Abstract
This article discusses the concept of “suahunu” as the “trialectic space” and highlights its key principles and ideas as part of the project of pioneering new analytical systems for understanding Indigenous communities. The concept is borrowed from the lexicon of the Akan people of Ghana, with the embedded meaning that if one is seriously about learning, one will come to know and acquire knowledge and act responsibly. The article also raises lessons for the ways we produce and validate knowledge for social action and practice. In the discussion, the ideas embodying the “trialectic space” (e.g., body-mind-soul interconnections, culture-society-nature interface, sacredness of activity, spiritually centered space, ancestralism, embodied connection, decolonization, and multicentricity) are fleshed out, pointing to the implications for revisioning schooling and education globally for contemporary learners.
Keywords
“Suahunu” is a term in the Ghanaian Akan language meaning if one learns one will know and acquire knowledge. In this article, I theoretically explore the concept of “trialectic space,” which I refer to as “suahunu,” within the frame of an Indigenous literary criticism relevant for countervisioning education in contemporary contexts. I employ this concept of “trialectic space” (“suahunu”) in reframing an approach to decolonizing education for contemporary young learners. My goal is to highlight some important aspects of the “trialectic space” in a way that allows us to rethink the delivery of education to learners of today; my goal is to amplify the knowledge base of the “trialectic space” and what its teachings mean for rethinking schooling and education. The discussion is anchored in the relevance of “multi-epistemic spaces” (Cajete, 2000) and the ways young learners become conversant in the politics of multicentric knowledge production. More specifically, I advance the concept of a “trialectic space” (“suahunu”) as a space for intellectual and political dialogue as well as concrete practice for social change to happen. This trialectic space involves a “dialogue encounter” (Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 1996) and political discourse and social action among multiple parties constituting an “epistemic community.” It involves a dialoguing through uncertainty to come into different ways of knowing about one’s sociocultural environment. Immanently, trialectic space is transgressive and counterhegemonic to institutionalized colonial epistemes. It challenges conventional ways of knowing to acknowledge what hitherto is assumed not to be “knowledge” in dominant circles. Central to the trialectic space is the question of ontological space, innate, intuitive ways of knowing associated with long-term dwelling within particular historical spaces. The trialectic space concerns the temporal, as well as the ensuing relations, human conditions, histories, epistemological ways of knowing as imbued through space, time, and memory. When we think of the trialectic space through the temporal, for example, the particular relationship between space and time, we come to speak also about colonial histories and the “socio-onto-genesis” that constitute a body of knowledge (also see Fanon, 1967). Consequently, the trialectic thinking constitutes working with embodied histories of our myriad identities through space, time, and colonial geographies. These moments are interwoven and interrelated and do not constitute partitioned bodies of knowledge.
Trialectic thinking involves understanding the sociocultural environment through the ontological self and social reality. The ontological is discursively produced, involving the manner in which the subjectivity of learners comes to be shaped and formed through local societal practices. The trialectic space of “suahunu” that I am positing asks us to think about how we work with/live by and what are the consequences/implications of an ontological primacy as rooted to the stasis of (African) temporality that concomitantly speaks of the historical solidarity with all learners. My interest with the trialectic space lies with interpreting the experiences within schooling and education by looking at the material existence of young learners through culture, aesthetics, language, and politics. The trialectic space of “suahunu” allows us to think of the learning experience, emphasizing the heterogeneity of the learner and the fact that the learner’s experience is not encapsulated in a social/cultural and political vacuum. Thus for, say, Indigenous learners we need to think of the historical development of the learner through an Indigenous spatiality.
Critical to the discussion about trialectic space is recognizing the epistemological vanguard that guides and continues to inform the institutionalized knowledge production project. In thinking of the trialectic space of “suahunu,” one of the challenges is to come up with strategies that work to introduce/affirm/reinscribe counter and oppositional knowledges, that is, knowledges that have been positioned outside the limits of the institutionalized ways of knowing or bodies of knowledge. This would require decolonizing education. This is not a simple task. For example, we know that what has constituted the “social sciences” with their hegemonic rationale, disseminate colonial edicts, whereby knowledges as emanating from multiple locations are continuously nullified by the (Western) academy. We also know that multiethnic/multilingual African and other Indigenous peoples have been producing local, culturally rooted knowledges long before colonialism imposed its will. These knowledges over time, as passed down by generations, have come to mold young learners. The trialectic space of “suahunu” is affirmed to acknowledge all knowledges as existing in flux, that is, a flux that anachronistically embodies the spatiotemporal of the Indigene. In coming to work with these knowledges as legitimate ways of knowing, the work of decolonization becomes possible. If colonization is understood as the imposition of one particular way of doing things (see Dei, 2000; Dei & Asgharzadeh, 2001; Dei & Kempf, 2006), when we open the space for multiple ways of knowing and understanding, we begin to undo colonial knowledge regimes. In this effort to decolonize, we must remember that the work is not to undo Western ways of knowing, but rather to undo the hold they have on what is considered legitimate knowledge. In other words, the work of decolonization is not about placing another form of knowledge at the top of a knowledge pyramid, but rather finding ways for multiple knowledges to dialogue for anticolonial praxis (Cesaire, 1972; Fanon, 1963; Memmi, 1965; wa Thiong’o, 1986).
