Schweitzer was, as many of
his contemporaries, convinced
that Europes culture was
developed on a higher grade. His
relation to colonialism was
discrepant. On the one hand, he
criticised its inhuman actions of
which he distanced himself with
the term brotherliness.
On the other hand, he had
introverted its ideology so that
he considered black people as
primitive human children, who
of course should
never be exterminated but should
be guided orderly, based on
Christian principles.
The primitive conditions of
living in Lambaréné reflected
this image of primitive people
and was even enforced by the
public in Europe and in America
that honoured Schweitzers
tutelage with contributions
needed for his work. He adapted
his activities to these
expectations because the more his
activities corresponded to such
expectations the higher were the
contributions. He used them to
expand the village de
lumiere thereby targeting
the expectations of the
participating public.
|
ALBERT
SCHWEITZER IN HIS OWN WORDS:
11
Solidarity has
tight limits for the primitive. It
involves only the blood relation, that
means members of the clan, which is
representing his idea of a family. I am
talking from experience. I have such
primitives in my hospital. If I ask a
patient of this group who is not
bed-ridden to do small tasks for a
bed-ridden patient he will do it only if
this one does belong to his clan. If this
is not the case, he will answer rather
simple-minded: This one is not a
brother of mine. He cannot be moved
to do a service for this foreigner,
neither through reward nor through
threat.
12 The black will work
very well under certain circumstances,
but he will work only that much as the
circumstances request from him. He is
always only a casual worker.
African writer Chinua
Achebe has quoted
Schweitzer as saying: The African
is indeed my brother but my junior
brother, which Achebe criticized
him for, though Achebe seems to
acknowledge that Schweitzers use of
the word brother at all was,
for a European of the early 20th century,
an unusual expression of human solidarity
between whites and blacks. Later in his
life, Schweitzer was quoted as saying:
The time for speaking of older and
younger brothers has passed. It is
also more likely that Schweitzer was
speaking in terms of modern civilization
than of class relationship of man; this
would be consistent with his later
statement that the time for
speaking of older and younger brothers is
over, and his discussion of the
modernization of primeval
societies. Later in life, he became more
convinced that modern
civilization was actually inferior
or the same in morality than previous
cultures.
PUPIL 3:
We do not want to overlook anymore that
the core business of Albert Schweitzer,
his work in the jungle-hospital of
Lambaréné, is marked by some major
contradictions.
The
journalist James Cameron visited
Lambaréné in 1953 when
Schweitzer was 78 and
found significant flaws in the
practices and attitudes of
Schweitzer and his staff. The
hospital suffered from squalor
and was without modern amenities,
and Schweitzer had little contact
with the local people. Cameron
did not make public what he had
seen at the time: according to a
recent BBC dramatisation, he made
the unusual journalistic decision
to withhold the story, and
resisted the expressed wish of
his employers to publish an
exposé aimed at debunking
Schweitzer.
American journalist John Gunther
also visited Lambaréné in the
1950s and reported Schweitzers
patronizing attitude towards
Africans. He also noted the lack
of Africans trained to be skilled
workers. After three decades in
Africa, Schweitzer still depended
on Europe for nurses. By
comparison, his contemporary Sir
Albert Cook in Uganda had been
training nurses and midwives
since the 1910s and had published
a manual of midwifery in the
local language of Luganda. |
PUPIL 1:
Albert Schweitzer is according to
School Web names giver
for, in the meantime, more than fifty
schools in German speaking countries
We in Nienburg have been the first one
who did bear his name and we are the
first one to try to find out how the
consciousness of our names patron
developed, and out of what matter it came
into being
Hold on for that matter!
Who are you? And what
book is it that you wave with?
45
The personality structure of
the black African is to a large extent
formed by cultural and social living
conditions as well. For this reason it
differs from that of the European or
North American. At the same time it does
not sufficiently match the conditions
that must be met to successfully cope
with the European/technical civilization,
although it is this civilization that the
black African insists on adopting. For
this reason substantial incompatibilities
exist which become apparent when
cooperating with black Africans, for
example in the field of development
cooperation. How this differing
personality structure has been formed,
what characteristics must particularly be
taken into account, and how the resulting
difficulties can be dealt with are
problems examined in this book.
You wrote it?
45
Yes, I am Dr. Christoph
Staewen, born in 1926, a German medical
doctor, specialist of psychiatry,
neurology and psychotherapy. In 1963 I
began to study in Western Nigeria,
amongst the people of Yoruba, the
conditions of uprooting of these Africans
caused by the increasing confrontation
with the technical civilisation of the
White Man, and provoking more and more
reactions of anxiety and deformations of
behaviour. In Nigeria I received texts of
the famous, secret Ifa-oracle. Later I
worked for more than six years as
all-round-doctor for Africans in Niger,
Congo-Brazzaville and Chad, where I
continued my research on African
psychology.
One of the most important findings: each
African is born into a clan. A clan is to
its members not only sort of an
institution providing social security and
protection, but it is above all a kind of
a powerful and shelter providing SECOND
SOUL for every single one only
that there does not exist really somebody
as a single one but only as a part of the
whole organism that is called clan. This
,second soul for all arranges for
each of its parts the sense of life, its
whole joy of life, its steadiness and its
orientation on its path of life.
How much the existence of a clan can ease
the life for the single African, will
even make it bearable for him, is to be
observed in medical projects. These facts
I have learned, besides a couple of
others, from Albert Schweitzer in his
jungle-hospital in Lamabaréné!
To me it is inconceivable how it was
possible that he, despite his almost
superhuman efforts, was brought into
discredit especially within the younger
generation as a patriarch who allegedly
would not take advice or as a supporter
of colonial attitudes.
