Back home

Just to let you know, I have come home safely and healthy on July 29th.

Sahel

Just back in Ouaga after a trip to the Sa-hell. What's in a name, I'd say...
I am tired to death, lost a few kilos and if I did not feel hungry I was sick. Imagine that that is their life; every day in and out; every year...
¨This is Africa, this is the Sahel¨ is the response to every flat tire, another hour waiting or a child with an obviously nasty infection. But it is said with a smile and accompanied by the never ending calls from the children. ¨Les blanches, donne-moi bonbon/argent/medicin (the whites, give me sweets; money etc)¨. Our Dutch politically correct mothers would snap us for it, but here things are still named the way they are. So we just shouted back "Hi le noir/black, ca va" or "Black, leave me alone."
We saw the mysterious Touareg on their camels, the men covering their face. The Peul and other nomads; the women who carry their wealth in old silver French francs on their hair. It was a dream even though sometimes a bit nightmare like. In a strange way we thoroughly enjoined it.

And is not beauty in the beholder's eye; poverty only real when one has no richness of heart?
When Youssouf walks me home at night and I struggle not to fall over a goat, sleeping people or the open sewage, he sighs: "Is not my home a beautiful place, Cousine (nichtje). It is nice and quiet and we can still see the stars. And everyone knows me. For not all the money in the world I would want to live in Europe."

Ouagadougou

After a trip as expected - 21 adults and 5 kids crammed in a 12-seater resulting in aching knees, bottom and neck - we arrived in Burkina Fasos capital. Ouagadougou is as cool as it sounds!
Finally, finally the ¨real¨ African music instead of hiphop! Another concert every night!! The french have clearly an eye for culture in their ex-colony and seem to sponsor excellent cinema, cultural centre and even library.
In between, we arrange all our visa for staying; going to Mali and getting back to Ghana. Bianca throws up in the garden of the Ghanaian embassy probably with yet another food bug. I fall head-over-feet on the street and am happy with the big pot of iodine/betadine we bought. Not being able to sleep on our crappy bed, we have swapped for a bit less crappier beds in a Catholic Sisters guesthouse. With Mother Mary looking down on us, we certainly feel safe.

As a Ghanaian friend told me ¨you know I do not want to dissapoint you but up there it is quite the same as here; actually... they are also black! Oh yeah, but they do speak a difficult language.¨ My french is not as good as I wished, but with a lot of patience seems to keep us out of the worst trouble.
There are more differences though: poorer, with more stinking, open sewages and even more unwanted friends uh amis... Am becoming quite a bitch to yet another rasta boy with their omnipresent cat calls and sleazy chat-ups: they are all too glad to call my attitude rascist. Cant they understand how anoying they are! But the music more than makes up for it and so did the bizarre ceremony I watched this morning:
Like every week the Moro Nabu came out to greet his people and to discuss court cases with the elderly. Imagine: the king of the Mores/de Moren/ los Moros!! In a bizarre ceremony mixing the traditional with the modern; he still is asked for his approval over current affairs of national government. The important men of the city came to gather in the palace garden (which looked rather like a dog-shitted city park than anything more up to royal standards). According to their means and status, they arrived on bicycles, motorbikes or spotless Mercedes Benz cars with their traditional boubou dress, sword and djembe-like gongs. The chiefs horse was there, there was a lot of kneeling for him (and to all the senior men by the juniors) and even two cannon shots were fired.
One of his servants told me the other day how he was taken away from his mother involuntarily at a very young age to serve the King. Not being allowed to school, go home or play modern instruments, he had to work for him till being released from duty at about 20 years of age. Now he is a musician. But is not that called slavery? The custom has not changed since then..

Africa, where age is still seen as an achievement that demands respect instead of a process of decay that needs to be covered up with lifting surgery.
Africa, where traditions are valued, but just as much are mobile phones.
I am going to enjoy one month more of this crazy continent!!

Last days of research

After ages, I thought I let you know where I am.

After sick, ill, asthma attacks and sick again, I finished my research around Tamale. They showed me the gods that allow or demand burning bushes. Without wanting to show disrespect - it looked to me an eggshaped form plastered with feathers on a stick. They told me all about their fire-and-hunting feast after harvest and I could see their eyes glimmer. They explained me how the gods are actually quite flexible and comprehensive towards a change in customs - like stopping the burning of the bush - as long as you sacrifice enough guinea fowls. But as a smiling chairman explains: ¨It is not the gods but the people that will not allow it!¨
Well anyhow it is a long story and I will tell it to you when back home (which as you might have heard is 29 th of july)... Sure thing is that I hugely enjoyed my last days in the field, when finally not trying anymore to understand their behaviour in terms of a rationality that I could not grasp. Is it more rational to be smoking our lungs away; stressing up to the point of heart attacks etc. than burning the bush?

Time had come to say good bye and we even organised a dinner party for our electricity friends. They are some guys in our street who work on a Worldbank project of putting street lights on both side of one street, where other parts of town have none - strangely coinciding with upcoming elections. Thing is, the Ghanaian are deemed too stupid for doing the project themselves - so our friends are driver or watchmen only - and therefore some Egyptians who could hardly speak English were flown in. They stay in their airco building almost all day. Ibrahim, Abdullah and our other friends are therefore teaching us the art of boredom; where unemployment seems the norm, a useful skill to master. They know exactly who of all our neigbhours have passed at what time of the day and are happy for any chat and offer their help to the tiniest problems we have (like where to find yam for dinner.
After eating their pasta and finishing their drinks - no alcohol, thanks to Allah - they ask permission to go home; a Ghanaian party finishes whith the food it seems...

Holidays start with travelling up to Bolgatanga to see the others and have two field trips:

Transition tragedy? The God(s) are alive!

Lately someone asked me whether I thought that African farmers by indigenous knowledge actually know what is the best way to take care of their soils, but that it is true outside intervention like fertilizer that they have started spoiling the land just like we do in the West.

My answer was that indeed the intimate knowledge that people here have on their natural environment has been and still is often underestimated, ignored and by that way destroyed. However, romantizicing indigenous African knowledge by saying that by following it, all problems could be solved is just as much of a mistake. It is the black-and-white view (very literally here) that is worrysome. Any body of knowledge, like 'western scientific' knowledge cannot just be bad or good; parts of it will or will not prove useful to work in specific context. Workable new knowledge is mostly fusion...


Without pretending to know the truth on this issues, I want to share my thoughts on what could be one of the many truths about the African continent. Based on my own observations and on literature read and re-read (see some references here under) in these days when my lungs have decided that two months of ‘free air’ has been enough and are now struggling again to breath..


Where to find security in a changing world?

To me it seems more that the world around these people has changed and is changing so rapidly, that their indigenous knowledge cannot keep coping with it. The transition from a ‘traditional’ society to ‘modernity’ has often made their strategies ineffective in the face of new ‘needs’. Now they only have a ‘choice’ to hang on to the old ways that do no longer provide physical security - but at least some sense of spiritual security - and new practices that neither promises security, just a premium for those who win the gambling game of capitalist entrepreneurship. So what they do is basing their system on traditions, with ‘adopting’ modern practices only when they are given in the form of ‘gifts’ or when they can be accommodated in a non-threatening way, which means without much investment.
Ownerships over development projects seems extremely weak. On the one hand expressed wishes (to us as white outsiders) for outside assistance especially in material or financial terms seem extreme and indiscriminate: "Anything that can help our crops to grow will do. Give us fertilizer, give us tractors, give us boreholes etc." (Quite different from the farmers I met in Chiapas!). On the other hand, not even the names of the organisations that have already passed by (and knowing the density of NGOs in Northern Region this must have been quite a few) can normally be recalled, so little impact they seem to have made… And few of the ideas taught by these outsiders are still practised without continuous outside support. Besides, own initiative to innovate or organize in new ways seems small.

And not without reason… A farmer tells me: "They have told us we should be investing in our farms. See it as a business. So one guy in this village, put a lot of labour and investment in his farm. He rented tractor services to expand the farm. He had prepared compost and manure and carried it all to the fields with the rented cart. Then the rains did not come and he lost the harvest. He is in great debts now." Another young farmer adds, when asked why he does not take a loan to raise his production: "You see it is about having God on your side. You can have God with you one year and have a good harvest. Then you do not have to go in for a loan. Another year, you could have a big farm and have all the inputs bought with your loan. But when God is not on your side, you will still have a bad harvest."
Is it the harsh climate combined with the weathered, old soils of the African context that has already taught them this lesson for centuries and was it re-taught to them by the colonial experience and the subsequent instability and exploitation by their own leaders? When we look carefully at history, the myth of a peaceful Africa before the Europeans set foot on its shores cannot be sustained. But through colonisation, local elites did acquire the means to intensify wars, exploitation and hunger of the many and wealth for the few. Has following tradition, ‘doing as one’s ancestors’ and - staying in that way relatively shielded from the outer world - become so dominant in this culture as attempt not to break the fragile natural and social equilibrium? Has ever something substantially good come from following the advise of the outside world??

