Heart of Loneliness

The following are two essays I've recently submitted in my class on the history of health and healing in Africa. As I've recently more or less ignored this blog, with infrequent posts, I have been engaged in this final class to earn my undergraduate degree in history at Portland State. It has commanded a lot of my attention with a great deal of reading and rigorous analysis of the texts.

From the "For What It's Worth" Department here at Round Bend Press:


Heart of Loneliness: Love, Migration and Sexuality in Postwar Bechuanaland

Fissures in Botswana society resulting from colonial, industrial and economic influences created new conditions of loneliness among Batswana in the post-World War II era. A heart of loneliness displaced old paradigms of community as a new morality filled the vacuum created by migration, debility and disaffiliation. As social conditions changed, a re-evaluation of relationships and a new meaning of love between men and women arose from nascent alienation. The moral imagination of Batswana stretched into new territory.

By 1960, 20,000 Tswana men were working for wages in mines, having left the merafe of southeastern Bechuanaland to toil in South Africa. Another significant number of workers—men and women—joined the flow of migration, seeking alternative wage work where they could find it, often far from the merafe and the familiarity of their old communities (Julie Livingston, p. 145).

Love in the time of migration became skewed. Amid new moral and physical landscapes, many men and women searched for each other in their hearts. As the influences of the gerontocracy and the chiefs/rulers of their culture eroded, they struck out on their own. While the essence of the heart (bopelo), a cosmological reckoning steeped in the merafe and the quest for purity and ancestral pacification remained strong for a time, as did the habit of cultural deference to elders, conditions were inevitably altered in the face of an emerging economy of individualism. Where men and women once lived and slept with each other in environments that promoted mutual understanding amid Tswana rituals, suspicions, worry, and dread (and attendant legal issues) arose in unions fragmented by space and time and the erosion of familial and sexual rituals. Men and women began to “break the rules.”

The heart of loneliness brought attendant problems to the social framework of Bechuanaland. Livingston refers to Lynn Thomas’ research in Kenya, where similar paradigm shifts opened Kenyan society to new levels of disaffiliation in the colonial era, resulting in a surge of unplanned pregnancies, abortions, and infidelity. The new order and evolving worldview of many young Kenyans was as much an effort to “create something new” as it was a reaction to the floundering of the old order, the author quotes Thomas (Livingston, p. 144). Livingston aptly applies this phenomenon to her own research in Botswana, finding causal similarities in the two cultures.

New levels of anxiety and alienation grew attached to personhood among Batswana in the postwar era through Independence. One is able to infer from the stark spike in mental health issues in the postwar era that men and women were suffering from more than debilities arising from war, industrialism and the economic abuses of the colonial system; they were also suffering in the realm of love. The heart of loneliness grasped them with an increasingly westernized discomfiture. As it happened, love did not so much fall apart as it rather grew irrevocably into something new and daunting in the Tswana psyche.

Livingston, Julie. Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana, Indiana University Press, 2005

I highly recommend the above work if you have the slightest interest in African culture and the impact of colonial rule in the twentieth century. It is a challenging and deep-seeded work by a brilliant historian. Despite its depth, or perhaps because of it, it is a remarkable read.

This second essay is on Lynn Thomas' "Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. While it is not as readable as Livingston's book, it remains fascinating for its discussion of female circumcision as a cultural phenomenon in parts of Africa.

Entangled Meru, Entangled Methodologies

An incursive interpretation of Meru historiography shapes Thomas’s analyses of native gender and generational disaffiliation, and British political and religious influence in central Kenya during the colonial era. Thomas attacks patriarchy with subtle precision. She deftly eschews teleology in her analyses by dissecting common entanglements between integrated colonial and Meru cultures that restricted the power of Meru women, demonstrating how colonial and localized patriarchal authority undermined these women.

Anti-colonial resistance as a major element of change in Meru is thus given short shrift in the author’s understanding of the conditions that led to upheaval in Kenyan society as well as independence, as if to say in bold lettering, Cold War? What Cold War? Social and cultural entanglement, Thomas argues, is the most important aspect of the historiography in question. It is a narrow focus, but deep in meaning. The author paints entanglement as the tension wrought between the expectations of a pre-colonial Meru culture once engaged in ordinary acts of living against the encroachment of a westernized ethos based in classist, racist, sexist and generalized assumptions of reality. Much textual evidence of these historical markers exists. Thomas isn’t concerned with it.

Vaginas, not philology, formulate her dialecticism as she graphs how both the colonizing and subjugated cultures grew entangled over time through laws and policies regulating women’s bodies. These discredited regulations stranded colonists in an imbroglio of complex social problems they were unwilling to admit--or were unaware--they themselves created. Analyzing this mélange, Thomas develops the post-modernist’s array of precepts. She throws off genre interpretations of anti-colonial rebellion steeped in the nuances of political and revolutionary fervor in favor of a deeper, incursive analysis of patriarchy as it played out in the collusion of colonial and localized Meru interests. Her research demonstrates again and again the fallacy of a black and white, East versus West, interpretation of Meru historiography. The core of the author’s argument synthesizes imperial and localized patriarchy, and for good reason, for she claims it led to myriad abuses of young women. But her argument is just as intent upon demonstrating that Meru’s historiography is unwieldy, and that teleological and anti-colonial messaging based in ideology are problematic.

Thomas, Lynn. Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya, University of California Press, 2003.

Thanks for reading.


TS