Afterword: Across Difference, Toward Freedom

Keguro Macharia (bio)

Invitation

I was delighted when SA Smythe invited me to write this Afterword. It extended an earlier invitation issued in 2018 to participate in a symposium, “Troubling the Grounds: Global Figurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity,” held in May 2019. My response to Dr. Smythe was short: “My mother has cancer—not a secret—and I’m her primary caregiver. I’m unable to travel out of the country.” It was more curt than I’d have liked; the schedule of doctor’s visits and regular tests and intermittent hospitalizations and homecare left me too exhausted to think with others, even too exhausted to write more elegant emails. Some tethers are more weighted than others. I am so grateful that the invitation remained open, and returned, and that I could accept it this time.

This invitation arrived during a global pandemic, at a time of unrelenting grief and exhausting carework, a time of compounding losses and inventive mutual aid. A time when those vulnerable to premature death have been made even more vulnerable, while others have been made newly vulnerable. A time when thinking and writing have felt clotted: urgent in the face of ongoing devastation and impeded by the halting rhythms of fear and mourning. Time has felt interrupted and unending, labyrinthine and borrowed. We—I?—have struggled to document what it feels like to try to live now, and wondered what forms of analyses and invention can suffice to name our present.¹ We—I?—have wondered if all writing is useless unless eulogy and obituary, and know that, in some way, every piece of writing is infused with the sound and feeling of loss.

Interruption and truncation have become rhythms of living and thinking, ways of marking the impossibility of time. Rest in Peace (RIP) and pole saturate the air:² grief thickens, as does rage. And these mark the sayable—often choked out, always necessary, especially when survival and freedom are at stake, and especially when survival and freedom are framed as antagonists by those who want our survival, but not our freedom. I am not trying to be abstract—it is simply that geohistories stack against each other, and over and over we tell each other that India feels like Kenya feels like South Africa feels like Canada feels like England feels like the U.S. feels like Uganda feels like . . . : minoritized lives are at stake; minoritized lives are considered disposable; and minoritized lives are further minoritized by state neglect and abandonment. Everything is not everything—sometimes, it feels like it is.

And still, there is invitation: to think with and along, to imagine from where we are toward freedom, to see with clarity all the ways we are assembled as the undone and the unmade and to know with certainty all the ways we make ourselves possible as we pursue freedom. I can do no better than to echo and amplify the invitation that was extended to me. I invite you to read and reread the assembled writing, as I have also been invited to read and reread, to learn and to imagine toward freedom.

Geohistories

I am writing from Nairobi, Kenya. The name Nairobi is derived from the Maasai phrase Enkare Nyrobi—place of the cool waters. A wandering nation, a nation of people who pursue life on the move—contact, pleasure, trade, food, adventure—the Maasai model ways to think about ancestral naming that do not privilege ownership. Not “I name this and so it belongs to me,” but “I passed here, noticed my experience of it, named that experience, and in that naming created dreams that might shape how others experience it.” Against the press of dangerous, ongoing ethnonationalisms in Kenya, where certain ethnic groups claim specific lands and attempt to expel others from those lands, I have been trying to imagine relations to place and space that are not based on exclusionary ownership. It might be that some names invite us to share experiences—a club named bliss, a bar named happy, a mountain named cold, a food named delicious—and that place is an invitation, not a boundary.

Geohistories: Where we call from and are called to assemble so that we may think together, dream together, imagine freedom together, practice freedom together.

From this particular geohistory, the term “indigenous” resonates differently. The history of what was first named part of British East Africa in the 1890s and then Kenya in 1920 is often taught as a history of migration by diverse people into this region. When they arrived—from western Africa or northern Africa or central Africa or southern Africa or from the Indian Ocean coast—they mixed in a range of ways, sharing some resources and fighting over others, trading with and raiding from each other. They borrowed names and rituals, ways of living and loving, forms of being legible and gendered. Perhaps I am being romantic about this. Yet Kenya’s historians teach us that what we now know as fixed ethnic groups with discrete characteristics took shape during colonialism: laws restricted movement, insisting that particular people came from and inhabited certain areas. Groups were described as “agricultural” or “martial,” as “traders” or “nomads,” as “sedentary” or “mobile.” Colonial laws insisted on genealogy and identity: colonized Africans needed to carry identity cards that named an ethnicity, a bounded region named “origin,” a white employer’s name, and an African father’s name.³

I am burying a story.

