A BIT OF DIGRESSION BEFORE HARMONY LESSONS 2024

TRANSCRIPT:

Today I am trying to see if Facebook will allow me to share a five-minute clip without cutting it.

Now, let’s begin with something memorable. Do you remember our first slide when we started discussing natural equality?

The clip had an image of six skeletons. One of them we said was a poor person, the other was rich, there was a black and a white person, and there was a Christian and a Moslem. Their skeletons looked the same because in death we return to that absolute truth of being the same.

We then considered the importance of humility because we all share the same life cycle of birth/living/death. As a Harmony society, we decided to focus on the morals that will enable us to lead a good life during that period of being alive on this planet. How should we live our lives? There are many compasses to guide us some of which are religious. Religions offer moral compass for living a life of virtue, so do cultural traditions. Some societies do not follow a particular formal religion, instead they are guided by their own values that are embedded in how they see the world. They will have tales and taboos about right and wrong. Even in Africa before foreign religions, we had our own worldviews of what is right and wrong.

For thousands of years people lived knowing what humanity is all about! They did not turn each other into food or say, hunt the neighbour’s child and cook it  In short humans knew how to live. They made rules and followed them. The most well-known of them is THE GOLDEN RULE, which can be traced all the way to ancient Egypt and China. It warned people ‘not to do to others what they would not like done to them’ and it extended even to nature, requiring everyone to maintain reverence. This rule was later adapted into an affirmative command of ‘treating others the way you want to be treated’ but it did not extend to nature. Here we deliberately forgot to include nature although we are embedded in nature, and it sustains us.

As a harmony society, we decided to focus on virtues. Those quintessential values that make life meaningful and harmonious. This is why our first HARMONY GOAL is #Humanity Education, so that we can increase our competency in finding a balance between Indigenous Knowledge and modernity without being engulfed in either.

We want to know how our ancestors lived and related to nature. What sort of relationships did they have with other kingdoms of nature? - soil, water, air, plants, forests, animals, rocks, mountains etc. What did they eat and how did they celebrate events? Why and how did they practice worship? What was the significance of names? They could have called each other by numbers!! Sure we know the meaningfulness of names but what is in the name? For instance, my Chagga birth name is Naaikye, which translates as “She should be thanked.” The accompanying story is that, a few minutes after I was born, my father came rushing past the midwives and told my surprised mother that ‘she should be called my mothers name.’ When challenged how he knew the new baby was a girl, he said that his deceased mother had just visited him in a dream and woke him up complaining that he had not honoured her. My parents had two other girls. Now then, my birth name was MEANINGFUL, but the attitude of wanting everything to sound European, I chose to prioritise my Christian name Regina and I was ashamed of being called Naaikye in school!!! This is one of the HARMFUL PERCEPTION that we feel we must address in order to restore some reverence to our heritage.

The worry is that we are cutting off the umbilical cord with our ancestral heritage. I am guilty of severing the connection with those who brought me into this world😪 There are so many things we need to purge from ourselves in order to heal from this “I am not Ok” stance and remember that we are Okay. That everyone came with unique gifts into this world but also inherited cultural and intellectual assets that enable him/her to perform a particular kind of work to the best of their abilities.

I know I have digressed today, but my aim is to test if Facebook will allow me to post a five-minute audio clip without cutting it. Next time I will prepare better, I promise. I don’t want you to attack me 😆Whoever tries we will attack each other 😁😁 Bye for now, it is me mama RKW aka Naaikye. Nawapenda/Love you Mwaaaaa 😘

WHAT IS TUKO SAWA?

Tuko Sawa is a Swahili expression meaning we are okay. It also means we are equal or we are the same. Tuko Sawa is an equality and fairness tool, which is very helpful tool for reminding ourselves that we are all created equal, endowed with consciousness and that we are capable of  making a  choice of treating Others with compassion and dignity.

The Tuko Sawa concept is informed by transactional analysis; a humanistic psychology that explores how we interact with each other. Tuko Sawa goes further by encouraging people to  self-moderate their actions because in doing so, one is left with a contented sense of wellbeing by knowing that they did the thing, at the right time even if no one was looking.

Tuko Sawa is empowering and humbling at the same time as we are forced to see ourselves in Others knowing that we share the same life cycle, despite our vast differences. Infact Tuko Sawa is founded on the fact that the whole web of life is a "unity in diversity" and that every Being has a right to be on this planet, therefore our role is to be of service to one another.

