[Essays On Recent Topics Actrice Chretiennes
Everardo Laboy
This work introduces and partly annotates more than 1200 items indicating religious, ethical, healing and spiritual responses toward or by people with disabilities, deafness, or mental disorder or debility. Materials are found in the social, legal, medical, educational, literary, ethical, psychological, religious and anthropological histories, cultural heritage and current lives and practices in most countries of Africa, from antiquity to the 2010s. They are mainly in English (80%), with French (15%), some Arabic, German, and Dutch (with Afrikaans and Flemish), and a sprinkling of Ashanti, Coptic, Greek, Hausa, Latin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Setswana, Spanish, Swahili, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu... The Introduction shows that this is more than a dry record of textual materials. Responses have been made to and by disabled and vulnerable people, in both traditional and modern ways, across the vast wealth of African history and culture. Among the authors, more than a hundred voices of disabled people are identified and heard.
--- Here is a tool with which to map and grasp the dimensions and diversity. The richness of compassionate and innovative human behaviour in many of the world's economically weaker countries can become a surrogate indicator of global progress toward peace-building and more humane resource distribution. This should be shared with the rest of humanity in the 21st century. Massive problems confront us all: war, injustice, disinformation and political turbulence, resettlement of refugees, battles for water and resources amidst climate change and resurgence of disease. These threats and disasters are unlikely to be solved unless there is an increase in wisdom and mutual respect among all the major civilisations. It requires a recognition that the poorest and apparently weakest nations and peoples have valuable, documented experience, and may offer wisdom, to contribute toward peace-building and the common good.
The annotated bibliography below is for:
1. Anyone in Africa who has web access and would like to know more about how disabled or deaf or mentally disordered people get along within the continent; and who has sufficient English or French to be able to handle materials of some complexity.
2. Anyone, in whatever country, who is researching, or planning to research some of the topics in the title, and would like to get a wider sense of the range of what has been written and how these things work in many African countries; and who is prepared to look up some of the listed material and read it for themselves, and to reflect critically on what they find.
3. It is not designed for people who already know everything they want to know about Africa, or who believe it's all quite simple, or that any complexities can be dissolved by a few points they thought of as soon as they saw the title, points which are clear, straightforward (and probably mistaken). It is not designed for someone in a Western college who is required to write a 2000-word essay on 'Africa and Disability', and hopes to complete it in two hours and then go downtown with the guys and have some fun. If they can give it ten hours and 3000 words, they might find something of interest below.
4. It is not intended to give 'soft protection' to any kind of armed or coercive force, enabling military planners to enlist the goodwill of indigenous peoples, as a preliminary to invading the lands in which they live!
--- [This proviso arises after reading The Tender Soldier by V.M. Gezari, 2013, in which a "Human Terrain System" was devised to help foreign troops -- (who were blundering around in Afghanistan and being killed by local people who preferred to manage their own lives) -- to understand how they might avoid causing insult and anger with their every word and action. The Human Terrain System was a shambles, so it hardly entered the military lexicon. Anyhow, the information below is freely available online, so it may be 'below the radar' of any acquisitive military force, which expects to 'buy' information for big dollars. Much of Africa still seems at risk of being taken over, bought and sold and parcelled up, by economic forces and 'development aid', regardless of the feelings and beliefs of a billion ordinary African men, women and children. Anyone with some human intelligence who bothers to study the materials below, should understand that there are at least 50,000 different kinds of 'African', and 50 million variations in the beliefs Africans hold about the meanings of life, death, illness, disability, healing and goodness. Many Africans are also adept at concealing what they think and feel, putting up a plausible curtain of misleading or comical stories. Think twice before invading their territory. The outcome will not go the way you planned it...]
5. The bibliography is not produced for any institution, nor for any Global Initiative, or UN Agency, or religious organisation, or International Community of Right-Thinking Citizens; nor is it funded by any such agency. It lists the thoughts and studies of more than a thousand scholars and participants, having a very wide range of views and experience within the broadly defined field, collated and annotated by one minor scholar with the capable assistance of his wife.
