The Wayfinders (19 page)

In the 1970s and 1980s a series of catastrophic
droughts, along with famine caused by ethnic conflict and war in
neighbouring Ethiopia and Somalia, drew international attention to the
Kaisut and adjacent regions of sub-Saharan Africa. The development community
suggested that the degradation of the Sahel and the impoverishment of the
people was a consequence of overgrazing, which in academic vernacular came
to be known as the “tragedy of the commons.” As long as people did not own
land, individual greed would inevitably triumph over community interests.
The solution was privatization and the imposition of a land management plan
imported wholesale from the American West. In 1976, the United Nations
launched a multimillion-dollar initiative to encourage the tribes to settle
and enter a cash economy, reducing the size of their herds by selling stock.
This external prescription, which echoed British colonial efforts since the
1920s to convert the tribes to sedentary life, ignored the obvious fact that
for hundreds of years the very survival of the nomads had been dependent on
them looking after the land. The desert was their home. Using animals to
convert the grasses and scrub vegetation to protein was the most efficient
use of the land and the only way to live in the desert. Mediating the
process, securing the rights and well-being of every individual to the fate
of the collective, were complex ties of kinship, relationships too subtle to
be perceived readily by outsiders. The genius of the nomads was their very
ability to survive in the desert.

The problems began when a people born to move
were obliged to settle down. Watering holes grew into relief camps and these
in time into small towns, all oases of dependency. Those who sold their
animals became wards of international aid agencies, which distributed maize,
Iowa corn for the most part, that had to be boiled to be edible, and thus
the last of the trees were cut to make charcoal. Those lucky enough to have
the means dispatched their eldest sons to be educated at mission stations,
where they came into the orbit of the church.

When I travelled through the Kaisut in 1998 I
visited a mission at Korr, a refugee settlement, and met a wonderful man,
Father George, an Italian priest who had established the food relief
operation in 1975. At that time Korr was just a seasonal camp, a source of
water visited by small bands of nomadic Rendille herders. When I was there,
only a generation later, there was a population of 16,000, 170 hand-dug
wells, and 2,500 houses, all roofed in cardboard, burlap, and metal sheets
bearing the names of international aid organizations. Father George was his
own harshest critic. “Schooling,” he told me, “has not changed the people
for the better. This is the pain in my heart. Those educated want nothing to
do with their animals. They just want to leave. Education should not be a
reason to go away. It’s an obligation to come back.”

The problem is that few do. As Father George
acknowledged, they acquire a modicum of literacy and certain basic skills,
but in an atmosphere and with a pedagogy that teaches them to have contempt
for their fathers and their traditions. They enter school as nomads,
graduate as clerks, and drift south to the cities where the official
unemployment rate is 25 percent and more than half of high school graduates
are without work. Caught between worlds, unable to go back, and with no
clear path forward, they scratch for a living in the streets of Nairobi and
swell the sea of misery that surrounds the Kenyan capital.

“They must hold onto tradition,” Father George
told me. “Ultimately it is what will save them. It’s all they have. They are
Rendille and must stay Rendille.”

BEFORE SHE DIED
, anthropologist Margaret Mead spoke of her
singular fear that, as we drift toward a more homogenous world, we are
laying the foundations of a blandly amorphous and singularly generic modern
culture that will have no rivals. The entire imagination of humanity, she
feared, might be confined within the limits of a single intellectual and
spiritual modality. Her nightmare was the possibility that we might wake up
one day and not even remember what had been lost. Our species has been
around for some 200,000 years. The Neolithic Revolution, which gave us
agriculture, and with it surplus, hierarchy, specialization, and sedentary
life, occurred only ten to twelve thousand years ago. Modern industrial
society as we know it is scarcely 300 years old. This shallow history should
not suggest to any of us that we have all the answers for all of the
challenges that will confront us as a species in the coming millennia. The
goal is not to freeze people in time. One cannot make a rainforest park of
the mind. Cultures are not museum pieces; they are communities of real
people with real needs. The question, as Hugh Brody has written, is not the
traditional versus the modern, but the right of free peoples to choose the
components of their lives. The point is not to deny access, but rather to
ensure that all peoples are able to benefit from the genius of modernity on
their own terms, and without that engagement demanding the death of their
ethnicity.

It is perhaps useful to reflect on what we mean
when we use the term
modernity
, or
the modern world
. All
cultures are ethnocentric, fiercely loyal to their own interpretations of
reality. Indeed, the names of many indigenous societies translate as “the
people,” the implication being that every other human is a non-person, a
savage from beyond the realm of the civilized. The word
barbarian
derives from the Greek
barbarus
, meaning
one who babbles. In the ancient world, if you did not speak Greek, you were
a barbarian. The Aztec had the same notion. Anyone who could not speak
Nahuatl was a non-human.

We too are culturally myopic and often forget
that we represent not the absolute wave of history but merely a world view,
and that modernity — whether you identify it by the monikers
westernization,
globalization,
capitalism,
democracy,
or
free trade
— is but an expression of our cultural values. It
is not some objective force removed from the constraints of culture. And it
is certainly not the true and only pulse of history. It is merely a
constellation of beliefs, convictions, economic paradigms that represent one
way of doing things, of going about the complex process of organizing human
activities. Our achievements to be sure have been stunning, our
technological innovations dazzling. The development within the last century
of a modern, scientific system of medicine alone represents one of the
greatest episodes in human endeavour. Sever a limb in a car accident and you
won’t want to be taken to an herbalist.

