A Season of Stories 7: Community

This special episode combines all the stories from Season 7…

“Togolese Women in the Struggle for Independence” – Marius Kothor, PhD candidate in the Department of History at Yale University 

“Taungurung Community in Australia” – Dr. Jennifer Jones, Associate Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, Archaeology and History at La Trobe University’s Albury-Wodonga Campus

“Native Americans in Anti-Colonial Networks” – Dr. Justin Gage, Visiting Researcher at the University of Helsinki and Instructor at the University of Arkansas

“An Islamic Community in Nineteenth-Century West Africa” – Dr. Mauro Nobili, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“The Church Order in the Protestant Reformation” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston, Associated Fellow, Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) Mainz

“Underdogs in the American Imagination” – Dr. Bruce Berglund, Historian

“Community in Loneliness” – Dr. Fay Bound Alberti, Reader in History at the University of York

“Healers in Seventeenth-Century Angola” – Dr. Kalle Kananoja, Senior Researcher in the Department of History at University of Oulu

“Intellectuals in Hindustan” – Dr. Manan Ahmed Asif, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University

Transcript

90 Second Narratives
Season 7: “Community”
Episode 10: “A Season of Stories 7: Community”

Sky Michael Johnston:

Hello and welcome to 90 Second Narratives. I’m the host and creator of the podcast, Sky Michael Johnston. This is a special, “Season of Stories” episode. You are about to hear all the stories from Season 7 which share the common theme of: Community.

As in past seasons, this season’s guests have combined to offer a fascinating perspective on the topic of the season. There are so many interesting connections that could be drawn between the nine stories that we’ll listen to now, but I’ve decided to divide them into three groups of three for reasons that I’ll explain as we go. 

The first three stories all relate to resistance against colonialism. In terms of the theme of community, there is a lot to consider in these stories. In each case, we have existing communities that people are struggling to protect and preserve from the destructive forces of colonialism. But at the same time, the communities are transformed. They are impacted by colonialism, but also, in the struggle against colonialism new aspects of the community are forged and created from within. And then there’s this, these stories take place in Africa, Australia, and North America. Is it fair to think of colonial resisters from disparate parts of globe as members of a broader shared community in addition to their more local communities? Listen to the stories and see what you think.

The stories are “Togolese Women in the Struggle for Independence” told by PhD candidate Marius Kothor, “Taungurung Community in Australia” told by Dr. Jennifer Jones, and “Native Americans in Anti-Colonial Networks” told by Dr. Justin Gage.

Marius Kothor:

In Togo, people often tell a popular story about the country’s independence. The story goes something like this: In 1960, the former French colony achieved independence when a woman tucked a piece of paper into her undergarments and crossed the border from Ghana into Togo. The documents were not detected by the male colonial officials at the border since they could not search women’s bodies. The woman then delivered the documents to the leaders of the anti-colonial movement, thus ushering the country into the post-independence era. 

In many ways, this story has all hallmarks of a legend, a kind of mythical rendition of history. Yet this story perfectly incapsulates the experiences of women like Madam Atakpaméto, a merchant and political activist who in Lomé, Togo’s capital city.

Before her death in 2020, I spent a series of summers having conversations with Madam Atakpaméto about her memories of Togo’s independence movement. Through songs and recitations of poetry, madam Atakpaméto told me stories about how she acted as a messenger in the movement, carrying documents to anti-colonial nationalist on both sides of the Ghana/Togo border. 

Listening to Madam Atakpaméto stories and that of the other Togolese women, I write about, I realized that by narrating these stories, Togolese women present their bodies as carriers of Togo’s independence thereby casting Togo’s anti-colonial struggle as a gendered history in which women played a unique role that is distinct from that of men. 

So, rather than being a folklore, that popular story of Togo’s independence that placed a woman as the central figure, is not so much a story about an individual woman but of a community of Togolese women who, in very literal terms, positioned their bodies at the vanguard of Togo’s liberation.

Jennifer Jones:

