Throughout high school, I visited an elderly, disabled woman in my community named Margaret. My brother had visited her before me, until he went to college.
Although I would help her with anything she needed around the house (the left side of her body is paralyzed), mostly I just kept her company and played games with her.
Margaret’s life story is pretty amazing. Her parents were missionaries in Liberia, but she grew up in the United States, where she went to a boarding school and then college. Then she, too, became a missionary in Liberia. She spent her life living three years there and one year here until she had a stroke around age sixty and she moved permanently back to the United States.
While in Liberia, Margaret was a missionary with the Lutheran Church. She was in charge of language program, where she taught new missionaries the local language (Loma) and a literacy program, where she supervised a group of African teachers, who were teaching their own people to read. Once a month she led a teacher meeting and she also helped write stories in Loma for students to read.
She said that her life was different from the way it is in the United States because she had servants to cook for her and wash for her. People in the Peace Corps objected to the idea of hiring African servants. However, Margaret contended that they had a limited opportunity to make money and that working was better than not having a job. She added that the best thing that you could do was to provide jobs, pay fair wages, and respect your workers.
She described the native people had friendly and hardworking. They had a highly structured society with very strict gender divisions (women worked some jobs and men worked others). Men cut brush to make farms and women cleared low brush, planted seeds, weeded, and did the harvesting. They farmed rice and women also kept small vegetable gardens where they grew hot peppers, sweet potatoes, and cassava, which they usually ate with their rice.
Margaret also mentioned the polygamy in their society. She didn’t object to it on any grounds of immorality, but she said that it was not a good system, because there was unhappiness and jealously among the many wives of each man. Men had to be careful and get equal presents for all their wives and eat the food that they had cooked for them in equal parts. Of course, people are people, and men often picked favorite among their wives, causing a great deal of contention.
When I asked her if anything surprised her about Africa, she said that she had been surprised by how intricate the grammar in Loma was. She explained that anthropologist may have found primitive tools, and primitive weapons, but they had never found a primitive language. Every language has been fully formed with complicated grammar and all parts of speech. She said that it was a great experience to learn an African language, because they are so different from any Indo-European language. Loma is a tonal language, and she described how while supervising missionaries in language study she had noticed that many of them tried to indicate a high tone by raising their eyebrows and a low tone by lowering their eyebrows, which obviously didn’t work when they tried to talk to the native people.
While many people find the society where she lived very chauvinistic, Margaret argued that women actually have a great deal of freedom and respect there. She explained that women had control over whatever money they earned from what they grew in their vegetable gardens and that they were able to become witch doctors, just the same as men. The witch doctors have the power to heal and the power to kill, and Margaret said, “If you have the power over life and death, then you’re pretty powerful.”
I’m not sure the inner-feminist in me can agree that a polygamous society (even one where infidelity is high and men don’t mind their wives sleeping with other men) and where women have to bow to all the men that they encounter is very respectful of women, but I see her point.
Also, I found her note about the lack of primitive languages to be intriguing. Perhaps it is one of the best pieces of proof that no group of humans is inherently more developed and superior than any other. Although, characteristics of individual languages can be affected by people’s surroundings, the idea of having a language is not, unlike, say, the crops that people eat, or the weapons they can make, or the diseases they develop. And we humans all do have language.
One of the fundamental questions that my world history class addressed (when we weren’t busy coming up with historically inspired band names or watching my teacher knock a stapler off his desk when he started ranting about neo-cons) was why some nations are so rich and others are so poor. Of course, part of the explanation that Europeans used to convince themselves that they were able to conquer the world because whites were inherently superior, not because, as Jared Diamond would say, because they guns, germs, and steel. But the fact that there are equally complex and complete languages across the world from the most primitive, remote village in Africa, to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, helps show how ridiculous racism and the idea that any group of people is inherently superior is.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Escape From (And Return To) Nigeria
Recently, I went a talk at Princeton University by Bob Criso, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria during the 1960s. In the fall of 2008 he had returned to Nigeria with a group of other former Peace Corps volunteers.
My mother had written an article about him for the local paper and wanted to go see him talk.
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and in many ways serves as a microcosm for the continent’s problems. A former British colony, the country is split into three main tribal groups, the Hausa-Fulani in the north, the Yoruba in the West, and the Igbo in the East. Beyond that, there are hundreds of other smaller tribal groups throughout the country. The Hausa-Fulani are Muslim and adhere to shariah law, which creates conflict for the non-Muslims living in their area. Nigeria won its independence in 1961, but the government has been incredibly unstable resulting in a series of coups throughout its relatively short history. The geography runs the gamut from a tropical coast to savannah to desert in the north. The capital has been moved to Abuja, a city in the middle of the country, from the former capital of Lagos, which was on the coast, in order to promote more unity in the country.
Criso arrived in Nigeria in May of 1966. He lived in a small mud-hut Igbo village named Ishiago with no running water or electricity. He taught at a boarding school established like Irish missionaries. He also built the school library, headed a chicken raising project, and marketed pottery. Many of the students at his school were very bright and won scholarships to study abroad. Criso described his village as remote, but not primitive, noting particularly the sophisticated pottery.
