In 2005, I was asked by the AU to serve as the presiding officer for the formation of ECOSOCC, a position I was pleased to accept. In this role, I oversaw elections for these representatives and the launch of ECOSOCC as a fully constituted body in September 2008. In the past, civil society tried, often fruitlessly, to reach out to Africa's heads of state to urge them to respond to the myriad needs of their people, and to involve ordinary Africans in making decisions about what happened in their countries. In turn, some leaders dismissed members of civil society as ignorant and unpatriotic, funded by the West to destabilize African governments. The creation of ECOSOCC recognizes, albeit perhaps only partially, the need for civil society and governments to work together.
Like all institutions, ECOSOCC will be only as effective in meeting its mandate as the commitment of those who participate in it. While I'm sure that people in every African country would like to see a strong civil society, some of their leaders may not want it to flourish. Others seek to appoint those who will serve in civil society organizations, thus maintaining a degree of control over them. Indeed, this has been a problem in establishing ECOSOCC itself. However, it is the duty of those of us in Africa, both government officials and civil society representatives, to make the partnership that ECOSOCC represents work. If this effort is successful, it has the potential to help the continent rebuild the much-splintered and twisted three-legged stool.
CULTURE: THE MISSING LINK?
THE IMPORTANCE of Africans' cultural heritage to their sense of who they are still isn't recognized sufficiently by them, or others. Culture is the means by which a people expresses itself, through language, traditional wisdom, politics, religion, architecture, music, tools, greetings, symbols, festivals, ethics, values, and collective identity. Agriculture, systems of governance, heritage, and ecology are all dimensions and functions of culture—for instance, “agriculture” is the way we deal with seeds, crops, harvesting, processing, and eating. Whether written or oral, the political, historical, and spiritual heritage of a community forms its cultural record, passed from one generation to another, with each generation building on the experience of the previous one. Such a collective self-understanding directs a community in times of peace and insecurity; it celebrates and soothes it during the passages of birth, adolescence, marriage, and death; and it enables it to survive during transitions from one generation of leaders to another.
Culture gives a people self-identity and character. It allows them to be in harmony with their physical and spiritual environment, to form the basis for their sense of self-fulfillment and personal peace. It enhances their ability to guide themselves, make their own decisions, and protect their interests. It's their reference point to the past and their antennae to the future. Conversely, without culture, a community loses self-awareness and guidance, and grows weak and vulnerable. It disintegrates from within as it suffers a lack of identity, dignity, self-respect, and a sense of destiny. People without culture feel insecure and are obsessed with the acquisition of material things and public displays, which give them a temporary security that itself is a delusional bulwark against future insecurity. We see this in many places in Africa today. An example of the destruction to African cultures wrought by the imposition of arbitrary imperial boundaries can be seen in the fact that, while most of us know what might constitute a French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, or Indian culture, it is impossible to speak meaningfully of a South African, Congolese, Kenyan, or Zambian culture.
My long-standing attempt to understand the impact of the destruction of culture on Africa's current challenges has partly been a personal journey to discover who I really am. It began on my first day of primary school, when I was too young to appreciate the deliberate trivialization of my culture and the political, economic, and social impact of the colonial administration's imposition of their culture on ours.
I absorbed a beautifully prepackaged set of beliefs intended to indoctrinate and prepare my community for a long colonial rule without any resistance: once Africans accepted our second-class position, we would be safe and taken care of—happy slaves in our own land. It was not until I went to the United States in 1960 to begin my university education that I started to become interested in my cultural roots. Recalling what my grandparents told me of the history of our community, I began to realize that, unlike what I had been taught, much of what occurred in Africa before colonialism was good. As with the ritual through which power changed, the ituika, the leaders were accountable to their people, who were able to feed, clothe, and house themselves. People carried their cultural practices, stories, and sense of the world around them in their oral traditions, which were rich and meaningful. They lived in harmony with the other species and the natural environment, and they protected that world.
My grandparents and others of their generation measured their happiness, their material and spiritual well-being, in ways far different from today. Their medium of exchange was goats. They kept domestic animals, which they used carefully for survival and treated humanely, and cultivated a variety of food crops on their lands. Because most of their basic needs were met, they didn't consider themselves poor. They lived within a community full of rituals, ceremonies, and expressions of their connection to the land and their culture; they didn't feel alienated or adrift in a meaningless, highly materialistic world that assigns value only in dollars and cents, because their world was animated by the spirit of God. They took what they needed for their own quality of life, but didn't accumulate and destroy in the process—and they did all this so that future generations would survive and thrive. By the time my mother died, in 2000, everything could be sacrificed for money: forests, land, goats, values, and even people. In a cash economy, it became necessary to destroy the environment, own part of it, and deny others access to it—including those whose families had lived on it for many generations.
