Notes from Central Africa

The peace is shaky again in Burundi, where the government is accusing the FNL rebels of plotting further attacks, and the FNL are saying–as they have been for years–that they just want to be a legitimate political party. So says Reuters.

This is good news for anyone who makes money off of instability, which is a bigger group of people and profit than most of us compassionate naifs often think. It’s also good news, perhaps, for a surprising actor: an anti-landmine organizatoin.

I found this on Reuters Alertnet a few weeks ago:

The team with me, from Swiss Foundation for Mine Action (FSD), are hoping to complete an ambitious mission in September and declared Burundi the first conflict zone in the world completely free of all known landmines and unexploded ordnance.

To meet that goal, of course, requires that Burundi still be considered a conflict zone with the FSD finishes its operations, be that ahead of schedule or behind. I’m sure the good people of FSD had no such intention, and I’m clearly feeling a little snarky today, but the goal crafted for a sound byte is just a bit too ironic to pass up.

What in the name of all things holy and profane is going on in that most precious of printed real estate, Maureen Dowd’s column space in the NYT?

There is nothing–no news peg (unless the Christie Brinkley thing is one, but I’m not American-pop-culture with-it enough, halfway around the world, to know), not grander meaning, not even a Hallmark holiday–that indicates why in the world we’d spend July 6 (I’m a week behind, but it’s still the #1-emailed article, apparently) listening to the printed world’s most famous redhead (sorry, Samantha Power) quote a priest who talks to high school kids about who not to marry. Seriously, what’s this doing in the middle of my NYT? It feels kind of like watching a TV show you taped, but someone switched the channel in the middle and didn’t apologize.

The only thing that makes sense to me about the column is the one part she didn’t write:

“Thomas L. Friedman is off today.“

This has nothing to do with Africa, but my mom sent me a link to this illustrated story in the Times—it’s kind of like a picture book for adults, and it’s about kids; how cleverly clever–and I have to share. The illustrator, Christoph Niemann, writes about riding the subway with his two young kids, Arthur and Gustav. I have a cousin, about to turn 6, who is a Metro system savant, and this made me laugh out loud:

“People often ask me for directions in the subway. Even though I know my way around rather well, I still have to defer to Arthur very often. Yet it seems people don’t trust the advice of a preschooler. They should.”

(I can vouch for this; Jason could’ve given directions to anyone, but they just wouldn’t listen.)

Also, I loved this one:

“A chaperone on one of Arthur’s school trips told me something he overheard when all the kids were neatly lined up in rows of two. The girl holding Arthur’s hand asked him, “Have you heard of Peter Pan?” “No,” he replied, “have you heard of Metro North?” “

But you have to go here, and check out the illustrations.

I don’t have any idea. But here’s what Temba Kekura told me (this is the last part of my Sierra Leone series; if you read yesterday’s post, you haven’t seen this yet):

Before the war, when his village and his family and his body were whole, Temba Kekura was a farmer. He had few things, simple things, the things he needed – land, crops, family, and two strong arms. Then he became part of a story that repeats, village after Sierra Leonean village.

The rebels came. They looted, burned houses, raped. They killed Mr. Kekura’s mother, and when he refused to join the force, one of them cut off his right arm.

So now, he calls himself a gardener. He tends peppers and okra with a hoe. Proper crops – cassava, sweet potatoes, and rice – he leaves to men with two arms, or to their war widows.

Most days, his arm, that arm, hurts. “Whenever I feel pain, I just think bad things,” he says about his life, about himself, but mostly about the man who left him this way. “My heart spoils.”

So he has never talked about what happened; but his body tells a story everyone knows on sight. That story starts with Fallah Sakila.

Way back in March, the Christian Science Monitor sent me to Sierra Leone to report a series on ‘grassroots reconciliation,’ for lack of a better term, after the war there.

It’s finally seen the light of day, in a three-parter which began yesterday. Here’s the setup:

John Caulker might know the rough, red-rock roads of rural Sierra Leone better than he knows the hallways of his own office in Freetown, the seaside capital.

