Fundamentals vs Fundamentalism*
  by Professor Satendra Nandan
The University of Fiji

Preamble

Thank you for your warm and kind invitation to me. I’m delighted to be amongst you for a variety of personal and professional reasons.

In a few years, I’d be completing half a century in academia. So you can imagine my gratitude and affection for teachers and the teaching profession. 

More specifically, I’ve a special regard for the FTU.  In 1982 when I won my first Parliamentary election, USP dismissed me.  With three children, a teaching wife, suddenly I was houseless, jobless; but neither hopeless, nor helpless.

The FTU offered me its Executive Officer’s position.  I accepted it enthusiastically. Fortunately, the Supreme Court reinstated me at USP, much to the dismay of some of my academic colleagues.  But that is another story…

What I really wanted to say in that personal note is that I remember such acts of kindness:  I’ve grown on them.  And I acknowledge it with pleasure today in your presence.

Another reason I’m delighted to be here is that your conference is being held at Swami Vivekananda College: both the man, after whom the College is named, and the institution mean a lot to me. I’ve been through many institutions, but none occupies that sacred space in my mind as Shri Vivekananda.  My many journeys into the ocean of education really began at Shri Vivekananda High School, then on the banks of the Nandi river, by the broken wooden bridge, near the Sangam temple, across a koro, in a tin-shed, next to a sugar-cane farm.  The school, in a visionary moment, was founded in 1949 – possibly the first sustained secondary education for children of farmers, workers, small shopkeepers, from all over Fiji. Since then I’ve been eternally grateful to the Rama Krishna Mission.

Luck was with me and a bit of pluck and labour helped.  The School was a revolutionary idea: seventy years after indenture.  Almost 130 years later we’re trying to create a University of our own – open, as the school was, to all:  no racial or religious distinctions, no class or colour divisions. An extraordinary achievement when you consider the few secondary schools in Fiji then were closed to many of us for these reasons.Another small reason that gives me some joy is that someone is putting together a collection of my selected essays and speeches form 1978-2008.  This address to you will form the last piece in the volume.  So thank you for the opportunity, Agniji - a kind of intellectual Agni priksha for me!

The theme of this conference is Fundamentals of Unionism: Its Implications for Teachers.  I’ve been a union person since my early days in Fiji and Australia.  Indeed I’ve been an active and paid member of the oldest Labor Party in the world – the ALP. And also the first Labour MP in Fiji Parliament. I do believe unions are vital for the welfare of a democratic society.  And so much of our world has been shaped by remarkable union men and women. The so-called evil empire of the Soviets fell because of Solidarity in Poland to mention one magnificent example. 

In 1789 we had the fall of Bastille; in 1989 the demolition of the Berlin Wall; girmit labour arrived in 1879 to save Fiji from colonial disaster.  And in all these revolutions, workers played their crucial role.  One hopes in 2009 or by 2029? The Great Bamboo Wall will also collapse, though monks are dying on the roof of the world at the moment while the Olympic torch is burning, not brightly but brutally. 

I’m also aware that you know more about the fundamentals of unionism than I do.  Many of you have contributed to FTU; I hope many more will continue to do so.  The Child: Our Hope is a splendid motto: - Child and Hope, you cannot think of two more meaningful words.  And your service as teacher and administrators is second to none.

Today, however, I wish to give a fundamentally different emphasis to the word ‘fundamentals’.  I want to talk briefly about Fundamentalism and the teachers’ critical role in resisting this global phenomenon that is threatening us in a variety of disguises, from  exclusionary indigineity to ‘international community’.

Teachers, in my opinion, have a trinity of dynamic roles:

Let me begin with the last. And with a local context.  In Fiji, despite all the talk of globalization, we have created a deeply fragmented society. Politically, I think, Fiji is a most racist country.  Many people still keep bleating:  Race is a fact of life.  So racism should be our way of life.  One wonders how much do they know about the real facts of life.  This racial fundamentalism is most damaging and reprehensible.  We, as thinking citizens, ought to challenge it all the time, in every institution, in every act, in every lesson we plan, learn and teach.

