Knowing and Uchawi

            It only recently came to my attention what a powerful sway local beliefs surrounding magic, or uchawi, have in my village; I think, in a large part, this is because my neighbors are very aware that outsiders view witchcraft as backwards and primitive. They know it’s seen as a detriment to Development, the chief goal of Tanzania’s leaders and western nations that use diplomacy, economics, and aid to direct the Tanzanian policy. Yet, uchawi is still a very strong component of people’s lives.

            Students have told me that they can’t start a business in town because the uchawi won’t allow it. Witch doctors are said to use magic to collect debts and people wear amulets made from Chinese coins to cure illnesses. Of course, this foreignness can strike an Americans as silly. We chuckle when we are told past ventures have failed due to magic, not because of a complete lack of business skills and planning. However, this post isn’t supposed to highlight something backwards or, *cringe*, primitive. Actually, I think it highlights many flaws in western thought.

 I personally find the way my neighbors live refreshing; there’s no western self-delusion of knowing or certainty (the kind that makes us individualistic and confident but can also be used to rationalize terrible things, such as depleting the planet’s resources and enslaving entire continents). People here recognize that they don’t know that much, something we could all stand to do more of,  and act according to their experiences, the resources available to them, and what they see as effective. Uchawi is the unknowable, and Tanzanians give it a more healthy reverence. We, westerners, claim to know things and live by facts, scientific principles, laws of economics, and political systems, for example, but most of us would be hard pressed to really explain them. We constantly put our faith in things we understand only elementarily; we trust things we don’t know because someone says they can and are understood, beyond our comprehension. The only difference our ideologies have from uchawi is someone claims to understand them, that they are not, by definition, mysterious and apart.

A reoccurring point in Paul Farmer’s anthropological and medical work is that people in Haiti accept what they need to survive, be it western medical treatment or voodoo. Neither is a hindrance to the other, they are just two ways of people trying to reduce suffering and make sense of life; people adopt what works. Why should we ask a rural Tanzanian to live life by the scientific method, when a life of observation and, we would say non-rigorous, experimentation has lead them to conclude uchawi is the answer?

When I hear development workers anguishing over Tanzanians’ inability or hesitance to adopt free market practices, I want them to understand that those practices aren’t widely adopted because, hey, maybe they don’t work in Tanzanian society. Westerners quickly dismiss uchawi because of its ineffectiveness but keep on zealously pursuing neoliberal market reforms despite the absence of predicted outcomes. Imagine Larry Summers, the medicine man.

My experiences in Tanzania have lead me to ask a lot of questions: Do we want a world order that has been designed by a small, elite portion of the population? Opinions will vary. How about if we know these same people are responsible, actively or complacently, for incredible suffering, environmental degradation, human exploitation, and murder in the name of ideals? If development has been going on for fifty or more years and all we see are failed attempts to implement the same flawed and incompatible systems and ideas, are these development goals actually legitimate? I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re fooling ourselves; which, to be fair, I think is the fate of humanity; although maybe not the fate of individuals.

At the core of these problems in development and cross-cultural understanding, I see the flawed western dedication to knowledge. This rejection of knowledge may seem a little strange coming from someone who studied and teaches chemistry but I think one of the best lessons of science is the adamant dedication to skepticism and rejection of dogmatism. Basic limitations in human knowledge and experience should garner respect for the unknowable universe we live in. Some of the greatest scientific understandings of the twentieth century, the uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, and complimentarity, are based on acceptance of our ability to have absolute knowledge. To best understand the behavior of matter at a subatomic scale we have to accept the boundaries to our knowledge and visualization. Is it a coincidence that one of the theory’s founders and greatest proponents, Neils Bohr, also happened to ponder the duality of Kierkegaard? I don’t think so; in fact, I think the philosophical and the scientific are inseparable. One of the basest human instincts is to try and find am unknowable meaning; with the odds stacked against us, we should go at it every way we can.

Yet, in many instances, science has been used to humanize a very inhuman universe, shrinking trillions of years of entropic perpetuation and chemical perturbations into a system comprehensible on a human scale. We learn to adapt to our environment through observation, but we have committed many mistakes through the self delusion of knowledge. Our certainty in human understanding has created a world where food production is dependent on petroleum (the distant memory of our everyday friend, the sun) and resource extraction instead of nature’s self-perpetuating bounty. What’s more, we allow human constructs like capitalism and religion to be taken as natural laws and are not satisfied until everything we perceive is dissected, every little part understood.

            How do I now see science in my life? It’s a way out of complacency, driving humans to think honestly with an understanding of our limitations. We could all do well to remember that science in its purest form is anti-intellectual; to observe, not suppose. Humankind’s drive to dream is what brings it back into the intellectual realm. One of the most scientific Tanzanian’s I know told me he saw a man, mocking his university education, turn a rope into a snake. He saw it and he believed it. Try telling Mosley his spectra were an illusion! He did what every great scientist has done; he saw an unexpected phenomena, he evaluated it based on his incomplete understanding of the physical world, and, thanks to Bohr’s theoretical work and guidance, saw something that was more or less magic at the time: a complete collapse of Newtonian dogma, the quanta of a nuclear world. He was fortunately in an environment to replicate his observations. Now where’s that man with the rope?

            As a human being, I’m torn because I love and respect the glory of being a self aware, curious individual but also recognize the unnatural and skewed world that our intellect has lead us to create. Navigating this paradox, like so many others, is one of life’s challenges. Ultimately, I think the only way forward is to embrace every beautiful facet of reality in our perception, recognize our abject puniness, and go forward cautious of our hubris and, not paralytically, cynical. I.e. Let’s be more Vonnegut, less Old Testament. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t act with conviction, to achieve anything we must, but let’s try not getting carried away this time.

So, do I mock uchawi and a Tanzanian culture that can appear lazy and unmotivated? No. In some ways, it’s more truthful than the cultures that would criticize it. I will mock any system that refuses to respect the legitimacy of nature, holds fast to human dogmatism, and allows the human miracle of perception and self knowing to harm the world it draws from.