Tatjana Pavlov-West is a lecturer in English at the Waldorf teacher training college in Stuttgart (Germany) and an associate researcher at the University of Pretoria (South Africa). She holds an M.A. in English, French and Art History and received her PhD in English Literature from the University of Pretoria (S.A.). She has worked as an English teacher at several Waldorf schools in Germany and taught English Literature and Visual Arts at the University of Pretoria (S.A.) and English literary and cultural studies at German universities in Tübingen, Berlin and Potsdam. She has published a number of articles on seventeenth century English drama, postmodern films and novels, gender and racism in the context of South African literature and performance art. Her monograph Images of the Wounded Mouth: Dissonant Approaches to Trauma in Global South Literary, Visual and Performance Cultures appeared with Narr in 2020. Email: pavlov-west@freie-hochschule-stuttgart.de

 

Introduction

This article emphasizes the importance of decolonizing the EAL-, or in the German context, EFL- (English as a foreign language) curriculum with its tendency to focus on white authors coming from Britain and the US and to make space for a “balance of stories” as formulated by Chinua Achebe in his essay collection Home and Exile (2001). This “balance of stories” can be achieved if lecturers and teachers become politically conscious and are willing to think carefully about the choices of their teaching material. The inclusion of literary texts and performative artefacts created by indigenous writers and artists from the erstwhile colonies and the diaspora, who speak for themselves and are not spoken for by the benevolent white author, is extremely relevant for a decolonial teaching approach. After explaining the inherent power structures that are at work in our preferred American- and Eurocentric knowledge systems, I will offer some counter-examples that open up the possibility of widening students’ perspectives on history and culture. I will describe how I, as a lecturer in English, introduce African literatures and cultures as part of my postcolonial curriculum at the Waldorf teacher training college in Stuttgart by pointing out the “the danger of a single story” (Adichie 2009) with the help of Chimamanda N. Adichie’s TED Talk of the same name as well as several artworks and poems.

My aim is to encourage students to think critically, to engage in interesting discussions with one another and to broaden their horizons by offering them a variety of different texts and activities. This will help them to become more open-minded, tolerant, and politically conscious teachers.

 

Why decolonizing the curriculum is necessary

“Until lions have their own historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.”

(African proverb)

This African proverb is an excellent starting point for a discussion on the necessity of decolonizing the curriculum in educational institutions, where “the hunter” (when interpreted as the Western colonizer) is still “glorified” and determines what kind of knowledge is being taught. This phenomenon is still visible in many educational institutions, both in former colonized countries as well as in our own schools and universities, where the main curriculum for teaching English as a foreign language is still mostly based on a Western value system. In the EFL classroom in Germany, both at regular state schools and private schools such as the Steiner schools, the focus on the so-called “core” countries, Great Britain and the USA, reveals this preference. Even when we teach topics such as multiculturalism in Great Britain and the US and discuss issues of racism, the ambiguity of belonging and questions of identity, we tend to look at texts mostly written by white authors (e.g. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird) instead of choosing texts written by those marginalized and oppressed peoples whose voices have been silenced for far too long.

One could justifiably ask why the State Ministry of Education in Baden-Württemberg (MKJS) still uses (in the teaching plan valid since 2019) Tom Franklin’s novel Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (2010) and Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Torino (2008) for the final A-level examination (the German Abitur) to discuss the topic of racism and questions of belonging in America instead of looking at works created by writers of Colour? Given that police violence against People of Colour presents such an acute and urgent topic, not only in the US but worldwide, I wonder why we do not teach, for instance, a film like The Hate U Give (2018) based on the novel of the same title by Angie Thomas, a young Afro-American woman writer who deals with the issue of structural racism and expresses the relevance of the Black Lives Matter Movement. What about Nic Stone’s Dear Martin (2017), which would allow us to teach pupils about the connections between the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter Movement today? What about analysing a song and video clip like I can’t Breathe by H.E.R. (2020) to speak about the murder of George Floyd and all the other victims of racial profiling and the urgency to change structural racism that still prevents certain groups from being treated equally in all areas of life? Who decides what should be taught and examined at school and why do these choices still seem to privilege white authors? My intention is not to discredit Harper Lee’s great novel (I have taught it myself on several occasions) or the texts by Franklin and Eastwood currently in use for German A-level exams. All these works are certainly worth reading and/or watching and offer numerous starting points for discussion in the context of discrimination and the ‘ambiguity of belonging.’ It would, however, also be worth discussing in class why Gran Torino, for example, was criticized by the Hmong community in the US for its cultural inaccuracies (see Lee and Tapp 2012) and why choosing merely white authors to talk about racism can be problematic.