For sure, there are some merits in database format, e.g. for finding keywords in combination, and for saving space. Yet the present full text includes very many key words, in several languages, that were harmless historically, but have now passed out of common or polite use. To cross-reference all such terms, across language and semantic range, would be difficult. Databases are like old-fashioned sardine tins - it's hard to be sure that you've got everything out, that might be lurking in a corner! The annotations provide some clues, or page numbers, which might be more difficult to work out in a database. Here, in a full-text version, if you do some work you can see everything for yourself, in whichever language it is offered.
--- [In .pdf format, it should be possible to use a simple trick such as to 'Find', which opens a search box at the top of the screen, and use it to search for any word or name. In other formats, a 'search' option is already on offer. The present compilers used combinations of MicroSoft Word, WordPerfect, and Google Chrome, going online using a PC but with a service provider designed for mobile phones, and Panda anti-virus protection. After using these odds and ends for many years, it is easy to forget that most of the world's surfers probably use quite different combinations of software, and might get some different results from the same search or manoeuvre! Merely setting Google to search in French as the main language brings up some different results.]
Google Scholar? Doesn't Google Scholar already provide everything that is here? No! (Not yet!) The various parts of Google are wonderful tools for finding many titles and checking details, in many languages, especially for journal articles in recent decades. It is less brilliant for locating earlier materials, or for seeing beyond the standard two-line snippet. Google sometimes finds its way through the keyhole of a locked cupboard so clever!; but at other times it does not even see round the corner. It's a huge machine - it doesn't have feelings, thoughts, beliefs or irony. It's not built to provide historical context, or to evaluate conflicting evidence. Google's engineers tweak the algorithms daily, to deter people from using tricks to boost their own product. But to provide careful annotations, involving context and some inside knowledge of individuals and scholarly work in complicated fields, over a lifetime -- this still requires human judgement and persistent revisiting of sources, and rethinking of how best to express the nuances.
[Recent developments in software generate poetry mimicking deep human thought, emotion and truth; and may detect irony or sarcasm; and can respond appropriately to humans in different language groups and perceptions, without the humans realising that a machine is addressing them. The younger world, i.e. the future population, already communicates remotely by voice, face, picture and tweet; but not so much by heavy blocks of grammatically-tidy printed text! Efforts to educate and civilise the younger billions will probably need to make more use of recent media, with fast-moving images and linkages. Do the young people think differently from the generation that was born before word-processing on computer became an everyday tool and who then saw the second great leap, the boom of the internet from 1992 onward?]
--- [Somewhere out there, one or two billion of the world's population, some of them African, have not yet made a phone call of any kind. What!!?? Do such people count for anything? Yes, they count as fellow-humans. It might be harder for them to be counted in the plans of people who have been using electronic gadgets since the age of four, and who think that using such gadgets is as normal as having two hands and ten digits.]
Period, Geography. During compilation it was planned to divide the bibliography into sections, e.g. "North and North East Africa (Islamic, Coptic, Egypt, Ethiopia)" and "Sub-Saharan Africa", and some such periods as Antiquity, Medieval, Modern. While trying to apply these labels to a print-out before actually switching materials around, problems arose of contents and materials which did not fall neatly into a single category of time or place. There is documentary evidence of blind singers and musicians employed through three thousand years in northern and north east Africa, with at least three religions involved. Or take Augustine: he wrote briefly but perceptively about Sign Language in the 4th century CE at Tagaste (now in Algeria), and his Christian theological works are still being read, re-translated and discussed today. Why should these people of Africa be placed in an artificial box by some old British guy living centuries later in the Midlands of England?
--- Finally, the attempt was given up. So all materials are listed in alphabetical order of the first author's surname (shown in capitals). So, work from North, West, East, Central or Southern Africa, and from any period, may be listed next to work from any other period or place. Confusing? Perhaps this may encourage users to notice a broader range of relevant material across the vastness of Africa's history and resources. ---- [During the attempt at classification, roughly 10% of the material fell into the 'Antiquity' bag, almost all being in Northern parts of Africa. The decision not to divide into sections was taken when only about 500 items were listed. When the total exceeded 1000, I wondered again whether I should have divided it up somehow; but by then too many other difficulties had arisen. I was trying to fight my way out of piles of materials and draw a line under it.]