The Postcolonial

"The empire gave its colonies real, tangible benefits. Wherever the British ruled, they erected a light, relatively inexpensive form of government that was not corrupt, was stable, and was favourable to outside investors." Nick Llyod, defending the legacy of British colonialism 

"What saves us is efficiency - the devotion to efficiency." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

The liberation has past. Independence still reigns but the moment of transition, and of struggle, age into the history books. Banners of protest have long been stored away, and anthems, fresh and vibrant as they were introduced, revert to droll phrases echoed by schoolchildren stationed around a flagpole in the dull morning light. The colony is no more, the commonwealth has dissipated, but what of the young nation state? What legacy has it inherited, and like any inheritor, what will it do with the spoils it has received?

"Postcolonial" is not merely a term to describe an epoch, a chapter in the history books of the future, but represents a contested terrain in academia, and a movement advocating more scholarship and thought into the space between the colony and the independent nation. "Postcolonial thinking is entanglement and concatenation, unveiled chiefly through its critique of identity and subjectivity" (Achille Mbembe, an interview).

From the point I'm standing at, I can see the postcolonial intersecting at two specific and crucial points which are also overlapping: education and language.

Education

I see the school as much a postcolonial remnant. Often it is the only proof in rural areas of a government, with government clinics, in villages which retain mostly traditional systems of informal law and land ownership. Its devotion to order and obsession with cleanliness clearly reflect its origins as a civilizing and enculturing institution.

I'm fascinated with the use of order because it is so starkly contrasted with the organic and negotiated nature of the village. In the villages, houses are scattered randomly and architecture often prefers the circle, mostly in the creation of insakas, or roofed kitchen areas. School areas differ drastically, and long rectangular classroom blocks are arranged with the precision of a military establishment.

I want to rethink this idea of order when I finish reading Michel Foucault's "The Order of Things", a history of ordering and symbolism in the Western sciences. In Zambian schools, order is found in the organization of the desks or the intentional set up of the classroom, the progression of lessons according to strictly constructed lesson plans and the procedures of meetings. Order is a method in which the institution is reproduced across the country - how it is duplicated in form and format - and how new teachers are initiated into the order. Safety is in order; if procedures are followed, everything is well. Semantics are not argued over, per se, but interpretation and classification are major areas of debate.

A clinic worker enters the classroom. His topic of address is not any of the preventable diseases found in this part of the continent, but the cleanliness of the classroom. There are some peanut shells under the desks. He ends his speech with the call and response of a preacher: "Cleanliness is next to ..." - you know the rest.

Teachers arrive in class dressed very smartly. Ministry of Education officials visiting schools note the "professional appearance and attitude" of teachers in the classroom. Cleanliness and the appearance of cleanliness are not distinct, but identical attributes - not a signified and signifier, respectively, but both. In the same way, order does not symbolize logic or a rational organization of things, but exists as its own end, a free floating signifier. Perhaps this is the unintentional outcome within postcolonialism - appearances are taken on but the meanings underneath are lost. Maybe it's the nature of cultural borrowing, and is not exclusive to Africa or even the postcolonies. When Americans tattoo themselves with nonsensical Asian characters, it is similar: the desire to partake in something from a foreign system, and take it as one's own. I can't help seeing the context would have been different if China had colonized America, and its language left as a residue, rather than part of a globalized borrowing.

Language

It's difficult to discuss language from my standpoint. The English language is partially the reason I'm here, am able to work in the community, and teach in the schools. However, I'm not an English teacher or have TEFL (TESOL, EFL, the acronyms are infinite) as any of my goals here, so I have at least some flexibility to analyze English as the lingua franca.

"Perhaps the most priceless asset of all was the English language itself, which gave a unity to the subcontinent that it had never known before and which is allowing India's people to do business around the world today with great success.

Indeed, it is indicative of this that in February 2011, a Dalit (formerly untouchable) community in Uttar Pradesh built a shrine to the goddess English, which they believe will help them learn the English language and climb out of their grinding poverty."

