I have a story on that ...

I have a story on that ...

Daniela Waldburger and Carl-Philipp Bodenstein

 

In this blog-post, we will share - as announced in our last posting on getting access to the field - some few insights in selected personalized stories we made during our interviews while being in Livingstone (Carl) and Lubumbashi (Daniela). We both worked with interviews before our research stays and were thus aware of the challenges, traps but also the potential of this method to reveal unexpected fragments of knowledge that our partners are willing to share.

How to start and where to go? That was certainly the most pressing question for Carl when he began conducting his interviews. There are different ways and methods to do qualitative interviews, from open to closed, from unstructured to structured, from narrative to problem-centred, depending, among others, on the research topic and question. In any circumstance, sufficient preparations and research beforehand are always necessary. However, elements of uncertainty remain. When conducting narrative interviews, for instance, one of these elements is the uncertainty getting enough details and sufficient depth, which is followed by the problem of how to respond to a lack thereof. Another one is the way by which one directs an interview away from general statements towards the specifics, as often the details are relevant to the researcher. In Carl’s case, where questions on past personal experiences of urban housing and everyday life as well as the changes thereof over time constituted the main interest, it was sometimes not easy to get to those specifics and details. Also, the time spent in the field was just a couple of weeks and his research was not accompanied by an ethnographic method such as participant observation, where longer (initial) periods of spending time with groups and individuals help to ensure not only a higher degree of familiarity (known as rapport), but also, as a result, a deeper sense of social and cultural contexts. Yet, there are ways and sometimes lucky circumstances that help to deal with these issues. Thanks to Carl’s research partner Jonathan, who - intentionally or not in regard to how to actually practice these interviews - proposed to lead the first interview with his mother, the issue of how to start and where to go became a less pressing one. In a way, it served as a test interview not only for Carl, but also for Jonathan, since this research relationship was also new to him.

In his brilliant work on the role of the interview social science researcher Charles L. Briggs¹ points to the important fact that “The interviewer rather stands as a co-participant in the construction of a discourse.” Daniela was very sensible on that point when she started her work in Lubumbashi. She was conscious because during an earlier research on the plurilingual repertoire of Comorians in Marseille she was struggling with one particular question. In one of her first biographical interviews Daniela aimed at getting an understanding of a woman’s life stations, her network, jobs, etc. which had an impact on her language repertoire which was including ShiNgazidja, French, some Swahili and some Arabic and even ShiBuhsi (an immigrant language in Grande Comore from Mauritius Island). Fascinated by the interviewee’s capacities Daniela thus asked which language and script she would use to write a birthday card to her relatives, which were living on Grand Comore and Mauritius Island. The interviewee looked at Daniela, shook her head in surprise and started to laugh. The woman told Daniela that this question would really be worldly innocent and completely out of date and that of course she would always call on someone’s birthday. Then the interviewee suggested that Daniela should rather ask for the languages used for writing the grocery list. And so she did, in all the succeeding interviews, and with great success. While this account might sound anecdotal, the essence of this discussion on the meta-level of the interview was a very important one. The interviewee took indeed the role of a co-participant in the construction of the discourse.

