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I'm Lee Chungrejo, and this week we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. We're talking today with Sam Deschuter. He's author of A Global Approach to Local Problems, how to write a longer, deeper, and wider history of the international year of disabled persons in Kenya. Sam, thanks so much for joining us today.
Thank you for having me. First of all, can you tell us how is writing a longer history push the mission of an international organization? Yeah, that's an interesting question. My article in itself does not initially aim at pushing this mission of international organizations, but I'd say inadvertently it shows the potential of doing so, and gives a few clues as to how this could be done.
If we take the example of disability, which is central to my article, I think my article shows that writing this longer history shows that in devising these disability policies in Kenya, the idea of development has always been central, and part of having development as an ultimate goal was that there was always this reduction to economic logic. So this basically meant that a disabled person was seen as a burden that had to be turned into international assets, which meant turned into a productive worker, and that whole discourse kind of traces back all the way to at least late colonialism. But that discourse that was guided by the project of development was actually also a central discourse or a central part of the logic of international organizations. And so if you then jump to the present day, you can see that very same basic argument is still being made by a lot of international organizations that work specifically on disability inclusion and development.
They kind of give this economic case for including disability and development practices, which boils down to this kind of argument about that it is more cost effective to do something about disability and to turn disabled people into productive workers. And so showing this longer history of where these ideas came from, I think that this can be interesting and that this can push the mission of international organizations. Because nowadays you actually see that more and more historical work on international organizations is being done, and that organizations like the ILO, like the International Labor Organization, also say UNESCO, the World Health Organization, that these organizations are actually also encouraging and facilitating this kind of historical research. And one can hope that they use this research that traces this long period of present day practices, that they use this history to evaluate their past practices or understand where present day practices come from, but also where these practices might have been problematic in the past.
So for example, if we go back to the article, you can see that an economic logic that was used to tackle issues of disability, that one of the consequences of reducing everything to that economic logic was that false, you know, political, social, cultural aspects of disability and of barriers that disabled people faced in society were basically reduced or were not taken into account. And so disabled people were turned into workers, but there were no other accompanying efforts to mitigate any other barriers they were facing. And so there was nothing being done about, you know, they had access to employment once they were trained, whether they had access to transport, whether there were issues of discrimination, social and cultural perceptions of disability that produced barriers for people with disabilities. So yeah, in short, I think writing this kind of longer history can actually help international organizations to critically examine their past, to rethink their present day activities and then from their own kind of push a critical agenda for the future.
Yeah, so you would mention that sort of colonial thread about productivity, was that something that international organizations were aware when they put these policies together at all? I don't know if it's really an issue of awareness or rather of something that was there and when international organizations, and in the case of Kenya, the International Labor Organization came into the picture that they had to work with what was there and what was there was actually, you know, headed to colonial roots and have this kind of economic logic. And in that way, you know, just kind of naturally got integrated into what these international organizations were doing. And then again, these international organizations, well, first of all, many of them also had their colonial roots, but secondly, they were also pushing this agenda of development and you know, thinking about disability in terms of development kind of led them to the same basic premises and same basic ideas about the centrality of employment, of training disabled peoples, of turning them into productive workers.
And so quite naturally, I would say they worked with the same kind of premises and assumptions and these colonial policies or the colonial interventions. You also wrote that the reason why the assembly heads of state and government declared an African decade in 1999 was to provide quote, a local approach to the problems of disability and to develop local solutions to the problems. I think that's really interesting because I was reading another paper recently about local versus global responses to pandemics using Ebola in Africa as an example. Why do they need a local approach to disability?
Yeah, yeah, I think indeed there's this kind of interesting parallel that you can draw with responses to pandemics and even the current approach to pandemics. So first of all, you have this whole aspect and this whole discourse about local versus global perspectives that is going on here. And part of what I argue in my article is that first of all, as historians, it's sometimes useful to go past these global local dichotomies because if you look at what actually happens in the ground on the ground, then you see that international organizations are just working on the ground with local politicians, with persons with disabilities, with other organizations, even missionaries. And so they have to do things on the ground and they have to work with what's there and kind of framing this in something that is either a very global approach or a very locally made a solution.
As a historian, analytically, this is something sometimes not very useful. But then again, when you're studying this history, you come across these actors that do frame this kind of or that do frame this history in terms of global solutions and local solutions. And I think that is important that as a historian, you are attentive to when historical actors are doing this and you try to analyze what they are saying when they are saying this. So the question in this regard becomes, you mentioned the organization of African unity and that in 1999 they declared this African decade for persons with disabilities because they said that you went, had declared, you went decade for persons with disabilities, but that offered only global approaches.
We need local solutions. You know, your question, why did they actually think they needed a local approach to disability? And I think that reference to responses to pandemics is also very interesting. You mentioned the Ebola pandemic, but even if you look at the current COVID-19 pandemic, you have some critics in different African countries and also in Kenya that kind of formulate very similar critiques.
