236 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
Threats to African languages (cf. Harrison, 2007, p. 9), including sign languages,
are related to the transmission of deaf culture and practices of learning and, as
such, constitute further aspects of changes in concept formation:The fact that concepts are manifest in practices implies that when practices
die, concepts also die.... This effect is also visible in the alarming loss of the
world’s languages and the concomitant threat of reduced cultural diversity.
(Harrison, cited in Engeström & Sannino, 2012, p. 315)The deaths of several deaf elders in the early 2010s also significantly affected
the Extreme North community, in part because “in Africa, when an old person
dies, it is like when a library burns down” (Malawian philosopher Amadou
Hampaté Ba, cited in Diale and Fritz, 2007, p. 1). Indeed, the request to docu-
ment ExNorthCamSL came from a leader who was aware of the cultural heritage,
available resources, and need for sustainable progress (also see Lutalo-Kiingi &
De Clerck, 2015a).
The community also reveals its resilience and creative use of resources from
culture, knowledge, and thought in a collective production of drama and dance.
These performances hint at resistance to a dominant ideology of development and
can be read as a negotiation of an alternative worldview. In his study of metaphors,
Underhill (2011, p. 239) writes that “no one worldview imposes itself unilaterally
upon another”:The perspective of the individual confirms the contours of his or her personal
world. And cultural mindset depends upon the ability of ideology to pene-
trate and shape the personal worlds of individuals. Ideology, like bacteria,
cannot live outside of organisms. Individuals must accommodate themselves
with the cultural mindset if it is to be preserved. This involves an inevitable
process of ageing and mutation. Worldviews must resonate with conscious-
ness. They must enable individuals and peoples to give expression to their
thoughts and feelings. They must enable us to live together as communities.
Ideology is thus constantly modified by individual expression, and therefore
subject to innovation.Negotiating this alternative worldview through a physical experience of the dance
as an embodied metaphor for a fruitful future with unity can be perceived as trans-
formative. This is perhaps conceivable as a “sense of language,” which was a core
concept in Humboldt’s work that “involves our capacity to transform the ‘worlds’
which present themselves in the discourse around us... [and] is the essential ca-
pacity which must be celebrated and defended in the discussion of the relationship
between language and the mind” (Underhill, 2011, p. 240).
By studying the metaphors of the development tree and the African mama, which
were documented during transnational interaction in Cameroon, I have sought
to impart a better understanding of learning-based or epistemic actions involved
in concept formation. Combined with a genealogical stance and sensitivity to the