Nick Llyod, Is Britain to blame for many of the world's problems?  

Some see English as the best gift the British gave to Zambia, but there is the opposing argument that the language will eclipse local tongues, which will eventually, in the absence of use and documentation, fade away. Many African authors and poets write in the lingua franca to access wider (and Western) audiences.

In Zambia schools local languages are taught, but English is introduced around Grade Three, and often from Grade Seven it is used to lecture in all subjects, often at the expense of clarity and understanding. Only seven local languages are taught, although there are 73 total languages and dialects spoken in the country. The Lala used in my community mixes with Bemba and English, and I wonder if it will even be a distinct dialect in years to come. If I move a few hours south on the road, I'll encounter Wisa, another dialect not formally taught in schools. And if I travel north, and surreptiously cross the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the prominent Western language is French, but that's another story.

I see English filling in the grammatical holes of local language. In Bemba, to command someone to do something and command them not to do the same thing is only differentiated by inserting an i into the middle of the verb phrase, which is not always readily distinct while speaking:

mwikala (you sit down) and mwiikala (don't sit down)

So English has come in. Even small children will say not ukusenda or not ukulya (don't take, don't eat) to their smaller siblings.

...

The Zambia I live in is a hybrid culture - a site of pastiche, clash, and amalgam. The anthropologist's dream of an unknown tribe living in the bush untouched by Western influence, a tribe that could offer us untold lessons about ourselves and our history, is not the context I see here. And I find that notion a little insulting. I see a lot of borrowing and accommodation: everything borrowed is something changed, altered to fit in. Zambians as well as Americans make things their own. This type of ownership, and what is changed while other parts remain as a residue or legacy, fascinates me.

Boys' Day (Ifishimu)

We are the original badasses.

This is the ending thought to today, boys' day. I began the morning with porridge as my host father yolked the cattle and brought them to the field. I continued work on a garden fence, an only partially haphazard combine of logs, sticks, straw, twine, and nails. I am the original construction worker. Steven helps me, holding up sticks as I tie them together. I am able to set a few poles before my palms are demolished by the Iron Age tool I borrowed, its hilt constructed from coarse wood.

Steven, on his own, starts peeling and slicing sweet potatoes and "Irish" potatoes. Before I know it, he starts making french fries, submerging the pieces in hot oil. We eat them, a respite from work.

More boys come, another Steven as well. As they play, I wander around with the hoe, looking for ideas. A tree is teeming with caterpillars. Black, furry, and yellow spotted with coarse white spines. I confirm with the boys that these are edible, and I ask them to show me how to cook them. Here is their recipe:

• Pluck the caterpillars (ifishimu) from tree branches. Climb the tree if necessary.
• Squeeze ingested plant juices from them. Discard.
• Boil the limp masses until the water is finished.
• Fry with oil. Add desired species, and serve with appropriate relishes.

We make a movie about this (see above). We are the original lords of the flies. I invent work to do so I can have some respite.

This was boys' day.

Peace Corps: For and Against

A year in.

Three hundred and sixty five passes of the sun; four cyclical seasons: rain, cold, dry, and then rain again; and other measurements: forests that have changed color week by week, the births and deaths in the village that occurred within this time frame, the endless iterations of sitting on my porch at the end of each completed day.

It's time for some evaluation. A halfway point summary, a review perhaps, of the organization under whose banner I labor.


I joined Peace Corps for the opportunity to live in a community I otherwise would never have known existed. I was motivated by the theory that to help people you must live with them, eat with them, learn their language, and involve yourself in their social situation. I was swayed by the image of the Peace Corps volunteer, knee deep in a ditch, helping the world.


Peace Corps: What is it good for?


A brief history. The organization was started under the presidency of John F. Kennedy and, as the story goes, the seed began with his speech at the University of Michigan Union:

How many of you who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete. I think it can! And I think Americans are willing to contribute. But the effort must be far greater than we have ever made in the past.

