New stories about indigenous wisdom - A Conversation with Wakanyi Hoffman

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Could we have spaces in our education systems where Indigenous wisdom keepers are also part of the education system? And not just them, maybe it is retired professors as that elders council. So then the teachers are mediators. They're holding the container, the space where that intergenerational wisdom can emerge.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me again for another episode. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. When you get right down to the essentials, humans learn more often than not through stories. It's one of the most powerful technologies that humanity has ever invented, and Indigenous peoples have been using it for millennia. The amazing Wakani Hoffman is asking important and powerful questions about how we might use story more intentionally in our approaches to teaching and learning as we reorient our lost education systems. Wakani Hoffman. Makani is a storyteller, author, and keynote speaker specialized in Ubuntu philosophy. She was born and raised in Kenya before embarking on an adventure around the world and is an expert researcher-practitioner on integrating indigenous knowledge into global education systems, as well as a fellow at the New Institute in Hamburg, Germany. She is the founder of the African Folktales Project, an ongoing open-source resource of indigenous wisdom and knowledge for schoolchildren, as well as the author of many stories including Sala: Mountain Warrior and The Twelve Days of Christmas Safari. Rokhani is also doing fascinating work at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, investigating the meeting points of ancient wisdom and modern technology.

I'm so, so happy to be able to talk to you, Rokhani. Thank you for doing it.

Me too. Really glad to be here. Thank you.

Amazing. And so perhaps I'd love to start with, if we can, maybe just as a kind of a context setting, because I think from what I've understood about your work, you've worked in lots of different kinds of spaces, but there's some threads that seem to feel like they run through all of them. And I know you started some of that work researching and trying to deeply understand the role of Indigenous knowledge systems and Indigenous wisdom can play in the education system. And obviously for me and the podcast, that's a really important thread of inquiry for me. I find that fascinating. So I'd love to speak about that a little bit, but perhaps maybe just as a context setting, if you could just speak to, I'm seeing that coming up quite a lot, right? Right now, looking elsewhere outside of the so-called mainstream institutions of formal education for inspiration or for other ways of thinking and being that might help to inform ways we think about education going forward. I wondered perhaps, yeah, if you could reflect on why now, like, why is this coming up so much? Are you seeing it? Or maybe you're not seeing it come up so much, but just, I'd be interested in reflections on, yeah, broad moment we're in, in terms of these kinds of questions.

Yeah, I think I'll begin with the crisis that we're in. We have the climate crisis. Right? That's kind of the universal crisis that we can all admit that affects every one of us, all 8 billion people of us on the planet. And this has created a sense of a polycrisis. So the climate crisis is sort of a conduit for all the other crises that we've been in to emerge, right? So, and we can look at the financial crisis as sort of the machine that sits in between, needs oiling, needs to be dismantled, whatever you want to think about it, it exists.

Right?

And it hold— we're all entangled in this machine, right? So what has informed or what has been engineering this machine is modern science. And now we are seeing that modern science does not have the solutions that we need, particularly for looking at ways in which we can live sustainably as communities, as a community of life that is not human-centric, but actually involves all the other relations that we have. And then we've seen the rise of some form of new spiritual expressions that are not really also addressing the whole crisis that we're in. It's not, we're not going to look to the Tibetan Buddhism only to solve the climate crisis or the holy crisis that we're in. We're not gonna, Christianity didn't do it for us, right? So what is left? I think then that's why this interest to look back to, and not really looking back, it's recovering knowledge that we have left on the periphery, on the, on the what's so-called margins, which are not really margins, right? When you think about indigenous people, yes, they exist on the margins of society physically, right? They live in these physical locations that are the most isolated and farthest removed from modern society, but at the same time, they're not marginal. Indigenous knowledge has influenced our modern innovation, right? We just didn't use that knowledge as the formal knowledge. We invented another body of knowledge called science and which is great, right? It has helped us solve so many problems, but I think we're seeing the end of science as we know it. And so what next? What next to me is indigenous science, if you want, or an integration of indigenous knowledge and modern science. What does that look like, right? And that's, I think that is the most exciting thing that we can do. We can be curious about how to merge, how to marry these two worlds, these knowledge systems, and then we might invent a new way of thinking that could help us emerge out of this crisis.