I would like to draw attention to a general problem in many parts of our Euro-American school system: our choices in terms of school material still value texts by popular white (and mostly male) authors more than those created by marginalized people who are, in fact, affected by discrimination. It is our task as educators to challenge the widespread assumption that the most valuable knowledge and the most valuable ways of teaching and learning come from a single European tradition. Educational institutions have an enormous impact on pupils and students since they are regarded as places where trustworthy knowledge is transmitted. If teachers neglect to inform students that many of the texts that belong to the well-appreciated (classical) English and American literary canon perpetuate a binary understanding of the world in which marginalised groups and colonised people are presented as the fundamentally different ‘Other’, inferior to the economically and politically dominant society, we will continue to produce biased and stereotypical viewpoints. We need to critically discuss this issue, let the students explore where these racist structures come from and provide them with a variety of cultural texts and artefacts, also created by People of Colour, that counter these narrow-minded perspectives. Educators need to be politically conscious, encourage critical thinking and provide a safe space for students to discuss these sensitive issues without interfering too much. They need to be careful not to impose their own beliefs onto the students but offer a variety of challenging texts and exercises that allow an exchange of different thoughts and opinions. As Martyn Rawson rightly points out, “the role of the teacher is to provide access to the works, formulate a set of tasks, provide feedback, but otherwise stand back” (Rawson, 2023).

 

The Danger of Indoctrination

Teachers can easily indoctrinate their pupils and students as demonstrated, for instance, in a song by Tom Paxton from 1964: “What Did You Learn in School Today?” is the title of the song and the major question that runs through the refrain. The question is answered by several biased statements the interrogated “little boy” learned from his teacher, such as “I learned that Washington never told a lie. I learned that soldiers seldom die. I learned that everybody’s free.” Written in 1964, the teacher’s statement mirrors the desire to conceal unpleasant truths about America’s history in favour of the maintenance of an illusion of a successful, dreamlike nation. The statement de-dramatizes wars, ignores the continuing plight of Black people for equal rights in the Civil Rights Movement and the fact that the first president of the United States, who is known for having fought slavery, was paradoxically a slave owner himself who abused both his Black slaves and Native Americans. How does this contradictory information fit together? Paxton’s song can be used as effective teaching material to make students aware of how powerful educational systems are in making people, and especially children and young adolescents, believe one-sided perspectives on history. History is much more complex and not at all neutral. According to Andrea Major this also applies to the glorification of the British Empire at higher educational institutions in Britain, where she observes “a collective amnesia about the levels of violence, exploitation and racism involved in many aspects of imperialism, not to mention the various atrocities and catastrophes that were perpetrated, caused or exacerbated by British colonial policies and actions”  (qtd. in Owen, 2016, para. 14).

We need to become conscious of these inherent power structures and start asking how stories are told and by whom? If we want to overcome ingrained structural inequalities, we need to reconsider what the subject matter is and how it is taught. Whose perspective on history is presented? What is left out and why? As James Muldoon states, this undertaking requires a “transformation from a culture of denial and exclusion to a consideration of different traditions of knowledge” (Muldoon, 2019, para. 12). This does not mean that we should abolish the canon, but we should question its assumptions and broaden our ways of thinking by including a wider range of perspectives. As Muldoon notes:

“We can still teach authors like John Locke, but we should note that he was a liberal political philosopher deeply enmeshed in American slavery – including investing in the slave-trading Royal African Company and co-authoring the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which enshrined chattel slavery. The issue is complex, but to overlook this ignores the fundamental role that slavery and colonialism played in the development of modernity” (Muldoon, 2019, para. 10).

Following Michel Foucault’s theories on power relations, Bill Ashcroft et al. (2007) describe the colonial discourse as a system employed by dominant social groups to construct their ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ in order to impose certain knowledges and values on marginalized groups. In his famous book, Decolonizing the Mind (1986), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explains how these power structures are embedded in our educational institutions in the way their foundations are embedded into language and literary studies. John K. Noyes  summarizes Ngũgĩ’s observation and his call for change quite aptly by saying: “The institutional imbalance in the teaching of indigenous versus imported languages and literatures is a relic of imperialism that needs to be remedied” (Noyes, 2020, p. 267). The teaching of postcolonial literatures and cultures can offer such a remedy to this problem. However, considering the time restraints that language teachers often face at school, the choice of teaching material is of utmost importance.

