Ubuntu Relational Love

Decolonizing Black Masculinities

Devi Dee Mucina

• Verlag: University of Manitoba Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780887555862
• Thema: Sozialwissenschaften
• Thema: Genderforschung

Ubuntu is a Bantu term meaning humanity. It is also a philosophical and ethical system of thought, from which definitions of humanness, togetherness, and social politics of difference arise. Devi Dee Mucina is a Black Indigenous Ubuntu man. In Ubuntu Relational Love, he uses Ubuntu oratures as tools to address the impacts of Euro-colonialism while regenerating relational Ubuntu governance structures.

Called "millet granaries" to reflect the nourishing and sustaining nature of Indigenous knowledges, and written as letters addressed to his mother, father, and children, Mucina's oratures take up questions of geopolitics, social justice, and resistance. Working through personal and historical legacies of dispossession and oppression, he challenges the fragmentation of Indigenous families and cultures and decolonizes impositions of white supremacy and masculinity.

Drawing on anti-racist, African feminist, and Ubuntu theories and critically influenced by Indigenous masculinities scholarship in Canada, Ubuntu Relational Love is a powerful and engaging book.

MILLET GRANARY 1

Kwakukhona as a Methodology

As stated earlier, each Millet Granary starts with some methodological questions, which I use to guide my writing because these questions help me contemplate the geopolitics of my orature from an Indigenous Ubuntu philosophy, which is shaped by change across Africa and across the global context. This said, I would like to foreground these methodological questions by stating that they guided me in creating a coherent written structure, but they should not be seen as guiding impositions on the readers. In fact, some readers with limited understanding of Ubuntu may find these questions to be irrelevant. Each Millet Granary also concludes with some philosophical questions as a way of reflecting what stood out for me as educational, but this may not be true for you as the reader. It is my hope that you will get what you require based on your own context.

Methodological questions that guided my writing of this Millet Granary:

1. How does the Ubuntu orature work structurally as a knowledge disseminator?
2. What are the responsibilities of the orator in Ubuntu education?
3. How does the Ubuntu orature regenerate Indigenous knowledges?

Sanibonani Khumalo and Nandi,1

There is so much to share with you, but before I go on, I must give you the context of why I am sharing and how this sharing will help you understand your Ubuntu heritage. Colonialism has and continues every day to silence us from sharing our Ubuntu truths by over-conflating the limitations and problems of Ubuntu governance. This is not to say that I wish to shield Ubuntu governance from honest criticism. On the contrary, I welcome honest critical engagement as a tool of betterment and not as a tool of silencing and shaming in order to dispose us of our Ubuntu governance. Let me be the first to inform you that the current brand of Indigenous Ubuntu governance has oppressive and marginalizing practices. However, as these Ubuntu institutions are a reflection of us, we have a duty to make sure that they also reflect our reality and, where they fail to do so, we should come together and create a solution. This is how you create responsible democratic participation. No other people can give another people democracy and freedom. These things are achieved through a process of self-driven action and self-reflection about our future aspirations. Let us not allow colonialism and neo-colonialism to fragment us any further. To live an informed Ubuntu life is to create a consciousness struggle, as Ben Okri (1997) states, “Our lives have become narrow enough. Our dreams strain to widen them, to bring to our waking consciousness the awareness of greater discoveries that lie just beyond the limits of our sights” (4). The narrowing of Blackness inevitably narrows what humanity is and this is the opposite of my aim. Yet modern-day trends of academic discourse have labelled the work of individual historical remembering as navel-gazing and, in so doing, the experience of the individual, especially the colonized individual, has been rendered unreliable (Okri 1997). In other words, the individual memory is not worth listening to because there is too much mystery in it. So whom do we listen to?

The politics of state society have determined who we need to listen to. Again, I will take us back to Ben Okri (1997), who conveys to us who has been sanctioned to speak when he states: “The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things. Politicians, heads of state, kings, religious leaders, soldiers, the rich, the powerful [the scholars in high academics]—they all fancy themselves the masters of this earthly kingdom. They speak to us of facts, policies, statistics, programmes, abstract and severe moralities. But the dreams of the people are beyond them, and would trouble them” (4).

I do not legislate to anyone how to live. I only share my experiences and my remembered fragmented knowledge in hopes of educating our children to love their Blackness, because it is a source of great power. The oratures that I will share using the Ubuntu philosophy show that the power of our Black knowledge has been the cause of our being silenced, being dislocated, being disconnected, and being erased from our own history. In an effort to dispossess us of our Black knowledge, compulsory able-bodied whiteness with its structures of sexism, classism, and racism has endeavoured to make our own Black minds turn against themselves by creating doubt about the existence of Blackness as a powerful force of life (hooks 2000; Okri 1997).

