We felt it was important to begin by introducing ourselves, in order that you, the reader, can understand some of the contexts in which our ideas developed. Liberation theory is interested in how our relationships are shaped by our present experiences and by our pasts, including what we have inherited from our ancestors about who we are and our position in the world (historical memory). For example, historical relationships of domination and oppression developed during the transatlantic slave trade continue to impact on our interactions with each other, the ideas held in society and the nature of our institutional structures, as the Stephen Lawrence inquiry highlighted.1 McCarthy (1994) suggests that professional narratives can serve to colonise and silence local wisdom (knowledge and expertise gained from our own personal and cultural experiences) for practitioners and clients alike.
Given that everyone has a different relationship to theories of liberation depending on their own contexts, we would like to invite you as readers to consider the following questions as you read on:
Part 1: snapshots of Taiwo’s journey in relation to liberation approaches
I have described elsewhere ways in which the people who have come to me for help have shaped my commitment to liberation psychology ideas and how these ideas in turn inform my practice (Afuape, 2004, 2006, 2010, 2011, 2014). Here, I share snapshots of my personal journey with respect to this commitment.
Early memory
My family life growing up was largely characterised by warmth, humour, affection and love. The news was always on TV and there was political debate and reflection. My parents and siblings are some of the most thoughtful and socially caring people I know. Creativity was an especially important part of how we expressed ourselves, celebrated life and felt connected to others. As a Nigerian British-born woman of working-class origin, I cannot think of a time when the idea that social liberation was key to emotional wellbeing, did not fit. Much of the distress I experienced or witnessed growing up was linked not to the normal vicissitudes of life, but to experiences of prejudice and oppression based on skin colour, ethnicity, gender and class.
I would have been very young, and yet I remember watching the TV drama Roots with my family and being both haunted by the sheer horror of what I saw, and inspired by acts of resistance. Roots was a novel by African-American writer Alex Haley, based on his family history, and became a TV series charting the history of his family, from a young Gambian man called Kunte Kinte being captured by slavers and taken to the USA, to his descendants’ emancipation in the aftermath of the Civil War; it then focused on these descendants, all the way down to Alex Haley himself.
At that time it was not cool to be African. I spent much of my primary school dodging racist remarks about being ‘an African’. Despite the painful realisation that I, and people from the African diaspora, were viewed as inherently inferior and deserving of derision, by what seemed to be the majority of people I came into contact with, I came from a proud, vibrant and creative family who celebrated who we were and where we come from. Interestingly, my clearest memory of Roots is not the deeply harrowing scenes of brutality (enslavement, transportation in the Middle Passage, punishment on plantations, rape and lynching), but one small act of resistance, where an elderly Kizzy, Kunte’s daughter, spits into her former slaver Miss Anne’s tin cup when told to fetch her water. At that young age I must have been struck by this story of resistance. It struck me that even in the face of the worst of humanity, there are ways of resisting that are never trivial, because they uphold something of ourselves, even when they have no discernible impact on gross injustice. Kizzy spat in this cup without Miss Anne being aware. Kizzy’s action was a rejection of Miss Anne’s view of her, and it seemed to me, a defiant act of knowing oneself in the face of not being known. Miss Anne could never really know Kizzy, her beauty and her wisdom, because the vehement savagery of racism and slavery prevented such knowing. We cannot truly see each other when we believe on any level that there is not much to see. This act of resistance also seemed to me to disrupt any tendency to feel pity, at the expense of respect, for those tortured and enslaved. This story of resistance was as important to me growing up as the story of oppression.