In thinking through the trialectic space of “suahunu,” African and Indigenous learners can engage the everyday knowledge conventionally disseminated within the variant spaces of schooling and education. Historically, conventional knowledge has come to govern and regulate everyday societal relations, producing as an ethic a particular code of conduct on the said Indigenous body, which in a cryptic way works to script the lived experiences of young African and Indigenous learners. What is disconcerting is the ways in which knowledge produced for and about African learners is discursively constituted and populated with the other’s experiences and meanings as well as a consciousness from the monolithic voice, from particular geographic locations, and yet masquerading as an all inclusive voice. The concept of “suahunu” as trialectic space points to the ways in which African and Indigenous learners come to know the essence of their lived experiences. It further informs how African, Indigenous, and colonized peoples make meaning of their lives.
With learning in a trialectic space, contemporary students can subvert conventional schooling and the colonizing associated practices. Trialectic space of “suahunu” embodies local Indigenous languages, an affirmation of the African/Indigenous spirituality, and a much-needed ancestral connection. “Suahunu” works to transgress classified Western expert epistemes, which culminate in African and Indigenous peoples consequently coming to a form of alienation, whereby knowledges with cultural roots in Africa are interpreted as being inferior to dominant/colonial knowledges. Trialectic space provides a spiritually grounded, anticolonial approach to education that can dialogue with how African and Indigenous learners become alienated from their local surroundings and social environments and, conversely, also to counter Eurocentric cycles of knowledge production. Such anticolonial education will enable learners today to deploy Indigenous knowledges as a positive concept, to be proud of their ancestry, culture, history, and heritage, to discover the essence of their Africanness or Indigenousness, and to become conscious of their own historical situation. Education through a trialectic space must be about understanding what identities mean to the young learner and the politics required in making such identifications. Spirituality plays an important role in learning in a trialectic space. “Suahunu” provides a trialectic space to come into a form of action-oriented spirituality, to come into ways of knowing that bring an ethic of care and affirmation onto the identity of the African and Indigenous body, and to act positively to change current social conditions.
Specifically, the trialectic space is constituted as a space for learners to openly utilize the body, mind, and spirit/soul interface in critical dialogues about their education and social change. It is also a space that nurtures intellectual and political conversations while valuing the importance and implications of working with a knowledge base about the society, culture, and nature nexus. Such spaces can be created only when we open our minds broadly to revision schooling and to see schooling as a place/site and opportunity to challenge dominant paradigms and academic reasoning and working collectively to bring change.
Toward an Indigenous, African-Centered, Anticolonial Lens to “Suahunu”
This discussion is informed by an Indigenous, African-centered, and anticolonial discursive framework. The anticolonial framework gestures to a theorization of colonial and ongoing recolonial relations and the implications of power and imperial structures on the processes of knowledge production, interrogation, validation, and dissemination; claims of Indigeneity and Indigenous knowings; and the recourse to agency, subjective politics, and resistance. Among the theoretical suppositions of the anticolonial framework is the insistence that the transformation of educational realities must start with the issue of reconceptualizing education, for example, asking new questions about the what, how, and why of education. Current formal schooling is essentially a colonial and oppressive system, and transforming the educational system calls for an anticolonial stance. As noted elsewhere (Dei, 2000; Dei & Asgharzadeh, 2001; Dei & Kempf, 2006), “colonial” is defined as more than simply anything “foreign” or “alien.” Instead, the “colonial” implicates all that is “imposed” and “dominating.” The “post” in postcolonial that may speak to an aftermath of the colonial is equally problematized. The concern is with a reorganization of “colonial” relations rather than a supposedly “new colonial” of the postcolonial, and particularly the ways reorganized colonial relations and mind-sets structure and dominate social relations of knowledge production, ruling, and social practice.
The anticolonial analysis of education and society allows for the interrogation of the power relations of schooling and society structured along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, culture, class, religion, language, disability, and sexuality. There is a central place for local cultural knowings, as well as local voices in the dialogue on education and social change. Teasing out points of contention, resistance, and opposition in the dominant voices and practices of educational delivery offers possibilities for transforming the current social system. Anticolonial approaches to schooling and education would examine how such local voices shift beyond mere critiques of the current order to transformative options that genuinely educate all learners. The “African-centered paradigm” can be conceptualized as a worldview. It is about working with a multiplicity of theoretical and philosophical perspectives (e.g., Afrocentricity, Africology, etc.) that have Africa as a central point of reference and a counterpoint of history. It is a discursive approach or lens to knowing Africa as more than a physical space. Africa is theorized beyond its boundaries and a fixed notion to include the transhistorical experiences, complex cultural knowings, myriad identities, and social practices of African peoples pointing to a shared continuity of our Indigenous systems of thought and life systems. The African-centered paradigm is also mainly oriented toward ideas and principles embedded in local cultural values, norms, and ethical practices highlighting the essence of the African humanhood (e.g., ideas of community, social responsibility, respect for elderhood, ancestorhood, spirituality, and cultural history—all as part of the totality of African peoples lived realities and contributions to global knowledge). The African-centered paradigm grounds the learner in the rich intellectual traditions of African peoples and the pursuit of knowledge to serve African people’s needs, aspirations, and concerns. The paradigm also expresses an Indigenous ontology that values wholeness, connections, and the interrelationships of self, group, and communities, as well as the nexus of body, mind, soul, and spirit in the coming to know.
Equally significant, African-centered paradigms provide a space for learners to interpret our experiences on our own terms, with our worldviews and understandings rather than being forced through a Eurocentric lens. As Molefi Asante and many others have argued the African-centered perspective is about developing an African worldview. This worldview, as a system of thought, is shaped by the lens of Africology, stressing the centrality of culture, agency, history, identity, and experience. Consequently, African-centered education would stress notions of culture, centering learners’ histories, identities, and experiences, focusing on the learner’s agency to bring about change in personal and community lives. Culture is critical to knowledge production. In fact, cultural paradigms shape knowledge. We need to work with the notion of the “centeredness” of the learner in her or his own learning in order to engage knowledge. A culturally grounded perspective that centers African/Indigenous people’s worldviews would help resist the dominance of Eurocentric perspectives. There is the need to center the agency of marginally colonized peoples such that African or all learners become subjects of their own histories, stories, and experiences (see Asante, 1991, 2003; Mazama, 2001; Ziegler, 1996).
The anticolonial framework helps us express a particular discursive politics that seeks to concretely subvert and replace colonial and colonizing educational practices. Helping to envision and establish counter education through the discursive practices of storytelling, Indigeneity, and the engagement of spirituality, as well as the use of our intellectual agency, the power of history, historical memory, and anticolonial education also shapes the ways we come to understand ourselves as learners with a sense of purpose and direction, and enables us to relate to our past and present as we (re)imagine futures. History is a sort of battleground where, today, we struggle over the past to establish the terms of the present and the future. As a totality of a people’s lived experiences, history is about the past, present, and future continuum. We live history, and living history is about struggles and resistance. Consequently, the trialectic space must be fought for and won in the academy. Such awareness of history is also significant in coming to understand why we need the trialectic space in the academy. The trialectic space recognizes histories are steeped in tradition, culture, spirituality, and social identities. The trialectic space troubles how colonial education has fostered a sense of the dominant (colonizer) telling our (colonized) histories. The trialectic space allows us to contest histories and question as to who tells others’ histories, how, and why. History is power in terms of its omissions, negations, silences, denials, and absences. For oppressed peoples, our past has been colonized, and Europe has become the giver of history. We need to take back our histories and the past. Unfortunately, we have been caught in the tropes of mental subversion and continually struggle in search of our own intellectual footing. Thus, we need anticolonial trialectic spaces in the academy to reaffirm our histories, cultures, traditions, spiritualities, and identities as essential to the learning process. Far from helping learners heal their wounded souls, contemporary forms of education have depersonalized learners and derooted us from our histories, cultures, identities, traditions, and spiritualities. We need a trialectic space that allows us to resist colonial and colonizing education and to question how and why many of us have come to speak Eurocentrism better than Europeans themselves.
Conceptualizing the Trialectic Space: Working With Some Basic Principles and Ideas
The trialectic space is associated with the following eight interrelated principles and/or conditions. These principles are framed in the broader understanding of the living subject and her or his interactions with the social and natural worlds.
A Body-Mind-Soul Connection
Every Indigenous society has a conception of the body-mind-soul interface or connection. For example, the Indigenous African cultural and customary knowledge of the Akan peoples of Ghana enthuses that the individual being is made up of the three elements: honam (body), sunsum (spirit) and the okra (soul). Within Akan culture, it is known that it is the mother or the abusua/family who gives the child the body as the source of wealth and social position. The spirit, which is the source of one’s character and personal integrity, comes from the father, while the soul, one’s inner self/personhood/environment is endowed by and from the Creator (also see Boadu-Ayeboafoh, 2012). The trialectic of body-mind, spirit, and soul functions to make the individual self a whole person within a larger world. It offers a lens for reading activities around the self and within their communities. It helps the self come to know and make sense of the world in relation to others. Coming to know the self and the community around the self is to appreciate oneself and others, and to begin to act responsibly. It is about coming to a humanhood as a whole being.
There is a need for a cultural and paradigmatic shift that avoids the privileging of Cartesian reasoning and “intellect” over body. School education often forces a separation of intellect from body, skill from reason—which, if we approach the critique with an Indigenous framework in mind, is a false demarcation. Knowledge is more integrated and organic than this separation allows. Because of the problems associated with such demarcation, a revisioned education will have to change learners’ and society’s mind-set of separating body, mind, and soul while simultaneously challenging the Western privileging of “academic” over “practical” pursuits. Such privileging constitutes a false separation of knowledge. Intellect and activity must be envisioned as complementary and not as part of an either/or model that ranks knowledge for the purpose of exploiting it. Any intellectual conversation is a sacred activity involving the interactions of bodies, minds, and souls. The soul, mind, and body are inseparable for the critical learner. Learning cannot be depersonalized, and we cannot ask the student to place the mind over soul and body, and vice versa. Holistic learning ensures when the student works with the body-mind-soul nexus. Learning and teaching become emotionally felt experiences. We know that the moments when learners are engaged in terms of body, mind, and soul are those moments that end up having a long-term impact in terms of the intellectual growth of the student. Learners develop a purpose in life and direction for their education. They learn early on that their education is to serve a larger purpose rather than simply for their individual growth and accomplishment.
