In 1993, I was working with the human rights education arm of a Kenyan non-profit, Kituo Cha Sheria (Legal Advice Center). Our mission was to provide basic training on human rights to low income urban communities around Nairobi. Every morning before work, I used to have tea with a couple of Kenyan friends–two lawyers working at Kituo, angry about the Kenyan political and economic hegemony, and full of ideas on how to challenge it. We started to talk about what we would do if we had the money.
Four months later, with the help of some Kenyan law firms, the Ford Foundation, USAID and some others, the Rights Awareness Project was born. We built RAP to be a different type of non-profit with a different type of mission. Most human rights organizations we had seen, both in Kenya and elsewhere, were issue driven. We were happy that they were out there, fighting for prisoners of conscience, or torture victims, or victims of judicial abuse. But that was not what we wanted to do. Like the RAP music with which we shared our name, we sought to distinguish ourselves not by what we said, what “issue” we chose, but how we said it.
We believed that effective human rights education focuses on methodology over substance: how we educate rather than what knowledge we seek to transfer. When people asked us what human rights issues we focussed on, we said “we don’t”. When other activists suggested that we were undermining the movement by defining human rights so broadly, we disagreed. We believed that until we let communities tell us what human rights were important to them, it would be impossible for “human rights talk” to belong to the people who could most use its power.
All education seeks to be transformative in two ways–ontologically, changing who we are, and epistemologically, changing what we know. The importance of these two functions will vary greatly depending on the type of education in question, so there is a spectrum of possibilities. A couple of examples: At one end of the spectrum you have formal schooling, like high school or medical school. Medical school focuses on transforming the knowledge one has rather than the person one is–the “ontological” rewards (e.g. turning out compassionate doctors) are also desirable but the real work is to make sure students get a body of knowledge. At the other end of the spectrum is education such as marriage counseling or management training. The “educator” doesn’t care a toss if the “student” forgets the information shared as long as he or she is fundamentally changed as a marriage partner or manager.
Of course, gaining knowledge can be incredibly empowering, and its almost impossible to change the way someone is without giving them some form of information, but too often, human rights pedagogy gets trapped in methodologies steeped in knowledge transfer. RAP believed that human rights pedagogy should focus more on being ontologically transformative, and spend less time focusing on information. If we could help build anger or hope or love, or a sense of power or trust, if we could spark a dream, or ignite the passion of a group of people to work together, then, we believed, those people would do more to guarantee their human rights than we ever could. Bottom line, we believed that human rights are taken, not given.
Since returning from Kenya, I have thought about our founding principles a lot, and they still make sense to me, and still challenge me all the time. Community building and rights education initiatives are always in danger of becoming entrenched in epistemological paradigms. Why is this? Why do we think that if we can just get people the information they need, change will happen? Maybe its because we do what comes naturally-and educate others the way we ourselves learned. Maybe it is precisely because the stakes are lower when we are merely sharing information rather than seeking to alter fundamentally the way people address their world. “Too much harm has been done in the name of those who want to change others for the better” the argument goes. Maybe its because traditionally, funders have wanted “measurable product”, and while they have difficulty measuring the level of empowerment in an oppressed community, they can certainly understand how many people an organization has “reached” with lectures, presentations, and the like.
I have a sense that the most powerful reason for the continued preeminence of epistemological paradigms in human rights and community building work is that the alternative–ontological education–is just plain hard. I think this is especially true if you are a high energy social activist. To be effective, community builders need the time, energy, and resources to build the trust of the community, the knowledge of that community’s own ways of communicating, and the skills to use that knowledge appropriately. That takes more patience than I was always capable of. I remember in one low-income community, my colleagues made me sit for four long days with locals, drinking tea and talking about anything but social change issues, before we could bring up the idea of starting a program there . . . . I was going nuts! I remain daunted by this challenge.
So how did RAP focus on the ontological rather than the epistemological? We did it by trying to foster engagement rather than transfer knowledge. Here is a story about one way that we did this.
