Wangũi wa Kamonji explores African indigenous knowledge for restoration & resilience

Africa World Now Project

Wangũi wa Kamonji in her article, Women in Kenya rebuild resilience amidst an eco-cultural crisis, published in February of this year, a few weeks before the current global pandemic takes its cripplingly hold, writes that: “in the global North, it has become more common to declare that indigenous peoples hold the solutions to the climate crisis. Such rhetoric risks being only lip-service if solutions do not recognize and resource indigenous-led work to repair damage to indigenous cultures, commitment to an indigenous resurgence and the full integration of wisdom of these indigenous values in projects that seek solutions. After decades of shame, [violent] suppression and devaluation, much indigenous knowledge held by groups like the Tharaka [in Kenya] has been forgotten, hidden or impaired. Tharaka women [have] often commented that it seemed like “everything was going to disappear.” Facing this eco-cultural crisis, remembering, and restoring indigenous women’s knowledge and practices, grounded in a paradigm of respect and collaboration with the Earth, emerges as the most salient pathway to recovery and restoration.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali adds sharp clarity to this notion when she argues that, I must quote in its totality: “Throughout Africa, in spite of ongoing colonization and the continuing effects of globalization, there are people, particularly in rural communities, who still associate their existence to, and with, the land, and with their immediate socio-physical environments and surroundings. Land has been a source of Indigenous identity for Africans, in that through associations with the land, local cultures, spiritualities, politics, economics, and the relations of society to Nature are defined. There are knowledges associated with the land that continue to guide everyday existence. People continue to negotiate identities, cultures, and spiritualities with particular understandings of the place of the human in their environments. These phenomena constitute important dimensions of the knowledgebase, and such knowledge also informs everyday existence. African indigeneity must be read as both a process and a form of identity. It is an identity that defines who a people are at a particular point in time. But it is also a recognition that such identities are in a continual process of existence.

The lesson here is that a peoples’ indigeneity and indigenousness is not simply taken away from them simply because they encounter others on their homeland [or beyond]. The Eurocentric constructions of the Indigenous as primitive, culture-based, and static is a ploy to privilege European identity, and should be distinguished from what the people claim and assert of their own indigeneity and indigenousness. The latter is about the affirmation of self, community, history, culture, tradition, heritage, and ancestry.

Eurocentric constructions are about establishing cultures of hierarchies as a way to accord privilege and power. This is how racism worked and continues to work.

Today, AWNP’s Tasneem Siddiqui [@DrT_Siddiqui] is in conversation with activist and thinker, Wangũi wa Kamonji [@_fromtheroots]. They explore the contours and practice of indigenous knowledge and ancient technologies as that inform a decolonization that is simultaneously in resistance & restoration.

Through research, dance, storytelling and facilitating diverse public spaces for critical consciousness and transformation, Wangũi wa Kamonji is retrieving and restoring indigenous Afrikan lifeways and practices. [Also see: @afrikahai_]

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!