Fascinating, because one of the things comes up for me when you talk, there's a knee-jerk response from some people to do the either/or, right? It's like, well, you can't have Indigenous, what does that mean even Indigenous science holding those two things? So I'd love, I find that a really fascinating question. I'd love to dig into that, but maybe a way into some of that is I've heard you talking about just maybe trying to kind of unpick a bit. What do you mean when you talk about Indigenous ways of knowing or Indigenous wisdom? Because I've heard you say that often it gets framed as old-fashioned, backwards, static. And unchanging, but actually the complete opposite is true. Those were your words I heard you say elsewhere, and I, I just, yeah, I'd love you to speak to that a little bit more in terms of perhaps why has it been framed in that very kind of regressive, backward-looking frame, and sometimes by the people who are advocating for it, I would say, in a kind of romanticism of going back to the past.

So when we talk about indigenous people or indigenous knowledge, there's a very strong narrative that always divides Indigenous and the other. Either you're Indigenous or you are not. And I like to say we're all Indigenous to this planet, right? We are all Indigenous to the locations, to the communities, to the spaces that we are. And we can trace our Indigenous backgrounds, right? We could trace your original tribe. If you went as far back, you could do it with DNA and all of these other things. So the reason why there is this knee-jerk reaction, I think, is because A, we think of Indigenous as ancient, Ancient knowledge systems. How can we go back to ancient Egypt, you know, to solve problems of Africa today? We couldn't, right? However, there is this perennial wisdom that Indigenous people have held on to, and there is a process of cultivating and refining Indigenous knowledge. It hasn't remained located in a space and time that is impossible to adjust to the times that we're in. I think it is the values of Indigenous knowledge. It's a value system that's remained consistent over time that we can now look back to and realize that the values that enhance the spirit of interconnectedness are not different to the values of the commercial world, for example, but the intention is different, right? Whether on the one hand, the financial system, the intention is to create more possibilities for individuals to amass wealth, whereas with the indigenous intention is not for an individual to amass more wealth, it's for community to thrive. So the way in which we look at different aspects of human flourishing, money is looked at very differently. Wealth is looked at as not just one form of wealth, there are multiple forms of wealth, right? And so this is a difference. This is a key difference between indigenous knowledge. It is curated and enhanced and continually refined to enhance human flourishing as a community, right? Whereas the modern world is very much based on the individualistic, I'm the master of my own destiny and everyone else has to be the master of their own destiny. But what is the destiny, right? With indigenous knowledge, the destiny is the flourishing of everyone, whereas for our modern times, modern world, the destiny is for one individual, myself, to flourish. But you can't flourish without the other, right? So this is the key difference, and I think that if we can start to We need new narratives about what it means to have Indigenous knowledge in our midst, that actually it is not a separate knowledge system. It is very much integrated in ourselves as human beings, but that we have a different intention when we look at what Indigenous knowledge is good for versus what the modern knowledge is good for.

Yeah. And it's interesting as well, isn't it? Invoking the word knowledge even in itself brings with it all this baggage of a, a set of concepts that we can move around and, and pull out of context and use in another context. And, and I want, I sometimes it's kind of tainted by those epistemologies of modern science in a way. And actually there's something more processual or flowing or moving about someone I've had on the podcast previously, Ray Ison talks about knowing rather than knowledge because there's a kind of movement to the process of knowing. So I, yeah, I just wanted to reflect that even, even just calling it indigenous knowledge sometimes might put it into a particular kind of frame that falls into the traps of the either/or of Do we use modern scientific knowledge or indigenous knowledge? But actually this, speaking to different guests on the podcast, like Vanessa Andriotti, I don't know if you know her work.

I do. I know her very well. Yeah.

Great. So the idea that it's not just a set of knowledge, it's a combination of ways of being and knowing that are somehow all intertwined, which I think for a lot of people not socialized into or enculturated into those ways of being, you know, from not being part of that context. It's quite difficult sometimes to wrap your head around, right?

That's right. And, and I like that you are framing it from the perspective of knowing or not knowing, which is very different to— with knowledge, we oftentimes conflate it with knowledge that can only be curated or received in a, in an institution, for example, right?

Yeah.