 

The Death of Monocultures: Yinka Shonibare’s British and American libraries

Another essential aspect often ignored in the EFL classroom is the fact that the so-called British or American literary canon consists, in fact, of many authors with migration backgrounds (and we should not forget that the USA would not exist as such without its migrants). American Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck, for instance, was of German, Irish and English descent and John Agard, whose poetry found its way into the prestigious Norton Anthology of British poetry, is originally from Guyana. One can cite an infinite number of such examples, and to make students aware of this fact, I show them Yinka Shonibare’s art installations The British Library from 2014 and The American Library from 2018.

Shonibare, whose parents moved from Nigeria to England, is considered as one of Britain’s most successful contemporary artists. In both these installations thousands of books are exhibited on shelves, attracting the viewer’s attention with their unusually colourful covers made by using wax and dye, which are a trademark of Shonibare’s artwork. The colourful and multi-patterned fabric of the book covers, which many people believe to be ‘authentic African’, was in fact inspired by Indonesian batik prints. Historically, these were manufactured in Europe, mainly by the Dutch and English artisans. The prints were not popular in Europe, so the Dutch sold them to people from Africa who enjoyed wearing them (Kerlogue, Smed, Haks, 2004).

The fabric of the book covers as well as the books themselves, written by so many culturally diverse authors living in the diaspora, demonstrate the interconnectedness of cultures and economies. Furthermore, Shonibare’s artwork reveals – just like the fabric – that what we assume to be the ‘authentic’ literary canon of Great Britain and the US, is a heterogeneous accumulation of different texts coming from multicultural societies. What does ‘authentic’ actually mean? Does it refer to something ‘pure’, to an ‘untouched’ monoculture that no longer exists (if it ever did)? These questions are worth discussing with the students in the context of our globalized world.

Upon examining the books at closer range, one will notice on each individual spine the name of a well-known author, artist or other celebrity. Most of these famous individuals (such as Toni Morrison, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Alex Wheatle, Angelica Kauffman etc.) are descendants of slaves or migrants (either first, second or later generations), enriching and belonging to Britain’s and America’s cultures. These authors, however, alternate with well-known figures who are associated with racist or anti-immigrant attitudes, from writers such as John Locke and Daniel Defoe to politicians such as Enoch Powell and Oswald Mosley. It is quite interesting that these installations appeared at a time where Western countries were increasingly seeking, in the British context for example, to create a ‘really hostile environment for migrants’ (Theresa May quoted in Hill, 2017, para.1). In such contexts, our societies are confronted with new waves of migrants, but are often unwilling to welcome these newcomers, see their potential to contribute to their nation’s economy and culture, and to realize our own possible complicity in the causes for their flight (colonisation, neo-colonialism, climate change etc.). The hostile, often right-wing migration policies that can be observed world-wide tend to ignore these complicated historical and political implications. Shonibare’s works, however, celebrate the cultural diversity of the so-called core nations that we, as educators, sometimes depict as monocultures. These pieces of art may provoke a discussion on numerous important topics, from the meaning of culture, identity, history and global politics and the entanglement of the past, present and future. As a matter of fact, we do live in multicultural societies, and this should be reflected in our education and teaching material.

The importance of English in our globalized world is undeniable. According to The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language, English is used as a first or second language in more than seventy countries (Crystal, 2013, p. 4) and it is now the language “most widely taught as a foreign language” (ibid., p. 5), specifically in more than one hundred countries. This sounds impressive but we should not forget that one of the major reasons for this phenomenon lies in Great Britain’s less ‘great’ history: slavery, colonialism and imperialism have turned English into a lingua franca by force. The success of the English language and culture is the legacy of British imperialism and American political and economic power. During its heyday, the British Empire ruled in over ninety territories in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, the Caribbean, Australia, and the Pacific claiming about 25 % of the world’s population as its subjects (Innes, 2007, p. vii). This is exactly why it is so relevant to spend more time on the teaching of postcolonial literatures and cultures in the English language curriculum, learn about these countries, their complex histories, including the often-neglected pre-colonial times. Let us explore how the works of marginalized peoples are affected by colonialism and, nonetheless, manage to hold on to some indigenous traditions, which are embedded in their artworks and reflect their complex, hybridizing identities in a globalized world.

