INTERMEDIAL INDIAN OCEAN - In Conversation with Mshai Mwangola
Abstract
- Abstract
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As part of the Indian Ocean events in November 2021, Dr. Mshai Mwangola, Ph.D., was a guest of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence in Bayreuth. In this interview, she talks with Clarissa Vierke, Professor of Literatures in African Languages at the @unibayreuth, about her performance lecture and her kanga workshop.
Mshai holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University (USA). Her thesis on Kenya’s “Uhuru Generation”, titled ‘Performing Our Stories, Performing OurSelves’, approaches the idea of a generational historical mission through the re-creation, invocation and facilitation of performance as a site of individual and communal reflection. Mshaï's pedagogy, research and creative work is grounded in understanding performance as both the process and product of meaning-making. In her performance lecture for the Intermedial Indian Ocean Event entitled "Hadithi Njoo: Leso as Palimpseston" she talked about the history of the evolution of leso as well as some of the social, cultural and political uses of this textile.
Origins & context
- Title
- INTERMEDIAL INDIAN OCEAN - In Conversation with Mshai Mwangola
- Language
- English
- YouTube playlist
- Workshop Intermedial Indian Ocean - 2021
- Date
- January 23, 2023
Identifiers & sources
Full text
- Transcript
- so ushai mamora thank you for agreeing to talk to me and you for having a conversation just after the beautiful kanga workshop you gave but first of all before we talk about the kangas and the kanga workshop please introduce yourself and it was a wonderful workshop i had such a wonderful group of people so my name is michelle mongola i'm a performance scholar an oratorist a kenyan a woman who just loves cloth and performance and i think of myself as a storyteller as well yeah i think that's a beautiful kind of description and i guess you could add so to say further attributes to further attributes to it um what's the importance of kanga what about this these clothes why are they so important so for me they're important because these are the clothes literally of our lives as women from especially tanzania kenya the eastern african region but also you find you know versions of them all down the eastern coast and i think for me they're important because it literally is the cloth that you're wrapped in as a baby and for some people it's the cloth they're acting when they're going to be buried and everything else you can think about you know your weddings your um going to give a gift to a friend it's what you spread your table with it's what you work with so for me it's the importance of a club that accompanies women and men through life and and you know that in so many ways also carries our history and how are kangas then related to storytelling because you said your story is i have a version of a performance that i do that's called i have i have so many stories to tell you and each story each story is a kanga that has a story so many of the kangas are associated with people's personal stories they're associated with stories of communities they're associated with the history of this the space so i think for me what i love about kanga is you can pick up a kanga and it's got a story so it's as a storyteller it reminds you of the story to tell yeah and kanga famously of course also have a gina or samo so saying literally a name in the middle why what form so we call it the gina which means the name because often when women are buying lessons so some women will bite because they are beautiful just in themselves as you can see they're beautiful but also because thank you each of them has this um name that's literally printed on the cloth and so what women will do with this name it could sometimes it's a greeting sometimes it says i'm celebrating something sometimes it's a message you're sending to someone so what people love about the cloth is just by wearing or displaying the cloth you are communicating with other people and so the importance of it for some people they don't even care about the color or the design on the cloth what they care about is the message so for instance the first after i graduated the first job i got the first with that first salary you buy your mother a kanga but you must also match the words so usually say thank you my mother for bringing me up well or something like that so it's the association between the occasion the message the person who's wearing it the person who's seeing it that the words bring to it oh thank you could you explain then how people communicate with kanga so you are now wearing a message i am now wearing a message and it's a message you know that talks about so this one would often be one let's say to a wedding because it's talking about where there is love there is also blessing you know the kind of thing so what would happen is that a woman would have a stock of less so or kanga both words are used and when you're going into a space where you want to communicate the message you either wear it or you display it and people who come into that space or who see you read the message read the context based on who is wearing it and they interpret it so the most interesting situations is where the message is is very ambiguous so somebody could put a message that is communicating something to somebody whom they respect too much to say it outright so for example i want to my mother has spoken to me harshly my mother-in-law has done something i don't like a neighbor who is you know somebody i have to respect is getting on my nerves so i cannot tell that person directly but i can wear a lesso that says something about you know your sharp tongue is not you know or if you continue like that i will do something or say something about you know people who do bad things bad things happen to them and when i pass into that space the person will read the message or other people will know that i am saying this about someone and again you know if a young man is in love with the young woman and he he offers her a kanga and she wears it and people see it people know oh there's something happening with this young woman so that's how they are often used okay and what if the neighbor then jumps on you and says what are you sending me what kind of message is that you see i never would not do that because when i wear it i did not say who it was for so if a neighbor jumps on me everybody will take my side because they will say why do you think it is you what have you done to her what the neighbor would most likely do is look for a lesso that responds and usually that will go on until one of us signals a truth or maybe somebody else will come in i know somebody we both respect wearing a lesso that also says something like let us all live in peace with each other but it would it's a way of people dealing with conflict without actually saying words or violently doing