Criso was in Nigeria when the Nigerian Civil War broke out. After the Igbos seized power in the central government, random violence and killing broke out against them in the northern part of the country. Seeking safety, Igbos throughout the country flooded back to their homeland in the east carrying horrible tales of pregnant women being cut open and hacked up bodies. The Peace Corps volunteers and the Africans kept track of what was going by using transistor radios to listen to the BBC (no domestic source of news was reliable). The Hausa students at Criso’s school had to be snuck out of the village so that they wouldn’t be killed.
One day, while Criso was teaching class, two jeeps pulled up the school and told him that the school would be shut down and that the students must return to their villages to be conscripted into the army. At that point, many Peace Corps volunteers had the left the country and the Peace Corps had given Criso a van to pick up five people and told him that if their was ever trouble he should wait for instructions. At that point he droved to a town 35 miles away where there were two other volunteers and on the way he realized that there must be a war going on. He encountered roadblocks manned with militiamen with machetes who were especially suspicious of whites. The eastern part of Nigeria had seceded and became the country of Biafra.
Criso succeeded in getting to the town where he was headed, but he could not go any further, so he picked up the two volunteers and brought them back to his house. When he returned a mob surrounded his house and two men came to the front door and questioned him about the other volunteers. They were particularly suspicious of one of the volunteers, and African American woman, because she was black, but not Igbo. When they asked to search the house Criso refused them and some men rolled a 50 gallon drum of kerosene under his house (the house was built on stilts to protect it from flooding).
At that point an elder in the village stood up on a tree stump to defend Criso and his fellow Peace Corps volunteers. Due to that and a heavy rain falling the crowd thinned out, although people still remained.
Three teachers from the school where Criso had taught came to the house to apologize for what was going on. They helped get the two other Peace Corps volunteers, who were terrified out of their minds, onto a train to get away.
The next day Biafran troops showed up to his house. Together they picked up a Peace Corps nurse. Criso remembers being shot at, at one roadblock. Eventually they got to the coast and were evacuated on the final boat of evacuees leaving Nigeria. Criso explained that his time in Nigeria had been a great experience, and that it had been very disappointing that one day a jeep showed up and it was over. He never had a chance to say goodbye to the friends he made their and he left all the African art he had collected and his personal photos behind. He spent 40 or so years yearning to go back.
In 2008 he finally got a chance to return. A group of Peace Corps volunteers who had served in Nigeria (all in the time of the Civil War, because that was the only time when the Peace Corps operated in Nigeria) flew into Lagos and traveled the county with armed guards. The groups met with tribal leaders of the three main tribes.
Nigeria is a country with almost no infrastructure. There is a lot of corruption and leaders put their money into Swiss banks instead of investing it in their own country. The North tends to be in better shape than the rest of the country, because they are in power. They group encountered no other tourists during their trip. Trains don’t run because of neglect and disrepair.
When they met with the Emir of Kano, in the north, there was an elaborate ordeal. The traditions went back hundreds of years with chanting and fancy clothing and lots of fanfare. There was a lot of opulence among the traditional leaders, especially thanks to the tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue (Nigeria is a member of OPEC). This hugely contrasted the poverty of the ordinary people. There were piles of garbage all over. Criso noted that this was different from the sixties, where, although people had been poor, the poverty hadn’t been so crippling. Many of the schools in the country have deteriorated, which was particularly disheartening to the Peace Corps volunteers who worked so with them.
The trip happened around the time of the American presidential election (the election actually occurred while they were there. The Nigerian people were very excited about President Obama. One of the volunteers had brought Obama bumper stickers, which were very popular items with the Nigerians. One man remarked that McCain might be a good man, but that he wanted to lead America and that Obama could lead the world.
Criso’s trip back to Ishiago was very emotional for him and proved to him the value of his work during his time in the Peace Corps. The town was a very different place from what he had left. There was a new paved road, it had tripled inside, there was a three story hotel, electricity, and a gas station. When he tried to find the school where he had taught, nobody knew where it was. However, finally he found the school, which had been transformed into a federal agricultural college. The guards would not let him inside, but when he explained who he was, somebody mentioned that they knew a student who had gone to the school. It happened to be a student that Criso remembered very well. Immediately, Fabian, his former student came to meet him, embraced him warmly, and started calling his fellow classmates, telling them about their former teacher’s return. Unfortunately, though, most of the students had been killed during the war. Some managed to survive the army, though, and others hid in the brush for three years.
One thing that this lecture made me wonder is why Africans had kept the arbitrary European boundaries when they declared their independence, instead of redrawing countries on tribal lines. Criso explained to me that a huge problem is that a great deal of the oil revenue came from Biafra. He also noted that the only ethnically homogenous country in Africa, Somalia, has some of the worst problem of civil war on the continent.