The Black Spur Drive in Australia’s scenic Yarra Ranges wends through ‘majestic Mountain Ash forests’ and past gurgling brooks, taking tourists to lush beauty spots. Some histories describe this road as the ‘Yarra Track’, prospectors trekked from Melbourne to new alluvial goldfields along this road in 1861. But miners didn’t ‘blaze’ this track, nor did the white pastoralists of the 1840s. This path was originally named the ‘Blacks’ Spur’, with a possessive apostrophe recognising the traditional owners of the land. The Taungurung people traversed this ancient route for trade and cultural purposes since time immemorial. But most histories only recall a single journey; when ‘the blacks’ were dispossessed, walking down to a new government reserve and into exile, in 1863. The Blacks’ Spur was a trail of tears and the Taungurung rendered ‘casualties of colonial dispossession’. Taungurung Elder Uncle Roy Patterson, however, claimed an unbroken connection to the Blacks’ Spur. His family resisted dispersal efforts, living in fringe settlements, and working in the forests close to their Country. They worked on ‘susso’ gangs during the Great Depression, re-routing the Blacks’ Spur with pick and shovel, in exchange for rations. They also re-forested the Blacks’ Spur after the devastating ‘Black Friday’ bushfires of 1939. In later years, Uncle Roy laboured here, building fire access roads. He proudly recalled, “I got a lot of history in that area, because of the Blacks’ spur”. This continuous history could be recognised; a small possessive apostrophe transforms the ‘Black Spur Drive’ into the ‘Blacks’ Spur’. Many roads and highways in Australia originally carried First Nations traffic and could tell similar stories of resilience and cultural survival. I wonder, do unacknowledged stories of Indigenous belonging lie beneath the roads of your daily life?

Justin Gage:

By the late 1870s, after years of resistance, most western Native Americans had been forced onto reservations, those ever-shrinking pieces of land created by the United States government to contain and separate Natives.

For the US government in the nineteenth century, the solution to their so-called Indian Problem depended on geographic isolation – keeping Native Americans in a space where they could be set distant and controlled and perhaps assimilated.

Despite the colonial control and confinement, western Native Americans remained mobile in the late nineteenth century. Their tenacious mobility, defined not only as the freedom of geographic movement but also the ability to share ideas and information widely, allowed western Native Americans to create vast networks of communication that traversed the boundaries of the US government’s reservations. These intertribal networks were threaded together in the 1870s and 1880s by intertribal visiting and letter writing.

Native Americans disseminated important information and ideas on a continental scale, often in opposition to US colonialism, including religious knowledge and practices like the Ghost Dance.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government tried to suppress intertribal communication.

Because of the anti-colonial notions that were spread along Native networks, US officials were afraid of its impact on their efforts of assimilation. But Natives did not allow themselves to be kept prisoners on reservations. They thought that they would have the freedom of movement and they expected US government agents to give it to them. When that freedom was threatened, Natives struggled to keep it.

If the definition of a community is a group that interacts and shares ideas and ways of life, then western Native Americans were building an intertribal community in these early reservation years. They were and still are an extraordinarily diverse community made up of hundreds of nations, but all were facing a common, unyielding challenge, hoping for a similar outcome.

Because of the rise of communication among tribal nations, Native Americans could discuss the circumstances that tied them to one another. Meaningful ideas could be transmitted to every reservation in the West because a community actively spread those ideas. Even in the face of colonialism.

Sky Michael Johnston:

These next three stories give examples of how people have attempted to create or shape communities in the first place. The first story in this group, Dr. Mauro Nobili’s, “An Islamic Community in Nineteenth-Century West Africa,” recounts how a chronicle was used to present an image of a political ruler that was easier for people to build a community around. Then, my story, “The Church Order in the Protestant Reformation,” describes a bureaucratic mechanism that was central to the creation of religious and political communities in early modern Europe. Finally, Dr. Bruce Berglund’s story, “Underdogs in the American Imagination,” tells how sports were an ingredient in the fashioning of a national community during the Cold War in the United States. These stories take place in three different centuries, but each one reveals that sometimes the building blocks for a community are deliberately put in place—especially when the unity of a political entity is at stake.

Mauro Nobili:

Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith explores the intertwined histories of a West African Arabic chronicle, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and its role in advancing a political project, the legitimation of the nineteenth-century Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi, located in what is now the Republic of Mali. 

The Tārīkh al-fattāsh has been widely understood by scholars to be a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century work that was subjected to later textual manipulation. My book demonstrates that the Tārīkh al-fattāsh is in fact a fully-fledged nineteenth-century work written by substantially rewriting an earlier local chronicle.  

I prove that the Tārīkh al-fattāsh was written to enhance the legitimacy of the founding ruler of the caliphate of Hamdallahi, Aḥmad Lobbo, who raised to the power without belonging to any elite of the time, after what can be defined a coup d’etat.  

Aḥmad Lobbo is portrayed in the chronicle as sultan, the authoritative ruler of West Africa and the last of a long line of legitimate rulers that dates back to the first millennium; as the twelfth of the caliphs under whom the Islamic community would thrive, according to a ḥadīth ascribed to the Prophet; and as the “renewer” of Islam, who, according to another Prophetic tradition, is cyclically sent by God to prevent the Muslim community going astray. 

In doing so Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith clarifies the history of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh that has caused scholars to spill much ink for more than a century, and provide the first study of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi in English language.

