researching discourses on widow inheritance: feminist questions about \"talk\" as...

$: Researching Discourses on Widow Inheritance: Feminist Questions about \"Talk\" as Methodology$
Teleka Bowden, Toronto, 2008

Photograph by Zanele Muholi

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c h a p t e r4Researching discourses on widow inheritance: Feminist questions about ‘talk’ as methodology

Awino Okech

Introduction: To start is to be positionedThe political conflict in Kenya that followed the elections in February 2008 took global news reporting somewhat by surprise. To those of us steeped in the analysis of Kenyan citizenship, and debates around the meaning of status and authority within those debates, the swift movement to political violence, attributed simply to ‘ethnic’ or ‘tribal’ difference, was both predictable and an important index of ‘democratic processes’ in a country whose constitution still (in 2008) did not offer core protections against gender discrimination. This was also the year in which I initiated research on ‘widow inheritance’ in Kenya—a subject to which, as a young feminist thinker and activist, I was drawn for several reasons. As an activist and researcher who had explored the implications of ‘rites of passage’, and who was deeply critical of developmental approaches to gender equality that simply assumed that ‘traditional practices’ were throwbacks to the pre-modern, I found myself asking questions about the ways in which contemporary local discourses within Kenyan contexts debated widow inheritance.

It is important to begin by stating that the term widow inheritance1 is a contested one from diverse points of view. Many scholars solidly within traditions of cultural anthropology (see Ogot 1967; Ogutu 2001; Ocholla-Ayayo 1980) have argued that what happens among the Luo people of Kenya is not ‘inheritance’, but a leviratic union in which a levir (a husband’s brother) is required by tradition to take on the brother’s widow and provide support and protection (Ogutu 2001: 12). It is argued that attempts

1 Wife inheritance is also used in some literature to refer to widow inheritance.


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to translate the word and process from Luo leads to a misleading equivalent in English and to a misrepresentation of its actual meaning (see Ogutu 1995). Nyanzi et al make a similar argument about the Bagandan context, noting that ‘the notion of “taking over the widow” was necessary and discussed in terms of protecting her from seeking sexual relationships outside the clan in order to support herself and her children’ (2005: 4).

Larger debates around the word ‘inheritance’ also include the question of objectify-ing women: women’s rights activists argue that the term itself is a violation of women’s rights (see HRW 2003; CREAW 2008). Although I have made the decision to work with the term ‘inheritance’ in this chapter, I remain wary of the discursive legacies my own interests ‘hook’ through the use of ‘widow inheritance’.

As with other debates around ‘culture’, widow inheritance continues to attract a range of popular, academic and advocacy research. In the past decade, research that engages with widow inheritance has come from the terrain of HIV prevention and from debates on women’s rights. My first challenge as a researcher was to locate my own interests outside hegemonic knowledges of widow inheritance, and this took me into the theories of Sylvia Tamale, Charmaine Pereira and other contemporary researchers in the politics of gender and sexualities, who refuse to see ‘African women’ as merely victims of pervasive and crude cultures of patriarchy.

My core objective for this (doctoral) research was the exploration of the dynamics of local discursive engagements on widow inheritance. Tensions arose immediately for me in negotiating material that offered ‘explanatory accounts’ of widow inherit-ance as the only route to engaging with the subject. The development of categories, such as ‘harmful traditional practices’ under which widow inheritance falls, reinforces the notion that what is different—not ‘natural’—is harmful (Arnfred 2004: 13). While there is increasing critique of gender and development discourse on the victimisation of African women, the overall framework of ‘othering’ remains intact. As such, Lazreg (1994: 10) notes, the subject is constructed not in order to understand women, but as a vehicle through which to gather documentary evidence of their oppression. Approaches such as these, which underscore the need to save ‘African women’, have influenced not only Northern donors, but also African researchers and activists. The definition of women’s agency within these texts is predicated on survival rather than one that recog-nises active processes of subversion and transgression.

