GOODBYE TO ALISON REDMAYNE, MUNG'ANZAGALA SEMUGONGOLWA

by Martin Walsh

Alison Redmayne, Utengule, Usangu, December 1981

I've mentioned Alison Redmayne a number of times in this blog and will again, I hope. We first met at her house in north Oxford in February 1980 when I was planning doctoral research in Usangu, in south-west Tanzania. She became my ethnographic mentor and a lifelong friend. I last spoke to her in January, when she rang me from the Churchill Hospital in Oxford -- she'd been in and out with various complaints, but nothing that made me think that I wouldn't see or speak to her again. However, she didn't leave the hospital this time, but succumbed to a recurrence of lymphoma, a cancer that she'd beaten off once before. I had no idea until I wrote about her in my last post (Where The Doctor is Ignorant) and today's equivalent of the bush telegraph brought me the sad news.

Alison Hope Redmayne was born on 1 October 1936 and died on 20 February 2013, aged 76. She was buried in Wolvercote Cemetery on Wednesday afternoon (13 March), following an informal graveside ceremony attended by family and friends, who shared recollections of her before continuing to do the same in the more congenial surroundings of the Victoria Arms in Old Marston. It was unexpectedly, but appropriately, sunny when we were in the cemetery. The most poignant moment came when we all gathered around and strained to listen to the start of one of her recordings of Hehe mourning ceremonies, played back by her nephew's son Max over a mobile phone with a small tinny speaker attached.

Alison Redmayne, Oxford, August 2000

I couldn't help but reflect that if she'd been buried in one of the villages in Iringa or Mufindi that she knew so well, we'd have found ourselves in the midst of a multitude, the air filled with heartfelt lamentations and rousing songs in praise of Mung'anzagala Gisakamutemi Msengidunda Semugongolwa (her full name as an adopted member of the Hehe royal family), this extraordinary woman who spoke their language like few other Europeans could, who gave the best years of her life to recording their history and ethnography, and who ignored her own physical suffering to devote herself instead to improving their welfare, saving the lives of who knows how many people as she did so. Here's just one testimony, posted on the Mjengwa blog on 15 March:

I met Semgongolwa while I was a student at Lugalo Secondary School back in 1970. Even though I am Hehe, my Kihehe was far worse than hers. I will always remember her anthropological studies she conducted among the Wahehe; she was one of the few people who entered into the field, and never left!
. . . Alex Mwakikoti 

Alison Redmayne, Luhanga, Usangu, December 1981

Although she also worked in northern Nigeria, Alison Redmayne's name will always be most closely associated with the Hehe and neighbouring peoples in Tanzania, and so it should be. I've spent most of my spare time in the past week sorting through our correspondence, records of her visit to Usangu in December 1981, and searching for photographs, tape recordings, and a short video I made of her at home in Oxford in August 2000 (I've posted stills from this in the sidebar to the right -- scroll down to find them). I'll write more anon, but wanted to begin to say goodbye to her with this (grave) post marking her departure from this life and passage into the world of the ancestors whom she talked and wrote so much about.

Bibiliography of selected works by Alison Redmayne

Sound recordings

Alison Redmayne Collection, British Library, London.
For an introduction, link to the collection catalogue, and sample recordings see:
Topp, Janet 2012. Rare Tanzanian music recordings preserved. Music in the British Library Blog, 13 July 2012.

Photographing the Sangu chief Alfeo Merere, Luhanga, December 1981

Unpublished dissertations

Redmayne, Alison 1961. The Concept of Feudalism in African Ethnology. Unpublished B.Litt. dissertation, University of Oxford.

Redmayne, Alison 1964. The Wahehe People of Tanganyika. Unpublished D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford.

Published papers, articles, book chapters

Lee, Annabelle [= Alison Redmayne] 1968. African nuns: an anthropologist’s impressions. New Blackfriars 49 (576, May): 401-409. Also in 1968. Exchange. New Blackfriars 49 (579, August): 614-616.

Redmayne, Alison 1968. Mkwawa and the Hehe wars. Journal of African History 9 (3): 409-436.

Redmayne, Alison 1968. The Hehe. In Andrew Roberts (ed.) Tanzania Before 1900: Seven Area Histories. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. 37-58.

Redmayne, Alison 1969. Blasius Undole’s History of the Ndamba. Anthropos 64 (5/6): 957-959.

Redmayne, Alison 1969. Hehe medicine. By Dr. Weck, Senior Doctor of the Imperial Colonial Troops in Gerrnan East Africa. Introduced, translated and annotated by Alison Redmayne. Tanzania Notes and Records 70: 29-40.

