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79 5. Sponsoring Education for All: Revisiting the Sacred/Secular Divide in Twenty-First-Century Zanzibar Julie Nelson Christoph Conservative in nature but often ruthlessly demanding of change, sponsors carry within their material and ideological orbits multiple aspects of literacy’s past and present, receding and emerging traditions that accumulate as part of a history of contact and competition. Even within single institutions, the uses and networks of literacy crisscross through many domains, potentially exposing people to multiple sources of sponsoring powers—secular, religious, bureaucratic, legal, commercial, technological. It is these characteristics of the sponsors that give contemporary literacy its demanding qualities of complexity, multiplicity, and stratification, its sense of surplus and its volatility. —Deborah Brandt, Literacy in American Lives In 2010, while describing the reading and writing activities in which he had engaged in the past twelve months as part of his professional activities , a forty-five-year-old man explained that he does not read “[b]‍ecause I am a businessman” and that he does not write because “[i]‍n business, there is nothing to write.”1 Similarly, a forty-nine-year-old man who works in agriculture said, “My work has nothing to do with reading and writing”; a female farmer, age thirty-eight, said, “I don’t write goods that I produce; I keep records in my mind.” A fifty-two-year-old woman reported that there is no need to engage in reading or writing activities with her family because “[m]‍y whole family knows how to read [and] how to write.” These respondents are citizens of Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous republic of Tanzania—one of the 164 countries that committed in 2000 to accomplishing the UNESCO goal of achieving Education for All (EFA). All of these respondents report being able to read and write materials they encounter in their daily lives and would thus likely be included among the literate adult population in Zanzibar in measures of EFA achievement. And yet, their Julie Nelson Christoph 80 descriptions of their literacy practices demonstrate a different valuation and use of literacy than EFA might predict. UNESCO often depicts literacy as an essential step on a unidirectional pathway to success, as the catalyst that will transform economic systems and empower women and families. A UNESCO pamphlet on EFA, for instance, makes these unequivocal claims: “Education is a fundamental human right. It provides children, youth and adults with the power to reflect, make choices and enjoy a better life. It breaks the cycle of poverty and is a key ingredient in economic and social development. Mothers’ education has a strong impact on health, family welfare and fertility” (n.d.a, p. 2). As Brian Street (1984) has argued of the UNESCO literacy campaigns of the 1960s through 1980s, such campaigns value literacy as a socially transformative good—one that not only leads to predictable ends but that also can be “reduced to statistical measures and economic functions” (p. 13). This autonomous understanding of literacy suggests that once the measures have been attained, the social transformation will follow suit. In keeping with earlier UNESCO initiatives, EFA aims to effect “positive social transformation, justice, and personal and collective freedom” as assessed through six measurable goals, including an improvement in adult literacy levels by 50 percent by 2015.2 In contrast, the literate Zanzibaris quoted above describe reading and writing as tools—useful in some contexts, perhaps, but not necessarily essential to or transformative of every element of daily life. These responses from Zanzibari citizens illustrate the difficulty of attempting to control from above something as unstable as contemporary literacy. Even where the statistical measures suggest that international literacy goals are being met, individuals’ daily literacy practices may undermine or complicate the goals of the literacy campaign. Using Brandt’s understanding of literacy as a fundamentally volatile entity that is facilitated through messy, complex, and even contradictory sponsorship networks can help illuminate why literacy is the way it is in Zanzibar—why it is that the very people who seem to be fulfilling EFA goals undervalue and often fail to benefit from literacy as EFA envisions it. Brandt’s model can also suggest ways that discussions of literacy and development might move beyond the autonomous model. In this essay, I draw from my survey of adult literacy practices in Zanzibar , exploring this disconnect between the official objectives of international literacy initiatives and the uses to which individuals’ literacy is put—with a special focus on the role of Islam as an...

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