Enzymes, Ants, Chapattis and Weeds: Figuring Out How to ‘Manage’ ‘Indigenous’ ‘Knowledge’

1. Enzymes, Ants, Chapattis and Weeds: Figuring Out How to ‘Manage’ ‘Indigenous’ ‘Knowledge’ ByDonna Pido, PhDDepartment of Design and Creative MediaThe Technical University of Kenya.pido@africaonline.co.ke

2. Abstract • In order to stimulate discussion and introspection about the many issues related to the Management of Indigenous Knowledge, the author builds on earlier publications and examples drawn from nearly five decades of participant observation in Kenya. Consideration is given to the historical conflict in attitudes toward the management of knowledge in general during pre-colonial, colonial and post independence periods. Culture-based systems and their caretakers have faced intrusion and misappropriation by self interested parties while vast bodies of knowledge have been lost as the generations that held that knowledge have expired. In plans for management of indigenous knowledge, the range of stakeholders and changes in applicability over time must be considered. Examination of categories and dichotomies of Indigenous Knowledge and modes of collection, expression, storage and dissemination can inform the small and large scale planning and implementation of indigenous knowledge management.

3. Vignette 1. There is a plant that grows wild in many parts of East Africa. It contains an enzyme that breaks down cholesterol when consumed in food. Indigenous peoples have many uses for this plant but they do not know that part of its efficacy is connected to cholesterol nor do they know about the enzyme unless they are medically trained. Even the medically trained do not necessarily make the connection between the two. The author learned of the connection from a fellow American indigene in New York City. How shall I manage my learned knowledge of the plant combined with my indigenous American knowledge of the enzyme and my cholesterol level? Shall I keep it a secret?Share it with everybody through a book, article or social media? Place it in a password protected archive? Make it a secret only for women? Form an NGO or a religion to promote its use? Sell it to a drug company? Notice that I haven’t told the reader the name of the plant in any language, or explained how to cook with it. Am I acting ethically? The flower at right is a decoy.

4. Vignette 2. Flying Ants come out after a rain. People from Western Kenya know how to catch them in huge numbers, fry them and munch on them or pound them into a paste and put the paste in food. For an American in Kenya, my indigenous knowledge places the paste, like peanut butter, on bread with jam. We have used our indigenous knowledge in Katheka Kai, a place where the local indigenous knowledge does not include catching, cooking and eating flying ants because they are not believed to be food. Should we try to introduce our local colleagues to the deliciousness of flying ants, eat them all ourselves or note and write about the differences in our three bodies of indigenous knowledge? Do we, as the British did in the 19th century, classify the indigenes of Katheka Kai as a lower form of humanity because they don’t eat flying ants? Would it be ethical to force children from Katheka Kai to eat flying ants at boarding school if that goes against their culture?

5. Vignette 3. A Black Kenyan friend was invited to a party in the United States. Everybody was supposed to bring a dish from their own national tradition. My friend made chapattis. The Indians and Pakistanis at the party laughed heartily and explained that chapatti is Indian, not African. How indigenous or exotic is the complex body of knowledge that surrounds the chapatti? If chapattis are not indigenous why do we have debates about Coastal Roll and Up Country roll? Do men join in this debate? Is the debate worth having? Should it be recorded? Who invented the two kinds of roll and what has happened to the rolls in the culture of fast food kiosks? Can exotic knowledge be indigenized and if so, how? How long does it take and how does it happen?

6. Vignette 4. In the early 90s there was a team consisting of an American and a Kenyan who were sent by an organization, long forgotten by the author, to collect information on the edible plants that people resort to only when there are food shortages. These would be the plants that we do not ordinarily eat but can eat if the only alternative is starvation. They toured the country interviewing people and collecting names and samples of plants that may be needed at some point in the future by generations that may have forgotten their very important use. Is the collection comprehensive? Where were the list and the samples deposited? How are they being preserved? Has the information contained in the research been disseminated? How can we access it today and for how long will it be available? Did the team find any indigenous plants that are edible but not known to the local people where they grow? Did they test their samples to make sure that nobody was lying and putting in poisonous plants?