I was nine or ten when I heard my dad’s verbal support of the miners as they scuffled with the police during the UK miners’ strike in 1984/1985. My dad, who normally took a non-violent stance on social issues and political affairs, was supporting their resistance and protest. I understood that there was something very important and essential about collective power and resistance; that liberation itself was the key to emotional, spiritual and collective wellbeing. More recently, I was on my way to the British Library to meet Gillian when we were on sabbatical writing this book, and a tall White man shoved aggressively into me as he went past. As is my tendency when someone pushes into me, I responded by saying ‘sorry’ for getting in his way and as I did heard him call me a ‘stupid Black c**t’. I could have carried on walking and absorbed his racist sexist attack, but I chose instead to turn around and challenge him to repeat what he had said directly to me. Instead he kept walking. I reflected on my way to the library how common those sorts of experiences are for me and other Black people. It felt important for me in that moment to give back what he had tried to leave me with. Despite feeling angry and distressed, it was also important for me not to spread hate with another hateful remark back. This mini protest enabled me to both give it back and let it go.
My parents
My mother is my ultimate heroine when it comes to being a courageous woman, but I did not always appreciate what I now appreciate about her. Growing up, my mother’s commitments to others, to community and to action, were at times experienced by me as absence, and I wanted more of her presence. My mother worked hard and was always tired. Bullies in my primary school made fun of how she dressed and her tendency to fall asleep in public places. I now hugely admire my mother’s dedication, strength and fearlessness. In particular, she embodies a different way of being a woman than is popularised by the media. I remember telling my nursery teacher that my mum could chop apples in half with her hand and open bottle tops with her teeth. Of course my imagination was running away with me, but I believed my mother was strong, at a time when feminine beauty was supposed to be weak, soft and subordinate. Despite tiredness, my mother is not enervated. My mother takes pride in her appearance but not based on narrow Western definitions of beauty, as she prioritises comfort and warmth. My mother speaks her mind and takes up space in a world where women are supposed to be silent objects of an authoritarian gaze. She is deeply loving and warm, but not vapid. She challenges the tyranny of the Beauty Myth2 without wasting time getting to know it from the inside. Every time I act from what feels true to my nature, my body and my authentic sense of myself, I am embodying her. I was told by my parents that I was capable; that being female, Black and working class were not limits. To this day I will attempt at least once to carry or lift something that most people around me think is beyond my small frame and nine times out of ten I will manage it!
I would describe my father as pro-woman, and he told us that he vowed at a young age to make sure his daughters (in particular) would not only be educated but would contribute to making the world kinder and more just. This is not to say that, both my parents, do not in some ways uphold traditional views about gender, but both embody ways of doing their gender that is opposite to dominant discourses about what is ‘natural’. My mother is strong physically, emotionally and mentally; she is practical, hardworking, business-minded, fearless, savvy and outspoken. My father is gentle, spiritual, intuitive, sensitive, romantic and loves flowers (of course these are not fixed positions and both also exhibit the qualities I’ve assigned the other). As a result, I respect men who similarly connect to and love the feminine inside of them.
Experiences of prejudice
I have three sisters and one brother, who I experience as existing beyond traditional ideas about what it means to be men and women. As a result I have always questioned dichotomous and fixed understandings about gender that exclude the possibility that there are as many different genders and sexualities as there are people. The type of Black progressive masculinity prevalent in my upbringing is often treated in mainstream society as an oxymoron. Despite the fact that there are alternative and progressive masculinities emerging within mainstream society all the time, the persistent image in mainstream society of Black masculinity does not mirror this diversity. I have been acutely aware of the mostly denigrating way African-Caribbean men are viewed in British society (and globally) and have deep admiration for Black men surviving in this context of White male supremacy. In fact I would say that I love and embrace the African man in me, the way my father seems to love and embrace the African woman in him.
As someone who identifies as working class, I am also sensitive to the ways in which mainstream society and media seem to scrutinise, ridicule and demonise the working class (see, for example, UK TV programmes such as Benefit Street on Channel 4 and Illegal Immigrants and Proud on Channel 5) and refer to White working-class culture as ‘chavy’ and unsophisticated. My experience of racism is that it is not the sole property of uneducated, reactionary people, or confined to the past, but operates in many different ways in the present, that I often do not have the opportunity to talk about, given the anxieties this raises in others. I often feel shut down by a change in conversation or focus on some other form of discrimination when talking about racism.
Creativity and community
Growing up, I was also surrounded by examples of the links between resistance to oppression and creativity. On one hand, we were encouraged to respect authority – for example, to behave in school and listen to teachers – while on the other hand my parents communicated a respect for subjugated discourses and mistrust of dominant discourses such as the medical model. We were taught about ancient wisdoms from Africa and Asia, such as Ayuveda, yoga, meditation, shamanism, Chinese medicine and African herbalism.
Creativity, and in particular music, was a big part of my life and I tended to listen to music that had a social and political message.3 My mother would often burst into song, filling the air with a joyful energy imbued with wisdom and surrender; the type of surrender that lets go, rather than gives in; that lifts you up not pushes you down; that promotes peace, not passivity. The power of creativity, much more than merely an escape, was a means of simultaneously digging deeper into ourselves and connecting to an infinite resource beyond ourselves.
I started to write because I could not always speak; in fact I was an elective mute as a child and struggled to have confidence in my own voice. Being socially awkward and shy, I would hide in the library at school break-time and read books, as reading connected me to others and helped me listen to myself. I loved poetry and Irish literature and from a young age was drawn to books about social justice and celebrating subjugated cultures. The more I read the more I developed a sense of myself and each book led me to another voice that gave dimension to mine. My secondary school English teacher gave me Beloved by Toni Morrison, which blew me away. I re-read Beloved four times and each time it led me to other books that expanded the edges of my understanding of liberation: Ain’t I a Woman? by bell hooks (1982), Refusing to be a Man by John Stoltenberg (1990) and Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (1984). What began as reading in response to feeling lonely at school resulted in finding community and consciousness in books; much like the hand in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, coming out of history, and the consciousness and experiences of others, to make links with mine (Bennett, 2004).
The books I read mirrored the strong affinity I felt with other oppressed people, and my family’s emphasis on being part of a global community. I was in awe of the special qualities you acquire as a result of surviving oppression. The world of reading opened me up to different forms of resistance throughout history and the dialogue that took place between activists in different parts of the world; for example:
- In 1964 Ernesto Che Guevara (14 June 1928–9 October 1967) spoke before the UN in favour of Paul Leroy Robeson (9 April 1898–23 January 1976), an African-American singer and actor who became involved with the Civil Rights Movement; in support of murdered (by the American and Belgian government) Patrice Lumumba (2 July 1925–11 February 1961), the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); against racist segregation in the Southern USA and against the South African apartheid regime. Ernesto Guevara fought with a Cuban force of 100 Afro-Cubans and Congolese fighters in the DRC, against a force composed partly of White South African mercenaries. Guevara offered assistance to fight alongside the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) for their independence from the Portuguese. As a result, he was heralded by Malcolm X (19 May 1925–21 February 1965), Nelson Mandela and the Black Panther’s Stokely Carmichael (Anderson, 1997).
- Leo Tolsoy (9 September 1828–20 November 1910), Russian writer, philosopher and political thinker and Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi, leader of Indian nationalism in British-occupied India and civil rights and liberation campaigner, were in regular correspondence with each other (Leo Tolstoy wrote a letter to Mahatma Gandhi about non-violent resistance and love as a weapon). Tolstoy’s ideas on non-violent resistance are said to have heavily influenced Gandhi (Anand, 2010).
- Bayard Rustin (17 March 1912–24 August 1987) an African-American civil rights and gay activist, brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the African-American civil rights movement from India, which helped Martin Luther King Jr. become an international symbol of peace and non-violence (Rustin, Carbado & Weise, 2003).
- Bayard Rustin supported human rights struggles worldwide and consulted with Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Nnamde Azikewe of Nigeria in the 1950s. In the USA he helped organise the Committee to Support South African Resistance, which later became the American Committee on Africa. In addition, Bayard Rustin supported the rights of refugee people and gay people (Rustin et al., 2003).
- Nelson Mandela’s 1997 speech in Durban, South Africa, described how he gained strengt...
