A Teacher's Travels & Search for Math/Science Theorems that aren't Named after White Men |
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A Teacher's Travels & Search for Math/Science Theorems that aren't Named after White Men |
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“Don’t forget to get canned meat” I woke up early Monday morning ready for our drive thru the bush and over the border into Namibia. The rental 4x4 car, the only type of car that could access Tsumkwe, was to arrive at 7:30am. Of course that didn’t happen. The car arrived hours late, with the hatch locked. Lloyd, Veronica’s son, and his daughter Nicky, age 8, and I spent a couple of hours in Maun going locksmith to locksmith trying to get the back of the truck open so we could store our coolers and tents. That wasn’t a success, so we instead figured out a way to pry the back open with a crowbar, filled up the tank, grabbed some meat pies and rushed out of Maun to get to the Dobe border gate before it’s closure at 5pm. Lloyd was kind enough to bring me here, his mother Veronica pushed him to because it was important to me, and I covered the expenses. We have huge ideological differences, but we were successfully able to talk to each other about pretty much everything on the 6 hour journey. For example, Lloyd, a Motswana, tells me that he thinks Botswana and South Africa need Afrikaners because black people are lazy. I obviously disagree and have a more complex view of “work ethic,” but I listen, and we learn about the other. We listened to highlife, Afropop, house and Sia thru small villages, dirt roads, passed heaps of elephant poop and around termite mounds. The white sand turned to red upon crossing into Namibia at the small border gate, which is manned just by two people in a small shed. Lloyd tells me that in Tswana folklore, they say that red sand means that blood was shed in a place. I can’t help but think of the Herero people who had fled Namibia to escape the Germans only a century before our own trek. Namibian roads are better maintained than the Botswana side, so our rollercoaster ride comes to an end, as we entered the Nyae Nyae Conservancy area, and then 10 minutes later, arrive in Tsumkwe. The village is quiet, and there are mainly San people walking by on the gravel road, specifically they are Ju|’Hoansi. I have come to Tsumkwe to learn from them, after being invited by |UI Steve Kunta, a native of the area, guide, school founder and teacher. After finding the campsite at Tsumkwe lodge, Lloyd, Nicky and I set up our homes for the next few days and Steve calls me asking to meet up. “You look tall in your WhatsApp picture, but you’re short” I first meet Steve in person, after months of talking via WhatsApp and email, at the general store/filling station in the center of the village. As soon as we pull up to the store, which acts as sort of a piazza, I get out of the truck and look around. There are Herero women walking around, and a few San men sitting under a tree. I turn my head, and realize that someone is walking toward me with a huge grin---it’s Steve. One thing I’ve learned from traveling in places where I’m not fluent in the language, is that one can usually tell if she’ll be connected to a person in the first initial moments of eye contact. I know the moment that Steve and my eyes meet, and we shake hands, that we’ll be close friends. We both had assumed that the other looked tall in their pictures, and we are both in fact pretty short. Most Ju|’Hoansi are my height or shorter with small frames, with lighter skin than their Bantu neighbors. Steve gave me a breakdown for our next couple of days, and we part ways. For whatever reason, that night at the campsite was tense. Lloyd complained a lot, and I was personally nervous because I didn’t have enough Namibian dollars to pay for gas and to compensate Steve, and the town’s only ATM had been broken for about a week. The next nearest ATM is in Grootfontein, which is a 3 hour drive away if there is no traffic---traffic in this area would be cows, elephants or other animals. It was in these tense moments that I was thankful Nicky was there. Like all 8 year olds, she was so excited to be missing school and on an adventure. Nicky is a charming little girl, but she watches a lot of Nickelodeon, and so she talks like pre-teens on Nickelodeon shows---exaggerated, dramatic and sarcastic. She stayed in my tent with me, and when she climbs into her sleeping bag for the first time she says, “Oh my god! Can you believe it? This is my first time sleeping in a sleeping bag. SoOoOo cool!” It’s special experiencing camping with Nicky. “The Original Affluent Society”