Redmayne, Alison 1970. The war trumpets and other mistakes in the history of the Hehe. Anthropos 65 (1/2): 98-109.

Redmayne, Alison 1970. Chikanga: an African diviner with an international reputation. In Mary Douglas (ed.) Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations (ASA Monograph No. 9). London: Tavistock Publications. 103-128.

Redmayne, Alison, with Clement MwaNdulute 1970. Riddles and riddling among the Hehe of Tanzania. Anthropos 65 (5/6): 794-813.

Roberts, D. F., J. Chavez, and Alison Redmayne 1974. Dermatoglyphics of the Hehe (Tanzania). Man (N.S.) 9 (1): 31-43.

Following in the footsteps of Chief Alfeo Merere

Redmayne, Alison 1975. The Hehe. In Family of Man: People of the World and Where They Live (Marshall Cavendish Encyclopedia, Vol. 3, Part 41). London. 1138-1140.

Redmayne, Alison 1980. Note on health services and the indigenous population under the German administration (German East Africa). In E. E. Sabben-Clare, D. J. Bradley and K. Kirkwood (eds.) Health in Tropical Africa During the Colonial Period: Based on the Proceedings of a Symposium Held at New College, Oxford, 20-23 March 1971. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 115-117.

Redmayne, Alison, assisted by Christine Rogers 1983. Research on customary law in German East Africa. Journal of African Law 27 (1): 22-41.

Published report

Booth, David, Flora Lugangira, Patrick Masanja, Abu Mvungi, Rosemarie Mwaipopo, Joaquim Mwami and Alison Redmayne 1993. Social, Economic and Cultural Change in Contemporary Tanzania: A People-oriented Focus. Report to SIDA, commissioned through Development Studies Unit, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University.

Her final publication and book review

Redmayne, Alison 2011. Review of Helga Voigt, Letters from Helga 1934-1937: A Teen Bride Writes Home from East Africa (trans. Evelyn Voigt, Renfrew, Ontario: General Store Publishing House, 2008), and Werner Voight, 60 Years in East Africa; Life of a Settler 1926 to 1986 (Renfrew, Ontario: General Store Publishing House, 1995). In Tanzanian Affairs 100 (September-December 2011): 70-71.

WHERE THE DOCTOR IS IGNORANT

by Martin Walsh

A page from the Cambridge Expeditions Medical Handbook

Flat on my back, beneath the Galaxy, I fear

This burning in my groin is gonorrhoea.

-- Tony Harrison, Manica

When I first went to Tanzania in 1980 my portable medical library comprised the Ross Institute's Preservation of Personal Health in Warm Climates and the Cambridge Expeditions Medical Handbook. The former, aka the Little Red Book, betrayed its origin in a milieu in which the nervous disposition of one's wife and the behaviour of one's servants were common concerns -- more, certainly, than they were to a 22 year-old explorer of the nether regions of Ujamaa (later in life, though, I could have done with an update). The Cambridge Handbook was much more useful, though its diagnostic tables tended to induce hypochondria. Instead of reading possible diagnoses from the combination of symptoms, it was much easier to pick on the worst disease and imagine the symptoms that were listed under it. And so every crick in the neck mirrored meningitis and every instance of colic conjured up appendicitis. Although this is a hazard associated with all self-help health guides, the Handbook's crude diagrams and simple matrices seemed designed to maximise the inflation of illness and a category of anxiety that the Little Red Book didn't cover.

The cover of the 1979 edition

I first heard about the virtues of Where There Is No Doctor, the English version of David Werner's Donde no hay doctor, from my ethnographic guide Alison Redmayne. I didn't buy a copy until sometime later when I was living in Mombasa. I was persuaded of its efficacy when a sister-in-law living with us in Kibokoni fell ill with shingles, and her head ballooned in an alarming way, and began to resemble a cross between a football and a scaly pufferfish. None of us knew what the cause of this was, and she resorted to a variety of local remedies, including smearing her head with a concoction of herbs. However, after a quick read of Where There Is No Doctor, I was able to confidently declare that she had no need to waste any more money on waganga ("traditional" doctors), because the swelling would go down of its own accord, and the scaliness disappear. As you might expect, no one took any notice of me, but she did indeed get better as I had smugly predicted she would. I've lost count of the number of times I've made use of the book, and for some years I've kept a second copy in Zanzibar so that I don't have to carry it back and forth. One day in Dar es Salaam I found a dog-eared copy of the Swahili translation, Mahali Pasipo Na Daktari, and mama watoto (the missus) has been using it ever since.

