Belonging, Boundaries, and Self-Development in Kenyan, Nigerian, and Ugandan Health, Educational, and Artistic Communities

Summary

The panel addresses health, educational, and artistic communities in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda. The themes of belonging, boundaries, and self-development are woven throughout to focus attention on local-global dynamics in our associations as professional academics employed in the United States sustaining relationships with the communities with whom we partner on the African continent. China Scherz (UVA) serves as moderator from expertise in medical anthropology. Nina Berman (ASU) presents on “Acrolife: Self-Care, Solidarity, and Creativity Among Kenyan Acrobats.” Berman’s paper addresses how marginalized young men struggle to live their lives with dignity in many areas of the world. Their marginalization results from poverty and accompanying factors, such as low levels of education and membership in specific ethnic, racial, and religious groups, and often puts them at risk for being recruited into criminal and violent organizations. Berman highlights the complexities of the lives of Kenyan acrobats and explores their experience in the context of Kenya, but also with an eye toward the situation of marginalized young men globally. Cyrus Olsen’s paper is research “Animate Life: Health, Solidarity, and Belonging in Buganda and Kigezi Communities of Uganda.” The Buganda and Kigezi communities of Uganda with whom I partner for research in global health insist upon recovering traditional African knowledge (TAK) for upholding their own grammars of animacy as we approach increasingly detrimental health problems such as stroke. As we work together to gather information on local grammars of animacy, allow these grammars to inform our development of clinical stroke tools for improved brain health in these communities, and thereby enhance communal flourishing, we do well to attend carefully to more expansive modes of solidarity for holistic care, lest cultural hegemony further marginalize and destroy ways of healing our planetary crises today. Data from fieldwork within Uganda shall be shared and placed in conversation with Baganda philosophical research lead by Ferdinand Kasozi of Makerere University (see Kasozi, 2011). Our research develops philosophical theory in conjunction with medical anthropology to test the degree to which late stage capitalism has upended traditional ways of knowing and behaving. Maurice Sikenyi’s research is titled “Local approaches to addressing school dropout and learning outcomes: Lessons from Uganda This paper shares lessons from a project that examined two different models of allocating additional staff to provide remedial education and enroll out-of-school students in Uganda. Using a randomized controlled trial design, we assign 112 government schools in rural Uganda to one of three experimental arms: a control group, a treatment group where community volunteers work alone, and a treatment group where community volunteers work alongside a highly qualified paid staff member. Sara Pugach (CalState LA) presents “Pushing Progressive Boundaries: African Graduates of Soviet Bloc Universities and the Development of African Socialist and Marxist-Leninist Ideologies in the 1960s and 1970s.” This paper will look at Africans who received their doctorates in humanities fields from Soviet Bloc universities – primarily the German Democratic Republic – in the 1970s and 1980s; these students’ ideas had significant impact like those like Nigeria.