something that would cause harm because i can always say that it wasn't meant for you but you know if you think it feels think about it it makes people think yes it makes people think yeah so now um you were just giving this beautiful workshop where you also made us design our own kangas thinking about the basic elements of design what makes a kanga kanga what needs to be there we already talked about the message what else talk about the message we talked about the motifs so kangas have got the beautiful thing about if you look at kangas there are literally thousands of designs and yet you see the same patterns being repeated again so i think for me what is so innovative about the design is that so for example the one i'm wearing you will see dots dots get in all many many kangas this is the corrosion the cashew it gets repeated in many kangas and it really is about how you place them how you repeat them the patterns that you make so that's one element some people love the colors so some are darker some are lighter so some sometimes the color itself would communicate um something and then also um people would wear the kangas depending on so some kangas actually have no message so this one is one that has no message but that design itself is associated with something so when you put the elements literally the thing i love i think best about kanda is in its simplicity it is so complex it's got layers and layers and layers so you can choose what you want to amplify and maybe somebody else will be looking at the same color and reading something completely different and so it's that complexity that i think communicates so much in the cluster here in the cluster africa multiple we are very much concerned with different epistemologies so thinking about different ways of producing knowledge and how colonial knowledge or a kind of a knowledge system that started during colonial times has been too dominant and other ways of you know communication of passing on knowledge of history have been sidelined does is the um kind of another carrier of knowledge history conversations yes and actually i started by saying i'm a performance scholar and what we use the word perform in performance studies to mean how people make knowledge and performance studies as a discipline comes out in the 70s around the same time the other word i used was oraturist that in the african academy we're talking about oration not just as oral literature but what i define it to be is the transcending of boundaries in the making of meaning and performance scholars are always saying beyond written text or alongside written text as you literally see in kanga how else do people make meaning what i find so interesting is that as we moved into the 21st century people are breaking away from written texts so now people are using screens people are really thinking about all the different ways that we can communicate and for me when i'm teaching and you know working especially with younger people who are looking for how else can we make meaning in the world how can we store it how can we engage with it kanga is the perfect entry to say that literally for over a century people have been using kanga so for example this piece of cloth carries the history of the indian ocean in it or you know a kanga can be passed down a family line and it has your family history in it so beginning to say that not only as individuals but as a as the african academy in particular as people in the world we can use kanga as a doorway to think about how we communicate without speaking or necessarily writing in the way that we know writing to be i mean that's great and i think you are such an interesting person also to think about that since you are both a scholar as well as a performer which i think you also very much highlighted in the performance lecture which um well we all felt like you are putting a mirror to our faces but you're also kind of really encouraging us to explore something else could you tell us a bit about or about the other many projects in which you've been kind of exploring other forms of knowledge through performance other forms of history you've been involved in so many different things too many but not for me i've always i define myself as a storyteller because very early i thought the thing that connected everything i wanted to do was the stories that people tell and going back to how we read the world especially within the academy i am used to doing research that comes to me in a very there's a way we code our words the way is the way we do research and i found stories in any form to be able to get people to talk about multiple things so we have run for the last three years as part of a group with called the orator collective we do we call it a book cafe people come they have coffee i have a coffee we have a coffee master called andrea mora who teaches us about coffee but we also read a book and we don't just read the book we enter the world so we do not do the standard book reading we perform the book and then the people who come and we literally have no idea who's going it's a coffee house it's open anybody can walk in they might find themselves being put into role in the role of a character they might find themselves literally in the performance or we might set up a text part of the text and they have to make a judgment right so the idea is to get people to see literature not just as a storybook to entertain themselves but as an entry into the world um i also do projects i work with civil society a lot i chair the board of uraya which is the biggest non-state civic education facility in kenya and a project that's close to my heart are scenarios so often people think in ten years you know in kenya the politicians think in five years spans ten years spans scenarios take you into building a world 50 100 years into the future and when people work with the countries they live in or the communities they live in not in the today and the now but the community that their grandchildren will inherit then you begin to say what do i need to do now to make sure they will inherit the future i want them to inherit also bearing in mind scenarios give you alternatives so you know all at least we always like to think kenya vision 2013 would be this amazing country but then the other story is 20 in 2030 we might not exist we might have and because we could have become the east african community as we are saying we are working towards or because we had civil roles and people don't want to to consider that so building stories with communities that allow them to see that the choices they make now affects their grandchildren's future that's another project that i'm very very invested in yeah so you and kind of invite people really to imagine yes and we think big yes and we start by doing a deep dive into the history and so people can see this is the trend we've been on for the last 100 years if we continue like this this is where we're heading but if we change we could go