Luckily, this necessity has been noticed by educational researchers in Germany, who have increasingly started to broaden the EFL curriculum by publishing practical teaching material on other English-speaking countries which were all once part of the British Empire. They offer interesting suggestions regarding the teaching of Australia, Canada, India and South Africa, and more recently, the region of the Caribbean and Nigeria, as countries of interest (e.g. Mitchell, 2005, Eisenmann et al. 2010, Matz and Rogge, 2020). However, there is still a lack of classroom time to cover all the requirements mentioned in the binding German educational plans (Bildungspläne) which makes it difficult to devote more attention in class to postcolonial literatures.

However, Waldorf schools, in contrast to the regular state schools, are fortunately not obliged to use prescribed textbooks and hence have much more freedom in creating their own syllabi. It is only in the context of mandated state exams in high school, most clearly in 13th grade, that Steiner schools are obliged to follow the education plans of the respective German federal states and to utilize the required teaching material for the final A-level exams. Thus, let us make most of the chance we have of providing students and pupils with a wide range of postcolonial texts (visual, written and performative) in order to avoid, in the words of Adichie (2009), the ever-present danger of a “single story”. Let us also include more contemporary literature, art (including graffiti) and music that relate to the students’ own world and will help them to better understand how relevant it is to gain more perspectives on these issues.

In the following section, I will give an example of how I introduce Africa as part of the postcolonial curriculum to a small group of students at the Waldorf teacher training college in Stuttgart (Freie Hochschule Stuttgart).

 

Introducing Africa as part of the postcolonial curriculum

Step 1: A mind map about Africa

When I teach English-speaking African literatures and cultures, whether at university or school, I like to begin with an exercise in which the students are supposed to close their eyes and think about Africa. What do they associate with Africa? What are the images that come into their minds when they think about the continent? After a minute or two, I ask them to share their associations and we gather them in form of a mind map on the blackboard.

Despite the fact that our students are in general well-informed and intelligent, it is remarkable that many of the associations they mention nonetheless revolve around poverty, AIDS, civil wars, draughts, and undernourished people who, in some imaginations, still live half-naked in remote places and are in urgent need of Western civilization. Of course, some pupils also acknowledge the natural beauty of the continent: its vegetation, mountains and the famous Big Five (lion, cheetah, rhinoceros, elephant, buffalo), which they might know about from other people or the media. Sometimes music, dance (and a combination of the two) and colourful clothes, are mentioned too.

Once we have gathered all these associations, I ask them where their ideas about Africa come from, and they soon mention films, news, social media, and advertisements. What becomes visible is the fact that their knowledge about the continent comes mostly from stereotypical images that are reinforced not only by the media but sometimes even by our own educational system, which tends to present Africa as a backward continent in contrast to the technologically advanced Western world. Binary oppositions between ‘the West and the rest’ are still at work and if we honestly desire more equality in a world in which everyone is treated with respect, we need to start questioning our sources of information and broaden our perspectives by teaching material produced by people living in the post-colonies and in the diaspora.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Africa is that it is often perceived as one big country. The fact that it is a continent consisting of fifty-four countries (with borders that were effectively imposed by the colonial system), and that there are over 3,000 different ethnic groups with rich cultural traditions, speaking more than 2,100 different languages, is something that many people in the West are not necessarily aware of.

 

Step 2: A puzzling puzzle and Yinka Shonibare’s Scramble for Africa

To gain a feeling for the geography of Africa, the size of her numerous countries and her borders, I borrow some wooden puzzles of the continent from a local development education centre (EPIZ Reutlingen) that focuses on providing teaching material of the Global South. These puzzles are quite large so that four to five students can easily work together on one puzzle. Some countries in the North (e.g. Morocco, Tunis, Algeria, Egypt) and in the South (e.g. South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique) seem to be easier for them to locate than those countries around the equator. Nonetheless, the students always manage to eventually finish the puzzles and appear to enjoy this haptic exercise.

Once they complete the puzzles, I ask them how many countries they know of and in which ones English is spoken as an official language. The next thing I require them to do is to look closely at the wooden map of Africa and tell me what they notice about the borders. They soon remark upon the artificial grid pattern, and this usually leads to a discussion about colonisation and imperialism. There are always a few students who already know about the so-called “Scramble for Africa”, which began at a conference in Berlin in 1884 (also known as the “Congo Conference” or “Berlin Conference”). This event changed the face of Africa drastically and gave rise to most of her borders as we know them today.

At the request of Portugal, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck invited the major powers of the world to this meeting in order to negotiate the partition of Africa among the European colonial powers. Artificial borders were set without any form of consultation with the indigenous peoples of the continent. Fourteen countries participated in this decision making, among them Belgium, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany and, of course, Great Britain. Great Britain was one of the major players in the conference, gaining control over Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Egypt.

To demonstrate the sheer absurdity of this undertaking, I show the students an image of another art installation by Yinka Shonibare. It is called Scramble for Africa (2003) which is an obvious reference to the Berlin Conference. The students are asked to describe the installation before they start exchanging their ideas about the artwork’s possible meaning in small groups. To initiate their group discussions, I provide them with a few questions such as: Who, in your opinion, do these figures represent? Why are they headless? After thinking about these questions in small groups, they share their interpretations in the plenum.

The installation consists of fourteen life-size fiberglass figures, all of them headless, sitting on chairs around a huge wooden table on which we can see an engraved map of Africa. The figures are dressed in Victorian-era British suits, made of the same colourful Dutch wax print fabric we already know from Shonibare’s other artworks.

The fourteen figures, whose gestures recall contemporary depictions of the discussions at the Berlin conference (see for example the well-known print by Adalbert von Rößler in the Allgemeine Illustrierte Zeitung of 1884), could stand for the participants at that conference. However, three factors complicate this identification: first, their visibly brownish hands and necks; then their colourful uniforms and the discrepancy with Victorian suits; and finally, the absence of facial features, which makes any clear identification impossible.

This ironic twist turns our habitual assumptions upside down. Why are these figures made to look more like what we assume to be African than white European if they are wearing suits and are obviously discussing important issues in a conference setting? The headless bodies make it even more difficult to differentiate the attendees. They all look the same, which mirrors the all-too-familiar Western view of Africans who are regarded as one large homogenous population deprived of any marks of individualism. Thus, on the one hand, the headlessness of the figures may connote the Eurocentric branding of Africans as being primitive and unable to think and act rationally. On the other hand, it may emphasise the fact that the Western powers who made these momentous decisions were not thinking rationally themselves, ignoring the obvious long-term consequences.

Artificial borders were imposed upon the African continent without acknowledging the vast ethnic diversity, thereby causing problems to the present day among different ethnic groups. The African landscape with its rich natural resources, once appreciated and respected by its indigenous inhabitants, was now exploited and excessively damaged. The disastrous consequences for the environment are today more visible than ever before. The inhabitants of the African continent were literally incapacitated. Not only was their land taken away from them but also their identities were dislocated. In the name of ‘civilization’, new languages, new religions, new ways of living and thinking were imposed on them. Those who had the opportunity to attend schools were indoctrinated by a Eurocentric educational system that perpetuated binary oppositions which often destroyed the self-worth of the indigenous population. The absence of heads may thus indicate how unreasonable the division of the continent was.

In this way, Shonibare deconstructs Western binary oppositions such as the ‘primitive and the civilized,’ ‘the rational and the irrational’ and exposes the arbitrary nature of such attributions. Furthermore, he reveals the absurdity of this historical event, thereby inviting us to look at the Berlin Conference from a different perspective – that of the colonized instead of the colonizers. Additionally, he invites us to think about the long-term consequences of the Scramble for Africa. These disastrous consequences include civil wars, corruption, poverty, environmental destruction, and many other aspects that we associate with Africa as the mind map has shown.

Shonibare asks us to consider the various narratives that explain these phenomena – narratives which may simplistically and stereotypically make Africans responsible for this chaos in an essentializing conflation of ‘Africanness’ and catastrophe; or those more complex historical narratives that show the destructive effects of European colonization in the long term. As Adichie says, “Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story” (Adichie, 2009, min 10:40). She is alluding to the fact that the frequent “failure of the African state” that became evident after a decade of independence is in fact closely linked to “the colonial creation of the African state”, as exemplified in the Scramble for Africa. Expanding the repertoire of narratives of the history of colonization will make for qualitatively more complex and less inaccurate understandings of the present global state of affairs: “Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story” (Adichie, 2009, min 10:40). We need to listen to these other stories to broaden our knowledge about indigenous peoples and their rich cultures all over the world.