However, I’m still not convinced that there wasn’t a better way to divide Africa (or the Middle East for that matter) that wasn’t the arbitrary borders drawn by Europeans. On the other hand, now I have wrestle with the fact that dividing the countries by tribe wouldn’t work, either.
My mother had written an article about him for the local paper and wanted to go see him talk.
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and in many ways serves as a microcosm for the continent’s problems. A former British colony, the country is split into three main tribal groups, the Hausa-Fulani in the north, the Yoruba in the West, and the Igbo in the East. Beyond that, there are hundreds of other smaller tribal groups throughout the country. The Hausa-Fulani are Muslim and adhere to shariah law, which creates conflict for the non-Muslims living in their area. Nigeria won its independence in 1961, but the government has been incredibly unstable resulting in a series of coups throughout its relatively short history. The geography runs the gamut from a tropical coast to savannah to desert in the north. The capital has been moved to Abuja, a city in the middle of the country, from the former capital of Lagos, which was on the coast, in order to promote more unity in the country.
Criso arrived in Nigeria in May of 1966. He lived in a small mud-hut Igbo village named Ishiago with no running water or electricity. He taught at a boarding school established like Irish missionaries. He also built the school library, headed a chicken raising project, and marketed pottery. Many of the students at his school were very bright and won scholarships to study abroad. Criso described his village as remote, but not primitive, noting particularly the sophisticated pottery.
Criso was in Nigeria when the Nigerian Civil War broke out. After the Igbos seized power in the central government, random violence and killing broke out against them in the northern part of the country. Seeking safety, Igbos throughout the country flooded back to their homeland in the east carrying horrible tales of pregnant women being cut open and hacked up bodies. The Peace Corps volunteers and the Africans kept track of what was going by using transistor radios to listen to the BBC (no domestic source of news was reliable). The Hausa students at Criso’s school had to be snuck out of the village so that they wouldn’t be killed.
One day, while Criso was teaching class, two jeeps pulled up the school and told him that the school would be shut down and that the students must return to their villages to be conscripted into the army. At that point, many Peace Corps volunteers had the left the country and the Peace Corps had given Criso a van to pick up five people and told him that if their was ever trouble he should wait for instructions. At that point he droved to a town 35 miles away where there were two other volunteers and on the way he realized that there must be a war going on. He encountered roadblocks manned with militiamen with machetes who were especially suspicious of whites. The eastern part of Nigeria had seceded and became the country of Biafra.
Criso succeeded in getting to the town where he was headed, but he could not go any further, so he picked up the two volunteers and brought them back to his house. When he returned a mob surrounded his house and two men came to the front door and questioned him about the other volunteers. They were particularly suspicious of one of the volunteers, and African American woman, because she was black, but not Igbo. When they asked to search the house Criso refused them and some men rolled a 50 gallon drum of kerosene under his house (the house was built on stilts to protect it from flooding).
At that point an elder in the village stood up on a tree stump to defend Criso and his fellow Peace Corps volunteers. Due to that and a heavy rain falling the crowd thinned out, although people still remained.
Three teachers from the school where Criso had taught came to the house to apologize for what was going on. They helped get the two other Peace Corps volunteers, who were terrified out of their minds, onto a train to get away.
The next day Biafran troops showed up to his house. Together they picked up a Peace Corps nurse. Criso remembers being shot at, at one roadblock. Eventually they got to the coast and were evacuated on the final boat of evacuees leaving Nigeria. Criso explained that his time in Nigeria had been a great experience, and that it had been very disappointing that one day a jeep showed up and it was over. He never had a chance to say goodbye to the friends he made their and he left all the African art he had collected and his personal photos behind. He spent 40 or so years yearning to go back.
In 2008 he finally got a chance to return. A group of Peace Corps volunteers who had served in Nigeria (all in the time of the Civil War, because that was the only time when the Peace Corps operated in Nigeria) flew into Lagos and traveled the county with armed guards. The groups met with tribal leaders of the three main tribes.
Nigeria is a country with almost no infrastructure. There is a lot of corruption and leaders put their money into Swiss banks instead of investing it in their own country. The North tends to be in better shape than the rest of the country, because they are in power. They group encountered no other tourists during their trip. Trains don’t run because of neglect and disrepair.
When they met with the Emir of Kano, in the north, there was an elaborate ordeal. The traditions went back hundreds of years with chanting and fancy clothing and lots of fanfare. There was a lot of opulence among the traditional leaders, especially thanks to the tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue (Nigeria is a member of OPEC). This hugely contrasted the poverty of the ordinary people. There were piles of garbage all over. Criso noted that this was different from the sixties, where, although people had been poor, the poverty hadn’t been so crippling. Many of the schools in the country have deteriorated, which was particularly disheartening to the Peace Corps volunteers who worked so with them.
The trip happened around the time of the American presidential election (the election actually occurred while they were there. The Nigerian people were very excited about President Obama. One of the volunteers had brought Obama bumper stickers, which were very popular items with the Nigerians. One man remarked that McCain might be a good man, but that he wanted to lead America and that Obama could lead the world.