The Society-Nature-Culture Interface
To speak of a world community is to acknowledge the society-nature-culture interface as in constant union and relations. This interface connects the material and nonmaterial, the social, cultural, as well as the physical and the metaphysical. The society-nature-culture interface speaks of harmonious interrelations that offer meaning to everyday social existence and the human condition. It can be argued that knowledge is based on observing and experiencing the social and natural worlds, and that humans are learners of the social and natural world. Knowledge is socially and collectively created through the interactive processes among individuals, groups, communities, and their natural worlds. Knowledge comes from individual, family, and community interactions, as well as through the interactive processes with nature. In effect, humans are part of the natural world. We do not stand apart and neither are we above the natural world. Thus humans and their culture simply relate to nature and the surrounding environments. The society-culture-nature interface also acknowledges that both the social and natural worlds are full of uncertainties, and that there is no certainty in any knowledge. Every way of knowing is clouded by some uncertainty about the social and natural worlds. Humans do not need to strive and explain away everything about their world. In effect, humans do not possess the Earth. It is argued in Indigenous and African cultures that all living beings have borrowed the Earth from the ancestors, and that the living would incur the wrath of the ancestors if they destroyed nature in the process of satisfying societal and individual material needs. Knowledge is about searching for wholeness and completeness. This wholeness is a nexus of body, mind, and soul, as well as the interrelations of society-culture-nature. To understand is to have a complete, holistic way of knowing that connects the physical, metaphysical, social, material, cultural, and spiritual realms of existence.
The Sacredness of Intellectual Activity
Sacredness is about reverence, respect, and humility. These virtues are part of how we come to know. There is intellectual merit in working with the idea that every social activity is sacred. This knowledge brings a sense of purpose and direction to everyday activity. It speaks of our responsibility and accountability for our actions. Learners are accountable for the knowledge they produce. A sacred trust must exist among learners to utilize the knowledge we all produce with a degree of ethical responsibility and care. Our knowledge cannot injure or cause harm to others. Such knowledge is also acquired, not simply through our own individual talents and skills, but is also endowed upon us by a moral authority that may be beyond the capacity of the human senses to comprehend. The understanding of the sacredness of human activity as involving mental, spiritual, emotional, physical, and metaphysical acts and interactions brings a holistic interpretation to human experience. The sacredness of activity also means bringing a deeper meaning to our intellectual pursuits. Knowledge cannot be just for the sake of consumption. Knowledge must not only compel action but also seek to change the learner and her or his community. Engaging learning in the trialectic space nurtures a powerful sense of purpose and direction that helps learners to remain focused on the task of social change through the power of ideas. Learners are not just subjects but also creators of their own worlds. We make our own histories, and making such histories is part of the sacred act or activity. History and social change are processes that do not completely lie outside the purview and power of human agency. While the act of change itself is sacred, humans, nevertheless, can predict and cause social change with the blessing of the powers of the natural world (e.g., ancestral spirits). We make and create our own histories. The history of resistance and survival is so much embedded in human historiography.
The Importance of a Spirit-Centered Space
The spirit is linked to learning and producing knowledge. For effective learning the spirit must be centered in an environment where bodies come to know. This environment, a trialectic space, is a spiritually centered space connecting place, spirit, and body. The spiritual is embodied (also see Dillard, 2000; Dillard, Abdur-Rashid, & Tyson, 2000; Shahjahan, 2007). Our souls are witnesses to life as it unfolds. Coming into the trialectic space requires an affirmation of our spiritual identities as a way of knowing. Spiritual identity is a salient, fundamental, analytical concept offering an entry point in understanding the lived experiences of all learners. Knowledge is spiritually driven or anchored. Knowledge gained in this space is embedded or imbued with the spirit. The spiritual becomes the axis on which knowledge rests, that is, the substructure or foundation for understanding the social, cultural, economic, material, and political. Therefore, understanding the spirit constitutes an important basis of ontological, epistemological, and axiological knowings of the trialectic space. Thus, in claiming knowledge within the trialectic space, every learner must center self, identity, representation, and history.
For the oppressed, we cannot downplay the possibilities of a spirit-centered education. All learners engage schooling with their identities, and spiritual identity is part of our myriad identities (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, [dis]ability, etc.). It is through the powerfulness of the spirit that we reclaim ourselves and souls. Reclaiming our spirituality can help us to resist colonial and intellectual domination. If we are to center spirituality in schooling and education, we must find ways to pedagogically and methodologically teach and learn about our spiritualities. We must see that our spiritualities are embedded in everyday action and our lived realities as learners. And yet we must also exercise some caution as we engage spirituality in the Eurocentric space. Spirituality is not “for sale,” nor is it to be engaged simply for consumption. Spirituality has deep meaning beyond the obvious. Affirming spirituality is not to avoid discussion of power issues and particularly asymmetrical power relations structured along our identities. Also, we must not shy away from troubling questions of spiritual impositions (e.g., fundamentalism). We cannot engage in the problematic duality of the materiality and nonmaterial split. Affirming spirituality is to understand spirituality as personal and yet collective, and as something that exists in relational terms with others aspects of our identities. For embodied learners, spirituality is part of “coming to know and acting responsibly with knowledge.” Within the “suahunu” etymology an understanding of spirituality affirms an authentic meaning of inner self and the relations with the outer environments. It also defines clearly what spirituality stands for (e.g., developing relations with a Creator, appreciation of Mother Earth and the teachings of the Land, understanding the relations of the self and collective and developing a sense of purpose and meaning of existence). Schooling that engages spiritual teachings focuses on such interpretations about our worlds. Such teachings are not about the commodification of knowledge, but an engagement of knowledge beginning with the appreciation of self and the inner environment. Therefore, an understanding of spirituality intended to serve altruistic and materialistic interests is shunned. Bringing spirituality into schooling and education requires a critical reading of spirituality as action oriented and transformative. It also calls for engaging the dynamics of power, knowledge, and social action. Spiritualities cannot be imposed, and the trialectic space helps us to acknowledge ourselves as spiritual beings in a spiritual-centered space. Each learner brings with her or him their spiritualities, whether or not this is acknowledged in schooling and society. In a classroom seen as a spiritually centered space, we are all enriched by our collective spiritualities that also require that we use knowledge to address key issues of power, social oppression, injustice, and systemic inequities. In the trialectic space, there is no splitting of the material and nonmaterial as everything is interconnected. Everything can be understood in relation with others as we learn and work together to affirm ourselves and our collective beings.