There, streets are crowded equally by people and piles of trash – a sign, in its own unintentional way, of abundance. Kids hawk candies, shammies, pirated DVDs, and cellphone chargers. They tease you, in the heat, with cold Cokes and baggies of drinking water tied tight at the top. An hour in traffic – a rather common way to pass an hour in Freetown – and you can do a day’s shopping from your car window.

Here, to the east, in the villages where Mr. Caulker has done human rights work for 10 years, neither goods nor income are disposable. Every kid’s belly seems to sag for lack of food. All that can be found for sale are staples – cassava, mangos, rice. Then there are the signs of the brutal, decade-long civil war: Abandoned houses, some clearly shelled, stand apathetically along the road. In one village, a rusting tank, its cannons sometimes used as makeshift laundry lines, sits at a crossroad, inscribed hopefully, “For Sale!”

The farther Caulker goes on his cross-country trips, the farther away Freetown seems – geographically, existentially. In countries recovering from war, capitals have the edge. They’re the places where political power is reestablished, aid projects are launched, and donor money flows. It’s in the capitals that the “postwar reconstruction” agenda, engineered in good part abroad, begins.

“It’s like they have this postconflict checklist: Truth commission, tick. Military assistance, tick. Trials, tick. Next. Go on to the next country,” Caulker says. “But the people have answers. They have their cultural values.”

Caulker wants to put those values on that checklist. For months, he has been traveling from village to village, reviving fambul tok – family talk in Krio (an English creole). It’s a tradition with a long history – before the war; before, even, the white man – and a range of meanings. Villagers sat around nightly bonfires, telling jokes and recounting the day’s events. Sometimes, fambul tok resolved disputes, adjudicating everything from petty theft to matrimonial discord. The practice made villagers more than neighbors; it united them as a fambul.

Caulker thinks these old ways may be Sierra Leone’s best method for dealing with its newest problem: reconciling rural communities after a war felt most brutally in these villages he says fell through the gaps of the postwar checklist. Here, former soldiers live again alongside the women they raped or whose husbands they killed, or the men whose hands they cut off. They didn’t apologize; didn’t acknowledge the past. They just, Caulker says, moved back in.

The series continues today, and concludes tomorrow (with video!). Hope you’ll check it out.

Oh, so many apologies.

* First, to my few but devoted commenters–commentors? how is it spelled? this new internet age!–whose wonderful thoughts I’ve let languish in the “awaiting approval” pipeline. Sorry about that; it’s been a bit crazy here, and I didn’t want to click in and out until I could really engage.

So, here I am, ready for you. Which is by no means to assume that you are still there.

* Second, an apology on apologies: My post on Canada’s truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) elicited the ire of one reader (whom I don’t know), who vigorously and quite rightly nudged me to correct my assumption that there’s no reparations involved in the Canadian TRC. I had assumed–wrongly and stupidly–that if there were a reparations scheme, the BBC would’ve reported it. I’d been doing so much of my own reporting on truth and reconciliation measures, and so much work at grad school before that, and reparations have never not come up in those conversations, so I figured it would be part and parcel of any story on a TRC. (Though a bit of sympathy to the BBC: I had 4,000 words over three days to deal with Sierra Leone, and I still had trouble getting a graph about reparations in.)

My Astute Reader is not right about the amount–it’s $2 billion, according to the International Center for Transitional Justice, and not $4.9 billion as s/he asserts–but is right about the fact that it’s part of the package. In fact, the ICTJ says reparations and the TRC were negotiated at the same time, which is pretty remarkable: So often, governments fear TRCs because of reparations. ‘Open an official truth-telling process,’ the logic goes, ‘and people will eventually ask you for money for the suffering you’ve given them space to talk about.’ It’s been a problem smart people in transitional justice have been working on for a long time. So this Canadian commission is good news on that front. (Quick note, just to temper this a bit: A 2003 article in the journal Comparative Education says that more than 9,000 lawsuits had been filed against the Canadian government in a bid to get reparations–and that was just in 2003. So the reparations fight was not a short, quick battle.)