Criso’s trip back to Ishiago was very emotional for him and proved to him the value of his work during his time in the Peace Corps. The town was a very different place from what he had left. There was a new paved road, it had tripled inside, there was a three story hotel, electricity, and a gas station. When he tried to find the school where he had taught, nobody knew where it was. However, finally he found the school, which had been transformed into a federal agricultural college. The guards would not let him inside, but when he explained who he was, somebody mentioned that they knew a student who had gone to the school. It happened to be a student that Criso remembered very well. Immediately, Fabian, his former student came to meet him, embraced him warmly, and started calling his fellow classmates, telling them about their former teacher’s return. Unfortunately, though, most of the students had been killed during the war. Some managed to survive the army, though, and others hid in the brush for three years.
One thing that this lecture made me wonder is why Africans had kept the arbitrary European boundaries when they declared their independence, instead of redrawing countries on tribal lines. Criso explained to me that a huge problem is that a great deal of the oil revenue came from Biafra. He also noted that the only ethnically homogenous country in Africa, Somalia, has some of the worst problem of civil war on the continent.
However, I’m still not convinced that there wasn’t a better way to divide Africa (or the Middle East for that matter) that wasn’t the arbitrary borders drawn by Europeans. On the other hand, now I have wrestle with the fact that dividing the countries by tribe wouldn’t work, either.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
My Life. And His Life.
When I was twelve years old, I was carefree. Of course I was aware that war existed—we were right on the verge of the Iraq War at the time—but I lived in a country that had not had to endure war on it’s own land for over a hundred years.
The closest I ever came to living in the midst of a war was the summer my family spent in Israel, when I was seven. For one thing, everywhere in Israel there are soldiers (and even ordinary citizens) with rifles. For another thing, the outdoor market Machane Yehuda in Jerusalem was bombed only a week after I had been there. Even so, Israel was relatively peaceful during the three months I resided there.
The second closest I’ve ever come to war was when I was eleven, when two planes were purposely flown into a city an hour away from my home and killed thousands of people—including at least one I’d met. In the weeks following September 11, 2001, every plane I saw that looked like it was flying too low scared me. But after awhile, my life returned to normal.
I’ve been lonely in my life, but I’ve never felt completely alone. I’ve been an outcast in my life, but people have never irrationally feared me to a point that they hated me and wanted to hurt me.
Perhaps the only thing that I share with Ishmael Beah is that we have both been students at Oberlin College.
Ishmael grew up in the African country of Sierra Leone. At the age of twelve he and his brother were separated from his parents and village when they went away for the day (to give a hip-hop dance performance) and the rebel army ransacked their village during the time that they were gone. Later, he was separated from his older brother as well (I must admit, I would have given anything to be able to get away from my older brother at that age).
Before Ishmael and his brother are separated, they wander around the countryside with a group of their friends, trying to stay alive and avoid being conscripted into the rebel army. At one point, they are found by rebel soldiers who separate out the boys who they want and tell them that they will be initiated into the army by killing all the boys who were not selected. Ishmael was selected and his brother was not. When he tries to catch his brother’s eye from the other group, he realizes that his brother is ignoring him and there is already a huge divide between him and his brother. Seeing how scared the boys are, the rebel soldiers decide to bring the groups back together and make selections a second time, not from the goodness of their hearts, but because they do not want weak, scared boys in their army. Luckily, Ishmael and his friends are able to escape. For a while it seemed like they found peace working on a farm, but the rebels eventually attack there, too, and while rushing into the woods to avoid them, Ishmael is separated from his brother forever.
After that, Ishmael wandered alone in the bush for a long time. Merely reading his descriptions made me shiver. At the time I was reading it, I was alone in my house. Reading about his complete and painful loneliness made me long for human contact and company.
Eventually Ishmael hooks up with another group of boys (some of whom he had gone to school with) and they continue to wander as a group the way he and his brother and their friends had before they got separated. They face some scary situations where death seems certain and one member of their party does die.
Afterwards, the boys make it to a village, which is run by the Sierra Leonean army and where Ishmael’s real troubles begin. He and his friends are conscripted into the army. They aren’t forced to join up, but the army makes it very clear that they will die soon enough trying to survive on their own and that the army is their only hope.
From there, Ishmael is made into a killing machine that feels nothing and for whom killing is no more difficult than breathing. To keep the boys under in a daze and aggressive, the army provides them with marijuana, cocaine, and brown-brown (a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder—I read somewhere that the gunpowder helped make the boys more aggressive, but it remained unclear to me why they needed both cocaine and brown-brown), and has them watch violent movies glorifying war and its heroes. Ishmael is never separated from his AK-47, which acts almost like a teddy bear or a security blanket for him.
Beah does not describe his years in the army in all that close detail, which was probably for the best, because I found it disturbing enough as it was.
After a few years in the army, Ishmael is rescued by UNICEF and goes through the process of rehabilitation so that he can be a normal human being, again. Over and over the boys are told that they are not at fault for what they have done. But it takes them a long time to believe that they have done something wrong in the first place, much less to believe that it is not their fault.