Those who migrated to what became Kenya found other people living here: the Ogiek and the Sengwer, among others. The Maasai described some of these people as “Dorobo,” which means people without cattle, poor people. In the Coastal areas, the Somali named them “Boni,” which means people without possessions (Schmidt-Soltau 15).⁴ Difference precedes colonial naming, even as colonialism shadows what we know as knowledge, and it’s difficult to know how the Maasai and Somali intended these terms. It’s easy to hear contempt in what might simply be a way to describe difference. In the colonial languages we have inherited, members of these groups were called “hunters-gatherers”; contemporary official documents still use the term. This designation erases the ways in which these groups tended to and were tended by the lands they traversed, how they named place and space, formed maps of experience and intimacy.

Those who moved to Kenya interacted with these indigenous groups. At a benign level, they exchanged goods and practices, and were intimate in a range of ways. Less benignly, some migrating groups dispossessed indigenous groups, snatching lands and other resources. There might have been attempts at ethnocide. During the colonial period (1895–1963) and post-independence (1963 to the present), successive governments continued to dispossess indigenous groups, primarily by evicting them from traditional forests they inhabited and tended. As elsewhere around the world, indigenous people in Kenya—and Africa—are subject to state violence.

Per the 2005 Report of the African Commission’s Working Group of Experts on Indigenous Populations/Communities, the term “indigenous” is contested.⁵ All African people are indigenous to the continent, the Report specifies, but “African people have for centuries been migrating from various parts of the continent and there have been wars of conquest, which shaped the character of nationalities” (12). I appreciate the report’s attention to movement and experience, to an Africa of migrating people who lived with difference and conflict, war and conquest. Yet as the Report notes, those who moved found other people living where they settled, people who had relations to their spaces, including the Hadzabe in what is now northern Tanzania; the Batwa who live in the equatorial forests of Central Africa and the Great Lakes region; and the San of Southern Africa. I find useful this general description from the Report:

To summarize briefly the overall characteristics of the groups identifying themselves as indigenous peoples: their cultures and ways of life differ considerably from the dominant society and their cultures are under threat, in some cases to the extent of extinction. A key characteristic for most of them is that the survival of their particular way of life depends on access and rights to their traditional land and the natural resources thereon. They suffer from discrimination as they are being regarded as less developed and less advanced than other more dominant sectors of society. They often live in inaccessible regions, often geographically isolated and suffer from various forms of marginalisation, both politically and socially. They are subject to domination and exploitation within national political and economic structures that are commonly designed to reflect the interests and activities of the national majority. This discrimination, domination and marginalisation violates their human rights as peoples/communities, threatens the continuation of their cultures and ways of life and prevents them from being able to genuinely participate in deciding on their own future and forms of development. (89)

As might be expected in an official document from the African Union, terms such as “dominant society” and “national majority” obscure the role of the state in harming indigenous groups. Moreover, the human rights frame used to address ways in which these groups are minoritized relies on definitions of the human that must exclude these groups, given that rights discourses and practices are subtended by white supremacist definitions of those humans who are eligible for rights. And let me emphasize one final point: these groups have been victimized by extractive practices that steal and poison their lands, on the one hand, and by conservation practices that purport to save forests and other natural resources on the other.

I am still trying to work the seam between indigenous and African, to trouble the idea of indigenous African by pointing out that it must hold at least two meanings: to name the rupture of colonial modernity that deracinates through slavery across all African oceans—the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean—and to name various groups whose practices of living and tending to the earth are disrupted by European colonialism and the extractive practices it bequeaths to Africa’s nation-states. Indigenous African sounds and means differently depending on who says it and where they say it from and what forms of relation they want to name and foster.

In a remarkable conversation with Dionne Brand, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, artist, and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson provides a way to think about indigenous relations to land and the ongoing work of dispossession by the Canadian state. She states:

Land is very important to Indigenous Peoples, but we think of land quite differently from the colonizers. For us, land is not an enclosure that is protected by a border. Land is not a natural resource to exploit. Land is not a commodity. It is a particular space full of relationality to which we form very deep attachments over very long periods of time. Nation-states need to remove Indigenous bodies from land in order to commodify land and exploit natural resources.

