain, access to power was gender-based; therefore, politics was largely men’s job… The system of indirect rule introduced by the British colonial government recognized the male chief’s authority at the local level but did not acknowledge the existence of female chiefs. Therefore, women were effectively excluded from all colonial state structures” (341).
Oyeronke Oyewumi
The child asks, What’s my name?
Have you heard of Nawal el Saadawi?
She writes: “The young men built their tents in the square to get some rest. Women with their infants lied down on the ground in the cold and rain. Hundreds of ladies and girls, never harassed by anyone, walked proudly feeling freedom, dignity, and equality among their fellows. Christians are participating in the revolution side by side with Muslims. I was surrounded by some young men from Muslims Brotherhood: they said to me ‘We disagree with some of your opinions in your writings but we like and respect you because you have not acted hypocritically with any regime or force inside or outside the country.’ During my walk in the square, people were coming to me, men and women, from different directions, embracing and hugging me saying ‘Dr. Nawal, we are the new generations who have read your books and inspired by your creativity, rebellion and revolution’ I swallowed my tears and said ‘This is a happy occasion for all of us, a celebration of freedom, dignity, equality, creativity, rebellion, and revolution.’”
Nawal el Saadawi
Nawal el Saadawi is 80 years old. She is Egyptian. She is an 80 year old Egyptian novelist. She is an 80 year old Egyptian novelist and physician and psychiatrist who has committed her life to fighting against oppression, and particularly the oppression of women. She was among the hundreds of thousands of people in Tahrir square in January and February 2011, part of a nonviolent revolution that some of us may have watched on TV.
Dzina lanu ndani?
You may have heard of Wael Ghonim, the Google executive arrested during the Egyptian revolution. Upon his release, he said: “Dear Western governments. You have been supporting the regime that was oppressing us for 30 years. Please don’t get involved now. We don’t need you.”
And: “This revolution belonged to the internet youth, then the revolution belonged to the Egyptian youth, then the revolution belonged to all of Egypt. It has no Hero, no one should steal its thunder, we were all heroes. That’s the first thing.”
Wael Ghonim
Do you know the name, Antjie Krog? In her memoir of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission she juxtaposes quotations from numerous participants and commentators. She records:
“At Tzaneen a young Tswana interpreter is interviewed. He holds on to the tabletop; his other hand moves restlessly on his lap. “It is difficult to interpret victim hearings,” he says, “because you use the first person all the time. I have no distance when I say ‘I’… it runs through me with ‘I’”.
“Now how do you survive it?”
“I don’t. After the first three months of hearings, my wife and baby left me because of my violent outbursts. The Truth Commission provided counseling and I was advised to stop. But I don’t want to. This is my history, and I want to be part of it – until the end” (169).
I presume that there has been a dissonance between my voice and these words. I feel it. When I read literature in my courses, aloud, passages like this, often it is only in the moment of uttering someone else’s pain or anger or joy that there springs doubt. I should not be reading this aloud. The doubt arises when I realize how easy it is for me to compile these words and arrange them and to treat them as theory. The doubt that reflects my relation to that “I” – I should have no distance when I say “I”, but that “I” is not me; I am not stepping in their shoes. I don’t want to pretend to walk a mile in their shoes. It is no good to simply understand these words – for people like me to understand ‘them.’ Rather I need to understand that these articulate my history; that I am part of this story, but in a way different from those who have written these words. I utter these words not to represent Africa accurately, but to articulate my connection to Africa differently than that single story of darkness and sunsets, impoverished dirty feet, women who need to be saved, and patronizing, well-meaning, pity – the non-African’s desire to make a difference.
Wainaina counsels to always end a discussion of Africa with “Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because we care.”
Zikomo Kwambiri, Thanks.
Check Out:
Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British Protected Child. Knopf, 2009.
Chimamanda Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story”
Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. Broadway, 2000.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in Aftrican Literature. Heinemann, 1986.
Oyeronke Oyewumi, “Colonizing Bodies and Minds: Gender and Colonialism,” in Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism. Ed. Gaurav desa and Supriya Nair. Rutgers, 2005.
Marlene Nourbese Philip, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence. Mercury Press, 1991.
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