Deafness and Blindness, Disability and Inclusion, in West African Tradition and Modernity: review of books and materials
By M. Miles (m99miles@hotmail.com)
BAMBA SUSO & BANNA KANUTE (1999) Sunjata. Gambian Versions of the Mande Epic, translated and annotated by Gordon Innes, with Bakari Sidibe.Edited by Lucy Durán and Graham Furniss. London: Penguin. isbn 0-14-044736-9 Softback. UK Pounds 7.99.
CONSTANZE SCHMALING (2000) Maganar Hannu: Language of the hands. A descriptive analysis of Hausa Sign Language.(International Studies on Sign Language and Communication of the Deaf, Volume 35). Hamburg: Signum Verlag. xx + 295 pages. isbn 3-927731-70-6. Softback. UK Pounds 26.95.
H. WILLIAM BRELJE (Ed.) (1999) Global Perspectives on the Education of the Deaf in Selected Countries.Hillsboro, Oregon: Butte Publications, Inc. x + 423 pages. isbn 1-884362-36-2. Softback. UK Pounds 32.95.
A little-known storehouse of disability-related traditions and activities awaits detailed exploration across the countries of West Africa, from the 13th century onward. Some parts are starting to reappear in new editions, surveys and research studies, such as those listed above. Other fragments are to be found in older travellers' reports and missionary archives. The best general guide is probably still John Iliffe's account (1987) of the history of the African poor. However, the West African disability history field is slowly growing and differentiating itself from that of other regions.
Sunjata
One interesting sometime-disabled character, known as Sunjata, was a battling ruler of the ancient Malian kingdom. His feats have been retold and embroidered by bards or griots for 700 years. Among African heroes of old, Sunjata probably leads the field in terms of websites now devoted to him (search also on Sundjata, Sundiata, etc). Traditional storytellers, who varied the manner and extent of the story according to their audience, are now matched by websites from school level to higher academic study. Sunjata has come a long way from his early years as a slow-learner, very late developer, "a cripple and a glutton", or "deformed and shapeless" (Bamba Suso & Banna Kanute, pp. ix, 63).
The precise nature of the historical Sunjata's childhood impairment is now impossible to decide. The present edition of the tales as told by two Gambian griots notes that "Griots do not generally suggest any reason for Sunjata's lameness" (p. 97). One version has him crawling on all fours for seven years (p. 5); another says that at twelve or at fourteen years "Sunjata could not crawl, Much less stand up, Much less walk" (pp. 57, 59, 74-75, 113). Did he refuse to get up out of pique because his half-brother had mistakenly been recognised as the first-born? (p. 5) Did the seven- or fourteen- year pregnancy of his ugly, hunchbacked mother have any bearing on the issue? (pp. 4, 42, 99, 110) Did he prefer to be carried, like the 'Boy Who Refused To Walk' in the Hausa folk tale? (Tremearne, 1913, 351-354; also 196). Ask the next griot you meet.
Ironmongery
Many West African legends tell of strange children with extraordinary behaviour (Görög, Platiel et al, 1980); yet substantial childhood disability is an unusual and unlikely background for a future successful warrior king, so there may have been some historical basis to the Sunjata legends. Certainly, the passing detail is fascinating, as when the leader of the early griots recommends to "Forge iron and give it to him so that he may rise up", and the storyteller explains that when someone breaks a leg, the craftsmen give him a crutch to put under each arm (Bamba Suso & Banna Kanute, p. 61). The result of this suggestion is real 'barefoot orthotics':
"They quarried iron ore and smelted it, And they fashioned it into a very long rod. They cut it in two And they bent it. Three full-grown men took each rod and brought it."
Sunjata, like many a kid being fitted with a first calliper, was unhappy with the ironmongery. After making the rods buckle under his weight, "He grabbed them, he picked them up and flung them away from where he was sitting." (pp. 62, 115) Quite a role model for direct action by disabled children! Fortunately Sunjata had a big sister with a nice line in behaviour management, who appeared from time to time to calm him down, carry him on her back, or find the missing piece of the jigsaw (pp. 13, 81-84, 112, 116).