The idea was now planted. The idealism of the sixties and the soft power battle against Communism provided the inspiration for the institution. Sargent Shriver, Kennedy in-law and advocate for poverty reduction and volunteerism, served as the founder and first director of the Peace Corps. No doubt the institution was inspired by the novel The Ugly American, a harsh criticism of U.S. foreign policy in Asia which features a character who works and lives by a philosophy later absorbed as Peace Corps-ism: to live with the people, work with and for the people, and leave a small footprint but a big impact.

Since its inception, Peace Corps has been many things to many volunteers and host country nationals, and many projects have been performed under its banner. Its core mission is tripartite:

1. Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2. Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3. Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

This is the numerically ordered mantra of Peace Corps. All volunteers will be able to recite it in both English and a local national language, and describe work they are doing which falls under each.


For Peace Corps


The institution has a lot going for it. If anything, it is unique: very few NGOs, GOs, or volunteer organizations are like it. And for its successes and failures, it performs them cheaply: the entire Peace Corps budget, as of a few years ago, is described as the price of two F-22 fighter jets. It pales in comparison to other sectors of government spending, and the impact of its three goals is potentially profound. In my humble opinion, Peace Corps as both an institution and a philosophy have these advantages:

• Anthropologists Without Borders. The training Volunteers receive and the areas they live in, and in fact the insulation within their community, would make any ethnologist jealous. I live in a mud house with a thatched roof built by my village, I can get by in both the local language and the local dialect, I have access to the village and the local leadership, and I get invited to weddings, rituals, funerals. The counterpoint to this is that although Volunteers received a smattering of ethnographic and anthropological tools through Peace Corps training, we are hardly trained in anthropology, to separate our biases from our observations, to conduct interviews or observations, to take full scientific advantage of our embedded-ness.
• Cultural Exchange. Leaving my political views out of the matter, I can acknowledge that my service has been a great opportunity for me to learn about Zambians, and Africans in general, and for them to learn about American values, culture, and attitudes. I find Zambians to be incredibly hard-working, inventive, and friendly people who happen to be stuck in between a traditional culture, a partition of recent colonialism, and the modern world which villagers are able to see but are quite removed from.

Against Peace Corps


Every point has its own counterpart, if we subscribe to the law of opposites. Even Peace Corps has its dialectic, which has allowed for it to evolve, but, as seen by some critics, it has not evolved enough. Here are some of my opinions and the thoughts of others:

• Too Many Generalists Abroad. Former Cameroon Country Director for the Peace Corps Robert Strauss argues in a New York Times Op-Ed that while in the past recent college graduates were beneficial to developing countries, most now have more educated nationals than employment opportunities. Peace Corps has come to terms with the majority of its volunteers being "generalists", which is the organization's flattering term for recent college graduates, or youths with little practical experience teaching, farming, working in health, or other areas in which host countries are requesting "trained men and women". In this effort niche programs like teacher training, the one I work under in Zambia, will be replaced by English teaching, a job more easily performed by a college graduate who is a native English speaker and may or may not have previous teaching experience.
• One-sided Evaluation. Peace Corps Volunteers like myself perform their own evaluations in the form of volunteer reports. While this is a useful way of recording projects and impacts in a community where a volunteer is isolated from other volunteers and Peace Corps staff, it suffers when it is the primary measure of a volunteer's work. Anyone who has graduate college is adept at making oneself look good on paper. Strauss argues that the institution "does not systematically ask the people it is supposedly helping what they think the volunteers have achieved. This is a clear indication of how the Peace Corps neglects its customers; as long as the volunteers are enjoying themselves, it doesn’t matter whether they improve the quality of life in the host countries."
• Centralism vs. Decentralism. In my opinion, Peace Corps hovers in between being a centrally managed organization, and being decentralized, on many different levels. Until very recently, each country office has had to build their own training from the bottom up, often with limited time and resources, while other countries have similar, if not identical, programs. Now there is a push towards having centrally created programs from Peace Corps headquarters in Washington. A flaw of Peace Corps is that, while volunteers are provided with materials and project ideas from both global and country offices, there is little formal communication between volunteers working on similar projects. For example, if I'm building an irrigation system, there might be other volunteers in other countries with similar sites and irrigation projects, but there is currently no system in place to share ideas. Information and reports can travel very slowly up the ladder, end up in Washington, and be disseminated through project materials, finding their way back to volunteers. This is not an efficient system for volunteers across the globe to share similar work, their successes and failures.
• Sustainability - Philosophy or Doctrine? A sociological review of HIV/AIDS programs in Malawi brings up the "doctrine of sustainability", whether the move towards making aid "sustainable" and funding workshops, skills training, and other interventions in lieu of direct aid. Like any paradigm shift, this philosophical change in how aid is delivered, which Peace Corps heavily relies on, is becoming questioned.