Whereas here we are talking about really the art of knowing, the discovery, the ways of knowing that are different to ways of acquiring knowledge. Yeah. An education from an indigenous perspective from my perspective, is not an education that you receive in a school. It's literally a school of life, you know. You're learning every day how to be in relationship with yourself, how to be in relationship with the members of your community and beyond as well, how to be a member of the community of life on this planet, which then all ties back to this intention to be a good citizen of the Earth, right? So even the identities that we hold on to in our modern world— my nationality, and therefore I have loyalties to being Kenya, for example, or my football team, you know, all these things. That's very different to how the indigenous conception of personhood is. You are a person through the community, and also at the same time, we are all part of, just a small part of, members of the community of life, which includes, you know, all the non-human entities. And this is really a different way of looking at community. And actually, I would even push back on the word community. I find it very troublesome now. Because we've actually conflated community with isolation. You know, I belong to this community and I don't belong to that community.

Right. Yeah.

Interesting. And therefore there's a, we exclude each other from different communities.

Yeah.

I'm looking at it more, I'm expanding that notion of community into thinking about habitat. I exist in this habitat and the word habitat already invokes this image of other beings that are not just human. Yeah. You know, there are the trees in my habitat, there is the buildings in my habitat, the inanimate and animate objects as well are part of the the habitats that we exist in. And that also has a way of— there are cracks in the habitat, there are roads that divide different habitats, so I can ease in and out of different habitats. So it kind of gives me this freedom of movement as well that community doesn't often— Interesting.

Yeah, yeah, we like to draw boundaries around things, right?

And there are no boundaries. I mean, the boundaries are made up, they're lines, they're imaginary lines. So can we think of the wild animals, you know, in Masai Mara in Kenya don't know the difference between that side of the road and this side of the road. It's just a road in between. It's an imaginary boundary. So if we think of habitats and being habitants of different spaces, then these imaginary lines become sort of part of the habitat that you're in as well.

Yeah, yeah, it kind of invokes ways of living as well, habitual ways of living, right? Almost coming from the same root. It's like we are all just trying to figure out ways of being in our habitats and and some of their— there are patterns that emerge out of that, those ways of being that we call habits, right?

Exactly. And because we are now looking at, at a future, whether we like it or not, where we are so entangled in each other's lives, cultures are not one culture, they are products of many cultures before, right? You couldn't even name one culture that's isolated and unique and homogeneous that hasn't had any influence from others. So being able to to realize that we're going to be easing in and out of different thought systems, different knowledge systems, different ways of being human, even the expression of being human. That's also something we have to put on the table and ask ourselves, what does it mean to be human anyway? You know, in relation to non-human, right? Exactly.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And there is an interesting reflection though, I think some people have, that that feels like a flattening. What some of what you've described feels like a flattening of difference. And I, that's something that I'm, I'm quite interested in. It's like those boundaries that are fictional, they are, you know, imagined communities, right? Benedict Anderson. And you know that we do like to imagine communities for belonging.

Mm-hmm.

And so there's something going on there in part of what it means to be human, which is about, it does kind of us and them. So obviously it creates rivalries. Clearly you can see that everywhere in history. But there's something there that I think is trying to hold onto the real deep value of difference and diversity while also gesturing towards, like, as you're saying, the, the entanglement. And of course we are, we are all parts of one another and parts of the same biosphere and the ways that we can thrive or not in that are dependent on all of us. But there's, yeah, there's something interesting there about the role of diversity and difference is a really important feature of that kind of collection of habitats. And so learning to be in your own. Habitat where you came from is, I don't know, somehow an important piece of that. And that's where education for me plays a role there in how do you learn your own habitat but also understand other people's? I don't know.