Sky Michael Johnston:

Even someone who is well-versed in the history and theology of the Protestant Reformation might not know much about the subject of this story: the church order. Church orders, or Kirchenordnungen in German, were detailed and lengthy documents that gave instructions for all things related to church life in a given political province.

You may remember that in 1517 Martin Luther critiqued certain practices in the Roman Church in his famous 95 Theses. One could say his criticisms “went viral.” Luther became a celebrity. His popularity—and infamy—grew as his conflict with the Pope and leading Catholic theologians escalated over the following years. But a truly stunning aspect of the Reformation, is that Luther’s debates with Rome quickly developed into a firmly grounded and highly institutionalized church that rivalled the Catholic Church throughout Central Europe. Church orders were one of the most important mechanisms in that remarkable development.

Here are some of the topics you can find in sixteenth-century Protestant church orders. Instructions for conducting a Sunday church service including guidelines for sermons, prayers, music, and the administering of the sacraments. They also contained many instructions for building and maintaining a specific kind of religious community, not only within the four walls of the church, but in every part of a local society. There were instructions for when to ring the church bells and why. There were instructions for visitations—meetings between church leaders and common people to ensure proper adherence to doctrine and practices. And the church orders laid out the administration of the church which was deeply intertwined with the local government.

While the Reformation was originally a popular movement fueled by the energy of common people, the more enduring form of the movement also received considerable support from powerful local rulers. Church orders reveal the tremendous administrative and bureaucratic efforts that went into fostering the Protestant communities that changed the landscape of Christianity.

Bruce Berglund:

Sports are an important ingredient in building community. Whether you’re a participant or a spectator, sports allow you to take part in a visible, public activity, fostering social connection and a sense of shared identity. For instance, take for example the Miracle on Ice. On February 22nd, 1980, the US Olympic hockey team pulled off a stunning upset win against the Soviet Union at the Winter Olympics. Why does this hockey game still matter to so many people today? 

More than forty years after the Lake Placid Olympics, and thirty years since the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the Miracle on Ice still has a strong hold on many Americans. Why is that? What does this game mean for Americans, in terms of their sense of community and identity?

Think of this: What is the quintessential American sports movie? You might think of Rocky, or Remember the Titans, or even Miracle, the 2004 Disney movie about the Olympic team. American audiences are drawn to stories like these, stories of underdogs, usually people of working-class background, who rise to the top through sacrifice and hard-work. 

The 1980 US Olympic hockey team were underdogs. They were real amateurs –most players had come right from college. The American players also came from working-class backgrounds. Among their parents were a truck driver, an electrician, a carpenter, an auto plant worker. In contrast, the Soviets were the best hockey team in the world. They called themselves amateur, but in fact the Soviets were paid to train and play hockey year-round. They had won the gold medal in the previous four Olympics. The year before the Lake Placid games, they had trounced a team of NHL All-Stars, 6–0. The US Olympic team trained for one purpose—to beat the Soviets.  “We were a real-life ‘Rocky’ story,” said coach Herb Brooks about his team’s win. “We reflected the work ethic.” The hockey team’s win at Lake Placid still holds meaning today because they were America’s last true underdogs. They were the underdogs that Americans still imagine themselves to be.

Sky Michael Johnston:

Today’s final three stories offer some truly insightful, and even counterintuitive, perspectives on community. Community inherently involves a group of people, right? Then what is the role of the individual in a community? Isn’t it ironic that sometimes unique individuals who stand out from the crowd are the very people who become the catalysts for the formation of a community? The last three stories give historical examples of precisely these types of figures.

First, Dr. Fay Bound Alberti shares “Community in Loneliness” about the important twentieth-century writers, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. As you listen to the story, think about the difference between loneliness and solitude, and how forming community cuts against modern society. Second, Dr. Kalle Kananoja shares “Healers in Seventeenth-Century Angola.” And third, Dr. Manan Ahmed Asif shares “Intellectuals in Hindustan.” In these three stories we encounter writers, healers, intellectuals—people who transcended the norms of their societies and, yet, became the anchors of communities anyway.

Fay Bound Alberti:

The story that I want to tell you is about loneliness. In my book, A Biography of Loneliness, I wrote about Sylvia Plath, the writer who like Virginia Woolf wrestled with loneliness. Virginia Woolf, whose dates were 1882 to 1941, talked about her deliberate alienation from others in order to reach the bottom of the vessel and to see the world differently. Like Plath, who lived from 1932 to 63, Woolf found creativity in loneliness, but she also found the constraints of domesticity and the mundanity of woman’s life made her lonely. So, in both women’s writing we find the expectations of gendered behavior stifling. Both Woolf and Plath had challenging upbringings marked by loneliness and separation, but Plath focused on wanting to escape loneliness—an escape that found impossible because she believed it to be loneliness as a disease of the blood. She felt she could never be free from loneliness and in all of her writing that comes through. 