It is my search into this heritage I have in common with millions of others in Africa and elsewhere that convinces me that the tenets of modernity—with its belief that material goods, greater technology, and innovation at any cost will solve all our problems and meet all our needs—are insufficient to provide an ethical direction for our lives. Ultimately, I began to accept, and even yearn for, the part of me that had been concealed for so long, the part found in the culture into which I was born and within which I'd partly been raised. It was impatiently waiting for me to explore and understand. I suspect this is an experience shared by Africans across the continent and in the diaspora, and by many others whose cultures have been threatened with extinction.
One way I felt this dislocation between who I was and what I was educated to be was through my name, which reflected the imposition of a “foreign” identity upon my own. When I was born, as was traditional in Kikuyu culture I was given the name Wangari, after my paternal grandmother, and Muta, my father's first name. But, as the child of Christians, I was baptized and given a biblical name, Miriam, which is how my parents, friends, and teachers addressed me while I was growing up. Miriam became my first name and Wangari my last, a practice encouraged by the colonial administration to downplay African surnames, so that only the British would be called by their formal last names. (Clearly, this process served to facilitate the local peoples' acceptance of their inferior status and colonized identity.) When I came under the influence of the nuns at the schools I attended, I embraced the Catholic faith and was encouraged to take a new name, because Miriam was perceived as more akin to Protestantism. To honor the Holy Family of the New Testament, I chose to be renamed for Mary and Joseph, feminized to Josephine, upon being received into the Catholic Church as a teenager. Josephine was shortened to the nickname Jo, and from then on I was known as Mary Jo Wangari. It was at college in the United States that I recognized the strangeness of being called Miss Wangari, which is the equivalent of being called the daughter of myself. Eventually, I reclaimed my birth name—and with it some measure of my origins.
Even today, although Africans livin
g in Africa will more likely use their Christian names, they often very quickly reclaim their African names once they go beyond the continent. Through a process of self-liberation, they appreciate the satisfaction of owning aspects of their culture. Through my own journey, I know that it takes effort and will to recognize that one is not backward, inferior, out of touch, or a “tribalist” if one accepts one's cultural heritage and defines oneself by it—that, indeed, only that culture can provide self-knowledge and self-identity.
To be sure, culture is a double-edged sword that can be used as a weapon to strike a blow for empowerment or to threaten those who would assert their own self-expression or self-identity. In many communities in Africa and other regions, women are discriminated against, exploited, and controlled through prevailing cultures, which demand that they act a certain way. They are denied power, access to wealth and services, and even control of their bodies through practices such as female genital mutilation, early or child marriage, and rules of disinheritance. Some cultures demand that men be warriors and learn to kill, or to treat women a certain way, or to repress emotions, such as affection, pain, and compassion. Those who break away from the norm are punished or ostracized. These are some of the negative aspects of culture. We cannot shy away from these realities.
When I first began to engage with Kenyan civil society in the early 1970s and joined the National Council of Women of Kenya, it was on behalf of the Kenya Association of University Women. Although I'd returned to Kenya as Wangari Muta, committed to playing my part in advancing my newly independent country, I wore Western clothing and spoke fluent English, including at home with my family. I moved into the privileged setting of the university, where I achieved a doctorate, available then only to the tiniest minority of people in Africa, and an even smaller minority of African women. Although opportunities have expanded since, the number of African PhDs, and in particular women PhDs, is still comparatively small.
It was, therefore, as a member of an exclusive, Westernized elite common then to many societies in postindependence Africa that I began to listen to rural women speak of their difficulties in obtaining firewood to cook nutritious foods and providing clean drinking water and fodder for their animals—the beginnings of the Green Belt Movement.
It was through my contact with these women that I began to seek the linkages between poverty and environmental degradation and the loss of culture. When I began to build the Green Belt Movement, I thought that all that was needed to encourage people to conserve their ecosystem and restore food security was to teach them how to plant trees and to make connections between their degraded environment and their difficulties. However, over the years I began to recognize that the rediscovery of culture was not something simply personal, but a political and social necessity, and that a reengagement with one's roots meant attempting to embrace all of its richness, contradictions, and challenges in fitting into the modern world.
I started to understand why communities were not only culturally uprooted, but were also literally pulling up the few remaining trees available to them, on which they and their children and grandchildren depended. When communities were told that their culture was demonic and primitive, they lost their sense of collective power and responsibility and succumbed, not to the god of love and compassion they knew, but to the gods of commercialism, materialism, and individualism. The result was an expanding impoverishment, with the peoples' granaries and stomachs as empty as their souls.
When I began to become active on environmental issues, people were curious about why I was helping women plant trees. Was it because of where I was born or raised, or how and where I was educated? Was it because of my parents or grandparents? Was it something in my cultural heritage that particularlycherished the natural world? Was I doing it to advance my career, become rich, achieve fame, or gain political power? Why, they continued, did I persist in pursuing environmental conservation when so many odds were stacked against me? After all, I had a flourishing academic career at the pinnacle of learning in postindependence Kenya, the University of Nairobi.