Shonibare’s mobilization of a fundamental ambiguity in his depiction of the figures at the Berlin conference – are they Europeans (given the context and the recognisable late-nineteenth century cut of the uniforms they are wearing) or are they Africans (following the style of the fabric and the colour of the hands)? – opens up multiple possibilities of interpretation. These multiple possibilities of interpretation in turn alert us to multiple narratives that exceed the simplistic assumptions of stereotypes. Once again, as Adichie observes: “Africa is a continent full of catastrophes […]. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe. And it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them” (Adichie, 2009, min 13:13).

 

Step 3: The Danger of a Single Story and the Importance of Counter-narratives

It is extremely relevant to show students both sides of a coin. This is why I recommend watching Adichie’s famous TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story” (2009) in class. Her impressive presentation is a real eye-opener to the students (and to pupils at school from about grade 10 onwards). It offers a good starting point for any kind of teaching, not only postcolonial literatures and cultures but any topic that is concerned with issues of discrimination.

I usually provide my students with a number of questions before watching the YouTube video, in order to facilitate a subsequent fruitful conversation. For instance:

• What does Adichie mean by a “single story”?
• What examples does she give?
• Why does she believe “single stories” are dangerous?
• Is there a single story that others often use to define you?
• Can you think of other examples of “single stories” that may be part of your own worldview?
• Where do those “single stories” come from?

At a later point, I have the students work in pairs to look closer at the transcript, asking them to select their favourite passages and explain their choices to the rest of the group. Apart from enabling them to analyse Adichie’s important message (the content), the exercise should prompt the students to pay attention to how she conveys her ideas (the form). What kind of rhetorical devices does she employ to bring her message across? How does she manage to connect so well to her audience, gain their attention and make them aware of the importance of avoiding “single stories” without them feeling as if they are being blamed?

In her TED Talk, Adichie shares a number of personal stories about growing up in Nigeria and moving to the US for her university degree. By talking about her experiences of having been ‘othered’ and of having herself ‘othered’ groups of people, countries and individuals on the basis of one-sided, incomplete narratives, she calls attention to the potentially damaging effect of ‘single stories.’ They cause misconceptions that can easily lead to intolerance and exclusion (in some cases even to violent hate crimes).

Students might not know about the concept of ‘Othering’ which is closely linked to further postcolonial notions, such as, for instance, ‘binary oppositions’, ‘Orientalism’, ‘alterity’ or ‘the subaltern.’ These phenomena can be detected in Adichie’s personal accounts without the students having to be able to wield such theoretical terms at this stage of the discussion. However, by looking more closely at different quotes from her speech, these terms can be gradually introduced into the discussion, and their meaning and applicability can be understood in a concrete and tangible manner. One such example is a very amusing story about Adichie’s arrival at the students’ residence (or dorm) in the US:

“My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my “tribal music,” and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. (Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals” (Adichie, 2009, min 4:30-05:09).

This is a very interesting passage. It highlights how binary oppositions between the ‘self’ and ‘the Other’ are still at work and how many people think only in terms of differences between groups – rather than realizing all the things people, no matter where they come from, have in common. Achille Mbembe explains this phenomenon in more general terms:

“As a general rule, the experience of the Other, or the problem of the “I” of others and of human beings we perceive as foreign to us, has almost always posed virtually insurmountable difficulties to the Western philosophical and political tradition. Whether dealing with Africa or with other non-European worlds, this tradition long denied the existence of any “self” but its own. [...] The theoretical and practical recognition of the body and flesh of “the stranger” as flesh and body just like mine, the idea of a common human nature, a humanity shared with others, long posed, and still poses, a problem for Western consciousness” (emphasis in the original) (Mbembe, 2001, p. 2).

In order to illustrate how far back this dichotomized thinking goes, I introduce the students to Rudyard Kipling’s poem “We and They” (1926). Kipling’s poem exemplifies how Western subjects, especially in their position as dominating colonizer, regard themselves as the ‘civilized’, ‘cultivated’ and ‘superior’ group in contrast to the ‘primitive’, ‘barbaric’ colonized. I ask the students to create a list of all the adjectives, nouns and verbs that are used in the poem to describe the “we” and “they”. The result is illuminating. Kipling’s poem manages quite well to reveal that binary oppositions, with their biased classifications, are completely arbitrary and depend on whose perspective is represented. With the help of this poem, students can learn to understand Edward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’ (1978) and the idea of binary oppositions and the dichotomized thinking they underpin.