Ultimately, Ishmael moves in with his uncle in the capital city of Freetown. He goes to visit the UN in New York in order to give a report on child soldiers and how it is imperative to stop the horrible practice of using them. He makes friends in America who he keeps in touch with after returning to Sierra Leone. For a while he resumes a normal life, going to school and living with his family. After another coup in Sierra Leone and living in really horrible and dangerous conditions and he escapes, first to Guinea, the neighboring country, and then from Guinea he goes to New York to live with people that he met there.
Ishmael Beah was certainly comparatively a lucky young man. He was saved from the army and he was able to create a new life for himself without returning to soldiering as many rescued child soldiers did. He went to live in America and got a high school degree and then a college degree.
And if Ishmael Beah is lucky, then I don’t have words to describe the peaceful, and fearless life that I’ve lived. But as I mentioned before, what Beah and I have in common is that fact that we attended a school know for its social awareness and action. And reading Beah’s account of being a child soldier has given me a fuller view of a dismal world that I hope one day I can work to change.
The closest I ever came to living in the midst of a war was the summer my family spent in Israel, when I was seven. For one thing, everywhere in Israel there are soldiers (and even ordinary citizens) with rifles. For another thing, the outdoor market Machane Yehuda in Jerusalem was bombed only a week after I had been there. Even so, Israel was relatively peaceful during the three months I resided there.
The second closest I’ve ever come to war was when I was eleven, when two planes were purposely flown into a city an hour away from my home and killed thousands of people—including at least one I’d met. In the weeks following September 11, 2001, every plane I saw that looked like it was flying too low scared me. But after awhile, my life returned to normal.
I’ve been lonely in my life, but I’ve never felt completely alone. I’ve been an outcast in my life, but people have never irrationally feared me to a point that they hated me and wanted to hurt me.
Perhaps the only thing that I share with Ishmael Beah is that we have both been students at Oberlin College.
Ishmael grew up in the African country of Sierra Leone. At the age of twelve he and his brother were separated from his parents and village when they went away for the day (to give a hip-hop dance performance) and the rebel army ransacked their village during the time that they were gone. Later, he was separated from his older brother as well (I must admit, I would have given anything to be able to get away from my older brother at that age).
Before Ishmael and his brother are separated, they wander around the countryside with a group of their friends, trying to stay alive and avoid being conscripted into the rebel army. At one point, they are found by rebel soldiers who separate out the boys who they want and tell them that they will be initiated into the army by killing all the boys who were not selected. Ishmael was selected and his brother was not. When he tries to catch his brother’s eye from the other group, he realizes that his brother is ignoring him and there is already a huge divide between him and his brother. Seeing how scared the boys are, the rebel soldiers decide to bring the groups back together and make selections a second time, not from the goodness of their hearts, but because they do not want weak, scared boys in their army. Luckily, Ishmael and his friends are able to escape. For a while it seemed like they found peace working on a farm, but the rebels eventually attack there, too, and while rushing into the woods to avoid them, Ishmael is separated from his brother forever.
After that, Ishmael wandered alone in the bush for a long time. Merely reading his descriptions made me shiver. At the time I was reading it, I was alone in my house. Reading about his complete and painful loneliness made me long for human contact and company.
Eventually Ishmael hooks up with another group of boys (some of whom he had gone to school with) and they continue to wander as a group the way he and his brother and their friends had before they got separated. They face some scary situations where death seems certain and one member of their party does die.
Afterwards, the boys make it to a village, which is run by the Sierra Leonean army and where Ishmael’s real troubles begin. He and his friends are conscripted into the army. They aren’t forced to join up, but the army makes it very clear that they will die soon enough trying to survive on their own and that the army is their only hope.
From there, Ishmael is made into a killing machine that feels nothing and for whom killing is no more difficult than breathing. To keep the boys under in a daze and aggressive, the army provides them with marijuana, cocaine, and brown-brown (a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder—I read somewhere that the gunpowder helped make the boys more aggressive, but it remained unclear to me why they needed both cocaine and brown-brown), and has them watch violent movies glorifying war and its heroes. Ishmael is never separated from his AK-47, which acts almost like a teddy bear or a security blanket for him.
Beah does not describe his years in the army in all that close detail, which was probably for the best, because I found it disturbing enough as it was.
After a few years in the army, Ishmael is rescued by UNICEF and goes through the process of rehabilitation so that he can be a normal human being, again. Over and over the boys are told that they are not at fault for what they have done. But it takes them a long time to believe that they have done something wrong in the first place, much less to believe that it is not their fault.
Ultimately, Ishmael moves in with his uncle in the capital city of Freetown. He goes to visit the UN in New York in order to give a report on child soldiers and how it is imperative to stop the horrible practice of using them. He makes friends in America who he keeps in touch with after returning to Sierra Leone. For a while he resumes a normal life, going to school and living with his family. After another coup in Sierra Leone and living in really horrible and dangerous conditions and he escapes, first to Guinea, the neighboring country, and then from Guinea he goes to New York to live with people that he met there.
