Deaf in Burundi – a case of paternalism (2)
This is the second part of the report on the Deaf in Burundi. The first part was published 14th July 2025 and can be seen here. In this second part, Lane examines the paternalism that has arisen in Burundi, and indeed the very colonial attitudes that brought that system to the country.
Part Two
The hearing leadership of special education believes that the local school offers the least restrictive environment for deaf education (Conference of Executives, 1977); deaf people themselves think it is the most restrictive environment (National Association of the Deaf, 1987). Hearing authorities generally view American or British Sign Language as a crutch, refuse to learn it and discourage its use; the half-million deaf Americans for whom this is a primary language believe it is the equal of English as a natural language and superior for instructing and communicating with deaf people (National Association of the Deaf, 1987). The hearing experts are opposed to deaf teachers and in most states block their entry into the profession; organizations of deaf people think they would be as good or better than hearing teachers and seek their admission.
This is but a partial list: the truth is that there is deep conflict between deaf people and those who profess to serve them in America. The fundamental divergence is this: hearing experts do not see why deaf people should have a major say in the conduct of deaf affairs, especially as their ideas are so
contrary; deaf Americans don’t see why hearing people have the determining say in matters of deafness. So it is with the colonizers and the colonized.
Padden and Humphries illustrate their claim that hearing professional people who work with deaf people have a different “centre” than their clients, with this observation: From a hearing point of view, someone who is a little hard-of-hearing,’ is much less deaf than someone who is ‘very hard-of-hearing’. But deaf people see things the other way around. When they sign that an acquaintance is ‘A-LITTLE HARD-OF-HEARING’ they mean that the person has a little of the ways of hearing people but basically is quite deaf. When they sign that someone is ‘VERY HARD-OF-HEARING, they mean the person is very much like hearing people, scarcely like deaf people at all.
The trait lists do seem, then, to incorporate paternalistic universals and paternalistic parallax; we come to the third test, which concerns economic self-interest. According to some theorists, money is the driving force behind paternalism. If they are right, we should expect to find an economic basis not only for colonialism but also for the way hearing people structure their relations as a group to deaf people.
At the dawn of European colonization of Africa, King Leopold of Belgium assembled a few hundred officers and sent them to the Belgian colonies. His goal was to ensure quick profits in rubber, ivory and palm oil, collected as tribute or by forced labour. He created a downtrodden working class, extracted an unimaginable fortune, and triggered a European race for spoils in Africa that ended with the lives and fortunes of a quarter of the world’s population under the control of Belgium, France, Great Britain and Italy. Although the colonizers saw the colonies at first as a source of labour and of raw materials that could be turned into manufactured goods and sold on European markets, later many for European military colonies became markets themselves — goods, clothing, and even food and they remain European markets today.
Deaf people have long been an inexpensive source of manual labour for they often work in factories and print shops and various trades. Their poor education goes hand in hand with this economic role. In recent years, the deaf community has also become a market: deaf people buy many of the things hearing people buy but, in addition, they buy hearing aids, captioning devices, teletypewriters, speech therapy, audiology, rehabilitation and interpreter services, special education and more. Some of these services and products for deaf people are bought by government. I estimate that the market of products and services aimed specifically at hearing-impaired children or adults in the United States is about two billion dollars, that is, one and a third billion pounds annually.
Consider the hearing aid share of the market, for example. The Hearing Aid Industry Association estimates that all 80,000 hearing-impaired children in school in America own one or more hearing aids after all, their teachers can require the purchase (Erting, 1985). The policy has a slogan, “Every deaf child has a right to a hearing aid.” Yet virtually all these children became deaf before they could learn English and nearly half of them cannot hear and understand any speech (Ries, 1986), so it is doubtful whether most deaf children derive any educational value from their aids, which may be why they are continually taking them off. It is natural to suspect, then, that economic issues have played some role in determining this educational policy. Four million adults in America own hearing aids I am told, but perhaps only half of them purchase other products or services for the hearing-impaired, so I have excluded two million of these adults. The average cost of an aid is $500 and the industry association would like to see it replaced every five years. This comes to an annual market of half a billion dollars, a third of a billion pounds. Generally, a client must see an otologist and an audiologist before being fitted for a hearing aid. Add another half billion dollars. Then there are the educators, administrators, psychologists like me, counsellors, interpreters, and more.