7. is Of the six plants shown, 4 are edible, 1 is not and 1 is poisonous. They all grow in Kenya. Which ones are ‘indigenous?’ One is the national emblem of Ireland. Can you ID them?

8. If we rank the indigenous knowledge referred to in these vignettes, which are more important and which are less important? To whom? For what purposes and why? Should they be preserved or discarded or just allowed to fade into realms of the forgotten? Who needs or wants them now and who will or will not need or want them in the future? • If we consider the plight of the research biochemist who can’t feed himself without having a wife to make his chapattis, or the starving family whose grandma never told them they could eat certain weeds and also flying ants, where can we go with concepts and considerations in the management of ‘indigenous knowledge?’ • In the 21st century we are victims of three major negative factors in the history of this region. One, for thousands of years, was the persistence of slavery which created a culture of self protection through concealment. Second is the absence of the use of writing among East African peoples prior to the third negative factor, the Colonial Incursion and subsequent colonization. Every idea we have now and every strategy we may develop is coloured by the cataclysmic experience of at least five indigenous generations who were out-technologized and abused by exotic forces.

9. While in the past the use of writing depended on paper and cumbersome means of storage and dissemination such as letters, files, articles, books, we are now in a new world of digital collection, storage and dissemination – for as long as we have electricity and the necessary equipment . Collection and conservation of verbal, musical and pictorial information is much easier now. Storage capability has expanded exponentially thus enabling the preservation of infinitely more detailed and extensive bodies of knowledge. Sharing and dissemination of knowledge are now truly global, while reservation, limitation and denial of access become increasingly obsolete and difficult every day. Categories of knowledge are collapsing as YouTube and other websites enable all of us to tell each other what we think others may want or need to know

10. In Julius Yego we have a perfect example of an indigene from a community with a long history of using spears as weapons now self- teaching the ancient Greek tradition of javelin throwing on YouTube and becoming a world champion in that sport. All knowledge now becomes democratized over time and space. Universities may become redundant outside their laboratories, studios and workshops.

11. What, Who, Where, When, Why and How? • What is ‘Indigenous Knowledge?’ How are we to define the terms ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Knowledge?’ Is my knowledge of the enzyme, received from a fellow indigene, indigenous to America? Is knowledge generated in a laboratory indigenous to the country where the lab is located or linked to the ethnicity of the person who generated it or the institution or company that financed its discovery? Is the term ‘indigenous’ a euphemism for something else? Could it actually be referring to knowledge that has not yet been written or sound recorded? • What is the time factor in Indigenous Knowledge? Is the knowledge of an older generation more or less valid than that of a younger one or are they equal in importance?

12. What are the processes of indigenization and how can we take them into account in information management? Can anybody set guidelines on the adoption, acceptance and reworking of an exotic element to make it indigenous? The chapatti is a case in point, originally from south Asia but incorporated, changed, embellished and reworked in East Africa to the extent that the Asian and East African versions are strikingly different – to those who know or pay attention. Should we be documenting the history of the chapatti in Kenya? What should we be paying attention to? • What form should ‘management’ take? Will it be by legislation at national, county and local levels? Will it be ad hoc and individualized? Will anyone continue to observe boundaries of ethnicity, religion, gender, generation, occupation in the collection, storage and dissemination of Indigenous Knowledge? Any efforts to control information flow are fraught with problems. • What can be done to foster and develop a culture of information sharing in a nation state with a long history of reservation and segregated access? • What about child lore - the indigenous knowledge of the young –?

13. When – how far back does indigenous knowledge go? Wilderness survival experts are now teaching us that we can survive by using chipped stones to cut up a rotten carcass and making soup from the maggots. If our very distant ancestors hadn’t known that, we wouldn’t be here today. They also ate forage plants that we no longer recognize as decent food and we have mostly forgotten that we can eat them during hard times.

14. When does indigenous knowledge become dysfunctional? In many communities young males are taught that they should defy all risk and forge ahead even though their lives are in danger. Likewise many young men go through indigenous training programs that emphasize negative behavior toward members of the opposite sex. Some are even taught that people whose genitals are not modified are lesser humans than themselves. When should indigenous knowledge be discarded and replaced? • When will humans stop generating indigenous knowledge? • Note that the Irish shared their indigenous knowledge with everybody by making their main last resort food, the shamrock, their national symbol

15. Why should we be considering the collection, storage, analysis, verification and dissemination of indigenous knowledge? One answer is why not? Another is, because we can. Yet another answer is, because we need it. Another is ‘because so much has been lost, and we lose the rest at our peril. • As the HIV/AIDS epidemic wiped out a generation in Eastern and Southern Africa, it became clear, especially in Uganda and Malawi, that children were being orphaned before they were old enough to have received adequate knowledge of their subsistence systems from their parents. The grandparents were often too old or too overburdened to transmit the fine details of their cultures to the children.

16. This also happened in Western Kenya where a generation of clan ‘elders’ under the age of 30 had to take over management of the community from the older men and women who had died. This can happen again, and, if nothing else, it should be an important factor in community based efforts to collect, record and store indigenous knowledge. • Going back to the vignettes above, we can now ask just how important it is for people to know that they should be conserving the stands of the enzyme plant and continue using it as their forebears did in spite of ‘modernization’ packaged foods and the rejection of their original diet. Shouldn’t everybody be informed of the efficacy of this plant and shouldn’t we try to figure out ways to include it in everybody’s menu options?

17. How can we gather indigenous knowledge, store it, disseminate it taking various stakeholders’ interests into account. How will we deal with the necessary integration of the written word with oral, auditory and kinetic knowledge? • How will we integrate indigenous knowledge and systems with exotic knowledge and systems? ArapYego is a case in point. Janus, The Roman God of Naples was converted into Saint Januariusnarlly 200 years ago. Do the Italian americans parading his statue remember who he reallly is.? • How will we deal with issues of privacy, secrecy, generation lock, gender lock, ethnic lock, religious lock and occupational lock at the personal, family, local, county and national levels. A case in point is about occupational lock. Already, health care professionals face patients who have looked up their symptoms on the internet and who present themselves with a description of the diagnostic options they think the clinician should consider. • Mention the mysteries of Nyabububu and Ekeigoroigoro • How will anybody deal with selectivity and forgetfulness? People tend to remember and report that which is favourable to them. Small details of the moment may become important data later on. Note that the author of this paper cannot recall the name of the organization that sent the team of researchers to collect edible wild plants as recently in the 1990s.

18. Discussion • As an American anthropologist, the author is heavily influenced by the early theorists who realized too late that vast bodies of indigenous knowledge had been lost as exotics overran the indigenes in the Americas between the 16th and 20th centuries. As the academic discipline called Anthropology took form, concerned researchers set about a massive ‘salvage’ exercise in the collection of data on the life ways of the few Native Americans who had survived the onslaught and the slaughter. They were trying to collect information that had largely been lost with the dead from people who had been grossly traumatized, by the brutalization of their persons and their ways of life before they were even born. It should be no surprise that a social scientist who ‘grew up’ with the understanding that everything should be collected, recorded and stored would advocate massive data collection from the elderly and knowledgeable people in every part of Kenya and from all walks of life. Archival research into indigenous knowledge is absolutely necessary but may not be as rich in information as we would wish.

19. A research project on women’s access to skilled delivery services in Homa Bay was designed by exotics in their own country. The questionnaire did not enable respondents to mention the custom of following suit in choice of delivery venue. Respondents couldn’t tell the researchers about this determining Indigenous Knowledge because they weren’t asked. During the famous 1985 SM Otieno case in which his widow sued his clan for the right to bury him in Matasia rather than Nyalgunga, nobody in court mentioned the Indigenous Knowledge-based need to follow suit. As the senior son in his family, he had to set precedents for all his junior brothers to follow. If he had not been buried in Nyalgunga, none of his brothers could have been buried there, thus destroying their clan and lineage.   • When tiny white mushrooms sprouted after a rain on the termite nest in my Nairobi garden, I recognized them as Amandegere, a Kisii delicacy, and was about to harvest, fry and eat them. My brother-in-law stopped me with his knowledge that they were poisonous. He being an indigene and I an exotic, I deferred but later found out that they were, indeed, Amadegere. His indigenous knowledge trumped mine even though it was inaccurate.