Here’s a local leader writing in one of our local dailies last Tuesday: ‘Race is a fact of life.  It is biological, God-given and one’s identity’.  He’s, of course, wrong on all three counts.   How can you persuade such people that the world is round when they continue to proclaim:  It is flat.  

For the first time in this country, a Prime Minister has stated categorically and clearly: We must not make race the determining factor of our national policies.  First it is wrong and immoral that an accident of birth should shape your and your children’s destiny; second, in Fiji, once we do that, the responsibility and  responsiveness of one community to the needs of individuals from another become less important.  The history of all civilized societies has been a struggle against persecution, marginalization and dispossession because of race and religion, colour and creed.  We cannot continue with this kind of thinking in the new millennium. 

The FTU and the FTA might wish to show the way.  If a teachers’ association is racially orientated, what hope is there for our children?  Life is not teaching 1 + 1 equals 2; that’s arithmetic.  In nation-building 1 + 1 always equals 1.  That is the art of living and even loving.  If we begin to discriminate in our classroom, how tragic that would be in these changing and challenging times.

Some of us have made racial thinking into a political art and have benefited from it.  It has defined us in our constitution; it has corroded our conscience; it has diminished us as people, citizens and individual human beings.  We’ve allowed ourselves to be defined by others; we’ve taken their valuation of ourselves.  Once you define a person by the racial tag, no further thought is necessary. The pigmentation of your imagination becomes the deciding criterion of your personality and perception.

In the past 130 years Fiji and Fiji-citizens have undergone many transformations.  In the 21 years since 1987, a segment of our society has undergone sea-changes:  deeper than our ancestors in the century before that day. Many of our children and relatives are now in New Zealand and Australia; Canada and California.  The world has widened for many. The suffering inflicted became a challenge accepted.  It’s been a creative suffering like a new birth. 

Many of our compatriots have moved into societies where racism was the norm but how they have struggled to progress beyond it.  And members of Unions have played their significant and enduring roles in changing the national consciousness: White Australia Policy is now turning into on Asian Programme as the recent Canberra Summit proposed.  The ‘yellow peril’ now appears like a golden sunrise on the economic horizon. 

History can be servitude; history can be freedom.  The journey of our girmit ancestors began under a racist empire; then they were subjects.  Today, as citizens, we should be living in a new world sharing our rights and shouldering our responsibilities.

But the real struggle against racism is now in our island nation.  Do we accept this as the only alternative possible for our society and our nation?  It didn’t work in South Africa; why should we let this snake seduce us in the Eden of the South Pacific?  It may come to you as a surprise that Nelson Mandela cast his first democratic electoral vote aged 76.  28 years in prison taught him patience and the principle of human relationships and the process by which a person, a nation can move forward.  The Chief Guest at his Presidential inauguration was his jailer.  On the side is the Robert Mugabe, 28 years as President and now his whole nation seems like a prison.

I teach literature.  At the postgraduate level my students, mainly teachers, talk about Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.  It’s a popular book and very readable.  However, I do sometimes feel how often its real message is missed.

Okonkwo, the protagonist of the famous African novel, has many admirable qualities. Yet he finally hangs himself.  Among the many issues Achebe is examining is the moral code of leaders which have to be more than a set of personal convictions.  Fiji has several leaders with many convictions!  But leaders need to be sensitive to the feelings and concerns of the community, both materially and intellectually.  Their personal values must be melded with the needs and aspirations of the society.  An Ibo saying puts it:  I am because we are.

Okonkwo is not in touch with his world around him.  And he kills, finally taking his own life.  Humility, simplicity and understanding might have been more meaningful for him, rather than false ideas of personal pride in which human identity was made subservient to tribal tradition.

In short, I’m saying the morality of life demands an open engagement with the life of others. Okonkwo’s autarkic approach to life prevents him from learning from others around him.  The capacity to re-examine our convictions in the light of new knowledge, changing circumstances, is a creative quality.  Reading the prophets or the Mahatmas as rigid individuals is to misread them.  The Jesus in moneylenders’ temples is very different form the Christ on the Cross; the Mahatma fighting the imperial Raj is totally different from the man walking alone in the jungles of Noakhali, the killing fields of partition in Bengal.