This market is controlled by hearing people. It is said to be conducted in the interests of deaf people, but the profits go almost exclusively to hearing people. A hearing person entering one of these professions is expected to take on a way of perceiving and relating to deaf people that operates to the social, psychological and monetary advantage of hearing people.
Finally, we come to the “White-Man’s-Burden test.” In a paternalistic relation, the benefactors commonly take on the role of educators. They prove to be educators who subscribe to the “clean slate” view: their beneficiaries have no language, culture, institutions or none worth considering and the benefactors have the burden of supplying them with their own. Thus it was that the civilizing task of the colonizers in Africa required them to supplant the natives’ languages, religions, institutions, with those of the European mother country. The Belgians colonizers saw only a primitive unwritten language, paganism, and tribalism in Burundi and sought to supplant these with French, Christianity, and a civil service. This White-Man’s- Burden characteristic of paternalism is also found in the relations between the hearing establishment and deaf people.
A major survey of research on cognition and deaf children states, “The deaf child grows up essentially without any language… Lacking language, they have been exposed to few sophisticated ideas” (Rapin 1979, pp. 209, 223). The classic American book on the psychology of deaf people, a primer for generations of experts on deafness, states: “Sign language cannot be considered comparable to a verbal symbol system.” Many recent authors echo that view: “The argument against the traditional sign language, that it is nongrammatical and impedes the development of correct language forms, is valid” (Reeves, 1976).
“You know from your own experience, I wrote to Mme. Umuvyeyi, how effective your home sign language proves every day. Imagine then the resources, the richness of American Sign Language, the shared body of knowledge of America’s deaf people across the generations. Linguists have shown that it is a full-fledged language in its own right, with a complex grammar and art forms, but these are as unlike English as Kirundi is unlike French, and many hearing authorities are unprepared to see a language based on principles different from their own.”
Although a growing number of scholars are calling our attention to American Sign Language and to British Sign Language, most practitioners are proceeding as if it doesn’t exist. Teachers of deaf children commonly say they are teaching their charges “language” when in fact they are trying, and failing, to teach them English: most of the children are already as fluent in their primary, manual language as the teacher is in his or her oral one. This ethnocentric misunderstanding about the nature and status of American Sign Language leads hearing educators to fix up” the children’s “arbitrary gestures” (as they seem) to make them more like English. Likewise, paternalistic ignorance of American Sign Language has deprived ASL-using children of the protection the law provides all children who use a minority language. The Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1974 (20 USCS 1703f) requires that every state must: “take appropriate action to overcome linguistic barriers that impede equal participation by its students in its instructional programs.” Chinese-using children and Navaho-using children, to name just two groups, have been granted the benefits of a bilingual education under this law, but hearing educators of deaf children have not seen its relevance to ASL-using pupils.
Four different kinds of evidence, then, support my conclusion that the relations institutionalized between hearing and deaf people in the United States are fundamentally paternalistic. We find paternalistic universals; parallax in trait attributions; economic self- interest; and a claim to a civilizing burden.
To show that the relations institutionalized between two groups are paternalistic is to reveal ways in which social structures operate to the detriment of both parties. There are, of course, individuals who try by their actions and statements not to behave paternalistically, but it is in the nature of things that they can be only partially successful. Probably we should distinguish between voluntary and involuntary paternalism. And not all individuals and groups are voluntarily paternalistic, nor paternalists to the same degree.
Accordingly, in my letter I presented the contemporary American way of educating deaf children as a paternalistic system. Naturally, I shared with Claudine’s mother the sad results of paternalistic education of deaf pupils, the troubling statistics with which everyone here is familiar. The average 16 year-old deaf student reads as poorly as an 8 year-old hearing child. Even in his best subject, arithmetic, the American deaf high school student is four grades behind. This was true in 1974 as it was true in 1983 — there has been no progress. The same atrocious results were found in Britain. Likewise, the average Japanese deaf student will go through life reading like a nine year old.
