Abstract
James N. Amanze's and Fidelis Nkomazana's edited volume Disability is Not Inability. A Quest for Inclusion and Participation of People with Disability in Society is a major contribution to the study of disability in southern Africa and beyond. In the impressive number of 27 chapters, the contributing authors provide a multiplicity of perspectives on disability and society. The book, which emerges from a conference held at the University of Botswana in October 2018, builds on earlier collaborative work by the editors and contributing authors on religion and disability. Consequently, religion is a core transversal theme in several of the chapters. However, the focus of the volume is not limited to perspectives on and from religion and theology (as the editors’ disciplinary background might lead one to assume) but engages with disability from various angles. The distinctive value of the book lies precisely in its comprehensive and transdisciplinary conceptualisation. The editors succeeded in attracting contributions approaching the inclusion and participation of people with disability, inter alia, from the perspectives of theology and religious studies, human rights, education, philosophy, public health, and medical sciences.
Chapters 1 and 6 engage with the book's theme from a perspective of a rights-based approach of people with disability, focusing on the context of Botswana. The first chapter sets the tone by decidedly positioning disability as a human rights issue and showing how societal norms and discrimination violate the human rights of people with disabilities. Chapter 6 relates to this by zooming in on the right to universal health care, which, as the authors argue, is not fulfilled largely due to inadequate rehabilitation services.
In a separate thematic strand, Chapters 2, 3, 14, 15, 16 and 27 focus on different religious perspectives. Chapter 2, by the book's editor James N. Amanze, sets the tone of these contributions by assessing the attitudes towards people with disabilities in African Traditional Religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism from a comparative perspective. Chapters 3, 14, and 16 complement this with a focus on Christianity. Chapter 3 engages with the ecumenical movement's advocacy work on disability; Chapter 14 provides an exegetical engagement with the Gospel of Mark and Chapter 16, by the second editor Fidelis Nkomazana, zooms in on Pentecostal churches. Chapter 16 has a regional focus on Christianity and disability in Malawi, while Chapter 27 engages with the perspective on disability in Islam and by contemporary Muslims. These chapters highlight a crucial divergence between religious perspectives at a theoretical level and religious practices. While readings of religious texts, such as the ones provided in the aforementioned chapters, for instance, affirm the notion that all humans are created in the image of God, religious practices often do not accommodate for the inclusion of people with disabilities. Moreover, despite the fundamental affirmation of the human dignity of people with disabilities from the perspective of theological tenets, social stigmatisation and discriminatory attitudes prevalent in society can also be found in religious communities.
Moving beyond religion, another set of contributions to the volume engage with questions of exclusion/inclusion and how the inclusion of people with disabilities can be achieved in various areas of society (Chapters 4, 5, 10, 13, 20). The book thereby combines the investigation of societal barriers to inclusion (e.g., Chapter 4) and the investigation of technical barriers as well as ways to overcome them (e.g., Chapters 5, 10, 13, 20). In this vein, Chapter 5, for example, deals with the accessibility of public spaces. A particularly unique chapter illustrating the breadth of approaches in the book is the (quite technical) exposition of a solar-powered wheelchair in Chapter 20. Educational perspectives, such as an assessment of the way that disability is dealt with in school textbooks or of educational policies, can be found in Chapters 21 and 22. From the medical and public health points of view, Chapters 12, 18, 19 and 26 introduce studies in children with cerebral palsy (Chapter 12) and autism spectrum disorders (Chapter 18) as well as engagements with the policy frameworks (Chapter 19) and access to health care (Chapter 27).
The volume is undergirded by a definition of disability as a condition of “physical or mental impairment” (Amanze in Chapter 2). However, in many instances the book moves beyond a mere analysis the situation of people with disabilities. The book actively seeks to contribute to improving the people with disability's current situation and towards shaping society in such a way that facilitates full inclusion, i.e., in which social structures, religious, and cultural norms, infrastructure etc. are designed in such a way that the “impairment” seizes to be an impairment. This is highly appropriate and commendable. Inter alia, this seems to be informed by ethical reflections on the humanity of people with disabilities such as the ones presented in Chapter 23, which draws on the concept of Ubuntu in achieving inclusionary approaches to disability. The normative inclusionary approach is also visible in another chapter of the discipline of philosophy, Chapter 7. By scrutinising theories of personhood in regarding their inclusivity of people with disabilities, the chapter shows that also the epistemological spaces of academia can be exclusive and hence need to be transformed.
Overall, the book is truly transdisciplinary in the sense that the boundaries of the academic space are transgressed: along with contributors from academia several of the chapters are written by practitioners in education, religion, and government – thereby uniquely positioning the book to have an impact not only in terms of the academic debate but also in terms of improving the lives of people with disability in society. One unique merit of the volume thereby lies in its comprehensiveness. The chapters traverse various sectors of society, such as health, education, infrastructure, religious communities, sports as well as archives, libraries, and information technology. The collection provides an important addition to other books on disability in Southern Africa, such as the recently published Routledge Handbook on Disability in Southern Africa edited by Tsitsi Chataika. Like Chataika's handbook, Amanze and Nkomazana's volume caters for the need to broaden scholarship on disability from its predominant focus on South Africa and the editors should to be commended for this. Amanze and Nkomazana's edited collection stands out from existing literature in at least two aspects. First, it makes the effort to take account of the highly important role of religion and culture in southern Africa and shows the relevance of religion and religious communities for discourses on disabilities and practices of inclusion. The volume thereby highlights the religion – disability nexus as an important pathway for further inquiry. The approaches in applied philosophy taken by the two chapters on disability and personhood (Chapters 7 and 23) especially provide an important starting point in this regard by relating the issue of disability to the core question of what it means to be human.
The volume would benefit from an index at the end of the text and a more in-depth thematic synthesis. Considering the comprehensive scope of the many chapters, a glossary of the key terms would improve the accessibility of the many topics covered in the book to the readership. Moreover, while the thematic and disciplinary diversity is certainly a strength of the volume, the authors could have tied the different threads together by highlighting the relationships, in terms of convergences and divergences, of the various chapters. For instance, to ascertain how the somewhat technical topic of solar-powered wheelchairs (Chapter 20) connects to Islamic perspectives on disability (Chapter 27) is largely left to the reader. A concluding summary making the connections between the various thematic strands explicit would have make it easier for future research to pick up on, and further, the important work done in this book. One specific theme of such further work, which the current volume points to only implicitly, might be to challenge the notion of disability altogether from a religious and cultural perspective. Taking the religious and cultural perspectives outlined in the book, such as seeing all humans as God's creation in the monotheistic religions or the cultural philosophy of the value of humanness (Botho/Ubuntu), might actually lead to a point where we would not speak of “people with disabilities,” but recognise different abilities as part of overall human diversity.
Nonetheless, Disability is not Inability is undoubtedly a highly valuable contribution to scholarship on disability, for which the editors and authors deserve applause. While the book's main geographic focus is on Botswana and southern Africa, the collection has relevance far beyond its immediate context. The book is a must-read for anyone engaged with issues of disability in theory and practice in southern Africa and beyond, be it in academic scholarship, education, religious communities, the health sector, or government institutions.
