How does one properly celebrate the first night of Hanukkah in a Djola-hearted city on the periphery of a 95% Muslim country? One of the volunteers back in Thiès got a package containing a menorah and some cheap colorful candles (the Crayola crayon type, which will have to do. What can I say? I’ve got a weakness for beautiful Hanukkah candles.) So we video-conferenced. Inbal gave all the participating goyel a brief run down on the Macabees, the destroyed temple of Jerusalem, the oil that burned for eight days and eight nights, and the commemoration of that miracle through our wintery Festival of Lights. All relatively well and fine on their end of the webcam, mine was a little less conventional. We’ve had all of the regional supervisors in town for a conference - it’s fun when they’re all here - and the night before Moussa (the guard) was telling them all about my webcam. (Moussa gets a kick out of seeing my family in the computer). Looking at me and my webcam like we were something right out of the Jettsons, if they knew the Jettsons, the 5 or 6 of them fall somewhere between misunderstanding and total disbelief with the whole thing. So last night, they huddled around my laptop - Arona, Moussa, the other Moussa, Tamba, Insa, Mamadou - mesmerized as much by the camera as by Inbal’s simple ritual, her lovely prayer, the the two flickering lights. (Forget the choppy image and cheap candles and tears of laughter, it was perfect.) Arona decided to contribute a little Djola ditty of his own to the delight of the girls in Thiès.
The significance of this, to me, goes something like this. This is where technology’s carried us, you see? Cyberspace technology like this has certainly nudged a lot of things into antiquity, regrettably. It hasn’t yet eradicated a 2000-some-odd-year-old Jewish ceremony or Djola folk songs. Instead, where the two have spent millennia running down separate roads, last night, they crossed paths. Maybe it wasn’t the first time, but it was an intersection, and a Hanukkah, that won't soon be forgotten.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Saturday, December 1, 2007
I can't believe, frankly, it's been six weeks I've been down here. It aggravates me to look back on that much time and not really be able to recall where I put it. I suppose technically I’m not traveling, I couldn’t truthfully say that. Technically I’ve been installed here in this region (for 2 months), but I can’t say I feel settled, on the contrary, I feel like I’m on the move. I still experience those hallmarks of traveling solo: exhilaration and lonesomeness. Exhilaration of discovery - of people, food, sounds, groovy little postcolonial corners, and splendid riverscape views - and the slightly less sexy joy of bumming around new markets - discretely dipping my fingers in barrels of dried beans (if it's ever possible for me to do anything discreetly ...) and hopping over rivulets of rotten vegetables and avoiding eye contact with the more aggressive vendors. And feeling also something like a ravenousness to take it all in. And lonesomeness, well, speaks for itself. When those things fade into habituation - I suppose that signals the end of one’s traveling.
Describing the process of adjustment into a foreign place, a very wise professor told me this: people don’t see you for who you are, but for who they perceive or want you to be. A lot of times - and I assume this is especially true in instances where there is a language barrier - you can find yourself more or less knowingly conforming to THAT person, at the loss of a bit of your own personality. Per Petterson brushes up against this idea in Out Stealing Horses, (and his Nordic protagonist has only moved a couple hours north): People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours […] it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself.
(OK a little hardened, a little valid nonetheless. When it gets problematic is when their own feelings, opinions, and assumptions are shaped by a very different life experience and understanding of the world; then they really miss the boat.)
Describing the process of adjustment into a foreign place, a very wise professor told me this: people don’t see you for who you are, but for who they perceive or want you to be. A lot of times - and I assume this is especially true in instances where there is a language barrier - you can find yourself more or less knowingly conforming to THAT person, at the loss of a bit of your own personality. Per Petterson brushes up against this idea in Out Stealing Horses, (and his Nordic protagonist has only moved a couple hours north): People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours […] it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself.
(OK a little hardened, a little valid nonetheless. When it gets problematic is when their own feelings, opinions, and assumptions are shaped by a very different life experience and understanding of the world; then they really miss the boat.)
Monday, November 19, 2007
immigration, qu'est-que ce?
A couple days ago I posted a link to a trailer for a new independent film by Idrissa Guiro, Barcelona ou la Mort (Barcelona or Death, http://docbarcelone.canalblog.com). It’s in French, but I think worth watching because the images alone are visually arresting (for me, their beauty comes from their realism - that’s so Senegal!) Although if you’ve ever been to Gorée Island, the last image hits you like a slow-motion punch to the stomach. It’s like peering out of the “door of no return” at the Maison d’Esclavage, and seeing the tides washing over the glossy black rocks below your feet. (Always a bleak reminder that few things survive the ocean the way rocks do). The trailer starts with a man recounting this visit to a jardin d’enfants, a preschool, in Senegal where he asks the kids, “Who among you wants to go to Europe?” The kids look at each other quizzically. Rephrasing the question, “Who wants to go to Spain,” all hands shoot in the air. “Why?” He asks the gathered 2 and 3 year olds before him. Finally a little one says, “pour manger.” (To eat.)
Pirogues are the long heavy boats that have made possible the livelihood of Senegalese fishermen for centuries. They are carved out of the wood of the colossal fromager trees, and they have colorful images painted on their sides, sometimes words like Baraka, Serign Touba, and Alxamduilay, which aren’t really so much magical lingo on their own so much as plain old vernacular blessings. These are the boats that fathers, sons, cousins - a handful, maybe 10 - push out on the waters in the morning and steer back into port at night, hopefully heaped with the daily catch.
