Something extraordinary is happening in the wake of the New York tragedy.
It is already hard to recall what normal life was like – and this is only the beginning. Americans in general, and New Yorkers in particular, are struggling to come to terms with their living nightmare. Disbelief is muddled up with a desperate
struggle to understand what has happened to them. Sleeplessness and a fear of sudden movement or being startled by unexpected noises have all become commonplace.
But it’s not just New York. The whole world has changed. I, too, tend to wake with a start at the slightest noise in the night, and hold my breath when an airliner passes unusually low overhead – and I’m all the way out here in Cameroon.
Day Zero Plus Ten. Driving into town, I spot an old, rusty red petrol tanker that has ploughed across two (mercifully empty) traffic lanes during the night, and come to rest, nose in the air, atop the concrete housing that kept one of Douala’s rare traffic lights rooted to the ground. Now the robot is lying on its back, the ancient truck splayed across it like a lion that has brought down its prey, the driver standing helplessly to one side, scratching his head and wondering how he is going to get his vehicle back on the road.
It is a banal, almost comical scene. And yet it’s hard not to look at it without making uncomfortable new associations. An ordinary traffic accident (and they are no rarity in the crazy streets of this haphazard, ex-colonial Central African city) is now corrupted by ingrained images of terror raining from the skies. Things will never be the same again.
But wait a minute. Why should we be nervous, way out here in Cameroon, where nothing of any significance ever happens? Who would want to bomb an obscure chunk of Africa?
Well, let’s not forget that, of more than 200 people killed and thousands injured in the bombing of the United States embassy in downtown Nairobi, the vast majority were Kenyans innocently walking the streets of their own town. Let us also not forget the staggering statistic recently issued by the International Rescue Committee: that about 2,5-million people have died in the past three years as a result of the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And no one knows precisely who is footing the bill for that war – or why. (And that’s only one of many proxy African wars.)
This is not a tit-for-tat game of numbers. No one can discount the magnitude of what happened in the US on September 11 – especially not the public trauma that overtook New York’s melting pot of humanity on the southern tip of Manhattan Island.
On the contrary, something extraordinary has begun to happen in the wake of the tragedy that hit New York. Amid the many, senseless voices crying for bloody revenge, and in spite of the visible preparations for unprecedented bombing campaigns against one of the world’s poorest nations by its richest and most powerful, hands of compassion are reaching out to find a new understanding of the world.
The e-mails started arriving with-in the first week. People began sending out circular letters to all their friends, anyone in their network of acquaintances, giving their anguished views of what had happened, but more importantly, asking for a sharing of ideas on the meaning of it all, begging for answers. Those who had picked up words of wisdom floating on the ether that is the Internet forwarded them across their mailing lists.
In one day I received personal letters from novelist Russell Banks (whom I know) and pop philosopher/ healer Deepak Chopra (whom I’d only heard about). On subsequent days I came to know the intimate thoughts of many others – powerful, fumbling, angry and hurting by turns.
Something about the televised tragedy in New York, a Hollywood horror movie come all too vividly to life, caused people to drop their inhibitions and address themselves to strangers from the heart -acknowledging the tiny six degrees of separation that link each of us not only to the drama inside the blazing infernos of lower Manhattan, but also to the terror of millions of individual Afghans fleeing ahead of an impending but as yet unspecified doom.
Many of these are the voices of Americans, or people who have exiled themselves to the relative freedom of the US. They are a minority struggling to have their voices heard over what one writer called “the rhetoric of retaliation that is now in full-throated roar” across the US.
And somehow, miraculously, reason is beginning to seep in where before there was only talk of a “War for Infinite Justice”, an open-ended crusade against an unspecified enemy, a war whose parameters no one was allowed to know.
On television the politicians have consciously started to rein themselves in. Where before there was only talk of “civilised nations” waging war against terrorism and barbarism, the crusading alliance is now forced to examine the possibility that the borders of civilisation might well be more far-flung than they had previously thought. The challenge now is to define what is meant by “civilisation,” what is meant by “terror” and what is meant by “justice”.
One of my new-found e-mail correspondents urged fellow Americans to “talk about the root causes of terrorism; the need to recognise [other] people’s despair at ever being heard, short of committing such dramatic, murderous acts”.
Another urged Americans to make the long-overdue move from “a thing like this should not happen HERE!” to “a thing like this should not happen ANYWHERE”.
After the shock waves that still reverberate from Ground Zero, the world will never be the same again. But if this kind of reason gets half a chance, it might just become a better place to live.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza