Bessie Head was born in 1937, in Natal, South Africa, to a white mother and a black father. Her mother was institutionalized in a hospital, under claims that she was mentally ill, as relationships between people of two different races were at the time illegal in South Africa. Her mother died in 1943 and Mrs. Head was given into foster care.

In 1964, after she was estranged from her husband, she left South Africa on exit permit for Serowe, Botswana. In Serowe, she would write all her major novels and stories: When Rain Clouds Gather (a fictionalized autobiography that focuses on the life choices of a South African refugee in Botswana) – 1966 -; Maru (a book I have yet to read, published in 1971), A Question of Power (a fascinating introspective quest that the author once called “a private philosophical journey to the sources of evil.”) – 1973 -; The Collector of treasures and Other Stories (a beautiful collection of short stories whose protagonists all live in the rural areas of Botswana) – 1977; Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (which I’m currently reading) – 1981; and A Bewitched Crossroad (a book I consider a fascinating source for political and social commentary, despite the fact that the author had often denied having any interest in politics) – 1984.

Bessie Head died on April 17th 1986 when she succumbed to hepatitis, at age 49. Yet her writings will, without a doubt, inspire many generations to come, among them, even one random Romanian guy.

Well, here’s the thing. Despite the fact that Bessie Head was born in South Africa she is considered the most famous Botswana writer. Now, that is ironic because Head herself had her deal of troubles with the Botswanan government. In 1975 she wrote that “[n]othing can take away the fact that I hav never had a country; not in South Africa or in Botswana where I now live as a stateless person.”

That being said, Bessie Head was without a doubt one of the most prescient authors of hr generation. She dreamed of a free South Africa, of racial tolerance and a better future for all people living in Africa.

In the next couple of days I will compile a list of my favorite quotes from her work. For now, I just want to share with you what Bessie Head thought of the apartheid regime in South Africa long before the apartheid was over. Bessie Head wrote the following fragment in 1972:

It is impossible to guess how the revolution will come one day in South Africa. But in a world where all ordinary people are insisting on their rights, it is inevitable. it is to be hoped that great leaders will arise there who remember the suffering of racial hatred and out of it formulate a common language of human love for all people. Possibly too, Southern Africa might one day become the home of storyteller and dreamer, who did not hurt others but only introduced new dreams that filled the heart with wonder.

It is a shame that this great woman did not live to see her prediction come true. Yet there is still so much we can learn from her great work.

Ayacko Paul Odero in Tirgu Bujor, Romania. Photo Credit: Vasile Caburgan/Viata Libera

I spent my first 14 years of my life in a small town in the  South-East of Romania called Tirgu Bujor. Then I escaped. But that’s a story for another time.

Reading the regional newspaper I still occasionally write for I discovered that a Kenyan citizen is working in my hometown of only 7000 people. His name is Ayacko Paul Odero.  He is 34 years old and works for a local construction company. As the author of the article mentions, he is the first African to be exploited in the otherwise uninteresting city of Tirgu Bujor. Paul Odero works more than 12 hours a day for only 1000 RON (about 350 dollars) per month. Mr. Odero used to work for the Kenyan National Railways before seeking political asylum. As we can easily see, his problems did not end when he filled in the papers to become a refugee – after all, he ended up in Romania which is clearly not much better than Romania  (for example, the presidents of both countries have been accused of forging elections in the last five years).

I wish I could have anything good to say about his current situation but the total chaos that Romania is going through in the last 4-5 years has clearly affected Mr Odero as well. He appears to have obtained a post-high school diploma in airport security. He learned the Romanian language through a government sponsored language program he was enrolled in upon arriving to Bucharest. He went to school at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest but ran out of funds to finish it. He was then relocated to the Asylum Seekers’ Center in Galati (a city located about 40 miles away from his current location and the city where I was born). Then he worked for a local construction company. He was mocked by one employer which refused to pay for his labor. As of February of this year, he has been working at a local construction company in Tirgu Bujor.

As he told the reporter interviewing him, Mr. Odero does not leave the place where he works. He tried to visit the town once and the local policemen arrested them. Romania, what can you expect…?

As I have worked with asylum seekers in the past, I am quite familiar with the emigration procedure. Basically, as a refugee, you are first relocated to a refugee camp. After spending considerable amounts of time over there – in some cases it can take up to 3-4 years – a commission randomly assigns a country you are supposed to go to. You can either take it or you risk spending another year in a filthy refugee camp where diseases travel faster than the light.  Mr. Odero, like many other people, chose to leave Kenya in hope for a better place. Little did he know when he signed the refugee papers that the place where he will end up in will never look to you and say “Karibu tena…” Instead, you get more of Nenda kajitombe…

PS: the information presented in this post is based on an article published today, June 1^st, in Romanian, by Viata Libera Galati.