Ishmael Beah was certainly comparatively a lucky young man. He was saved from the army and he was able to create a new life for himself without returning to soldiering as many rescued child soldiers did. He went to live in America and got a high school degree and then a college degree.
And if Ishmael Beah is lucky, then I don’t have words to describe the peaceful, and fearless life that I’ve lived. But as I mentioned before, what Beah and I have in common is that fact that we attended a school know for its social awareness and action. And reading Beah’s account of being a child soldier has given me a fuller view of a dismal world that I hope one day I can work to change.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
The pen is mightier than the sword. Or, words really can protect someone from being chopped up by a machete.
Nonviolence tends to get a reputation as ineffective and weak. Even people who think that nonviolence is a nice sounding idea question whether it would work against unspeakable evil (e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Mao).
I wrote a research paper last semester demonstrating how the people of Denmark saved nearly their entire Jewish population from the Nazis using nonviolent methods. I concluded that yes, nonviolence could and had worked in the face of genocide.
However, after reading Paul Rusesabagina’s autobiography An Ordinary Man, I have a different question: Can anything but nonviolence counteract genocide?
Paul Rusesabagina, of course, is the hotel manager whose story the movie Hotel Rwanda is based on. I’ve seen Hotel Rwanda at least twice, so the story, which a great deal of the book covers, was familiar to me. The first time I saw Hotel Rwanda was in theatres, the evening that my midterms finished in 9th grade. I had never heard of the Rwandan genocide (or the country of Rwanda) before that, but I found the movie incredibly moving, although terrifying and depressing. The second time I watched the movie was in English class in 10th grade. I’m pretty sure I enjoyed watching it the second time only because it was better than having my 10th grade English teacher teach. What struck me most at the time was how little the world seemed to care about the genocide. The line that stuck with me most was a Western journalist who said, “I think that when people turn on their TVs and see this footage, they'll say, "Oh my God, that's horrible," and then they'll go back to eating their dinners.”
But reading his autobiography, I realized that there was something unique about Paul Rusesabagina—he saved the lives of the 1000+ people seeking refuge in his hotel through nonviolent means. And if you think that nonviolence is for cowards, that it doesn’t take unbelievable amounts of courage, I urge you to look at Paul Rusesabagina. Men with machetes (and there were plenty of them in Kigali at the time) could have easily killed Rusesabagina, entered his hotel, and killed the people inside. But he never thought to protect himself, to protect the people in his hotel with his own gun or machete. He used words.
This is what Rusesabagina has to say on the subject: “All of these come down to a failure of words. And this is what I want to tell you: Words are the most effective weapons of death in man’s arsenal. But they can also be powerful tools of life. They may be the only ones. Today I am convinced that the only thing that saved those 1,268 people in my hotel was words. Not the liquor, not money, not the UN. Just ordinary words directed against the darkness. They are so important. I used words in so many ways during the genocide—to plead, intimidate, coax, cajole, and negotiate. I was slippery and evasive when I needed to be. I acted friendly toward despicable people. I put cartons of champagne in their car trunks. I flattered them shamelessly. I saw whatever I thought it would take to keep the people in my hotel from being killed. I had no cause to advance, no ideology to promote beyond that one simple goal. Those words were my connection to a saner world, to life as it ought to be lived.”
I have come to believe that violence cannot protect from evil. People who operate gas chambers and chop people up with machetes because of their ethnicity, race, or religion know how to react to violence. Violence is counteracted with more violence. Eventually a lot of people die and the side with more people and/or better weaponry ends up winning. Nonviolence forces you to appeal to their humanity.
Maybe some wars have to be fought. Wars that people ordinarily come to look upon as just wars often involve stopping slaughter of the innocent—like World War II. But I think that if more people embraced nonviolence and believed that it worked death tolls in genocide could be kept down.
After all, it’s happened before.
I wrote a research paper last semester demonstrating how the people of Denmark saved nearly their entire Jewish population from the Nazis using nonviolent methods. I concluded that yes, nonviolence could and had worked in the face of genocide.
However, after reading Paul Rusesabagina’s autobiography An Ordinary Man, I have a different question: Can anything but nonviolence counteract genocide?
Paul Rusesabagina, of course, is the hotel manager whose story the movie Hotel Rwanda is based on. I’ve seen Hotel Rwanda at least twice, so the story, which a great deal of the book covers, was familiar to me. The first time I saw Hotel Rwanda was in theatres, the evening that my midterms finished in 9th grade. I had never heard of the Rwandan genocide (or the country of Rwanda) before that, but I found the movie incredibly moving, although terrifying and depressing. The second time I watched the movie was in English class in 10th grade. I’m pretty sure I enjoyed watching it the second time only because it was better than having my 10th grade English teacher teach. What struck me most at the time was how little the world seemed to care about the genocide. The line that stuck with me most was a Western journalist who said, “I think that when people turn on their TVs and see this footage, they'll say, "Oh my God, that's horrible," and then they'll go back to eating their dinners.”