We start with common ground. What is it that we stand on? Like really physically, we are on this planet. I think this is— we've had periods of building, you know, the Enlightenment period, right? Where we rose to the levels of thinking in very human-centric way that we can, we are somewhat in control of the elements, right? Our yearning to go discover a different planet is really part of this human-centric ideas of our responsibility and our intelligence. I think with diversity comes multiple ways of knowing, as you said, and also multiple ways of knowing bring us closer to multiple intelligences that we have not interacted with. And biodiversity isn't just diversity in the human family, it is diversity in all. So when you think of habitat, I'm not a posthumanist per se, but I do believe that we probably always lived in a posthumanist world without consciously admitting to the fact. And we have to be honest about that. We are not alone, even though we've done a horrible job of destroying, you know, parts of the animal kingdom and all of that. But we are not alone. We're not the only ones that exist. So even, I would even push back on the idea of diversity because even the word itself somewhat invokes an image of human diversity. And we don't think of diversity as diversity of thought, diversity of knowledge, diversity of other forms of intelligence that we haven't interacted with. We can't be without the conditions in the, in the atmosphere, for example. So it's a different form of science, I think, that we're looking at. And that is why to me the indigenous way of knowing is a form of science that we need to engage with more deeply, that has a non-material conception there to human flourishing that modern science does not give us that inclination. The modern science is very much geared towards innovative ways of being in this material world, whereas the indigenous science, if you may, gives us that which is not material, that which is not contained, that which is not in boundaries, that which is not staying put, right? That which is constantly changing. And that's scary, right? I mean, I think that's the tension, right? Ooh, what do I do with if things are not in form? But they've never been formed. We've just formed them in our minds. We've had imaginary boundaries, right? We've had imaginary ideas of self. I am myself, right? And I'm not you, right? We, we have this distance, but we don't, we really don't because we're entangled in this atmosphere, you know, in this climate that we are in. So how do we start to look at ourselves as a community of life? And I think that is the, if you may, indigenous consciousness. The logic of thinking that we are, we are not a particular intelligence, but we are part of many forms, many particular forms of intelligence, and that ours isn't superior or inferior. It is just a piece of the much bigger puzzle that we're looking at when we talk about intelligence and diverse forms of intelligences.

Yeah, that's, that's fascinating. And it's, I guess the question that comes to me is then if that's the case, what is our role? And that's kind of, you know, what are we to do here, right? As humans.

Yeah.

Given we find ourselves. Yeah.

What is our purpose? You know, these words are coming up, of course, because, and I think it's, it's brilliant that we are sitting with these questions because on the other hand, the, the question behind that is, have we ever had a role to play in the, in the grand, you know, have we ever really had a real purpose? Or have we told ourselves stories of purpose based on our, you know, based on our conception of superiority, like the superior species? So then we gave ourselves a purpose based on that narrative, right? I think what is important is to find out if we're not the center of creation, right? And if we're not in charge, so to speak, of all our other relations, then we don't have that role to play. We have a different role to play, which is to integrate our values into the wholeness of the ecosystem that we call this Earth, right? What How would those values be, become? And the question I would pose is, who do we need to become, right? Rather than who are we, what does it mean to be human? Who do we need to become in order to be members of this community of life that we have thought for a long time we were in charge of, and now we're suddenly going like we don't? So then we need to think about who do we need to become, and that's where values come in. And those values are not unique to one culture. They're not unique to Indigenous people or non-Indigenous people. We need to find formations, new formations for new values to emerge. And they might be, they might look very different to what we value. We might think we have compassion as a universal value that we have, but maybe it's not universal, right? We might think that we are all yearning for peace, but maybe we are looking for peace because we've not been peaceful. So I think it's digging back to sort of the human condition and how you relate with the non-human entities. And that's where we might find common ground, I think.

I love that. And I, you, you mentioned values earlier and I did kind of put a pin in it to come back to, cuz I do, I re— it's been coming up a lot for me in different conversations, whether it's a conversation about which, you know, educational curricular or pedagogical approach, it doesn't, it, what, whatever the conversation is, actually when you scratch at the surface of the conversation, you quite quickly get down to, well, what do you actually care about? What kinds of things do you care about for, for example, these young people that you are creating an educational experience with and for?

What do you care about?

What do you value? And I think so often we like to stay at the level of the doing, what, you know, what is this thing or this new approach or whatever it is, rather than, as you say, potentially there's more common ground when you really start saying, well, you know, why is it that you prefer this more didactic teaching approach, for example? What is, what is it that you actually care about?, and really value that underlies your choices. And if you haven't reflected on that and it's just a habitual way of doing, maybe something to think about. But you know, what is it? What are the values that underlie that? Because I think being more open about what those values are to what do we care about, the idea of care is some so deep in what we are, I think, as organisms and humans, caring to stay alive, caring about things, things in the broader sense, there's something important there to try and work with, I think. So then maybe, as you say, maybe there's common ground when we really get down to those questions.

It's interesting that you bring in the element of care, which I was actually going to talk about. So a dear friend of mine and a colleague who I've been so privileged to work with is actually doing work on care, care as a, as a unifying human element, the art of caring. And he has coined the term, which is is we are homo curans. We actually do. Wow, okay, interesting. Brilliant.