On October 16, about 130 men from Senegal, Mali, Guinea-Bissau, and Gambia piled into a pirogue and quietly sped away from Ziguinchor, the sunny fishing village that took a swing at being a city and landed a little left of field, that I temporarily call home. Their destination was the Spanish Canary Islands (and ultimately, I believe Spain). First they had to reach international waters, 220 km off-coast, where travelers are immune to the menacing threat of helicopters and coastal patrols (Senegal and Morocco partner with Frontex, the border security branch of the EU). Somewhere outside of Mauritania their engine broke, and after a week of drifting, the surviving 90 or so were pulled from the sea and hospitalized in Morocco. 42 bodies are missing. To give you a sense of the numbers, since January of 2006, roughly 25,000 Africans have made similar journeys, and 3,000 have died (according to one estimate). No small number have college and post-collegiate degrees.
Immigrants from Senegal send home $630 million every year, which is 6.85 % of the GDP. And though it's a little off track, I think it's worth considering the family structure, or the idea of the family, as it exists in Africa. Families are loosely but extensively conjoined, and when these young men get in a pirouge, it’s got little to do with job satisfaction, wanderlust, or the lure of the West. It’s not their own future they’re ready to die for, but ultimately, their family’s.
How much do Americans know about the problem of clandestine immigration? My sense is that many Americans have an awareness that this goes on, shelved someplace neatly in the back of waking thought. The truth is, as I see it, it doesn’t touch us immediately enough to spark any sort of inquietude beyond a passing sympathy. In our defense, it’s not exactly all over the American news; in fact judging by the NYTimes archives, the subject barely makes it out of editorials. I think in not so many words, we tell ourselves, “that’s Europe’s problem.” How much truth is there to that idea? Many young Senegalese, particularly in the cities, say they’d rather drown en route to Europe than spend their lives looking for jobs that don’t exist. Worse yet, this is one of those things you hear so many times, it’s lost impact. How much is this America’s problem too?
This article could go in a dozen different directions. I could start highlighting the blame on the US, for its hand in keeping these economies at such a low-achieving level. I could talk about globalization and the exchange of culture (or the importation of western culture, but not entirely) that occurs as markets open across the globe, specifically in developing countries. That gives birth to a consumer culture, which ordinarily drives a work force. But then there’s massive unemployment. And then on the bigger level there’s substantial trade barriers against African goods. Outside of Senegal, Africans migrate for different reasons, persecution and war. I could talk about America’s responsibility in regards to those conflicts. But I’m neither an economist nor a historian - maybe an art historian - so I’m going to stay out of those murky waters! Obviously the answer is, a lot.
But instead of plunging into answers, I’m going to go ahead and take the other route, that is to say, put a few more of my own questions out there.
Starting with a less-than-rhetorical question: What is this notion of borders today - borders between people - at a time when they’re falling down everywhere? Economically speaking, culturally, speaking. Diplomatically, too, in some ways. While in theory, non-interventionist ideas sound nice, (America’s meddled in one too many cookie jars for its own good and everyone else's). That being said, there is no such thing as as political isolationism anymore, at least not in the way just about every American president before Wilson espoused. So where do you draw this line, between non-intervention and isolation? Where do you draw the line between economic and political intervention? (Quickest way to a government’s heart is through its pocketbook). Where should we intervene? Given that interventions are unfortunately just non-altruistic.
Ok, so, we’ve got these borders evaporating into thin air, at the same time as country borders are being reinforced and “controlled.” What’s our aversion to immigrants, us, a country founded by them? I think part of it has to do with the fear of a growing permanent underclass (We've watched France struggle with the repercussions of this). But if we’re not going to open our borders, then we could in the very least provide economic incentives for would-be immigrants to stay home. In the very most, we could pull their countries out of impoverishment.
I’m going to finish with a quote from Bono’s Foreword to Jeffrey Sach’s The End of Poverty (I know, I know, it seems almost unfairly easy, adding a little extra gravitas, a little ummph, to your speech by adding 9/11, we learned that from Rudy Guiliani. Nonetheless, point taken):
The destinies of the "haves" are intrinsically linked to the fates of the "have-nothing-at-alls." If we didn’t know this already, it became too clear on September 11, 2001. The perpetrators of 9/11 might have been wealthy Saudis, but it was in the collapsed, poverty-stricken state of Afghanistan that they found succor and sanctuary. Africa is not the front line in the war against terror, but it soon could be.
"The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty." Who said that? Not me. Not some beatnik peace group. Secretary of State Colin Powell. And when a military man starts talking like that perhaps we should listen. In tense, nervous times isn’t it cheaper - and smarter - to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them?