People today talk glibly about a clash of civilizations.

It is not that: it is really a clash of fundamentalisms.  Segments of many religions are infected by it.  Even Hinduism, the most hospitable of all religious way of life, since ancient times, is now often competing with virulent sectarianism of much younger religions.  We need, once again like our wise sages, to bring to our students the wonders of the world, the grandeur of God, the infinite variety of our lives, the openness of our imaginative understanding, the reality of many rivers of truth flowing into one indivisible ocean, and the limitations of human intelligence. Mantras without meaning, morality without humanity, religiosity without spirituality, will make us into hollow men and women.  Too much knowledge, too little wisdom.

We’ll have to bring into our classrooms, and organizations the humane values by which we’ve survived and walked through the valley of the shadow of death.  In Fiji we’ve a unique opportunity and its most potent and protean expression can be given in the classroom.  In that room, among those students, you have a unique freedom that no one can take away, unless we allow them to do so.  And every union, which cares for its members, must protect that freedom with united courage and the unity of professional purpose.

Many years ago, I read somewhere: that a truly educated person is one who can entertain a new person; a new idea; and, above all, himself or herself.

It took our parents and grandparents 70 years with a sack of rice, a tonne of cane, to start a secondary school; it took us another 60 years to establish our national university.  A few years ago I visited Harvard.  What impressed me was not the reputation of the University but the simple fact inscribed on the unpretentious gate of the University.  It stated simply, Established in 1638.  The remarkable fact about that is that the Pilgrim Fathers landed on that shore, escaping from political and religious persecutions in their home counties, in 1624; in fourteen years – the period of Rama’s exile – they had founded a University.  That is some vision; genocide, slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, Klu Klux Klan followed but, here was a place where human intelligence and reason also developed. And today an Obama can dream of becoming the President of the only super-power in the world, needlessly obsessed by one Osama   And the USA is fundamentally a nation made by migrants.

We’ve all been marked by the events of the past twenty years.  There’s no certainty that such things will not happen again – the first World War was fought to end all wars.  It cost 20 million lives.  Less than 20 years later they fought the second one: it cost 50 million lives.  In the heart of civilized Europe was born the Holocaust.  And Hitler had won his elections in 1932 democratically, besides being a vegetarian.

I’m not suggesting that any such apocalyptic fate will befall us – but as the notices on the road-side proclaim:  Disasters do happen.  Are you prepared?

We forget that even Jesus, in people’s vote, lost out to the thief Barabas.  It is not surprising that in Orwell’s 1984 the rulers of Oceania have three slogans: War is peace.  Freedom is slavery; Ignorance is strength.  Twenty four years after the novel’s imagined date why do I occasionally hear echoes of these lines in Fiji?

We’ve to think about all this Together. I believe with your help, we may be making a small beginning in changing the direction of our ship of state.  That is why I support the People Charter for Fiji.  20 years ago similar exercise was done in Britain – Charter 88.  When ordinary citizens attempted to debate about the kind of country they wanted to live in, vote in, teach in and grow old in.

Elections and US Supreme Court gave us George Bush; and  in Ireland Ian Paisely.  Elections have been held recently in Kenya and Zimbabwe.  The point is that elections alone do not produce answers to human complexity.  There has to be creative involvement of our people in establishing a framework, the guiding moral principles, the dharma of a society must be recognized in business and politics, and by trade unionists; judiciary; media; schools and universities.  When we can do this, the moral authority of our nation becomes more meaningful then its military might.   We need to redefine non-economic values and revive our critical spirit.  Inculcating a sense of rationality is our challenge from the classroom to our conscience, from our dining table to our temple and church steeple.

Every union must protect and promote its workers’ rights and interest, but we are also professionals. Thus briefly to Professional Ethics.  What is this ethical life we talk about? University academics are good at giving advice on good governance, transparency, and accountability; not to mention economic development and political democracy.   But let us pause for a moment.  How is it that some of our institutions of education are apparently making headlines for the wrong reasons?  It took a student body to reveal to us the inflated salaries of some. And this in the third world of the Third World.  I know in every institution there are many men and women of intelligence and integrity. Why should they remain silent?  Is it a culture of silence or the cult of being silenced by a lucrative contract.  Or knowing the truth and keeping silent?  Surely the ethics of academic freedom demands a courageous response.  Teachers Unions and Staff Associations, I think, should lead the way.