That is brilliant.

And, and I want to just backtrack to what you said about, you know, if you ask the youth, the younger generation, you know, what do you care about? Why do you care about this value and not that? Why do you value this? These are really important questions to ask because we don't ask— we ask what are our values, but we don't ask why those are our values. That should be the follow-up question, right? And I think that part of it is because we have narratives that have invented what we should value over time, as one does, right? Even within family might be habitually doing certain things, and then those habits become your values. And so there's no questioning why that is, and your children become automatic— those are their automatic responses in life. And I think if we look at the narratives of separation, for example, the heart and the mind, you know, that's been a narrative that we told for so long now, that I am a thinker or I'm a, I'm a feeler, right? And we never think about how that is all happening within the same individual and where is the integration. I think we've been living in the world of monster storytelling. You know, our stories are full of monsters. You know, the scenes are stories of division, and division, you know, creates something in between. And what is that sitting in between us is a scary thing. Fear takes on the shape of something, whether it's capitalism is our big monster of the day, right? Or the gender divide, or the politics, or Donald Trump, whatever you want, you know, that's the big monster. We're so accustomed to seeing that, and you see that, of course, in Hollywood, there's always the hero's journey and he has to conquer something, right? And here I even want to invoke Bayo Akomolafe's ideas of tricksters. Maybe it is the moment that we need to bring in those trickster characters. You know, I give the metaphor of if you have a garden and you've been working in your garden and you've been planting things and they've been growing over time, you might get into the habit of expecting the same things to grow without actually thinking that maybe the conditions in the environment are changing, and therefore you might— the birds might drop new seeds of, you know, from wherever grow. And that might be surprising, and you might start uprooting things that are actually useful. So I think the question is, what, what is asking to grow? And that's where we will cultivate what really our values are. What is seeking to grow in this new space where we have the monsters and we have a few tricksters in our midst in the garden, right? What is asking to grow? And I think this is a moment to really contemplate and and maybe even rejoice in the, in the space of being given the opportunity to not be burdened with the responsibility of looking after every single thing because we don't know every single thing's function, right? Be curious about it. Why is this thing growing? Why is this particular narrative taking so much form and shape? You know, what does it mean to live in an interconnected world? Curiosity here plays a much bigger role. Then we will invent something new and different. If we're curious enough, slowing down enough to actually see and sense into the space in between that sort of thinker and feeler. I think this is where we are at and, and we can all agree that we have feelings and we have thoughts, but somewhere in between we have not managed to integrate that head and the heart and therefore then get into embodiment as well. Yeah.

Yeah. No, absolutely. I love all of that. And it strikes me one of the things that's the kind of the slight irony is that we need, often we need to wait for the modern science to catch up. People like Lisa Feldman Barrett and her work on emotion to prove in inverted commas that the head and the heart are, of course, I mean, everything is emotional. Everything, you know, there's no thought that it's not also emotional, you know, and there is deep interconnectedness. So it's, I just, yeah, I find that quite always a funny irony that we didn't trust that we knew that already. We had to wait till the science tells us.

Exactly. And once the science And once the science told us, all we did was, oh, that's affirmative, but we didn't embody it.

Yeah.

So now what are we going to wait for that embodiment?

Yeah.

And while we're waiting for that embodiment is when we are in a crisis. We are continually in a crisis that we can resolve by literally embracing what is growing within us and amongst us. Yeah.

But it, I love what you were saying about the, the kind of curiosity and the humility, cuz that again, it just comes up all the time in my conversations and it's almost like that's what wants to grow right now is this value and disposition of curiosity and humility because it's just so overwhelming. And often it is a kind of a bleak conversation about what do we do? How do we solve the polycrisis? Rather than this rejoicing you just talked about, which is, you know, which is, feels of course much lighter and more generative, more, it creates possibility when there's some rejoicing happening. Seems a strange thing to hold, to be rejoicing in a moment of crisis, but that—