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
last weekend
I considered composing this in iambic pentameter but ended up opting for something a little more stream of consciousness, I'm tired and it is the 21st century, I apologize for run-ons
Where rugged could be a gross understatement, we’re zipping down sandy paths à la moto, (as romantic as it sounds for 20 minutes tops) I’m thinking about the most evocative landscapes I’ve come across in print. Thinking about Willa Cather’s Nebraska, thinking about what she might have to say about the edens I’ve found myself in lately. The Land That Photos Don’t Do Justice To and somehow seem like cheating anyways. I’d paint you a picture through words, but such is the problem, I’m at a loss for them. I’ve rummaged through my arsenal of diction and come up short. The words I want to use - like “pungency” and “frequency” - aren’t even in the right sensory ballpark. (Although I don’t know how to apply it, “spirulina” isn’t entirely far off.) I’m lead to conclude - and why not? - that the people who describe it best are the people who’ve made it their home, at one point even their religion. And in their tongue it’s simply: Sacred Bush. The greens of vegetation and rusty hue of the earth are of a saturation that only becomes slightly more believable when dusk starts to sap its vibrancy, when oncoming night threatens to make all things monochrome. (In that vein, I don’t need a mirror to know mine is the last face to disappear into the deep blackness of night). And all over is this smell, something almost metallic; it’s something that grows in Florida, and closing my eyes (barely catching my breath) I’m back in Treetops Park, in my mud-spattered uniform running the woodsy three mile path that only a hundred thousand footsteps and wrong turns taught me. This is the hour that I arrive in the village of Niassène, greeted by a human warmth and spirit on par with their surroundings. Later I’m watching a skit put on by the villagers, and in the stretches between whispered translations, I’m only vaguely paying attention to the drama unfolding on-stage and instead my sleepy, wandering mind is enjoying the rollicking audience and wondering if it couldn’t be too different from the candle-lit milieus in which the bests of Shakespeare made their 16th century debuts. If one were to substitute the Globe Theatre for a modestly square dance hall. I don’t doubt for a minute that had they not been gripped in the riotous throws of laughter they’d be hurling rotten vegetables. And during this time, three plucky little kids who couldn’t believe their stroke of luck or overcome that last trace of childhood gall stole touches at my feet. If they were surprised or disappointed by the feel of boring old flesh, they wouldn’t meet my eyes to show it. I spend the entire night in that space between the strata of asleep and awake. There's ants in the bed and I can here something scurrying all over the room, near my head, at one point I can hear it breathing. In almost delirium (I must have been leaning more towards asleep … or feverish) I was upset I couldn’t remember if mice eat people, running over and over the lines, "if you give a mouse a cookie" and couldn't remember anything further to quell my worries. (For what its worth, I spent the night in this same village once before in a clean and cozy room - guess I picked the wrong straw this time). I think I forgot to mention that all of this occurred under the most unimaginable sky. The type of sky that restores credibility to those constellation maps you see (almost mitigating the fact that its very existence relies on a sad want for electricity in these parts). The longer you stare into the dark, your eyes process more and more white stars until you can’t tell star from sky, even thought they’re virtually opposite in color. Like an ashtray spilled on dark ebony wood. That's the way it is, hey? rodents and sublimity. Two sides of a coin.
Monday, November 12, 2007
African films, alhamdulilay!! part trois
I thought this was a nifty once-and-for-all concerning Africa in American film. I'm not saying Blood Diamond wasn't a fantastic movie, and Leonardo's South African accent impeccable ... I'm saying he called Sierra Leone "Africa" one too many times for me. (Before falling back on an old favorite, the other title I toyed with was Africa: More Than A Country Overrun With Poverty, Famine, Draught, Desertification, Poltical Instability, Ethnic Strife, Landmines, Machetes, AIDS, Shrunken Skulls, Mr. Kurtz, Robert Mugabe, and Killer Bees)
(excerpted from Gerise Herndon's essay, "The Antenna and the Mosque: Liberatory Mass Media in Moolaadé")
Manohla Dargis (2007) confesses “tragedy fatigue” when viewing films about Africa, though not, she clarifies, “the real deal,” such as Sembène’s films, among which, she argues, “Moolaadé manages to tackle the issue of female gential mutilation and critique patriarchal Islam in one entertaining package (really). My problem,” Dargis goes on to specify, “rather, is all those films filled with suffering, struggling black Africans who, for the most part, seem to be on camera to make me feel bad.” Tired, clichéd images that fit with US mass media’s frequently recycled and undifferentiated representations of an imagined “Africa” are trotted out again with the effect of making the public feel pity for the beleaguered continent or relief at residing in the US. Popular movies from the US such as Hotel Rwanda, The Last King of Scotland or Blood Diamond, in contrast to Sembène’s creations, do not fundamentally attempt to liberate or transform; their purpose is to turn a profit. They may produce strong emotional response to an individual character’s noble action, but they do not ultimately hope to shift power relations. The most recent issue of Sight and Sound juxtaposes these films with what Dave Calhoun (2007) calls “Africa’s invisible classics.” Classics by Sembène, Djibril Diop Mambety and Cheick Oumar Sissoko are invisible both to multiplex US audiences and to many African viewers purely because of the power of the profit motive driving mammoth production studios. Hollywood and Bollywood exports have dominated screens and styles, at least until the recent abundance of Nollywood productions [out of Nigeria] available on video. But US audiences won’t find easy access to Nollywood anytime soon. Hollywood needs to give US audiences “white guides” to lead them through “black pain” (Calhoun 2007, 34) to make historical and cultural realities easily digestible in less than two hours.
