SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXT

The sociopolitical context of Namibia is a paradox because on the one hand, it has national legislation protecting women’s rights in its Constitution of 1990, including statements that Namibia is a “democratic . . . State securing to all our citizens justice, liberty, equality and fraternity” and that “women in Namibia have traditionally suffered special discrimination and . . . need [now] to play a full, equal role in the life of the nation” (Preamble, Article 6). On the other hand, however, Namibia remains one of the most violent and unequal societies in the world, with an “apparent increase in violence since Independence” (/Khaxas, 2005, p. xiii). The country is plagued with high rates of HIV/AIDS, abusive cultural practices, extreme poverty, social exclusion, poor health care, corruption, and political hegemony. Sadly, Namibia is hardly alone among developing countries in this egregious reputation.

Unsurprisingly in such contexts, HIV/AIDS has reached epidemic proportions, with a 20 percent infection rate for most of southern Africa, and nearly 47 percent in the Caprivi region in northeast Namibia, with little change in numbers despite billions of dollars for education and treatment from organizations like PEPFAR, Project Hope, and the Millennium Challenge. Surprising, perhaps, is the gender distribution for HIV/AIDS: 62 percent for women versus 38 percent for men (Namibia, 2009). Thus the disease overwhelmingly victimizes women.

THE WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP CENTRE

To temper this dangerously oppressive climate in Namibia, the Women’s Leadership Centre (WLC) was founded in 2004 with the primary purpose of fostering women’s writings as a means of female consciousness raising, empowerment, creative expression, and resistance to male-dominated culture. It focuses on the most marginalized Namibian women. To date the Centre has published two books, a third is in press, and a fourth is in the planning stages.

The focus of this report is the second anthology, We Must Choose Life: Writings by Namibian Women on Culture, Violence, HIV and AIDS (/Khaxas, 2008), which puts faces into the bleak AIDS landscape in Namibia, providing a human dimension to the bureaucratic facts and figures. It also gives an epiphany of the root cause of the AIDS pandemic: not lack of education, but the presence of male-dominated culture, which both genders are programmed to accept, both believing that “a respected woman is quiet, obedient, hard-working, and married” (/Khaxas, 2008, p. xix).

Submissions for the books were solicited through 20,000 flyers distributed throughout the country, followed by four writing-training workshops in the capital city of Windhoek for 150 participants, who then conducted more than 50 regional workshops. Workshops were part group therapy and part writing instruction. As the U.S. State Department’s English Language Fellow to Namibia for 2008, I had the privilege of participating in several of these workshops. Submissions could also be sent directly to the Centre. From nearly 500 submissions, 150 were published in We Must Choose Life, many by first-time writers. Some submissions were translated for non-English speakers, and some were also transcribed for illiterate women. Many women had to be coached to overcome their objections that writing was not appropriate for their status.

PROJECT BENEFITS

The broader benefits of this type of indigenous writing project are several. From a sociopolitical standpoint, the unique contribution of the Centre’s publications is that they empower marginalized people to tell their story and advocate for social justice by using “writing as resistance” to reject the status quo and thereby change their world. In so doing, the books can become important agents of social change for writer and reader alike.

In addition to advocating, the Women’s Leadership Centre publications also profoundly educate both writers and readers. They are supreme examples of auto-ethnography, which has become a cutting-edge form of qualitative research—on AIDS or any other topic. As such, they enable marginalized people to “become writers” in their own right, realizing that writing is not something that only White or educated people do. This is a radical insight, given that African women have been the objects of study and scrutiny mainly by others, rarely seeing the outcomes of the information they provided. Of course the anthologies are also gold mines of qualitative data for outside researchers.

TEACHING UNITS

From an English-teaching perspective, the WLC books provide scarce but desperately needed authentic, contextualized, and culturally appropriate materials that can be used in settings lacking computers or even textbooks, as is the case in much of Africa. One curriculum, already used in schools and women’s groups in Namibia, is the Women’s Voices: Reading Guide (2009), which provides step-by-step instructions for group facilitators with no teaching experience. For example, the Guide suggests that facilitators choose a story of interest; try to read it aloud (for illiterate group members); focus on first impressions of words and images; consider the context, structure, and author of the story; look for deeper meanings about gender roles; consider how a man might interpret the story; relate it to group members’ own lives; consider different endings for the story; and think about personal or community changes the story advocates.