And yet that's what we often do. We rejoice in moments of crisis. I mean, even there are many multiple stories across the world during the coronavirus where people, unlikely people came together. I had a friend who was passing pizzas over the fence to her neighbor, you know, while before that there was that boundary between our house and your house. But all of a sudden you're stuck in this space and you don't know. The not knowing brought out the joy in a way. So I think we must look at the other side of things, right? So if your garden is full of weeds, What's growing around those weeds? Why are those weeds popping up? And this is the point of learning from a point of not knowing rather than from a thesis. I've got this hypothesis that this is what, you know, science does, right? I've got this hypothesis, this is what I'm looking for, this is my question, and then I'm going to go out and seek. Indigenous knowledge or indigenous science is slightly different. It comes from a space of, it is an adventure. I don't know. And therefore I will discover what I don't know as I continue with the journey of not knowing. And it's not to mean that you're going to be open to anything and be embracing of any kind of crisis that comes and be helpless and stay in a state of contentment all day long.

Yeah.

There's an intelligent way of humbling yourself. Being humble is intelligent, I think. You know, being humble is a way of saying, I don't know enough about this. I'm curious to know, and I will rejoice in the middle of the not knowing. And I think that's what we need for our times, is joy.

Beautiful. I love it. And obviously one of the things that seems to be a very big feature of your work, which you've already invoked a few times, is story and narrative. And I think that's one of the things I really would love to ask you about a bit more explicitly, because I think, as you said, the, the way that the narratives create particular dispositions towards valuing certain things or just, or even unthinking habitual ways of just, this is how we do things, right? Because through story, but, but somehow the story is the technology that is, or one of the technologies that's doing a lot of that work. It's like carrying a lot of the values and the, the ways of being. And it feels like kind of, as you were saying, in a way, certain stories have been allowed to pretend that they're not stories, right? They've like, they've been allowed to frame themselves as universal truths rather than stories. So yeah, I've got loads of questions about story, but I just find it a really interesting vehicle that, that you are, seem to be using in your work really powerfully, partly as a way of learning, I think perhaps, but like, for example, your story about Sala, I wanted to ask you about, you know, and just maybe kind of very concretely, you could just describe a bit of that story of Sala and why you wrote that, because I think in very real ways, it feels like you are using story as a means to do the work that you're— that we've just been talking about?

So stories, I'll start with boring stories. I find stories that continue with promoting one emotion throughout, which is actually most of our stories. If you listen to stories of trauma, for example, and this is not to demean or to discredit or to reduce certain traumas and claim that they're not real, whatever it is that you feel, that's real, right? We can agree on But it is the overtold story of a particular human condition, whether it is depression, for example, or whether it is, you know, some form of psychosis that affects the wellbeing of humanity and then becomes sort of a generalized condition that we can say is universal when we know that different cultures deal with different things differently. For example, the story of abandonment or the story of, you know, a child who felt they were not loved enough, even the concept of love, right? It's a very boring story when it only looks at that love is between two people, a mother and child only, and not the whole entire experience of this person being taken into account. And then eventually that person saying, well, I didn't feel loved enough, but actually they're referencing the love between them and a parent and not the love that they felt in a community. That's very different. The stories that speak to me are stories that actually have multiple emotions, multiple ways of engaging with that story. So they're very open-ended. And they're up to your own interpretation. And that's really the original African way of oral storytelling. So I began with storytelling as a way of recollecting folktales from Africa that might give us an inclination of how societies in the past dealt with crisis that they face. You know, they dealt with famine, they dealt with issues of climate change and social dynamics that were not healthy within communities, and they told stories to try and work through these things. But they didn't leave out the bad stuff. You know, we tell good stories. We are very good at telling the happy ending story, right? But there was no happy ending and there was no sad ending. It was just an ending. The story was as it is and the emotions emerged as they are. So in order for a story to be truly effective, in my opinion, it has to leave you with multiple pathways for solving the problem that you had. You should not leave with just one solution if you have a problem. You should leave with so many multiple pathways, so many solutions that you are— you should leave feeling abundant. I've got so many tools in the toolbox. I came with one problem and actually I've got so many hammers, you know, which one will I use? It's up to you, right? Yeah, depending on what the problem you have. And so on Sala, this was actually, this is a very interesting thing that happened to me during COVID and my children were stuck at home as every parent had. We all had our kids at home and I was sitting at the dining table watching all my children with their devices and thinking to myself, this is the most absurd thing we could have come up to put our children in front of computer screens. And then I had a— my youngest was 5 years old, and we had to get him an iPad. He didn't have access to any of that before. All of a sudden, he's going to school on an iPad, you know, and he's in a classroom. And of course, he got into Minecraft and other things, so he wasn't actually paying attention to the classes. And I thought, is this the best that we could have come up with? And then suddenly, I started thinking about my own childhood and what would that have looked like if we had experienced corona in my times when I was a little kid, I would have been in the countryside with my grandmothers. I would have been running around in the bush playing with worms and insects and discovering all kinds of things. Really, that was my childhood. And then it drove me to think, to start wondering about the children of indigenous communities in Kenya where I'm from, and what was COVID for them? Because the narrative of the day was so many children are not in school, they'd have no access to education. And I started really feeling irritated with this idea of education. Because we only could think of education as inside the classroom and not beyond. So what about the kids who've always been in the bush? Where are they? What's going on? And what I discovered was that some of the indigenous communities had reverted back to certain cultures, certain really dangerous cultures, such as, you know, marrying off the 13-year-old girls, right? Because that was one way of securing themselves economically. And so I realized that we were all struggling with how to capture this moment of a global crisis and our knee-jerk reaction was the same. In the contemporary modern world, we thought, just bring on the technology, let the children learn, don't disrupt that. The indigenous people are like, well, let's just go back to our old, all of our old traditions and do the things that we used to do before we entered the modern world. And I thought there's something missing in between. There's a voice of wisdom. And to me, the voice of wisdom is the elders, it's the grandmothers. So I had this idea that it is time to bring the grandmother's voice in storytelling.

