Retrospective 1: Traditions II: Everyday Lives of African Men

Traditions II: Everyday Lives of African Men was held in Addis Ababa on 28-30 November 2011. The event came after a long year of planning, near-disasters, miracles, obstructive bureacracy and of course wonderful people who negotiated institutional limits and boundaries. As you can tell, it was a mixed bag of highs and lows.

Following the conventions of events planning meant we needed to do certain things, that is, adhere to the traditions of academic conferences. The people must eat, must have somewhere to sit amidst the pondering and presenting, not worry about where they will sleep at nights or put on their armour of silks or sackcloth, have ample water and heat to bathe, must be moved from one point to another. Now, of course humans are social and biological and these logistical things are just part and parcel of the work of bringing people together. The traditions, resistances and compliances to mores and conventions are in the details though.

Traditions II delegates in Africa Hall

The space should surround one with the requisite institutional gravitas that the work of pondering, expounding and so forth presumably necessitates. We chose two venues. For the first day, the UNISA  Regional Learning Centre in Akaki, and so infrastructure became indicative of and showcased the transcontinental reach of our institution and the relationship to minds, hearts and bodies coming together. Maybe it was a choice of institutional power too and thus our ability as representatives of the institution to effect the making of tradition. For the second and third day, we were located in Africa Hall at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa. It is a space of now historic power. The room is reminiscent of a different era and that sense of history and time past almost lulls you into forgetting that traditions were made in this room that affected the lives of millions of Africans, the legacies of which we still contend with. Or rather one should say it is a space where history slipped practices of everyday life quietly into tradition; the dry centrifugal and yet contingent policies of states transforming the possibilities of livelihoods, romances, parenting, healthcare, travel and transportation, entertainment and who knows what else happens in rarefied spaces.

And yes, the price of corn does affect tradition. If corn is too expensive, and monocultural farming practices are enforced by global politics using Africa as a breadbasket to produce its wheat, then more people will eat bread and develop ritual practices around now scarce corn or to centralise the necessity of the wheat sheaf. The woman who insists on practicing outdated or new modes of food production in the domestic or household economy when she can no longer find corn might be scorned by her in-laws for being old-fashioned or modern, not get sex from her ravenous for corn/wheat husband for her dis/respect for traditions, will be unable to pass on her embodied histories via tradition to her children or grandchildren, has to renegotiate the caregiving and health practices that was enabled by corn production or fava beans if you will, has to make new circuits of bringing food to the home due to the un/availability of seed for corn/wheat or now go to the super baker of wheaten bread three roads or houses or neighbourhoods over rather than the has-been corn muffin old lady down the road, has to cook and experiment with new foods for the feasts and who knows what else. So yea, the space was meaningful. Does sound like a well-considered decision to have held it there, given the corn/wheat dilemma.

Did I tell you we fell in love with the space? The room is just beautiful too. At our first meeting with the space we gushed about history, and the artwork and the maroon velvet sofas and blue chairs and the enormous mural with only men in it. It is a man's space, this incredible room. Men at the apex of power making masculinities in obscure ways. For an academic conference,  that sought a renegotiation of praxis around African masculinities and tradition it was a marvellous space.

So, post-conference why have I not waxed erudite about the content of the conference and instead gone on and on about the spaces? Why am I not cataloguing the facts and themes and being all academicky about the presentations? The simple reason is I am still processing. The more complex one is that it is not possible to contain experience, no matter how gravitas-inducing the space. Memory is selective and reproducing Traditions II as tradition will be contained by the outcomes of the negotiation of memory. And that perhaps  is tradition in practice ...

The almost totally new black manifesto for dummies continued: 2 more things to remember in a world where blacks are free to be who they want to be

To continue (http://transformingtraditions.blogspot.com/2011/11/almost-totally-new-black-manifesto-for.html):

7. A critical black consciousness - here meaning a critical consciousness about all what being black entails - does not just bubble up from the biological fact of one’s body. There is not ready-made relationship between a person’s skin colour and her thought about the ideological meaning of skin colour. Dark-skinned can be - well, anything. Sometimes that thing is great. At other times it is something not to be proud of. The same applies to Africanness of course. One does not develop a questioning attitude about what Africanness mean because one lives in Africa or is referred to or refers to herself as African. Indeed, this unsettled relation between body and thought, physical location and intellectual view, holds for all identities historically oppressed or marginalised by European, patriarchal, capitalist, (hetero)sexist and racist power: a black lesbian woman does not become radically feminist simply because she has endured sexist violence all her life, and a rich African boy might not necessarily turn out to be the enemy of the poor. Even while ‘there is no doubt that the pain is always felt more by those who lives with oppression than those who have intellectually converted to the cause of the oppressed” then, as Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya has said, a critical view of the state of the metaphoric black-and-white world needs nurturing, arises out of deliberation.

 

8. Ghanaianness isn’t part of anyone’s make up, you don’t pass on Ghanaian DNA to your children. Percy Zvumoya said that in a well-thought piece on the Italian Mario Balotelli in the Mail & Guardian. Of course he is right that Ghanaianness isn’t genetic. However he is wrong that you can’t pass Ghanaianness to your offspring. Yes you can, just as you try to pass on Balotelliness, Italianness, Africanness, blackness or any other sense of collectiveness. It isn’t only our DNA that we pass on to our issue, because it’s not only biologically that human beings try to reproduce themselves. Because we are aware that children come into the world as strangers, it is not enough that they have our genetic material. We also want them to have our way of life. We want them to learn to see the world, themselves, us and others the way we see things. We induct them into our language. We hand over our memories, and pray they will not be betrayed. We pass on out tastes, aspirations, fears, dislikes and hopes. That is what tradition is all about. And that’s the only way Ghanaians, Africanness, Italianness, blackness or any collective sense of us-ness, that thing we refer to us culture, can manage to live on when we are gone.