There is wisdom to be had, therefore, in approaching the social through the biographical. Although the notion of the human subject is construed very differently in different societies and through the history of European thought,9 it is in the experience of persons—not of groups, animals, or things—that the world makes its appearance, albeit fragmentarily and fleetingly. The whole world does not exist for anyone. It is an idea. What exists are worlds within worlds, and the more we penetrate these microcosms, the more we come to question the generalizations we make concerning the hegemony of the macrocosm, whether this is conceived historically, culturally, or ethnically. It is therefore the indeterminate relationship, the lack of fit, the existential aporias between a person and the world in which he or she exists that become the focus of our anthropological concern.
ALL I COULD DO WAS USE SIGNS
“So they push us to school. To tell you the truth, Michael, my first years of school, probably up to when I was eleven—I have no memory of them. Either I intentionally shut them out or something like that, but I don’t remember anything good or interesting because I didn’t understand anything the teachers were saying. All I could do was use signs. I would just sign, ‘Oh, where are they going?’ and go there. ‘What are they doing?’ I’d do that. Games—I couldn’t play games because I didn’t know what anyone was saying. Somebody tells you to run across. I didn’t know what he meant. So I’d be excluded from doing that, whatever it was. The worst thing was, I couldn’t tell anybody about my problems because, if I did, I’d be punished for trying to get out of going to school. So I kept quiet. It took me a long time to be as talkative as I am now. It wasn’t until I was in secondary school that I began to speak a bit, because by then I’d made some friends and learned a bit more English. But even then, I wouldn’t say much. I was a bit hesitant about communicating with people because of my fear of making a mistake or saying the wrong thing.
“Those primary school years were also difficult because before going to school in the morning, I had to work in my grandmother’s garden, the shamba. You had to go dig before you did anything else. You’d wake at five o’clock in the morning, then go with your grandmother and dig, and after tilling the land you’d come back home and go off to school. You didn’t have time to clean up or wash off the sweat. The problem was that the school was three kilometers from the place where we were staying, and if you were going to get there on time you’d have to run. If you walked, you’d be late and get punished. And so, you leave the shamba and run to school. No time to bathe, and anyway, to bathe you’d have to fetch water from the river, which was four kilometers away—the Manafa, as it is called. So after coming from the shamba you only had time to clean your hoe. The rule was simple: you are not supposed to leave sweat on it because it could rust. So you are supposed to clean the hoe and leave the hoe clean. Cleaning yourself didn’t matter. So you run to school. And then you are caned. I don’t remember any day during that period that I was not caned.”
“By the teachers?”
“Yeah, it was like breakfast.”
“Because it was a daily occurrence?”
“Truly. Every day. It only stopped when I was sixteen and went to secondary school. Up to then I don’t remember a single day that I was not caned. The reason could have been because I was dirty every morning, or I was late (because I was late almost every day), or I was sleeping in class (which also happened every day). Now I know it was because I was tired and hungry, but at the time I didn’t understand. And the beating was not like someone coming along and giving you a rap or a smack. No, no, no. Beating was like an activity on its own. Teachers set aside a time to do it. I mean they could set aside half a period of teaching just for punishment. And I was almost always the first to be beaten because I was late, dirty, or had been caught dozing. Minimum every day I would receive six strokes of the cane. You had to lean over with your hands on the table, and they caned you at the base of your spine. Six for being late, six for being dirty, and six for not answering questions correctly. For me, the problem was that I couldn’t even understand what the teacher was saying. I couldn’t understand the questions, and I couldn’t give the answers. And then there was after school, when you were supposed to run home, meet grandma, get your hoe, and go back to the garden for more work until seven o’clock, when it is too dark to do any more digging.”
“Without having eaten anything all day?”
“Not always, because you’d often get the chance to take some leftovers from home, like a piece of sweet potato, cassava, or millet bread. You would hide it in your shorts or in your armpit, because no one would want to eat it if it had been kept in one of those places. Or you could spit on the food when everyone was looking, and so keep it until break or lunchtime without it being taken from you. The problem was that whenever you came to school with food, you reeked of it, and there would be those small, young boys waiting for you, waiting to take it away from you. So I would get used to going without food during the day, from eight in the morning to four or five in the evening. Sometimes I would be able to find some banana peelings and eat the softer part of them. Or you could go for the peelings of sweet potatoes from outside the teachers’ homes. They peel their food, so you go and get those peelings and eat them. They were actually very fine and sweet.”
“Would you eat in the evening, then, when your work was done?”
“Yeah, but you could never be sure of that meal either, because visitors would often come, and they had priority.”
PUNISHMENT, PERSECUTION, AND PERVERSION
Food sharing is at the core of kinship. Providing succor and support to those who are dependent on you for their very existence is the moral basis of family life, and commensality affirms the mutual well-being of the household. However, throughout East Africa, men have migrated from rural villages to find work in towns, and lives have been lost to HIV/AIDS, leaving countless children orphaned. Grandmothers have had to bear the burden of growing crops and feeding the orphaned grandchildren who now depend on them. Not only is food in short supply and farm labor exhausting; competition for scarce resources breeds resentment and ill will. As Erick Otieno Nyambedha observes in a recent study on western Kenya, “The sharing of food, once a token of warm relations between grandmothers and their grand-children, has now lost its charm and beauty and become a frugal part of day-to-day survival in a grim world.”10 One might also note that denying food was a traditional way of punishing children for being lazy, though deliberate starvation of children would not be tolerated.
It is also worth noting that among the Bagisu, physical punishment was a precondition for the attainment of manhood, and initiation (imbalu) was a kind of graduation ceremony for boys who had proven their ability to with-stand extreme pain. Each boy had to stand stock still while his foreskin was cut and subcutaneous flesh stripped from around the glans penis. “The degree of pain entailed is never underplayed; the most commonly used descriptive phrases being ‘fierce,’ ‘bitter,’ and ‘terrifying.’ Only those who have faced this fact and overcome their fear can undergo the ordeal successfully.”11 Given the high value placed on male strength (kamani) and self-determination in Bagisu society, it is possible that Emmanuel’s ordeals were seen as a necessary preparation for manhood. Certainly, his growing ability to endure painful beatings without complaint, achieving complete detachment from the ordeal, resonates with conventional Bagisu ideas about the need to dissociate oneself from emotions of fear and humiliation to attain transcendence. In Bagisu parlance, initiatory ordeals were forms of “punishment,”12 not for an offense committed but to stir the neophyte into developing metaphysical power. This power consisted in being able to control one’s emotions rather than being controlled by them.13 Manhood was therefore a matter of deciding to submit oneself to the ordeal rather than shrinking from it. As one initiate put it, “No one has asked us to do it. No one is forcing us. We ourselves have overcome our fear.