Understood properly, the Tuko Sawa tool can heighten self-awareness and recalibration of our thoughts, words and actions.

TRANSCULTURALISM, WELLBEING AND EQUALITY CONSCIOUSNESS

This short essay was originally published in Germany on the 2nd July 2018 at the TRANSCULTURAL LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE; ZEPPELIN  UNIVERSITY.                    (LINK TO THE SOURCE)

INTRODUCTION: Our guest author Dr Regina Kessy writes about the prejudices we still have when encountering foreigners – thereby especially focusing on the African continent and its historical framework – and about the need of a “transcultural gaze”, ensuring transcultural awareness and open-mindedness in today’s interconnected world.

Birkaskolan students in Stockholm participating in a twin school project to increase Empathy and Wellbeing.

“If the young are not initiated into the tribe, they will burn down the village just to feel its warmth.”
 (An African Proverb)

We live in an interconnected world but our understanding of each other is still distorted by preconceived knowledge created through the differentiating ethnocentric gaze of “Us” and “Them.” Homogenous cultures are slowly becoming a thing of the past giving way to more complex societies where human interactions must seek to embrace and reflect unifying human values for peaceful coexistence. Our bewildering situation evokes the historical time when Fernando Ortiz coined the term “transculturation” to describe the cultural dynamics in Cuba when multiple cultures shared the same geographical space at the same time with each culture “always exerting influence and being influenced in turn.”

This short essay argues that a “transcultural gaze” as a way of knowing and being can function as a universal human virtue that will enable us to navigate the over-information labyrinth with all the cultural blind spots that cause disharmony and disrespect amongst individuals, groups and nations.

The cultural blindness of the past allowed one culture to define and discredit another by using extremely negative differentiating paradigms. Understandably, this was a result of the very limited “ethnocentric gaze,” because cultures were still homogenous, largely because of restricted technology of transport and information. This was the time when the few European travellers who managed to reach the African continent described it as the “Dark Continent” totally overlooking what the local people knew or thought. To them Africa was in total darkness; socially, culturally and intellectually and it was up to them to shed the light of civilization upon it. The civilization discourse constructed enduring myths about many cultural others who were often described as “beasts,” “savages” and at best “primitives.” Brantlinger (1985) writes that “at the time, reporting about the “Dark Continent” back in Europe created excitements that can be likened to space exploration today.”

A transcultural gaze about phenomena we know nothing about can actually result in useful categorizations and functional stereotyping, which can help in dealing with cultural others. Nineteenth century Swahili ancestors in Tanzania for instance fondly described the white European explorers as wazungukaji (wanderers) because they seemed to be travelling about a lot. Although a form of caricaturing into “Us” and “Them” the word did not carry any negative connotation, instead it was a descriptive verb about what the white visitors were doing. Today in spoken Kiswahili the word is a noun for Caucasians Wazungu (plural) or Mzungu (singular) in a most positive manner, which explains why Wazungus are never offended when local people with big smiles address them as such. This simple cross-cultural encounter demonstrates how meaning can safely be created and sustained if the “gaze” of the observer is not clouded by negative prejudices about cultural other, instead uses wisdom, rationality and empathy.

Regarding what black African think of themselves, the late academic and political writer Ali Mazrui notes that, “one of the paradoxes of history is that it took Africa’s contact with the Arab world to make the Black people of Africa realize that they were black in description, but not necessarily in status. The term ‘Sudan,’ meaning ‘the Black ones,’ carries no pejorative implications. That is why Africa’s largest country in territory (capital Khartoum) still proudly calls itself ‘Sudan.’ In a European language one cannot imagine an African country calling itself today ‘Black Land,’ let alone ‘Negrostan,’ as the name of a modern state. On the other hand, it took European conceptualization and cartography to turn Africa into a continent. To Europeans, ‘black’ was not merely descriptive; it was judgmental. Whilst Arabs alerted the people of Africa that they were black, the Europeans tried to convince black people that they were inferior.”

The proverb above captures the need for an enlightened and compassionate framework for being, knowing and interacting in today’s world. A transcultural gaze will allow individuals to respectfully acknowledge human differences whilst embracing shared values. The methodology lies in ensuring that transcultural awareness penetrates consciousness particularly in young-adults. This will improve not only their self-esteem and well-being but globally, it will help build more empathic and prosperous societies.

References:
Brantlinger, P. (1985) Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent.
Critical Inquiry, Vol 12(1) pp166-203)

Mazrui, A. A. (2014: 277-278). African Thought in comparative Perspective. Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, UK.