So for example, in Kenya, you have people saying that this whole quote unquote standard lockdown approach that we are used to in Europe and the US doesn't really work in a country like Kenya. So for example, there's this activist in Kenya called Gachie Gachie, who exactly warns of the dangers of what he calls copy-pasting solutions from Europe or from the US in Kenya. So in Kenya, you have President Kenyatta who is also calling people to stay at home, work from home, practice social distancing, but for many people in Kenya just doesn't conform to their everyday reality. So they're, for example, living in very densely populated settlements.
They're surviving on the wages. They're generating income through the informal economy. For example, just don't have easy access to drinking water to wash their hands regularly. So things like that.
And so you have these people like Gachie Gachie and Kenya and many others also in other African countries who are saying that interventions and responses to this pandemic must be thought of in a more local way. And I think that's an interesting parallel because part of what the Organization of African Unity was saying in 1999 is a very similar argument and most of it was actually economic for them. Because they said the solutions that were offered during the UN International Year for Disabled Persons and then the International Decade for Disabled Persons in the 1980s, much of the solutions that were offered were actually predicated on technology, on economic resources that just weren't available in many global South countries, in many African countries. And so there are, which was basically the same as what, for example, Kenyatta and I could start saying today that there is no one-size-fits-all solution that, whether you're talking about making a society accessible to disabled people or whether you're talking about fighting a pandemic.
You should always start from a thorough understanding of local context, of the political, economic, social, cultural context that you're working in. So that makes sense, and I guess that the technological and economic factors that play locally in Kenya really affect the way you create policy around disability. Whereas it seemed like in West Africa when it came to Ebola, sort of the cultural aspect was at play when it came to things like, you know, burials were really important there. How do you deal with that piece of the social and cultural fabric when you're dealing with the pandemic?
So it's, I guess, two different threads that we're seeing here. It feels like technology and economics are the bigger factor when it comes to disability policy than like a cultural factor or something like that. Yeah, well, the organization of African unity in their critique, they didn't really talk about that social and cultural aspect, but it's definitely also there. You see that when you look historically or even in the present day at which international organizations are doing, it turns off offering technical assistance in the field of disability that they are sometimes thinking about these social and cultural aspects.
But then again, so there's two things. First of all, of course, you could say that disability is something that is very much culturally contingent, you know, what disability is, how people experience disability, how people perceive disability is very much defined by the social and cultural context in which you're moving. But then the second point is that a lot of times these international organizations had very little grasp on this social, cultural context. And they kind of offered these glettitudes and cliches about what disability meant in Kenya or in other African countries.
And so, you know, rather than helping them in tailoring their approach to the social, cultural context in which they were intervening, it also created these new stereotypes about what Africa was and that also played into these ideas that existed about, you know, dark Africa, where everything is magic and everything is superstition. So that was also the danger of trying to think about this social, cultural context that they didn't always get it right and that also led to stereotypes about what disability meant in an African context. What's the international labor organization and how is it instrumental in Kenya's disability policies? Yeah.
Well, the international labor organization is actually a rather old organization, I'd say. So they celebrated actually their 100th anniversary last year. So they were founded in 1999. Wait, 1919?
Yes. Now it's a specialized agency of the United Nations, but you can see that its history predates the UN actually. I mean, there's a lot to say about, you know, what the ILO is because it has such a long history that I mean, I guess there's a few things that maybe are instrumental in understanding their involvement in this history of disability policies in Kenya. So first of all, the ILO international labor organization as, you know, kind of the title suggests is an organization that is dealing with all questions relating to labor to boot it up.
And so the first important thing is that, quote quickly, they seem to realize that disability was very closely linked to questions of labor. So there was a question of, you know, labor accidents that had not worked for, but also it was founded in 1919. So right after the first war, where a lot of countries were dealing with all these soldiers that came back from the war disabled and were thinking about how can we guide these, this disabled veterans back to employment. And so this is the first instance where the ILO got involved with issues of disability through their concepts of vocational rehabilitation.
So vocational rehabilitation was a rehabilitation that was centered on vocational training and ultimately aimed at getting people with disabilities into fixed employment, to put it simply. So right away from basically 1919, they were involved in this issue. But at that time, they were mostly what you would call a standard setting organization. So they wrote recommendations and conventions.
And so in 1955, for example, they produced a very important recommendation on vocational rehabilitation. But then the second thing is that since the 1940s, they more and more also became what you would call it basically a development agency. So they started doing technical assistance, so sending birds to global south countries to assist governments in different domains. And so this technical assistance became equally important to their standard setting activities.
They started since at least the late 1950s, started to send ILO experts in the field of vocational rehabilitation to global south countries, to African countries, also to Kenya. And so this I guess is kind of a first basic answer to your question, right? So the ILO started sending experts, technical experts in the field of vocational rehabilitation to Kenya. And so the Kenyan government actually requested these technical experts on several occasions throughout 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, asked the ILO to send them one or more technical experts in the field of vocational rehabilitation.
