[note]Jan.17.2009

Being in a Tanzanian school, you will almost certainly witness some forms of corporal punishment and my school is not an exception. A commonly practiced one is stick beating. I’ve heard that it’s even legalized to some extent: if I remember correctly, you can find a clause which says that teachers are allowed to beat one student for three lashes a semester under a permission of the headmaster. Not so surprisingly, it is done more often than what the law might say.
Ever since I started working at the school, I’ve frequently seen teachers using sticks to either beat the students or simply to threaten them to move into their classrooms in the morning or after recess. I’ve been told numerous times by my colleagues that stick beating is the “African Psychology” and that the students need such threat for them to do anything. The sound of beating and screams of the students are unsettling enough for me, but what makes me cringe is the fact that the teachers are enjoying themselves doing it with a big grins on their faces and others watching are laughing at the students getting beaten in their thighs or buttocks.
In my personal view, I do not tolerate any forms of corporal punishment, because I don’t think it has any positive effects on the students’ behavior both physically and psychologically. I do however think that I’m in no position to start advocating for abolishment of it from my school because doing so would mean that I am imposing my values from outside onto an established community and doing so is extremely dangerous. If the corporal punishment was to be banned, the proposal and the decision to do so should initially come from the local teachers and the students.
So most of the time when the beatings are taking place, no matter how painful it is to do so, I would just pass by with a quick glance or wait in the distance if it is in the morning and the staff room is locked, but this time it was different. One morning, almost half of the school came in late. The late students were gathered in the courtyard and because there were so many students to be beaten up, an enraged teacher brought out a bunch of sticks (I didn’t know they had so many because I’d only seen one or two of them) and asked other teachers to participate in the beating. Most of the teachers willingly took the advantage of the situation and went right ahead on the beating. As usual, all I could do was to sit around on the side and wait until it’s over. But then one teacher came by with an extra stick on his hand. He put the stick in front of me and asked me to join in. I was a little confused, because I’d never been asked to do so before and, me being from a part of the world where this form of punishment had long been abolished, had assumed that the other teachers already knew that I did not practice it.
Although he was very persistent trying to make me do it, I kept politely refusing by simply telling him that I don’t do it. My response was probably amusing to other teachers around me that they started laughing at me again saying “this is African psychology!” I told him to go on with the beating but again firmly stressed that this was not my thing. He finally went back to the crowd of students with a stick on his hand after jokingly telling the other teachers that I wasn’t capable of doing such a thing.

An instance like this makes me realize that I was brought up in an entirely different culture with different set of values from the ones the people around me have been brought up in, and that I could never understand or accept some things they practice. It’s been more than three months since I came to this country and now I’m no longer in the initiation phase where I could look at everything with an excitement. I’m beginning to settle down, thus starting to discover both what I like and what I don’t appreciate so much about various aspects of life here.
So what do I do now? Not only in terms of the corporal punishment, but also other cultural practices in general, I guess I need to draw a boarder line and tell myself not to go beyond the line and ask others to respect my choice as well. Working in a school setting, sooner or later I will inevitably come across instances that will require me to penalize students. I’ve heard from some other education volunteers that they have had a hard time dealing with misbehaviors of their students because without a stick in your hand, the students often don’t take you seriously.

The corporal punishment however, definitely is and will always be way beyond the line for me.