Maybe the griots have a wry liking for this story. Later, after Sunjata had hauled himself upright and begun to battle for his future kingdom, he enjoyed a bard's xylophone music so much that "Sunjata grabbed his two Achilles tendons and cut them", to stop the man leaving. "You must stay here and play the xylophone for me; You must be my griot." (p. 80). This ancient method of hobbling someone, by cutting the tendons, recalls the great Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta's story of visiting the Malian kingdom in the early 1350s, where he was impressed by the local remedy for educational delay or intransigence. He noted that people were keen for their children to memorise the Qur'an. "If their children appear to be backward in learning it they put shackles on them and do not remove them till they learn it." (Ibn Battuta, transl. 1958, IV: 966). The visitor met a handsome, well-dressed young man heavily shackled on one foot, and asked his companion "What has he done? Has he killed someone?" This caused much laughter, and Ibn Battuta learnt that the shackle would stay until the verses were learnt.
Deaf People Signing at Kano
Deaf people and sign languages have been less in evidence in West African histories. Certainly there was regular use of gestural communication between coastal Africans and early English travellers who had no common language, as in the account of William Towerson's first voyage to the Guinea coast in 1555-1556 (Europeans in West Africa, II: 360-392, especially 368-373). The elaboration of "langage gestuel" among three very different West African populations has been documented and classified by Céline Baduel-Mathon (1971), yet without mention of deaf people. However, from the Hausas of Northern Nigeria, Major Tremearne in 1913 recorded a folk tale in which someone pretended to be deaf. "'The King showed his hand to the Deaf-Mute in the manner that one questions a Deaf-Mute' (i.e. by the sign-language), and the Man replied (on his hands)..." (Tremearne, p. 49). He also described some 30 familiar signs or gestures (pp. 54-57) used among Hausas, as well as the Bori actors' depictions of deafness (pp. 536, 538). Looking back from the 1990s, an elderly deaf Hausa could tell Constanze Schmaling (2000, details above) only that his sign language "has always been there", handed down from older to younger, as far back as anyone could remember (p. 47).
Schmaling gives a useful review of the history and cultural background of deaf people in Hausaland and its focal city Kano in Northern Nigeria (pp. 3-38). The main aim of her book, based on a doctoral thesis of 1997, is "to present the HSL [Hausa Sign Language] data and to document the nature of HSL as used in Kano State", from a database of some 1,900 signs transcribed in the mid-1990s with the Hamburg Notation System and cross-checked with native signers (pp. 49, 51). No doubt the Hamburg system gives an accurate notation and can be visualised well by experienced users; but the tiny symbols will not give much clue to the casual reader. Fortunately, Schmaling provides a good deal of linguistic material explained in a comprehensible way and embodying a range of cultural and conceptual phenomena.
Hausa SL in the mid-1990s already had an iconic sign for 'mobile phone' showing the antenna being extended (Schmaling, p. 169); while the sign for 'Tuesday' is believed to derive from an historical event in which a returned warrior had his damaged eye removed with a knife, on a Tuesday (p. 203). The sign for 'leper' combines with that for 'any sharp tasty spice' to designate 'ginger root', apparently a cultural perception of skin colour and texture (p. 177). The 'leper' sign also serves to compound a negative association (p. 207, footnote), indicating the familiar negative attitudes. It is interesting that HSL is as illogical as most European languages in depicting the past as being behind oneself while the future is in front (p. 141). This contrasts with the Middle Eastern linguistic perception of the past (which one can to some extent know and survey) as being in front, while the future (which is unknown and unseen) lies behind. About 180 pages of the book are devoted to description of signs and discussion of their uses singly and in combination.
Kano's Blind Community
Kano has had an organised community of blind people for centuries and up to the present. The explorer Hugh Clapperton (1788-1827) spent several weeks at Kano in 1824 and remarked on the high prevalence of smallpox and of blindness. He left a sketch map of the "separate district or village for people afflicted with this infirmity" [i.e. blindness] "who have certain allowances from the governor, but who also beg in the streets and market place. Their little town is extremely neat, and the coozees well built" (Clapperton, 1824, 655, 661, 671). He also learnt that lame people had a similar place or sector, but did not see it (p. 661).
