Christopher Hitchens in his volcanic and charged memoir Hitch-22 talks of a time when he met a Rwandese genocide survivor. He writes;
“I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was nobody left on the face of the earth, either a friend or relative, ‘who knew who she was’. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illness, friendships, and kinships-gone. She went on living but with a ‘tabula rasa’ as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to “make a new start” or to be “born again”: Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. Do you wish to have more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a “clean” sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov’s microcosmic miniature story “Signs and Symbols,” which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective…”
He was writing this in relation to his trip to Poland where he was trying to trace his roots from the maternal side. Hitchens learnt rather too late in life that his mother was Jewish. Her mother committed suicide in a ritualistic pact (something that may have contributed to Hitchens’ atheism). He had never mentioned this to him. And the maternal grandmother waited until later in life before she could let out the secret. Since the 1800s and the first part of 1900, the Jewish were targeted a lot anywhere in Europe; this culminated in the World War 2 holocaust. So, immigrant Jewish who settled in ‘safer’ countries preferred keeping the Jewish identity as private as possible. Before the holocaust, the Jewish had been expelled from Russia, and Eastern Europe in general and Hitchens was trying to establish why most Jewish kept to themselves when they settled in the West.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is 23 years since Africa’s worst genocide, took place in Rwanda. W can debate about the South Sudan and Darfur wars were as terrible. But what made the Rwandan genocide potent was the record time it took to annihilate hundreds of thousands of people. That fateful April and the successive 100 days, over 800,000 people were hacked to death. Nations watched as the orgy went on and by the time they were intervening it was too late and a country was permanently scarred.
Being born is an accident of fate. Someone is born a prince, someone is born a genius, someone is born beautiful, some are born average, some are born without a sense of humour (what tragedy!), some are born poor, rich you name it. The bigger tragedy is the geographical locale where you end up. Some are lucky (save for the extreme winters) to be born in rich Scandinavian countries that are largely peaceful (they have had a fair share of their bloody history). But some are born in Iraq, South Sudan, Eastern Congo, Afghanistan, Mexico, and other hellholes.
Imagine being a Tutsi, or a moderate Hutu in Rwanda around March 1994. Maybe you are 21, fired up with the whole world at your feet literally. You have your family, you congregate around the table for supper, eating matoke and vegetables, storying and what have you. Maybe you were a strapping young man dating the beauty across the ridge. Everything is going on fine (except that everything was going south, from as early as 1990, the tensions were palpable, the war inevitable.).
Then come April came, the presidential jet is downed and with it, a president is killed starting the killing spree that will rock the continent and the world.
But the war was a culmination of long-time historical injustices that could be traced to the arrival of the colonialists and even before. We can’t delve into the history, but think for a moment what it feels like to be on the receiving end of such barbaric, primordial brutality when you have nothing to do with the circumstances that occasioned the war.
Think of the women burnt in a church in Eldoret during the 2007 post-election violence because Kibaki had stolen an election in Nairobi. Of the man who was cut into pieces in Naivasha just because he was dark and happened to come from Nyanza. Of the people killed in Kericho tea plantations. Think of being a Jew during World War 2. And other people who have died in wars that had nothing to do with them.
We take life for granted, but you never know when you can be on the receiving end of something barbaric, and torturous experience because of someone’s blind hatred and greed.
To be born is such a terrific, yet terrifying accident. More so if you are a firstborn. You never know how many times your mother may have aborted, or the amount of sperm your father may have wasted, for you to be the lucky person to live. To survive the diseases that our ancestors survived, weather calamities and all, to survive infant mortality, your mother surviving when she delivered you, to raise you, is something we take for granted. We think that being 7 billion people on earth makes your unique arrival and continued survival a joke, but it is not. Even worse, you don’t know when and how you will die. Some have the fortune to live to old age and die peacefully. Some are not as lucky; disease, wasting disease that is, accidents, wars, drunk driving, cheating on their spouse (especially in the military), and such eliminate them before they hit their prime.
Here is a paragraph from Richard Dawkins’s “Unweaving the Rainbow as quoted in Hitchens’s book;
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly, those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, and scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
So, here is to a reflective week. Think of the circumstances you live in and how fortunate you are to be alive, to enjoy the music, the fresh air, the great food, the great family, good sex, and every privilege life accords to you.
You will never be completely free and happy as to enjoy everything (diseases, being broke, petty people and all, have a way of getting in the way) but enjoy life. We are only assured of this lived experience, if so briefly, so take as little pain as possible and reap the maximum pleasure you can.
Happy week lads and lasses.
The Deal 