The Power and Efficacy of Ancestralism
The linkage of life and death in most Indigenous communities presents relational knowing about social and collective existence. We learn as living souls and beings who also pass on knowledge received from our ancestors. An important area where most Africans and Indigenous peoples establish communion with the “spiritual” world is through the veneration of ancestors. Indigenous African religious and philosophical belief is based on the two related notions of life after death, and a continuity or linkage between the world of the living and that of the dead. The dead are venerated and respected, for Africans believe that their dead ancestors guide and keep an eye over the behavior of the living kith and kin. Ancestors are said to sanction good or appropriate behavior while punishing those who deviate from society. As Africans remember the dead and pay homage to them (e.g., giving gifts and pouring libations), they are conscious of the fact that these ancestors are watchdogs of their society. In order for the living to be venerated as ancestors upon death, they should have lived a good life and been socially responsible. All this serves as a potent force in the social conduct of Africans as they struggle with the fundamental problems of everyday living. Through the combination of African respect for gerontocracy, a belief in the power of ancestors, and “pressure” of the community censorship, traditional Africa maintained law and order in its communities. This veneration of the dead was not accorded to anyone. It was more so for those who had “good” lives worthy of emulation. The giving of food to the departed souls is a token of fellowship, respect, acknowledgment, hospitality, respect, and symbols of family and community, continuity, and contact. As learners engage the trialectic space, there is the physical and metaphysical presence of bodies and souls. Such collective presence creates the sense of a sharing of knowledge for mutual benefit. It also allows learners to develop responsibility to their learning in sharing a space that can be called a “community of learners.” The knowledge that our ancestors are guarding and guiding us helps the learner to appreciate the importance of not betraying the good cause that all learners have been called to serve, one that is higher than oneself, for the broader community.
Bringing an “Embodied Connection” to Knowledge Production
In Indigenous philosophies, all knowledge resides in bodies and in cultural memories. The body helps us to know through its readings of history, culture, and identity. The pursuit of knowledge is about engaging in action and transformation. We must consequently bring an embodied connection to knowledge production. This is more than simply about concerns of intellectually detaching/distancing ourselves from the knowledge we produce. There is a consciousness of knowing and coming to engage knowledge. The relevance of embodied knowing calls on the knower to challenge the independence of our scholarship and activism. In effect, the Indigenous argument is that we not only speak of our experiential embodied knowledges and how these knowledges speak to our social realities, but also address key questions of responsibility and ethics in the use of knowledges. Far too often we have knowledge seekers as researchers who become “flight by night” experts preoccupied with securing knowledge from local communities with no sense of identifying with the struggles and aspirations of these communities. In this desire for knowledge, we commit social and ethical crimes of misrepresenting the knowledges of these communities to meet our academic disciplinary interests. For example, are there some ethical concerns and social responsibility issues when we force some of these oral knowledges into “corrupted written forms” in the dominant language? Ethically, what are we doing when we seek to present these bodies of knowledges in terms simply comprehensible to the dominant and its ways of knowing (also see Andreotti, Ahenakew, & Cooper, 2011)? How do we situate ourselves as part of the communities we study? How do we coproduce knowledge with our communities in ways that fundamentally shift the established ways of knowledge production? It is fine to have local communities in our midst, but how are our communities up there presenting papers with us on their own knowledges as “coproducers”?
There Is a Self and Collective Implication in Creating Decolonizing Spaces
Working within the trialectic space raises questions of goals, purposes, objectives of knowledge production and how we come to know. For example, if knowledge is about resistance, then how, what, and why do we resist? The members of the epistemic community that occupies the trialectic space are all implicated in the struggle to create a decolonizing space for learning and social change. Each learner cannot give or share knowledge in a space of oppression, hierarchies, privileging, and deprivileging of bodies. To create such a space of community belonging with power hierarchies, there is responsibility on all. We are all implicated here. Our collective implications and responsibilities ensure that there is a shared sense of purpose to design alternative futures for a better world. We work together to fight all forms of social oppressions. A decolonizing space is one devoid of power hierarchies and asymmetrical power relations. It is also a space of collective consciousness about a common destiny. It is a space where we can dream our hopes for a better community, where we work collectively, where all voices and experiences count and the task is to relate our individual and collective experiences to the broader macro-structures of society in order to understand our lived conditionalities. The individuation of the self has limits in not placing a larger collective struggle ahead of individual selfish ends and interests. There is always going to be the power of community, in its various forms over the fragmentation of ourselves simply as individuals, each circumscribed in her or his own subjectivity (also see Abraham, 2011). Within Indigenous communities, while the individual self is affirmed as important, it is correspondingly maintained that the individual makes sense only in relation to the community she or he is part of. What is called for is a collaborative rather than a competitive individual who places the interests of the collective/community above her or his own. The individual develops the sense of collective responsibility for the survival of the larger community. While the community itself may not be devoid of power relations, issues, and contestations, the goal is always to work for the survival of the community and to define the community itself as a community of differences. As a complement, it is also when the community recognizes the needs, aspirations, and sacrifices of all individuals constitutive of the group that we can truly claim to have decolonizing spaces for learning.