In my country

Let’s start with the facts. In 1995, President Nelson Mandela established the Truth and Reconciliation Commision, a court-like system meant to witness, record and, in some cases, pardon some of the most atrocious acts of violence, torture and, generally speaking, human rights violations that happened during the Apartheid. Its mission, the way I see it, was twofold. First, it was meant to actually achieve reconciliation between the black and white communities of South Africa (a mission whose degree of success is highly debatable). Second, the Court’s hearings were used as a mechanism of documenting these atrocities so that all South Africans could have a more nuanced perspective and resource materials on their history. The Court’s mission is, in itself, a controversy. To its architects, it was a device to uncover the truth by using amnesty for perpetrators as a mediating force. It wasn’t, in itself, a judicial body meant to punish those who have harmed others.  Based on the ethical African concept of “ubuntu” – which can be broadly defined as the ways in which people relate to each other – the TRC seemed more as an instrument of healing than one of revenge. But as the horrifying stories presented in the township hearings were being broadcast all over South Africa at the time, it was only natural that the entire process caused very mixed feelings among the general public.

John Boorman’s In my country, set at the time of the commission hearings, tries to capture the complexity of life in those tumultuous times while creating an enticing story that would be appealing to a Western audience. He is only partly successful in doing any of the two. Samuel Jackson plays Langston Whitfield, a Washington Post reporter covering the hearings. Whitfield is highly skeptical of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and his aversion towards the whole process becomes apparent both in his writing and his radical views of what happened in the country and what the role of “all the White people in South Africa” was. He thinks the perpetrators are easily getting away with murder and that justice is not served. As it happens, he meets Anna Malan, a white Afrikaaner poet who was commissioned to do daily broadcasts for the South African Broadcasting Company. The two start on the wrong foot, as they have very different views on the commission, but they end up sleeping together. In the process, we think, Whitfield changes his mind and eventually sees the value of the hearings but the script doesn’t specifically reveals it.

Now, the movie received mixed reviews from critics. After doing a little bit of research I realized that Western critics criticized the movie heavily for its unnecessary sub-plots, love stories, and predictability, while South African critics praised them for covering such a critical episode in post-Apartheid history.

As far as I am concerned, if there was one topic where sexual intercourse should have been left out of the equation, perhaps the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was one of them. The white Afrikaner journalist falls in love with the black American journalist and they eventually end up in bed.  Even if the director wanted to use this sub-plot as a metaphor for the reconciliation, the idea was rather simplistic at best. After all, Whitfield is American so his background does not really qualify his for the metaphor.

Otherwise, I think this is a good movie in that it actually introduces the Western audience to an episode in South Africa’s post-apartheid history which is not actually known by a lot of people.

I rate this movie 6/10  

How “we”, Western scholars, relate to “them”, African subjects, in an attempt to accurately depict their realities in ways that would be beneficial to a more comprehensive understanding of African affairs, is a contentious issue. In Whose Life is it, anyway? Issues of Representation Life Narrative Texts of African Women, Kirk Hoppe argues that the life narratives gathered by a Western researcher are not actually “true” stories of these women. The stories an ethnographer has access to only represent the unfolding history of the relationship between Africans and their Western counterparts and how the West analyzes Africa in order to redefine its own identity. Consequently, to him, life histories are not useful resources for determining the historical truth with respect to African women’s lives. In Truth Telling and the Politics of Women’s Life History Research in Africa: A Reply to Kirk Hoppe, Haidi Gengenbach argues that Hoppe’s analysis is inaccurate because African women use and reaffirm their agency in ways that Hoppe is incapable of understanding or incorporating in this article. After giving various examples of African women’s agency, Gengenbach concludes that life history research is in fact a valuable methodology which can help us better understand African (women’s) realities.

In this essay I will analyze the main arguments brought up by the two scholars and argue that both their analyses are, in fact, incomplete. In determining what ethnographic data is historically accurate, one should definitely look at how various power relations unfold in real life and to what extent the “unseen” and “untold” daily events and rituals can complicate the narrative and the data a scholar in studying (as Gengenbach suggests). However, this is not the only factor that shapes the accuracy or the value of an ethnographic account. Those of us interested in ethnographic research are not only responsible for recording what people say to us but also for accurately analyzing and explaining the context in which our respondents make a statement. What both Hoppe and Gengenbach come short to conceptualize (though Gengenbach gets very close to it) is that a scholar should never accept and report the surface narrative presented by his/her subjects. Doing ethnographic work is not only about asking questions but also about paying close attention to what people say, when they make a statement and under what circumstances they do it. After all, I argue, a scholar should not extract specific episodes from life history narratives as a mechanism designed to achieve accurate forms of truths. Instead, the ethnographer is supposed to understand those episodes, and the experiences they are referring to within the narrative created, including the specific context in which those experiences occurred and when the narratives were retold.

