R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

By Jamie A. Thomas

Bikes and bajajis at a taxi stand and bus stop in Dar es Salaam.

"I don't like the way they speak English in front of me."

Research is Communication.

In my last post, I wrote about what I find most powerful about research, and how I came to develop a strong project during my fieldwork in Tanzania a few years ago. Here, I want to describe what I've learned about the importance of interpersonal communication.

I was weaving in and out of the midmorning city traffic in a bajaji, a typical motorized form of three-wheeled, open-air transport, when I most intensely began to understand the importance of language and communication in urban Tanzania. This was in thanks to the bajaji driver, who I had struck up a conversation with during our ride across Dar es Salaam, from Sinza to Msasani.

An Unscripted Experience in Listening.

We had begun by speaking in Swahili that overcast morning, exchanging a set of unsurprising hellos and how-are-yous. However, once it came out that I spent a lot of my time at the local university, a place the driver did not frequent, the conversation quickly escalated. We continued in Swahili, and I strained to hear him as we picked up speed, and the wind whipped by us, carrying a cacophony of honking car horns and hazy exhaust.

"Habari yako? (How are you?) Nzuri. (Good.)"

View from the inside of a bajaji on one of Dar es Salaam's busiest roads.

The driver went on to tell me that he didn't interact very much with university folks because they tended to speak English among themselves. He confessed this excluded him because he did not understand English. Circumstances had led to him only being able to complete a small amount of schooling in his childhood, and to matriculate to high school and university would have meant taking classes taught in English. For this reason (and others), knowledge and use of English had long become a local symbol of being educated, stemming from policies and practices surviving from the colonial period. In Tanzania, use of English operates as a mechanism of exclusion, of status, of class and opportunity, even though Swahili is still regarded as the language of wider communication.

A Path of Empathy.

Listening to the driver's testimony, I began to think more deeply about my own language use, and how I could be unintentionally excluding others. This man's perspective had not been one that I had deliberately sought, and yet he had given me so much insight on the personal dimensions of Tanzanian language policy, with a valuable view on higher education from the outside in. My encountering of the driver's story went beyond hearing to listening and profoundly engaging with his concerns and observations. I allowed his story to challenge my understanding of the urban landscape, and in doing so, I entered down a path of empathy.

Up until this bajaji ride, I had been so focused on gathering input from people at my primary field site that I hadn't yet reached beyond this more narrow group. But because our paths crossed, and I was open to hearing his story, my perspective was greatly widened. As a result, I began to actively seek the voices of those outside of my immediate circles, learn more about how the university related and responded to the city, and formulate a more holistic research design.

In all, some of my biggest insights in research have come from unscripted moments in the field, and time spent with unexpected stakeholders. These moments have highlighted the extraordinary importance of interpersonal communication as a way of demonstrating respect for stakeholders through a willingness to listen.

No Shortcuts to Interpersonal Communication.

There's no shortcut to listening, or developing stakeholder relationships. When the bajaji driver began sharing with me that day, he was coming from a place where he knew intimately what it felt like to be disrespected and ignored through language, and through the absence of communication. Eventually, the bajaji slowed, and it was time for me to get out at my destination and move on. I did get out and move forward, but our conversation remained on my mind for the remainder of the day.

I continue to thank this driver for a deeper understanding of how my ability to derive insights into attitudes, behaviors, and underlying processes, is a result of the time we, as researchers, spend observing and sharing in the lives of others.