Insights from an African History of Disability

Radical History Review

Volumn 2006, Issue 94, 2006, Pages 111-126

  Livingston, Julie ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 85082206080     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2006-94-111     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. This essay draws on work in my book, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
2. See Rachelle Arkles “The Social Consequences of Industrial Accidents: Disabled Mine Workers in Lesotho” (master’s thesis, University of Witwatersrand, 1993); and Randall Packard, White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
3. I have tried to keep the non-English terminology to a minimum here, but some Setswana terms are necessary. Setswana, like all Bantu languages, classifies nouns through a system of prefixes. Setswana refers to the language and culture of the Tswana ethnicity. Motswana is a single Tswana person, Batswana are multiple Tswana persons, and Botswana is the collective noun for all Tswana people and hence the name for the modern nation. Often English speakers use the root term Tswana as a substitute for Batswana or Setswana. Though many people who live in South Africa share this ethnicity, as well as certain historical experiences with people in Botswana, this article refers only to the history of those Batswana from the country now called Botswana.
4. Stephanie Cohen, personal communication with the author. This figure generally holds true for the village wards I have worked with through the community-based rehabilitation program. The reader should note, however, that in these one out of six households, there is often more than one disabled resident. It is easy to think of compounds where two, three, four, or even five disabled persons live. In 1999, a fellow researcher along with local clinic staff and a Motswana research assistant conducted a series of three ward house-to-house surveys to gauge the incidence of disability. Each survey covered all compounds of a single ward of a village. Two of the villages chosen were rural, and one was peri-urban. Survey respondents were not necessarily household heads, but all were resident household members. They were asked to report the number of disabled persons in the compound. The results showed a reported prevalence of 4 percent in the peri-urban village and 8 – 9 percent in the rural villages. See Stephanie Cohen, “Community Based Rehabilitation in Botswana: Theory and Practice in a Dynamic Context” (unpublished paper, 1999), 39. The government census found that one in ten households housed a disabled resident, but the majority of disabled persons live in rural areas, as Cohen’s figures show. Government of Botswana, Central Statistics Office, Living Conditions in Botswana: 1986 – 1994; Socio-economic Indicators Based on the 1985/6 HIES, 1991 Census, and 1993/4 HIES (Gaborone: Government Printer, 1996), 55.
5. This is not to suggest that all persons with disabilities in Botswana spoke in this way.
6. Important exceptions include the work of essayist Nancy Mairs and that of the late Robert Murphy, an anthropologist. Both of these authors have written in the first person, which perhaps contributes to their ability to fold the somatic and the social together so well. They each reflect on these processes of bodily transformation in existential and narrative terms, while probing the social and cultural implications of disability in American society. Both also developed their impairments as adults, impairments that increased in severity over time. Perhaps when impairment is caught up in ongoing and accelerated processes of bodily transformation, as it is/was for Mairs and Murphy, the somatic aspects of it are differentially situated vis-à-vis the subject than they are in instances where impairments are more stable in their manifestations. See Nancy Mairs, Waist High in the World: A Life among the Nondisabled (Boston: Beacon, 1996); and Robert Murphy, The Body Silent (New York: Henry Holt, 1987).
7. But see Joshua T. Malinga, “The Pan-African Movement of People with Disabilities,” in Disability in Different Cultures: Reflections on Local Concepts, ed. Brigitte Holzer, Arthur Vreede, and Gabrielle Weigt (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999), 274 – 76. Though only a very short piece, Malinga’s chapter suggests the importance of such an undertaking.
8. I appreciate the immensely productive insights that have come from scholarship that seeks to move past the artificial dichotomy of impairment versus disability, in favor of a more nuanced analysis of embodied life. It is not my intention to resurrect or reify this binary by focusing on impairment, but rather to contribute to this move by furthering our understanding of the social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of somatic life.
9. See Matthew Kohrman, “Why Am I Not Disabled? Statistics and Transnational Subject Making in Modern China,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17 (1999): 5 – 24; Matthew Kohrman, “Motorcycles for the Disabled: Mobility, Modernity, and the Transformation of Experience in Urban China,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 23 (1999): 133 – 55. Kohrman’s work documents how transnational political and economic forces and the priorities of service delivery programs can shape how new definitions of disability are forged. See also Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Reynolds Whyte, “Disability and Culture: An Overview,” in Disability and Culture, ed. Ingstad and Whyte (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 3 – 32.
10. I am borrowing the term quest for therapy from the anthropologist John Janzen, The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
11. Arthur Kleinmann, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
12. Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg, “Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship,” Public Culture 13 (2001): 533 – 56.
13. I take the term normate from Rosemarie Garland Thomson. She explains “normate” as “the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings … the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them.” See Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 8.
14. This is not to suggest that intellectual pursuits did not matter to self-making in the past, as they certainly did for many people, only that there were more spaces for intellectual diversity before the rise and subsequent dominance of Western-style education and the standardized testing that has accompanied it.
15. See, for example, Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York: Verso, 1995); Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies; Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2000); and Lennard Davis, ed., The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997). For an overview, see Catherine Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other,’ ” American Historical Review, 108 (2003): 763 – 93. While I disagree with the suggestion of some scholars of disability that the modern Western emphasis on norms is in some way unique, I do nevertheless acknowledge that the creation and increasing prominence of statistical standards have altered notions of physicality.
16. This Euro-American emphasis is an effect of the current trends in scholarship. Most disability studies scholars appear open to and enthusiastic about broadening their field geographically and culturally. See Kudlick, “Disability History.” Yet while four-fifths of the world’s disabled persons live in developing countries, there is a relative dearth of humanities and social science scholarship exploring disability in non-Western contexts. Important exceptions include Eric Silla, People Are Not the Same: Leprosy and Identity in Twentieth-Century Mali (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998); Kohrman, “Motorcycles for the Disabled”; Kohrman, “Why Am I Not Disabled?”; Ingstad and Whyte, Disability and Culture; Holzer, Vreede, and Weigt, Disability in Different Cultures; and Veena Das and Renu Addlakha, “Disability and Domestic Citizenship: Voice, Gender, and the Making of the Subject,” Public Culture 13 (2001): 511 – 31.
17. Rapp and Ginsburg, “Enabling Disability”; see also Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 9.
18. The Apgar test, designed by an American doctor in the 1950s, is performed immediately after birth to assess the infant’s physical condition and to predict the child’s developmental potential.
19. Linton, Claiming Disability, 138.
20. This is not to dismiss the clear class differences in technological and medical access within the United States.
21. This is a much different sensibility from the one that has dominated American culture since World War II. For more on the growth and dominance of the technological imagination in American bodily culture, see David Serlin, Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
22. A more extreme contrast can be found in the case of live organ donors. Someone who loses a kidney through surgery in order to donate it to a relative is not constructed as disabled or as diseased, but rather as a gift giver, despite the fact that kidney loss can pose debilitating effects for the donor.
23. This is not to suggest that bodily aesthetics do not matter to people at all. For more on this, see Julie Livingston, “Aesthetic Impairments: Bodily Challenges to Sociability in Southeastern Botswana” (paper presented at the African Studies Association annual meeting, New Orleans, November 11, 2004).
24. Julie Livingston, “Reconfiguring Old Age: Elderly Women and Concerns over Care in Southeastern Botswana,” Medical Anthropology 22 (2003): 205 – 23; and Julie Livingston, “Pregnant Children and Half-Dead Adults: Modern Living and the Quickening Life-Cycle in Botswana,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77 (2003): 133 – 62.