Details in the sense of (personal) stories, anecdotes and the like are very important as they give personal context to larger issues. They reveal and elucidate social discourses and relations. But it sometimes takes a while for these details to unfold during an interview and in some instances they don’t unfold at all. One way to direct interviewees to remember the stories and anecdotes is to ask them about seemingly mundane aspects of their lives. During one interview, Carl and Jonathan held with two elderly men, such an everyday question lead to a quite interesting anecdote. The interview with Mr. Muela and Mr. Mayumbero was going quite well in the sense that the two interviewees had a lot to talk about, however, much of what they told reflected the general common sense and knowledge especially within the older generation about the process of decolonisation and the people involved in it. While this is interesting in its own regard, since independence still serves as a symbolic resource, it is rarely reflecting everyday aspects. Carl therefore tried to ask about specifics like water supply, the availability of toilettes and access to food and commercial goods. In this moment Mr. Muela started to talk about the so called “window system”, under which African people were not allowed to enter European-owned stores to buy goods, but had to line up outside instead in order to receive them through a small window. While Mr. Muela was explaining the “window system” Mr. Mayumbero suddenly jumped in laughing to himself in a prankish way and raising his left hand and forefinger as if he wished a reservation for his thought and said: “Ohh, I have a story on that.” Indeed, his story was a very precious one. It was an anecdote on how the window system was ridiculed by Africans during colonial times. In it, Harry Nkumbula, one of the main protagonists within the struggle for Zambian independence, is said to have gone to a butchery in order to buy the head of a cattle, which would not fit through the small window. While the butcher tried to convince Harry Nkumbula that he could collect the head from inside the store, Nkumbula was adamant that this would be against the law and left without the head. In some biographies and other writings, this episode exists in different variations with different protagonists and goods. Yet, it had never been told to Carl within an interview before and although it is not a personal story of the interviewee, it certainly reflects the significance of the “window system” for the everyday life during the colonial period.

Against the backdrop of her lesson learnt in Marseille, Daniela followed an attentive approach in Lubumbashi. The research topic was a completely different one. Daniela conducted dozens of biographical interviews with former workers of the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) and its successor Gécamines. These workers organized themselves into the Collectif des ex-agents de la Gécamines in 2003. Since the 1990s, the mining business experienced a severe decline and as a result the World Bank enforced to sell the company’s assets to foreign investors. Subsequently, 10,000 employees were redundant and got lousy compensations. Daniela’s aim was to gain insight into the lives and experiences of these workers of a company that structured all domains of their lives from birth to death. The topics discussed therefore covered a very wide range: place of origin, education, start of work for the mining company, relocations, housing situations, leisure activities, marriage, birth of children, feelings of (in)security or surveillance, impacts of company owner on the work, promotion, health care, child care, moment of getting redundant, etc. There was one question Daniela asked even though she was very aware that it might be a question that could be considered inappropriate: “Did you like your job?” She was afraid that answers would go into the direction of criticizing her for asking something that could be perceived as presumptuous in a way, asking people about “loving a job” as for them having a job meant security, money, housing, access to health care, education for the children. Still, Daniela asked this question in each interview. Nobody got angry and the answers differed according to the status of the workers. In the Cité Gécamines, the neighbourhood of the blue-collar workers, the first reaction to this question usually was that they certainly loved their job because of the mposho, which literally means the ration of food they got on a weekly basis, but serves as a synonym for security, money, housing, access to health care, education for the children, etc. However, in most cases they added a very particular point, namely that they were proud agents de la Gécamines. They used the French term agent, which translates as ‘representative’. In describing their jobs or work, they often used the term travailleur ‘worker’, but when it came to this question, their lexicon changed. It seemed that the question on whether they loved their work or not opened up the possibility to talk about a feeling of belonging and pride, a topic Daniela did not give them a chance to touch upon otherwise, as she usually asked this question towards the end. In Makomeno, the neighbourhood of the cadre, the persons interviewed all had very good positions and enthusiastically described why exactly they loved their work. From doctors who loved to help their fellow human beings, to managers who described their joy in creating good working conditions for their subordinates. While in Makomeno the interviewees usually did not link Daniela’s initial question with mposho like workers in the Cité Gécamines, they equally used the term agent at this point of the interview. Daniela was happy that with this question she finally could offer her interview partners to talk about the more emotional aspects linked to their work, which sometimes offered details she would have missed otherwise. This became especially obvious in the interview with Marie Jeanne. After an already long interview, Daniela thought she already knew  a lot about Marie Jeanne’s work, her positions and life. It was only after this question that she proudly explained that she actually was the first Congolese woman in the company getting a cadres position. She described her work after she had been appointed to a secretary as the first black woman in that position. She explained: “This position gave me a bit of a choice. When I was working people came and looked at me through the windows, “ah look at this black woman typing the machine!” I was very proud.”

1. Briggs, Charles L. 1986. Learning how to ask – a sociolinguistic appraisal of the role of the interview in social science research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 25.

 

March, 2019