But reading his autobiography, I realized that there was something unique about Paul Rusesabagina—he saved the lives of the 1000+ people seeking refuge in his hotel through nonviolent means. And if you think that nonviolence is for cowards, that it doesn’t take unbelievable amounts of courage, I urge you to look at Paul Rusesabagina. Men with machetes (and there were plenty of them in Kigali at the time) could have easily killed Rusesabagina, entered his hotel, and killed the people inside. But he never thought to protect himself, to protect the people in his hotel with his own gun or machete. He used words.
This is what Rusesabagina has to say on the subject: “All of these come down to a failure of words. And this is what I want to tell you: Words are the most effective weapons of death in man’s arsenal. But they can also be powerful tools of life. They may be the only ones. Today I am convinced that the only thing that saved those 1,268 people in my hotel was words. Not the liquor, not money, not the UN. Just ordinary words directed against the darkness. They are so important. I used words in so many ways during the genocide—to plead, intimidate, coax, cajole, and negotiate. I was slippery and evasive when I needed to be. I acted friendly toward despicable people. I put cartons of champagne in their car trunks. I flattered them shamelessly. I saw whatever I thought it would take to keep the people in my hotel from being killed. I had no cause to advance, no ideology to promote beyond that one simple goal. Those words were my connection to a saner world, to life as it ought to be lived.”
I have come to believe that violence cannot protect from evil. People who operate gas chambers and chop people up with machetes because of their ethnicity, race, or religion know how to react to violence. Violence is counteracted with more violence. Eventually a lot of people die and the side with more people and/or better weaponry ends up winning. Nonviolence forces you to appeal to their humanity.
Maybe some wars have to be fought. Wars that people ordinarily come to look upon as just wars often involve stopping slaughter of the innocent—like World War II. But I think that if more people embraced nonviolence and believed that it worked death tolls in genocide could be kept down.
After all, it’s happened before.
Monday, January 19, 2009
You Liberate It, You Own It
A revolutionary flounders without a revolution. I believe that idea is at the core of Africa’s problems. The generation of independence leaders in Africa transformed over time into a generation of brutal strongmen and dictators and these men who once gave Africa hope and freedom often left their countries unstable and impoverished.
The idea of a continuing revolution is absurd. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines revolution as “a sudden, radical, or complete change.” However, dictators are big fans of the idea that they are leading a constant revolution. I first encountered this concept when studying Fidel Castro and Cuba in my Latin American film class my senior year of high school. The subjects of the documentaries and characters in the films that we watched were obsessed with the idea of the revolution and being revolutionaries, despite years and years having elapsed since Castro took power in 1959. But it seemed obvious to me that Fidel kept up the pretense of leading a revolution to remain the dictator of Cuba while the human rights of the Cuban people were violated, they didn’t have enough food, and they attempted to find a better life by trusting their lives to rickety rafts.
There is no revolution in Cuba today and if there is a revolutionary movement it is not that of Castro, but one against Castro.
Similar situations occurred all throughout Africa. Kwame Nkrumah led the Gold Coast to be the first European colony in Africa to seek its independence as the country of Ghana. In his years as the Ghanaian leader he incurred a massive debt, arrested members of opposition parties, and promoted flawed policies in nearly every political sector including agriculture, industry, and foreign affairs. Nkrumah’s problem was that because he achieved independence, he came to believe that he could do no wrong. He successfully caused a revolution, but he was not equipped to deal with all the responsibilities of a political leader. Nonetheless, he convinced himself that since he had created Ghana only he was capable of leading Ghana and thus the country suffered. Finally, Nkrumah was overthrown in a coup d’état, another occurrence that was to become a basic theme in Africa.
The same basic story permeates all of Africa. Léopold Senghor was the liberator and first president of Senegal. The Senegalese economy depended on groundnut exports. Senghor held back the economic future of his country by introducing an inept and corrupt groundnut management system and by selling groundnuts at lower than market price. Senegal’s story had a better ending than most with Senghor introducing a multi-party system and voluntarily stepping down from leadership. In Guinea, liberation leader Ahmed Sékou Touré, used brutal force to protect his power by publically punishing anybody that he claimed plotted to overthrow him. Most of these “plots” were figments of his imagination or purposely created so that he could punish his critics. Touré also attempted to rule his country’s economy for twenty years with disastrous affects until he finally reached out to private investors and ruled the country until his death. Julius Nyerere, in Tanzania, promoted African socialism. His ideals were fine enough, but he believed that results could only come about in a one party state and used force to make Tanzanians adhere to his socialist policies. Even as his policies failed, Nyerere refused to blame socialism and kept his country on a downward path.