I want you for a minute to consider the implication of Jared Diamond’s (1997) Pulitzer Prize–winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. In his prologue, Diamond writes: “Authors are regularly asked by journalists to summarize a long book in one sentence. For this book, here is such a sentence: ‘History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves’” (25). Yet he abandons this position when he cannot ignore the continual Black knowledge that contradicts his theory presented in Guns, Germs, and Steel. So what does he do? He becomes the racist that he claims he is not. He starts to play the biology game. The same biology game that, he states in his prologue, is not a viable explanation for the difference among people. In the case of Black Africa, he makes it his foundational position for explaining Blackness. Chapter 19 of Diamond’s book is entitled “How Africa Became Black” (376). In this chapter, as communicated by his title, we encounter his racist scholarship, which he tries to use to discredit Black knowledge, while at the same time he appropriates it as anything but Black knowledge.

To survive such a constant attack on Blackness, Malidoma Patrice Somâe (1994), in Of Water and the Spirit, reminds us that due to slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and the marking of our bodies as inferior beings, some of us have had to forget the power of our Blackness as a way to survive while, on the other hand, some of us have had to remember our Blackness and our spiritual past as a way to survive. To those Black people who have remembered our African ways, I hope the oratures that I share will encourage you to keep educating us, the segments of our Black communities that have forgotten our Blackness as a means of survival. To those Black people who have had to forget, suppress, and hide their Blackness in order to survive, I hope my primer (an Ubuntu cultural introduction that informs the knowing Ubuntu that cultural teachings are about to be shared) of “Many Millet Granaries ago” conveys to you that we are still here, we are still strong, and we still remember who we are, even if it is only in fragments. If we share our fragmented oratures, we get a fuller and richer picture of our Black knowledges, which helps us understand who we are. The Ubuntu have always used the orature to extol the power of experience as a teaching tool. I can use no other research tool, as this landmass called Africa is the first orature, and Ben Okri (1997) assures us that “Africa breathes stories. In Africa everything is a story, everything is a repository of stories. Spiders, the wind, a leaf, a tree, the moon, silence, a glance, a mysterious old man, an owl at midnight, a sign, a white stone on a branch, a single yellow bird of omen, an inexplicable death, an unprompted laughter, an egg by the river, are all impregnated with stories. In Africa things are stories, they store stories, and they yield stories at the right moment of dreaming, when we are open to the secret side of objects and moods” (115).

Here I quote Ben Okri’s narration of oratures in an effort to explicate that oratures enable the encoding of my embodied forms of knowing and learning, as expressed by Stuart Hall (1997). To me, an Ubuntu, orature is a functional and viable (re-)search approach that one ignores at one’s own peril. History reminds us that the orature is done with the purpose of maintaining cultural continuity while, at other times, the orature allows for cultural directional change. The orature honours our memory (sacred history) while at the same time validating our Ubuntu spirit of change because the only constant in our lives is change. Put simply, our oratures are our efforts to create shared interpretation structures about experience so that change has shared meaning.

Nandi and Khumalo, it is my hope that by illustrating to you the teaching power of the Ubuntu orature, you will each have a starting point for educating your children as I am educating you. So, listen well, if an old one were to utter the following introductory words—in Shona “Paivapo,” in Ndebele “Kwakukhona,” or in Zulu “Kwesukasukela”—the meaning is always the same: “There was this happening” or “Many, many Millet Granaries ago.” Upon hearing these words draw yourselves nearer to the person that has uttered them, because these phrases let you know that the orator is offering you an Ubuntu cultural teaching from olden times. In response to the oratorical prompting of “Paivapo,” in Shona the audience responds by saying “Dzepfunde,” which is to say, “I am ready to learn from your pedagogical orature,” or “I am ready to receive your teaching.” Each time the old one introduces a new setting in the orature, a different character, or conveys the objectives of the characters in the orature, she draws in the audience by saying “Paivapo.” Another point communicated by “Dzepfunde,” as prompted by “Paivapo,” is that, through their response, they, the audience, are actively acknowledging their consent to participate in the Ubuntu orature. Their response of “Dzepfunde” also acknowledges their familiarity with Ubuntu orature as a relational pedagogy in their social acquisition of holistic Ubuntu knowledge, which is grounded in supporting the well-being of all Ubuntu. This prompting goes on until the old one is convinced that she and her audience are synchronized in their orientation toward the teaching methods of that particular orature. Mthikazi Roselina Masubelele (2008), in her dissertation titled “The Role of Bible Translation in the Development of Written Zulu: A Corpus-Based Study,” conveys how the Ubuntu Shona structure of call and response is also exemplified among the amaZulu by quoting Noverino N. Canonici’s Zulu Oral Traditions (1996, 55):

