The Challenge for Africa (21 page)

Civil society and government needn't always be at loggerheads. In the 1960s and '70s, for example, the Kenyan government helped fund civil society organizations, many of which were carryovers from the colonial administration: women's organizations, including the National Council of Women of Kenya and Maendeleo ya Wanawake; Kenya Red Cross; the YWCA; St. John's Ambulance; and the Scouts, among others. While it would be essential to ensure transparency in any government's financial support for civil society groups today, because of widespread corruption and favoritism, it would nonetheless be beneficial for African governments to acknowledge, as others around the world have, that there are certain things they cannot do or that civil society can do better.

Moreover, in funding civil society organizations, the government would also be supporting volunteerism and, in so doing, encouraging the creation of a much-needed culture of service. Talent could also be fostered: many civil society groups are staffed by young people, who accept that not every task needs to have financial compensation and that service can be its own reward. In addition, the government could, if it were willing, learn from these organizations.

As long as governments regard civil society with suspicion and hostility, however, and civil society remains weak, fractured, or able to be co-opted, real development will be difficult to achieve—not least because a vast gap quite often exists between what leaders agree on in the cabinet or parliament and what is actually occurring at the community level. The CDF is one attempt to bridge this gap. On a continent-wide level, this is the special value of the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) of the African Union.

In 2005, the African Union took an important step toward acknowledging—and, perhaps, in the future, embracing—civil society, by establishing ECOSOCC. As an arm of the AU, with a mandate to report directly to the union's heads of state and government, ECOSOCC's task is threefold: to bring the voices of the African peoples into the AU's decision making processes; to educate the peoples of Africa on all aspects of African affairs (politics, economics, culture, and health); and to encourage civil society throughout the continent to work for the welfare of the African peoples. The assembly is comprised of two civil society delegates from fifty-two of Africa's fifty-three countries, with a planned role for the African diaspora across the world. ECOSOCC has the potential to contribute continent-wide solutions to Africa's problems.

In 2005, I was asked by the AU to serve as the presiding officer for the formation of ECOSOCC, a position I was pleased to accept. In this role, I oversaw elections for these representatives and the launch of ECOSOCC as a fully constituted body in September 2008. In the past, civil society tried, often fruitlessly, to reach out to Africa's heads of state to urge them to respond to the myriad needs of their people, and to involve ordinary Africans in making decisions about what happened in their countries. In turn, some leaders dismissed members of civil society as ignorant and unpatriotic, funded by the West to destabilize African governments. The creation of ECOSOCC recognizes, albeit perhaps only partially, the need for civil society and governments to work together.

Like all institutions, ECOSOCC will be only as effective in meeting its mandate as the commitment of those who participate in it. While I'm sure that people in every African country would like to see a strong civil society, some of their leaders
may not want it to flourish. Others seek to appoint those who will serve in civil society organizations, thus maintaining a degree of control over them. Indeed, this has been a problem in establishing ECOSOCC itself. However, it is the duty of those of us in Africa, both government officials and civil society representatives, to make the partnership that ECOSOCC represents work. If this effort is successful, it has the potential to help the continent rebuild the much-splintered and twisted three-legged stool.

THE IMPORTANCE
of Africans' cultural heritage to their sense of who they are still isn't recognized sufficiently by them, or others. Culture is the means by which a people expresses itself, through language, traditional wisdom, politics, religion, architecture, music, tools, greetings, symbols, festivals, ethics, values, and collective identity. Agriculture, systems of governance, heritage, and ecology are all dimensions and functions of culture—for instance, “agriculture” is the way we deal with seeds, crops, harvesting, processing, and eating. Whether written or oral, the political, historical, and spiritual heritage of a community forms its cultural record, passed from one generation to another, with each generation building on the experience of the previous one. Such a collective self-understanding directs a community in times of peace and insecurity; it celebrates and soothes it during the passages of birth, adolescence, marriage, and death; and it enables it to survive during transitions from one generation of leaders to another.

Culture gives a people self-identity and character. It allows them to be in harmony with their physical and spiritual environment, to form the basis for their sense of self-fulfillment and personal peace. It enhances their ability to guide themselves, make their own decisions, and protect their interests. It's their reference point to the past and their antennae to the future. Conversely, without culture, a community loses self-awareness and guidance, and grows weak and vulnerable. It disintegrates
from within as it suffers a lack of identity, dignity, self-respect, and a sense of destiny. People without culture feel insecure and are obsessed with the acquisition of material things and public displays, which give them a temporary security that itself is a delusional bulwark against future insecurity. We see this in many places in Africa today. An example of the destruction to African cultures wrought by the imposition of arbitrary imperial boundaries can be seen in the fact that, while most of us know what might constitute a French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, or Indian culture, it is impossible to speak meaningfully of a South African, Congolese, Kenyan, or Zambian culture.

My long-standing attempt to understand the impact of the destruction of culture on Africa's current challenges has partly been a personal journey to discover who I really am. It began on my first day of primary school, when I was too young to appreciate the deliberate trivialization of my culture and the political, economic, and social impact of the colonial administration's imposition of their culture on ours.

