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INDEPENDENT

Sierra Leone, April 11- 24,  2001

Vol 7 No 3

EXPO TIMES
Exposing today for tomorrow

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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 African’s 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 Fanon’s 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, Africa’s population was 21.2 percent of the known world population; by 1920 it was 7.7 percent. In contrast, between 1650 and 1750, Europe’s population grew by only 3 percent, but at the height of colonialism (between 1750 and 1900) the population rose by 400 percent. By then, Europe’s 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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