A hasty conclusion: all of these things fit together to compose my Peace Corps service, the bad inextricably tied with the beneficial, the flaws with the advantages. Overall, though, I can't keep from thinking that I'm getting more out of this than my community is getting out of me - an inevitable self-reflection also accompanied by thoughts that I'm not doing enough, not trying hard enough. The self-critique propels me forward. 

Peace Corps is neither a Cold War tactic or an independent development organization: Sargent Shriver's plans departed from the anti-Communism of the era, yet the institution is still a government agency. It flings volunteers into host countries with long yet distinct tethers, and I am one of them. Undoubtedly each volunteer will have a different experience, and opinions will contrast and contradict. Like any employees, we argue and dissent with our employer, but our discussion is not quite a debate, but a dialectic, which molds our experiences as volunteers and inevitably modifies the structure, subtly, of the organization. See the advocacy of returned Peace Corps volunteers and other, more political, positions. We are not Peace Corps, but Peace Corps is certainly us.

Amasuku, Bush Fruit

This marks the last post to this blog this year. In a few days I will be on a plane, heading to a vacation in Portugal, and will return in the new year. It's been a strange and interesting year, although it's seemed both longer and shorter than that, as if I stepped into a time vortex (and when I have to calculate time differences in order to make world-spanning phone calls, I feel as if I am). I want to thank all of my readers, family and friends who have made their voices louder so I can hear them, as far away as I am.

My last video for the year, it's about bush fruit. The kids, Bwalya, Lazslo, and Steven, are becoming emerging actors, and it's difficult to keep them out of the periphery of the camera lens. Look forward to more from them.

Merry old year and happy new one.

Another brief update

Welcome, November. The year has progressed exceptionally fast, and I have found myself in the midst of a variety of projects. As much as this blog has become a gallery of journal entries, a behind the scenes and in between the lines of the pleasures and vulgarities of Peace Corps service, this is more of an update of what takes place on the main stage, what occupies my day. So more lucidity, less metaphor.

I work within a school zone, mostly at the largest school which is also responsible for overseeing the government and community schools in the zone. Some of the projects we have been working on with the teachers and students:

Africa Map. A large map of the African continent, to serve as a permanent teaching aid for the school. We have gone beyond thinking about thinking about creating it, to applying the paint thick onto the walls. All the countries, including the new Southern Sudan, will be colored, and we are attempting to draw and paint all the flags of Africa as well, from the stripes of South Africa to the shield of Kenya and the stars and stripes of Liberia.

The map in progress

Co-Teaching. The main focus of our project, but has been shifted to the backburner, to simmer. The idea of this is to teach with a Zambian teacher, also called team teaching, and ideally it's continuing professional development in the classroom, with a focus on trying out new teaching methods and practicing experiential learning.

