Whatever the correct translation might be, the truth is that the relationship between the experts and the local community was never good and no manner of modern PowerPoint presentation could make up for the initial misunderstanding.
In some languages in Mozambique, there isn’t a word for “poor.” A poor person is designated by the term chisiwana, which means “orphan.” In these cultures, a poor person isn’t just someone who doesn’t possess assets, but above all it is someone who has lost their network of family relationships, which, in rural society, is a support mechanism for survival. The individual is considered poor when he or she doesn’t have relatives. Poverty is loneliness, a family rupture. It is possible that international experts, specialists in writing reports on destitution, don’t take sufficient account of the dramatic impact of destroyed family links or of social networks for mutual help. Whole nations are becoming “orphans,” and begging seems to be the only route to torturous survival.
By recounting these episodes, I wish to reinforce what we already know: the systems of thought in rural Africa are not easily reduceable to European processes of logic. Some who seek to understand Africa plunge into analyses of political, social and cultural phenomena. To understand the diversity of Africa, however, we need to get to know systems of thought and religious universes that often don’t even have a name. Such systems are curious because they are often rooted in actually negating the gods they invoke. For most of the peasantry in my country, the issues surrounding the origin of the world just don’t exist: the universe quite simply has always existed. What is the role of God in a world that never had a beginning? This is why, in some religions in Mozambique, the gods are always referred to in the plural, and have the same names as living people. The problem with God, according to a Makua proverb, is the same as that of the egg: if we don’t hold it properly we drop it; if we hold it too hard, we break it.
In the same way, the idea of the “environment” presupposes that we humans are at the centre and things dwell in our orbit. In reality, things don’t revolve around us, but we, along with them, form one same world; people and things dwell within one indivisible body. This diversity of thought suggests that it may be necessary to storm one last bastion of racism, which is the arrogance of assuming that there is only one system of knowledge, and of being unable to accept philosophies that originate in impoverished nations.
I have been talking about the various cosmovisions found in rural areas of Mozambique, but I wouldn’t want you to look at them as if they were essentialisms, resistant to time and the dynamics of exchange. Today, when I revisit the island of Inhaca, I see that campaigns have been mounted to kill the wild pigs that invade plantations. Local chiefs prepare for the visits of foreign scientists using their mobile phones. Throughout the country, millions of Mozambicans have appropriated the words “culture” and “nature” and have absorbed them into their cultural universes. These new words are working on top of the original cultures, in the same way that certain trees invent the ground out of which they appear to be growing.
In short, cultural phenomena aren’t stopped in time, waiting for an anthropologist to turn up and record them as some proof of an exotic world, outside modernity. Africa has been subject to successive processes of essentialization and folklorization, and much of what is proclaimed “authentically African” is the result of inventions external to the continent. For decades, African writers had to undergo the so-called test of authenticity: their texts were required to translate that which was understood to be their true ethnicity. Nowadays, young African writers are freeing themselves from “Africanness.” They are what they are without any need for proclamation. African writers seek to be as universal as any other writer in the world.
It is true that many writers in Africa face specific problems, but I prefer not to subscribe to the idea that Africa is a unique, singular and homogeneous place. There are as many Africas as there are writers and all of them are reinventing continents that lie inside their very selves. It is true that a high proportion of African writers face challenges in order to adjust their work to different languages and cultures. But this is not a problem that is exclusively ours, those of us who are African. There isn’t a writer in the world who doesn’t have to seek out his or her own identity among multiple and elusive identities. In every continent, each person is a nation made up of different nations.
One of these nations lives submerged and is made secondary by the universe of writing: this hidden nation is called orality. Yet orality is not a typically African phenomenon, nor is it a characteristic that is exclusive to those who are erroneously called “native peoples.” Orality is universal territory, rich in thoughts and sensibilities that can be reclaimed by poetry.
The idea persists that only African writers suffer what is called the drama of language. It is true that colonization induced traumas over identity and alienation. But the truth, my friends, is that no writer has at his disposal a language with its norms all tidy. We all have to find our own language in order to demonstrate our uniqueness and unrepeatability.
The Indian sociologist, André Beteille, once commented: “having one language makes us human, being at home in more than one is what makes us civilized.” If this is true, Africans — assumed down the ages to be uncivilized — may be better suited to modernity than even they themselves think. A high proportion of Africans know more than one African language and, apart from these, speak a European language. That which is generally seen as problematic may after all represent considerable potential for the future. For this ability to be polyglot may provide us Africans with a passport to something that has become perilously rare nowadays: the ability to travel between different identities and to visit the intimacy of others.
Whatever the case, a civilized future implies sweeping and radical changes in this world that could be ever more our world. It implies the eradication of hunger, war and poverty. But it also implies a predisposition to deal with the material of dreams. And this has everything to do with the language that lulled the sick woman to sleep at the beginning of my talk. The man of the future should surely be a type of bilingual nation: a language with an organized set of norms, capable of dealing with visible, everyday matters, but one fluent, too, in another language to express that which belongs to the invisible, dreamlike order of existence.
What I am advocating is a plural man, equipped with a plural language. Alongside a language that makes us part of the world, there should be another that makes us leave it. On the one hand, a language that creates roots and a sense of place; on the other, a language that is a wing upon which to travel.
Alongside a language that gives us our sense of humanity, there should be another that can elevate us to the divine.
Keynote address to the WALTIC International
Literature Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, 2008.
The Seven Dirty Shoes
I shall begin by confessing to a certain uneasiness. While it is a pleasure and an honour for me to accept this invitation to be with you, at the same time, I don’t know how to do justice to such a pompous title: “learned address.” I have deliberately chosen a theme about which I have a certain amount of ill-contained ignorance. Every day, we are confronted by the rousing exhortation to fight poverty. And all of us, in response to our most generous, patriotic spirit, yearn to join this battle. There are, however, various types of poverty. And among all of these, there is one that escapes all manner of statistical and numerical indicators: this is the impoverishment of our ability to reflect upon ourselves. I speak of our difficulty in thinking of ourselves as the subject of history, as a place of departure from and destination for a dream.