The title of this section was a Time magazine article titled published in 1969 about “Bushmen” and anthropological revelations during the time that contrary to prior research and beliefs, ethnographers were finding that hunter gatherers, particularly San groups, worked less and were content without yearning for material possessions and conquest. The article, inspired a surge in researchers heading across the globe and to the Kalahari to “study” hunter gatherer societies. The Ju|’Hoansi were frequently the focus of these studies, mainly because they lived in a harsh environment, had for millennia, and thrived. I’m currently reading an excellent book about the Ju|’Hoansi called, "Affluence Without Abundance", written by James Suzman, an anthropologist who had followed a similar path as me. He attempted to start his work in Botswana, and found the bleak realities of Botswana’s treatment of their San groups, and then stumbled into Tsumkwe to find a completely different, much less bleak reality. He writes about the history of Homo Sapiens and their roots here in Southern Africa. Ju means people and |hoan means truth. Together, they mean real person. Steve had shared this with me too when we first met. Most Ju|’Hoansi are in Namibia, near the Botswana border. These specific Ju|’Hoansi in Nyae Nyae were the most isolated of all San communities until the mid 1900s, and have uniquely retained control of their lands and traditional ways. They are some of the few on the continent that still hunt and gather, which doesn’t mean they all do and even the ones that do, do not hunt and gather all the time. Unlike the former Botswana president Mogae describing the San or Basura, as is derogatorily said in Tswana, as “Stone Age creatures who must change,” the Namibian government was battling apartheid South Africa until their independence in 1990. Many San in Namibia lived in serfdom or as sharecroppers on white farms, like in Botswana, as they do in places like New Xade or among Herero and other pastoralists, but the Ju|’Hoansi in Nyae Nyae have always lived there independently. The ones who lived on white farms, were victims of repulsive abuse. The Kalahari used to have a series of rivers and lakes, evidence of this is seen in salt pans and in the Okavango Delta wetlands area. According to Suzman the first people to have seen these lakes and their remnants were the genetic ancestors of all modern Khoisan, and perhaps of us all. A hundred fifty thousand years ago, he says, our human family tree branched out---those who remained in southern Africa became the ancestors of the modern San, and the others who moved north, became the ancestors of everyone else. Geneticists have found this to be true in that the contemporary San still carry really distinct and diverse DNA sequences. Also, interestingly, the Khoisan have been relatively successful compared to the other branch of humans. They’re a tiny minority in Africa, but they’ve been relatively very stable throughout their history whilst other non-Khoisan humans have had instability and declines, evident in the lack of genetic diversity in non-Khoisan humans. Fascinating! Right?! While most of the world, specifically the Global North, has been preoccupied with conquest, expansion and colonization, the San had been mastering making a simple living where they still are, in the harsh Kalahari Desert region. Many also believe this to be why Africa’s megafauna and large animal species has endured, while mass extinction, yes due to climate changes, but also due to the presence of humans, has occurred in the rest of the world. There are not many places other than southern Africa that have large mammal species and one has to wonder why, but many believe it’s because of the San. The decline of large mammals in Africa has only been recently with the arrival of white men and guns. They have been satisfied with their way of living, the environment around them and have not asked for much in return. This way of life is so contrary to most of life in Botswana, which is at an interesting point in its “development” and obsession with modernity. It’s worth noting though, that they have been attacked viciously by German, Dutch, Afrikaner, British colonizers as well as be other Bantu groups, for centuries. I’ve shared what their experience has been in Botswana, and their numbers are quite small compared to what they used to be in South Africa---most all Khoisan in southern South Africa, near the Cape Colony, were killed off and enslaved, and exist in only small numbers in South Africa. They found no need for trading, had no interest in colonial life, nor were they easy to enslave, which made them targets of Dutch colonial violence. “Mi sin jan” After peanut butter and banana sandwiches, my American camping breakfast of choice, we meet up with Steve. He brought me to a research permit office, and I explain what I’m doing in Tsumkwe. Everyone smiles and doesn’t ask anything of me, except a copy of my Fulbright letter. Steve and I then go to meet the head of all village schools, Cwisa Cwi. Cwisa is warm and kind. He proudly shows me a picture of the time he met the Queen in London. I also meet Gabriel, a Herero, from a different part of Namibia, who gives me Namibian dollars, and just tells me he knows I’ll wire him the money once I get wifi. Steve and Cwisa tell me that we’ll be going to Nhoma, a tiny village in the bush. Because of climate change, there is a bit of a food shortage in Nyae Nyae so the Namibian government sends food to this area. However, the food gets stuck in Tsumkwe because it’s hard to reach the other villages. Steve and Cwisa take advantage of our 4x4, and we load up the truck with maize porridge, soya vegetable packets and other canned foods. Along the way, we stop to pick up a teacher who would have otherwise walked 12 hours to get to the school, and then stay there. Along the way, Steve and the teacher, tell me about how to hunt porcupines, one of their favorite foods, and Oryx. I asked if the porcupines shoot their quills out at them but am assured that porcupine hunting is very easy, and they’ll even use their quills for jewelry