Redefining Patriotism

This article first appeared in the 3rd issue of the Africa Youth Human Rights Network's e-magazine; These Are Our Rights, February 2011.

It is being called the jasmine revolution and has sent shockwaves throughout the world both for its intense rapidity which not only took Tunisia but the whole continent by surprise but also its dramatic and almost fairy-tale like ending: a dictator packing his bags and making a very undignified exit to the nearest country that would take him.

Unlike the many articles that have flooded the news agencies, the blogosphere and Facebook I really do not want to debate the rights or wrongs that have been set in motion by this latest example of people power. I have my own doubts as to what the future holds but I am content to sit back and see what that is. Instead I would like to go back into the past with you. I would like to let us reflect for a moment on the name Mohamed Bouazizi. Perhaps in the frenzy of the revolution the international community may have forgotten his name but that name in Tunisia now stands for the hero who started a revolution when he gave his life for his country.

It all started with a slap and an insult, it ended with the most dramatic revolution this year and certainly one of the most dramatic in recent history. Mohamed Bouazizi is at the centre of the entire furore. A young man slapped in the face by a police officer, jobless despite the fact that completed his baccalaureate, selling vegetable to make ends meet despite the fact that his country is one of the richest in the region. No country should be allowed to sit back and watch any of its citizens in such a state but for Mohamed, not only did his motherland sit back and watch from their gleaming villas along the Mediterranean but the states representative in the form of a police officer slapped him in the face and insulted his father who died when he was three.

The rest of the story should be familiar, after taking his complaint to the local governor who would not open their offices to him; he doused himself in petrol and set himself on fire. In doing so he set on fire the regime of President of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, set on fire the spirits of his fellow countrymen who had suffered in the same conditions as he had for the last twenty three years and changed the course of Tunisian history forever. And that is the crux of all this reflection, the fact that at the very centre of this story is someone, a single person, who decided to do something, a great action, to change things. And not only did his countrymen take heed and listen to his unspoken message but they all went out and declared enough is enough.

What does one define patriotism as? Is it that feeling that courses through ones blood as one gazes at the flag fluttering in the morning breeze? Is it the pride one feels when gazing admiringly at a label that says made in your country? Or is it the undying conviction that every single square inch of your homeland is you homeland and that no one, not any one, can ever take that away from you? Is it the brave spirit that runs down the street in the face of a flood of bullets as South African school children did in Soweto, or sits silently in jail as Nelson Mandela did on Robben Island, or face a tank in the middle of Tiananmen Square and say, “I will not move!” as that famous and sadly unnamed Chinese man did twenty years ago.  Or is it defined by Mohamed Bouazizi’s final act that screamed, “I would rather die than live one more day oppressed by this regime.”

A great man once said that those who sit and allow tyranny to reign are active participants in that tyranny and as I look at the world map and see all the worlds “trouble spots” I cannot help but feel that those words ring truer now than ever before. We can blame world leaders all we want, but as the Ndebele tribe of Southern Africa say, a king is a king because of his people. Defining patriotism is a difficult thing but I can dare say that Mohamed Bouazizi came closer than a lot of people have done ever since NathanHale declared before he was executed as an American spy by the British, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” 

There is a Sadness

There is a sadness that lives on the riverbank. Calmly she sits and stares at her face in the passing flow of the river of life, sometimes losing herself in the depths of the reflection of her own eyes, hair a glorious gold, framing a face of such beauty that the heavens weep for not possessing it. In the passing current she sees the many manifestations of herself and smiles: sadly, wanly, the whiteness of her skin tinged slightly by the rush of blood, the ice in her eyes melting a bit but only for a moment. A diamond tear flows down her ivory cheek and joins the flow of the river, joining the flow of countless sorrows. 

There is the sadness of the children; born into suffering, their destinies as immutable as the stars in the heavens, they shall die before they see their tenth summer. Some born into riches beyond imagining but their loneliness a vast desert they are lost in. There are some whose parents brand them every night with broomsticks, irons and kettles; anything that comes to hand but the real pain is in their hearts, torn to shreds even before they skin is turned into a bloody mess. 