Yet, Plath like Woolf recognized the uses of loneliness, not mere solitude, as a way of evading some of those cultural expectations. “God, but life is loneliness.” Plath wrote, “Despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of parties with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear, and when at last you find yourself able to pour out your soul to another person,” she said, “you stop in shock at the words you utter, they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small, cramped dark inside you for so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment, and companionship, but the loneliness of the soul, and its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”

I would argue that in addition to seeing loneliness as somehow part and parcel of human experience and linked to creativity and the experience of being human, it’s also important to look at the historical aspects of loneliness, that it is part and parcel of modern society with its fragmentation and separateness, the expectations that it places on people to be independent, to be self-sufficient, to thrive without community. Needed other people is almost depicted as a kind of weakness. And in the end, both Plath and Woolf found community as well as creativity in loneliness. Knowing that other people were lonely too, other women experience loneliness too, was a great comfort to Sylvia Plath. And through writing they entered a community of creative women and writers who were somehow able to stand against the isolation that was so necessary to write.

Kalle Kananoja:

In 1698, a batch of denunciations was collected in the Jesuit college of Luanda, Angola. Following an edict distributed by the Inquisition, witnesses came forth to denounce people who had allegedly taken part in suspicious religious ceremonies. Many of these depositions described the activities of African healers and diviners and were given by slaves owned by the Jesuits.

This was the case, for example, with Gregório, who told how a healer named Vitoria had called him to participate in sacrificial veneration of an ancestral spirit. Gregorio referred to Vitoria as a ‘surgeon’, who was consulted by many people seeking a cure for their illness, and who served as a link between the communities of living and the dead.

A similar sacrifice had taken place on one of the Jesuit estates. This was relayed by Matheos, who had seen a healer named Paulo Cambundo and other diviners from ‘distant lands’, sacrificing chickens and a goat, and placing a pot over a fire. In the pot, Matheos observed blood, wild honey, bones, and red feathers. Accompanied by musicians, three men proceeded to dance around the fire. The purpose of the ritual was to cure a sick woman. Paulo, the master of the ceremony, invoked powerful ancestral spirits, again showing how the dead had a central role in the restoration of health. 

These denunciations point out, how in West-Central Africa, healers did not work simply in their home villages but also travelled to serve patients in other locations, enjoying considerable fame in so doing. The powers of healers were made manifold by their mobility, because they offered the possibility of novel cures, both spiritual and medicinal, that were central to communal well-being.

Manan Ahmed Asif:

Muhammad Qasim Firishta was a physician, a diplomat and an intellectual. Born around 1570 CE and died sometimes after 1620 CE in the Deccan, contemporary India, he was known for his way around libraries and around circles of power. We know him from a monumental history he wrote that he titled “Nauras-nama” (The Book of New-ness) but which became influential under the title Tarikh-e Firishta (the History by Firishta). This book of around 1000 folio pages, written in a very accessible style of Persian with Hindavi and Deccani words, was commissioned by the ruler of Bijapur, Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II. Firishta describes in his book that he was part of a wedding party with a different ruler and was taken prisoner and escaped after much troubles, eventually to find himself at a court, where the King spoke and wrote the most beautiful Persian, the most excellent Daccani, the most exquisite Arabic and the most learned Sanskrit. Firishta, awed by the learned ruler, requests a commission and Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II gifts him a Persian history of saints “Razwatul Safa” copied in his own hands, and says that such a single-volume history of all of Hindustan needs to be written. This is the book that Firishta goes on to write and title “Naurasnama”. The book is full of incredible stories, ethics of history writing, and a glimpse of the social and cultural milieu of seventeenth century subcontinent, at the precipice of European colonization. My favorite are the brief accounts of Firishta traveling from library to library, archive to archive, in order to research his own work (this he had to do while fulfilling his so-called day job as a diplomat). I always find that these stories remind me of the ways in which a contemporary academic has to apply for grants and steal some precious few days in an archive. Firishta’s history is a wonderful glimpse into an intellectual world of precolonial subcontinent that I urge you all to seek out.

Sky Michael Johnston:

Thank you to all the storytellers from Season 7. If you want to connect with the storytellers you hear on 90 Second Narratives, follow the podcast on Twitter @90secNARRATIVES. Everyone you hear on the show is a historian doing fascinating work. These stories just scratch the surface of their incredible research.

Once again, I’m Sky Michael Johnston. And I invite you to join me next Monday for the start of Season 8. The theme for the new season is: Journeys. It’s going to be a lot of fun. As always, thank you for listening to 90 Second Narratives, the podcast that gives you “little stories with BIG historical significance.”