The Swahili version, c.1984

Never mind where there really is no doctor, the state of medical training in East Africa is such that you need all the help you can get even in places where there is someone with that distinguished title. I'll save the story of my imaginary blood clot -- imagined by some of the finest doctors in Kenya -- for another occasion. I'll also refrain from detailing all the horrors suffered by loved ones, far too many of whom haven't survived to tell the tale themselves. But you get the drift. Over the years Alison Redmayne has performed heroics in ministering to the sick in and around Iringa and Mufindi, and has been an indefatigable campaigner against bad practice in the hospitals and clinics of this particular corner of Tanzania. Talking about this with her one day around the turn of the millennium, I quipped that Where The Doctor Is Ignorant would be a more accurate title for our favourite medical guidebook, at least in the local context. This is not to denigrate the good work that many doctors and medical agencies do in East Africa, or to downplay the difficult conditions in which they strive, often with rudimentary facilities and inadequate medical supplies. But lack of adequate medical knowledge is a serious and widespread problem, and can't be denied.

The full text of Where There Is No Doctor can now be downloaded for free from the website of Hesperian Health Guides, together with other community health guides, including Where Women Have No Doctor and Helping Health Workers Learn. These and other resources are also available in a variety of languages, which can be seen at a glance on Hesperian's Resources by Language page. Unfortunately Mahali Pasipo na Daktari, the Swahili version of Where There Is No Doctor, is no longer in print: indeed there are no Swahili resources on the Hesperian site. That's a pity. An updated translation of this and other books, especially if well distributed and accompanied by relevant training, would go at least some way towards filling the medical knowledge gap in Tanzania and other parts of the region where Swahili is widely spoken.

References

Davies, T. W. Undated [c.1979]. Cambridge Expeditions Medical Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge Expeditions Medical Scheme.

Harrison, Tony 1987. Manica. In Selected Poems (2nd edition). London and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 31-34.

Ross Institute 1978. Preservation of Personal Health in Warm Climates. London: Ross Institute of Tropical Hygiene. [first published in 1951]

Werner, David Undated [c.1984, 2nd printing]. Mahali Pasipo Na Daktari... Kitabu cha Mafunzo ya Afya Vijijini. Dar es Salaam: Rotary Club of Dar es Salaam.

MALE CIRCUMCISION, VIOLENCE, AND SEXUAL HEALTH

Bukusu novices

 Writing last week about 'Periodic flowering and circumcision cycles', I was reminded of a trip to the slopes of Mount Elgon in July 1992, to belatedly negotiate bridewealth payments. One day we saw a group of boys singing and dancing in the open, and I was told that they were novices preparing for circumcision, which takes place in August every second year. My notes on this trip are sprinkled with reference to the years in which my male in-laws were circumcised, and in some cases the topical names that these years were given, such as Nandege (1960, named after an aeroplane that often flew overhead at night, waking people up), and Namirundu (1976, referring to the guns used by Idi Amin's firing squads). These were important marks of men's identity, reflecting the centrality of male circumcision in local Gisu (Masaaba) culture. I'd long been aware of the psychological effects of this, and earlier in 1992 had asked a young male relative to write notes for me on the practice of circumcision among the Bukusu, on the Kenyan side of the border (Wepukhulu 1992).

When I first read Timothy Wangusa's Upon This Mountain (1989), a novel about troubled transitions to manhood in Bugisu (one young man evades the cut and is forced to wear women's clothing, another has the operation furtively in hospital), I thought it captured the local obssession with circumcision perfectly. It's no accident that Suzette's Heald's ethnographic studies (1998; 1999) and film (Hawkins and Heald 1988) have made much of the violence of male circumcision and the ways in which it engenders an ethos of violence in turn. Homicide rates are unusually high, the Gisu are widely feared, and in the past were rumoured to be cannibals. Uncircumcised men are warned that they visit Gisu and Bukusu country at their peril when the biannual rites are underway, and the newspapers are never short of stories of forcible circumcision when every other August comes around.