Simpson’s thinking gives flesh to a common understanding in Kenya: indigenous communities tend forests and waterways, as they are also tended by those forests and waterways. Despite knowing this, the Kenyan state is determined to dispossess these communities. And it might be that the very idea of Kenya depends on dispossessing indigenous communities, repeating and extending the violence of dispossession through which Kenya came into being.

Listening

I am listening to and listening for.

Listening to attempts to suspend those habits of interruption that would demand context and theory and justifications and persuasion and evaluation. It is difficult and necessary. Listening for attempts to catch those difficult registers, barely audible in the noise of the quotidian. It is ongoing training in working across difference. Listening for has no interest in mastering what is heard, nor in deferring ethical and moral questions. It knows that much is missed, but hopes that what is caught enables the shared work of pursuing freedom.

Listening to and for.

Drawing on the practices and histories of our ancestors and our interactions with the indigenous peoples of these lands, scholars within western hemispheric Black Studies continue to ask ourselves, how does black life fit into (or not) the histories and ongoing conquest and colonization of peoples and their homelands? (Sandra Harvey)

Listening to and for.

We cannot want witchcraft—even as we might want its heresy—and yet it remains, producing spectacular violence and spectacular objects that unsettle the social. And yet, there is something seductive about witchcraft, about the power it possesses and can transmit. This power is not just a discursive referent to things that have actual power. In this sense, witchcraft is not merely a critique of capitalism or of the particular workings of any given African nation state, but of sovereign power and those who wield it. (Alírio Karina)

Listening to and for.

What does it mean for African-descended and Indigenous communities to farm alongside one another in the urban Bay Area?

. . .

The vegetable beds tended by Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Black Earth Farms offer an existing model of co-constituted, land-oriented care between Black and Native communities. This site of growth and abundance – fed by and illustrative of Black and Indigenous political imaginaries that diverge from the model of nation-making predicated on exploitation, dehumanization, and dispossession – pushes against prevailing white settler geographies that imagine African-descended and Indigenous peoples as placeless. (Sarah Fong)

Listening to and for.

Sonja Larson, Camari Serau, and Mere Tuilau are all born out of a Blackness whose lineages of resistance and liberation anchor and overlap in Papua. . . . This essay bears witness to the clarity and courage of Melanesian women and gender nonconforming people.

Black is the color of solidarity. (Joy Enomoto)

Listening to and for.

My Central America is Caribbean. My Central America is a Caribbean Coast whose natural resources and peoples have and continue to be exploited by US imperialism. My Central America is Black, Black Indigenous to be exact, whose descendant’s survivors of the transatlantic slave trade and Carib-Arawak indigeneity on the Antillean island of St. Vincent and whose marronage and exile call Central America’s Caribbean Coast: home. To be Garifuna is to be Caribbean and Central American simultaneously. I am the grandchild of banana workers from Tela and Balfate, Honduras whose transmigrations to Harlem, New York, in 1964 was made possible by the political mobilization of Garveyism and whose parents met in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn in 1982. My Black Central America is also New York City. (Paul Joseph Lopéz Oro)

Listening to and for.

In 2015, we began assembling a dialogue among Black identified scholars committed to research focusing on Black diasporan people about how Black Studies might approach Native and Indigenous Studies. (Chad Infante, Sandra Harvey, Kelly Limes Taylor, Tiffany King)

Listening to and for.

The recognition of genocide is caught in a double bind. Where acknowledgement of an ongoing genocidal process unfolds before a spectatorial international community, or where retrospective recognition is circumvented because of its political inconvenience and unsettling potential, inaction is tantamount to denial. But limiting our understanding of victimization by framing it according to the western episteme is also a kind of a denial. It renders and interprets history solely as an attempt to reassert the primacy of imperial humanity: the reinscription of the power to demarcate the killable from those who must not and should not be killed (and the mutable boundary between these non-discrete categories). Whether this is a product of our limited socio-political imagination or of the legal structure’s limited capacity for redress (and the destabilizing potential of reparations, particularly if recompense were to be defined by the harmed parties in question), it is certainly reflective of the pitfalls of endeavoring towards “the human.” (Zoé Samudzi)

(At this point, every single part of me that has ever taught is telling me I have over-quoted and I need to summarize and synthesize so the reader can grasp my main point. I am still listening to and listening for.)

