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relations that is forged carefully and diplomatically, albeit sometimes through considerable pain
and suffering.
In this sense the numuw who work with iron, wood, and clay are like the jeli or griot
singers. They have a role in giving young children their traditional positions in society, providing
utensils for the creation of new households, arranging marriages, and generally creating the social
world of the village, just as the jeli serve as diplomatic mediators in conflict situations to hold that
social world together.
If we think of the technology that the numuw and the jeli use as a technique to express the
meaning of social relations as well as a catalyst that drives development, what does this tell us
about responsibility? One possible answer is that the numuw create something that is shared
unequally among the people but would not exist unless it was shared. Unlike Prometheus, whose
personal gift of fire was responsible for tools and skills which misled people into thinking they are
immortal and who in his modern incarnation was blamed by Shelley for neglecting his individual
responsibilities for the resulting state of affairs, the numu is the caretaker of a common existing
source of power, nyama, that can be used to build social relations, not only individual well-being.
Rather than seeking out new sources of power, as the nuclear scientists at Los Alamos did, the
numuw work with individual members of the community to sustain communal solidarity using
existing sources of power.
According to the Prometheus myth, then, technology is a divisible good that may improve
the food security of present and future generations as long as it remains under the control of
private seed companies who take responsible care of it. Responsibility is a matter of proper
Convention