It is my belief that when people are paid salaries form the public purse, these should be easily and readily available for public scrutiny.   Sometimes the clause of confidentiality can be seen as an act of corruption and many of us driving on tarsealed roads, get tarred by that brush. I believe in Fiji no one – no one I repeat – should be paid a tax-free salary.  In a poor country it is an obscenity and the sooner it is abolished the better.  It is a colonial relic of greed and exploitation.   I know someday the poverty of the poor will end; but the vulgarity of the rich seems endless.  We cannot live to long on islands of prosperity in a sea of poverty.

Let me conclude on a personal note.  I now live in a rented flat five minutes away from my place of birth, where my deepest connection with my mother – our umbilical cord – is  buried.

Every morning Jyoti and I drive to Saweni – which I’ m told, means footprints.  Naturally I’m reminded of the poem I’d read in my student days:

          Lives of great men all remind us
          We can make our lives sublime
          And departing leave behind us
          Footprints on the sands of time.

The road form Martintar to Saweni is pot-holed.  Many train trucks lie derailed; my cousin Ram Narayan’s over-loaded lorry lurches dangerously on the Lomolomo dual carriage way.  But I look at the rain washed hills; the green sugarcane fields; the palm trees swaying like siblings, and a few cows and horse-riders along the way. And in the midst of all human chaos and natural, breath-taking beauty by the Viseisei village where Dr Bavadra’s grave is, we arrive on our small campus together.

The young students’ faces are bright and beaming; the classrooms look ordinary.  But once we begin teaching – reading, writing, sharing – the dreariness of daily life disappears and we feel quite rejuvenated.  That is the miracle of a blackboard and chalks; a page in a book; a poem on a page; a formula on a sheet of paper, and the variety of voices and accents in the classrooms.  This is, I think, the deepest and fundamental bond between the teacher and the taught.  And it blesses both.  Let us never forget that unique gift as we teach and remember our own teachers.

To me the fundamentals of our teaching profession are what a father wrote 150 years ago to the headmaster of his son’s school:

My son will have to learn, to know that all men are not just, all men are not true. But teach him also that for every scoundrel there is a hero; that for every selfish politician there is a dedicated leader …. Teach him that for every enemy there is a friend. It will take time, I know; but teach him, if you can, that a dollar earned is of far more value than five dollars stolen… teach him to learn to lose …and also to enjoy winning. Steer him away from envy; if you can, teach him the secret of quiet laughter. Let him learn early that the bullies are the easiest to lick… Teach him, if you can, the wonder of books…but also give him quiet time to ponder the eternal mystery of birds in the sky, bees in the sun, and flowers on a green hillside.

In school, as in life, teach him it is far more honorable to fail than to cheat…Teach him to have faith in his own ideas, even if everyone tells him they are wrong…Teach him to have the courage to reexamine his ideas in the light of new knowledge.  Teach him to be gentle with gentle people, and tough with the tough. Try to give my son strength not to follow the crowd when every one is getting on the bandwagon. Teach him to listen to all men…but teach him also to filter all he hears on a screen of trust, and take on the good that comes through. Teach him, if you can, how to laugh when he is sad…Teach him there is no shame in tears. Teach him to scoff at cynics and to beware of too much sweetness… Teach him to sell his brawn and brain to the highest bidders, but never to put a price tag on his heart and soul. Teach him to close his ears to a howling mob… and to stand and fight if he thinks he is right.

Treat him gently, but do not cuddle him, because only the test of fire makes fine steel. Let him have the courage to be impatient… let him have the patient to be brave. Teach him always to have sublime faith in himself, because then he will always have sublime faith in humankind.

The father was Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President who fought a civil war to free slaves.  He was assassinated by a racial bigot.  Just as Gandhiji was killed, soon after India’s freedom, by a religious fanatic.

In these deaths, there may be a most fundamental lesson for all of us as teachers towards what gives meaning to our lives; immoratilty to our souls: breath to our voice; vision to our eyes.