Sharing Indigeneity in Multicentric Knowledges
Knowledge is about sharing. No one has a monopoly over knowledge; there is no ownership of knowledge. Knowledge production is a collective and collaborative undertaking. We can share our knowledges only when we uphold the virtues of multicentric learning spaces. For many Indigenous peoples, coming into this space is an affirmation of our Indigeneity. The trialectic space recognizes the importance of multiple ways of knowing. As part of the multicentric ways of knowing, Indigenous knowledges and other bodies of knowledge, including mainstream or Western science knowledges, can “dialogue” in an academy without a “spiritual proof fence” (Masseri, 1994; Shahjahan, 2007). Emotions, intuitions, and spirituality constitute legitimate knowings and are not “anti-intellectual.” Acknowledging multiple knowledges is about the humility of knowing, eschewing arrogance. For example, it is part of the collaborative dimensions of coming to know that challenges colonialism, the violence of genocide, dispossessions of Indigenous lands, and the historical processes of dominant groups coming to “settle” as a “conquering/imperial” force. Knowing one’s own Indigeneity is a form of identity and resistance and also coming to consciousness of one’s place in society. In engaging the concept of Indigeneity in the trialectic space, we can work with historically contingent variables to open up possibilities for discussing the historic specificities, the myriad sites of complexities and contestation of colonization in relation to the ongoing production of resistances of colonized bodies. The trialectic space brings broader theoretical implications to the learning process as it allows us to speak and take up colonizing relations, and to challenge and resist practices of domination as opposed to a more concrete material and physical participation in the social processes of living in a “postcolonial” context. The Indigenous is foremost about connection to land/place and Mother Earth. The question of “ownership of the land” is raised in the political contexts of Euro-colonial dispossessions and denial/appropriation of a history of genocide, violence, and brutality.
Implications for Countervisioning Education in Contemporary Contexts
The foregoing principles are critical in rethinking education for contemporary times. But these principles are also much ingrained in elements of precolonial education in many Indigenous communities. I would argue for a reclaiming of these ideals in precolonial Indigenous communities for the education of the young learners of today. Specifically, I would highlight particular aspects of African education that work with these principles of the trialectic space as we forge ahead. As argued in a forthcoming chapter (Dei, in press), precolonial Africa was largely characterized by an Indigenous education in which knowledge production, interrogation, validation, and dissemination (including teaching and learning) utilized what was available, what people know and sought to know (also see Abbam, 1994; Wiredu, 1995). Education therefore defined/determined the ways, practices, strategies, means, and options through which African peoples themselves came to know, understand, and interpret their worlds (social, mental, physical, and metaphysical) and acted within such worlds for effective social existence (Boateng, 1990; Okrah, 2003). Learners were taught about connecting learning to their social and natural worlds, the inseparability of the spirit, body, and mind, the sacredness of human activity, and the responsibility of the learner to the social community of which she or he is part. Education was teaching and learning about the past, present, and future continuum emphasizing the place of local culture, traditions, and history and making the individual subject a whole being belonging to a community and with societal responsibilities (Boateng, 1990). Education was also about the interface of society, culture, and nature.
Precolonial African education was defined broadly as more than going to school. It was learning about family, community, nature, and society interconnections through everyday practice and social activity. Precolonial education was largely informal (also see Fafunwa, 1974, 1982; Fafunwa & Aisiku, 1982; Sifuna, 1990, 1992) as linked to traditions and cultural education. Education started in the early years of an individual’s life and was approached through a culturalized medium of instruction, such as stories, fables, folktales, songs, proverbs, apprenticeship, arts and crafts, vocational trades, and other forms of folkloric productions (Abbam, 1994; Miruka, 1994; Okrah, 2003; Wiredu & Gyekye, 1992; Yankah, 1989). The educational site was not the “school” but within communities, homes, and families. These were the trialectic spaces. The medium of instruction was through the local vernacular. Precolonial education, as understood by local communities, would make a distinction between “wisdom” and “knowledge” acquisition by insisting that an educated person is one who understands herself or himself (as a whole person—mentally, spiritually, culturally, emotionally, physically, and materially) and is continually guided by the mutual obligations to and interdependence with the wider community (Wiredu & Gyekye, 1992; also see Shizha, 2005). In effect, precolonial African education was to advance African culture, history, traditions, and spirituality. The success of such education depended largely on the important roles of parents, family, elders, cultural custodians, and community leaders as teachers of knowledge, wisdom, and morality (also see Opoku, 1975, 1997; Yankah, 1989, 1995). Within local communities there were also other culturally sanctioned modes and medium of education (e.g., intergenerational transmission of knowledge through age sets/grades, secret gender societies, rituals; also see Boateng, 1990).