At the same time, the students should also be informed about Kipling, his life and the historical context of his work. The speaker in “We and They” seems to understand that these binary oppositions depend on perspective, as the last stanza illustrates:

But if you cross over the sea,

    Instead of over the way,

You may end by (think of it!) looking on We

    As only a sort of They !

                                              (Kipling, 2015, p. 502)

Kipling, however, was himself an imperialist who, nonetheless, believed and supported such binary thinking. The ‘We’ and ‘They’ dichotomy has been used by colonizers, like him and his family (he was born and partly raised in India), to justify the exploitation of the ‘Other.’ Kipling’s racist attitude towards indigenous peoples becomes more evident in one of his much earlier poems with the very telling title “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) where the speaker describes indigenous peoples as “half devil, half child.”

In her TED Talk, Adichie refers to the literature of John Locke and the specific line of Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” to demonstrate where these exaggerated misconceptions come from. She explains how the Western depiction of Africa through literature creates a dehumanizing image of African people and perpetuates an oversimplified image of the continent:

“This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke, who sailed to west Africa in 1561, and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as “beasts who have no houses,” he writes, “They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.” Now, I’ve laughed every time I’ve read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Locke. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West. A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet, Rudyard Kipling, are “half devil, half child”  (Adichie, 2009, min 6:53-7:20).

It is this kind of literature – which belongs to the classical literary British canon – that is still taught at educational institutions. Of course, nowadays we do realize how absurd these depictions are, and can teach these texts critically in the light of colonial history. During the colonial period though, this is what children learnt at school and believed to be true. Not only the colonizers’ children but also the indigenous children who were sent to missionary schools. In many cases, this led to an internalization of racist views, a phenomenon described by W.E.B. Du Bois as “double consciousness” (Du Bois, 2015, p. 5) which can be understood as a split self-perception that makes the Black subject look at her-/himself through the eyes of their white oppressor. The risk of such an unconscious behaviour is that the identification with the oppressor often goes hand in hand with self-hatred and self-destruction as explained, for instance, in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952). This is why the offer of counter-examples, where indigenous people are neither reduced to the abject ‘Other’ nor rendered entirely invisible, is so essential. Adichie herself, although born long after the end of Nigeria’s colonialisation, experienced “how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children” (Adichie, 2009, min 1:32). She talks about the kind of books she read as a child, which always described settings in Britain that were foreign to her and revolved around the lives of white characters with whom she could not identify. Only when she finally got in touch with novels by African writers such as Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye was she able to realize “that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature” (Adichie, 2009, min 2:03).

Interestingly, Adichie counters these deep forms of structural racism at a level that is not that of explicit resistance but is embedded in the very form of the narrative strategies she mobilizes. One example of these strategies is her judicious implementation of a mixture of humour (causing a lot of laughter during her talk) and seriousness to bring her point across. What may appear funny and absurd (Locke and Kipling’s descriptions of the ‘African’ or the content of the children’s books she read as young girl which omits the experience of Black people), is – as a matter of fact – extremely hurtful and damaging.

This problem needs to be taken seriously since negative descriptions of People of Colour and the exclusion of their voices and experiences persist to a certain degree and have an effect on how people are perceived and treated even nowadays. Racist perspectives are sometimes hardly noticeable, especially to those who are not affected by them, but they are still present and highly problematic. Since our society is multicultural and thus our classes are too, we need to be careful how we address these issues and need to ensure that we leave enough space for discussing different perspectives and their effects.

Another more complex aspect of Adichie’s dismantling of binary oppositions lies in the skilful manner in which she addresses these problematic issues without sounding reproachful. If her use of humour helps to create a relaxing atmosphere, then her non-accusatory tone of voice is crucial in maintaining the effortless tenor of her narrative. Her stories of being ‘othered’ as an African Black woman alternate with stories in which she herself ‘others’ people about whom she is ill-informed in turn. She mentions, for instance, her view as a child of the family houseboy Fide. She pities him because of his poverty but when she sees how creative his family is, she feels ashamed: “All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them” (Adichie, 2009, min 4:01). Another occasion where she herself falls into the trap of believing a single story that is reinforced by the media takes place during a visit to Mexico:

“And as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing. I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame” (Adichie, 2009, min 8:42 -9:14).