What makes me sad about all this is that the woman I met in Montreal in October 2007, who had been through the residential school system, didn’t know anything about it. ICTJ says the agreement was negotiated in 2006 and the payments started in 2007; but when I met her at the Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide, she still felt neglected and anonymous. She hadn’t seen any money yet, or heard of any.

Certainly all the press this is getting, in Canada and beyond, will change that. Also, I’m citing an example of a single individual, which certainly no statistician, and not even a good journalist, would ever get away with. But I think there’s still a lot to be learned–and not just in Canada–about how to make these institutional processes reach far and wide, to make the majority of those they’re supposed to help feel included.

Which, to be unforgivably self-referential, some of these question are part of what my series on Sierra Leone is about.

But at the heart of that post on Canada is a question that has been gnawing me for a long time. It’s not just about TRCs; it’s about the whole notion of story-telling. We say–we, journalists; we, TRC commissioners; we, peacebuilders; insert-other-we-here–that sharing stories, or “truth telling,” or “giving testimony,” or any other favored locution, brings benefits: many people say it helps the teller, by bringing closure or giving voice or some such thing (though in interviews I did for the Sierra Leone stories, many people also acknowledged ‘truth telling’ has the potential to re-traumatize). Many people say it’s good for society, a learn-from-the-past-so-you-don’t-repeat-it thing. Many people say it helps us craft history.

All these things are true, to varying degrees–and, surely, like everything, are sometimes not true. It’s the second one that concerns me, which is why I harped on that quote in the BBC piece: I’m worried that we are–that I, too, am–too quick to offer platitudes about the social utility of listening to victims. I’m not entirely sure that, if something awful happened to me, I’d want someone to say, “Tell us, for the good of America.” I think I would probably be tempted to say, “Get lost.” And I’m surprised more people don’t say that to me.

Which must mean that one of those justifications, or some other one I haven’t included, really do carry some weight. It’s just that sometimes, it’s impossible for me to understand.

Saw this on the BBC headlined, “No paper for Zimbabwean money.”

It’s wrong, I know, but that’s kind of funny: The Germans supply the country with paper to print bank notes on, but because of the election, they’ve said, “No more.” So now, Zimbabwe can’t print any more money.

Which may be the best thing to happen to the value of Zimbabwe’s currency in quite awhile?

So the 4th of July is also Rwandan liberation day, the day in 1994 when the Rwandan Patriotic Front took control of the country and the genocide ended. Some folks I encountered today thought I was feeling all festive for them–which, sure, I am, but I was mostly stoked that the 4th of July means burgers and beer at the American embassy. Not that I’m a woman who needs an occasion to love freedom.

July 1, by the way, is Rwandan independence day, the day the country officially shucked Belgium (though it was a shucking long in the works). No public festivities on that day–because it’s a bit of a murky thing to celebrate. Independence is when the balance of power here shifted, starting decades of rule that would culminate in “Hutu Power” and ultimately genocide.

So no parties on the 1st here. Just a leisurely day off, with some time to think about, as one person put it to me, “how badly we used our independence.”

I don’t understand this

. There are a hundred million things to write about here—me and my professional compatriots are trying to get a humble few of them into print, and no one cares. But the AP bothers to write, and the International Herald Tribune bothers to print, a lengthy piece on visitors to genocide sites.

It’s not just that it’s the most obvious thing you could possibly write about here. It’s not just that a story on visiting genocide sites does almost nothing more than rehash the same story everyone writes from here, with some hotel addresses at the end. It’s that it’s so clear that this is a non-story that it starts this way:

Visiting places famous for death is nothing new. You can tour the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau in Germany and Auschwitz in Poland, or the killing fields of Choeung Ek in Cambodia. Tourists sought glimpses of the World Trade Center ruins within days of the Sept. 11th attacks.

Rwanda is another destination where visitors can bear witness to the mass slaughter of innocents….”

And it’s not just this is a lame way to start a non-story. It’s that the sentence sounds so cold and inhuman, as if Rwanda were just another destination where…

Sometimes, you just have nothing to say. And while I could still use a lot of practice, I have learned that in those moments, it’s probably best just to keep your mouth shut.

But I’ve never been good at staying silent for too long. So here we go…