and to make other tools. Nhoma Village School is deep in the bush. We unload the food into the teacher hostels and to the women who cook food for the children. There is a woman breastfeeding her baby underneath a tree, and two women squatted near her, with their bottoms on the ground and knees up, in the way I’ve seen most women sitting here. Some of the older women have tattooed lines in the space between their eyes and ears. It’s good luck. I sit in on a class in the two room schoolhouse. To my surprise the class is small---maybe about 23 children--and they’re not in uniform. Most are barefoot, and their skin is caked with dirt and grime. Instruction is in Ju|’hoansi as are their textbooks. Namibia has 13 official languages, and all textbooks are translated for at least grades 1-3, unlike Botswana, which only uses Setswana and English. The children are unphased by my presence and don’t stare at me, and are more interested by the car, something they rarely see. The two teachers are both Ju|’Hoansi, as I hear, all teachers at the village schools are. It’s important to them that San teachers are teaching San children. The teachers told me they teach Namibian core subjects in addition to teaching traditional cultural practices. Boys learn to make traps, bow and arrows and spears, and they learn to hunt. Girls learn about plants, berries and how to gather. All children learn traditional songs and dances, and there is a traditional healer in the village from whom people can also learn. At this point I’m proud of myself because I’m able to say, clicks and all, “Hello how are you? My name is ||Asa (my Ju|’hoans name),” and greet the women sitting outside before meeting Steve at another one of his projects. One of the two teachers leads me there thru the tall grass, and advises me to watch out for snakes and scorpions. We find Steve standing above a large pink hide. Steve helps a group of people make traditional sandals from animal hide, which they then import to somewhere in Europe. The shoes are cleverly called, “San-dals.” We share apples and dried mangoes on the drive back and agree to meet up again after lunch. After lunch, Cwisa and Steve, take us first to Gabe’s house, where we find his children high up in a tree picking yellow berries, among other small children, and we then head to a shebeen called Rockstar. Together, we laughed and drank Namibian beers. Nicky drinks a grape Fanta. A Kavango man tried to sell me fried fish from an old ice cream box, and a passing man tried to trade Lloyd a goat for a 40 ounce of beer. I never feel uncomfortable as the only woman in this group, besides little Nicky, and it makes me smile to be sharing beers at a concrete outdoor table with San people. In that moment, I think back to my time in an Intro to Anthro required class, I took my freshman year, 10 years ago. We had to read Nisa, an ethnography about a !Kung woman and watch N!ai. I never imagined I’d be here experiencing the Ju|’Hoansi in such a different way than those early ethnographers. While they seemed so intent on finding difference, I was looking for commonalities. Cwisa explained to me how to hunt giraffe over beers---you have to crawl quietly thru the grass, before the assigned shooter, shoots a poison arrow into the animal---which is an experience I cannot relate to, but there was something inexplicable that connected me to Cwisa and Steve. When Nicky became hungry, as the only woman in the group, I was of course the one asked to take her home and feed her, even though her father was there. I left Lloyd to drink with the men, and Nicky and I had a nice dinner of canned vegetables, rice cakes and meet. The next morning we broke down our campsite before scooping up Steve and heading to another school--//Xa/Oba Village School. It was as isolated as Nhoma but a bit smaller. The school had 15 children and one teacher. They were doing physical education when we arrived, and Nicky joined them. I talked to the teacher who told me a huge issue was transport for children to Tsumkwe after they were old enough to leave the village school (4th grade). They are hundreds of kilometers away and have to walk, which isn’t safe. We passed one large elephant just on the way to school, and elephants are very common on the road to Tsumkwe, which as much as I love these animals, am accepting that they aren’t always safe for people to be around. Just like in Botswana, San children, here in Namibia, are relatively shy. They attach themselves to their parents, who communicate with them like adults, but who keep them close. The children smile but are timid around new people, especially funny looking ones like me. One brave student befriends me, and we play badminton together. I then spend most of the rest of the morning in the cooking area with an older woman heating up a cauldron to cook in. We gently place sticks underneath the hot, black pot, while two women talk to me in broken English and Ju|’hoans. We communicate with smiles and hand gestures. They ask if I have any sugar. I don’t, but I give them the rest of the food we have---some canned goods, fruit and bread. Throughout the morning, Steve will embrace me, and say, “||Asa, you must come back and stay with us for 6 or 10 months. You’ll learn our language fast. You’ll teach our children.” The thought floats around the front of my mind. Finally, Steve takes us to a giant Baobab, in fact it looks