Shan and Shoshanna: In Africa!

Shoshanna and Shan

This is a belated New Year's post -- a solar New Year's post -- but I only yesterday received photos to go with an end-of-the-year report (itself received on January 28, 2013!) from my brother Shan and his wife, Shoshanna, to family and friends, a report that I break into here where Shoshanna describes their Africa trip:

Culminating the year and fulfilling a life dream to visit Africa, we spent 3 amazing weeks in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa. The first portion of the trip was spent living in Livingston, Zambia with Gertrude Akapelawa, the visionary founder of Victoria Falls University. After delivering pro-bono leadership training for 100 faculty, teachers, and staff, we headed with our backpacks on foot over the Victoria Falls Bridge across the baboon-lined border into Zimbabwe to join our Intrepid Camping Safari comrades.

For the next two weeks, we traveled with African guides through stunning countryside and coastline, stopping in small African villages and camping along the way. The final leg of the trip was spent in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, a stunningly up-close and personal encounter with leopard, lions, hyena, crocodile, monkeys, and huge herds of antelope, zebra, elephants, wildebeest, Cape buffalo, hippo, black and white rhinoceros, and giraffe. Lucky for us, it was just past birthing season, so we were privileged to see and photograph lots of animal babies hugging their mothers' sides.

Now for the photos sent by Shoshanna. First, a picture of Shoshanna, Shan, and a lady whom I take to be Gertrude Akapelawa, founder of Victoria Falls University:

Next, a photograph -- from which country, I don't know -- of two African women, the closer of the two carrying a baby in a sling on her back:

Here's a comfortable view of Victoria Falls, a view better seen enlarged, so click on the image:

Now come the animals (some of them) in the order mentioned by Shoshanna above, a fuzzy leopard first:

And next a lion, studiously ignoring the happy Intrepid Campers:

Also, a lazy lion, though one allowing himself slightly more interest in the passing safari:

And now appears -- as we all know from that eminently trustworthy source of factual information, The Lion King -- the lions' mortal enemy, the hyena:

Far better than that scurrilous creature, a baby zebra with its mother, apparently a unicorn mother zebra:

Not to mention a mother elephant and her baby, her rather big baby:

And a suspicious Cape buffalo (but where's his cape?):

Plus a hippopotamus (and like an iceberg, 90 percent is below the surface, so don't take this image at face value):

Even a rhinoceros, a black rhino (I suppose):

And finally, a condescending giraffe:

And those are all fourteen photos: people, landscapes, animals -- the sought-after African experience, I reckon -- along with Shan and Shoshanna's Africa leadership sessions, likely a wild life itself, but no photos of that, so we can only hope that my brother and his wife stop by and fill us in, and they might want to check out yesterday's blog entry on the African artist El Anatsui.

Meanwhile, I've been traveling all over the world myself, though I have no photos to share since my excursions are solely in the realm of my hyperactive imagination . . .

El Anatsui: Gravity and Grace

Gravity and Grace
El Anatsui
Brooklyn Museum

The art critic and writer Holland Cotter has an article in the New York Times, "A Million Pieces of Home" (February 8, 2013), on the fascinating artist El Anatsui, who hails from Ghana but works in Nigeria and is currently the subject of a retrospective exhibition, "Gravity and Grace," at the Brooklyn Museum, February 8, 2013 to August 4, 2013, and most fascinating is his method for creating monumental works of art, which he developed almost by accident, as Cotter relates the story:

One day, by his own account, on a routine scavenging hunt through Nsukka, he picked up a trash bag filled with twist-off liquor bottle tops of a kind manufactured by Nigerian distilleries. Although it took him a while to realize it, he had found his ideal material: locally made, in ready supply and culturally loaded.

Liquor had come to Africa with colonialism. Production of rum propelled the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Later Africa had made a double-edged European import its own. And the history of all that was printed, in shorthand, in the brand names on the bottle tops: Bakassi, Chelsea, Dark Sailor, Ebeano.

In addition, crucially, the metal was visually magnetic. The colors - reds, yellows, silvers, golds - were bold and bright. And it was easy to manipulate, to "fold, crumple, crush," to quote the title of a documentary film on Mr. Anatsui made in 2011 by Ms. Vogel, a curator and former professor of African art and architecture at Columbia University.

Finally the bottle caps answered Mr. Anatsui's growing interest in expanding the scale of his art. Pressed flat, twisted, or cut into circles, then punctured, the caps could be wired together into panels or blocks, which were joined to form pliant, fabriclike sheets, each sheet a whole made of fragments, and, potentially at least, endlessly expandable. "When I started working with the bottle caps," he said recently during a trip the United States, "I thought I'd make one or two things with them, but the possibilities began to seem endless." The labor involved was arduous but communal, a kind of three-step performance. Studio workers in Nsukka made the initial blocks. Mr. Anatsui determined the configuration of the blocks into a larger works. Whoever installed the finished piece could hang and drape it as they pleased. No way was the only way, no way was permanent.

But don't get the idea that Anatsui is some untaught artist. He studied Western art in high school and university in what is now called Ghana, taught by European teachers in the twilight years of what was then a British colony, the Gold Coast. After leaving school, he immersed himself in Ghanaian traditions of art, seeking to indigenize himself, but he must have continued to absorb European ideas, and not only about art, for as the Brooklyn Museum informs us:

Reading French philosopher Simone Weil's 1947 book Gravity and Grace inspired Anatsui to explore the concepts of what he calls "the material and the spiritual, of heaven and earth, of the physical and the ethereal" by using a limited, contrasting color palette, as typified in this work, among his largest. The seriousness of Anatsui's project reveals itself in the limits to which he stretches his materials and process, while the title and form evoke a poetic interest in transcendence and connection.

Anatsui would appear to be an artist-intellectual since he reads Weil and applies her ideas in his artistic creations. This artwork, called "Gravity and Grace" -- inspired by Weil and inspiration for the retrospective's title -- is a rather large work of aluminum and copper wire, 145 5/8 inches by 441 inches (369.9 x 1120.1 cm), which means it's about 12 feet by 37 feet (about 3.7 x 11.2 m). Like all of these monumental works that I've seen photos of, this one seems both heavy and light, "the material and the spiritual . . . the physical and the ethereal" that Anatsui himself offers as a description of what he aims to explore.

To see more of Anatsui's works, click on the NYT's slideshow, the Brooklyn Museum's website, or Google's images.

En-Uk's Small Eyes

This drawing titled Small Eyes by my twelve-year-old son, En-Uk, reminds me of some African sculpture, though not quite this Yoruba piece:

I know that I've seen some African sculpture with a longer neck that En-Uk's piece recalls, not that he was influenced.

Any readers who can help?

Evangelicalism's Unintended Consequences?

Church Emboldening Women?

Graeme Robertson

Getty Images

NYT

The writer Helen Epstein offers an interesting finding in her opinion piece for the New York Times, "Talking Their Way Out of a Population Crisis" (October 22, 2011). In this article, she tells of a Columbia University demographer, James F. Phillips, and his colleagues in Ghana who were tying to empower women of the Kassena-Nankana people to use contraception for better family planning:

At first, they organized special "durbars" -- all-male political gatherings presided over by the village chief -- to help explain to men that family planning would make their women and children healthier and stronger. These efforts weren't very successful.

Then the team noticed two things: Their data clearly showed that large numbers of women were having fewer children, whether or not they lived near the experimental family planning programs. And large numbers of evangelical preachers were establishing churches in the Ghanaian hinterlands to which, every Sunday, Kassena-Nankana women dressed in Western-style finery headed in droves.

Dr. Phillips assigned a student to see what effect the churches were having on contraceptive behavior. To their amazement, they found that female Christian converts were three times as likely to use family planning as women who retained their traditional African faith, and had significantly smaller families.

The churches certainly didn't promote family planning. But, despite their defense of patriarchal family values, many churches were giving women a voice denied them by their own culture.

Ms. Epstein doesn't say why the researchers report that these evangelical churches "certainly didn't promote family planning," and I wonder if that's entirely true. But let's assume that it is. How then did evangelical Christianity give women a voice enabling them to start family planning?

Traditionally, Kassena-Nankana women are not involved in everyday decision making, even about household matters. But the born-again women were forming committees, making speeches and organizing outings, fund-raisers and other activities. Tradition in Kassena-Nankana also forbids women to communicate with ancestors and other spiritual beings; only men can do that. But the Christian women were speaking directly to Jesus about their problems. He was, many of them may have felt, the first man ever to listen. This may have given them a language for speaking to mortal men as well, even about such sensitive matters as contraception.

I wonder if the researchers asked the women about family planning to find out how the process of empowerment actually worked. With wording like "may have felt" and "may have given," the researchers appear less than certain. Or perhaps Ms. Epstein is guessing? She does say, though with equal uncertainty, that:

[R]elaxed, trusting and frank conversations between men and women may be the most effective contraceptive of all.

If so, then evangelical Christianity would perhaps be promoting that, but I'm also just guessing. Somebody should ask those women themselves . . .

Atheist pro deo?

Matthew Parris

(Times Online)

Not precisely pro deo, though self-proclaimed atheist Matthew Parris, writing for the Times Online last December, does state that "As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God," for what he really means is that he has come to believe that Christianity is having a beneficial influence in Africa. Actually, as someone who lived in Africa as a youth some 45 years ago, he had long already noticed a positive effect, albeit with reservations:

It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

A more recent trip to Africa subtly shifted his views, for he tells us that his former position was inadequate:

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

Actually, he says that he first noticed this at age 24, when he traveled by land across Africa:

Whenever we entered a territory worked by [Christian] missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers -- in some ways less so -- but more open.

His more recent trip, several decades later, reaffirmed that earlier impression and added to it, for he noticed something about the NGOs whom he met:

I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. "Privately" because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

Parris offers his theory for how Christianity works its liberating effect and encourages a disciplined individualism:

Anxiety -- fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things -- strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds -- at the very moment of passing into the new -- that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? "Because it's there," he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's . . . well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation -- that nobody else had climbed it -- would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

I take it that Parris is a Protestant atheist (as he elsewhere in fact admits), and he seems to be theorizing about a rural Africa of the past, perhaps of his childhood. Moreover, he overemphasizes the individualist aspect of Christianity, for even Protestantism insists that the believer belongs to the body of Christ, which is the church -- a more abstract concept of the church than in Catholicism, of course, and not to be fully identified with any particular denomination, but a corporate dimension nonetheless.

I do therefore wonder -- and I'm merely wondering, mind you -- just how beneficial for Africans are such churches as the "Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministry" . . . though possibly even a gospel of wealth has its liberating aspects, from a sociological perspective, at any rate.