Zulu storytelling follows a specific pattern. It has an opening formula which the storyteller usually uses which begins thus: Kwesukasukela! (Once upon a time, it happened) to which the audience’s response is Cosi (small quantity). During the storytelling the audience will be active participants, joining in song and using various facial expressions and gestures that correspond with what is happening in the story. At the end of the story the storyteller will wind up her tale using a concluding formula, which will vary from one storyteller to the other, the most popular being Cosi cosi iyaphela (This is the end of our story), and the audience will respond by saying Siyabonga! Yaze yamnandi indaba yakho (We thank you! What a nice tale it was!). (Masubelele 2008, 59–60)

Embedded within this reciprocal relational structure of communication is the balance between giving and taking. This point is well researched and communicated by the respected Indigenous scholar of the Sto:lo and Xaxli’p First Nations, Jo-Ann Archibald / Q’um Q’um Xiiem (2008), in Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body and Spirit. Archibald reminds us that Indigenous oratures engage through interactive performance, meaning that both the orator and listener are actively engaged by the fact that they have very specific functions to perform in the making of the orature. The performance of the orature makes it whole in the Ubuntu structure. The repetitive qualities of an orature help facilitate the listeners in holding what they deem to be important lessons within an orature. Achiller Isaiah, may he find his way to the ancestors, was fond of saying, “The markers of an Indigenous African orature are many, but the lessons are few.”

Since the dawn of human societies, and as Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison has poignantly stated, there are no other universal words that pay such noble homage to human memory than “Once upon a time….” In Morrison’s own words, “This opening phrase of what must be the oldest sentence in the world, and the earliest one we remember from childhood, is the foundation stone of things memory—one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge” (as cited in Goss and Goss 1995, 15). Unquestionably, for Toni Morrison and most chroniclers of societal unfolding events, the orature is an important faculty of engaging critical regeneration and honest self-criticism while offering a collective vision for a community’s manifest destiny. By engaging with Ubuntu orature, I hope to make our African oratures talk to other people in complex, challenging, and sometimes contradictory ways. I want us to be comfortable and uncomfortable with each other’s oratures because this keeps us questioning how we matter to each other from a position of respectful curiosity. As we come to understand and know each other through relational respectful curiosity, it is my hope that we will seek to be transformed intellectually and spiritually, so that we see each other and matter to each other. Baba always reminded me that it was our ability to inquire about the aspects of an orature that moved us from comfort to discomfort, which made the orature a good teaching tool. Yet as the queer feminist scholar Roewan Crowe (2004) states in her essay “Crafting Tales of Trauma”: “My inquiry is a deliberation on telling and an actual telling. Throughout the text, I am a reluctant storyteller in process, carefully considering the questions: Why tell? How to tell? What is it like to tell?” (124).

The tensions expressed by Crowe (2004) are also my tensions. I have found myself questioning why I was telling our stories, especially when speaking from my own location, as it only seemed to highlight my own contextual experience. Self-doubt and questioning were at times great. At such times of questioning, I was tempted to change my work but, somehow, the following Maseko Ngoni proverb made me believe that I was on firm ground for speaking to our people. The Maseko Ngoni proverb states: “The orature of one cannot be told without unfolding the oarture of many,” and, to further diversify our many Ubuntu voices, I am also using written sources as a guide for establishing and introducing a wider understanding of Ubuntu. Yet most of the oratures that I have of Ubuntu teaching were given to me using oratues. I am aware that I share these oratures using colonially imposed structures of textual objectivism, which our Indigenous oratures do not fit. In the arts, these colonial approaches of textual objectivism are offset to some extent by textual subjectivism, but these methodologies do not centre Indigenous Ubuntu consciousness as represented by our oratures. To centre Indigenous Ubuntu consciousness, we must embody a new methodology in our using of English textual engagement. I call this new Ubuntu method of engaging Indigenous oratures in textual form “Indigenous relational sensitivitism,” which I hope creates an emotive textual encounter and response to Ubuntu teaching. I also want to point out that the use of the term “Indigenous relational sensitivitism” is new only when it refers to its usage in English textual engagement because, within Ubuntu...