into this area so the one thing that happens people know their history differently the other thing that happens is we try to bring people who normally don't talk to each other so you also realize you know i can't fight with people who live in my community because we have to live this thing together if there's a war that bullet will not know you know that i have this political belief or that political belief and so you can build relationships with people you don't so this was actually a question i i i was just thinking about like how is the past then connected to the future because i also saw it very much you referred to to kanga in so many different ways so the practice in the present what it means also for probably thinking about one's identity as a woman as an east african but then on the other hand you link it also so much to a broader indian ocean kind of context could you comment on that yeah so i always have thought of the present as this space that's a bridge and the things from the past we must know and we can learn from that we want to pass on to the future so if you look at the history of kanga for example this is a piece of cloth that emerged in an area of globalization which was not hierarchical right you have everybody in communities from everywhere from indonesia all the way down to mozambique and all of them are are meeting exchanging they're doing all sorts of things some of them are great military powers but china will come to them let's say to um as we know dragonflies see as a book by vonno wall explores they come in they come and exchange and they go away and there's a there's a space of respect and that teaches us something about when we talk about globalization today we're thinking of hierarchies we're thinking of what can i take so that you have less and i have more and i think it's lessons like that when we go back and we say kaga came out of this exchange what is it that it can teach us about the future that we inherit um what are the messages that have come down to us over the cloth so for me the present there's a symbol i love from the akan um that it comes from the adinkra cloth that's the sankofa and sankofa is a bird that's flying into the future but it's helped us looking back into the past and its body is in the present so for me the performances that i do are always anchored in the past that i don't want to go back into but i'm always saying it's got i'm heading into the future and i may not get to the future but you see birds also lay eggs and those eggs roll on into the future right so you must always have that eye of where i came from but also where we are going as a people yeah i mean beautiful that's a beautiful kind of image of it i think that captured captures it very well also giving a very central position i mean here to symbols but but of course then also to stories right so what is next then for you what's the next project going to be so you know first of all this project was supposed to be a small one it actually started out of my own interest i wanted to know the history and then i began meeting people who were kenyans like me but did not know didn't even know how to read kanga especially this generation so now i do workshops and now it's turning into a book i do not want to just publish books so my commitment is that every chapter in the book has a performance element which is either a storytelling show a workshop a something and so the dream is to complete that project and to be able to have the companions together because like kanga you can't just have text you know you must have all of this this is part of a larger project i call common treasures and that a group of us have been working with and each of these looks at something we have inherited from the past so something like the language and looking at what what is it telling us for the future swahili is uniting a lot of african i mean african countries you can travel round east and central and southern africa and find kiswahili speakers in each of these and now swahili changes right if i speak what i speak in kenya in tanzania in mozambique in drc it's different but we understand each other so that's a project i want to explore that i want to explore coffee coffee is ours but often you know people even call it arabica and it's like oh no no no coffee started in africa so that's a story i want to explore as well but just explore the common treasures that east africa has given to the world and how we have shared this and look at not only the history but always again looking towards the future of humanity that we are contributing to wow i mean this is this is so exciting i mean even if one just thinks about um coffee which is also so much part of the colonial history and of the kenyan history which are so intertwined and now also of a global economy um if you want yes i i just i just read this morning this is really a coincidence i just read this morning that coffee has been the most widespread drug in human history uh so actually far more than beer or any other or alcohol you name it coffee has really been the drug that is also one can also even think about what it is as a symbol yes yes and working in the book cafe with andrea mora people like the right type one award was also writing on coffee one of the things that we have learned so you know when you go into the history of coffee they are amazing legends you know there's a legend about a spirit that so wanted to commune with humanity and bring them together it turned itself it infused itself into the coffee plant so every time you drink coffee you are in commune with the divine but with each other and there are stories about how you know another one where god decides to bring warring communities and you know you can't boil coffee and people don't smell it and so they come and then they sit and they talk so they're stories that you know people people ask about what's the value of coffee you know people will give you this is the coffee that the world market sells the highest but the real coffee that's the most valuable is the one that brings people together and those rituals that you find communities from ethiopia to somalia to kenya to uganda you know i mean if you follow the rituals in these different countries it's always about bringing people together and so for me it's those layers of meaning that we want to excavate we want to give back to the world and we also want ourselves you know if you come to kenya most people don't drink coffee we we produce coffee but we don't drink it we drink tea which is good now the whole of our history right but to give us to own to embrace back our our coffee as you know as african people and to say look we have no problems sharing it with the world but we must understand it and it's power first so let's have a coffee now yes that's a great idea thank you so much thank you very much clarissa thank you for talking and please come back and with all the wonderful projects and all the best thank you thank you you