Week 19: The Miseducation of Me - the pubescent African transformer

It's funny how money change a situation; 
Miscommunication leads to complication; 
My emancipation don't fit your equation
……
You might win some but you just lost one..
You might win some but you just lost one

Lost Ones, Lauryn Hill, in the miseducation of Lauryn Hill 1998

Like every proper child of the African soil, there was inevitable contestation in stamping an extra name to my identity betraying the multiple IDENTITIES: Not 1, Not 2, Not 3, Not 4…6 names in total - MARY VALENTINE WANZA MUTINDA – KIPKEMOI....CHEPKWONY.

Thinking of this mathematically, assuming that I need to be called by at least 2 names with the order of names important (i.e. Mary Wanza and Wanza Mary are two different identities).... then I can go by at least 30 different aliases in this World!

In my social reality these identities manifested in naming are a testimony to the indepth belief of an interconnected lifecycle from cradle to grave - at birth (time of birth/ who had died/ what child number I was/ what clan was I allocated), adoption of religious orientation (baptism, confirmation, salvation)... marriage (patriarchal or matriarchal bias) as well as positionality in society based on contribution and lineage (I am yet to get here)

Sheila Murray Bethel, a notable author and speaker on leadership and change quips:

 ‘One of the most courageous things you can do is identify yourself, know who you are, what you believe and where you want to go”

I was judiciously schooled in the positivist / post- positivist paradigm which basically frames there is one social truth. One way of order - 40 is 40. Gravity makes things fall. Sickness can only be confirmed in the lab. There is only one truly acceptable social order and conduct. There is one destination of human desire and subsequently one linear path of solving problems across the whole world (with minor adjustments) but by and large one size fits all.

As a "highly educated African woman" zealous of transforming my social reality and enhancing human dignity - I immersed myself soaked in the ideology and tested the present hegemonic world order to my society. When my society did not fit I expressed a solution as steps towards bridging the gap aligned to progressing towards the ultimate desired dictated order. Classic example formal insurance - if only 2% of Kenyans accept formal insurance then the 98% are a misfit and we explain the solution to bridging the gap as improving financial literacy.

Even in nascent stages of my (mis) education some ideas felt a bit of a misfit to what I perceived in the voice of my social setting. For instance, the exaltation of the individual as the ultimate. The human aspiration was therefore defined as an individual aspiration.

I get an education, I get a car, I get a house, I, I, I .

This western mindset was crystalized by French philosopher Rene Descartes in 1637 book Discourse on Methods

“Cogito, ergo sum.” “I think; therefore I am”

In sharp contrast, in my social setting I was a child of the village. My upbringing and being was a communal affair inscribed in my identity by name - inheriting a name from my ancestors and automatically assigned a clan identity. The strong acknowledgement and awareness of social interconnected and interdependability in the African setting has been expressed in the term Ubuntu

Ubuntu : - A person is a person through other persons. 

This is also manifested in language.

Contrasting to western language and the dominant English language where salutations are individualized and limited to a present moment such as simple Hi or Hello - that registers presence or "How are you" that checks on individual state; African languages often expressed greetings in connections beyond now. In my maternal language - Kikamba, the full breadth of a chance greeting with an unrelated elder will go something like this:

Waacha - How are you?
Aa, musyai syana syendwe na iisovewa - Am well dear parent, children be loved and protected

The formal academic challenge to individualism is credited to the seminal work by Henri Tajfel on Social Identity Theory (SIT) in 1979. SIT argues that individuals in groups are subject to particular psychological pressures or influences because of, and flowing from, their membership of social groups. Social identity and lived contextual reality underlies social systems and acceptable social organizations that is irreducible to intra- or interpersonal levels of analysis. Simply put - The individual is defined beyond self.

In a number of occasions as I conducted my experiments and financial gap analysis I felt like an imposter - suppressing who I am. A Black skin in a white mask portrait articulated by Franz Fannon (1967). The tests also felt like questioning my social reality for unicorns. A complete misfit. Utopic.

Acknowledging self, especially in the painful historical reality that is the African story, is indeed a step of courage. I cannot dissociate the historical reality of a colonialism apartheid reality in the construction of the present day social order. This is not a reflection for soliciting pity. Far from it. It is a step of moving beyond assumptions and burying heads in sand towards stating facts. After all:

Assumption is life's lowest level of knowledge - Edwin Louis Cole

Asking the right questions and getting to the root of who I am, my social reality is, - is then not only a step of courage but a step of knowledge.

Getting to that space where I can explore the wholeness and completeness of my social reality allows for genuine solutions to real social challenges.

Inevitably this calls for the deconstruction of what has been presented as the ultimate one and only way of doing things and (re)construction of the what is the real whole complex human story - to reclaim back the history.

It courageously calls for acknowledgement that the ultimate one and only solution was crafted from a biased incomplete lens drawn from an anthropocentric - domination individualism paradigm that defined, minimized and progressively demonized the other by politicizing human differences.

This history manifests and influences today. For instance the dominant knowledge (the documented "truth") posits a that it is as a result of poverty we have the slumification of Nairobi. A more complete story will lay credence to the fact that since its formation in 1896 Nairobi was set on an apartheid ideology which sought to plan for the minority white colonial settlers and Asian immigrants. The African was purged to go back to the village and do what he can only do for his miserable peasant existence. Inevitably slums dotted the city landscape from the start! Plans for Infrastructure was drawn up for the favored geographies.

The fledgling post independence government with a desire to prove their worth quickly inevitably picked on what was easiest to implement - existing biased plans. This created path dependence that has biased development outcomes with the minority private plots got better served, the unplanned majority zones getting more complex and more gentrified.

Iconic, celebrate, 1984 Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu elegantly teaches us that the dominant story today may not necessarily be the "truth" of human identity by retelling the meaning of the simple bible story of the Garden of Eden

Humanity today is obsessed with competition. We worship in the temple of cut throat competition. Yet this is not our true identity. The lesson of the Garden of Eden. None of us comes fully formed in the world. Eve was what ‘the doctor ordered’ for Adam. She had qualities Adam desired. Adam had qualities Eve lacked. No human being is self-sufficient – a self-sufficient human being is sub human. We need each other to be all that we can be.