Getting Things Right
A knock at the door of our residence. A woman makes a request, “Please contribute £2 for the care of abandoned pets.”
I want to rush back to my room, fish two precious pounds out of my school bag and give it to her. And add, “Could you please donate £1, with which I can feed a whole family, for a whole day and more, in a village called Mtakuja in Tanzania!” But I would seem too impolite!
A prayer moment in our church. The theme: Caring for Creation… or something like that! A melodious song with an accompanying PowerPoint of beautiful meadows and flowers. Perhaps there were also some photos downloaded from the website of National Geographic. The PowerPoint was followed by a scripture reading, a psalm, sharing…
I heard them say (perhaps they didn’t say, but I heard them that way!), “Destroy all the forests, throw some concrete and asphalt around. Plant all the trees in an impeccable array of rows and columns, so that our children can be close to nature.” A romantic discussion on environmental crisis! Brilliant!
I wanted to say, “What we need is a change of lifestyle. Could use two fridges instead of three, one plate at table instead of four? Could we reduce the use of aerosol; could we reduce garbage by using more re-fillers, rather than use-and-throw items, etc, etc.” Instead I kept quiet. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. After all, I too use some of these things just to appear modern, and to enjoy the benefits of development.
A talk on the present “credit crunch” in my college. A lady student asks the speakers, “What would be the implication of all this on globalization?” The present credit crunch will reduce FDIs (Foreign Direct Investments) and cut down possible aid to the Third World and hence they will not have purchasing power…. and so on! The lady student reacts, “It’s a pity. At least globalisation brought us together!”
Did I assume that that lady student had a very noble concept of globalization? I wanted to clarify, “Madam, are you telling us that the people in Tanzania, for instance, have to eat Robertsons marmalades and pickles bottled in the U.K., taste the Tabasco chilly sauce from the U.S., drink the Ceres fruit juice from South Africa, and use the Zain milk imported from U.A.E (don’t ask me if cows grow in Dubai!), while the fruits get rotten in a village near Mombo in Northern Tanzania, and the dairy milk is poured out in a village called Kinyanambo in Southern Tanzania?” I pass the moment in silence, because there was no time. Besides, would she really understand? For sure, most of us know the basics of economic system: demand and supply! Why oil price has been shooting up in the past year? Why we are paying more for diesel than petrol, while the production of the former actually takes less labour? But what we may not understand is why imported fruit jam in Tanzania is cheaper than the local product! And why Tanzania is forced to import exotic food products is perhaps to oblige to the trade agreement that was signed when Tanzania received some aid from the U.K! (At this point, I recollect seeing in the shelves of supermarket in Kenya, some exotic brand of tea that was packed in the U.K.!!! Don’t ask me where this tea was grown!) Anyway, this is globalization: be smart, compete in this one global market with your product and the fittest will survive! The fittest is one who has access to more credit, who can take more risks in the market, shuffle around with their credit using the modern communication and transport network, buy the cheapest raw material, hire the cheapest labour force, and get the best price for the product! Too complex to be put forward in a few minutes and I am not even an expert!
Newscast at 6 pm, on ITV, London. This is the third day in a row that I have forced myself to watch. The only international story is about Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Why are the British so much interested in Zimbabwe, I wonder! Is it because of the nasty remarks made about the queen of England by that old British-bred veteran? To continue this discussion would be too political, and digging up a lot of past and the accompanying guilt, and of course, about the complex situations of African life-presidents, dictators and warlords who are always, at least initially, pampered by some Western powers.
These days I am trying to read Dawkins’ God Delusion. Eurocentricism even in science, philosophy and religion! I am glad that Dawkins is only making a silly case against a Western Christian god. (Sorry, how dare I call ‘silly’ the case furnished by the great evolutionist, who gave us the concepts of ‘memes’ and ‘false genes’!) Of course, this great mind has inherited a meme from the history of Europe, a false gene that lies imbedded in his subconscious: the atrocities of a history dominated by the Holy Roman Empire, the struggles with the Crusades, pogroms, the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the so called Enlightenment. (And let us not once again mention, ‘holocaust’! Israel will have more reasons to justify the Berlin Wall of the 21st century. The West is silenced by its guilt, and the U.S. business and politics is dominated by certain group of people who have some ethnic roots in what is called ‘Israel’ since 1945.) Anyway Dawkins seems to have no idea of the millions of Africans and Latin Americans, and the billions of Asians who may look at God and religion quite differently.
But the pity is, his idea will sell. Not only in the U.K., Europe and the U.S., but all over the world. I imagine, (this is only an imagination, may be about the past!) there will be a conference held in London to discuss “Education in the 21st Century.” The Minister of Education from the United Republic of Tanzania will be invited. Of course, his journey, stay and even sitting allowance will all be lavishly paid by some well-intentioned NGO, whose funds will come from the tax-payer or a generous donor in the U.K. (or from a multi-national who has sucked the blood out of the poor Tanzanian!) There will be a British educationalist who, having read Dawkins the other day, will speak of a “value-free education.” The Tanzanian minister being better enlightened now, thanks to the conference and the tour abroad, will stand in their parliament (which in space is at least four times larger and better furnished than the chamber of the British House of Commons!) and pass a law that all religious symbols should be removed from the classrooms in Tanzania. And the MPs of Tanzania, clad in coat, suit and tie when the outside temperature is only 38 degrees Centigrade in the semi-desert of Dodoma, will console themselves that they are on the road to development because this concept of “value-free education” came from the WEST.
And there will be that poor teacher in one Shirimatunda village in rural Tanzania, who is trying to make some staccato sentences in English in an overcrowded classroom, “This is a window;” “This is a door;” – and actually that classroom has no window and door, but only large cut in the wall through which the students enter and leave, and some holes through which they get plenty of fresh air and sunshine. But that classroom does have a wall that has no religious symbol, thanks to one great mind called Dawkins.
Let me stop here. May be I got it all wrong. After all, I am still new here. Sorry for the very complex sentences in this letter. That is because, when my English teacher in primary school was teaching, I was watching the mangoes on the tree, through the hole in the wall.