The legendary origin of the blind community is given in the 'Kano Chronicle', probably composed in the 18th or 19th century from early records. When Muslim missionaries entered Kano in the reign of Yaji (1349-1385) many people embraced Islam, but there was some opposition. A mosque was built, but a group of people came regularly to dump filth there. However, the prayers of the faithful were heard and the defilers suddenly lost their eyesight. Their leader was told "Be thou Sarki [ruler] among the blind" (Kano Chronicle, III: 104-105). There may have been some link or reaction here to the story of Kano's earlier Sarki Gagua, who ruled from 1247 to 1290. For the second half of this long period he was blind, apparently after tangling with a local deity (pp. 101-102). Gagua was luckier than Sarki Dakauta in 1452, who reportedly was "dumb". People thought that, "'If he becomes Sarki he will be able to speak.' When he had been made Sarki, and after one night did not speak, they turned him out again." (p. 110)
Blind People on the West Coast
In many parts of West Africa blind people seem to have joined together for their survival, over centuries. This was noticed by Sylvain Golberry, who in 1785-1787 travelled between Cape Blanco in Barbary (now at the coastal border between Western Sahara and Mauritania) and Cape Palmas on the coast of Liberia near the border with Ivory Coast. Golberry appreciated many aspects of African culture, and admired some parts of the African character. He was impressed by the absence of poor beggars throughout his travels:
"In Africa, the only men who demand charity are the blind, who join in troops of eight or ten, each of them holding a very great stick in his hand, and properly habited in white cloth. They proceed to the doors of the huts, and sing passages from the Koran, or some other canticle; the praises of the proprietors are not spared, and the misfortune of the singer is described in very affecting language."
"The instant these blind people begin to sing they are invited into the house, and made to sit down, when victuals are given them; but these donations are offered with earnestness, and as a homage due to humanity, and to the pity inspired by the misfortune of the blind, rather than as a sort of alms. They then take great pleasure in hearing the canticles of the blind, who never want for any thing, because, whatever is necessary and agreeable is always lavished upon them." (Golberry, 1802, II: 353-354)
Golberry's view may have been rather more positive than what blind people themselves might have reported. It contrasts with the notes he made on the miserable condition of two Africans suffering from albinism (II: 384). Other reports also suggest that albinos could be treated very badly in West Africa (Dieterlen, 1951, 88, 94-97), while Iliffe (1984) has rebutted the idea that in pre-colonial times poverty and beggary were absent. Nevertheless, Golberry's remarks above accord with the best traditions of Islamic inclusion of blind people, as well as the Muslim obligation to provide individual and community support to those in need, in a non-stigmatizing way. The impetus for including blind people may have derived from well-known incidents with blind men in hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad, or from legends that were dated back to the time of the Prophet by blind West African bards, as discussed by David Conrad (1995). Formal teaching of the Qur'an to blind boys dates back many centuries and its recitation was a well-respected occupation on public and private occasions, so the diligent blind youth acquired a lifelong skill.
Some 75 years after Golberry's visit, Cape Palmas saw the start of Christian education for blind West Africans. The Reverend C.C. Hoffman, an American Episcopalian, wrote in 1863 of his plans to use William Moon's books in embossed type with two blind Africans, Charles Simeon and Susan. A deaf boy named Harvey was going to accompany Hoffman back to Liberia to teach the blind people basket-making, in which he was proficient. In 1864 Hoffman reported some success with the reading scheme (Moon, 1877, 58-64). This was a period when Moon's embossed books were in use also in India and China, while Braille's script was confined to Europe. Unfortunately, Hoffman died in 1865 and the impetus for blind education seems to have been lost.
These early efforts were part of a range of education, health and care activities in which Hoffman and colleagues had engaged for some years, of which a lively description appeared from Harriett Brittan (1860, reprinted 1969), who worked at Cape Palmas in the late 1850s. The missionaries all suffered much illness in the notorious 'White Man's Grave' of the West African littoral, but gave asylum to a range of African orphans or children left by families, and disabled adults or children (Brittan, pp. 45, 56, 119-120, 136, 139, 141-142, 194-195, etc). One child named Wah was deaf, and his deaf brother had been sent to America for education (p. 45). Brittan noted the developing use of signed and gestural communication between Wah and the hearing children (pp. 91-92, 115, 129).