Yeah, love it.

Grandmother needs to show up here. This is the moment at which the matriarch needs to show up and actually take care of the family. And so the story of Sala emerged out of this tension between the indigenous people's reaction to going back to what they know, which is going back is you can't cherry pick, right? You pick everything, which is good and bad. And our modern society, which thought, let's advance with technology, right? And the children were stuck in between, in between two worlds. And so I weaved in the storytelling and elements of Sala are very much my own childhood. They're also my own children's experiences over time. And Grandmother was obviously very much the voice of my grandmother. Yeah. And I actually even included elements of my grandfather who was kind of like a village elder and warrior and all these things. And I wanted to bring in this idea of you can have both. You don't have to have one or the other. You can have both. We can think of clever ways of incorporating this perennial wisdom with modern technology. And Sala, part of the story I wanted to show was that also we have issues amongst us, you know, the issue of gender, the issue of girls not having access to the same opportunities as boys. And that's clear around the world, but in particular in indigenous communities, at least in Kenya, it's a different way of engaging with that tension. And so I wanted Grandmother to weave in the wisdom of how to to overcome certain boundaries and become your own culture hero. You know, whether you're living in the bush in Africa or you're living in New York City, what is this way that in which you can interpret culture for humanity to really transcend these differences that we have and actually bring us closer to more palatable wisdom, wisdom that is available to all and not just contained in one area and not given to others. What would that look like? And that's how Sala came to be.

Amazing. And it, I feel like there's a, there was some, something in there about agency as well, of like, of Sala kind of discovering her own ability to act in the world, right? Her own voice. Yeah, right. Okay.

I really wanted her to have the voice, the voice of this young girl, and it could be any child, right? It could be any child anywhere. And I wanted her to be relatable as well. It's not just a story about an indigenous girl of the Samburu community. And it's not just the story of girls versus boys. I wanted there to be elements of how complex these relationships are, but that there is a missing voice, you know. And so that there is a— it's very much tailored to empowering girls explicitly, and also that sort of grandmother being the force behind that voice of the little girl child. But at the same time, within the story, one of Sala's helpers was her best friend who was a young boy in the class. So there was that as well. I wanted to hold that within these complex ways in which we relate to each other and how when we need help, who do we turn to, right? And yeah, and weave in elements of indigenous knowledge. You know, Sala learned a lot from her grandmother, how to sort of feel the earth with her eyes closed if she's, you know, when they're summiting the mountain. And then also the guide was a very sort of traditional Moran, which is a warrior of the tribe. And that's also a very patriarchal role, right? So I wanted that, those, to weave in the ways in which we are, and we can't disentangle ourselves from our particular roles that we've given ourselves, but we can change those roles depending on when they are needed. You don't discard everything. You can be resourceful around these elements of who we are, what we're doing. What does it mean to be a boy? What does it mean to be a girl? What does it mean to be a grandmother? Grandmother can change the rules and become something else. So I wanted to break the rules a little bit.

