What is the connection between these two pictures?
The picture on the right is of a classroom of students at the Bethany Christian School in Jos, Nigeria (West Africa). They are being presented with books from the U.S. Embassy.
What kind of books?
Books about their future. Specifically? Books that tell them how they can study in the United States of America. It's all about a brilliant future that awaits them. It's about hope.
The picture on the left is a machete. It is not about hope. It is not about the future. It is about death.
Today the world is reeling as it reads about the massacre of some 500 people in Jos, Nigeria. Most were old men, women and children that couldn't outrun hate-filled madmen who hacked them to death with machetes. A terrible, horrifying way to die.
No doubt many of these students were among the victims.
Victims of what?
Most of the news services reported this as religious or ethnic violence. Perpetrators and victims were from different tribes and religions so that was the easy explanation.
But Caroline Duffield of the BBC News in Lagos had a different explanation. She wrote: "These killings are often painted by local politicians as a religious or sectarian conflict. In fact it is a struggle between ethnic groups for fertile land and resources in the region known as Nigeria's Middle Belt."
Conflict Detectives
In order to stop violence we must know what it's about. We must be conflict detectives that get to the bottom of the conflict, the real cause of it so we can begin to figure out how to stop it.
This slaughter is about resources. Do the people know that? Or were the machete-wielding madmen not told and were simply whipped into a religious or ethnic frenzy of hatred so they would go on a rampage and kill all these innocent people?
It is time to stop being manipulated by so-called leaders who use hatred to try to accomplish their goals. It is time to be grown up adults who intelligently communicate with one another instead of resorting to cave man brutality. Surely we humans can do better than this.
Instead of this carnage that took place, what if the villagers had negotiated an agreement about the use and sharing of these resources? West African villages have traditionally had Palaver Huts where such discussions and negotiations take place.
It's time to return to the Palaver Huts. It's time to grow up. It's time to tell the truth about the cause of a conflict instead of painting it over with the usual religious and ethnic paint brush. It's time to solve the real conflict. And it's time for people to stop being manipulated by hatred.
My Story
I am deeply saddened by this useless slaughter in Nigeria. I love Nigeria and I love Africa.
I lived with my family in Enugu, Nigeria, many decades ago. We all left at the beginning of what was called the Biafran War in which the people had likewise been manipulated into ethnic and religious madness.
Some decades later in post-apartheid South Africa, my husband and I lived up in the mountains north of the Indian Ocean where my husband managed some resorts. There were frequent stories of hate-filled violence, many of them about being hacked to death by machetes.
The night before I learned that my father had unexpectedly died, a waitress in Pietermaritzburg chewed me out for wearing rings on my fingers. She told me about a woman who had her fingers hacked off with a machete in front of the library just for her rings. The death of my father and this latest chilling story about machetes convinced us that it was just too dangerous to be there. We loved South Africa, but it was time for us to return to the U.S.
Perhaps you recognize the name "Pietermaritzburg." That's the very city where Gandhi was thrown off the train for sitting in the first class section which was off limits to Indians. As he sat in the cold outside the train station all night, his anger burst into a fiery passion for the dignity of every human being. This passion ultimately led to Indians non-violently throwing the British out of India after dominating them for over two hundred years.
When I think about Pietermaritzburg, I always think about my hero Gandhi sitting outside the train station birthing in his heart a burning passion for human dignity. I also think about the endless flowering trees that can sweep you off your feet, and in the next moment, the chilling stories of machetes that plant your feet firmly back on the ground.
The beauty and the tragedy of Africa live in our hearts. There have to be answers to the conflicts in this smoldering continent.
Nigeria today
If you'd like to read the BBC account of this tragedy, click here.
