Motherhood as pedagogy
BECOMING a mother is often high on a woman’s to-do list; however, her social situation often determines how well people respect her for playing the role, and how they view motherhood as a whole.
According to Dr Adwoa Onuora, motherhood should be viewed as a pedagogy (the art, science, or profession of teaching) and in her recently published book Anansesem: Telling stories and Storytelling African Maternal Pedagogies, she presents readers with an opportunity to become acquainted or expand their knowledge of Anansi in a context that highlights African-Canadian mothers as knowledge producers.
Dr Onuora said motherhood refers to the science, art and act of teaching that one engages in through motherwork — that is, nurturance, protection, training, education and cultural bearing.
“It would be difficult to find a critical mass of people who would disagree that their first formal or informal teacher was their mother, or an aunty or grandmother in the home. Because of the gendered nature of caregiving and childcare, we find that children spend most of their time at home with one or all of the above individuals. That said, it is not far-fetched to view mothers as foundational teachers and leaders who are actively engaged in the project of passing on vital cultural and other forms of knowledge necessary for the survival of future generations,” she said.
Dr Onuora, a lecturer at the University of the West Indies’ Institute of Gender and Development Studies, Mona Unit, added that seeing mothering as a pedagogy — a conscious or unconscious act of passing on knowledge that facilitates the growth of future leaders, thinkers and agents of social change — allows us as a society to place more value on a role which has too long been taken for granted.
“It is because we do not see mothering and motherwork as a foundational pillar of our society and because we do not value this daily act of nurturance, knowledge transmission and guidance as critical, that we are in a space where this reproductive work continues to be exploited and not counted as important on the macro-economic agenda,” she said.
A review of the book done by Ajamu Nangwaya identifies Anansi the spider man as a folk character among the Akan in West Afrika. He entered the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas through the Holocaust of Enslavement. Anansi is associated with covert tactics used by enslaved Afrikans to challenge the daily experience of enslavement.
Nangwaya states that Jamaica’s version of Anansi stories is most widely known in the Caribbean because of the concentration of enslaved Africans of Akan heritage on the island, and adds that she often jokes about Anansi being the present-day patron-saint of Afrikan-Jamaican working-class.
“They are reliant on much of Anansi’s skills, ingenuity, ‘sweet mouth’ (way with words) and cleverness to survive the lashes of sexist, capitalist and racist exclusion. Anansi’s significance among the Akan is so influential that their tradition of storytelling is known as Anansesem or ‘spider stories’.”
The book is inspired by the Anansi storytelling traditions and it contains a number of Anansi stories that come with instructive lessons about life and its many challenges, and creative and ingenuous ways to overcome them. The book is based on the composite mothering stories of eight Afrikan-Canadian mothers.
Dr Onuora completed her PhD at the University of Toronto and lived in Canada for a while.
She shared the compelling reason for using stories to share the lived experiences of Afrikan-Canadian mothers:
“The practice of storytelling is common throughout various indigenous communities across the globe. Among African people, stories serve as an important medium for the articulation of culture, history and ancestral memory. Storytelling thus serves as an important tool for the celebration and reclamation of African heritage. To date, storytelling continues to serve as platform for resisting neo-colonialism and various forms of social oppression.”
Anansesem also engages issues such as the politics of hair culture, race and beauty, multiple gender identities, conformity or revolt against the imposed cultural identities of white supremacy, demonising of the mothering practices of working-class women, negotiating the presence of Africans in the educational system, sexual awakening and discovery, shadeism and internalised anti-African racism, indigenous African rite of passage around death, communal washing of clothes as a site of learning, and parental/ intergenerational conflicts.
The African maternal pedagogies highlighted in the book are committed to end all practices that oppress people.