For several years, Christina Sharpe has posted two or more images simultaneously with the tag, “Thinking Juxtapositionally.”⁶ From this practice, I have learned to ask what kind of thinking happens when synthesis is not the goal, when there is no single position to stage or oppose, when we are told to hold multiple things together. To be against synthesis? Yes, when such synthesis overlooks the textures of difference, misses the accents and demands of geohistories. Placed alongside, some things may desire contact, inch toward a seam, perhaps tight, perhaps gaping. Other things may desire touch but know that it cannot be sustained, and so they approach each other carefully. Longing is the name of the gap. And yet others fold into each other, forming a sharp crease—the join is visible, and difference remains. Freedom is a practice of and across difference. I will return to this.

Difference & Freedom

Freedom is a practice of difference.

Increasingly, I am convinced that difference must subtend and sustain freedom dreams and practices, and that in starting with and staying with difference, those of us interested in pursuing and practicing freedom might avoid the disappointments that come with demands for unity. I am guided in this by Audre Lorde:

Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. (111–112)

By way of closing, and by closing I mean to extend the invitation with which I started, let me return to thinking in this issue. Chad Infante writes, “The Black diaspora in the Americas need not claim indigenousness or nativeness to the Americas—or even to Africa for that matter—to make political and long-lasting connections with the Indigenous peoples of Africa or the Americas.” And I nod: freedom is a practice of difference. Tiffany Lethabo King writes, “I tend to find that much of the literature and critical theory in Black diasporan studies that addresses the Middle Passage and the enslavement of Black people lacks a robust grammar for talking about land. I think it is very difficult for descendants of the middle passage to have a discussion with Indigenous people in the Americas, Africa and across the globe about land.” And I nod, and I wonder what relations to earthliness might sustain engagement across difference. And perhaps the experience of space to which I gesture in the brief discussion of Maasai cosmologies is useful: not ownership, but an experience of place, an expectation of place. I garden—badly, amateurishly—and so I was drawn to Sarah Fong’s writing about how Black and Native communities farm alongside each other, tending the earth as it, in turn, tends them. What might it mean not simply to attend to each other, as is now common to say in an academic vernacular, but to tend to each other? To tend to each other in how we tend to the earth? How might grammars and practices of care and repair be central to inhabiting the seam of difference between and across Black and Native in shared quests for freedom?

I am listening to and listening for the registers in which freedom is sought and practiced, across difference. And I am grateful for the care with which the contributors to this issue have listened to and listened for each other, across geohistories, daring to imagine that the difficult is not the impossible, and that we can imagine and tend a more shareable earth. We dream freedom as we practice it every day.

Keguro Macharia

Nairobi

January 2021

Keguro Macharia is from Nairobi, Kenya. Author of Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora, Keguro blogs at gukira.wordpress.com.

Footnotes

1. Repetition has become one of those forms. I repeat myself constantly in this writing. It mirrors how often we now express condolences. It is deliberate.

2. Pole is a Kenyan term to share grief. See Macharia, “Pole.”

3. For more, see foundational works by Bethwell A. Ogot, A History of the Southern Luo (East African Publishing House, 1967) and Godfrey Muriuki, A History of the Kikuyu: 1500–1900 (Oxford UP, 1974).

4. Also see http://www.ogiek.org.

5. I dislike reading and citing from such reports very much—I use them to track official narratives by state and extra-state bodies.

6. Much of this practice is archived on a tumblr space https://hystericalblackness.tumblr.com

Works Cited

• African Commission on Human and People’s Rights. Report of the African Commission’s Working Group of Experts on Indigenous Populations/Communities. Banjul, 2005.
• Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing P, 2007, pp. 110–114.
• Macharia, Keguro. “Pole.” Popula, 20 Dec. 2018. https://popula.com/2018/12/20/pole/. Accessed 9 Jun. 2021.
• Schmidt-Soltau, Kai. Indigenous Peoples Planning Framework for the Western Kenya Community Driven Development and Flood Mitigation Project and the Natural Resource Management Project.
• Final Report, Republic of Kenya, Office of the President & Ministry of Water and Irrigation & Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, Dec. 2006. https://documents1-worldbank-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/curated/en/117131468091477136/pdf/IPP199.pdf. Accessed 9 Jun. 2021.
• Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake and Dionne Brand. “Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in conversation with Dionne Brand.” Literary Review of Canada, Jun. 2018. https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2018/06/temporary-spaces-of-joy-and-freedom/. Accessed 3 Jun. 2021.