Their incomprehension was understandable. During the 1980s, the regime in Kenya regularly accused people who challenged the government's policies or practices that subverted rural populations of being “antigovernment.” When I was accused of both, it wasn't because I was planting trees. Rather, it had more to do with the journey I had embarked upon.
While I could understand to some extent the government's paranoia about holding on to power, what I couldn't fathom was why the environment was not as important to my fellow Africans, or Kenyans, or even Kikuyus, who were in the government or in positions of authority in society, as it was to me. Why were political leaders behaving as if they had colonized their own country—and, in so doing, had facilitated the exploitation of natural resources like indigenous forests and land by handing them over to their political supporters or making them available to corporate interests? Why were they disinheriting their own people and future generations?
I realized then that it was not just the poor who had been culturally uprooted. Even those with power and wealth were not only unwilling but also unable to protect their environment from immediate destruction or preserve it for future generations. Since they, too, had been culturally disinherited, they did not seem to recognize that they had something to pass on. Although they were the people expected to protect their countries' wealth, they perceived themselves as passersby, and so took whatever they could on their way through. This also explained to me why many Africans, both leaders and ordinary citizens, facilitated the exploitation of their countries and peoples. Without culture, they'd lost their knowledge of who they were and what their destiny should be.
Of course, this problem isn't only an African one: people all over the world, rich and poor, are shortsightedly stripping the Earth of her bounty in favor of acquiring wealth today, at the expense of the survival of future generations, whether theirs or other peoples’. And yet, I feel the problem acutely as an African, precisely because I am within a generation or two of those who had a culture that, albeit unknowingly, contributed to the conservation rather than the destruction of their environment. By making these linkages, the full dimensions and impact of the loss of cultural connection to the environment became clear to me.
THE WRONG BUS SYNDROME
Through this analysis of the intersections of culture, the degradation of the environment, and political corruption, I realized it was necessary to enlarge the Green Belt Movement's conception of conservation to include a recognition of cultural heritage and the consequences of its loss, how and why culture was important, and how its neglect manifested itself in the ways the public reacts to the environment, and even to life itself. We came to understand that we had to allow people to see that the system in which they were living was fundamentally flawed. Until it was corrected, and people could feel empowered and hold their government accountable, the Green Belt Movement's work would not be fully realized. This is how the Civic and Environmental Education seminars gradually became an essential part of the Green Belt Movement's approach to development.
One part of the seminar is an exercise we named “The Wrong Bus Syndrome.” Traveling by bus is a very common experience in Kenya, as it is in many African countries. Since most Africans can identify with a traveler in a bus, it's easy for seminar participants to visualize what happens if a traveler makes the wrong decision and gets onto the wrong bus: she or he will arrive at the wrong destination and will, without a doubt, encounter unexpected problems. These may include sleeping out in the cold, going hungry, or experiencing something dispiriting or dangerous (such as harassment by the police or attacks by thugs). If the traveler gets on the right bus, he or she should have a relatively easy journey, because all has gone according to plan.
Throughout the many seminars the Green Belt Movement has held over the years, people have offered the following main reasons why a traveler could get on the wrong bus: he or she fails to ask for directions an
d does not seek all the necessary information; someone accidentally or deliberately misinforms the traveler; the traveler is incapacitated through mental illness, drug abuse, alcoholism, a state of distress and confusion, or genetic impairment of the mind; the traveler has a misplaced sense of arrogance and adopts a know-it-all attitude; the traveler cheats him- or herself and trivializes the implications of making the wrong decision; the traveler is fearful, intimidated, cowed, and lacks confidence and self-assurance; or the traveler is simply ignorant.
As part of this exercise, seminar participants are asked to enumerate the problems they're facing in their communities. The answers are issues familiar to poor people, and those concerned with development, all over the world—and they are legion. A group of a hundred once enumerated no fewer than 150 problems! Among the most common are hunger, poverty, unemployment, collapsed institutions, a lack of security, violations of human rights, and religious differences that split communities and divide friends and neighbors. Other problems relate to the immediate environment: loss of local biological diversity, especially forests; soil erosion; pollution; the disappearance of indigenous food crops; and the drying up of marshlands, streams, and springs.
In light of all these challenges, when asked if they're moving in the right or wrong direction, or traveling on the right or wrong bus, individuals in the seminars are usually unanimous in their opinions: they are on the wrong bus. They recognize that they haven't asked questions of their leaders—from the local chief to their MP to the head of state. They've been over-trusting, and haven't paid adequate attention to the information available to them. They haven't had the courage to stand up to these leaders and challenge the direction they have been taking the people in, or they have relied too much on their leaders' assurances that all the people have to do is to trust them. Or they have assumed that politics is beyond their understanding. Some may have allowed themselves to be misled by alcohol, drugs, or misinformation, making them easy victims for exploitation. All of these choices mean they are less capable of reaching the destination they want.
The Challenge for Africa Page 16