These approaches reinforce the notion of an activism derived from survival and existential questions (see Mikell 1997) and take, as given, heteronormativity as an organising force that cannot be destabilised. The class assumptions within these studies tend to silence and delegitimise the lives of urban Luo widows who negotiate the same dynamics as their ‘universally oppressed’ poor and rural-based counterparts. Studies that foreground empowerment and developmental paradigms that include women


Researching discourses on widow inheritance: Feminist questions about ‘ talk’ as methodology 97

as able members of the society do so from a belief in the direct correlation between economic wealth and choice. I believe that these approaches perpetuate what feminist scholars have described as a generalised discussion of ‘female subordination’ that is far too simple (see Arnfred 2004: 12).

The theoretical challenges framing my research occupied much of my attention. My interest in contemporary discourses on widow inheritance in Kenya positioned me not only in debate with development workers seeking to free ‘African women’ from ‘tradition’, but also, in the early months of 2008, within an arena fraught with political tension, grounded in questions of citizenship. Designing a methodological approach which would enable me to listen to what Luo men and women had to say about widow inheritance meant that I had to steer between multiple and contradictory assumptions about who I was in that space. Was I a development worker, a Luo daughter, a stranger coming with ‘educated’ and ‘ignorant’ questions, or a young woman needing to be con-verted back into the norms and values of ‘her culture’?

In this chapter I reflect upon some aspects of the methodology and methods that I found useful. I knew I was interested in examining the dominant popular discourses on widow inheritance and how they are produced. I also knew I wanted to explore the function of widow inheritance as a discursive device used to construct notions of stabil-ity within larger state-building discourses, rather than as a ‘cultural practice’ implicated in women’s subordination. I felt that these approaches would enable me to contribute to African feminist theorisations of gendered embodiment as narratives of the processes of nation and state. The challenge was how to engage these approaches through prac-tice, with people I had not met, and in a volatile political context.

Methodological starting points: Gaps between theory, positionality and possibilityAs research rooted in a feminist epistemological tradition that works to destabilise hegemonic and homogenous categorisations of the social, it seemed to me that a qualitative approach would offer the opportunity for a rich and complex understanding of the social context and questions at hand. So, I began from an acceptance of qualitative methods as anchored in a feminist epistemological framework, alert to the erasure of the nature of women’s experiences and their contributions to work, culture and knowledge. Feminist research and attendant methodologies seek to address the bias of this erasure (Narayan 1989). One of the prominent ways in which feminist research methods have contributed to redefining research praxis has been through re-imagining the ‘boundaries’ and the function of research. Feminist epistemology has also troubled the relationship between the researcher and those being researched by arguing for an

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interrogation of the researcher as a ‘subject’ within the research process (Mbilinyi 1994: Hekman 2000; Nagar 2007).

Methodologically, I had to take seriously those post-colonial theories that recognise that the history of writing and researching within and about the South have been shaped largely by the colonial story. Post-colonial scholars such as Mohanty (2002: 501) have argued for the definition and recognition of the ‘Third World’ not just through the lens of oppression, but also in terms of historical complexities and the many struggles to change this oppression, thereby pushing for grounded, particularised analyses linked to larger—even global—economic and political frameworks. Mohanty (2002), Spivak (1993) and Smith (2006) locate the role of the academy and the ‘native’ researcher as integral to the process of rewriting this history with integrity. Smith flags the role of research in these contexts, noting:

Research is a powerful intervention and it is critical that researchers recognize the power dynamic embedded in the relationship with their subjects. Researchers have the power to distort, make invisible, overlook, exaggerate or draw conclusions based not on factual data but on assumptions, hidden value judgements and often downright misunderstandings. They have the potential to extend knowledge or to perpetuate ignorance. (Smith 2006: 176)

In addition, it mattered to me that questions about the history of research lead to questions about the university as a key site for the production of national culture and development in the immediate post-colonial era and the disruption created by the presence of women in general, but feminist scholarship in particular, in these spaces (Barnes 2007). Barnes (2007) draws attention to the gendered imperatives, not only in the constitution of African universities but also in their cultures. She notes;

Thus, institutional cultures in modern, Western, African/South African universities maintain the ability to produce and reproduce ways of knowing that privilege certain kinds of maleness, and sideline and marginalise other ways of knowing and of knowledge production. (Barnes 2007: 17)

The theorisation of feminist epistemologies may have offered me the confidence to initiate research and to question my own orientations as a doctoral student, but the actual politics of negotiating with men and women (who were strangers and busy individuals) demanded more than this. In addition, the terrain in which I wanted to



engage Luo men and women in a variety of roles (as inheritors, negotiators, family members, widows, wives, husbands and elders) was, as I noted earlier, politically volatile. It was practically impossible for me to approach people simply as ‘an interested listener’ in matters quintessentially entwined in the political debate on who was or was not a ‘legitimate’ Kenyan citizen. It was equally impossible to ask for information about widow inheritance as though the answers did not have relevance for me personally, as I was identified as a young, Luo woman. A commitment to not ‘othering’ constituencies and not ‘prejudging discourses’ concerning understandings of gender and sexuality was not sufficient to render me welcome.

After much thought, I decided to draw2 on my history with a local NGO based in Kisumu town to identify a community organiser. The organisation’s programmatic interest in gender and culture was also central to my decision to have them act as an entry point into the community in question. Anne,3 the community worker they suggested, had worked with the organisation in an ad hoc capacity, mobilising members of her community around various projects and workshops. She had founded a community-based organisation based in Kisumu, was a traditional birth attendant and considered herself to be a development agent. Anne saw her role as identifying opportunities that could benefit women and she was well respected within the community—most of the women recognised her mobilisation skills and the ‘development’ that she had brought into the community. This gave her stature in the community, and when she called, people came.

The zone of ‘widow inheritance’ is highly politicised within state political discourses, imbued with ethnic bias, and has been the subject of numerous ‘research’ projects by academics and NGOs, as already noted. I was certain that I would have to craft my entry into the research site in a way that ensured that my research was seen and understood as examining something different and with a different lens. This was to ensure that I avoided a situation in which respondents told me what they assumed I wanted to hear, or simply interacted with me as a ‘young researcher’, someone far removed from the issues (despite my familiarity with the area and my fluency in Luo). I met Anne and gave her a full brief of the work I intended to do. We mapped out a field plan with regard to who would be interviewed, how many interviews would take place

2 The organisation KEFEADO was founded and headed by my mother. Her extensive work in the area served as a useful entry point through the identification of Anne, who worked with me in the formative stages of my fieldwork. However, all conversations with Anne occurred independently and were not linked in any way to the work of the institution. Her knowledge of the mother–daughter relationship nonetheless informed her expectations of this research project as a contribution to ‘seen’ development initiatives in the area. I had to work consistently during the focus group discussions to erase this assumption.

3 All the names of respondents have been changed.


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per day, where they would be held and what the community’s expectations were. I could not have done this on my own as an independent researcher, no matter how well versed I was in the theorisation of feminist epistemology. My relationship with Anne (which evoked my mother’s legacy of activism) enacted the politics of embedded feminism, without which my encounters with people, who became willing research participants, would not have occurred. The question of support and hospitality from ‘intermediaries’ is rarely explored within literature on the politics of feminist research methodologies.