Precolonial education did not compartmentalize education into social, cultural, spiritual, political, biological dimensions, nor social and natural science splitting, that is, the disciplines and the disciplining of knowledge associated with formal schooling. The centrality and interconnections of culture, tradition, language, and spiritualities ensured that learning was a lifelong activity (Abbam, 1994; Busia, 1969; Dzobo, 1973; Okrah, 2003; Thairu, 1975). Precolonial African education was pursued with a philosophy of “worldsense,” for example, systems of thought and ontologies speaking to the realities and workings of the cosmos, and the nexus of nature, society, and culture. Music, dancing, and orality were important modes of communication, including those of Indigenous stories, songs, fables, tales, myths, and mythologies as pedagogies and instruction (e.g., the use of Ananse stories and parables). The idea of mythic science was embedded in Indigenous education as linked to surrounding environments and the forces of Nature (Agyarkwa, 1974; Busia, 1969; Gyekye, 1987; Wiredu, 1995). The whole idea of uncertainty of knowledge and knowing was cultivated, and with it “not knowing” and/or “the fear of not knowing” was acceptable and inconsequential. As precolonial education became a socialization of knowledge upholding the everyday teachings of culture, spirituality, language, Indigenous songs, traditions, folktales, proverbs, and mores, the community was held together. Education focused on lived experiences and was primarily intended for everyday human survival and the search for solutions to practical problems (Okpewho, 1990; Uchendu, 1993).
Education was about the celebration of African myths, forms, and cultural stories of traditions. The storytelling tradition of African culture was a means of an Indigenous educational pedagogy and instructional strategy. It was about moral and character development of the learner that moved beyond rights, individuality, and self-discipline to developing a sense of purpose, meaning in life, social collective, social responsibility, and community enhancement. Science and technology were pursued as pragmatic and practical (e.g., vocational and technical training, arts/crafts; Adaye, 1947; Akrofi, 1958; Annobil, 1955; Awoonor, 1994; Nyerere, 1967).
The lesson for contemporary education in the context of the trialectic space is for education to uphold the values of community, identity, culture, and history, as well as Indigenous ways of knowing and spirit-centered education. Education must be locally contextualized and must equip learners to deal with challenges from the surrounding environments. Learning proceeded from a self and spirit centeredness among the community of learners operating within a decolonizing space. Learners were encouraged to bring an embodied connection to the learning process so as to develop a sense of social responsibility and the urgency of using knowledge to improve on existing social conditions. Learning was to engage in a communion with ancestors who guarded over and guided the learner and the entire process of educational delivery. All learners were valued for speaking from their lived experience and practice, and experiences were upheld as the contextual basis of all knowledge. The space of learning nurtured multiple perspectives.
Arguably, contemporary education can learn one or two pointers here. Critical education is about helping learners develop multiple perspectives that challenge epistemic and epistemological privilege of dominant intellectual traditions. Critical education is about understanding the self and responsibilities to self, group, family, communities/nation, and Nature. Contemporary education should stress the ontological and epistemological questions dealing with the interface of society, nature, and culture in making sense of the world, and interpreting social action and practice. Formal schooling and education should stress the connection between the physical and metaphysical realms of social existence in order for learning to be an emotionally felt experience. We create “communities of learners,” and it is important to challenge the unilateral fragmentation around difference where school/educational teaching helps young learners to understand and make the linkage between the individual and community. Critical education must also include teaching about the meanings of spiritual identity as a part of our multiple identities. Spiritual identity is a way of knowing. For example, what does it mean to teach about the universe as a basically spiritual universe? It means helping learners establish harmonious relations with their social and natural worlds. Furthermore, critical education must acknowledge the limits of Western intellectual traditions and confront the intellectual, spiritual, and political perils of mimicry (e.g., mental, physical, spiritual, emotional damage to learners through epistemicide). Arguably, there is a sense and urgency of “becoming crisis” of knowledge in the academy. This “knowledge crisis” has long been with us. Ever since the colonization of time, knowledge production has been Eurocentrically imbued and hegemonically installed within the hallways of academia. Many scholars have noted that colonization was not just about the colonizer/oppressor stealing colonized and Indigenous peoples lands and material resources. It was also about colonization of minds and the intellect (Asante, 1999; wa Thiong’o, 1986). It is for this reason that, for the oppressed, our strategies of decolonization have to incorporate a form of critical, anticolonial education. Such education will be a political and intellectual fight and struggle for self-preservation, self-defense, as well as the reclamation of our oppressed voices and stories and identities and an insistence on designing our own futures. The Euro-modernist/Euro-colonial project of racialized bodies seeking legitimation and acceptance in colonial spaces is flawed socially, epistemologically, and theoretically. It does not foster intellectual development. In fact, it causes mental, physical, spiritual, emotional damage. Socially (and notwithstanding any form of resistance), we have become “dismembered bodies,” “dislocated beings,” “fragmented souls” culminating into a sort of “the colonial archetype” in the academy. We have lost what it is to be human in the corporate culture of the academy. We have not always claimed our African humanhood. We need intellectual, spiritual, and social healing through the power of a discourse of loss, recovery, home, and ancestry as part of our everyday politics framed through an embodiment of knowledge. This is about the need to put ourselves back together (also see Anzaldúa & Keating, 2009). Healing is necessary for our learners to engage schooling and to become human again. What is required is for us to “refashion” our work (scholarship and political practice) to create more relevant understandings of what it means to be human. We must be able to produce critical knowledge that fashions a new way of thinking about being human (see Dei, 2012a) by believing in new knowledge possibilities. We must also be prepared to take risks and face the consequences of being activist scholars or “warrior scholars.” We must be able to engage the public sphere of global knowledge production from our lived identities as African and Indigenous scholars. I would maintain that particularly for oppressed/colonized and Indigenous scholars, we risk losing our souls, the essence of our being “academics/intellectuals,” if our work is not coupled with politics. Battles have been fought, doors have been forced open, reputations have been soiled, and lives have been lost to get us where we are today!