Not only do popular US productions depend on white narrators for credibility: they also rely on men to tell important stories. Hollywood representations of dramatic acts of heroism have been notably masculine. Sembène, on the other hand, provides rich, multi-faceted and diverse images of women’s various means of taking, expressing and enacting power [...] Sembène’s feminism offers a stark contrast to US studios’ contemporary adventures into what might as well be the 19th century’s “heart of darkness.” Manohla Dargis (2004) notes that recent Hollywood endeavors have depicted little to dispel age-old stereotypes of the dark continent in need of light [...] This sense of immutability, that the violence and the hunger are persistent, almost eternal and natural, infects too many films about Africa."
You know, this reminds me of something I used to think was so funny. The first time I was in Senegal, we used to spend countless and not ever enough nights at this bar around the corner from the language school in Dakar. Sweet little place, thatched roof, looow orange lights, a constant 100 cigarettes burning at any given time, dibite, and these bats that would fly in and out of the surrounding trees in tune to live jazz on Friday nights. But anyways, they always had the TV on, and it was always Hotel Rwanda playing over and over and over again. Yea I know, right? beats me too. Not that the place needed a background movie to set the mood in the first place. On the other hand fairly consistent with my theory that Africa might just be the Land of the Arbitrary .....
(excerpted from Gerise Herndon's essay, "The Antenna and the Mosque: Liberatory Mass Media in Moolaadé")
Manohla Dargis (2007) confesses “tragedy fatigue” when viewing films about Africa, though not, she clarifies, “the real deal,” such as Sembène’s films, among which, she argues, “Moolaadé manages to tackle the issue of female gential mutilation and critique patriarchal Islam in one entertaining package (really). My problem,” Dargis goes on to specify, “rather, is all those films filled with suffering, struggling black Africans who, for the most part, seem to be on camera to make me feel bad.” Tired, clichéd images that fit with US mass media’s frequently recycled and undifferentiated representations of an imagined “Africa” are trotted out again with the effect of making the public feel pity for the beleaguered continent or relief at residing in the US. Popular movies from the US such as Hotel Rwanda, The Last King of Scotland or Blood Diamond, in contrast to Sembène’s creations, do not fundamentally attempt to liberate or transform; their purpose is to turn a profit. They may produce strong emotional response to an individual character’s noble action, but they do not ultimately hope to shift power relations. The most recent issue of Sight and Sound juxtaposes these films with what Dave Calhoun (2007) calls “Africa’s invisible classics.” Classics by Sembène, Djibril Diop Mambety and Cheick Oumar Sissoko are invisible both to multiplex US audiences and to many African viewers purely because of the power of the profit motive driving mammoth production studios. Hollywood and Bollywood exports have dominated screens and styles, at least until the recent abundance of Nollywood productions [out of Nigeria] available on video. But US audiences won’t find easy access to Nollywood anytime soon. Hollywood needs to give US audiences “white guides” to lead them through “black pain” (Calhoun 2007, 34) to make historical and cultural realities easily digestible in less than two hours.
Not only do popular US productions depend on white narrators for credibility: they also rely on men to tell important stories. Hollywood representations of dramatic acts of heroism have been notably masculine. Sembène, on the other hand, provides rich, multi-faceted and diverse images of women’s various means of taking, expressing and enacting power [...] Sembène’s feminism offers a stark contrast to US studios’ contemporary adventures into what might as well be the 19th century’s “heart of darkness.” Manohla Dargis (2004) notes that recent Hollywood endeavors have depicted little to dispel age-old stereotypes of the dark continent in need of light [...] This sense of immutability, that the violence and the hunger are persistent, almost eternal and natural, infects too many films about Africa."
You know, this reminds me of something I used to think was so funny. The first time I was in Senegal, we used to spend countless and not ever enough nights at this bar around the corner from the language school in Dakar. Sweet little place, thatched roof, looow orange lights, a constant 100 cigarettes burning at any given time, dibite, and these bats that would fly in and out of the surrounding trees in tune to live jazz on Friday nights. But anyways, they always had the TV on, and it was always Hotel Rwanda playing over and over and over again. Yea I know, right? beats me too. Not that the place needed a background movie to set the mood in the first place. On the other hand fairly consistent with my theory that Africa might just be the Land of the Arbitrary .....
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
This was a really thought/anger provoking article appearing in the Times this week, that's worth having a look at. Contemporary politics and King Leopold’s Legacy aside, the essence of it is this: at the end of the day, everything is relative to culture. That’s all nice and makes for a cute, diverse branch of the animal kingdom … where it starts to show its formidable consequences is in inter-species relations.
Westerners, though I can really only speak on behalf of Americans, like to think of themselves as heroic, plain and simple. This romanticism is rooted vastly and deeply in the cultural diet we’re fed as kiddies, in school and out. Our sense of purpose in the world is shaped by this idea that we’re the lucky forebears of a long line of “Greats,” that endless list of American Heroes. (Isn’t that what we call our own men and women fighting the war on terrorism?) … And our Judeo-Christian background furnishes a warm, fuzzy sense of compassion for the less fortunate. And we’ve got the wealth and ambition to step up to the challenge. So needless to say, it's the crusade of our time: fixing the world.
A task we shouldn’t balk at because the world needs a fixing. The problem is: we don’t have all the answers, and certainly not the best ones. Because we’ve got modern science and washing machines, and public education and a relatively stable democracy, doesn’t mean we’ve got ready solutions for helping a bangladesh or a burkina faso or a burma in need. And in fact, many people would tell you it's a disposition just shy of racist, this assumption that we can solve the problems in “less developed” countries by our advanced tools and the grace of our humanism. Because those problems seem so uncomplicated: spend enough money, feed a village. Adopt an orphan, and give him or her something other than a future of certain impoverishment.
