Nducu wa Ngugi
I was watching a documentary called “Living with the Kombai”, which aired on the Discovery Channel, an American television station, a few months ago. While watching this film, I began to ponder how media (perpetuate and) construct ‘Otherness’.
The Kombai (c) Discovery Channel
In this documentary two white men leave their “civilized” world (their words not mine) and enter deep into the jungles of New Guinea to live with the Kombai. The idea behind the show was for these two men to immerse themselves fully into the Kombai’s way of life and “become” a part of them for a few weeks after which they will return to the “civilized” world.
I watched these episodes with curious intensity and then something began to bother me. The more I thought about it the more I became incensed. The women of Kombai were shown with their breast bare with no attempts to blur them as they do other TV shows. A disclaimer at the beginning of the show warns viewers that this show contains Indigenous nudity. Viewer discretion is advised. With that they licensed themselves the liberty to show naked bodies of Kombai girls and women.
But what does this word indigenous mean? Why does it so embolden producers of shows like this to show naked women as long as they belong to another world? Shouldn’t they just warn of nudity or does the word indigenous make it alright?
To understand the underlying and hidden connotation of these types of programming let us examine the word ‘indigenous’ and how it is used. Indigenous means “having originated in and produced, growing, living or occurring naturally in a particular region or environment”. It can also mean innate or inborn.
From this we can infer that indigenous nudity means it originates, produced, grows or occurs naturally in a particular region or environment. Doesn’t all nudity occur naturally? Why then is it used specifically when discussing peoples of color and especially those who have not embraced “western” ways of life? It is because they are the ‘Other’, which implies that because of their physiognomic cultural differences they are less than human and so they do not warrant the same decency laws that are applicable to the rest of humanity.
If we agree that nudity in Africa, New Guinea or Chile is the same as nudity in the US, UK or Spain then we dispel this notion that makes one form of nudity organic and dispensable and the other precious and unassailable.
What I am against is the double standard. When a show comes on TV documenting nudist colonies, why do they not show their indigenous living? Why don’t they show these nudists in their innate, indigenous nudity? Is Western nudity more sacred than other forms of nudity? Why place one form of nudity on a moral pedestal to be revered as if sacred while showing the nude bodies of young Kombai or Masai girls irreverently on TV as part of the landscape?
The message being sent here to me says two things: One, their nudity is not like ours. Two, they are the ‘Other’ and therefore not like us, humans. We are civilized but they are not. They blend in well with the flora and fauna so truly their nakedness is not to be revered as it is part of their scape. This devaluation of their humanity begins the process of making them the ‘Other’. Once this has been accomplished we stop caring that we are looking at the naked body of a teenager or a grandmother with her breasts hanging out.
When I discussed these episodes of Kombai women with my co-workers who had also seen them, our discussions centred on their socio-political environ. We never once discussed their nudity and it was only after a while that I realized that we had also detached ourselves from their humanity. I brought this up to my friends and their reaction was unsurprisingly casual: they did not feel a sense of voyeurism like we do when we see the bra section of Sears’s catalogues.
In order to construct the ‘Other’ you have to dehumanize them first, which is what the European missionaries and explorers in Africa did–one holding the bible and the other the musket (sometimes both).
Their mission was to “civilize”, and began by proclaiming local customs and its practitioners as heathen. By revoking our humanity, the Europeans were able to subject Africans to the most ferocious economic and social exploitation of a people. The colonial powers had their missionary pioneers as drum majors for the “civilization” of the African which justified their forcible removal from their lands, their economic exploitation and also informed their “need” to be Christianized and made civil. This social construct of the “other” therefore made it easier for the European palate to take the cruelty of slavery and colonial rule because it was happening to the ‘Other’, one not quite human.
The other dangers associated with this construct lie in its power to negatively label a segment of population, which is not just a cross-cultural phenomenon that happens between peoples from different lands. When we label and stereotype, we have set in motion a series of events that will culminate in destructiveness.
Stereotypes are products of this social construct and should be seen as the beginning of the de-humanization process. Stereotypes grow with time and eventually become a stigma that follows the victim wherever they go. Most black people in America are treated with suspicion and awe whenever they enter public spheres. Countless stories of white ladies clutching their purses closer and tighter when they see black men or crossing the street to avoid meeting a black man play out everyday. The evening news bombards viewers with images of young black man being arrested and hauled off to jail. We are hardly shown any white arrests.
