Читать книгу Drink the Bitter Root - Gary Geddes - Страница 9

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Orphan and Worm

I WAS EN route to Kigali, by way of Entebbe International Airport in Uganda. My research had unearthed an irresistible fact: that Entebbe was the final point of departure in Africa for Princess Elizabeth when, after hearing of the death of her father on February 6, 1952, she returned to take up her new life as queen of England and its colonies. The official telegram never reached her at the hunting lodge in Kenya; in fact, she did not hear the news until the BBC broadcast was relayed to her in the nearby Treetops Hotel. Her return home via Sunyani and Entebbe airports was delayed by a thunderstorm. I remember that day so clearly. I was not yet twelve years old, oblivious to the wider world, and had just crossed the intersection at Fourth Avenue and Commercial Drive in Vancouver on my way to Grandview Elementary School when a tall policeman put his hand on my shoulder and announced that the king had died. I must have had a blank look on my face, or been daydreaming, for he went on to explain that this momentous occasion meant school was cancelled for the day. I ran home and exploded into the kitchen, grinning from ear to ear, to announce the news to my stepmother.

“No school, no school! The king is dead!”

My stepmother was not much older than Elizabeth, who was assuming the throne at age twenty-five. I don’t know which was more of a shock to her: the king’s death or my irreverent behaviour.

If the passing of George VI did not go unnoticed in my family, it was even more significant news for liberation movements in Africa already gathering momentum for independence and an end to empire. India had shed the yoke. Colours and boundaries were shifting on the postwar maps, which included the recently created State of Israel. And it was Israel—for its original displacement of Palestinians, and then the prolonged occupation of their lands after the Six Day War—that would bring the small lakeside settlement of Entebbe once more into the news, in a daring raid that galvanized world attention.

I HAD BOARDED my connecting flight to Uganda at London’s Heathrow Airport. As we flew south over France and Spain, my mind was full of images of that famous raid and gun battle at 2300 hours on July 4, 1976, when a team of elite Israeli commandos, faces masked, rolled out of Hercules C-130 transport planes and drove at high speed in a black Mercedes and several Land Rover vehicles across the tarmac to storm the Entebbe airport terminal. The rescue mission had been set in motion on June 27, 1976 , after flight 139—an Air France Airbus A300 en route from Tel Aviv to Paris with 258 passengers and 12 crew on board—was hijacked in Athens by two Palestinian and two German militants and diverted first to Libya, then to Entebbe airport. Ugandan president Idi Amin, sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, lent ground support to the hijackers. After the non-Jewish passengers on flight 139 were set free, the hijackers threatened to kill the rest if their demand for the release of fifty-three Palestinian prisoners, forty held in Israeli jails, was refused. The secret Israeli rescue mission flew south all day below the radar along the Red Sea, through the Rift Valley and then west across Lake Victoria. In the bloody gun battle that took place during an audacious night raid lasting less than one hour, all of the hijackers were killed, along with three hostages and one commando, and another ten hostages were wounded. While rescuing the hostages, securing the airport and refuelling, the commandos killed at least thirty Ugandan soldiers and destroyed eleven Ugandan MiG-17 fighter planes on the ground. Idi Amin expressed his displeasure at the invasion by ordering the murder of flight 139 passenger Dora Bloch in her hospital bed in Kampala and the slaughter of hundreds of Kenyan nationals residing in Uganda, whom he regarded as enemy collaborators. Four years later, a bomb exploded on New Year’s Eve beneath the dining room of the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, killing thirteen people, belated payback against the hotel’s Israeli owners for the Entebbe incident.

In a few hours, I, too, would fly in over Africa’s Great Lakes region, once thought to be the source of the Nile and the meeting place of Stanley and Livingstone. The contrast could not have been greater between the cordial, highly publicized meeting of the Welsh-American journalist and the famous Scottish explorer, and the violent, clandestine encounter between Israeli commandos and Palestinian hijackers, but the two events had one thing in common: both were a form of high-stakes international political theatre being played out on African soil. The stakes in Africa now were no lower, though the site of violence had shifted from Entebbe to northern Uganda, neighbouring Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the ethnic card was played to mask what were essentially land and resource wars, a scramble to control the traffic in oil, diamonds, gold, copper and coltan that was rapidly unravelling the achievements of civil society.

I reclined in the seat and closed my eyes for a moment, trying to control my anxiety. My seatmates on either side were a young African businessman in the window seat wearing an expensive three-piece suit and reading the Times, which he had folded in that clever English way of making narrow vertical strips several columns wide, and a middle-aged African woman reading a Bible with the aid of granny glasses perched on the end of her nose. She had a long scar on her right cheek that I took to be a tribal marking. While I struggled with my fears and the claustrophobia of being wedged in the middle seat, the possibility of idle chat or religious testimony posed a greater menace. I thanked the gods of aviation that my companions had serious reading material to distract them.

