BOOK REPORT
TITLE: RECLAIMING INDIGENOUS VOICES
AND VISION
EDITOR: MARIE BATTISTE
PUBLISHER: UBC PRESS, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada. 2000
PAGES: 295
PRICE: $29.95
REVIEWER: KOFI AKOSAH-SARPONG
Five hundred years ago when the European colonialists
crashed into Africa, they imposed their definition of God and progress and rule of law.
This suppressed the indigenous values and stifled their inner growth. Of recent times as
knowledge booms and the world shrinks, letting each culture see each other, how important
an African culture is increasingly becoming clear. Many African indigenous values, for
long branded as "primitive" by the colonialists anthropologists, who were
heavily using places such as Africa as their laboratory to test all kinds of silly
theories, are now being touted by many a Western scientist as very important, especially
if the world is to be saved from the madness of science. Increasingly, it is becoming
clear today that the Western practice and notion of "progress" is unsustainable
for humanity, and that the Africans notion of balance between the physical and the
metaphysical is the best option for sustainability in the global context.
In 1999, the United Nations Environmental Programme and the world
Meteorological Organization came to the conclusion that human beings are dangerously
influencing global warming and that "climate change is likely to have wide-ranging
and mostly adverse impacts on human health, with significant loss of life." For this
reason, indigenous peoples, from Africa to North, from the western hemisphere to Asia, are
fighting to reclaim their values, which they have come to know, compared to the values of
the western world, is not after all "primitive." The world, including the
Western world, would be saved if indigenous people protect their values against the
insanity of science. It is in this context that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni had said
that, "Interference has brought stagnation and regression. The more orphaned we are,
the better for Africa. We will have to rely on ourselves. We will have to go back to the
year 1500, were we left off building an economic integrated in itself, able to produce its
own food, its own tools, its own weapons."
Reclaiming Indigenous Voices and Vision reveals attempts by
non-Western peoples to revive their long suppressed values by Westerners who do not
understand them and whose socio-cultural ills are increasingly spilling over to their
societies. The book is a collection of essays by 19 indigenous people. It has four main
parts. The first part is entitled Western Door: Mapping Colonialism, which tackles such
issues like the context of the state of nature and indigenous peoples and post-colonial
colonialism. The second part is Northern Door: Diagnosing Colonialism, which looks at
topics like post-colonial ghost dancing: diagnosing European colonialism, jagged
worldviews colliding, applied post-colonial clinical and research strategies, and
transforming the realities of colonialism: voyage of self-discovery. The third part is
Eastern Door: Healing Colonized Indigenous Peoples, which explores issues like the
"repressive tolerance" of cultural peripheries and from hand to mouth: the
post-colonial politics of oral and written traditions. And the last part is entitled
Southern Door: Visioning the Indigenous Renaissance, which plays with topics such as
protecting and respecting indigenous knowledge and empowering aboriginal thought. The book
has two appendixes: These are Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of the Heritage
of Indigenous Peoples and the Saskatoon Declaration of Indigenous Culture Restoration and
Policy Recommendation on cultural restoration developed at the Saskatoon Summer Institute.
What all these chapters and parts say is that indigenous knowledge,
made thousands of years ago through observations of nature and other elements, including
oral transmissions, is inextricable and very important part for indigenous educators and
scholars. The Supreme Court of Canada, among the growing such developments, has made it
legal that the legal profession, in Delgamuukw v.The Queen (1997), to
include and respect indigenous oral traditions in standards of evidence, overruling
centuries of development of the British rules of evidence. In this regard, indigenous
scholarship and research, which incorporates dialogue with and participation of indigenous
communities, are grounds to transform the post-colonial state. This scholarship has come
about from the need to comprehend, resist, and transform the crises related to the dual
concerns of the effect that colonization had impacted on indigenous communities. These
include the prowling erosion of indigenous languages, knowledge, and culture as a result
of colonization.
The clarification of post-colonial indigenous thought at the end of
the 20th century is the mission of the book. The work, though, is not
definitive but sound reflection of their voices, their analyses and visions of indigenous
Africans and their ilk elsewhere. This has occurred because colonialism worked on system
of exploitation, domination, and oppression, leaving behind a traumatic legacy in the
places like Africa. The book cites Franz Fanons The Wretched of the Earth
that, "The colonized will first manifest his aggressiveness which had been deposited
in his bones against his own people" but will eventually turn on everything.
Oppression was everywhere, and so was the technology of social control and death."
The massive hemorrhage of colonialism on Africans is revealed.
"The infamy of the Atlantic slave trade and the carnage of the Middle Passage
represent the largest and most callous forced migration upon any people in the world.
Conservative estimates of Indigenous Africans forced to be a commodity of the Atlantic
slave trade range from 15 to 20 million people; recent writers believe that a better
estimate is 60 to 150 million. For example, in1650, Africas population was 21.2
percent of the known world population; by 1920 it was 7.7 percent. In contrast, between
1650 and 1750, Europes population grew by only 3 percent, but at the height of
colonialism (between 1750 and 1900) the population rose by 400 percent. By then,
Europes population was spilling over to the rest of the world, with a million
emigrants a year going to other continents."
The book cites Eric Williams Capitalism and Slavery to
support its analyses of how the African slave trade to the Americas financed the British
Industrial Revolution and made huge profits for banking concerns as well as insurance
companies, especially Barclays and Lloyds. Profits from the colonial slave trade oiled
British manufacturing centers. Simultaneously, while all these was going on it
underdeveloped African indigenous peoples, stifling their inner cultural growth of Africa.
The new millennium has opened up the goodness of indigenous
peoples like Africans values. Gerald Massey has noted in regard to Africa,
"It is to inner Africa we must look in order to understand that which became majestic
in [Africa] Egypt." In line with recent media campaigns to restore indigenous values,
the book urges an agenda of restoration within all disciplines for human dignity and the
collective dignity of Indigenous peoples. "It recognizes the existing right of
self-determination, and it urges Indigenous peoples to promote, develop, exercise, and
maintain their orders and laws and to determine their political status and pursue freely
their cultural destiny within supportive social and economic development."
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