like two that have morphed into each other. Lloyd jokes that it seems an elephant had died near it because the tree resembles an elephant’s skin and body shape, and perhaps it had taken the spirit of the fallen elephant. We climbed the tree for a bit, and then we say goodbye to Steve. Well, we attempt to. We say goodbye, and then Lloyd says, “Well let’s just have lunch together.” We have lunch together, and Steve says, “I want to stay with you all, but I don’t know what else we can do with this short amount of time.” We all agree that we’ll all see each other again because Tsumkwe not only has left an impression on me, but on Lloyd and Nicky as well. Cwisa sees us off too, and before we know it, we’re back at the Dobe border, cleaning our shoes and tires to prevent foot and mouth, and we’re back on the bumpy road, Botswana side. Along the way, we pick up a hitchhiker, very cool older guy, with a feathered, brimmed hat, wayfarer sunglasses and a wooden walking stick. He’s traveling hundreds of kilometers to pick up money his son sent him hours and hours away. The ride was quiet, so I thought of Steve’s new village school, which will soon open. The school’s interior will resemble the outdoors, and teachers will have their hostels setup inside the classroom, to replicate how schooling once looked like for children in Tsumkwe before the white man came and built cement buildings. The goal is to preserve culture and to continue to teach from their indigenous perspective. Steve is not religious but believes in a power that comes from the natural world, much like his ancestors believed, as is documented on their wall carvings and paintings throughout the Kalahari, including on the Tsodilo Hills in Botswana. I look forward to following this school, learning from it and supporting it from wherever I am. Back to Gabs After so much traveling, I can’t stomach the idea of getting on a 12 hour bus ride, plus I’ve been battling a cold, so I purchase a plane ticket from Maun to Gabs. Early the next morning, I went to a Educational Technology coffee session at the Botswana Innovation Hub, which is an odd and jarring transition from over a week with San people both in Botswana and Namibia. I’m fascinated with how the word “technology” is being used to only describe digital gadgets. Sure, I love my iPhone, but how amazing that the Ju|’Hoansi engineered a bow and arrow, with a poisonous arrow (poison found in a plant), that could take down a giraffe. How remarkable are their tools that break down ostrich egg shells into beautifully, tiny beads. Most people at the talk are interested in capitol, privatization and enterprise, while there is very little talk about cultural preservation. The talk was an odd start to a day, which ended in me not feeling completely content in Gabs. In all honesty, Gaborone is not a city I would ever live in again, and I have deep ideological differences with the people who live here, which come up frequently when I talk about my work. Someone joked with me about these differences and said, “This is because you’re in the self-actualization phase of your development, while we are still trying to thrive.” There is some truth in this, but I also feel that the Ju|’Hoansi are “self-actualized,” and that poverty is something I and most of us only understand thru a western lens or in comparing people and situations to the western elite. The children in Tsumkwe had tattered clothing and no cellphones. By our standards, they are impoverished. However, they appear healthy and happy. Keneliwe told me that San groups in Botswana, although marginalized, are not nearly as affected by HIV/AIDs as non-San groups are. Globalization, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, greed and homogenization has changed the world maybe forever, and I don’t know if there is any going back. These past two weeks with San people, has given me a new set of things to think about. We can’t go back, and we don’t want to falsely romanticize and exoticize people. As we distributed government food to villages in Tsumkwe, I became frustrated thinking of people in America and probably in Europe, who follow a “Paleo” or similar diet, with the goal of living like hunter-gatherer “early humans.” I thought, “these humans still exist, are not living fossils and cannot even live as they once did with that nutritious diet, in large part because of climate change caused by America and Europe. Yet, here gym Becky is spending $100s a week on a paleo diet.” I’m thinking of ways that we can go forward, honoring people like San groups (again there are numerous, with different languages and cultural practices) and giving them autonomy in a world obsessed with a singular definition of modernity. I felt more comfortable in my Tsumkwe tent than I do here in Gabs, and I miss a home a bit, annoyingly always miss South Africa, and even have Sicily on the mind. Yesterday evening I went to a lovely yoga class at an older Indian woman’s house. I look forward to catching up on work this week on campus and am excited to greet Professor Batibo and Professor Gabanamotse-Mogara in Ju|’Hoansi. I hope you’re getting warmer temps at home, and I’ll see you all in 5 weeks! Mi are a (I love you).
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AuthorFulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching Archives
April 2019
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