In his analysis of the encounter between the Western ethnographer and the African respondent, Kirk Hoppe is dubious of both the scholar’s goals and expectations (Hoppe, p. 624) and of the African women’s agendas in relation to the researcher. (Hoppe, p. 625-626) Consequently, he argues that “[t]he spoken narrative is informed by motives and by understanding and misunderstandings or intentions.” (Hoppe, 628) In doing so, he underestimates the context in which an ethnographic research is conducted and he, perhaps, confuses an ethnographer for a journalist. A news reporter goes to Africa with the intention to cover a particular topic that would cater specifically to the audience he is writing for. The journalist will, most likely, not have formed a relationship of trust and mutual friendship with his respondents and s/he would spend relatively little time among the people required for his research. In that context, I believe Hoppe’s analysis would be correct: in a short period of time it is quite likely that the outcome of the investigative research would be severely altered by the goals and expectations of the two actors involved (journalists versus the subjects interviewed). But ethnographers do not fall in the same category. Many of them spend extensive periods of time among the people they study. In some cases, they progressively become members of those communities or at least people acknowledged by the locals as being something more than a journalist looking for a sensationalist story. In the process, Africans and Western scholars interact on a daily basis, share intimate stories and forge different types of personal relations with each other. Hoppe does not account for the striking difference between “unknown” and “familiar” given by the fact that, in time, a scholar becomes more than a simple stranger to the people he observes and interacts with.

Seen from a different perspective, some scholars might share the same hesitant view on historical accuracy when it comes to the type of information transmitted by the informers of an ethnographic research, as Hoppe does. I myself, doing research on the informal sector in Uganda, have struggled with the inconsistencies in the data reported by those I was studying. For example, in 2008, I was gathering data with respect to an informal, inter-connected economic network that made the supply and distribution of tourist crafts possible in Kampala. By the end of my initial stay in Uganda, I hired Hassan, a local young man to serve as my research assistant. Three weeks after my departure, I asked Hassan to go back to the same shop sellers and ask them exactly the same questions I used in my questionnaire. Whereas he received mostly the same answers that I had recorded, two questions generated different data. As Hassan used to be one of the shop sellers on site, the other entrepreneurs gave them different prices for the crafts they were selling in their shops. The prices reported to Hassan were generally 40 to 50 percent smaller than the once I was told would be paid for a craft. Yet when it came to a question regarding shop sellers’ monthly wages, the vast majority of them inflated the figures reported, thus claiming they were making more money than what they previously told me. To me, the discrepancies in the data were not the consequence of being lied to. I interpreted it in the light of where I, as an ethnographer, was positioned in relation to those whose lives I was observing. And, indeed, six months later, when I returned to the research site, some of the local entrepreneurs were able to comprehensively explain those inconsistencies. As some of them argued, telling me that a commodity is more expensive than it actually is was the result of the fact that I was initially seen as a foreigner and as a potential buyer for the crafts sold in those shops. Consequently, shop sellers expected that I would eventually buy some products from their shops and wanted to maximize their share of profit when the time came for me to buy crafts. On the other hand, these entrepreneurs had no reason to hide the salaries they were receiving from the shop owners as that would not have altered the way they saw me. Yet when Hassan asked them about their salaries, given the fact that he used to be a shop seller, his peers wanted to overplay both their status in the community and the salary they received at the end of the month. This episode is indicative of a social phenomenon that is completely neglected by Hoppe. Since I eventually turned out to be more than a simple tourist on site, I had to constantly negotiate and renegotiate my position in that community through numerous interactions with various local actors in different moments in time and in various social contexts. The result of my research was not the same as the research itself. In addition, despite the fact that the local shop sellers knew exactly what I was after they did not actually shared the information that was key to my research until I became what one of the sellers called “a legitimate partner for discussion.” In the process, in search for a more accurate understanding of the informal sector I was analyzing, both I and the people I was interacting with exercised our agency as we saw fit. Furthermore, on my end, I did not simply take their declarations for granted, but I tried to see beyond the initial surface narrative I was provided with.

As Heidi Gengenbach correctly suggested, Hoppe is also mistaken when it comes to African agency (Gengenbach, p. 623-624). Power relations are expressed both between Westerners and Africans but also within African communities. Consequently, Gengenbach is right to argue that there are other factors that affect women’s interaction with the ethnographer, such as the gender divisions between men and women, and the cultural background in which an interview is conducted. In addition, I also side with Gengenbach’s astute observation that “all knowledge is socially situated.” (Gengenbach, p. 627) Yet I would have perhaps wanted a more thorough analysis of how this particular observation practically changes the way ethnographers analyze or should analyze the narratives they are recording. In fact, the limitation of Gengenbach’s article ultimately comes from the fact that she is arguing against Hoppe, and thus for African women’s agency and the important of life history research, instead of looking at the broader picture of the scholar – informant relation, its consequences and contradictions.

