Women's Crossroads

I have been teaching as a lecturer in the interdisciplinary first-year general education program, Project Renaissance, at the University at Albany, SUNY, since 2003. If you've never been to the SUNY Albany campus, you can't imagine how dehumanizing it is.

Built on a flat, windy plateau, it is huge and stark, with an oversize modernist architectural style that has the effect of making human beings feel like ants. There is nothing warm and friendly about it, and for years I have gone there and done my best to combat the ethos of the place in my own classroom space, with mixed results--largely because the students are so used to the impersonal lecture-hall format, and a pedagogy that relies on testing as the main form of interaction with the teacher, that they can react in prickly, unpredictable ways to being asked to converse civilly with each other on controversial issues, to come up with original ideas about texts, or to--gasp--take initiative in their response to an assignment.

But yesterday, at a conference organized by the grand-sounding university "Consortium on Africa," I finally felt the first glimmerings that there might indeed be a community of kindred souls for me at the University at Albany. I finally discovered a group of unpretentious, friendly scholars and administrators, as well as serious, thoughtful students, who obviously care deeply about the African community, both in Africa and in the diaspora, and who were willing to do the extraordinary amount of work necessary to put together a full-day conference on the theme "Africa and the Diaspora: Agents for Change."

The morning panel, "Meanings and Experiences of Gender in African Diasporas," was a remarkable example of coalition in action:

• a white women's studies professor, Iris Berger, discussed her research on gender roles in South Africa;
  
• a young Black assistant professor in History and Africana Studies, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, explored how what she called "fissures in the patriarchy" in colonial Gabon, where chiefs briefly took women's side in regulating marriage, in order to increase their control of women's agricultural labor;
  
• a Black male Ghanaian assistant professor of history and political science, Gariba Abdul Korah, picked up this theme in the context of Ghana, showing how as Ghanaian society shifted from one where wealth was measured in wives and children, to a cash economy, conflicts developed between the traditional chiefs and the young men who left the village to work in the mines and plantations--conflicts that ultimately benefitted women;
• and a Brazilian assistant professor of Latin American, Caribbean and US Latino Studies, Patricia Pinho, discussed her research into "roots tourism" among African Americans, looking at what she called "the gendered nature" of this tourism, which is more often undertaken or at least organized by women--women who may be oppressed at home by racist discrimination, but become privileged in the context of places like Brazil and Africa.
  

One of the most interesting moments in this panel came in the discussion period, when a young Somali woman, a UAlbany student, talked about the situation for women in wartorn Somalia. "In Somalia, Islam and the patriarchy are all we have left in terms of institutions," she said, "and both of these are so repressive towards women. How can we take what we have, which is the patriarchy, and make it better?"

Of course, none of the panelists really had an answer for this poignant question. But later in the discussion a similar question came up, asked by a man who had traveled to the conference from Nigeria. "How can women be empowered," he asked, "in societies that consider them to be pieces of property?"

Professor Abdul Korah took this question on, pointing to himself as an example of a man who grew up in a traditional society, but who, through education, had overcome his prejudices against women, and now considered women his true equals. His evident passion on this subject was clear, and one certainly wanted to believe that he was speaking the truth, and that the right kind of education could overcome centuries of gender discrimination in Africa (and elsewhere).

The keynote speaker, Dr. Juliana Nfah-Abbenyi, was a shining example of what education could do for a powerful woman who was given her autonomy. A creative writer as well as a professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, Dr. Abbenyi spoke about her own upbringing as a member of the Anglophone minority in Cameroon, and used the example of the linguistic conflicts in Cameroon to illustrate the identity struggles of Cameroonians in the wake of colonialism.

Cameroon was occupied by Germany, France and Great Britain at various points in its history, and when it finally won its independence, in 1960, the country was partitioned into a majority French-speaking area, and two narrow strips of English speakers. One of these strips chose to throw in its lot with neighboring Nigeria, and is now part of Nigeria. The other strip remains part of Cameroon, but in a tense relationship with the French-speakers, perhaps somewhat similar, in linguistic reverse, to the situation of the Quebecois with the Anglophone majority in Canada.

Dr. Abbenyi showed photographs she had taken at the Anglophone university in Cameroon, where signs dot the campus proclaiming:

• "Succeed at university by avoiding Pidgin on campus"
• Pidgin is like AIDS--Shun it"
• English is the Password, not Pidgin"
• Speak English and More English"
• Pidgin is taking a heavy toll on your English--Shun it"
  

Pidgin English competes with English proper, French and the more than 200 native languages in polyglot Cameroon, and is being singled out at this Anglophone university as a special threat. Using Gloria Anzaldua, Homi Bhabha and other theorists as a framework, Dr. Abbenyi showed how these signs reveal "a deep anxiety and malaise" about linguistic and national identity in Cameroon. Pidgin, she said, drawing on her personal experience as a native speaker of this vernacular, is "the language of playfulness, informality, vulgarity, transgression, trade, celebration, and family." To ask students to "shun it" is to ask them to enter the English-speaking public sphere--which is already fraught in majority-Francophone Cameroon--and not look back.

Sometimes I feel at SUNY Albany as if this university, too, has asked us all in a much more subtle way to leave our authentic selves behind when we step onto that cold, windy campus. When I look at the faces of the students, faculty and staff walking the halls during the breaks between classes, I am reminded of the purposefully blank faces native New Yorkers adopt when we descend into the subways (as a native New Yorker, I know this mask well). It's as if you deliberately set up a negative aura around yourself, repelling all attempts at interaction, of whatever provenance.

At the conference yesterday, I finally felt as though I had entered a space in the university where we were being welcomed to come together in an authentic way and "speak pidgin" with each other--to speak the language born of our caring and compassion for others. I look forward to joining the "Consortium on Africa," and helping to co-create this important, empowering space with other members of this newfound community.