After months working in one low-income community near Nairobi with a group of about 15 men and women, we started to have discussions about the relationships between the sexes. At first tentatively and after a while with fervour, we were all debating whether physical violence between a man and wife was ever appropriate. Relying on our institutional mantra (“I hear–I forget, I see–I remember, I do–I understand”) RAP members and students developed two surveys, one for men, and the other for women. The men and women in the program went out, and questioned hundreds of people, asking their friends, husbands, wives and others, non-threatening but intimate questions about their relationships, and in particular about domestic violence. The results shocked all of us. Violence by husbands against their wives occurred in a vast majority of homes. About 60% of respondents thought that women were to blame for the beatings, and many of those were women themselves. Everyone wanted to do something about this but we weren’t sure what. We had been given a rare glimpse into a world that most Kenyans guarded with secrecy.
We decided to write a participatory play. There were a few small problems, however. We didn’t have a story, none-of us knew anything about play-writing or theatre, my Swahili sucked, and I had a propensity when writing in English to use words like propensity, which didn’t go down well with my colleagues who were both articulate in four languages, yet understood the force of simplicity.
The Bobbit story had broken all over the world in the weeks before (husband beats wife–wife chops off his penis while he is sleeping). We decided to ride the wave of local interest in the theme and write THE CUT. With many edits, and much “workshopping” with our community, we created something in Kenyan English of which we were really proud. Our heroine, Akinyi, chops off her husband’s hand while he is sleeping–the hand that has beaten her for years. The play is the trial of Akinyi, and the audience is the jury. Is she guilty of assault, or was she acting in self defense against future beatings? That was what the audience (or jury) had to decide. There were also a bunch of other participatory events during the trial-all designed to provoke laughter, indignation, argument and general mayhem.
O.k. now here is the real point. When we first showed the play, Akinyi was acquitted by a huge majority every time. We were screwing up. We were still too focussed on information. So we changed the tone of the play, made Akinyi less sympathetic, and the case against her a little stronger. Soon the verdicts were much closer, and you should have seen the arguments among the jurors. As interest in the play grew, and different communities wanted to put it on, we developed it further. Eventually, we took away the final verdict survey all together, which made the audience really furious. They were a jury and yet there was no closure, no decision, and therefore no right and wrong. Many left the play feeling that Akinyi deserved her beatings, and that was the message we were sending. The entire audience, however, left the play talking about domestic violence.
A friend in the Kenyan human rights movement asked me how we could write a play about domestic violence that didn’t condemn it categorically. That was the whole point, I said. We all shared the same conviction that domestic violence was a human rights violation. RAP believed, however, that the only way to fight this secret terror was to bring the message into the homes of perpetrators and victims in a way that, over time, might fundamentally change their outlook. We believed that, being part of The Cut, some men would want to argue Kamau’s case, and might even talk about this issue with their wives; we believed that wives would be inspired by Akinyi’s courage, that women would share stories with each other about their private hells, and gain power and courage as a result. In sum, we believed that like most human rights violations, domestic violence was a behavioural issue not a information issue.
The play became quite a hit in Kenya, and was translated into Swahili and a few of the 40+ local languages. RAP turned it into a manual, a radio show and a television production. We moved on to create other plays and participatory pedagogical tools.
In 1997, back in the United States for a short while, I opened the New York Times one day to read about a Masai woman, Agnes Siyiankoi, who had taken her husband to court for the beatings she endured over thirteen years. The case was causing uproar in Kenya-Her husband’s attorney wanted to close the trial from the public because, he said, the publicity would prejudice the jury. The article cited RAP and the statistics from our survey.
Maybe Agnes never saw The Cut. We never produced it in Masailand, and there isn’t a lot of access to radio or T.V. there. On the other hand, maybe she did, or maybe she talked to others who saw it. In any event, it takes a thousand things to make someone as strong and as angry as Agnes. I imagine she went through hell. “Women are very angry with me”, she said. “It is unheard of in Masailand to put your husband in jail.” She broke ranks in a fiercely proud community, and she will pay the price. It is the Agnes’s of this world that effect social change. Human rights are taken not given. All the human rights educator and community builder can really do is try to build some anger, hope or love. The community can do the rest.
Paul O’Brien, CARE