A good part of Africa is barely swimming, but what it needs foremost is for its saviors to look at what lies below their own pretty reflection on the surface.
The Orphans Who Didn’t Need Saving
By LYDIA POLGREEN
November 4, 2007
DAKAR, Senegal
IN 1890, King Leopold II of Belgium wrote to one of his colonial officials and asked him to set up orphanages in the vast African territory he ruled as his personal fief, the Congo.
The only problem with his plan was that there were no orphans. The concept scarcely existed in Congo or much of the rest of Africa. This is a continent where thousands of ethnic groups and cultures across a vast and diverse landscape nevertheless share basic traditions that dictate that a child whose parents have died is the responsibility of the broader family and community.
But Leopold’s problem was quickly solved — his men kidnapped boys from their families and dispatched them to the “orphanages,” where they received a bit of catechism, some military training and, if they were lucky, baptism.
Mostly, as recounted by the historian Adam Hochschild in his book “King Leopold’s Ghost,” the boys eventually became soldiers in Leopold’s vast native army, if they did not die in the long, harsh marches to the orphanages from their villages.
For Africans, Leopold’s orphan hunt, driven by relentless greed run amok in a colony he ravaged as his personal property, is only one particularly egregious example of a series of deep, and well-remembered, historical wounds.
That record helps explain the skepticism and outrage that greeted the efforts of a French charity, whose members were arrested last week as they tried to fly 103 children from Chad to France, to go hunting for orphans in the deserts between Chad and Sudan.
From the first days of European involvement in Africa, the West has helped itself to the continent’s children — as chattel to be worked like beasts of burden, as soldiers to bear arms against their own kin, or as souls needing salvation through civilization. Sometimes, as the example in Congo illustrates, they were all three.
But the scandal involving the French charity, Zoé’s Ark, is tangled in an even more complicated web, a modern one of apparently good intentions gone awry and of the perceived exploitation of the suffering of vulnerable people, and a profound cultural misunderstanding. The charity is not a well-known group like the dozens of experienced agencies that do lifesaving work in Darfur and eastern Chad. And it was operating far outside the normal boundaries of what established aid and human rights groups consider proper. Still, its experience shows how deeply angry Africans can become when Western “helpers” violate the continent’s own traditions and sense of sovereignty.
According to its Web site, Zoé’s Ark, which was started by a former fireman in France, was motivated by a sense of urgency.
In anguished language, the organization pointed to an obvious fact — the paralysis of international diplomacy in Darfur, in western Sudan, where an ethnic and political conflict has raged for four years, killing at least 200,000 and displacing 2.5 million. The Web site went on to say that something had to be done immediately to end the suffering of the most vulnerable children.
With heart-rending descriptions of children on the brink of death from starvation, violence and disease, the group raised money from French families to fly children out and place them — temporarily, it said — in French homes.
But it turns out that none of the 103 children are orphans in the traditional Western sense — foundlings with no place to go. Almost all were living with family members in villages, relatively well fed and cared for, according to the United Nations. The bewildered children cried as foreign reporters flocked to the orphanage in Abéché, Chad, where they were being temporarily housed late last week until they could be reunited with their families.
The children said they had been coaxed away from their families with sweets and cookies, according to Reuters, and a group of women claiming to be mothers of some children told a French cable news station that they had been told the children would be taken to Abéché for schooling, but that their families would still be able to visit them.
Zoé’s Ark seems to have run into the same problem that Leopold did: In many African societies finding a true orphan is not such a simple thing.
When details of the operation became known, high French officials, United Nations officials, and indignant French citizens, newspapers and child protection agencies sounded their disapproval of Zoé’s Ark’s actions. Jo Becker, child rights advocate at Human Rights Watch in New York, said that removing a child from his or her immediate surroundings might make sense only under circumstances like immediate risk of being forced into military service or a threat of immediate harm. “We would always say,” she said, “that the best place for children is in their community and with their families.”
To be sure, orphanages are full of children in cities across Africa, especially in countries where the AIDS pandemic has shattered entire extended families. And migration to cities has frayed some family bonds.
But many African countries, despite having a surfeit of children with dead or missing parents, have laws surrounding adoption that reflect a strong unease with the concept as it is practiced in the West. As a result, relatively few African children are adopted each year, especially compared with adoptions from Asia and eastern Europe.
Even the idea of Western adoptions sometimes seems to rankle. When Madonna adopted a young boy from Malawi last year, a fierce outcry erupted over whether she had followed proper procedures and whether the boy’s father had been duped.
In largely Muslim countries like Chad and Sudan, where Islamic law governs family matters, the entire Western concept of adoption is essentially forbidden by religious edict.
The current episode has a particular sting because Europe has been writing increasingly stringent rules to keep Africans from migrating there, culminating most recently in a new French law that in some cases requires DNA testing to get visas for family members. Taking a planeload of children away in secret while thousands of Africans drown in the Atlantic seeking to migrate to Spain strikes many Africans as hypocritical. “What message is the transaction sending?” demanded an editorial in the African Executive, an online business magazine. “Will Zoé’s Ark transport the 201 million Africans facing extreme hunger to Europe? Africa must vehemently resist this humiliation. If Zoé’s Ark is serious on the African plight, let it press Europe to open its borders to African migrants, grant African professionals jobs without discrimination, drop its barriers against African goods and allow Africa to export finished products.”