The money question was also one that I had to think through while in the field. I had initially intended to avoid the question of remunerating people who participated in the field process, but this was not to be. One of the ways in which the question of power manifests itself during research is through the idea of ‘compensation’, particularly in areas of research that are perceived as giving currency to the individual narrative. Lazreg (2002: 128) attributes this to the transformation of women’s lives into a discourse in which women’s life histories are seen as valuable, not so much for their intrinsic value to the women themselves as for what they tell us about this amorphous entity called ‘development’. I had initially suggested food items instead of cash as a token of appreciation. Anne argued that a ‘small fee’ of KES200 (approximately US$3)4 would be better as it offered people options to do what they wanted with the money. Having received a fellowship grant as part of the Steve Biko leadership cohort of 2007, I was able to cover these costs, as well as facilitate Anne’s movement and communication needs. What was complex was the fact that many people I encountered during the interviews—particularly the women—saw the research as framing the possibility of individual/group development assistance, despite my explanations. I had initially seen my entry through the local NGO as one way of dealing with the ‘benefit’ question. The organisation had been running, and continues to run, projects with a range of community-based organisations in the district, so my engagement as a researcher with its ‘project beneficiaries’ could easily be interpreted as an offshoot of ‘project work’, from which they were already benefiting. This came with its complications (which emerged) of ‘development-correct’ stories being supplied by respondents who wanted to ‘testify’ to change in exchange for ‘benefit’.

The need to balance community expectations with my research became evident in one of the most incoherent interviews I conducted, which was with a man who had ‘inherited’ his sister-in-law. His basic information, such as his date of birth and how long he had lived with his ‘wife’, seemed inaccurate and inconsistent across the interview (this inconsistency was apparent because I had previously interviewed his

4 KES = Kenyan shilling; US$ = United States dollar.



wife, whose information totally contradicted his). It became clear, after listening to both interviews and speaking to the community organiser, that something was amiss, and that the man’s narratives were full of fundamental inaccuracies concerning the circumstances of the inheritance. I was disturbed and I chose not to offer any ‘token fee’ after an interview that I felt had gone nowhere. As anticipated, he camped outside Anne’s home demanding his money. I had already explained the incident to Anne, who offered him the option of redoing the interview. When I returned for focus group discussions in July 2009, all of the men were reluctant to reassemble because of the earlier incident. I had to reassess my position, and reconcile my own concerns (the connection between ‘fees’ and ‘valuable information’; the worry about the interface between ‘fact told’ and the ‘truths of discourses’; the anxiety about being exploited, as a young woman, by community men). I took on board the argument that what I was paying for, or recognising, was the individual’s time and not the quality of the talk I heard, as interviewer or focus group facilitator. I know, however, that while it remained my prerogative to theorise a position from which I could work, that position did little to influence the research participants’ understandings of what it was I could pay for, and why.

Anne’s participation was not only essential in getting me started as a ‘researcher’ in the Luo community, but she also supported the research by working with Susan, who did most of the groundwork identifying the men and women who became respondents. Susan, a primary school teacher, could best be described as being mentored by Anne. Anne felt that local development initiatives would not only broaden Susan’s worldview, but also supplement her regular teacher’s salary. In fact, when I returned for the second leg of my fieldwork in July, Anne informed me that Susan had started a small business with the modest honorarium I had given her in April 2009. Anne was in her mid-forties while Susan was in her early thirties. Susan credited Anne for her own entry into ‘development-’ and ‘empowerment’-related work and deferred to Anne, especially when both were present. They accompanied me to all the interviews, conducted the necessary introductions before departing and often briefed the respondents on the purpose of the interviews. They were both extraordinarily supportive; so much, however, for my well-honed theoretical position on the need to be wary of develop-ment discourses. While their presence and energy did not commit me to shifts in my own framework, the fact of the matter is that without the trust of these women who worked strongly within a developmental paradigm, I could not easily have conducted interviews and become part of focus groups.

Since Anne and Susan had to escort me to the various sites for the focus group discussions, they sat in on all of these (whereas after the initial interviews, I conducted


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the rest on my own). Anne was the contact person, between the host5 and me in two focus group discussions. Susan, who was based in the village, took responsibility for the other four, mobilising women and men from different parts of the division, which, while a small area geographically, is prone to floods which render some of the roads almost impassable and make movement difficult. So Susan’s efforts to ensure geo-graphical disparity were appreciated.