Formal Blind Education
A fresh start was made fifty years later in Nigeria by the Rev. and Mrs David Forbes, at the Freed Slaves' Home, Rumasha, a day's canoe trip from the central river town of Lokoja (Forbes, 1917; Olusanya, 1966, 532, 535). Their effort in educating a small class of blind girls at the Rumasha institution from 1916 onward was practically lost from Nigerian educational histories, but has recently been reconstructed by Kathryn E. Hill from the archives of the Sudan United Mission (now 'Action Partners'). One of the first four blind girls, Miss Batu (later Miss Milkatu), rapidly gained proficiency in Braille and became an assistant teacher, a Hausa Braille transcriber and a leading light of the local Christian community (Hill, 1993; Hill & Yaksat, 1996). During the next thirty years, successful blind students spread Braille materials to blind people across a wider region.
At Akropong in the South East of the Gold Coast (Ghana) a formal blind school opened in 1946 under the Scottish Presbyterians and Methodist Missions, and its work was soon listed by a survey team that included the young blind official who much later would become well-known as Sir John Wilson (Blindness, 1948, 70). The team noted the 1931 Census evidence that where onchocerciasis ('river blindness') was present, very high levels of blindness could be expected, as has been the case in several West African countries. However, in areas where there were too few blind children for a separate residential school to be viable, the team recommended the example of "such American states as New Jersey, where 'Braille classes' attached to schools for the seeing are fairly common" (p. 47).
Further, Wilson and colleagues advocated that until anything more formal should be arranged, "any blind child brought to the knowledge of the education authority, who is otherwise physically and mentally normal" should be encouraged to attend the nearest day school and to join in with oral lessons, socialising with other children, singing, handicrafts and so forth (p. 48). These recommendations for various levels of integration (which were in fact less ambitious than William Moon's achievements in having blind children in ordinary classrooms across England and Scotland in the 1870s) have been lost and then reinvented at roughly ten-year intervals, until the 1990s when the rhetoric of inclusion swept in.
Deaf Education
Formal schooling for deaf children in Ghana and Nigeria began a little later, according to essays in a worldwide collection edited by William Brelje (1999, details above). A useful amount of information has been collected by A.D. Okyere and M.J. Addo on 'Historical development of Education of the Deaf in Ghana' (Brelje, pp. 141-155), with the first school begun by the pioneering Afro-American deaf development activist Andrew Foster in 1957. The following year saw the start of formal education of deaf children in Nigeria, and these developments are described in some detail by Emmanuel Ojile (Brelje, pp. 261-271). Brelje's book includes similar essays from 24 other countries, including Egypt, India, Lebanon, Nepal, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Zimbabwe, each with an historical introduction and a good deal of subsequent information. Curiously, a cut-off date of 1990 or 1991 seems to have operated on the references and contents of almost all chapters, suggesting that the book's gestation period was in the Sunjata class. However, much of its value lies in the historical perspectives offered, and the geographical breadth.
Co-Existence
Early European visitors to the Kingdom of Benin noted the participation of 'hunchbacks, dwarfs and fools' as entertainers at the royal court, which they could understand in terms of similar practices in Europe and West Asia (Dapper, 1686, 308-312, 332, 358). However, relations in West Africa between traditional and modern approaches to disability and health have often been less than cordial, during their few centuries of growing contact. Many West Africans have been happy to avail themselves of European therapies in addition to traditional practices, while the converse has seldom been the case. Nevertheless, some outbreaks of mutual learning and teaching occurred. The great leprologist S.G. Browne recalled that 40 years earlier in the Belgian Congo,
"I learned my clinical leprosy sitting between a cannibal chief and a cannibal witch-doctor - and good teachers they were, pointing out scarcely visible differences of skin surface that I should not have noticed unaided." (Browne, 1980, 76)
Browne went on to work in Nigeria and to train staff in the care of leprosy (Hansen's disease). He gave an interesting review of the historical development of West African leprosy services (Browne, 1980), paying warm compliments to the work of Francophone innovators. A more recent and critical approach to leprosy history by Eric Silla (1998), with material going back to the 16th century, focuses on the views of Malian sufferers from leprosy. (See also Iliffe, 1987, chapter 12).
