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Khadija Magardie
I have it on the strictest authority from one of the interpreters accompanying the Latin American delegation to the World Conference against Racism that the following exchange actually took place. A poor woman from a remote tribe of indigenous people in Peru had just told an assembled panel a harrowing tale of her degradation, abuse and racial victimisation at the hands of a “patron” an experience so traumatic that just talking about it reduced her to a shaking wreck. With a few sniffles of her own, a United Nations facilitator leaned over, gave the seorita a hug, and, in an American drawl, asked: “So can I have your card, and your address in Geneva?”
Yessup. That’s the UN all right. From the time “the guys in the badges in blue” arrived, the local mandarins must have sensed they didn’t stand a chance. They could only step aside to kleinbaas-skap; and watch forlornly as the UN men and women took over nearly everything. Which is, as one seasoned UN conference reporter announced, “normal during these things” they arrive and tell the natives just how things should be done.
It also confirms that grown-ups are strange people indeed. Who does not sympathise with the dilemma facing Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of the classic, The Little Prince, in trying to figure out these selfsame “grown-ups” who, when you tell them you have made a new friend, don’t ask what his voice sounds like, or if he collects butterflies. Instead, they ask questions like: “How much money does his father make?” and expect to then have learned something about him. The point, of course, is that what counts to real, flesh-and-blood people is not necessarily worth a toss to the others who run the world.
With the World Conference against Racism having come and gone, anyone who spent time “on the factory floor” with the delegations will know it was a success. Seen purely emotively, the rich kaleidoscope of people converging on Durban to discuss their problems, and meet others in similar situations in order to get advice, would even be enough to give a resounding “Yes!” to whether it was worth the while. Just ask the Durbanites how wonderful it was to hear everything from French lover to Shabba Ranks accents humming around over their restaurants’ mutton biryani pots. Delegates did come to influence policy indeed. But more than that, they came to meet other minorities and racially oppressed people, to sit down and plan how to learn from each other’s experiences. And if the numbers, and the discussions way into the wee hours, bear any witness at all, it is that the world conference was a good idea.
Of the conference attendees, one group in particular, the African-American delegates, let slip more than once that they had lots more on their minds. Journalists were not privy to their caucus meetings but the formal gatherings were impressive indeed. One group of women, all loud voices, big hair and perpetually shaking like freshly caught trout, stormed around the NGO forum for days handing out pamphlets calling on the press to come to the Africa tent to hear them talk about racial and gender oppression in the United States. Some of their brethren, however, found life more relaxing chilling around the Africa tent showing off their latest “ethnic gear” purchases from the stalls lining the conference entrances, and, interestingly, comparing genealogies with their fellow countrymen and locals.
“My great-grandfather came from Benin,” one man told an assembled group. “Ooh, really?” a “sistuh” oozed.
But to others, especially the world’s hacks, success had an entirely new meaning namely how much of the phraseology could be ironed out at the last minute, and how many nations could resist reaching out and grabbing each other’s throats. Like one big, collective Oracle of Delphi they penned grim predictions for the conference’s success from the outset.
“WCAR doomed for failure”, screamed one headline. “Conference on precipice as US and Israel pull out”, yelled another.
But being brokers in the business of disasters as journalists are, this is still worth being overlooked. Who can blame journos for feeling swamped when they know in their heart of hearts that most UN conferences are typically phlegmatic, but they are being hounded by a news editor back home to get comment from “opinion leaders” on how exactly the conference “plans to change the world as we know it”?
Nor was any of it helped by whom The Guardian rightly described as the UN’s human rights “tsar”, that saintly woman, the high commissioner. Yes, Mary Robinson, whose every utterance was greeted with wonder throughout (and who was always clad in pastels) sure laid the schmaltz on thick talking about how there would be “concrete plans of action” and “implementation mechanisms at national level”. One would forgive the hacks for wiping away a stray tear after her moving tribute (“we owe it all to the courage of this woman … etcetera”) to our Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, at the final press conference.
A far more interesting lot to follow, however, were the ever-so zealous “comment and analysis” people whose encyclopaedii were in serious overdrive as they scrambled over each other to be approached by the press to give one or another “insight” into the conference. Here was oversimplification, which is the hallmark of academia, at its best rather like blaming the greenhouse effect on the world’s plants and their addiction to photosynthesis.
As many of the delegates themselves confided, there was no chance that the world’s racial problems could be solved by a million such conferences. What most of them came to Durban to do was to meet other activists and exchange e-mails in order to network in the future.
It was also a chance for them to get some nice freebies, like beadwork, T-shirts and the like. This is not to mention the fabulous opportunity to wear their native plumed hats, velvet skirts, loincloths and designer dreadlocks in all their finery something that could invite ridicule back home. One guy, for instance, admitted that he could never wear his Kurdish pantaloons and dagger slung over the hip back home not because of racial intolerance by the Big Bad US of A, but because his American wife would laugh at him.