Anne’s role and perceived function in the community played out in an interesting way in the focus groups. Since she had not been present during the initial interviews I conducted, and because I did not administer questionnaires, she had no idea of the kind of questions that I was going to ask. She had a general sense of the area I was planning to cover during the focus group discussions, given that I had met with her intermittently to speak about the kinds of respondents I was looking for. However, having sat through the first focus group discussion, by the second one Anne felt confident that she knew what I was looking for and decided that she should ‘assist’. She took charge when she assumed I was unclear about what I was asking and intervened by offering ‘directed opinions’, thus triggering other responses. Having administered questionnaires as part of research projects for various NGOs and government agencies, Anne was used to a rote administration of questions, where the space for divergence was never an option. I concluded this from the fact that, whenever I chose not to ask a particular question that was in my ‘set of questions’, she would always ask whether I no longer needed to get a response to that question. As well-meaning and useful as this was, it also posed a challenge, particularly when she veered the conversations into unhelpful directions. In an effort not to offend her, I devised mechanisms to redirect the conversations by jumping in and asking different questions, thereby treating her intervention simply as part of a response offered by a participant within the group. Along the way she came to understand her role as an observer and participant within these discussions, as well as my approach to the research process. As a corollary, along the way, I came to recognise her role as researcher in the process of what I was able to achieve.

In the end, once I had begun the interviews and focus group discussions, I met regularly with both of them, providing direction on the type of respondents I wanted to interview in the following phase and taking their advice seriously. Most of the cues were taken from emerging issues within some of the interviews and focus group discussions and the need to verify information. I deferred to Anne and Susan to make the initial contact, even when the opportunity presented itself for me to do so directly. I did not want to ignore their influence and familiarity with the various families. While

5At the home of one of the respondents where we convened.



the approach worked well and my relationship with Anne and Susan strengthened, I came to acknowledge that I have not seen in-depth feminist discussion on methodo-logical approaches that rely on connections and collegialities with those never named as ‘researchers’ in the final article or dissertation. There are discussions about this in ethnographically oriented anthropology, and the figure of the ‘inside informant’ (a pejorative word, in some political histories) is ubiquitous in colonial anthropological and linguistic research. This remains an issue for me.

Maintaining a presence across timeFeminist scholars have suggested that the value in ‘story-telling’ lies in the emergence of counter-narratives that reveal that the narrators do not necessarily think, feel or act as they are ‘supposed to’. I was interested in hearing men’s and women’s stories of experiences of ‘being inherited’, of the ‘processes of widow inheritance’, and of local debates about the meaning of widow inheritance. What this meant was that my focus groups were designed to elicit stories of ‘what happened when’, and to encourage participants to ‘remember’ past events, and past dynamics within families, as well as to express their own opinions and ideas. Haug argues that

[a]s experts on their own experiences the individual women are both producers of ideology and the only ones who know how they did it. Their memories have stored up the information that explains how they came to choose a particular path and why, what meaning they were looking for, what compromises they acquiesced and what alternatives might have existed. Our task is to reconstruct this process and in doing so deconstruct existing meanings. (Haug 2000; 156–7)

The underlying assumption is that beneath the scraps of memory that have been as-sembled lie specific meanings, and new paths and possibilities become visible through contradictions, disharmonies, ruptures, incongruities or inconsistencies.

The interview and focus group processes that I used to engage with the women were designed to uncover a series of ‘facts’ about their lives, and to hear ‘stories’ about what had happened, which had led to them becoming inherited and ‘stories’ about what this had meant for them and their families; this revolved around drawing coordinates from life-cycle moments such as courtship, marriage, the death of a husband and widow-hood-related rites. However, the process went beyond this and sought to engage with their interpretation of their experiences of those moments. Obviously, questions were designed to assist such a process and other questions flowed from these in the course


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of the interviews. The result was a mixed bag. Some of the interviews were immensely rich in terms of the depth of information provided by the respondents. Others were more ‘guarded’ and ‘sanitised’, and some interviewees asked ‘why is my story impor-tant?’ and ‘will it be used for development gains?’

Initially, I had envisaged the focus groups as a space within which I would begin a process of sampling and distilling a group of core participants, with whom I would engage further through in-depth interviews. It worked in the reverse. Instead, the focus groups became the space within which to re-engage the 20 individuals initially interviewed around a different set of questions. The emphasis was removed from the individual to individuals within a group. This generated a new set of dynamics; for example, the women were more engaged in a group setting, while the men who had initially been interviewed individually chose not to engage as a group. I had to confront the fact that while most of the women I had interviewed as individuals were happy to engage with other women in a focus group setting, the men were not happy to engage with one another as ‘fellow-inheritors’. I had to find ways of expanding the possibilities for discussion among men, and with women. In the end, the focus group discussions included an additional new group of 60 women and men with whom I worked over a period of four months. This took time, and delicacy, and the demands of my own life took me in and out of the research site over the course of a year. This raised challenges for me in terms of maintaining a consistency and a presence, but it also contributed to what it was possible to discuss, especially with women participants, over that time.

While I was in and out of the research site intermittently over a period of one year (2009), the participant observation method that I employed was not a traditional anthropological one in the sense of immersing oneself in a community with the goal of becoming like them or close enough to be treated as family, with the aim of creating a level of openness to allow for ‘candid’ conversations. This was not my intention to start with, but I did detect a discernible shift in June 2009 when I re-encountered the women I had initially met in April 2008. There was a familiarity and a level of comfort that allowed for greater depth of conversations. The interviews in all instances were conducted in the home environment and often during intimate moments of meals, whether breakfast or lunch. This setting already provided an insight into the individuals’ lives and their interactions with the extended family living in the same environs.

Feminist researchers consider ‘research effects’, that is, the fact that concrete settings of interaction provide and withhold opportunities for and challenges to gendering behaviour for stories and are constructed situationally (Presser 2005: 2007). The choice of interview sites was also a deliberate attempt to balance the scales and open the channels for communication. All interviews were conducted in the homes of the respondents. I had not given much thought to the significance of hospitality



vis-à-vis assumptions of related openness. Yet two of the most comprehensive interviews I conducted occurred when I was invited to join a family meal. While I declined on one occasion, I accepted on the other, largely because the invitation came from a much older woman. In retrospect, and upon reviewing the transcripts that emerged from these interviews, these were the most open6 and relaxed because the respondents went on with their daily activities while they conversed with me. They did not feel constrained by an interview environment in which they had to stop their daily activities in order to speak with me. This had been the case with most of the other interviews, where the interviewees needed to do farm work and capitalise on the rainy season. However, I was also certain that this was more a result of the individuals concerned than of the environment.

The second layer of participant observation involved the logistics that shaped my field research. I spent the whole day in the field and commuted daily to the nearest urban centre, Kisumu, where I lived. As a result, I had all my meals in the village and, more specifically, in the home of the community organiser, where we also retreated for breaks. I contributed to all meals, but the hospitality with which the meals were provided far surpassed the cost of the ingredients. While the community organiser, left me alone with the respondents during the interviews, the breaks in between became the ‘fact-checking’ moments. Here she sought to ascertain whether a particular respondent had ‘revealed specific bits of information’ that, she noted, ‘are well known in the village’. She offered insights, analysis and observations and when walking to the various homesteads, she pointed out who was who and offered various tit-bits of information about life in what was her marital village.

We observe life either as an active or passive participant every day. We are constantly reading and interpreting people’s actions, statements and ways of being in an attempt to understand them better, and in so doing our own engagement with them becomes richer. Irrespective of whether those concerned are friends, family or ‘research subjects’, participant observation as a method cuts across the other methods cited above, but is embedded in questions of time and the meaning of how and when one comes in and out of a research space.

6 I use ‘open’ here to refer to the fact that the respondents offered information about their lives even when they had not been asked direct questions about certain aspects of their lives. They also responded to difficult questions, such as revealing the cause of their spouses’ death, which most of the widows seemed uncomfortable articulating, unless their spouses had been much older than them.