Another farmer tells me politely that the agricultural extension officer’s advice has always been very beneficial to them. When I probe him by stating that many farmers have in fact told me the opposite, he sighs and admits: "You know, God has its time and man has its time. But man cannot change God’s time. So the extension officer came once to tell us that that year we should expect early rains, and we should start sowing early. But the rains did not come and the crops died in the field. So I have lost faith in such advice."
If even the white man (or the white-black man..) cannot control the rains, would it not then be more rational to ‘invest’ in the relationship with the God(s) rather than in modern technology?
This might be a positive way of framing where an atheist would say these people show apathy – having lost faith in their own power, they have but the heavens to turn to. To us, their behaviour is illogical or irrational, as in our reality these helping/punishing Gods have died….so we have but ourselves to rely on.


Examples from the field of soil fertility management: beyond reason…?

In my own field of soil fertility management, I see how people hang on to practises that were once rational, but increasingly leave to be so as good-quality farming land (if you are not to be wholly dependent on chemical fertilizer with its skyrocketing price increases!) becomes scarce. People seem to be struggling with the transition from a shifting cultivation system to a permanent system where new rationalities come in. Long fallow periods, free-ranging livestock without conscious use of the manure, burning of crop residues or fields after fallow. All of these are or were adaptation to systems in which labour is more constraining than soil fertility decline. When trying to understand the farmers in their choice for certain technique I therefore try to see the surroundings where they are in: if they still have ample land of good quality available it will not be very likely they will go to the cumbersome work of compost making or manure collection. However, with my rational mind I cannot explain some of the ‘anomalies’ I see. As I do meet communities where the land is scarce (or the cost of clearing new land is prohibitive) and the fertility decline is obvious and still they do not adopt other technologies (like agro-forestry or composting) even when they have been shown to them extensively… And even when serious efforts have been made to develop technologies in a participatory way with them. (Sighing researcher/NGO-workers: "We thought it was participatory until we saw that after we left, no-one participated anymore… ").
On my probing questions, the farmers give ‘rationale’ answers: "We do not have money to hire labourers to carry the compost to the field or to rent an oxen for it." "Snakes will bite us if we do not burn the field before entering." "The land becomes fertile by burning the bush" (which would be true if the ashes were not washed away with the first rains.. Ash can add plenty potash, but in the long run you are destroying your organic matter.) Still, I sometimes feel that is not the whole story.

Having read my literature, I ask: "In some other communities they have told me that burning the bush is a way to appease the gods. Is such a practise also the custom here?" I get diverse answers on that:
Some acknowledge that it is true or at least they say "our gods allow it". "Yes whether you want it or not, coming this day, you have to burn." This than means that non-burning would not be a solution to these people, but rather causing them problems with their gods!
Others say it is only for hunting purposes: to search for ‘bush meat’ which comes out when their bush is burned.
One farmer in a supposedly non-burning community told me: "For us it is the other way round, God does not want us to be disturbing the animals in the bush. He sees everything. Besides in the community we have made strong laws that will punish all those that do still set the bush on fire." While in another community a farmer says: "We have stopped burning and that has nothing to do with religion. We just think it is not good for development." And yet another community says: "We have stopped the burning as this gives the animals more grass to eat. If someone is caught burning, the chief will ban him from farming for two whole years!"
What definitely becomes clear, is that the decision to stop burning can never be an individual one (someone else will simply burn for you then…), so that it would mean a community process.

