REPORT FROM KENYA

Fran wrote: 

While I only know David as an acquaintance, since it was always years between contact, he has always been one of my favorite Friends.  In any Quaker gathering he always had something to say worthy of the Quaker process of seeking consensus, often with humor.

The last time I saw David, it was at a St. Louis Meeting. At that time we talked about how he hoped to bring the AFSC HIP (Help Increase the Peace program of conflict resolution, modeled on AVP) to Kenya for use at solving community disputes. I should note that he was successful.

David writes Reports from Kenya, and this one, #617 of August 21, 2020 is something I want to share with you. This post on identity offers us a fresh way to think and talk about racial and other identities we use to define each other. 

IDENTITY

Report from Kenya

Picture: Me with grand-niece Trinah on our front porch a few years ago.

In a response to my posting last week, a loyal Reports from Kenya reader asked the following question: And you, with your deep experience of Africa and living embedded in an African family - I wonder what you would say about your identification. I thought it would be interesting to respond to this question.

When I was around ten years old, my Mom was driving a group of my school mates home from some function. I was sitting in the back seat with some of the other kids and I asked Louis Levy, “Are you Jewish?” Well, when we got home, my Mom gave me a tongue lashing. “Never ask someone if they are Jewish.” She did not explain why this was wrong, but I clearly got the message that I made a bad mistake by asking him that question.

But I am ten years old. What had I really done wrong? OK, I can’t ask a person if he or she is Jewish, but could I ask a person if he or she is Catholic? I concluded that I couldn’t ask this either. Or about anyone’s religion. But could I ask if a person was Polish, or Chinese, or so on? I decided that it was improper to do this also. My conclusion at that age was that I couldn’t ask a person any identity questions. As I got older this included not asking a person if he or she is gay or not, the person’s race, an immigrant, a former prisoner, or any of the other many identity classifications that exist. Just recently I learned that one does not call a person an “albino”, but the proper expression is “person with albinism.” This is to certify that that person is a human being first and foremost with just a particular characteristic.

Americans may consider this impossible, but race and racism are not an issue here in Kenya. I must admit that this allows me to be comfortable living in Kenya. Here is a quote from Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, Caste: The Lies that Divide Us, which I encourage you to read.

A few years ago, a Nigerian-born playwright came to a talk that I gave at the British Library in London. She was intrigued by the lecture, the idea that 6 million African-Americans had had to seek political asylum within the borders of their own country during the Great Migration, a history that she had not known of.

She talked with me afterward and said something that I have never forgotten, that startled me in its simplicity. “You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said.

Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that?

“Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.”

What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said. “They don’t become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.,” she said. “It is then that they become black.”

It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race. It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production. None of us are ourselves.

Unfortunately the human tendency to divide people into categories seems to be universal. So the issue of “tribe” in Africa replaces that of race. In the United States I always had difficulty making sense of the concept of the “one drop rule” where a person with any African ancestry is considered “black.” That’s not the rule on tribe here in Africa. The rule is that you are tribe of your father. Your mother’s tribe is irrelevant. This is necessary to make the system “work” because one has to have a single tribal identity. If there were people of mixed tribal ancestry and, since many Africans are of mixed tribal identity if one considered the female side of the family, the whole system would quickly collapse. I have as much difficulty making sense of this rule as I do of the one-drop rule. Often the tribalism of Kenyans annoys me. Of course different tribes have their stereotypes and this allows people to be put in little boxes. This – as for example, the Rwandan genocide – can be deadly. In Kenya it is difficult on the whole to know a person’s tribe by looks. But their African name gives away their tribe. My wife’s African name is “Kamonya” which indicates she is a Luhya. If she were named “Kamonyi” she would be a Kikuyu. Most Kenyans are very proud of their tribe.

When I lived in Pittsburgh, there was an older man at Pittsburgh Friends Meeting, named Dick McCoy. He was a professor of biology at the University of Pittsburgh. Since this was a long time ago, I paraphrase what he once said to me, “All human beings are biologically the same, but also all human beings are uniquely different from every other human being.” This is our paradox.

My conclusion at the age of ten that I couldn’t ask people about their identity forced me to assess people without the stereotyping that goes with the various identities. In one sense this makes life more difficult because I had to access everyone on their individuality, but of course it is much fairer. On the other hand it has made me be “out-of-step” with certain aspects of American culture.

A second result of not looking at a person’s identity is that I have not been at all interested in seeing myself through various identities. When I was a principal of high schools, I had difficulties because I did not conform to expectations of how a principal should act (authoritarian, dominating, and strict). Legally I have to be an American because the world demands that I have a US passport. But I never accepted the identity of being “a proud, red-blooded” America. Therefore, except when I have to get through immigration, I don’t see living in Kenya as particularly of any significance.

In short, I just try to be who I am. My identity is David Zarembka, one unique individual among the billions of people in the world. 

 Thanks to David for writing this report, to Peter for getting it to me and to Fran for sharing her friend and his insight.