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Language and academic researchBoth my years of formal education7 and the history of being born in a country colonised by the British has meant that my ability to speak, write and communicate effectively in English has been sharpened over a period of 25 years. As with most Africans,8 the dominance9 of the English language in my life coexisted neatly when expected (and sometimes uncomfortably) with the requirement to speak my mother tongue fluently10 (Luo and Kiswahili are the national languages of Kenya). While Luo was often restricted to the home, as I grow older I use it more frequently outside the home with those who can speak it. Kiswahili, on the other hand, was taught as an examinable language at school, but in my experience its use was restricted to school, and only rarely was it used as the language for commercial transactions in the marketplace. I also made attempts in high school to acquire French as a working language. The point I seek to make here is that the task of deconstructing and constructing phrases, meanings and narratives has been a constant part of my being. Thus, code switching became and continues to be a constant in the way in which I navigate languages and contexts to find the appropriate terminology to convey the right sentiments, although I may at times miss the target.

This was pertinent in several ways in the field, where I oscillated between Luo and a mixture of English and Luo, and when I was unable to ‘gather’ the correct set of words to communicate what I intended, I resorted to asking about the translation between the two. The challenge I faced in this particular study was not merely that I had to turn one set of messages into another language to enable me to write a thesis, but that it called for my engagement with the politics of that process. More importantly, I faced the very practical reality of what is lost in the process and what cannot be represented in another language without distorting, conveying a different meaning, or doing injustice to the messages of those I encountered in the field. The imagery, the nuances, the power and the reality of which linguistic norms and words are accessible to one gender and not the other may, potentially, be lost in this translation and subsequent analytical process.

My decision to work in a context and language that I considered familiar, I argue, provided me with insights that non-Luo speakers would be unable to glean unless through translators and accompanying ‘losses’. During the translation process I had to make choices around what I perceived as being not translatable, or not intelligible in a

7 Close to 20 years now.

8 Since I am writing from and most of my experience is connected to various parts of the African continent.

9 Obviously, in other parts of Africa, this negotiation is done alongside other colonial languages, such as French and Portuguese.

10 Where the idea of fluency is open to contestation by those around me who speak it with more agility.



hegemonic language, in this instance English. I note that this ‘choice’ to not give primacy to text in Luo is, in part, informed by the dominant discourses around ‘othered’ research subjects. Trying to make sense of them in a hegemonic language can often result in reduc-tionist views that elide the true significance of the practice. Allow me to illustrate.

In speaking to the various shades of widow inheritance, a respondent noted:

Luo version:Ka chi dala no, no tii kaka mama mobet buta ni [gestures to the woman seated beside him], ni miye ndawa. Bang’e yuore ne ng’awo koti ne e i ot. Maa nyiso ni od ni gi dichwo

Translation:[When a widow was as old as this woman, she was given a cigarette and her in-law would come and place his coat in the house to signify that he was now the man of the house.]

The English version above has been translated and retranslated several times in an attempt to ring true to the sentiments expressed by the respondent. In my own attempts to relate to and draw connections at a surface level with the meaning of cigarettes, coats, body politics and women’s sexuality, it is easy to dismiss, even on my part as a ‘native’, these attempts to hold on to some form of ‘culture’ as meaningless. A ‘coat’ carries huge weight in Luo in relation to sexual and patriarchal propriety; the ‘cigarette’ is not a cigarette (although it may be, as well). The literal translation erases the complexity of the Luo, full of resonant assumptions and simultaneous sexual evasion/directness; and the attempt to ‘explain’ this merely exoticises the Luo speaker.

A second example illustrates this again. In Luo, the difference between ot (house) and dala (home) is important. The development and inscription of this differentiation as a codified Luo norm occurred during the S.M. Otieno v. Wambui case in which argu-ments were made around the difference between an urban house, which was seen as a temporary base not indicative of any commitment (whether it was owned or not), and a house in the rural area where one’s blood ties were seen to be located, whether or not one visited it often or spent enough time there to call it a home.11 A distinction was thus

11 This is at odds with modern-day conceptualisations of the meaning of the term ‘home’, where the acquisition of property (irrespective of its geographical location) in which one spends time, builds memories and relationships would be read as home. To the Luo, this would never be a home, but a house. In fact, the increasing attention to the idea of ancestral lands became more potent at the height of the post-election crisis, with a resurgence of the idea of people needing to go back to their ‘roots’.