But these accomplishments do not make the Western
paradigm exceptional or suggest in any way that it has or ought to have a
monopoly on the path to the future. An anthropologist from a distant planet
landing in the United States would see many wondrous things. But he or she
or it would also encounter a culture that reveres marriage, yet allows half
of its marriages to end in divorce; that admires its elderly, yet has
grandparents living with grandchildren in only 6 percent of its households;
that loves its children, yet embraces a slogan — “twenty-four/seven” — that
implies total devotion to the workplace at the expense of family. By the age
of eighteen, the average American youth has spent two years watching
television. One in five Americans is clinically obese and 60 percent are
overweight, in part because 20 percent of all meals are consumed in
automobiles and a third of children eat fast food every day. The country
manufactures 200 million tons of industrial chemicals each year, while its
people consume two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs.
The four hundred most prosperous Americans control more wealth than 2.5
billion people in the poorest eighty-one nations with whom they share the
planet. The nation spends more money on armaments and war than the
collective military budgets of its seventeen closest rivals. The state of
California spends more money on prisons than on universities. Technological
wizardry is balanced by the embrace of an economic model of production and
consumption that compromises the life supports of the planet.
Extreme
would be one word for a civilization that
contaminates with its waste the air, water, and soil; that drives plants and
animals to extinction on a scale not seen on earth since the disappearance
of the dinosaurs; that dams the rivers, tears down the ancient forests,
empties the seas of fish, and does little to curtail industrial processes
that threaten to transform the chemistry and physics of the atmosphere.

Our way of life, inspired in so many ways, is not
the paragon of humanity’s potential. Once we look through the
anthropological lens and see, perhaps for the first time, that all cultures
have unique attributes that reflect choices made over generations, it
becomes absolutely clear that there is no universal progression in the lives
and destiny of human beings. Were societies to be ranked on the basis of
technological prowess, the Western scientific experiment, radiant and
brilliant, would no doubt come out on top. But if the criteria of excellence
shifted, for example to the capacity to thrive in a truly sustainable
manner, with a true reverence and appreciation for the earth, the Western
paradigm would fail. If the imperatives driving the highest aspirations of
our species were to be the power of faith, the reach of spiritual intuition,
the philosophical generosity to recognize the varieties of religious
longing, then our dogmatic conclusions would again be found wanting.

When we project modernity, as we define it, as
the inevitable destiny of all human societies, we are being disingenuous in
the extreme. Indeed, the Western model of development has failed in so many
places in good measure because it has been based on the false promise that
people who follow its prescriptive dictates will in time achieve the
material prosperity enjoyed by a handful of nations of the West. Even were
this possible, it is not at all clear that it would be desirable. To raise
consumption of energy and materials throughout the world to Western levels,
given current population projections, would require the resources of four
planet Earths by the year 2100. To do so with the one world we have would
imply so severely compromising the biosphere that the earth would be
unrecognizable. Given the values that drive most decisions in the
international community, this is not about to happen. In reality,
development for the vast majority of the peoples of the world has been a
process in which the individual is torn from his past, propelled into an
uncertain future, only to secure a place on the bottom rung of an economic
ladder that goes nowhere.

Consider the key indices of the development
paradigm. An increase in life expectancy suggests a drop in infant
mortality, but reveals nothing of the quality of the lives led by those who
survive childhood. Globalization is celebrated with iconic intensity. But
what does it really mean? In Bangladesh, garment workers are paid pennies to
sew clothing that retails in the United States and Canada for tens of
dollars. Eighty percent of the toys and sporting goods sold in America are
produced in sweatshops in China, where millions work for wages as low as 12
cents an hour, 400,000 die prematurely each year due to air pollution, and
400 million people do not have access to potable water, so ruined are the
rivers with industrial toxins.
The Washington Post
reports that in Lahore, Pakistan, one Muhammad
Saeed earns $88 a month stitching shirts and jeans at a factory that
supplies Gap and Eddie Bauer. He and his five family members share a single
bed in a one-room home tucked away in a warren of alleys strewn with sewage
and refuse. Earning three times the money that he made at his last job, he
is the poster child of globalization.

Without doubt, images of comfort and wealth, of
technological sophistication, have a magnetic allure. Any job in the city
may seem better than back-breaking labour in sun-scorched fields. Entranced
by the promise of the new, people throughout the world have in many
instances voluntarily and in great earnest turned their backs on the old.
The consequences, as we have seen in Kenya, can be profoundly disappointing.
The fate of the vast majority of those who sever their ties with their
traditions will not be to attain the prosperity of the West, but to join the
legions of urban poor, trapped in squalor, struggling to survive. As
cultures wither away, individuals remain, often shadows of their former
selves, caught in time, unable to return to the past, yet denied any real
possibility of securing a place in a world whose values they seek to emulate
and whose wealth they long to acquire. This creates a dangerous and
explosive situation, which is precisely why the plight of diverse cultures
is not a simple matter of nostalgia or even of human rights alone, but a
serious issue of geopolitical stability and survival.

Were I to distill a single message from these
Massey Lectures it would be that culture is not trivial. It is not
decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It
is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of
knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite
sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that
ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral
and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that
history suggests lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and
indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham
Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature.