Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro

Schooling, Community, and Gender in East Africa

Amy Stambach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135959227
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Sambach brings together an ethnograhic study of a school and community in East Africa. Stambach focuses on the role school plays in the development of the children's identity and relationships to their parents and community, as well as in the development of the region. At issue here are the competing influences of Western modernity and the cultural traditions of East Africa-ideas about gender roles, sexuality, identity, and family and communal obligations are all at stake. Stambach looks at the controversial practice of female circumcision in the context of school and community teachings about girls' bodies and examines cultural signifiers like music, clothing and food to discuss the tensions in the region.

1

“WHAT EDUCATED YOUTH DO THESE DAYS”

DIVERGENT VIEWS OF SECONDARY SCHOOLING

“Why are we selling our land and cows to send our children to secondary school? I really don’t understand it,” asserted Joshua Makia, a seventy-year-old man living on Mount Kilimanjaro.

“Yes,” responded Mzee Lema, “we’ve given up everything so that our sons—even our daughters!—can go to school.”

October 1991

“These educated girls think they can come back and rule the roost! We pay for their uniforms and school fees, and then they come and tell us we are no good, that we are backward and traditional.”

Mama Angela, mother of a secondary school graduate, living on Mount Kilimanjaro. January 1993

“Education is the best thing we can give our sons and daughters. Withouteducation, our children are nothing. With education, they can talk to the world.They can get jobs and move out of the village.”

Baba Elimbora, father of three secondary school students, who lives on Mount Kilimanjaro and works much of the year in Nairobi, Kenya. October 1996

SCHOOLS provide one of the clearest and most illuminating windows into the complexities and contradictions of cultural change. Whether it is a new institution built at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro or a charter school established in the United States, schools condense a myriad of ideas about gender, generation, history, and culture. Disagreements about schooling are sometimes profound, as when parents privately pull children from classes, or students quietly resist their teachers’ lessons. But regardless of the degree, debates about education provide a lens into social life beyond classrooms. They help us understand the connections people make between textbooks and the wider society, and they illustrate that the meaning and scope of schooling is often different from what is detailed in curricula and policies.

It was with this knowledge about the centrality of schooling in social life that I chose to study education on Mount Kilimanjaro. I was drawn to Mount Kilimanjaro because I had heard that the Tanzanian government had been using schooling for nearly three decades to develop a new national culture. What, I wondered, was the government doing in schools to bring so many different people into a common domain? What was the official idea of “culture” and how were people responding to it? I was also intrigued by the many reports I had read in U.S. newspapers about international agencies providing educational services to “poor countries” overseas. Many of these projects focused on teaching girls how to improve their lives and gain economic autonomy.

The Clinton Administration will announce on Wednesday [at a United Nations conference in Copenhagen] the creation of a program to help keep girls in schools in Africa, Asia, and Latin America….

“In some countries, especially as they reach adolescence, girls don’t attend school because parents fear they are not safe,” Dr. Daulaire [chief policy adviser to the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development] said.

Teachers will be trained to accept and integrate girls into a classroom where they might normally be ignored…. [New York Times, March 8, 1995, p. 12]

How did such programs fit into the government’s plans to fashion an autonomous national culture through education? How did they fit in with local views about what educated girls and boys ought to learn and become? Reports on schooling presented a “school-to-the-rescue” model of education, one in which schooling transformed “traditional beliefs” into “modern practices.”

I wondered how the school could be so much to so many different people. When I arrived on Mount Kilimanjaro, I encountered many more ideas about what school is and ought to be. To some people, schooling signified the demise of what they saw and valued as traditional culture. It raised concern about corrosive, Western influences on indigenous Chagga society, and it interfered with what some people saw as conventional relationships between men and women. Some Tanzanians, for instance, said that school-educated girls were undermining the norms that structured social life and everyday interactions—that they were contributing to economic decline and underdevelopment by not fulfilling their domestic duties. To others, the same institution was a sign of social progress. It attested to the possibility that anybody—rich or poor, male or female, old or young—could become educated and move up the social ladder, and that “the poor” could be lifted from a substandard of poverty to a higher social and economic level.

One of the issues most hotly discussed on Mount Kilimanjaro had to do with gendered and age-related social and cultural changes. Schooling was seen as reframing the ways many people thought children ought to interact with adults and as disrupting appropriate gendered relations among and between Chagga men and women (Mzee Lema’s view, for instance, quoted above). Other people, however, including Baba Elimbora (the last of those quoted above) thought education helped people “talk to the world.” Schooling, in their views, was a desirable institution, one through which “modern families” could be created, nurtured, and reproduced.

Taken together, arguments such as Mzee Lema’s and Baba Elimbora’s suggest that, no matter one’s point of view, schools are often pivotal social institutions around which the configuration of society as a whole is imagined, contested, and transformed, and that schooling provides one of the clearest institutions for observing debates about culture, generation, gender, and history.

Understanding this multifaceted character of secondary schooling—as a sign of cultural demise and of economic reinvigoration, of state control and international development, of utopian ideals and social conflicts—led me down conceptual paths that I initially thought were unrelated to schools. It involved me in discussions about the symbolism of local foods, the meanings of lineage, inheritance, and marriage, and the significance of circumcision and initiation. It took me to many places and people that ostensibly had nothing to do with education: ritual specialists, lineage elders, church officials, even the singer Michael Jackson. And it helped me reflect on some of the central issues in the anthropology of education and gender—especially the ways that relations of power and authority are shaped through and socially attributed to schooling.

Schooling, I came to see, marked the definition, impact, and reshaping of new forms of gendered and generational differences. It corresponded with the division of labor along novel social lines that often marginalized particular groups from economic and political resources, and it coincided with the creation of a sharp dichotomy between “traditional beliefs” and “modern practices.” But it also contained a constructive mode that provided a language for identifying and strengthening relationships among various social groups, including educated women who sought to establish lives beyond the immediate social and economic control of fathers and brothers.

I was interested in exploring the positive outcomes and the seeming contradictions that schools condensed, for it seemed that the top-down transforming power of schools over society had been overemphasized in educational reports. I wanted to work in an anthropological vein, to see how schools express broad transformations within families and how beliefs and practices that constitute schooling also constitute broader relations in contemporary social life. What better place to look at social manifestations of age, gender, and culture, I thought, than in an institution—the school—that models ideas about identity for younger generations? What better place to think about the macro-organization of societies than in institutions that claim to be microcosms of them?

Like most anthropologists, I have set out to write an ethnography that moves beyond institutional and geographic locations. To be sure, my focus is schooling on Mount Kilimanjaro, but it also includes the cultural ways in which schools and society reflect and act upon one another. In this regard, I am committed to something Clifford Geertz once said in a famous passage: that anthropologists don’t study local places per se, they study in local places (1973:22), and, elsewhere (Geertz 1994), that an anthropological study of “foreign cultures” provides us with a way for thinking about alternatives for ourselves, not alternatives to who we are. Distinctions between “to” and “for,” and between “in” and “about” a place, stimulate reflection on the meaning of self and other. They help us think about the processes by which educational institutions—particularly schools—model and reflect these distinctions for particular cadres of society. I began this study in the spirit of explaining the many, often contradictory ways age and gender are formulated in connection with schooling, and it is in this spirit that I offer the following description of life on Mount Kilimanjaro—not, in the first instance, as a picture of what schooling on Mount Kilimanjaro is all about, but as a glimpse of some of the ways we, as human beings, variably organize social life around and through educational institutions.

AN ILLUSTRATION FROM VILLAGE LIFE

The core of this work is based on fieldwork conducted across more than half a decade, from language study in the summer of 1990 to field research from 1991 to early 1993, and again in October 1996. I would like to begin the ethnography by describing some of the setting in which I am situating my argument. I present first an episode from a household where I lived during the first few months of my stay and where I observed the changing faces of students as they went about their daily lives. I then set out the conceptual issues that inform the narrative of this study and provide an overview of the location, village, and school where much of this study is based. I conclude this chapter with a synopsis of later chapters, outlining briefly the overarching themes and arguments of this work.

Before moving to a rented house in the village, I lived for two months in a household with seven children and two parents. Three of these children were students at Mkufi Secondary School, the school that serves as the centerpiece of my analysis. The oldest of these students was Stellah Mbasa, my eventual assistant, friend, confidante, and housemate.¹ At home, children’s operative mode (at least in the presence of their parents) was usually one of deference to adults. Students—particularly older girls—kept the basic operations of the household going. Every morning they put on their clothes to the loud shouts of Mama Elimbora²—“Stellah! Catherine! Elimbora! Lilian! Eudora! Kivawafo! Elingaya!” Mama Elimbora would call each of them in turn. Slowly at first, the oldest girls dressed, fetched water, washed clothes, and mopped interior floors. Boys in the household were charged with feeding the guinea fowl and watering the vegetable garden and flowers. Morning duties were in general less onerous than what was expected of children after school.At the end of the day, Stellah and Catherine were supposed to cook dinner, Elimbora to tend to her younger brothers. Male cousins in the neighboring house, some of whom ate meals with this extended family, were tasked with the project of cutting grass and cleaning and feeding the goat and her kids. This was the plan, though not always the practice: children were often looking instead for some diversion.

In the afternoon hours, before these children’s parents came home, the “boom box” came out of the locked cupboard, and Bobbie Brown, Black Box, and Michael Jackson tapes were played over and over again, often to the whine of straining batteries. The doors were flung open—windows too—so that neighboring friends might hear and join the party. To me, these were familiar signs of adolescent culture, flirtations with freedom and innocent rebellion. In fact, I welcomed this time in the late afternoon when I felt I could relax and connect with the songs and scenario. The children told me to “make myself at home” (jisikie nyumbani³), but the neighbors— adults and other youth in the community—had mixed opinions about the afternoon brouhaha.

Mama Lucky, who lived catty-corner from the Mbasas and who had married one of Mr. Mbasa’s father’s brother’s sons,⁴ loosely endorsed the afternoon release, calling it “what educated youth do these days.” She said she was rather amused by the chaotic dancing when she came one day to collect her daughter, Lucky. Lucky was one of the quieter Form 2 students but a ready participant in this “disco” culture.⁵ The neighborhood boy who lived across the road said he too was intrigued by the students’ loud music. Like a fraction—about 5 percent⁶—of the children in the area, he had quit school at Standard IV and spent most of his days farming and tending to livestock. He never joined the celebrations inside the house but instead hung around the main road and watched.

Less appreciative, Bwana Mafue, an itinerant worker, scoffed at the music when he came to the door looking for Baba Elimbora. Muttering that such dancing and loudness was disrespectful and that these girls were behaving inappropriately, he attributed the “nonsense” (ujinga) to Western education (elimu ya kizungu) and condemned schools for ruining African women. His view that schooling was particularly damaging to women—and to a patrilineal social order in which inheritance is reckoned through male lines—was shared by several others in the community, including Bibi Lenga, a ninety-year-old woman who lived across the road in a small wattle-anddaub house.

Bibi Lenga said quite firmly that “girls who danced this way will never get married or have good husbands.” She clarified that the sexual allure of the song lyrics was not the problem. (I translated the lyrics the children were singing and asked if they offended; she said not.) At issue was the general revelry—an indication, she said, that the girls’ parents had no authority. If parents could not control their daughters, why would men want to marry them? If educated girls were so proud of themselves that they could defy understandings about social deference, how would they behave in a married setting in which they would be expected (according to Bibi Lenga) to submit to husbands’ authority? Both she and Bwana Mafue suggested that schooling contributed to girls’ moral decline, and their comments clued me in to some of the ways educated young women, more so than young men, were construed through some lines of social discourse as a threat to the normative order and Chagga tradition.

Their comments provided an early theme: that of the emblematic value of schooling as a means for explaining social changes between men and women and between younger and older generations. And they gave concrete form—in the lives of these students and girls—to the general sentiment that school-educated girls were too independent and that youth in general were straining traditions.

Yet school-educated girls and their male counterparts did not see themselves this way. The girls in the Mbasa household typically described themselves as “educated” and “developed,” and they described Bibi Lenga and others who had not attended school as “backward” and “superstitious.” I often heard students talk about unschooled people in derisive terms, even as they also respected elders in other contexts for the social powers old people embodied. Uneducated people were responsible, many students put it, for “holding us back from achieving modernity” and for “keeping us in the bush” instead of “helping us get jobs and moving to the city.” According to some students, it was not they who threatened custom, but “ignorant people” who had not gone to school and who, as a consequence, did not know how to adapt their culture to “modern ways.”

Students’ views that old people held them back were manifest in many settings, including situations in which students avoided unschooled elders whom they feared might curse (laani) or jinx (nuksi) them. Chief among students’ critics were elders who thought students were “showing off” and trying to be “bigger than themselves.” Some old people were especially critical of schoolgirls who wore stylish clothing and makeup and had salon-styled hair. Others felt that fashionably dressed girls were respectable yet too assertive in their independence.

Especially censorious were some members of the community who self-identified as “born-again Christians”—religious persons who, as a whole, tended to be school-educated themselves but who sometimes questioned the moral implications of students’ material cultur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 "WHAT EDUCATED YOUTH DO THESE DAYS": DIVERGENT VIEWS OF SECONDARY SCHOOLING
• 2 SCHOOLING, INHERITANCE, AND BANANA GROVES: SIGNS AND SYMBOLS OF LOCAL LIFE
• 3 "SHOULD WE DRINK BANANA BEER OR COCA-COLA?": REDEFINING THE SIGNS OF TRADITIONALISM
• 4 "EDUCATION IS MY HUSBAND": GENERATIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS
• 5 "BOYS, PRESERVE YOUR BULLETS; GIRLS, LOCK YOUR BOXES": GENDERED MESSAGES IN CLASSES AND THE CURRICULUM
• 6 "THINGS WITH SOCKS": STUDENT LIFE AND POPULAR CULTURE
• 7 "MOUNTAINS NEVER MEET BUT PEOPLE DO": RELATIONSHIPS BUILT THROUGH SCHOOLING
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX