Harri Englund. Prisoners of
Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006. xi + 247 pp. $21.95 (paper),
Reviewed by Steve Sharra (Michigan State
University)
Published on H-SAfrica (June, 2007)
Published on H-SAfrica (June, 2007)
A Guest Who Brings Sharp Tweezers: Rights,
Freedoms and Disempowerment in the New Malawi
For most Malawians, the biggest news story of
2006 was the adoption of the thirteen-month-old baby boy David Banda by the
mega pop star Madonna. The adoption caused a storm both in Malawi and outside,
but for very different reasons. Most of the views expressed in the mainstream
media and on blogs in the West focused on whether Madonna was adopting David
for reasons to do with enhancing her own media image; yet in Malawi, the debate
was on why human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were opposing the
adoption. As far as comments expressed in the Malawian media and on the street
went, human rights NGOs opposing the adoption were doing so for reasons that
had little to do with baby David's welfare, and everything to do with the NGOs'
own image. Many Malawians saw the NGOs' actions as defending themselves from
accusations that all they cared for was for their pockets and prestige, as
evidenced by the conspicuous, sudden wealth acquired by NGO activists, from
expensive SUVs to mansions in Malawi's big cities.
Underneath the storm was a thinly veiled
anger against NGOs that went beyond David Banda, an issue that has not received
the adequate analytical attention it deserves. What were the many Malawians who
expressed their anger at the human rights NGOs reacting to? Was it the mere
fact that the NGOs were seen as jealous of baby David, as many simplistically put
it? Was it the larger undefined nature of what has come to be seen as civil
society in Malawi and their tendency to criticize the Malawi government in
everything it does, and despise Malawian culture and traditions at every turn?
Or, was it a much more nuanced, much more epistemological difficulty arising
from what Harri Englund inPrisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African
Poor has called the abstraction and individualization of human rights as
"freedom," whose consequences so far have been the further
marginalization of the African (especially Malawian) poor, and the entrenchment
of elitism amongst activists and the young people they deploy?
Despite the presence of a number of studies
that examine the impact of NGOs since the 1994 advent of multiparty democracy
in Malawi, few, if any, of them do what Harri Englund does in this book.
Malawi's 1994 transition from the thirty-year one-party dictatorship, under Dr.
Hastings Kamuzu Banda, to multiparty democracy has been the subject of numerous
studies both inside Malawi and outside. Change in Malawi was long coming,
taking the form of movements and political parties largely outside Malawi. But
it was 1992 that saw the first real bold move to criticize openly the
government, through a lentern pastoral letter written by the country's seven
Catholic bishops. The several studies that have examined the transition period
and the democratic process since then have been in fields such as theology,
cultural and literary studies, politics, and education.[1] There have also been
studies on the issue of language and how the insistence on English as the
official language of government, politics, business, and education keeps the
majority of Malawians, who do not use English in their day-to-day lives, out of
the democratic process.[2]
Englund's study is based on an engagement
with Malawi that starts in 1999, and becomes concentrated between 2001 and
2003, when he does an ethnographic study that focuses on three particular
aspects that capture the discourse on democracy, human rights, and freedom: the
translation work on key documents in the political transition; a civic
education NGO; and a legal aid NGO. Englund arrives at the conclusion that the
human rights discourse on freedom and democracy, rather than empowering the
ordinary Malawians that it takes as its main preoccupation, actually
disempowers the very people it seeks to empower. It is a powerful and
persuasive argument made painstakingly and eloquently throughout the study,
relying on both fieldwork and critical analyzing. Englund uses what he terms
"ethnographic witnessing" to expose how the disempowerment is
operationalized in the way terms such as freedom and human rights have been
translated into the national language, Chichewa. He further shows how the
disempowerment operates in the way civic education and legal aid are actually
carried out among the NGOs and human rights activists studied.
The author organizes the book's eight
chapters around the above-mentioned three case studies of translations and the
two human rights NGOs. Englund uses the acknowledgements section to demonstrate
his near perfect facility with the national language of Malawi, writing half of
it in almost flawless Chichewa with the syntax that characterizes the central
region of Malawi, the arbiter of its linguistic excellence. Englund ventures
into his thesis right there in the acknowledgements, saying human rights NGOs
in Malawi have preoccupied themselves with technical, abstract, and neoliberal
definitions of terms such as freedom and human rights in ways that do not carry
much meaning in the lived lives of ordinary Malawians. The sense of elitism
with which many Malawian youths have taken to their mission of educating the
masses about democracy characterizes ordinary Malawians as ignorant of what
democracy is, and lacking the wisdom and knowledge with which to live their
daily lives. The manner in which the concepts of freedom and human rights have
been translated into Chichewa means that the young people carrying civic
education to the ordinary people in the villages interpret these concepts in
terms of their own rights and benefits, rather than those of the ordinary
people.
Still using Chichewa in the acknowledgements,
Englund describes his main aim in writing the book as reminding his target
audience that, in order to gain deeper insights into the lives of the poor,
there is a need to live among them for sustained periods, with the aim of
learning from them. That requires learning their language and their culture,
and the hardships they experience. Englund says all this was lost on the young
Malawians who were "unleashed" on to the masses, as the civic
educators became more interested in their own freedoms and rights. He deploys a
Malawian proverb that draws on folklore and talks about how it sometimes takes
a guest coming in from the cold, seeking a place for the night, who has a sharp
pair of tweezers, to remove a thorn from the foot of a child after the parents'
tweezers have failed. Englund was that guest, but one who had more questions,
some of them uncomfortable. Nevertheless, he was still warmly welcomed into the
communities in which he conducted his ethnographic witnessing.
The introduction to the book identifies the
sources that inform Englund's intellectual framework, ranging from Michel
Foucault to Megan Vaughan to Amartya Sen to Jean and John Comaroff, and African
and Malawian thinkers such as Tiyambe Zeleza, Thandika Mkandawire, Kings Phiri,
Francis Nyamnjoh, Edrine Kayambazinthu, Pascal Kishindo, and James Tengatenga,
among many others. The first chapter takes up where the introduction leaves off
and continues the discussion of intellectual sources of the study, defining the
Foucauldian notion of "governmentality" and how it works to situate
human rights as individual freedoms in an African postcolonial context. Chapter
2 discusses how a major factor in the way that the "rights" and
"freedom" discourse disempowers the poor can be discerned in the way
these concepts have been translated into Chichewa in Malawi, and Chinyanja in
Zambia. One revealing finding in Englund's linguistic analysis is how, when
translated back into the English language in which the definitions originate,
the concepts mean quite a different thing, far removed from the realities of
the people the civic education endeavor is aimed at. For example, the Chichewa
translation for "human rights" has been given as "maufulu
achibadidwe," which in English means something close to "birth
freedoms," and not quite human rights (p. 49).
Englund argues that this kind of (mis)translation
arises from the undue emphasis on political and civil freedoms in both Malawi
and Zambia (p. 53), to the exclusion of people's local wisdom, relationships,
and aspirations. He cites Pascal Kishindo, a leading linguist at the University
of Malawi, who has argued that the Chichewa translation for human rights,
"maufulu achibadidwe," is in fact a new coinage, and that
"zomuyenerera za munthu" would have been a more accurate and
contextually relevant translation. The elitist, cavalier attitude with which
the translation exercise was undertaken is put into sharp relief in the way
Englund, a white researcher, was treated for his insistence on using Chichewa
during his interviews and discussions with Malawian human rights activists.
"Where will you go with it" asked one activist (p. 25), in a
dismissive tone that typifies the reaction of many educated Malawians towards
Malawian languages. Many others treated Englund's preference for Chichewa with
unveiled mirth. And the problem of what Englund terms "poor translations
for poor people" (p. 54), with key governance documents being written in
European languages and translations into indigenous languages being merely a
formality, can also be found in many other African countries.[3]
Chapters 3 and 4 draw on the implications of
the manner in which the translations were done, demonstrating how human rights
activists viewed themselves as a privileged class set apart from the villagers
whom they saw as illiterate, uneducated, and primitive--prone to misunderstanding
democracy. The human rights NGO in question in these chapters, the National
Initiative for Civic Education (NICE), European-funded and run by the German
Technical Agency for Development (GTZ), trained its activists to maintain
political neutrality, a position that Englund saw as undermining the very
activist orientation that was otherwise required to empower ordinary Malawians.
Englund describes a training session in which villagers exhibited their
impatience with the abstraction of "human rights" and "freedoms"
and began shouting to the young activists facilitating the training about their
material needs and economic problems. In keeping with the position of
neutrality, the young activists stayed close to their script of how to define
"freedoms" and the villagers' need for more civic education.
By far the most compelling narrative in the
study is introduced in chapter 5 and culminates in chapter 6, in a detailed,
heart-wrenching account of the flagrant abuses and open exploitation that a
Malawian man working for a Malawian of Indian origin went through, with the
active complicity of the legal officer of the legal aid human rights
organization, the Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation (CHRR). Englund
foregrounds the story of Yamikani Chikondi, who worked for Hassam Patel, with a
section titled "The Politics of Complexion," in which he provides
some facts and figures about the correlation between skin complexion and wealth
in Malawi. A long but necessary quote buttresses his argument:
"Complexion remains an index of wealth
and opportunity, with most Europeans and Asians enjoying vastly higher
standards of living than most black Malawians. Virtually all expatriates, as
well as those Asians who have acquired Malawian citizenship and the black
elite, live in urban residential areas that the impoverished majority visit
only as servants, guards, petty traders, laborers, and occasionally, armed
robbers. Although apartheid was never formally instituted in Malawi,
segregation is also evident in diet, modes of transport, pastimes, and numerous
other everyday contexts. Foreign professionals also tend to be paid more than
similarly qualified Malawians. Expatriate aid workers, in turn, usually wallow
in their luxury, exempt from tax and employing domestic servants and other
support personnel" (pp. 132-133).
Yamikani Chikondi worked for Hassam Patel as
a lorry boy, whose duties entailed accompanying the driver of Patel's hardware
store on various trips ferrying truckloads of customer merchandise to various
parts of the country. His salary was the equivalent of US $13.00 per month
(MK900=Malawi Kwacha), about two-thirds of the stipulated minimum wage in the
2001-2003 period. Yamikani was never told in advance of any impending trips;
instead, he was abruptly ordered to accompany the lorry whenever such trips
came up. Many times the trips lasted two weeks, during which time he did not
even have a change of clothes, let alone a chance to inform his wife and
children before leaving. On such trips, Chikondi's responsibilities included
sleeping in or near the lorry as a guard. He was given the equivalent of about
US $1.70 to survive on for those two weeks. The government's stipulation was US
$8.00 per day, but none of this was known to Chikondi. Chikondi was fired from
the job after three months, on unproven suspicions that he may have connived
with other workers who were caught stealing electrical switches sold in the
shop. Englund dedicates a good amount of his gripping and touching storytelling
and social justice analysis to this particular case, painting an alarming
picture of the travails that many Malawian workers undergo at the hands of
their European, Asian, and elite Malawian employers.
Englund's "ethnographic witnessing"
led him to uncover the double contempt workers such as Chikondi suffer, first
from their employers who treat them as "something less than human"
(p. 153), and then from the Malawians who are supposed to represent and stand
up for them in their recourse to justice. The legal officer handling Chikondi's
case chose not to disclose to Chikondi that his salary and travel allowances
were below the minimum wage in the first place. The case dragged on for several
months, during which time Chikondi had no income, yet he was required by the
CHRR legal officer to keep coming back at his own expense, and to provide the
legal officer with money for transporting him to carry out his investigations.
When the case eventually ended, the legal
officer had ostensibly taken the side of Patel in assigning blame to Chikondi
for causing the whole problem, and in denying him just recompense. The legal
officer informed Patel that he oweed Chikondi a pittance US $4.40 (MK317) as
salary and unpaid allowances, which Patel extracted from a thick bundle of
crisp new MK500 banknotes, while complaining, without any sense of irony or
even remorse, that freedom of employment was creating problems for employers
like him. The last two chapters of the book deal with the issue of human rights
and mob justice, and a recapping of the study's main arguments and conclusions.
In the concluding pages, Englund focuses on
the project of "Redeeming Freedom," the title for the last chapter.
He writes, "Sticking to the idea of freedom is more than a mere concession
to the realpolitik of neoliberalism. The need is to reclaim freedom from its
abuse in neoliberal projects, which carry, in many parts of Africa, uncanny
similarities to the late-colonial orders of exclusion and exploitation"
(p. 200). Such a comparison, while accurate, to a large extent, is apt to be
viewed differently amongst the different groups that constitute the audience
for the message Englund is trying convey. The book will be well received and
seen as making a persuasive argument for those who see NGOs as having pulled
the carpet out from under the feet of African governments, in the way NGOs
absorb not only donor money but also the foreign ideologies of the places where
the money comes from.
Englund's argument will also be equally
favorable to those who see the educated African elite as a major player in the
perpetuation of the poverty and disempowerment of the majority of African
masses, seen as illiterate, uneducated, and in need of civic education as to
what democracy, human rights, and freedom entail. Here is where this study
might also manage to please an unlikely audience probably not intended by
Englund--the Afro-pessimists. The depiction of the powerful moneyed elites with
the ideological and financial backing of Western donors pitted against
powerless, poor, illiterate villagers will appear to some to be a disavowal of
whatever vestige of hope was remaining for a neoliberal economic order. The
near absence of the role of government in the study gives the appearance of a
terrain in which NGOs rule unopposed and unobstructed. The reality, as Englund
has attempted to represent, is quite different, but this point can easily be
lost in the quagmire of rigid debates about African hope and despair.
Since 2004, with the holding of Malawi's
third multiparty presidential and parliamentary elections, the sense of
national pride and confidence amongst Malawians has palpably been on the rise.
Inflation has come down to single digits, the food reserves are registering
their most abundant amounts, donor confidence is back, and Malawi has been
forgiven US $1.4 billion of debt under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries
(HIPC) initiative.[4] The country has always been stable, and has never
experienced any civil conflict. Problems such as HIV/AIDS, infant mortality,
and poverty are still rampant, but the government's positive presence can be
felt especially among the middle class in as far as fiscal responsibility and
economic stability go. A number of high-profile corruption cases have been and
are still being prosecuted. There is a general sense amongst many Malawians
that their country is on the move, and is on track to realizing its full
potential. Malawi's transition to multiparty democracy has over time come to be
seen as one of the best examples of peaceful handovers of power on the African
continent and elsewhere. Very little of the advances the country has made since
the transition, however (especially the resurgence after 2004, not to mention
the peaceful transition in 1994), receive the due acknowledgement they deserve.
Many scholars and commentators still find it easier to focus on the problems
and failures.[5] Also lacking from analyses is the resurgence of the indigenous
philosophy of uMunthu and its collective responsibility for the well-being of
the community, which is gaining scholarly attention especially among theology
and psychology scholars, as well as in the popular media.
The appearance of the absence of government
in the daily affairs of Malawians in Englund's study partly derives from the
tendency by Englund to lapse into opaque theorizing, in what some may see as an
apparently overzealous attempt to ground the study in Foulcauldian analysis. In
quite a few places, Englund's choice of sources is hard to connect, and in
other cases the lexicography does not live up to the standards that otherwise
undergird much of the study. This is illustrated when Englund begins the
narrative of the dehumanization of Chikondi: "Critical analysis subverts
its own objectives if it does not include activists' contradictory position in
regard to human rights" (p. 145). Englund wants to simply state that his
critical analysis also includes contradictions between what the subjects in his
study said and what they did in practice, an example being a constant refrain
from the legal officer in Chikondi's case who kept insisting that he had no
mercy for Asians who abused the rights of less-privileged Malawians. Yet in
practice, these activists and other elites collude, albeit unwittingly, with
the rich and powerful tormentors of poor Malawians.
The introduction of the book and its first
two chapters are the most difficult to read, owing to Englund's attempt to
foreground a theoretical framework of the contradictions in the discourse on
democracy, human rights, and freedom. In quite a few places he subjects the
reader to sources that, however critical in their analytical pedigree in the
annals of Western theorizing, make little sense to African practicalities. The
penultimate chapter of the book deals with a case of mob justice and the
street-vending scene in Chinsapo, a township of the capital city Lilongwe, but
it is difficult for the reader to actually understand what the relevance of the
discussion is to the gist of the book's argument about the disempowering
effects of elite discourse on democracy, human rights, and freedom.
I opened this review with the story of the
furious debate caused by Madonna's adoption of a Malawian child, David Banda.
The question I posed at the beginning was about the origin of the anger
expressed by Malawians at NGOs opposing the adoption.[6] While not providing
the definitive answer to that narrow question (after all the adoption occurred
after the book was already published), Englund's ethnographic witnessing of the
actual practices of human rights NGOs in Malawi is quite revealing of the
tensions that have surfaced about the manner in which the concepts of
democracy, human rights, and freedom have been translated both into indigenous
languages, as well as into well-intended, activist fieldwork among the poor.
It is in this sense, that Englund's place as
the night guest who comes in from the cold and has a sharp pair of tweezers on
him comes to prominence. Englund has done a study that investigates what very
few Malawians will even imagine to be a problem, especially the questioning of
elitism in the translation and conduct of civic education and the practice of
human rights activism. In spite of the abstract sections of the book, it should
be mandatory reading for all human rights activists in Malawi and elsewhere; donor
agencies and international consultants; university students; school teachers;
and (equally important for the longue durée future of Malawi) student
teachers at both primary and secondary levels. Translating the book into one or
two of the major Malawian languages would bring the important debate that
Englund has initiated into the parlors of ordinary Malawians whose lives and
predicament are at the center of the study. This might even take one major step
in the direction of addressing the key issue being examined by Englund, the
nexus of perfunctory translation exercises and their connection to the
abstraction and isolation of knowledge and theory about human rights, freedom,
and democracy from people's real lives.
Notes
[1]. Kings Phiri and Kenneth Ross, Democratization
in Malawi: A Stocktaking (Blantyre, Malawi: Christian Literature
Association in Malawi, 1998); Kenneth Ross, ed., Faith at the Frontiers of
Knowledge (Blantyre: Christian Literature Association in Malawi, 1998);
Harri Englund, ed.,A Democracy of Chameleons: Politics and Culture in the New
Malawi (Uppsala and Blantyre: Nordic Africa Institute, and Christian
Literature Association in Malawi, 2002); Harvey Sindima, Malawi's First
Republic: An Economic and Political Analysis (Lanham, MD: University Press
of America, 2002); Moira Chimombo, ed., Lessons in Hope: Education for
Democracy in Malawi, Past, Present and Future (Zomba, Malawi: Chancellor
College Publications, 1999); and Martin Ott, Kings Phiri, and Nandini Patel,
eds., Malawi's Second Democratic Elections: Process, Problems, and
Prospects (Blantyre: Christian Literature Association in Malawi, 2000).
[2]. Al Mtenje, "Who Needs Civic
Education? The Inferiority Complex of the Malawian Elites," in From
Freedom to Empowerment: Ten Years of Democratization in Malawi, ed. Bodo Immink
et al. (Lilongwe, Malawi: Forum for Peace and Dialogue and others, 2003).
[3]. Nhlanhla Thwala, "Lost in
Translation," Mail and Guardian (April 18, 2007): http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=305750&area=/theteacher/teacherfeatures/>http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=305750&area=/theteacher/teacherfeatures/
; Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya, "English-only, Eish!" Mail and
Guardian (May 1, 2007):http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=306207&area=/insight/insightcommentandanalysis/>http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=306207&area=/insight/insightcommentandanalysis/
[4]. International Monetary Fund, "World
Bank and IMF Support Malawi's Completion Point under the Enhanced HIPC
Initiative and Approve Debt Relief under the Multilateral Debt Relief
Initiative," September 2006: http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pr/2006/pr06187.htm
[5]. Seanne Winslow, "Moments in History
Malawi's Peaceful Transition from a Dictatorship to a Democracy," YouTube
video, October 2006:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wecJ8Ou6RZg>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wecJ8Ou6RZg
[6]. Afrika Aphukira, "From Material
Girl to Spiritual Mum: Madonna, Malawi, and Baby David" October 17, 2006:http://mlauzi.blogspot.com/2006/10/from-material-girl-to-spiritual-mum.html ;
Nation Reporters, "Baby David Flies Out," The Nation (October
17, 2006): http://www.nationmalawi.com/articles.asp?articleID=19088
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=13275
Citation: Steve Sharra. Review of
Englund, Harri, Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor.
H-SAfrica, H-Net Reviews. June, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13275
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13275