Workshops. Sub-Saharan Africa, including Zambia, uses a system of in-service teacher training to ameliorate the undertraining of teachers. So far we've done a workshop on Mathematics in everyday life, with the intent of making Math teaching more relevant and intuitive; there was a recent program on this which unfortunately expired as soon as the donor funds ended. Another workshop centered around improvising materials for a pre-reading program that also faltered after USAID funding completed (a typical issue with an externally-funded education ministry). This week I just led a workshop on classroom management and discipline, with a focus on addressing and debating the use of corporal punishment in schools (which is technically not allowed, but still quite prevalent in different forms).

Community Schools. I could write a whole entry on this topic. Community schools are institutions which arise from a need for education within villages; unfortunately, despite frequent promises and policy changes, the government gives little support or funds to such schools. The Head Teacher who is responsible for overseeing all schools within the zone is very concerned with the status of community schools, in particular three of them which are currently not operating. Last month we attended a meeting with one school that is nearly completed its building and has a new teacher after the previous one quit due to lack of payment. It takes a lot of community participation and involvement, especially in poor rural areas, to keep these schools operational. Hopefully with the new government there will be fulfillment of some of the promises to provide for these necessary and important institutions.

Grassroots Soccer. Not the best name, considering the game here and everywhere else is Football, but this is a pilot program that has just come to Zambia from South Africa. It integrates physical education and sports with HIV/AIDS education, consists of a dozen practices which can be done as an afterschool program, community intervention, or sports camp. I'm running it with two of the sports coaches at my school, and we just finished our first intervention last week, the youths graduated with certificates, and big smiles on their faces. The program is quite good, the integration of topics like HIV transmission is quite elegant at times, and the kids really like it; and being facilitated in the local language, Bemba, they are much more participative. It seems like there is an issue of over-saturation of HIV/AIDS programs and education, very few of which are effective, engaging, and produce real results.

Training. I just found out I was chosen to be one of the three volunteer trainers for the next group of Peace Corps volunteers to arrive in Zambia and work in the education project in February. It will mean I will be out of my village for a month and a half next year, I will be in the capital city Lusaka creating and facilitating the training program to orient the new volunteers with the Zambian educational system as well as life in schools. My counterpart, Mr. Mwewa, has also been chosen to be one of the two Zambian teachers who will help facilitate the training sessions, so I'm very much looking forward to the two of us working together.

There are a lot of thoughts, ideas, and projects in process which are going on as well. I started a compost pit with the intent of beginning a small garden to demonstrate organic farming techniques and food security, but in this project I am more of a learner. At school, there is talk about literacy classes and a small library, but talk is cheap and thus I delight in it, playing with ideas before juggling the harsh reality of real things. I spend some of my free time studying the local language, although I am still perplexed by the local dialect, Lala. I am continuing to feel like an anthropologists, so just the very act of being is productive enough to keep me going. But as of late, work has filled many of the holes in my schedule, edged out my hobbies, and left many books to pine lazily on the shelf, bookmarked and postponed.

Creatures

 This is an ode to creatures I am learning to share my life with. It is a fragile balance. Some of them come into my house, and others I encounter outside. I rode a bicycle yesterday to town after a day of rains, countless centipedes were making their way across the Great Northern Road, begging to have a dumb joke written about them. Why did the centipede cross the road? Insert clever punchline here. Part of living in rural Africa is coming to terms with these sporadic yet frequent encounters, and, to borrow a term from Zambian English, I am getting used. Here is my poem, a tribute to them.

...

To the cockroaches with paper thin bodies that hover across a tabletop

To the spiders that sit in groups in the top corners of rooms sharing arachnid gossip

To the rats that scamp across my roof and to the mice too

To mosquitoes that have so much to take and only malaria to give

To worms with a thousand legs crossing my path after the rains stop

To snakes that convince me every twig and stick is a manifestation of their arrival

To the dead chameleon in my roof stuck forever on its last hue

To caterpillars that fall from trees like a light green rain

To grasshoppers and all else that scatter with every footstep

To the butterflies that orbit me, convincing me that nature has no intrusive beasts

except for perhaps me

...