But accusations of hypocrisy can cut both ways. Chad’s president for the last 17 years, Idriss Déby, abandoned his usual reticence with the international news media to deliver sound bites to the reporters who swarmed to Abéché.
He called the situation an outrage, and speculated that perhaps Zoé’s Ark planned to sell the children to pedophiles. Burnished cane in hand, he walked awkwardly among the scrawny boys and girls. It is hard to say when this former military dictator last paid so much attention to Chad’s children.
Despite the country’s burgeoning oil industry and increased foreign investment, especially from China, Chad’s 1.9 million children under the age of 5, like most of those taken by Zoé’s Ark, are among the most defenseless in the world against disease, hunger and death. One-fifth won’t make it to their fifth birthdays, according to Unicef statistics, mostly because of treatable diseases like malaria, measles and diarrhea. More than 40 percent will be stunted from hunger. Like millions of other impoverished children across Africa, they are waiting patiently for some kind of rescue.
Westerners, though I can really only speak on behalf of Americans, like to think of themselves as heroic, plain and simple. This romanticism is rooted vastly and deeply in the cultural diet we’re fed as kiddies, in school and out. Our sense of purpose in the world is shaped by this idea that we’re the lucky forebears of a long line of “Greats,” that endless list of American Heroes. (Isn’t that what we call our own men and women fighting the war on terrorism?) … And our Judeo-Christian background furnishes a warm, fuzzy sense of compassion for the less fortunate. And we’ve got the wealth and ambition to step up to the challenge. So needless to say, it's the crusade of our time: fixing the world.
A task we shouldn’t balk at because the world needs a fixing. The problem is: we don’t have all the answers, and certainly not the best ones. Because we’ve got modern science and washing machines, and public education and a relatively stable democracy, doesn’t mean we’ve got ready solutions for helping a bangladesh or a burkina faso or a burma in need. And in fact, many people would tell you it's a disposition just shy of racist, this assumption that we can solve the problems in “less developed” countries by our advanced tools and the grace of our humanism. Because those problems seem so uncomplicated: spend enough money, feed a village. Adopt an orphan, and give him or her something other than a future of certain impoverishment.
A good part of Africa is barely swimming, but what it needs foremost is for its saviors to look at what lies below their own pretty reflection on the surface.
The Orphans Who Didn’t Need Saving
By LYDIA POLGREEN
November 4, 2007
DAKAR, Senegal
IN 1890, King Leopold II of Belgium wrote to one of his colonial officials and asked him to set up orphanages in the vast African territory he ruled as his personal fief, the Congo.
The only problem with his plan was that there were no orphans. The concept scarcely existed in Congo or much of the rest of Africa. This is a continent where thousands of ethnic groups and cultures across a vast and diverse landscape nevertheless share basic traditions that dictate that a child whose parents have died is the responsibility of the broader family and community.
But Leopold’s problem was quickly solved — his men kidnapped boys from their families and dispatched them to the “orphanages,” where they received a bit of catechism, some military training and, if they were lucky, baptism.
Mostly, as recounted by the historian Adam Hochschild in his book “King Leopold’s Ghost,” the boys eventually became soldiers in Leopold’s vast native army, if they did not die in the long, harsh marches to the orphanages from their villages.
For Africans, Leopold’s orphan hunt, driven by relentless greed run amok in a colony he ravaged as his personal property, is only one particularly egregious example of a series of deep, and well-remembered, historical wounds.
That record helps explain the skepticism and outrage that greeted the efforts of a French charity, whose members were arrested last week as they tried to fly 103 children from Chad to France, to go hunting for orphans in the deserts between Chad and Sudan.
From the first days of European involvement in Africa, the West has helped itself to the continent’s children — as chattel to be worked like beasts of burden, as soldiers to bear arms against their own kin, or as souls needing salvation through civilization. Sometimes, as the example in Congo illustrates, they were all three.
But the scandal involving the French charity, Zoé’s Ark, is tangled in an even more complicated web, a modern one of apparently good intentions gone awry and of the perceived exploitation of the suffering of vulnerable people, and a profound cultural misunderstanding. The charity is not a well-known group like the dozens of experienced agencies that do lifesaving work in Darfur and eastern Chad. And it was operating far outside the normal boundaries of what established aid and human rights groups consider proper. Still, its experience shows how deeply angry Africans can become when Western “helpers” violate the continent’s own traditions and sense of sovereignty.
According to its Web site, Zoé’s Ark, which was started by a former fireman in France, was motivated by a sense of urgency.
In anguished language, the organization pointed to an obvious fact — the paralysis of international diplomacy in Darfur, in western Sudan, where an ethnic and political conflict has raged for four years, killing at least 200,000 and displacing 2.5 million. The Web site went on to say that something had to be done immediately to end the suffering of the most vulnerable children.
With heart-rending descriptions of children on the brink of death from starvation, violence and disease, the group raised money from French families to fly children out and place them — temporarily, it said — in French homes.