Which brings me round to an extraordinary book that I bought in Nairobi in 1987, Dan Omondi K'Aoko's The Re-Introduction of Luo Circumcision - Rite (1986). The Western Nilotic Luo live to the south of the Gisu, Bukusu, and other Bantu-speaking Luhya, and are best known for not practising circumcision. But K'Aoko sets out to demostrate that some Luo are familiar with male circumcision, and to this end details a number of traditional methods for performing the operation. Chapter by chapter these are:

1. The Okoko Method (Soldier Ant Method)
2. The Wino Method (Flywhisk Method)
3. The Opila Method (Sugarcane Rind Method)
4. Tuchruok Method (The Piercing Method)
5. Ridhrouk Method (Peeling Method)

I'll refrain from spelling out the painful and gory details of each of these. You can read all about them in the version of the book that was posted online in 2008 with the simpler title Luo Circumcision Rites. I'm no expert on President Obama's ancestors and their initiation rites, but suspect that at least some Luo must be under pressure from their Luhya neighbours to adopt circumcision. I knew a young educated Ganda man who booked himself into hospital so that he could be circumcised and live more comfortably with his Gisu mother and her family, and wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are also cases like this among the Luo.

More recently, though, Luo have been urged to take up circumcision for very different reasons. Gisu and others who practise male circumcision have long claimed that it is 'cleaner' and protects against sexually transmitted diseases, and this has played a role in the unwillingness of their womenfolk to sleep with uncircumcised men from other ethnic groups. Numerous studies have now shown that male circumcision significantly reduces the risk of infection by the HIV virus as well as other STDs (e.g. Weiss et al. 2000; Auvert et al. 2005; Gray et al. 2007), and this has led to programmes in Kenya and elsewhere to promote the practice. In July 2008 the Luo Council of Elders refused to endorse a Ministry of Health campaign to provide free circumcison services in Kenya's Nyanza Province (Anon. 2008). In September five prominent Luo politicians, led by Prime Minister Raila Odinga, countered by declaring in public that they had secretly undergone the operation, and five other MPs pledged to do so subject to medical advice (Telewa 2008). This bold challenge to cultural tradition seems to have had an immediate impact on take-up of the government's offer, though resistance to circumcision continued. Large numbers of Luo have turned to male circumcision to prevent HIV/AIDS, rather than to revive the ancestral practices that K'Aoko claimed, or submit to the cultural compulsion that exists where the cut outnumber and intimidate the uncut.

References

Anon. 2008. Kenyans reject circumcision plan. BBC News, Friday, 18 July 2008, online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7514431.stm.

Auvert, Bertran, Dirk Taljaard, Emmanuel Lagarde, Joëlle Sobngwi-Tambekou, Rémi Sitta and Adrian Puren 2005. Randomized, controlled intervention trial of male circumcision for reduction of HIV infection risk: the ANRS 1265 trial. PLoS Medicine 2 (11): e298. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020298.

Gray, Ronald H., Godfrey Kigozi, David Serwadda, Frederick Makumbi, Stephen Watya, Fred Nalugoda, Noah Kiwanuka, Lawrence H. Moulton, Mohammad A. Chaudhary, Michael Z. Chen, Nelson K. Sewankambo, Fred Wabwire-Mangen, Melanie C. Bacon, Carolyn F. M. Williams, Pius Opendi, Steven J. Reynolds, Oliver Laeyendecker, Thomas C. Quinn and Maria J. Wawer 2007. Male circumcision for HIV prevention in men in Rakai, Uganda: a randomised trial. The Lancet 369 (9562) (24 February 2007): 657-666.

Hawkins, Richard and Suzette Heald (dirs.) 1988. Imbalu: Ritual of Manhood of the Gisu of Uganda. Videotape distributed by the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Heald, Suzette 1998 Controlling Anger: The Anthropology of Gisu Violence. Oxford: James Currey.

Heald, Suzette 1999. Manhood and Morality: Sex, Violence and Ritual in Gisu Society. London: Routledge.

K'Aoko, Dan Omondi 1986. The Re-Introduction of Luo Circumcision - Rite [sic]. Nairobi [no publisher]. Online (with the title Luo Circumcision Rites) at http://kenyastockholm.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/luocircumcisionrites_03.pdf.

Telewa, Muliro 2008. Kenyan MPs admit to circumcision. BBC News, Tuesday, 23 September 2008, online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7584269.stm.
Wangusa, Timothy 1989. Upon This Mountain (African Writers Series). Oxford: Heinemann International.

Weiss, Helen A., Maria A. Quigley and Richard J. Hayes 2000. Male circumcision and HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Aids 14 (15): 2361-2370.

Wepukhulu, David Masika 1992. Bukusu Circumcision Rites. Unpublished manuscript notes written for Martin Walsh, Mombasa, April 1992.