Hey, just want to let you know the question about the autistic character in a fictional African country is my question. I have actually been to Africa – Uganda to be exact. That’s what I’m basing part of it on, but it needs to be fictional because I need to adjust the government and some of the terrain vehicles in.
I went with a church that associated with some medical groups. I have seen them training and teaching the local doctors a lot of medical basics.
Now, I don’t know about autistic people, but I’ve seen and heard so many cases about the mentally ill getting very poor or absolutely no treatment, or even being maltreated, especially with the very few expert psychiatrists around.
In one example, while I didn’t see the boy, but I heard of one with ADHD getting beaten and screamed at by his teacher because the teacher thought he was just very naughty. He had to be diagnosed by our psychiatrists and they had to teach the teacher and locals what to do.
In fact, one of the guys from Heartsounds told me that they had to teach that mental illnesses were not caused because they were cursed or something. In fact, he also talked about a lot of “healers” who actually tried to heal people by witchcraft. Something that went away in the West a long time ago.
In fact, I may be “improving” the situation by writing my autistic character as not being maltreated and being able to live quite well.
Hello!
This is probably beyond the scope of our blog but these are important conversations to be having. I want to begin by saying that I myself have never lived in Africa, and I would encourage any people who do live (or have lived) in Africa to share their thoughts. I will also add that by my understanding of this message, you have not lived in Africa either, although you have visited Uganda. To me, this is an important distinction – visiting a country doesn’t give the same understanding that one gets by living somewhere.
I think that we may be misunderstanding one another a little. My worries about colonialist overtones do not really come from the set-up of your story. A character who is homeschooled and living in a community where there isn’t knowledge of autism is not worrying to me. Instead, it is the language you chose to describe the set-up that makes me worry.
The colonialist overtones didn’t come from the idea that the doctors might not know about autism or that they might be ill-informed about mental health. It was calling them “uneducated” which raised alarm bells for me. There is a difference between being ill-informed or having no training about a particular subject and being “uneducated” in a general sense.
I am not doubting you when you talk about the difficulties and mistreatment faced by people with mental illness in Uganda. There is an extreme shortage of psychiatrists in Uganda, and there is stigma against mental illness.
Your example with the child with ADHD is unfortunately not unique to Uganda. Interpreting children with ADHD as being “naughty” is common around the world, and children with ADHD often receive harsh punishments. In a country where corporal punishment widespread (even if it is technically against the law), it does not surprise me that a child with ADHD would be punished in this way.
Similarly, stigma against mental illness and problems with the treatment of disability are not unique to Africa. As @scripttorture says:
Does Africa generally have problems with treatment of disability? Yes. But so does almost everywhere else. I don’t see these sorts of stories set in rich Gulf countries like Saudi and yet I know exactly why that is: because they mostly choose to isolate and imprison their disabled population and if you can’t see the abuse people assume it isn’t happening.
I think that working directly with disadvantaged people means that you become very conscious of the hardships and mistreatment that they experience. I realise that you have seen things first-hand in Uganda, and these things are troubling. I also think that if you do not have experience of working with patients with mental illness in the West, you won’t have the same awareness about people’s experiences in your home country. Which is not to say that things aren’t better in your home country – just that it is complicated, and a some experience in one context does not permit complete objectivity.
I also want to talk a little bit about traditional medicine and witchcraft. There are real problems and dangers associated with witchcraft. However, traditional medicine has an incredibly important part to play. @scripttorture again:
Yes, there are problems with stuff that really doesn’t work in a lot of African countries (there are also major problems with faked pharmaceuticals by the way) but the West has a long and massive history of misinterpreting African traditional treatments that actually work. We regularly dismiss genuine herbal medicines because they come with a song and dance.