Latterly, more open discussions have begun, and some respectful listening across the divide of tradition and the modern. In Cameroon, Sister Cecile Cusson in 1976 emphasised the need to listen to families with animist conceptualisations of disability, if there was to be any chance of involving parents in ongoing treatment of their disabled child. Gualbert Ahyi (1997) has outlined some of the benefits and dilemmas for the psychiatrist who knows both the traditional and modern models of mental health and illness in Benin, while Erick Gbodossou (1999) offers further bridge-building insights, as a Senegalese doctor trained in both traditional African and modern European healing techniques.
References
Ahyi, G.R. (1997) Traditional models of mental health and illness in Benin. In: P.J. Hountondji (ed) Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails. [Oxford]: CODESRIA.
Baduel-Mathon, C. (1971) Le langage gestuel en Afrique Occidentale: recherches bibliographiques. J. Société des Africanistes, 41: 203-249
Blindness in British African and Middle East Territories (1948) London: HMSO.
Brittan, H.G. (1860) Scenes and Incidents of Every-Day Life in Africa. Pudney & Russell. Reprinted (1969), New York: Negro Universities Press.
Browne, S.G. (1980) Leprosy. In: E.E. Sabben-Clare, D.J. Bradley & K. Kirkwood (eds) Health in Tropical Africa During the Colonial Period. Oxford: Clarendon.
Clapperton, H. (1824) Captain Clapperton's narrative. In: Missions to the Niger, Vol. IV, The Bornu Mission, Part III, edited by E.W. Bovill, reprinted 1975, Nendeln / Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint.
Conrad, D.C. (1995) Blind man meets prophet. Oral tradition, Islam, and Funé identity. In: D.C. Conrad & B.E. Frank (eds) Status and Identity in West Africa, 86-132. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Cusson, Sr. Cecile (1976) A rehabilitation experience with Cameroon animists. In: The Disabled in Developing Countries, 29-35. London: Commonwealth Foundation
Dapper, O. (1686) Description de l'Afrique . . . traduite du Flamand. Amsterdam.
Dieterlen, G. (1951) Essai sur La Religion Bambara. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Europeans in West Africa, 1450-1560, translated & edited by John W. Blake (1942). Hakluyt Second Series No. 87. London.
Forbes, D. (1917) Freed Slaves' Home, Rumasha. Lightbearer (Sudan Interior Mission), 13: 51-54. (NB: see also reports and items by Forbes and others in Lightbearer volumes 12, 15, 17, 21, 23, 25, 29, 31-33, 35-37, cited by K.E. Hill, q.v.)
Gbodossou, E. (1999) Defining the role of religion and spirituality in the lives of persons with disability in the Fatick region, Senegal, and the Mono region, Benin. In: B. Holzer, A. Vreede & G. Weigt (eds) Disability in Different Cultures, 58-77. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Golberry, S.M.X. (1802) Travels in Africa, performed during the years 1785, 1786, and 1787, in the western countries of that continent, etc. Translated from French by F. Blagdon. London.
Görög, V., Platiel, S., Rey-Hulman, D. & Seydou, C. (1980) Histoires d'enfants terribles (Afrique noire). Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose.
Hill, K.E. (1993) Rev David Forbes - the "forgotten father" of Nigerian Special Education. The Exceptional Child (Jos, Nigeria) 1 (1) 1-6.
Hill, K.E. & Yaksat, B.L. (eds) (1996) "A Cup of Cold Water. . ." [Jos, Nigeria]: Gindiri Material Centre for the Handicapped. (isbn 978-311990-5-8)
Ibn Battuta. The Travels of Ibn Battuta A.D. 1325-1354. Translated by H.A.R. Gibb (1958), 4 volumes, Cambridge UP for Hakluyt Society.
Iliffe, J. (1984) Poverty in nineteenth-century Yorubaland. J. African History, 25: 43-57.
Iliffe, J. (1987) The African Poor. A history. Cambridge UP.
The Kano Chronicle. Translated by H.R. Palmer (1928) in: Sudanese Memoirs, 3 volumes, reprinted (1967) as one volume, London: Cass.
Moon, William (1877) Light for the Blind. London: Longmans.
Olusanya, G.O. (1966) The Freed Slaves' Homes - an unknown aspect of Northern Nigerian social history. J. Historical Society of Nigeria, 3 (3) 523-538.
Silla, E. (1998) People are not the same: Leprosy and identity in 20th century Mali. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Tremearne, A.J.N. (1913) Hausa Superstitions and Customs. London: Bale, Sons & Danielsson.
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