There is the sadness of love. The sadness that is wrapped in red satin, perfumed in Paris and carries a thorn that inflicts a pain greater than all the spears in Alexander’s armies. There is the pain of the rejected lover, his eyes dark pits in his face, the gleam of hope extinguished from them with that final rejection. There are the used, lying in their beds, dripping from the exertion of lovemaking, still high from the adrenalin of fucking, still clinging to that other but as alone as if they were on an island in the middle of the seventh sea. Petals dripping to the ground, tears rolling down cheeks, throats aching from the exertion of crying, a sadness that touches a primal need as basic as that which commands the breath from our nostrils.

Andrew Mason (Creative Commons Licence via Wikimedia)
"There is the sadness of the lost...their wives woman they do not remember marrying"

There is the sadness of joy. Brief moments of ecstasy, sojourns on that ninth cloud of lore but knowing that the fall comes soon enough. The higher the summit, the deeper the valley. Joys temporarily brought by the nectar of the grapes, intoxicating joy that puts sorrow to flight, only to have her return in the morning with her extended family. A game that is danced in complicated circles, joys short-lived and dying every time, sadness outlives them all and dances on their graves. 

There is the sadness of the lost. Their lives in a corner they do not remember  turning into, their wives women they do not remember marrying. Deals gone wrong, faith abandoned on an empty pulpit, a flapping rag in a breeze that threatens to blow away every last one of their convictions. Memories of days when their plans were bright beacons I the distance; calling them to future successes, glory without comparison; they would be the pride of their families, the ones who would put their names on the lips of the entire village. Instead here they are, sitting beneath the shadow of decisions that at the time seemed as insignificant as the anger of a butterfly but in hindsight was the door to doom.

There is a sadness of the rejected. The ones whose every advance is put aside like the leftover remnants of a bad meal. Whose love is branded an affront to the sensibilities of those who have appointed themselves guardians of the world’s morals. Closeted and left behind they live life under a blanket of lies that grows heavier with each passing day. Surely the weight of the grave is a relief compared to the burden forced on them by the fall of the divine dice? A whirlwind of pain, hearts torn to bits, spirits weary things that look upon the act of living as a dungeon with no key to freedom. 

There is the sadness of the old. Bodies that refuse to move to the command of instruction, hands that seem to go off in directions unwanted, eyes blurred by the vision of countless memories. But as clear as crystal are the days gone by, the opportunities lost, the wishes unfulfilled, the nostalgia for a land that was never visited, the friend that died before they could reconnect, the job you wanted to do with all your heart but today is nothing more than a hobby. The coming of every days’ sunset, a reminder of opportunities that passed like thieves in the night, felt, barely seen and robbing your each day of hope. The grave awaits packed to the brim with unfulfilled dreams. 

Her eyes glimmer, she can never be satisfied. Each day she will drag another innocent into her embrace. Kiss them slightly on the lips sending a chill through their bodies, the light in their eyes disappearing like a flame surprised by a playful breeze. It is a feeling that they do well to learn for it shall be their companion till the end of their days. She shall smile into their faces until the end of time, and they shall learn to know her name and whisper it softly in the sweet forgetfulness of their dreams.            

Silhoutte of Sadness by JiNKY Lim (Creative Commons Licence via Wikimedia)
"They shall learn to know her name and whisper it softly in the sweet forgetfulness of their dreams."              

A crisis that the world is ignoring

Long ago when I was still competing on the Public Speaking circuit in High School, they taught us that one way to grab an audience’s attention was to start with startling statistics. Well here they are:

The United Nations has estimated that 750 000 people will die within the next three months in Somalia due to the on-going famine. That is almost the same number of people dead as the total number of casualties in Iraq over the past ten years.

Already over 29 000 children under the age of five have died since the beginning of the year. In terms of September 11 casualties, that is the equivalent of eighteen planes crashing into nine twin towers full of five year old children.

For the situation to be classified as a famine in the first place, at least two people out of every ten thousand people are dying. Of hunger. Every single day.