But it turns out that none of the 103 children are orphans in the traditional Western sense — foundlings with no place to go. Almost all were living with family members in villages, relatively well fed and cared for, according to the United Nations. The bewildered children cried as foreign reporters flocked to the orphanage in Abéché, Chad, where they were being temporarily housed late last week until they could be reunited with their families.
The children said they had been coaxed away from their families with sweets and cookies, according to Reuters, and a group of women claiming to be mothers of some children told a French cable news station that they had been told the children would be taken to Abéché for schooling, but that their families would still be able to visit them.
Zoé’s Ark seems to have run into the same problem that Leopold did: In many African societies finding a true orphan is not such a simple thing.
When details of the operation became known, high French officials, United Nations officials, and indignant French citizens, newspapers and child protection agencies sounded their disapproval of Zoé’s Ark’s actions. Jo Becker, child rights advocate at Human Rights Watch in New York, said that removing a child from his or her immediate surroundings might make sense only under circumstances like immediate risk of being forced into military service or a threat of immediate harm. “We would always say,” she said, “that the best place for children is in their community and with their families.”
To be sure, orphanages are full of children in cities across Africa, especially in countries where the AIDS pandemic has shattered entire extended families. And migration to cities has frayed some family bonds.
But many African countries, despite having a surfeit of children with dead or missing parents, have laws surrounding adoption that reflect a strong unease with the concept as it is practiced in the West. As a result, relatively few African children are adopted each year, especially compared with adoptions from Asia and eastern Europe.
Even the idea of Western adoptions sometimes seems to rankle. When Madonna adopted a young boy from Malawi last year, a fierce outcry erupted over whether she had followed proper procedures and whether the boy’s father had been duped.
In largely Muslim countries like Chad and Sudan, where Islamic law governs family matters, the entire Western concept of adoption is essentially forbidden by religious edict.
The current episode has a particular sting because Europe has been writing increasingly stringent rules to keep Africans from migrating there, culminating most recently in a new French law that in some cases requires DNA testing to get visas for family members. Taking a planeload of children away in secret while thousands of Africans drown in the Atlantic seeking to migrate to Spain strikes many Africans as hypocritical. “What message is the transaction sending?” demanded an editorial in the African Executive, an online business magazine. “Will Zoé’s Ark transport the 201 million Africans facing extreme hunger to Europe? Africa must vehemently resist this humiliation. If Zoé’s Ark is serious on the African plight, let it press Europe to open its borders to African migrants, grant African professionals jobs without discrimination, drop its barriers against African goods and allow Africa to export finished products.”
But accusations of hypocrisy can cut both ways. Chad’s president for the last 17 years, Idriss Déby, abandoned his usual reticence with the international news media to deliver sound bites to the reporters who swarmed to Abéché.
He called the situation an outrage, and speculated that perhaps Zoé’s Ark planned to sell the children to pedophiles. Burnished cane in hand, he walked awkwardly among the scrawny boys and girls. It is hard to say when this former military dictator last paid so much attention to Chad’s children.
Despite the country’s burgeoning oil industry and increased foreign investment, especially from China, Chad’s 1.9 million children under the age of 5, like most of those taken by Zoé’s Ark, are among the most defenseless in the world against disease, hunger and death. One-fifth won’t make it to their fifth birthdays, according to Unicef statistics, mostly because of treatable diseases like malaria, measles and diarrhea. More than 40 percent will be stunted from hunger. Like millions of other impoverished children across Africa, they are waiting patiently for some kind of rescue.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Friday, November 2, 2007
November 4th is International Mitzvah Day
You really did think about how nice in theory was that Amnesty International-produced album-for-Darfur, but you couldn't quite bring yourself to purchase a cd of Avril Lavigne, Snow Patrol. (Ok granted it's not all bad, there's some Black Eyed Peas, a little Flaming Lips). Maybe you also found something infinitesimally offensive about the name "Instant Karma" in its appeal to the latent Jewish Guilt in all of us.
Luckily good things come in second-chances. This the funkiest thing in humanitarian aid, at least that I've found so far: ASAP: The Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project.
"Featuring top musicians from around the world, Calabash Music and Modiba Productions will donate all proceeds from ASAP: The Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project.
Along with benefiting the people suffering in the Darfur region of Sudan, we all hope that this project will also raise awareness about the dire situation in Darfur: by some estimates, over 400,000 people have died by dehydration, disease, and at the hands of the Janjaweed -- armed horsemen supported by the government of Sudan.
To accomplish this, Modiba has teamed up with TrueMajority, a grassroots education and advocacy group committed to social and political justice (founded by Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's). TrueMajority has already done some incredible work in Darfur, sending camera crews and attempting to bring witnesses into the United States (the US State Department refused entry). Many thanks to all the musicians on ASAP for donating their music."
very fela kuti, very hottt (takes me back to Murphy's Sundays!!)
clicks away CalabashMusic
Luckily good things come in second-chances. This the funkiest thing in humanitarian aid, at least that I've found so far: ASAP: The Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project.
"Featuring top musicians from around the world, Calabash Music and Modiba Productions will donate all proceeds from ASAP: The Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project.
Along with benefiting the people suffering in the Darfur region of Sudan, we all hope that this project will also raise awareness about the dire situation in Darfur: by some estimates, over 400,000 people have died by dehydration, disease, and at the hands of the Janjaweed -- armed horsemen supported by the government of Sudan.
