Mana

Kid says to me, Hey Miss, and I say, Yis? because my accent detours the elongated drawl of Aussie vowels, my ears are attuned to Te Reo Māori now. Kid is a bouncy ball. Says, We’re not moving to Australia anymore and I ask, Why not? And Kid says, Because Australia’s got no mana.

I say to Kid, Aussie’s got mana but they left it out of the history books.

He asks, Aren’t you a history teacher?

The Internet says: mana equals power, authority, and control. But I know what you mean, Kid. You mean, power of the spirit. I watched my friend tap the palm of her hand against her chest and say, You know, mana? I nodded and tapped my heart in response and said, Yeah I know, mana.

And I say, Kid, you are right. Australia’s authenticity was stolen and lost and incarcerated in decades of musical-chaired politics. But it is not my turn to speak, Kid. I can only listen.

The last time I felt my hand tap against my heart in epiphanic gratitude for the spirit of Australia, I was sitting on a woven mat with an elderly Yolngu woman by the beach in Yirrkala, North East Arnhem Land, smelling sweet fresh crab meat wafting upon campfire coals. We had been comparing Yolgnu Matha and Bahasa Indonesia, two aurally similar languages due to a history of sea cucumber trading between Australia and Indonesia. It was one of the first times that I realised and felt I had been lied to. I learned more in that moment about Indigenous Australia than I did through years of high school.

It’s a new day and Kid comes bouncing in again, says to me, Hey whaea, you were the one who taught us Te Reo Māori in class yesterday.

I did not walk into the whare and teach you anything! Instead, I took off my shoes and said, You are my teacher, and Kid says, But miss, we don’t even know our own language - how can we teach you? I watched him with admiration as he bounced into the circle leading the class to chant the kara kia.

I wondered about how language connects me to people and how Māori use Reo to connect to the Land and how the Whenua is used to connect to Ancestors and how Tipuna are connected to Story and how Korero is connected to Life.

Connecting with Indigenous peoples’ worldviews is vital to every human’s future on our living planet. Nature tells us that diversity wins. Humans are part of that nature. And you cannot have nature without chaos. The kid’s situation represented this chaos for me.

I decided to embrace this chaos when I found myself teaching Ngugi wa Thiong'o’s novel Petals of Blood as an Australian Modern History and Bahasa Indonesia teacher cum English teacher in a Cambridge International school in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Petals of Blood is told from the voices of four main characters: Munira, Wanja, Abdullah and Karega. This 410-page novel is a simple love story, and at the same time, a murder mystery. The story is set at the foot of a mountain range in a small fictional village called Ilmorog (near Nairobi). It depicts the aftermath of the British colonisation of Kenya. In New Ilmorog, we see the characters’ final manifestations of their Western influenced selves.

Trying to teach these concepts to new generation pakeha, American, European, Māori and Pacific Islander students left me providing questions for the world rather than answers for my students. What rights do I have to teach about colonialism? Isn’t my white, female, Australian voice tried and tested?

I needed to reinforce our understanding of the Mau Mau Rebellion by inviting a global voice to help us understand colonisation in Kenya and therefore understand the characters and their motives.

On a whim, I emailed Ngugi on a random address I found online - he replied - stating that he has a soft spot for Aotearoa, since this is where the 1970s Colonisation of the Mind speeches began, and that he loves speaking to students because they remind him of himself. Ngugi is 84 years old and on dialysis... but his Zoom smile is as young and vibrant as ever!

Ngugi was arrested on 31st December 1977 for writing Petals of Blood in English. It was during his incarceration that he began writing another book in his own language by sneaking out excerpts written on squares of toilet paper. He swore to write in his own language, as English was the language of the colonisers who used language to control their prisoners.

We asked Ngugi what he thinks of Kenya now and he explained that in 1988, he wanted to return there for he missed it dearly, except that he was threatened with assassination upon his return home. It was a dangerous promise not to be taken lightly - he and his wife had been brutally beaten.

The main message Ngugi said that he wanted to give in Petals of Blood was one of simplicity: need not greed. He said that if we own more than one car, we can only drive one at a time, so why would we need more than one? He wants people to understand the idea of overconsumption and material wealth as unsociable and unnatural. From his experience in a Westernised Kenya, as shown throughout his book Petals of Blood, the lure of materialism can cause greediness in people, and it is this greed which spreads rather than the resources required for survival. This is a symptom of the internal coloniser, so my class learned through our education journey.

Ngugi said that the style of writing in Petals of Blood reflects the reality of communication he remembers from Kenya. He explained that people do not stop, pause, and wait when they talk with each other. He said that they interrupt each other and share their own anecdotes to relate to another person. Ngugi explained that therefore the narrative intertwines the four characters' voices allowing for different perspectives and the natural flow of discourse, free of colonial impact upon language. It is easy to see how Ngugi’s experience of writing on scraps of toilet paper became the ultimate bulwark against incarceration. It’s a simple ask really, asking for freedom to tell a story.

Ngugi also said that he wanted his main message to be about change. He is an advocate for learning, for changing things for the better. Mwalimu is the pet name given to the main character Munira, meaning teacher. I feel personally that Ngugi may understand the freedom I too feel in the role of a teacher. I have freedom to entertain my trusted, captive audience, and I try to use this freedom well. By exposing students to global voices, it is with ease that they may then trust and understand deeply, through personal connection, through story, real life global contexts.

It could be that through the telling of stories, anecdotes, we veer from the prescribed learning and bring a sense of humanity to the classroom. Instead of curated sentences and slogans as depicted by the colonial franchise in Petals of Blood, free flowing stories, authentic stories can combat the language enforced as an incarceration weapon.

One of my students asked Ngugi what we can do to help with decolonisation and, impressively, Ngugi’s response was: “Put your hand up who speaks Māori?” I couldn’t believe my luck! Here was an admired African author telling my New Zealand students that we must listen first to learn. This is particularly important within the institutionalised education practices of teachers. Teachers are in a particularly sensitive position as we build personal relationships with young people and whether it is explicit or implicit, we shape their way of being through the behaviour, attitudes and language we choose to allow or ignore. The more opportunity students have to reach out across the global classroom, the less ignorance can enable educational captivity.

Ngugi helped us go further than just knowing. We listened. We learned. We understood. We internalised as much as we could. We imagined. I chose to sit my students down with chaos to learn the difference between beauty and the sublime. How we move forward will determine the kind of humans we are and who we want to be, in the kind of world we want to live in. In the words of Ngugi, “...we must not preserve our past as a museum: rather, we must study it critically, without illusions, and see what lessons we can draw from it in today’s battlefield of the future and present.”

ISN | Collins New Writers Competition article submission