The Challenge for Africa (22 page)

It was through my contact with these women that I began to seek the linkages between poverty and environmental degradation and the loss of culture. When I began to build the Green Belt Movement, I thought that all that was needed to encourage people to conserve their ecosystem and restore food security was to teach them how to plant trees and to make connections between their degraded environment and their difficulties. However, over the years I began to recognize that the rediscovery of culture was not something simply personal, but a political and social necessity, and that a reengagement with one's roots meant attempting to embrace all of its richness, contradictions, and challenges in fitting into the modern world.

I started to understand why communities were not only culturally uprooted, but were also literally pulling up the few remaining trees available to them, on which they and their children and grandchildren depended. When communities were told that their culture was demonic and primitive, they lost their sense of collective power and responsibility and succumbed, not to the god of love and compassion they knew, but to the gods of commercialism, materialism, and individualism. The result was an expanding impoverishment, with the peoples' granaries and stomachs as empty as their souls.

When I began to become active on environmental issues, people were curious about why I was helping women plant trees.
Was it because of where I was born or raised, or how and where I was educated? Was it because of my parents or grandparents? Was it something in my cultural heritage that particularly
cherished the natural world? Was I doing it to advance my career, become rich, achieve fame, or gain political power? Why
, they continued,
did I persist in pursuing environmental conservation when so many odds were stacked against me?
After all, I had a flourishing academic career at the pinnacle of learning in postindependence Kenya, the University of Nairobi.

Their incomprehension was understandable. During the 1980s, the regime in Kenya regularly accused people who challenged the government's policies or practices that subverted rural populations of being “antigovernment.” When I was accused of both, it wasn't because I was planting trees. Rather, it had more to do with the journey I had embarked upon.

While I could understand to some extent the government's paranoia about holding on to power, what I couldn't fathom was why the environment was not as important to my fellow Africans, or Kenyans, or even Kikuyus, who were in the government or in positions of authority in society, as it was to me. Why were political leaders behaving as if they had colonized their own country—and, in so doing, had facilitated the exploitation of natural resources like indigenous forests and land by handing them over to their political supporters or making them available to corporate interests? Why were they disinheriting their own people and future generations?

I realized then that it was not just the poor who had been culturally uprooted. Even those with power and wealth were not only unwilling but also unable to protect their environment from immediate destruction or preserve it for future generations. Since they, too, had been culturally disinherited, they did not seem to recognize that they had something to pass on. Although they were the people expected to protect their countries' wealth, they perceived themselves as passersby, and so took whatever they could on their way through. This also explained to me why many Africans, both leaders and ordinary
citizens, facilitated the exploitation of their countries and peoples. Without culture, they'd lost their knowledge of who they were and what their destiny should be.

Of course, this problem isn't only an African one: people all over the world, rich and poor, are shortsightedly stripping the Earth of her bounty in favor of acquiring wealth today, at the expense of the survival of future generations, whether theirs or other peoples’. And yet, I feel the problem acutely as an African, precisely because I am within a generation or two of those who had a culture that, albeit unknowingly, contributed to the conservation rather than the destruction of their environment. By making these linkages, the full dimensions and impact of the loss of cultural connection to the environment became clear to me.

Through this analysis of the intersections of culture, the degradation of the environment, and political corruption, I realized it was necessary to enlarge the Green Belt Movement's conception of conservation to include a recognition of cultural heritage and the consequences of its loss, how and why culture was important, and how its neglect manifested itself in the ways the public reacts to the environment, and even to life itself. We came to understand that we had to allow people to see that the system in which they were living was fundamentally flawed. Until it was corrected, and people could feel empowered and hold their government accountable, the Green Belt Movement's work would not be fully realized. This is how the Civic and Environmental Education seminars gradually became an essential part of the Green Belt Movement's approach to development.

One part of the seminar is an exercise we named “The Wrong Bus Syndrome.” Traveling by bus is a very common
experience in Kenya, as it is in many African countries. Since most Africans can identify with a traveler in a bus, it's easy for seminar participants to visualize what happens if a traveler makes the wrong decision and gets onto the wrong bus: she or he will arrive at the wrong destination and will, without a doubt, encounter unexpected problems. These may include sleeping out in the cold, going hungry, or experiencing something dispiriting or dangerous (such as harassment by the police or attacks by thugs). If the traveler gets on the right bus, he or she should have a relatively easy journey, because all has gone according to plan.

Throughout the many seminars the Green Belt Movement has held over the years, people have offered the following main reasons why a traveler could get on the wrong bus: he or she fails to ask for directions and does not seek all the necessary information; someone accidentally or deliberately misinforms the traveler; the traveler is incapacitated through mental illness, drug abuse, alcoholism, a state of distress and confusion, or genetic impairment of the mind; the traveler has a misplaced sense of arrogance and adopts a know-it-all attitude; the traveler cheats him- or herself and trivializes the implications of making the wrong decision; the traveler is fearful, intimidated, cowed, and lacks confidence and self-assurance; or the traveler is simply ignorant.

As part of this exercise, seminar participants are asked to enumerate the problems they're facing in their communities. The answers are issues familiar to poor people, and those concerned with development, all over the world—and they are legion. A group of a hundred once enumerated no fewer than 150 problems! Among the most common are hunger, poverty, unemployment, collapsed institutions, a lack of security, violations of human rights, and religious differences that split communities and divide friends and neighbors. Other problems
relate to the immediate environment: loss of local biological diversity, especially forests; soil erosion; pollution; the disappearance of indigenous food crops; and the drying up of marshlands, streams, and springs.