In reality and I know this from
conversations with him he knew,
long before us, more about Africans than
all his critics. He was humble enough to
treat his African patients according to
conditions that were important to them in
order to become healthy again. When the
local people arrived in their dug-out
canoes they brought with them even their
chicken or a goat which, otherwise, may
have fallen prey to a leopard at home.
Albert Schweitzer allowed them to
recreate their way of family life around
their patient. Dirt was simply moved
away. Each family felt responsible to
cook for its patient. The hospital did
offer, for free, what was needed to
prepare food for everybody, the healthy
ones included. For this service Albert
Schweitzer expected assistance by healthy
and strong clan-members: women would wash
for the patient and for the hospital, men
helped to set up more and more
outbuildings for patients, made of timber
and stilted to protect against
river-floods and snakes.
Construction continued even beyond the
death of Albert Schweitzer because the
queues of patients grew from year to year
although beyond the other bank of the
river in the little town of Lamabaréné,
a cute European hospital had been
established. But, it offered only fixed
and limited time for visitors. Thus,
mainly inhabitants of the town used it;
all Gabonese who arrived with their
families from far away preferred the
hospital-village of Albert Schweitzer.
Work provided by relatives of patients
was never compulsory labour but modest
reciprocal service for the cost-free
treatment of the patient and the free
provision of food. Over the years, such
work provided immeasurable help to
thousands of Africans. And this was
understood by Africans themselves.
SPUPIL 1:
And it is understood by us as well, thank
you, Herr Staewen!
Did you really understand? Or is it
only an attempt to react like adults do,
especially those who engage themselves
with Africans in development-work? Before
I leave, I would like to tell you
something that I learned about children
in Africa.
45
We had found a
place to set up tent for the night. It
was at he bottom of a valley surrounded
by slopes full of rubble. Not too far
away, beyond one of these slopes, we saw
as silhouettes against the darkening sky
the roofs of a Kirdi-village. The Kirdi
were seen, at that time, by almost
everyone with contempt since they are
walking around naked. They are considered
primitive only to be of use
for example in the town of Oudjidji, when
those seemingly endless herds of tourists
are carried along to watch half-naked
girls moving in a spiritless sort of
dance to be repeated time and again. But
we were in another part of the region and
there were only a couple of cheerful boys
rushing down, carefully navigating the
rubble. They settled themselves quite
politely some five metres away to watch
with awe all these curious things taken
by us from our Landrover. Among the boys
were two or three with small tropical
abscesses on their legs which we treated
and dressed properly. Before night fell,
the children rushed to get home. No
African likes to move at night because he
believes there are too many ghosts
rampant who could be dangerous. During
the sixties it was in Africa
differently from, say, Italy quite
safe for campers to sleep in a tent; no
one would creep close to cut the lower
edge of the tent with a razor in order to
steal the baggage. This time, however,
there was a curious tapping noise
approaching the tent in the middle of the
night. You dont feel good abut
something like this; I, therefore, rushed
out of the tent
and there was in
the light of my torch the stumbling
feature of a boy, perhaps ten years old,
on his back a girl of perhaps eight,
perhaps his sister, which he carried,
panting and gasping, through the rubble
towards our tent. At her lower leg, the
girl had a huge and deep tropical
abscess; she was not able to walk. In the
early hours, we could treat her and we
took her back home where we left
dressing-material and sulphonamide
powder.
Why did I tell you about this experience:
Because of this little boy, an alleged
primitive, who had realized
that not to miss these Whites at
the bottom of the valley, so that they
could treat the girl as well before they
would disappear he had to overcome
his fear of nightly ghosts, he had to
make a tremendous effort to carry the
girl at night on a dangerous climb
downwards through the rubble of the
slope.
Who of us, in the same position and of
the same age as this boy, would have
acted similarly? This is Africa too, this
is how a clan can empower each of its
members: For the sake of someone else to
walk through a night filled with fear.
I am sure, you are going to understand as
I had too in my later years, although in
a real environment. Please, continue in
this virtual one.
PUPIL 2:
Our Working
Group Journalism meets, in
the real world, every Wednesday
in room 112 with nothing else on
our mind than to write
Everyone can join to find out how
texts are made, texts for
newspapers, texts for radio,
texts for imagined travels
|
For our guests from the
African TAZARA-Express we accepted to get
involved in such an imagined travel, and
we found out that Albert Schweitzer was
forty-four years of age when his
nationality was decided upon in a
railway-wagon
CONTROL!
REPLAY, PLEASE!
A forest, trees without
leaves. Rail-tracks are leading towards
the centre of the picture. In the
background, two trains are meeting. We
see the tail of the left one, obviously
parked in a long left bend; of the right
train, we see the head with its steam
engine. It must have stopped shortly
before the points, which lead to the main
track.
What we really see is the switching of
points of world history
We watch
the frame in which on 11th November 1918,
in the forest of Compičgne, an armistice
was signed which ended World War I.
PUPIL 1:
Born in Kaysersberg, Schweitzer
spent his childhood in the village of
Gunsbach, Alsace (German: Günsbach).
Long disputed, the predominantly
German-speaking region of Alsace or
Elsaß was annexed by Germany in 1871;
after World War I, it was reintegrated
into France. Thus, Schweitzer received
the French citizenship, however he liked
to call himself Alsatian Elsässer
and Cosmopolite; and he was fluent
in German and in French.
The dispute about the philosophy of
Existentialism, just becoming popular in
France, occupied him in the late years of
his life, possibly partly because he was
personally connected with Jean-Paul
Sartre who was a son of his cousin
Anne-Marie ...
Stop!
This one we met somehow in passing!
Where is comrade Trotsky? Did he remain
on the train?
And didnt he get sort of an advice
from this French philosopher?
|