We Must Choose Life has been used as the basis for curricular materials designed to promote the three goals of the 1992 TESOL/AIDS Resolution, which states that TESOL must target ESOL populations with AIDS instruction, integrate this instruction into the ESOL curriculum, and collaborate with other agencies to advance these goals. With this Resolution in mind, a 20-hour ESOL curriculum has been developed for high school and adult students with two sets of objectives (Broekhoff, 2009), both with cognitive and affective components. First is to motivate students to seek gender equality and AIDS prevention through exposure to authentic creative expressions of Namibian women, while at the same time encouraging them to become more empathetic toward AIDS sufferers and more analytical about cultural issues. The second set of objectives focuses on “best practices” language teaching, particularly as embodied in the U.S. State Department’s Shaping the Way We Teach English (Opp-Beckman & Klinghammer, 2006), including integrated skills, multiple learning modalities (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic), use of drama techniques, task-based group work, and various learner assessments for diverse skill levels.

IMPLICATIONS FOR ENGLISH TEACHERS

As these descriptions of the anthologies and teaching curricula suggest, English teachers can function as social reformers when they promote human rights among marginalized populations. This reformer role provides a powerful counter-argument to the all-too-frequent claims that ESOL teachers merely promote linguistic imperialism and Western hegemony. Instead, as agents of social change, English teachers can encourage the disempowered to speak from the “periphery,” and thereby gain strength both there and within the “centers” of power (Canagarajah, 2002).

There are two ways that teachers can become social change agents, as gleaned from my experience with the Women’s Leadership Centre. First, they can assist with the creation of “writing from the periphery” by participating in pre- and postpublication publicity and especially in the writing workshops themselves and in selecting and editing submissions. English teachers can help create a sense of voice and community and thereby educate both the writers themselves and their readers. A few caveats are in order, however. Because the oppression of women or of any other group is a sensitive topic, a bond of trust between writer and teacher is vital here. In fact, “facilitator” is probably a better word than “teacher” for a writing workshop leader. Trust can usually be better created by local leadership than by “do-gooders” from outside; in any case, local support is essential. In my own situation, I was welcomed to participate in and even lead writing workshops in Namibia’s capital of Windhoek, the only major city, but I was asked not to attend the workshops in the rural north of the country because most of these women have never met someone from outside their villages.

The second way English teachers can function as social reformers is by using writing from the periphery in their ESOL lesson plans for adults or high school students. Such writing, as stated previously, is authentic, contextualized, and culturally appropriate, and as such, it is far more relevant to the lives of Namibians than, for example, Shakespeare’s King Lear, a recent selection for the country’s high school juniors by the Namibian Ministry of Education (N.E.T.A., 2008). The poems, stories, and essays in the Women’s Leadership anthologies lend themselves equally well to thematic, consciousness-raising activities involving social concerns as to the structural and language activities of a typical English lesson.

Although the Women’s Leadership publications focus on the oppression of women in Namibia, this kind of grassroots writing project can be replicated in a variety of settings involving marginalized people worldwide. Issues can be diverse, pivoting on religion, politics, racism, and poverty, along with women’s oppression and AIDS. Teaching units can therefore use diverse primary materials while still enabling teachers to become agents of social reform. Thus through the project described here, the “Es” in both TESOL and Teacher Education achieve “glocal” relevance when teachers are educated to use English as a means of social reform.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is based on the author’s presentation at TESOL in New Orleans, March 2011.

REFERENCES

Broekhoff, M. (2009). Twenty-hour class curriculum for HIV/AIDS issues based on We must choose life. Unpublished manuscript. Eugene, Oregon.

Canagarajah, A. S. (2002). A geopolitics of academic writing. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Constitution of the Republic of Namibia. (1990). Preamble. Retrieved September 9, 2009, from http://www.orusovo.com/namcon/

Khaxas, E. (Ed.). (2005). Between yesterday and tomorrow: Writings by Namibian women. Windhoek, Namibia: John Meinert.

Khaxas, E. (Ed.). (2008). We must choose life: Writings by Namibian women on culture, violence, HIV and AIDS. Windhoek, Namibia: John Meinert.

NETA. [Namibian English Teachers’ Association]. (2008, May 30). Spring Conference, Windhoek, Namibia.

Opp-Beckman, L., & Klinghammer, S. J. (2006). Shaping the way we teach English: Successful practices around the world. Washington, DC: Office of English Language Programs, U.S. Department of State.

University of California at San Francisco Center for HIV Information. (2009, July). Namibia. [Web site]. Regents of the University of California. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu/global?page=cr09-wa-00

Women’s voices: Reading guide. (2009). Windhoek, Namibia: Women’s Leadership Centre.

Marna Broekhoff was the English Language Fellow to Namibia in 2008 for the U.S. Department of State. This year she is an assistant professor in the English and Foreign Languages Departments at Meliksah University in Kayseri, Turkey. She has taught for many years at the University of Oregon, specializing in writing, as well as in Japan.