In light of all these challenges, when asked if they're moving in the right or wrong direction, or traveling on the right or wrong bus, individuals in the seminars are usually unanimous in their opinions: they
are
on the wrong bus. They recognize that they haven't asked questions of their leaders—from the local chief to their MP to the head of state. They've been over-trusting, and haven't paid adequate attention to the information available to them. They haven't had the courage to stand up to these leaders and challenge the direction they have been taking the people in, or they have relied too much on their leaders' assurances that all the people have to do is to trust them. Or they have assumed that politics is beyond their understanding. Some may have allowed themselves to be misled by alcohol, drugs, or misinformation, making them easy victims for exploitation. All of these choices mean they are less capable of reaching the destination they want.

Interestingly, in every seminar, participants point to the loss of traditional culture as one of the major causes of troubles such as the misuse of alcohol and drugs, irresponsible behavior toward women and girl children, high secondary school dropout rates (especially for girls), prostitution, theft, the breakup of family relationships, and the commercialization of religion. They express distress at the phenomenon of street children, and the spread of HIV/AIDS. As they analyze further the causes of their problems, many people come to the conclusion that their society has lost its accepted values and taboos and has, therefore, become both vulnerable and susceptible to any leader who promises them the immediate satisfaction of their felt needs.

In turn, the seminars aim to allow individuals to deepen their sense of self-knowledge and realize that to care for the environment is to take care of themselves and their children—that in healing the earth they are healing themselves. The Green Belt Movement's tree-planting program and Civic and Environmental Education seminars seek not only to empower the poor economically and politically, but also to encourage them to internalize a sense of working beyond self-interest and make a greater commitment to service for the common good.

In the course of the seminar, after participants have concluded that they are moving in the wrong direction, the question is put to them: “What do you do now?” It is at that point that attendees reach the state where they decide that they must take charge—not to continue going the wrong way, but to get off that bus, board the appropriate one, and start moving in the right direction.

Getting on the right bus will help them deal eventually with the long set of problems they have listed. At this point in the process, participants gain what in Kikuyu is called
kwimenya
, or
kujijua
in Kiswahili, or in English, “self-knowledge.” When they experience
kwimenya
, participants can confront the choices they made that led them to take the wrong bus. They can also begin to choose differently.

Attendees recognize that they cannot be fatalistic, but must acknowledge their own agency. They comprehend that they need not only to choose wisely which bus to take, but to exercise
kwimenya
on issues as significant as how they are governed, how they govern themselves, how they manage their resources, how they expand democratic space, whether they respect or violate each other's rights, and whether they create or destroy peace. They see that if they are going to get better governance, they have to participate in elections, and determine which leaders they want.

Exercising
kwimenya
entails being responsible oneself, but
holding leaders responsible as well—in other words, not only protecting the soil on your own land and conserving nearby forests, but also demanding that the government protect the country's soil and forests from degradation and exploitation. The recognition of the need for both personal and political responsibility and accountability leads people to the realization of the central importance of democratic governance.

In my own personal journey, I realized that not only was I on the wrong bus, but everyone else was, too—and that one of the main reasons why we had gotten on the wrong bus was because we had lost our cultures. My analysis led me to conclude that if people are denied their culture, they are vulnerable to being exploited by their leaders and to being exploiters themselves.

The reawakening of
kwimenya
can provide individuals with deep psychological and spiritual clarity. There is enormous relief, as well as anger and sadness, when people realize that without a culture one not only is a slave, but also has in effect collaborated with the slave trader, and that the consequences have been long-lasting and devastating, extending back through generations. A new appreciation of culture gives traditional communities a chance, quite literally, to rediscover themselves, revalue and reclaim who they are, and get on the right bus.

The challenge for the many parts of Africa that were decultured is to rediscover their cultural heritages, and use them to both reconnect with the past and help direct them in their political, spiritual, economic, and social development. Despite their apparent simplicity to outsiders, who might consider their own culture more complex and sophisticated as well as more relevant and practical, the expressions of one's own culture are much more meaningful and constructive to those who claim them than alien (and supposedly superior) holy scriptures,
or masterpieces of literature and music produced by an occupying power. As wonderful and enriching to human experience as foreign heritages are to those who subscribe to and value them, they are nevertheless aspects of other peoples' experiences and heritage.

Indeed, through their strong power of suggestion, foreign cultures may reinforce a sense of inadequacy and nurture an inferiority complex in those constantly exposed to them and urged to perceive them as “better.” This is partly why foreign cultures play an important role in power politics, and in economic and social control. Once people have been conquered and are persuaded to accept that they not only are inherently inferior but also should gratefully receive the wisdom of the “superior” culture, their society is undermined, disempowered, and becomes willing to accept outside guidance and direction. This experience has been repeated throughout human history.

Citizens of former colonial powers are often baffled as to why indigenous or colonized peoples seem to suffer disproportionately from alcoholism, homelessness, mental illness, disease, lethargy, fatalism, or dependency. They cannot fathom why many of these peoples seem unable to relate to the modern world, why many of their children cannot stay in school, or why many do not thrive in the contemporary, industrialized world of big cities and corporate capitalism. They are surprised that their development programs don't produce the desired results and their attempts to alleviate the conditions under which so many indigenous or colonized peoples suffer may meet with passivity, indifference, resistance, or sometimes hostility.