In his discussion of “the telling” Hoppe argues that the researcher’s behavior, questions and facial expressions transmit a clear message to the respondent with respect to the type of information the researcher is looking for.  Yet that somehow contradicts his later argument that the narrator will only answer based on her understanding of what the scholar means (Hoppe 630). In the first case, we are being told that a respondent will give her answer knowing what the scholar is after, yet in the second case it appears that the narrator might misinterpret the scholar’s questions intentions and expectations, thus not following the path imagined by the researcher. So which one is it? Hoppe never bothers to clarify his position on this issue.

When recording and analyzing a life narrative, it becomes rather obvious that this is not a unidirectional process. Those interviewed for a particular research topic will not simply give an ethnographer the data s/he expects to receive, in the terms prescribed by the scholar. By telling his/her story, the subject will give a nuanced version of the events which might not follow the history, as we know it, ad litteram.  But what Hoppe fails to acknowledge is that this is, in fact, one of the most important reasons why life narratives should be used by historians in the first place: by introducing life histories in academic work, historians are able to bring in a new set of data coming from those subjects which are left out of conventional histories. In addition, as Gengenbach was correct to point out, the content of the narrative is also important for the research conducted, yet Hoppe does not seem concerned with this reality, either.

Given the fact that the informants of a research project will interpret the events and episodes in their lives as they sit fit, by exercising their right to choose how and under what circumstances a story is told, the scholar has the mission to find the optimal way to interpret the research material. The narrative shared by the person being interviewed sets out the context in which meaningful stories are shared, yet it is the role of the ethnographer to accurately interpret the events and the experiences told within the narrative of a life history. In that process, the interactions between the two actors become the essential factor that will determine the quality of a research project. It isn’t a matter of true or false stories, as Hoppe wrongly suggested. It is about how a story is interpreted in the light of the role it places in a life history, and in the historical context in which that experience has occurred. The role of the interpreter can be assigned to both the narrator and the researcher, but it the latter’s mission to accurately contextualize the story in such a way that a life narrative can be seen as a contribution to a field of study.

Lastly, by calling African women’s stories false, Hoppe is actually distancing himself from the actual responsibility of an ethnographer, instead of accurately conceptualizing the problem at hand. After all, if life narratives are not actually “true,” and potentially incorrect interpretations are caused by the “disingenuous” stories of the African people. That is a false yet convenient excuse for scholars like Hoppe who frame a problem based solely of their own understanding of African realities, thus failing to adapt to the local realities, narratives and discourses that people in Africa and elsewhere might employ in their lives. Once African agency is acknowledged, it becomes apparent that both scholars and locals are equally engaged in creating and actively nurturing the context in which the ethnographic research is conducted. The communication between the two is in fact the result of an informal partnership and not the consequence of the unfolding history of the Western ethnographer in relation to his African respondents.

To sum up, I agree with Heidi Gengenbach’s argument that Kirk Hoppe ignores African women’s agency and the ways in which African women accomplish their goals without jeopardizing the pre-existing power relations or other socio-cultural norms and understandings of masculinity that often govern the social relations in a local setting. In addition I also believe Kirk Hoppe does not accurately conceptualize the relationship between the scholar and the informant, the context in which it occurs and the types of bonds that are created between the two actors. Furthermore, I argued in this essay that the role of the ethnographer has also been underestimated; that it is the scholars’ mission to read between the lines and form a thorough understanding of the community and the life narrative s/he is studying. Looking for “truths” in ethnographic research might be appealing from a historian’s point of view, but that should not be the primary focus of such a project. Instead, I suggested that interpreting various experiences and episodes within the narrative and the context in which these were produced and recounted would ultimately lead to a much more valuable contribution to how people see, interpret, and position themselves in relation to their individual and communal history.  Not employing this method undermines both the agency of the ethnographer and of his/her subjects, how we see the relation between scholars and narrators, and, consequently, the quality of the ethnographic research as a whole.

Reference list:

Hoppe, Kirk, “Whose Life is it, Anyway?: Issues of Representation in Life Narrative Texts of African Women,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, 26:3, 1993

Gengenbach Heidi “Truth-Telling and the Politics of Women’s Life History Research in Africa: A Reply to Kirk Hoppe,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1994

Miescher Stephan, Louise White and David Cohen, eds., African Lives, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral histories, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.