Conclusion
Indigenous community perspectives, lessons of Indigenous knowledge systems, and the articulation of trialectic space are important for education to consider. “Suahunu” as a trialectic space is and can be a philosophy of education for young learners. “Suahunu” offers a comprehensive approach to the education of the learner. The ideas of “suahunu,” in effect, constitute an African philosophy and a philosophy of education. As philosophy is not separate from knowledge and ways of knowing, there is no universal philosophy for all peoples globally. But African ways of knowing, systems of thought, and/or life systems are more that concepts, idioms, and cultural expressions. Sages, as “Indigenous thinkers” in the African culture, are informed by local cultures as the basis of their knowings. Also, African systems of thought have their own internal logics, local sense making and augmentation, innovation, Indigenous interpretations of evidence, rationality, reason, and criticality. These knowings are steeped in culture-specific paradigms (e.g., community and communal interdependence conveyed through wisdom of sages and also laced in local parables, fables, folktales, proverbs, songs, cultural stories, myths, and mythologies, etc.). As already noted, “suahunu” (i.e., learning and coming to know and to act responsibly within communities) helps distinguish “the acquisition of knowledge” from the “application of knowledge” as “received wisdom.” Suahunu speaks about doing education differently than we are currently exposed to in the conventional schooling and education. “Suahunu,” as a “trialectic space,” calls for acknowledging and developing our relations with the Divine Creator, Mother Earth, and the Land, a coming to a self and the collective awareness of being, and understanding the meaning and higher purpose of life and social existence. “Suahunu” is about learners living in relation to the Land, Earth, and Nature and coming to know and act in our worlds. “Suahunu” calls on educators to begin their teaching practice by first knowing themselves, then the learner, and to appreciate the environments in which teaching, learning, and administration of education are taking place. The search for knowledge is a search for how one comes to know and to act. “Suahunu” advocates teaching Indigenous “philosophies of circularity” where we learn in circles, and in communal and communitarian settings with everyone having something to share with others. There is neither privileging of particular bodies nor valuing forms of knowledge, experience, and cultural accounts. Knowledge emerges through the practice of humility, care, giving, and sharing. Knowledge sits within the trialectic space of the traditional, experiential, and intergenerational communication and understandings, as well as from visions, intuitions, dreams, and the exposure to the outer world (also see Castellano, 2000, in another context). In connecting the physical, metaphysical, and spiritual to the social and material, the rights and responsibilities to Land and Mother Earth are seen as more than relations to the physical. Space is also viewed as more than a social space. Every space has a reverence to it. The sacredness of activity requires that classroom teachers, for example, see their work and the teaching profession as sacred (i.e., as informed by forces beyond mere human awareness and comprehension). In other words, “suahunu,” as the trialectic space, is about expanding the explanatory power and meaning of what is generally called “science.” It is such sacredness of work that ensures that there is a reverence to every (school/classroom) activity, including teachings and everyday learning, and that there is mutual respect for every learner, teacher, administrator, parent, guardian, and community social worker. Learning within the spirit-centered space also offers an understanding that our souls and spirits are witnesses to Life as it unfolds, even in the process of educational delivery. The work of a teacher must be motivated by an anticolonial call to duty that ensures the interests and capabilities of all students to succeed socially and academically. Conversely, there must be respect for the teacher because she or he has fulfilled significant societal obligations sometimes beyond the call of the profession.
In the trialectic space of learning there has to be an awareness of the politics, contradictions, paradoxes, and unresolved tensions of working within communities and with a community of learners. There are desires, interests, and politics that may collide as we contest and design our own intellectual futures. Such tensions can be healthy if engaged productively to subvert the current educational and social status quo. The current so-called “neocolonial/postcolonial context” of education must, of necessity, be captured as an “anticolonial moment.” This is important so that the project of decolonization is not compromised. The “anti” (in antiracist/anticolonial) is not simply oppositional and confrontational but, more important, “action-oriented” and liberatory. We must be proud to say what we are against and fight for what we want to see. In an unjust world, to claim a politics of objective neutrality is problematic. It cannot be said loud enough. The current school system is a site in need of antiracist, anticolonial reading, interpretation, intervention, disruption, and subversion. Learners of today are, and must be, anticolonial subjects and agents. We must always ask and contest: What is our vision of the critical education today? What sort of education should be taking place at our institutions of learning? Critical education is about living and working with ideas for transformation. Critical education must be seen as a “knowledge liberation” that helps us reimagine the space we all occupy here and there. We must work to claim a trialectic space from and within which to pursue education for today.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The paper has emerged from preliminary findings from my on-going 3-year SSHRC-funded study on: African Proverbs, Fables and Tales: An Investigation of the Pedagogical, Instructional and Communicative Implications for African and Canadian Schooling; and SSHRC Standard Institutional Grant [SIG ] project, ‘Suahunu: The Trialectic Space’.