I love it. Now, I love, I love that idea of that kind of multidimensionality and complexity of life, which we know we live every day, but we, again, we flatten in stories often into this type of person does this, these types of things, and this person's the hero and this one's the villain. As you say, it's so, yeah, flattening and very simplistic. Um, so I love that.

It's not as clear when you have so many emotions on the table, right, that you will find actually that those roles are a product of emotions that have come up from stories that we've told ourselves about what it means to be a man or a woman. But if we break down those emotions, we find that we're actually looking at ourselves, mirroring ourselves, our humanities on display, not our functions as humans.

Right. No, absolutely. I mean, I just quite practically, I would love to just ask you, because one of the things that it makes me wonder is how we might use story more effectively in educational context. You know, obviously that's my world and thinking about how do we bring more of these complex humanizing approaches into formal education space. I absolutely hear what you're saying. We, we define the broad idea of education as formal schooling as a very narrow thing. And that's clearly not what it is. Or that's not how I very much believe that's not what education is. It involves family, it involves multi-generations, all of those things. But I think in particularly in formal education, we've lost some of those humanizing ways of being and maybe using story again as a vehicle to bring back in some of that nuance and complexity of ways of living and being. I don't know if you had any reflections about that.

Oh, I have plenty of reflections and I think about this all the time. It's interesting that you're also reflecting on that. Intergenerational wisdom is lacking in our education systems. We talk about, you know, we put children in a box. In a school box, right? And we then give them educators. Those educators need to be in touch with other educators that have been around. And I think that one of the things that could be a beautiful project actually to do is to think about ways in which we can bring different voices of storytellers and storytelling being very particular. What are the stories we want to share and for what reasons, right? You know, that's very much in the design aspect. You must think about that, right? When you're designing a curriculum with storytellers? And by storytellers, I mean, could we have spaces in our education systems where Indigenous wisdom keepers are also part of the education system, right?

Yeah.

And not just them, right? We then have— maybe it is retired professors as part of that elders council of the new education system. And could we have a space in which children have access to this entire So then the teachers are mediators, they're mediums, they're holding the container, the space where that intergenerational wisdom can emerge. And I think it is time for us to actually engage with the elders, but not as just the elders because we like them and we love them and we want to give them a role, but that the elders that have something interesting to contribute towards the education of the next generation. And then in between we have the, the instructors, the educators, also learning, training themselves to become the elders, right? So that there's this continuum and we actually give respect and credibility to the teaching discipline. Teachers are the most important people that we have left, really, truly in the world that take care of our children and they need help. And we keep talking about, you know, teachers need more help, but who is going to give the help to teachers? I think they need to look to the wisdom keepers. They need to look to the older generation of curators and bring that into the space where education is happening and ease, give them ease. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I love that. It makes me think of, I don't know if you know Sugata Mitra and his Granny Cloud, right?

Yes.

I love those.

Yeah.

He was bringing that in, right?

Yes.

Very literally zooming in lots of grandmothers to bring their wisdom. I love it.

And actually, to be fair, I think that might have been at the back of my mind an inspiration to writing Sala years back.

Ah, okay.

I didn't realize it then because I was, I remember coming across that work and thinking, that's it right there. The grandmothers are just sitting. Nobody is talking to them. And I thought the same thing in African villages, you know, the grandmothers are at home and the children have gone off to school, and then we've essentially just removed responsibility from grandmothers. They don't have anything to do and they're not in touch with the kids. And now we have all this technology that actually we can use to bridge that gap, you know.

Absolutely.

In person, it could be a different medium.

Amazing. No, absolutely. This is So interesting. Thank you so much, Okani. I mean, yeah, no, there's so much here and I think it just, it feels so resonant with many different aspects of the conversations going on in education. So no, thank you. I mean, I feel like there's a lot more that we could talk about, but thank you so much for your time and I really, really appreciate it.

Thank you. So I'm, I'm happy to come around again and we can then dig into AI cuz that's its own. I think that deserves its own hour to be honest.

Right.

There's so much to unpack there. And of course it's changing constantly. So by the time we speak, I think we'll be talking about AI differently than what I would probably say 2 So true.

Amazing. Thank you so much. Lovely, lovely to meet you. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.