The only whites we see under cuffs are either poor white folks who are addicted to methamphetamines or other drugs or ones who are or seem to be mentally deranged. These arrests are easily dismissed as not representative of the majority race, but the result of disease—usually psychological—thus requiring institutionalisation in detoxification programs or mental wards.
So, whenever we think of or hear about crime we immediately assume the color of the perpetrator will be black because we have been conditioned to this association. One can only imagine what these stereotypes and images do to black children as they grow up viewing these images of themselves.
The few black intellectuals who appear on TV talk shows and propagate insightful debates in their fields of expertise are called “eloquent”, “different”, “safe” and lately “angry”, “inciting” or “clean!”
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton appear on TV every time there is a question relating to the African American experience. They are seen as safe. It is not surprising that we do not see the Angela Davis’ or Sonia Sanchezs’ appearing on these shows.
While these verbs might sound like compliments to the casual observer they serve another more sinister purpose, and that is to distance certain individual images from being a representative of his/her people.
They are the exception to the rule and therefore they do not mirror their community. It is the same mentality that keeps raising the question whether Barrack Obama is black enough! Well, if he is, then he must be like them and therefore not presidential, but if he is not, then what is he? To many, the fact that he is an American President no the first answer that pops to mind.
Janet Jackson perhaps knows best the cost of her wayward nipple during her now famous wardrobe malfunction. The media latched on this story and it was played over and over again so that even those of us who missed the nipple the first time had plenty of opportunity to ‘see’ it all. The media frenzy decried this as an indication of the moral decay in today’s society while some went further and talked of the over-sexualized black woman.
Lil’ Kim and her starred naked nipple had already raised an ever-present question of the hyper sexualized black woman. Why is it that in these two instances (not to mention the images of black women in Hip Hop videos) the body of the black woman is seen as overly sexual while that of a Kombai woman is seen as asexual? In both cases the body of a black woman is being defined not by herself but by another’s lens that reflects, configures and conjures her imagined hyper-sexuality for the public, or as part and parcel of the floral backdrop.
Why does showing Janet Jackson’s breast, for the split-second it was shown, make it a crime against decency? I think that two things are at play here: On one hand, Janet is accepted as a representation of American pop culture; hence decency laws apply to her. On the other hand, Lil’ Kim’s bare breast with her nipple covered only by a star brought merriment and confirmation of the highly sexualized black woman as seen on hip-hop videos: she cannot help herself. That Diana Ross took occasion to tap it a few times did not raise eyebrows but indeed had many a men swallowing in delight and wishful thinking. But that is not the case for the Kombai whose sexuality has been stripped, then transformed into a vehicle which is sexually unappealing and bare.
So where does that leave us? I think that we must demand the unequivocal application of the same standard of fairness in the family indecency laws to all shows regardless of their location of origin. Documentaries that serve to denigrate other people by desexualizing or hyper sexualizing are part of the dehumanizing process. This is done by taking out the human equation, whilst substituting it with a “less than” symbol. It is a symbol that absolves us of any social and moral responsibility to our fellow human beings. It is a dangerous disengagement because it allows us with great cost and impunity to abuse, dismiss, enslave, jail, maim and kill others because we do not see them part of our human experience.
Nducu wa Ngugi is an educator currently based in New York. He has a BA in Black Studies from Oberlin College, an Ed.S in Teacher Leadership and a M.Ed from Mercer University. His commentaries on social issues have appeared in the Business Daily Africa, Pambazuka News, Wajibu and other online journals.
I have always seen the Turkana, the Samburu and the Maasai (herders, dancers, etc) being used as 'items of touristic value.' They are cultures that 'have survived the onset of modernity and globalization, and delivered to "our generation" the purity of traditional Africa.' That, too, is dehumanizing our people. Which culture is not authentic? Is modernity not culture? I define culture from its Latin root - cultura: to cultivate to raise, to improve, to grow. Now, modernity is, I presume, improved culture... Should we be studying the white man, and where he is madly driving us to, or should we be selling juiced-up stories of black communities that found a simple, comfortable rest point along the journey of life, and refused to follow the rest of the species in its endless rambles?
Posted by: Geo Nalugala | February 02, 2011 at 12:00 PM