20. On a graver note, we can look at falsification of indigenous knowledge through the Turle fakes and the book that purported them to be new discoveries of ancient Maasai laibons’ paraphernalia. It was supposed to be a revelation of Indigenous Knowledge and artistic genius that had long been hidden by the laibons but that was actually a cover for something else. The hoax was invented and executed by GilliesTurle and two American collaborators. While they carefully skirted any blatant claims of authenticity, they gave the distinct impression that their goods, made in Kiserian and Kisamis were truly ancient art that predated the CITES agreement. They made a lot of money before the Kenya Wildlife Service and the American Fish and Wildlife Service put an end to their enterprise. Even now there are people who fiercely defend the fakers who were falsifying Maasai culture and using game animal parts for self aggrandizement.

21. The indigenous knowledge that has informed the HIV/AIDS epidemic in East Africa is another case in point. To give one tiny example, the knowledge that eating a monkey or having sex with a young child will remove your infection is indigenous, much to the consternation of the national and international health care communities. How was this knowledge generated and how did it gain credibility among so many indigenes? How many lives have been ruined or lost because of indigenously generated falsehoods? What can be done about it? How can it be recorded in a sensitive way? How can or should this kind of knowledge be ‘managed’. There is an extensive and intensive effort both internationally and locally aimed at neutralizing this kind of ‘indigenous knowledge’. It is called Health Education and it costs governments and donor agencies a lot of money each year. Other indigenous knowledge is simply ignored and discarded or managed through non-traditional channels The knowledge that domestic violence is acceptable and should be endured is now being managed by avoidance of marriage and by recourse to civil authorities and codified law.

22. Recommendations If we assume that Indigenous Knowledge should be reified and preserved rather than being discarded and forgotten, then we can consider models, methods categories of knowledge and plans for dealing with the challenges of this massive undertaking. • Efforts to collect indigenous knowledge can start at the very local, family level with family life histories, with recording of grannies’ memories with recorded group discussions and reminiscences of neighborhood groups. Churches can generate histories of their institutions. Women’s groups can do the same as can male age sets. Companies and organizations can be collecting their workers’ and members’ recollections.

23. Likewise, there is a need to collect and preserve the generated IK of children and young adults. In the US this usually falls to the folklorists, academics who collect informally generated IK in the form of songs, stories, sayings, jokes and a host of other ephemeral expressions. An important category of folklore is the games, sayings, jokes and stories that kids make up and pass on to the next generation of kids – the Indigenous Knowledge of childhood. With children in primary schools using laptops we now need to look at ways to increase their storage capacity and to examine what will be the unique indigenous knowledge of the Laptopped Generation.

26. Who are the stakeholders in the management of indigenous knowledge? Who is to be credited with the creation and generation of indigenous knowledge? Who owns it? In the digital age can any single person or group truly own it? Who decides who else can have access to indigenous knowledge? Who needs/wants it? Who are the economic stakeholders in the knowledge of how to catch and cook flying ants? Who cares about the different and contentious ways of rolling out a chapatti? Hoteliers and restauranteurs care. The woman who is ridiculed by her peers or is being beaten because her husband doesn’t like her chapattis is a major stakeholder in the indigenous knowledge of the chapatti. • Carrying the Who? question further, we can pose many challenging questions for discussion, examination and analysis. Among these are, • Who are the beneficiaries of indigenous knowledge? Who should be? • Who possesses Indigenous knowledge? Who should share it? • What authority do those people have? Who is in charge of information? • What agency do they have? Who can or who dares to try to keep information from other people?

27. When did the chapatti become indigenous food in East Africa? Does anybody remember the time before Irish potatoes? Does the fact that Irish potatoes are exotic make kienyeji any less indigenous? What about tea? What about pizza? Do we need a new category called ‘indigenized?” Taita women indigenized Merikani in the early 20th century by pleating it to create the volume and body of real goat skin. They were using an exotic material to imitate an indigenous one. People who don’t know that cannot make sense of some of the Taita artifacts now resting in museum collections worldwide. If they ask a Taita indigene now, will he or she know why their ancestors made so many hidden pleats in the cloth? • When will we have enough of stored IK? When will it be exhausted? When will the storage system crash? When will all this information be lost completely and forever?