Have I grabbed your attention enough? Have I startled you enough to want to continue reading? Please say yes because the very act of typing these figures is traumatic enough. I am sure you’ve seen the images on the evening news, on your Home page as you log into Facebook every sixteen minutes. A tweet here or there might have pierced your consciousness, tended on the few drops of pity that came dripping out and been relegated to the constant flow of news that we are subjected to. That was my reaction, a reaction born of having lived with these images on TV since I was as young as I can remember. Surely someone, somewhere is doing something about it, I told myself.

Unfortunately a Time Magaezine article broke through the bubble of my comfortable existence. According to Time Magazine, the United Nations remains fatally short by almost $700 million dollars of the $2.4 billion needed to feed the starving. Of the fifty five sitting heads of state in Africa, only four bothered to turn up to a summit convened to discuss the crisis in Somalia. And Africa’s richest nation, South Africa, has so far put forward $1.2 million to the cause, Nigeria’s pledge is still nowhere to be seen and the rest of the African continent is religiously mute on the subject of action.

What makes it intolerable, what makes it almost a crime against each and every one of those children whose sunset today might have been their last as they faced a night filled with the noise of the steady declines of their bodies, is that for decades now, Africa (seemingly led by Julius Malema) has been screaming; “African solutions for African problems”. Any attempt at interference by Western governments be it in politics, or religion, or human rights is met with the refrain of this song. ‘Leave us alone’, they say, ‘we are no longer your colonies’. ‘We can handle our own problems’. I pass no judgement on the wisdom, or lack of it, of this attitude, this is not the time to talk politics.

And yet, the time has come when a humanitarian disaster is unravelling in the plains of the Somali landscape, and the powers that be in the Halls of our continents buildings of power, have turned their gaze firmly elsewhere. Libya, has been an example of the African Union kicking itself into overdrive, countless heads of state climbing their presidential jets to “mediate” a solution to the crisis that ended with what the Libyan people had been asking for all along. Again, my argument here is not about the rightness or wrongness of what has happened in Libya over the past few days (let us leave that discussion for another night). My argument is in fact not about what has been done, so much as what has been left undone for the people of the Horn of Africa.

A few more statistics. The United States of America, has so far poured $593 million (this year alone) and the EU, beset as it was by a crippling financial crisis, is the second largest donor with $267 million.

“We as Africans have to get out of this situation of sitting back and waiting for people to fly here from far away to solve our problems,” said Nicanor Sabula of the East African Civil Society Forum ahead of the African Union Summit which failed to raise the $30 million target it had set for itself.

And if it seems that my disappointment lies with the African continent exclusively, I am sorry to disappoint in kind. Over the past few months the world has been shown nothing but the images of the recent revolution in Libya that the people of Libya started. Over the past few days the media has been saturated with images of Nicolas Sarkozy walking into fabulously opulent halls to discuss how to get Greece out of a debt that Greece created. A global movement has been started that aims to ‘Occupy’ the financial markets that until recently the citizens of those countries benefited from. I aim not to belittle each of these events, historic in their scale, but to show that in comparison, very little is being said about the citizens of a country who woke up to find that the rain refused to fall from the heavens through no fault of their own.

Long ago, in the innocent days of High School they taught us that a good writer would close with a conclusion that showed that the issues one had posed had a logical end, a termination of the train of thought. Dear reader, accept my apologies I have no conclusion for you. I leave it to you to ask yourself what it means to be an African, what it means to declare that you will solve your own problems and then back down when an actual problem does appear. And for the African and non-African alike, I leave you to ask yourself the question: Are we really going to let a quarter of a million people starve to death? It is not enough to click like on Facebook photo’s, it is not enough to create hash-tags on Twitter, or tut pityingly over the photos that we see on CNN. What is it that you are going to do to save at least just one, only one, of those your fellow human beings.

(Caption Image: The Pulitzer Prize winning photo by Kevin Carter taken in Sudan of a girl being trailed by a vulture waiting for her to die.)

**Click here for a stark and haunting photo essay by Time Magazine

UPDATE: There are many ways you can get involved, either as an individual or as a group. Many NGO's have branches worldwide, visit this page for a list of NGO's working in the Horn of Africa. To multiply the effect of your donation, consider holding a fundraiser (click here for some creative ideas) in your community. For those living in South Africa, Médicine Sans Frontières Supports direct cash deposits.