Now, I am reading Kirby’s article on bush-burning (see reference), who also talks about the importance of the ‘irrational aspects’ in problem-solving: "Attempts to change destructive social habits [like bush fires] by using logical arguments, workshops or demonstration farms are only partly solutions. The Anufo [and many other communities in Northern Ghana] do not view bush-burning as a harmful habit. Although some are aware of some of the harmful effects which we know to be caused by the burning, they may or may not see the association. Part of the reason is the rapid speed with which these changes have taken place. They say, ‘our fathers have always been burning but those problems have come only recently.’ It is analogous to the way in which up until now, having a large family has always been valued as part of the solution rather than a part of the problem itself." [My note: In subsistence agriculture, where land scarcity is not an issue, large households are normally better off. Once, land scarcity comes in or modern ‘needs’ like schooling or pharmaceutical medicines arrive, having many children becomes a burden instead of a blessing. However, wealth is here still measured in having many wifes and many children… It is as if ‘a transition of values and behaviour’ lags behind the transition in conditions. Probably just like in European history..]
He points at the long history in which it was necessary to fight the bush as it stood for great danger with its wild animals. With the fire as protective power, with trees (apart from a few useful ones) as a threat to humanity as it harboured all those animals and bad spirits. [As it used to be for us in the West…. Only when we had destroyed all wilderness around us, we came to value it and wanted it back. Although rather in the form of small, safe patches of man-managed natural parks than in its original chaotic appearance.]
Kirby than points at the tradition and how taboos have and are still playing a ruling role in ‘socializing’ the people: "The most appealing Western ‘civilised’ sanction is reason. Africans often find it ludicrous how Europeans revert to logic to get their children to do things. In Africa appeal is made to the ancestors. The almost universal taboo against carrying lighted firebrands (but rather carrying glowing embers) through a compound, for example, is not explained in terms of the fact that it obviously reduces the possibility of the thatched roofs catching fire, but rather because ‘the ancestors forbid it".
Since "all serious misfortune is ultimately related to mystical intervention" solving problems through performing rituals becomes dominant…


Taboos in transition: a tool for development work?

Taboos can and do change over time, as do all religious and cultural customs. However, Africa traditionalism has shown to be very persistent in agriculture as in health care. Even though outside monotheist religions and Western style education have had their impact, they have not been able to wipe out the influence of ancestors and spirits. Most of the Africans nowadays have brought them together in different levels of syncretism. As Kirby (see reference) says: "In spite of the liberal crusade, rural peoples in the ‘underdeveloped’ parts of the world, in Africa, Asia and South America, continue to employ interpretations of reality that are creatively expansive and that do no limit ‘reality’ to only that which is measurable or sensed."
Development aid became development cooperation. Local people had to become ‘owners’ of the project and to ‘participate’ actively in projects defined by others…
But as Millar, Kirby and Veluw (and probably others) argue: when we leave out aspects that are so fundamental to their lives – the spiritual and the social hierarchies of their communities – how can we ever expect them to feel owner over the projects? Since to many of them, the government is far further away than the land priests and the gods. Since to them rituals are just as important or more important in solving problems as technical interventions. Why not try and see if it is possible to involve the gods, priests and rituals in a dialogue with the communities? A dialogue that does not underestimate nor romanticizes indigenous culture.
This does not mean development organizations should start rituals themselves, but they could "make way for those in the traditional sphere to do so". As an example, he talks of a chief that gathered the Earth Priests to ban bush-fires by making rituals to the ancestors to ask for permissions to change the practises and by making an oath to the gods to punish anyone who still burns…. Breaking such an ode, can mean a sure death!


And me?

I am looking forward for my lungs to recover so that I can visit NGO CARE International, who has developed a special programme on burning… Besides I will visit prof. David Millar next week, who told me I should be more creative in my methods if I want to find out more about the cosmovision around soil fertility management. But how am I to go about that? Let’s see if he can advise me on that.
Oh yeah, for the real interested in soil fertility management, there is a lot more to tell about non-"adoption" of course… it will follow.
By the way, yesterday the brother of the bar tender died due through "witch craft"… (By others interpreted as an epileptic phase after stress due to threats over outstanding debts).

References:
Millar, D. (2004) "Interfacing two knowledge systems: Local Knowledge and Science in Africa." Paper for the Compas panel in the conference: Bridging Scales and Epistemologies:
Linking Local Knowledge with Global Science in Multi-Scale Assessments. Alexandria March 2004
Kirby, J. (1987), Bushfires and the domestication of the Wild in Northern Ghana. TICCS, occasional papers. Culture and development series no. 1, 1987, p 14- 29 (In the late ’90 s reprinted as chapter of a book, I cannot find the reference of anymore…)
Veluw, K. van (2007), When we take care of the land, the land will take care of us!, Agro-Special 6. Wageningen: Agromisa Foundation.