Ortiz F. (1995: 98) Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Duke University Press Books. Durham,
USA & London, UK

TO SEE IS NOT TO KNOW!

This short essay was originally published in Germany on the 2nd March 2018 at the TRANSCULTURAL LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE; ZEPPELIN  UNIVERSITY.                   (LINK TO THE SOURCE)

INTRODUCTION: As a true cosmopolitan, Dr. Regina Kessy (PhD) has lived in four continents and speaks six languages. 

She holds an MA (hons) in international journalism from People’s Friendship University in Moscow, Russia, and a doctorate from the Department of Media and Humanities at the University of Huddersfield in the UK. In her doctoral study ‘Decoding the donor gaze: Documentary, aid and AIDS in Africa’, she coined the term “donor gaze” to explain the dynamics of meaning-making in documentary films produced by the Third Sector. 

Dr. Kessy has vast experience in cross-cultural documentary film production as a freelancer for the private sector and non-governmental organisations both in Europe and Africa. Currently, she is working on a transcultural cognitive toolkit called KEA
(Knowledge, Empathy, Attitude), offering world youth a platform to acquire knowledge about and interact with distant cultures, broaden empathic reach and choose positive attitudes towards self and others."

The fable of the six blind Men and an Elephant reminds us that "truth" is constructed in our heads.

The explosion of visual media sharing around the world presents great possibilities but also an urgent need to address the chronic misinterpretation of images and spaces of “cultural others.” The dynamics of making sense about the world, or making truthful assertions about realities of others, is not a forthright process because the world appears differently to different people. The meaning and function of objects or concepts are culturally coded, and therefore an interpretation is fixed according to the “cultural-toolkit” available to the one perceiving the object or other people.
Philosopher-journalist Walter Lippman calls it “the pictures in our heads.” These experiential images are impressions and beliefs we accumulated throughout childhood and they shape how we perceive and interact with the world outside.

The famous saying that “seeing is believing” can be misleading because we all use different “pictures in our heads” to make sense of concepts and objects in the world. It is therefore beneficial to interrogate photographic “truthfulness” because we now live in an electronic age where meaning making is causing a lot of social psychological and cultural disempowerment. Consider for instance the word “chair.” According to the Oxford dictionary, a chair is ‘a separate seat for one person, typically with a back and four legs.’ This is taken for granted in communities with such seating arrangements but it is totally confusing when the word crosses geographic spaces to rural communities where people traditionally squat or sit on straw mats and reserve the three legged wooden kigoda (chair) for elders, esteemed visitors and disabled.

Increasingly, culture is forced to speak with one voice and this opens up infinite problems because we represent phenomena as if our experiences are the same world over. Furthermore, when we quantify abstract concepts like “success” or “happiness”, we reinforce a universal way of seeing, which leads to negative comparisons, discontent, envy, aggressive competition instead of
cooperation, migration at any cost and of course greed and corruption. The process of standardizing concepts is not accidental, therefore I would like to illuminate on the historical trajectory that favoured seeing as an objective way of knowing. Berthold-Bond’s Hegel’s Grand Synthesis: A Study of Being, Thought, and History explains that “history exhibits the relation of consciousness to the world,
and this developing relation constitutes our knowledge, our appropriation of truth.”

As my focus is photographic imagery, I will limit the backward glance to the nineteenth century because it was marked with unprecedented contact between Europe and Africa and invented ways of explaining human differences based on the racial assumptions of Victorian evolutionary anthropology. The development of the cameras as a tool of scientific inquiry allowed the documentation of non-Europeans to take the form of visible evidence. Charles Darwin routinely used photographs, and his illustrated masterpiece Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1871)
was the first manual to use photographs to illustrate a scientific theory. Descent of Man (1874), which is Darwin’s scientific framework on how humankind and human society should be understood, used considerable visual descriptions about other races that claimed to be objective in the Hegelian sense of ‘pure looking’ (reines zusehen). 

In fact, the notion that “seeing is believing” had immense social and cultural impact at the time because visual representations of non Europeans were seen as mirrors of their cultural and racial development. Indeed, photographic accuracy cannot be disputed but aesthetically, the image is never innocent.
Richard Avedon puts it this way: 

“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth!”

References:
• Berthold-Bond, D. (1989: 14). Hegel’s Grand Synthesis: A Study of Being, Thought, and History.
State University of New York, USA.
• Lippmann, W. (1998). Public opinion. Transaction Publishers. New Brunswick, New Jersey.