One of Africa’s strongman revolutionary leaders continues to make news today. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe refuses to give up his rule as his country plunges into disaster. Zimbabwe only received its independence in 1980 and as such is still stuck under the power of its strongman liberator while the liberators of other countries died, were overthrown, or gave up their power long ago. For many election cycles Mugabe won through rigged elections, but the world finally began to notice in the election that occurred in March of last year. The results weren’t released for a month, but when they were, despite blatant thuggery and ample opportunity for stuffing ballot boxes, Mugabe’s opponent Morgan Tsvangirai was declared to have won more votes (though not enough to avoid a runoff). Mugabe used more extreme and brutal measures that eventually caused Tsvangirai to drop out of the runoff. While a power-sharing deal was signed, it is still uncertain whether it will work. Meanwhile, the inflation and unemployment rates in Zimbabwe have been astronomical (inflation is the highest the world has ever seen and unemployment is around 80%). Mugabe kicked aid workers out of his country and hospitals are mal-equipped to fight the cholera epidemic breaking out in the country, and still Mugabe refuses to give up power, for it is his country.
No matter what, Africa would have had to endure hardships. The European colonizers exploited the continent for their own benefit. Geographically, Africa is far more prone to diseases because of its tropical climate. But if the independence leaders hadn’t been so convinced that the countries they liberated belonged to them and that nobody else could lead the countries more effectively, the countries in Africa would have had more successful economies and greater stability and might be far more developed by 2009 than they are today.
The idea of a continuing revolution is absurd. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines revolution as “a sudden, radical, or complete change.” However, dictators are big fans of the idea that they are leading a constant revolution. I first encountered this concept when studying Fidel Castro and Cuba in my Latin American film class my senior year of high school. The subjects of the documentaries and characters in the films that we watched were obsessed with the idea of the revolution and being revolutionaries, despite years and years having elapsed since Castro took power in 1959. But it seemed obvious to me that Fidel kept up the pretense of leading a revolution to remain the dictator of Cuba while the human rights of the Cuban people were violated, they didn’t have enough food, and they attempted to find a better life by trusting their lives to rickety rafts.
There is no revolution in Cuba today and if there is a revolutionary movement it is not that of Castro, but one against Castro.
Similar situations occurred all throughout Africa. Kwame Nkrumah led the Gold Coast to be the first European colony in Africa to seek its independence as the country of Ghana. In his years as the Ghanaian leader he incurred a massive debt, arrested members of opposition parties, and promoted flawed policies in nearly every political sector including agriculture, industry, and foreign affairs. Nkrumah’s problem was that because he achieved independence, he came to believe that he could do no wrong. He successfully caused a revolution, but he was not equipped to deal with all the responsibilities of a political leader. Nonetheless, he convinced himself that since he had created Ghana only he was capable of leading Ghana and thus the country suffered. Finally, Nkrumah was overthrown in a coup d’état, another occurrence that was to become a basic theme in Africa.
The same basic story permeates all of Africa. Léopold Senghor was the liberator and first president of Senegal. The Senegalese economy depended on groundnut exports. Senghor held back the economic future of his country by introducing an inept and corrupt groundnut management system and by selling groundnuts at lower than market price. Senegal’s story had a better ending than most with Senghor introducing a multi-party system and voluntarily stepping down from leadership. In Guinea, liberation leader Ahmed Sékou Touré, used brutal force to protect his power by publically punishing anybody that he claimed plotted to overthrow him. Most of these “plots” were figments of his imagination or purposely created so that he could punish his critics. Touré also attempted to rule his country’s economy for twenty years with disastrous affects until he finally reached out to private investors and ruled the country until his death. Julius Nyerere, in Tanzania, promoted African socialism. His ideals were fine enough, but he believed that results could only come about in a one party state and used force to make Tanzanians adhere to his socialist policies. Even as his policies failed, Nyerere refused to blame socialism and kept his country on a downward path.
One of Africa’s strongman revolutionary leaders continues to make news today. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe refuses to give up his rule as his country plunges into disaster. Zimbabwe only received its independence in 1980 and as such is still stuck under the power of its strongman liberator while the liberators of other countries died, were overthrown, or gave up their power long ago. For many election cycles Mugabe won through rigged elections, but the world finally began to notice in the election that occurred in March of last year. The results weren’t released for a month, but when they were, despite blatant thuggery and ample opportunity for stuffing ballot boxes, Mugabe’s opponent Morgan Tsvangirai was declared to have won more votes (though not enough to avoid a runoff). Mugabe used more extreme and brutal measures that eventually caused Tsvangirai to drop out of the runoff. While a power-sharing deal was signed, it is still uncertain whether it will work. Meanwhile, the inflation and unemployment rates in Zimbabwe have been astronomical (inflation is the highest the world has ever seen and unemployment is around 80%). Mugabe kicked aid workers out of his country and hospitals are mal-equipped to fight the cholera epidemic breaking out in the country, and still Mugabe refuses to give up power, for it is his country.
No matter what, Africa would have had to endure hardships. The European colonizers exploited the continent for their own benefit. Geographically, Africa is far more prone to diseases because of its tropical climate. But if the independence leaders hadn’t been so convinced that the countries they liberated belonged to them and that nobody else could lead the countries more effectively, the countries in Africa would have had more successful economies and greater stability and might be far more developed by 2009 than they are today.
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