By sharing these personal stories which include situations where she found herself judging people on the basis of one-sided media-coverage, Adichie makes herself more human and gives the audience the feeling that they can openly admit their own prejudices about individuals, groups of people and countries because of not knowing enough about them. Instead of accusing anyone in particular, she addresses a general phenomenon that concerns every one of us. Her purpose is not to blame the audience but to create an awareness that “[t]he single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story” (Adichie, 2009, min 12:45). Adichie does this by including herself among those who all too easily fall prey to the “danger of a single story.”

Education calls for a ‘balance of stories’ which begins with the storyteller herself, Adichie seems to imply. This principle of inclusiveness that involves even oneself as storyteller is a central principle of postcolonial writing and becomes a guiding generic principle.

Thus, a precondition for decolonizing the curriculum is to become a politically conscious teacher who is also able to confront and question their own beliefs and to make sure that we offer manifold perspectives, including those of indigenous writers and artists who recount events and experiences from their own perspective. Through art and literature, writers can reclaim their voices and their agency in the face of historical oppression.

Students need to be exposed to positive counter-examples that also speak of resilience and resistance during times of oppression and not merely about victimization. It would be helpful to provide material that not only demonstrates how postcolonial writers and artists deal with the effects of colonialism but also how they resist, re-invent and appropriate Western genres in a manner that underlines their impressive competencies. How do they remember pre-colonial times in their works and reconnect to some of their indigenous traditions? How do they express their struggle for finding their identities in these hybrid and ever-changing settings? All these issues are worth exploring in order to broaden our perspectives on people and countries we do not know well enough.

Despite Adichie’s predominantly Western education, she herself reconnects to her ‘African’ roots by embedding, for instance, the art of storytelling in some of her writing and, as it turns out, even in this TED Talk. At the very beginning of her presentation (Adichie, 2009, min  0:00), she introduces herself, significantly, as an oral narrator: “I’m a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories.” In this way, she puts herself in line with a rich African oral tradition. Storytelling is a living tradition that continues to evolve and flourish in African writing today. Many well-known African writers before Adichie, such as Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Camara Laye or Wole Soyinka, have presented the African oral tradition in various ways to articulate and express African thought and values (Kalu & Ukam, 2019, pp. 178-179). As Liz Gunner points out: “Storytelling is a sensory union of image and idea, a process of re-creating the past in terms of the present; the storyteller uses realistic images to describe the present and fantasy images to evoke and embody the substance of a culture’s experience of the past” (Gunner, 2000, para. 4).

I argue that this is exactly what Adichie does too: she combines contemporary stories about real events (e.g. the political climate in the US with its hostile immigration policies against Mexicans in the early 2000s) with fantastical ones from the past (e.g. Locke and Kipling’s descriptions of indigenous peoples during the colonial period) even if they are not directly connected to the African culture, and brings across her idea about the “danger of a single story.” Her storytelling techniques, such as the combination of humour and seriousness, as mentioned above, are also reminiscent of the art of African storytelling.

The integration of different elements of the African oral tradition into postcolonial writing is certainly one of many important aspects worth discussing in class after this general introduction. Oftentimes, we will find texts by African writers where folk tales, trickster stories, proverbs and lyrical passages alternate with prose and where the often-preferred European focus on the individual narrative point of view is replaced by multiple narrative perspectives in order to highlight the importance of the collective in indigenous cultures.

There are plenty of literary and performative artworks (including music) that I use for teaching African literatures and cultures after these introductory sessions. Unfortunately, the discussion of these works would exceed the scope of this article.

 

Conclusion

Decolonizing the curriculum means that we should consider everything we study from more than just the Eurocentric perspective. Postcolonial literatures and cultures offer insight into the life of people who, in many cases, have been under- or misrepresented in dominant Western discourses and thus foster a more open-minded approach to cultural diversity and hybridity. As Ferguson et al. point out, “it is an approach that includes indigenous knowledge and ways of learning, enabling students to explore themselves and their values and to define success on their own terms” (Ferguson et al., 2019, p. 3). This will help us to recognize, understand, and challenge the ways in which our world is shaped by colonialism.

As Adichie emphasizes: “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity” (Adichie, 2009, min 17:24). In this sense, let us try and “repair the broken dignity” by carefully thinking about what and how we teach postcolonial topics at school and university and be brave enough to leave behind some of the usual recommended literature that prefers to let white privileged people speak on behalf of those who have been silenced for far too long.
 

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