Salter Lecture: Bearing witness or bearing whiteness?
George Osgerby reports on the 2018 Salter Lecture
A central theme of the Salter Lecture at Yearly Meeting on 4 May was ‘power’. Diana Jeater explored in different ways the imbalances in ‘power relationships’ between Africa and the west. In ‘Bearing witness or bearing whiteness? Britain, Africa and Quakers’ the African history scholar and Quaker pointed out that: ‘You can fit the whole of Europe, Russia, the United States and China into Africa.’ There are fifty-four nations and up to 2,000 languages spoken. This is ‘an extraordinary diversity of habitat’, yet it is perceived stereotypically. There is a tendency, she said, ‘to regard Africa as a singular place typified by poverty, wildlife and noisy dancing’.
People often say things like ‘I went on holiday to Africa once’ or ‘I’m supporting a project in Africa’. Such comments, Diana Jeater suggested, are offered ‘overwhelmingly by people from what we might call the white world’, who view Africa as ‘consumers’ or ‘donors’. She told her audience: ‘I’m including us in that. We are very white.’
For British Quakers: ‘Our story tends to be “What we can do to help?”’ Quakers tend to do ‘grassroots’ work – in Kenya, Congo and so on. Paying tribute to some ‘wonderful work being done’, she also noted: ‘Being a donor makes us feel good about ourselves.’ She argued: ‘When we think of ourselves as people who do good we stop being seekers.’ Instead, we worry about how we are perceived: ‘Demanding, bureaucratic, inflexible… not a great self-image.’
She described development as a ‘massive international industry’ with vested interests involved. She talked about ‘ethical tourism’ and what she called ‘developmentourism’ – helping, doing good things – which locks us into a dependency relationship where others must be ‘worthy of benevolence’. We become, she said, ‘dazzled by our aid projects’.
Diana Jeater stressed that British Quakers do not tend to ask African Friends about their spirituality, but, as with the subject of the 2016 Swarthmore Lecture given by two African Friends (one in person), about peace and their peace work.
She pointed out that the majority of Quakers have dark skins. ‘More than half the Quakers in the world live in Africa.’ Referring to a comment on Facebook – ‘Who knew?’ – she asked: ‘Why don’t we know?’ Another Facebook comment was: ‘Kenyan Quakers aren’t kosher.’
Discomfort was another theme of the lecture. Her black Zimbabwean partner once accused her of being racist. She was ‘deeply hurt’ by this comment, but later began to understand what he meant: ‘I had privilege denied to him that I hadn’t even noticed.’
She continued on the legacy of colonialism and inequality: ‘Historical injustice creates a particular kind of world. We still live in that world. We are not excused from or apart from the system of privilege that shapes our world.’
She asked: ‘What if British history was written by Zimbabweans?’ Yet the reality for Zimbabweans is that: ‘All the great authorities are white.’
According to Diana Jeater: ‘We’re on the wrong side of the unfairness.’ But the need is for change, not a sense of shame and: ‘We can escape history.’ Equality would help, as would education: ‘The more we challenge power, the more power we see.’
A Friend asked how silence can be used to amplify voices not already being heard. Diana Jeater said: ‘We cannot bring down the master’s house with the master’s tools.’ She added that we help most by getting out of the way. We should not be telling Africans to ‘empower’ themselves when it is our own disempowerment that is required: ‘Why do they need us to speak for them?’
Conceding that ‘in this neoliberal world there are no easy answers’, she said: ‘Our African Friends have found ways we can learn from’ – for instance, on what she described as basic income. There are things other countries have been doing for ages, yet we don’t go to Africa for advice, we go to offer it, she observed.
Diana Jeater suggested: ‘In our global conversation with Africa perhaps we like to talk a little too much.’ We in the west ‘are all obscenely rich’, she contended. ‘The real donors in this world are the global poor. They are spiritually rich. Let us think of Africans as donors because that is what love requires of us.’
Comments
Diana’s inability to see beyond the binary reduced her lecture to rash generalisations, such as ‘the global poor are spiritually rich’, and platitudes like ‘in this neoliberal world there are no easy answers’. When a black-British Friend in questions afterwards challenged her on African homophobia, she became incoherent. The basic problem with her outlook is that she understands power as something which some people have and others don’t, when in reality the dynamics of power are fluid and change by the nano-second.
By frankem51 on 10th May 2018 - 17:39
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