We talk about the Ifa corpus as ‘divinitation’ when it’s used as a sophisticated therapeutic tool for mental health problems! I was lent a book on the ifa corpus by a friend at the univeristy a while back and it literally contains a ‘divination specialist’ learning about Western psychology techniques and responding with ‘Oh! That’s your Ifa!‘ Like- genuine joy and surprise that Westerners had this too! Coupled with curiosity about how we performed ‘readings’
In the West, we operate within a completely different cultural framework, where it often seems easy to draw a clear boundary between “science” and “superstition”, but that is a Western perspective. Definitions of mental illness itself are very cultural, and presentations of mental illness vary around the world. This is absolutely not to say that psychiatry does not have a place, but it is important to work within the cultural setting.
Joseph Atukunda, who founded Heartsounds, believes that spiritual medicine does have a role to play in the treatment of mental health issues in Uganda. Here is an excerpt from an aritcle from the BBC:
The psychiatrists at Butabika estimate that 90% of Ugandans believe that mental illness is linked to curses or demons.
And Joseph himself didn’t discount that possibility. He spent time at a traditional healer’s clinic run by a man called Dr Hassan Serwadda.
Dr Serwadda was clear in his diagnosis: there was witchcraft involved. “Some demons were on your head” he tells Joseph, “so I cut your head to put the medicine in it, I slaughtered a cock and bathed you in blood.”
For Joseph it was a difficult period, but he thinks the healer may have saved his life, and that tradition could have a wider role to play in mental health care.
“I was treated in this spiritual healer’s crude structures, but I am well now” he says. “Even conventional medicine has its advantages and disadvantages. So I can’t quite discard this spiritual healer as somebody who didn’t contribute at all to the wellness that I’m enjoying right now.”
The problem is that this whole discussion is an extremely complicated issue that needs to be talked about with nuance. The honest truth is that I don’t know if I have been successful in striking the balance between acknowledging the difficult situations faced by people with mental illnesses in Uganda and avoiding basing my reading of the situation from a solely Western perspective.
It is very easy to assume that one’s own way of thinking is right, but that is at the heart of colonialist attitudes. Europeans were able to conquer, invade, subjugate, all the while convincing themselves that it was for the good of those countries – after all, they were bringing “civilisation”, they were bringing Christianity. This “white saviour” attitude is ingrained in Western perspectives of other cultures, and it is very easy to fall into patterns of thought and speech that reflect these attitudes.
This is why it is so important to have an understanding of the issues around representation and the impact of the ways we talk about Africa. It is very very easy to phrase things in a way that plays into stereotypes about Africa.
In my original answer I recommended referring to @writingwithcolor unless you had an intimate understanding of the issues around representing African cultures. I would very strongly recommend familiarising yourself with the problems common in Western representations of Africa, and the effect that these narratives have on perceptions of Africa in real life.
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The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (this is a video, but closed captions and a transcript are both available). This is a good starting point for understanding the impact of representation in fiction. I strongly recommend this video!
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How to Write about Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina. This is a satirical article about stereotypical representations of Africa.
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The Americanization of Mental Illness by Ethan Watters. This is not specific to Africa, but discusses how culture influences presentation and interpretation of mental illness.
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An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Chinua Achebe (opens as a pdf). This has a more academic approach.
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Of Africa by Wole Soyinka. This is a book discussing post-colonial Africa, but I have not actually read this myself. I have not included a link, but it can be bought as either a physical book or an ebook.
Also Writivism is running several events in the UK about African literature this week (although, the chances of you being able to attend this are slim – I don’t even know which country you live in!)
They are launching an anthology – Odokonyero: A Writivism Anthology of Short Fiction by Emerging Ugandan Writers – which you can buy from Amazon. It is available on amazon.co.uk and .com.au and other versions of Amazon, not just the American site!
I will conclude by wishing you luck with your writing. It’s a great opportunity to learn about other cultures, so I hope that you have fun with your research!
-Mod Snail
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They aren’t about Uganda or colonization, but maybe they can help reframe the situation? Instead of Autism being a problem that only the modern West understands and can treat, it might help to remember that a lot of issues that Autistics face today are BECAUSE of how Western society works. A deep understanding of the society your story is set in is important.
kiragecko 