To accomplish this, Modiba has teamed up with TrueMajority, a grassroots education and advocacy group committed to social and political justice (founded by Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's). TrueMajority has already done some incredible work in Darfur, sending camera crews and attempting to bring witnesses into the United States (the US State Department refused entry). Many thanks to all the musicians on ASAP for donating their music."
very fela kuti, very hottt (takes me back to Murphy's Sundays!!)
clicks away CalabashMusic
Thursday, November 1, 2007
it's also hormones
Spent the last couple days, as usual, adding to the running mental list of blog-worthy material … little things, nuanced things, things that happen right under my nose that seem funny only when considered from a distance. (I can’t say it doesn’t feel turbulent sometimes, being physically in one place - here - but mentally coming and going constantly. Being immersed, being removed.) I like to tally these things, make lists of them, savor them as just-perceptible abnormalities, with probably the same satisfaction somebody finds in his carefully curated collection of shells or books or passport stamps. (This is probably indicative of some personality type or another).
Ok just to get it out of my system: though it’s not something I had previously put much thought into, I learned recently you can drive a manual car with a prosthetic left leg. You’ve got you’re (false) leg on the clutch, and when the time comes to switch gears, you move the gearshift with your right hand, and push your clutch leg with your left hand. Sounds simple enough; the problem is the 2 seconds of panic for everyone involved while no hands are on the wheel and on-coming traffic’s just plain in God’s hands. Well anyways like most things here, it warmed my heart to once again see that in Africa, people make $#!% happen.
But these things don’t really stand up to what I learned yesterday. Someone who works for the NGO died yesterday. Nobody I had even met, and I don’t even know the cause. But, I can’t shake it. This work that I’m doing, that we’re all trying to do over here.
I feel like I’m circling around a point, but can’t find a way in.
Ok, one step back. I spent the weekend visiting three villages where we run the Community Empowerment Program, and seeing it on the ground was seeing it in the flesh. The class is like an epicenter of knowledge. And true to the metaphor, hope and initiative ripple out with the force of an earthquake. (Far beyond the borders of any one village!) People are finding their own agency to make change. What they're chasing is nothing less than their own social evolution. The improvements in these communities, in education, health care, male-female relations, economic self-sufficiency … it’s exhilarating. (Factor in dancing around a fire singing a song, the only word of which I caught was "democracy.") So between that, and the sheer vibrancy of life here … well, I suppose I tend to gloss over context. I forget about where I am; I forget about life-expectancy. I forget there aren’t ambulances here. I manage not to notice the hip bones that show a little too sharply on every dusty animal. And ultimately, I forget that people here live on closer terms with death - and while that may in some ways be healthier than our tendency to push death to the darker corners of our awareness - they do so simply because it's got more presence here. (And it's not fair. That a simple accident of latitude can determine whether you eat or not.)
Aah, sometimes you feel like you’re riding the crest of a wave, and sometimes you can barely swim. And if it was immersion you were looking for, you’ve got it. But it’s a fine fine line between immersion and in over your head.
It’s all catching up with me …. the plain truth is I’m feeling a little too distant from the people I love. Oh this will pass, and I know it’s good for me, but man, it's a tough meantime.
Ok just to get it out of my system: though it’s not something I had previously put much thought into, I learned recently you can drive a manual car with a prosthetic left leg. You’ve got you’re (false) leg on the clutch, and when the time comes to switch gears, you move the gearshift with your right hand, and push your clutch leg with your left hand. Sounds simple enough; the problem is the 2 seconds of panic for everyone involved while no hands are on the wheel and on-coming traffic’s just plain in God’s hands. Well anyways like most things here, it warmed my heart to once again see that in Africa, people make $#!% happen.
But these things don’t really stand up to what I learned yesterday. Someone who works for the NGO died yesterday. Nobody I had even met, and I don’t even know the cause. But, I can’t shake it. This work that I’m doing, that we’re all trying to do over here.
I feel like I’m circling around a point, but can’t find a way in.
Ok, one step back. I spent the weekend visiting three villages where we run the Community Empowerment Program, and seeing it on the ground was seeing it in the flesh. The class is like an epicenter of knowledge. And true to the metaphor, hope and initiative ripple out with the force of an earthquake. (Far beyond the borders of any one village!) People are finding their own agency to make change. What they're chasing is nothing less than their own social evolution. The improvements in these communities, in education, health care, male-female relations, economic self-sufficiency … it’s exhilarating. (Factor in dancing around a fire singing a song, the only word of which I caught was "democracy.") So between that, and the sheer vibrancy of life here … well, I suppose I tend to gloss over context. I forget about where I am; I forget about life-expectancy. I forget there aren’t ambulances here. I manage not to notice the hip bones that show a little too sharply on every dusty animal. And ultimately, I forget that people here live on closer terms with death - and while that may in some ways be healthier than our tendency to push death to the darker corners of our awareness - they do so simply because it's got more presence here. (And it's not fair. That a simple accident of latitude can determine whether you eat or not.)
Aah, sometimes you feel like you’re riding the crest of a wave, and sometimes you can barely swim. And if it was immersion you were looking for, you’ve got it. But it’s a fine fine line between immersion and in over your head.
It’s all catching up with me …. the plain truth is I’m feeling a little too distant from the people I love. Oh this will pass, and I know it’s good for me, but man, it's a tough meantime.
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