The value of CONVERSATION with AFRICA (2018)

SISTER CITIES are meant to promote knowledge and exchange between people

Starting conversations between Virginia and West Africa

The Sister City idea fits perfectly into the framework offered by Oxford University historian and philosopher Theodore Zeldin, who published in 1998 a small but immensely important book called “Conversation: how talk can change your life” (published by the Harvill Press in London).

It is small both in size (it fits into your breast pocket) and volume (less than 70 small pages), yet its message is huge. CONVERSATION was originally a series of six BBC radio lectures delivered by Theodore Zeldin in 1996. I quote (with his kind permission) from his sixth lecture:

“ Bringing people of different nations together for sport and music is useful and fun, but only long conversations can reveal the full meaning of the deep resentment felt by many civilizations towards the West. What we consider to be our triumphs – our freedom, our empire or our technology – are viewed quite differently by them. Never has there been more need for conversations between civilizations, because never have they been able to inflict so much damage on each other. […]

“ Our sensibilities change when we visit the Islamic world, which at the beginning of the (previous) millennium was the most splendid of all civilizations at the time, and when we converse with Islamic women, to discover the enormous variety of conditions they experience, in different countries, in different classes, to realize how their position has changed many times in the course of their history, and how it is changing now, when we appreciate that Islam has been interpreted in as many ways as Christianity or any other religion. God says in the Koran, ‘We have created you male and female and made you nations and tribes, that you may know one another.’”

We have engaged in a conversation between Richmond and Segou that will last many years and involve many people. Conversations have been developing between health and education professionals, artists and musicians, students and professors, politicians and sportsmen and women, especially women in Richmond who have been leaders of the Sister City Commission and of Virginia Friends of Mali.

Our conversation about marriage in Salim Coumaré’s high school class was a classic example of exchanging ideas. The Malian extended family includes the grandparents, married children and grandchildren all living around a family compound – and since the weather is always warm, people spend most of their time outside talking, eating or drinking tea under shady trees. Most mothers even cook outside in the courtyard.

Some Malian men have two wives, who take it in turns to cook for their husband and for all their joint children. This Malian idea of family structure is broad enough to understand the American recomposed family, where divorced parents may remarry people who have their own children. This brings American children into forced proximity with “half-brothers” and “half-sisters” who have no blood relationship. But Malian families easily take in cousins, or the children of old friends who join the family – so the “recomposed family” is easy enough for Malians to understand. Our conversation broke down completely, however, when I explained that in America, it is now possible for men to marry men, or women to marry women.

When I described two gay men adopting a child, who would therefore have two fathers and no mother … well then the conversation collapsed into disbelieving hilarity. And who can blame them for laughing? Twenty years ago in Virginia, who would have believed that men would one day marry men and be able to adopt a baby? And how many Virginians can imagine a Malian household with one man having two (or even three) wives?

We have probably had less success in engaging in deep conversation with Malian women, although close friendships involving Richmond and Segou women flourish, especially through homestays in both cities. Yet the fact remains that Malian women are less involved in the political and social leadership roles than American women. Women are seen as the leaders of Malian families, where the title ‘Mother’ is equivalent to ‘goddess, but they are less well equipped to occupy the new municipal, regional and national spaces that came with colonialism and which require the skills of fluency in the foreign French language and mastery of Western laws and institutions.

Conversations with WOMEN are the subject of the book that my friend Anthropology Professor Christopher Brooks wrote with our Ségou colleague Salim Coumaré, which they presented at a conference in VCU: The Most Vulnerable: Women with AIDS and Islam in Mali.

Malian women are of course a part of the Islamic world described by Theodore Zeldin. Islam came very early to Mali, arriving during the 800s with the trading caravans of camels arriving from Morocco. Mali’s Islam was strongly influenced during the Middle Ages by the humanistic intellectuals of Timbuktu’s famous university and later by Sufi philosophical interpretations of Islam forged in the University of Fez, in Morocco. Mali’s religion preaches Islam as Love, Islam as Caring, Islam as Giving Charity, Islam as Peace and Tolerance – very different messages from the harsh version of Islam coming from the Saudi Arabian desert. To improve American understanding of Islam, and to start a conversation about Malian Islam, we created our program “Teaching Timbuktu” – and this was the beginning of our Sister City adventure.