I absorbed a beautifully prepackaged set of beliefs intended to indoctrinate and prepare my community for a long colonial rule without any resistance: once Africans accepted our second-class position, we would be safe and taken care of—happy slaves in our own land. It was not until I went to the United States in 1960 to begin my university education that I started to become interested in my cultural roots. Recalling what my grandparents told me of the history of our community, I began to realize that, unlike what I had been taught, much of what occurred in Africa before colonialism was good. As with the ritual through which power changed, the
ituika
, the leaders were accountable to their people, who were able to feed, clothe, and house themselves. People carried their cultural practices, stories, and sense of the world around them in
their oral traditions, which were rich and meaningful. They lived in harmony with the other species and the natural environment, and they protected that world.

My grandparents and others of their generation measured their happiness, their material and spiritual well-being, in ways far different from today. Their medium of exchange was goats. They kept domestic animals, which they used carefully for survival and treated humanely, and cultivated a variety of food crops on their lands. Because most of their basic needs were met, they didn't consider themselves poor. They lived within a community full of rituals, ceremonies, and expressions of their connection to the land and their culture; they didn't feel alienated or adrift in a meaningless, highly materialistic world that assigns value only in dollars and cents, because their world was animated by the spirit of God. They took what they needed for their own quality of life, but didn't accumulate and destroy in the process—and they did all this so that future generations would survive and thrive. By the time my mother died, in 2000, everything could be sacrificed for money: forests, land, goats, values, and even people. In a cash economy, it became necessary to destroy the environment, own part of it, and deny others access to it—including those whose families had lived on it for many generations.

It is my search into this heritage I have in common with millions of others in Africa and elsewhere that convinces me that the tenets of modernity—with its belief that material goods, greater technology, and innovation at any cost will solve all our problems and meet all our needs—are insufficient to provide an ethical direction for our lives. Ultimately, I began to accept, and even yearn for, the part of me that had been concealed for so long, the part found in the culture into which I was born and within which I'd partly been raised. It was impatiently waiting for me to explore and understand. I suspect this is an experience shared by Africans across the continent and in
the diaspora, and by many others whose cultures have been threatened with extinction.

One way I felt this dislocation between who I was and what I was educated to be was through my name, which reflected the imposition of a “foreign” identity upon my own. When I was born, as was traditional in Kikuyu culture I was given the name Wangari, after my paternal grandmother, and Muta, my father's first name. But, as the child of Christians, I was baptized and given a biblical name, Miriam, which is how my parents, friends, and teachers addressed me while I was growing up. Miriam became my first name and Wangari my last, a practice encouraged by the colonial administration to downplay African surnames, so that only the British would be called by their formal last names. (Clearly, this process served to facilitate the local peoples' acceptance of their inferior status and colonized identity.) When I came under the influence of the nuns at the schools I attended, I embraced the Catholic faith and was encouraged to take a new name, because Miriam was perceived as more akin to Protestantism. To honor the Holy Family of the New Testament, I chose to be renamed for Mary and Joseph, feminized to Josephine, upon being received into the Catholic Church as a teenager. Josephine was shortened to the nickname Jo, and from then on I was known as Mary Jo Wangari. It was at college in the United States that I recognized the strangeness of being called Miss Wangari, which is the equivalent of being called the daughter of myself. Eventually, I reclaimed my birth name—and with it some measure of my origins.

Even today, although Africans living in Africa will more likely use their Christian names, they often very quickly reclaim their African names once they go beyond the continent. Through a process of self-liberation, they appreciate the satisfaction of owning aspects of their culture. Through my own journey, I know that it takes effort and will to recognize
that one is not backward, inferior, out of touch, or a “tribalist” if one accepts one's cultural heritage and defines oneself by it—that, indeed, only
that
culture can provide self-knowledge and self-identity.

To be sure, culture is a double-edged sword that can be used as a weapon to strike a blow for empowerment or to threaten those who would assert their own self-expression or self-identity. In many communities in Africa and other regions, women are discriminated against, exploited, and controlled through prevailing cultures, which demand that they act a certain way. They are denied power, access to wealth and services, and even control of their bodies through practices such as female genital mutilation, early or child marriage, and rules of disinheritance. Some cultures demand that men be warriors and learn to kill, or to treat women a certain way, or to repress emotions, such as affection, pain, and compassion. Those who break away from the norm are punished or ostracized. These are some of the negative aspects of culture. We cannot shy away from these realities.

When I first began to engage with Kenyan civil society in the early 1970s and joined the National Council of Women of Kenya, it was on behalf of the Kenya Association of University Women. Although I'd returned to Kenya as Wangari Muta, committed to playing my part in advancing my newly independent country, I wore Western clothing and spoke fluent English, including at home with my family. I moved into the privileged setting of the university, where I achieved a doctorate, available then only to the tiniest minority of people in Africa, and an even smaller minority of African women. Although opportunities have expanded since, the number of African PhDs, and in particular women PhDs, is still comparatively small.

It was, therefore, as a member of an exclusive, Westernized
elite common then to many societies in postindependence Africa that I began to listen to rural women speak of their difficulties in obtaining firewood to cook nutritious foods and providing clean drinking water and fodder for their animals—the beginnings of the Green Belt Movement.