I told Mme. Umuvyeyi that there was a deep difference of opinion on the underlying reasons for the underachievement of so many deaf young men and women. On the one hand, many hearing authorities believe that the failure to learn their oral language in early childhood inevitably handicaps the deaf child’s
education. On the other hand, many deaf people believe that the failure to use the child’s fluent manual language in the classroom is the main reason for underachievement.
“Yes, paternalism is unseeing, selfish, and unsuccessful,” I wrote Mme. Umuvyeyi. But my catalogue of the evils of paternalism does not stop there. Paternalism places its beneficiaries in a dependent relation and keeps them there for its own psychological and economic interest. Paternalism deprives its beneficiaries of their history and therefore of the possible lives they can envision. Paternalism corrupts some members of the oppressed minority forming a class who conspire with the authority to maintain the status quo. Paternalism evades responsibility for its failure by affirming the biological inferiority of the beneficiary. Allowed to endure, paternalism instils the benefactor’s values in the beneficiary internalized. Thus it is that some deaf people put other deaf people down with labels such as: “low level, low verbal, not smart but a good worker, uses strong ASL.”
And in the end, the beneficiaries despise the benefactors who have so long despised them, and the benefactors decry the thanklessness of their jobs.
How can I protest the harm that paternalism does and at the same time prescribe a course of action for Burundi? I cannot. I can only point out the limitations of our own system as I perceive them, and the lessons of our own history. Even in this I must remind you, I told Mme. Umuvyeyi, that I am caught inescapably in the fabric of deaf-hearing relationships in America. I am a product of its history. I am a participant in a debate that never ends, because it concerns the enduring desire of deaf people for self-determination and self-actualization.
My reading of the lessons of deaf history in my country and Europe, I wrote Mme. Umuvyeyi, lead me to believe that deaf people must be given the power of self-determination as only a few decades ago Burundi people affirmed their own self-determination. Hearing people can work alongside deaf colleagues, provided that they learn their language, that they are endlessly vigilant against the disease of paternalism, and that they can persuade their deaf colleagues to hold them to account.
What can we do in America to set matters right, to change the institutionalized relations between deaf and hearing groups which are now paternalistic? I don’t know: I put the question to you. Perhaps we should begin by putting our own house in order.
[Shortly after I wrote those words, students, faculty and staff did indeed strike a blow at paternalism at Gallaudet University.] NOTE: This refers to the Deaf President Now campaign in 1988. See this Youtube trailer of the recent (2025) film.
I concluded my letter with these words: “What many Americans, hearing and deaf, yearn for but do not know how to achieve, is a relationship based on pluralistic equality, in which different is simply different, neither better nor worse. If your countrymen achieve this, deaf and hearing adults together, in mutual respect, will conceive and operate the first school for deaf children and teach in its classes. This is how deaf education began more than one hundred and fifty years ago in my country, before it drifted off course: a deaf man from France, Laurent Clerc, came here and opened the first school in Hartford with a hearing colleague. Who will be the first Burundian called to this noble mission, the role of Laurent Clerc, Apostle of the Deaf? If you and your husband believe it should be your daughter, Claudine, then let us join forces to find a way to enable her to continue the education begun in the missionary class.
Sincerely yours,
Harlan Lane “
The Umuvyeyis responded to my letter, saying that they and Claudine wanted very much to see her continue her education; the United Nations agreed to provide the funds for her first year in high school in America; and Claudine recently enrolled here at Gallaudet University’s Model Secondary School.
Harlan Lane -1936-2019. Cover of Deaf Life magazine. Deaf Life.
Interestingly some of Harlan Lane’s work also revolves around the similarities between audism and racism. At several points in time we, the Deaf, have been told our struggle is NOT a part of racism and therefore we, the Deaf, must drop the notion there’s anything linked between the two. Nevertheless Lane himself in fact pursued that very line of inquiry and drew strong parallels between audism/oralism and ethnicity. In fact at a Deaf conference in Paris during 2003, Lane outlined why there were strong parallels at work.
The main image is of the school at Gisuru. The image is from the school’s Facebook.