And they came to Kenya and they assisted the government, first of all, the Ministry of Social Services in developing and implementing vocational rehabilitation policies in the country. So that is, I guess, a simple answer to your question. A more difficult answer would be, of course, to really think about how instrumental they were exactly, but that is kind of a much more difficult question because, well, I guess there's two things. So first of all, the ILO had these standards setting activities.
So they devised these quote universal standards, like the 1955 vocational rehabilitation recommendation. And these standards were then to inform their technical assistance programs on the ground. But then when you look at what happened in Kenya, in Kenya, there were always just one or maybe two ILO experts on the ground. And these experts also worked within the Department of Social Services.
They had to work with Kenyan politicians, civil servants. They had to work with the resources that were available. So in the end, you will see that these ILO experts never did kind of a straightforward translation of universal standards on the ground policies and practices. Rather, they were working within the confines of the Kenyan political system, of Kenyan economic resource.
And of course, the agency and the actions of Kenyan politicians, bureaucrats, especially also of Kenyan disabled people themselves, they were at least equally important in shaping these disability policies. So it's hard in that way already to assess what exactly was the influence of the ILO in this whole process. And secondly, also, I think it's important to see that at times it becomes very hard to distinguish actually between the ILO and the Kenyan government, because both had that same basic goal of development. And so that also made that they had a very similar approach to its disability policies.
In both cases, both for the Kenyan government and for the ILO, this centered around vocational rehabilitation around getting disabled people into employment. So given this convergence of games and goals, it's always very difficult to assess how instrumental the ILO exactly was in developing policies in Kenya. Yeah, I'd say given, of course, the continuous presence of ILO experts from the 1960s all the way throughout the 1980s, it is, of course, safe to say that these experts, and I would say that actually that's a good way of saying that ILO experts rather than the ILO, that ILO experts have had an important role to play in developing these policies. Yeah, another piece of history that I found really fascinating here and I didn't realize it all was that after independence in 1963, the Kenyan state was quick to develop a national policy and disability, and then the following year, a committee for the caring rehabilitation of the disabled was appointed by the cabinet.
So compared to other countries, where's Kenya in terms of their policies on disability? Seems like there are a few decades at least ahead of the US. I'm not sure about other European countries, but just wondering if you can give us a sense of where they land on the global stage there. Yeah, it's interesting that you say that you make that comparison and that you feel actually that they are ahead of the US.
I think that partly has to do with this history being very much unknown and that in the West we don't really have an idea that in a lot of African countries there's been a lot going on in terms of, in this case, devising disability policies. On the question of compared to other countries where Kenya stands in terms of their policies on disability, of course, first of all, that depends on what countries you're comparing to. But compared to the US and I think compared to many European countries, I would say they're definitely not ahead. Kenya, of course, has had a colonial history and I think that's very important.
So what you see in the US, for example, is that after the First World War, a lot started happening in terms of rehabilitation. This also goes for a lot of European countries, but that in Kenya, which was then, of course, under colonial rule that the colonial government, they did very little. They had this limited pension scheme, but even that wasn't implemented very well. Even after the World War, where in Kenya more things started happening in the first institute, some first schools opened, even then you see that the government actually wasn't very much involved.
It was involved in a very limited way and it left much to missionaries, voluntary agencies. And then independence comes, and as you say, already in 1964, GoMedia is being formed to think about formulating a national policy. But you can see that at that time they still had a tremendous task ahead of them and that compared to other countries that had not experienced colonial rule to European countries, to the US, they had a lot of catching up to be seriously. I think then it's also interesting to extend it at the time frame of my article because my article stops in the 1980s, but I think a lot has also happened since, if we're talking about where Kenya stands in comparison to other countries, I think it's also interesting to look at the present day a bit more.
So nowadays you have the presence for Disabilities Act in Kenya, which was drafted in 2003 and enacted in 2004, which was actually the outcome of a much longer process that had already started in the early 1990s. So you have this presence with Disabilities Act. One thing that it does, for example, is establishing a national council for persons with disabilities, which is kind of a council that has to monitor that policies are actually implemented, that rights of disabled people are being respected. But also more importantly, I think this act also talks about, you know, it still talks about vocation and rehabilitation, it still talks about employment for people with disabilities, but it also talks about rights, it talks about accessibility, about access to information to public buildings, to transport.
So all of these things that were very much absent in earlier policies and also very importantly, that are things that are mostly, you know, that have mostly come about you to the activism of disabled people themselves and disabled people's organizations. So in Kenya, you can see that especially in the 1980s, disabled people and their organizations became much more vocal. I think it's a lot of due to that activism, that things like rights and accessibility also became part of the agenda. Well, looking forward to seeing more from you on that as you continue documenting this.
Sam Schuder is author of A Global Approach to Local Problems, How to Write a Longer, Deeper and Wider History of the International Year of Disabled Persons in Kenya. Sam, thank you again so much for sitting down with us today. Thank you very much. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast.
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