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drawn between house (ot) and home (dala) as being two distinct spaces with differ-ent meanings. To a non-discerning eye and ear (unaware of the discourse surrounding this), it is easy to use the terms interchangeably, and erroneously to use one to refer to the other. Read as text, the distinction can easily be missed. One notes, therefore, that translation and, in turn, language generates new forms of knowledge and paradigms, as well as new textual forms and new relationships to language through the interaction between words and the world. The two words were used often in my interviews and in focus groups, and on each occasion, the word used carried great influence over the political salience of the space being referred to, and the expectations of the women and men in that space, whether ot or dala. When I came to transcription, then transla-tion, and the final analysis to be written and read in English, I experienced a range of emotions: frustration, anger, grief and a sense of being theoretically underprepared for the intensity of the ‘non-translatable’.

To resolve the challenges above, my focus came to rest on how to ensure that a series of questions around ethnic identities and language practices (that is, how language is deployed) translate effectively into English words on this page. Language is an imperfect medium and one needs to grapple with the question of whether the task of translation is to re-present or represent the original. It is clear that re-presenting the original is an elusive task. I realised that what I would have to ask readers of my research-work to encounter my efforts to represent the original, and nothing more. I remain embattled in my own mind as to the theorisation of that ‘effort’, but am clear that the distance between listening in Luo (thinking in Luo) and writing in English (academic English) cannot be bridged simply through convictions of feminist alliance or commitments to cross-linguistic community-building.

ConclusionThis chapter explores, ultimately, the fact that research is not apolitical. It involves contestation, both in terms of the academy’s expectation and in terms of how to map politically innovative theorisation to the conditions of the ‘outside world’, especially with the rise in ‘development’-driven initiatives that have necessitated the production of ‘research outputs’ as part of programmatic initiatives. Scholars such as Bennett (2008) draw attention to the tenuous relationship between meeting academic requirements such as ethics and confidentiality in a context—the real world—in which expectations are driven by survival. This is also mediated by a context in which universities have the task of producing research relevant for development and, in turn, researchers who



can be deployed in service to the state. The post-colonial goal of the university as a ‘teaching machine’12 is still alive and well.

Reflections offered by Smith (2006), Barnes (2007), Mohanty (2002), Spivak (1993) and Lazreg (1994) call on us to question our (as ‘native’ researchers) complicity in the reproduction of binaries through the methodological approaches that we employ in the ‘field’ and, in turn, re-inscribe and reify in our writing. They implicitly recognise that the task of dismantling these hegemonic discourses is larger. Perhaps it lies in what Bennett (2003), Mekgwe (2006) and Mbembe (2004) refer to as the need to look to sites where silences and not silencing pertains, and where non-hegemonic discourses about the notion of research in Africa and on women have been written. These may act as opportunities to redefine our methodologies and allow us to grapple meaningfully with the complexities of the contexts within which we work.

In this chapter I have tried to comment on some of my methodological challenges about which I found little theoretical guidance, but which demonstrated the realities of ‘the field experience’ that not only reshaped my research plan, but also helped to sharpen questions about my identity, language and process. I still grapple with the idea of engaging in discourse analysis without paying attention to the fact of working with translated text and the loss of meaning/s. And I argue that the research process is not neat. The daily life negotiations that I had to navigate during the course of my research had an immense impact on the kind of data I was able to collect, the methods I initially employed and eventually dismissed, and the luxury of being able to find a quiet space within a well-resourced university to craft a coherent research thesis. It is my hope that by discussing this openly in this chapter I can contribute to a conversation about research in African contexts that takes gender seriously and locates the process of such research within the stories of our own lives.

12 To borrow from Spivak (1993).


110 JACKETED WOMEN

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