Once I had quieted my nerves, I had time to go over my notes on the week I’d spent in The Hague two months earlier visiting the International Criminal Court. Violence, human rights abuses and the miscarriage of justice are problems without borders, and no country is immune. The disproportionate number of African Americans in jails in the United States and First Nations individuals incarcerated or living in squalid conditions in Canada indicates that racism is alive and well and that injustice thrives in democratic countries. I’d seen justice miscarried yet again when the Commission of Inquiry into the Deployment of Canadian Forces to Somalia was discontinued at a key juncture, and Private Kyle Brown, a minor and reluctant participant in the killing of Shidane Arone, became a scapegoat for the guilty officers and a dysfunctional military hierarchy. To learn more about international justice and its response to war crimes and crimes against humanity, I’d read Erna Paris’s meticulous history The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice in the Age of Imperial America, in which she traces the development of Western concepts of justice and the colossal struggle to put in place legal mechanisms to administer justice at the international level. Establishing the International Criminal Court was a gargantuan task, but the principles and procedures were hammered out at the Rome conference in June and July 1998 and ratified by sixty nations on April 11, 2002. The ICC officially came into being on July 1, 2002, with the United States, China, Israel, Iraq, Libya, Qatar and Yemen in opposition.

I needed to know how witnesses are selected and protected by the ICC and how international justice, in a remote corner of Europe, could possibly change things on the ground in Africa. I wanted someone to convince me that George Orwell was wrong when he wrote, “All kinds of petty rats . . . are hunted down while almost without exception the big rats escape.” I was also keen to learn how international justice might be perceived by African victims and their families. For example, how would the conviction of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a Congolese rebel leader facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the forced recruitment of child soldiers, benefit a child in South Kivu who was still suffering from the trauma of being forced to kill his parents? How would such a conviction benefit a raped woman in need of fistula surgery, rejected by husband and family and still struggling to cope with her severely altered state? And what about the shadowy Congolese and Ugandan officials and businessmen who enlisted and supported Lubanga? Would they go unpunished? Already, the case against Lubanga was in danger of being thrown out of court because of procedural irregularities. Chances were good that he would go free, an insult to his presumed victims and a great embarrassment for the ICC, which was facing public criticism and struggling to prove its effectiveness.

The road to the International Criminal Court can be as brief as zooming in from outer space on Google Earth, or it can be an extremely long and drawn-out process, thanks to procedural matters, delays, appeals and the difficulty of accumulating reliable witness reports. Radovan Karadzic, the so-called Butcher of Sarajevo, had managed to evade capture in the Serbian capital of Belgrade for more than a decade by growing a Whitmanesque beard and posing, with all due irony, as a practitioner of holistic medicine.

In spite of its glass and white marble exterior, the ICC is an imposing structure with bars and electrified wires discouraging uninvited guests. Don’t even think of it, the architecture seems to say. It didn’t take long for the two security guards posted in the outer entrance to place me in the unwelcome category, especially after I confessed that I did not have an appointment. I’d forgotten my list of names and phone numbers. When the doctor-professor-visitor-from-abroad routine didn’t work, I dredged up a name from memory. “I’m here to see Claudia,” I said. “Perdomo?” one guard prompted. I nodded, though I’d forgotten Claudia’s last name from the brief e-mails we’d exchanged weeks earlier. I made myself at home in the locked lobby, amidst a few utilitarian chairs and an ATM. Cash, in case someone had to bribe his way into or out of this fortress of international justice? Just as I finished replenishing my modest stock of euros, the door opened and Claudia Perdomo materialized.

Claudia ushered me through the next set of locked doors, and we fetched drinks before selecting a table by the window. The cafeteria at the main entrance served as a reminder that this was a place of serious business: no art, no frills, no lounging about. Claudia told me she was Guatemalan and had worked for the UN on human rights issues. Now she was head of the Outreach Unit of the Public Information and Documentation Section. She explained that her team worked directly with victims and potential witnesses to help them understand the aims and procedures of the court and to create an environment in which they felt safe to share their stories. Her department used various methods to get out the ICC message: posters, booklets, radio programs and something called un club d’écoute, a listening circle for communities where there may be only a single radio. In addition to town hall meetings, where videos were shown and response from the victims and their families was encouraged, much use was made of what Claudia called socio-drama, where traumatic events were enacted in front of a group of victims.

“Theatre of the Oppressed,” I suggested. “Paolo Freire and all that?”

“Yes, yes,” Claudia said. “Freire, politicized language. And art as an enabling process. Sometimes the witnesses make up their own scenes to enact. Sometimes we help them along by providing a very limited script.” I knew a bit about drama therapy. It is a powerful medium, but also very volatile for the kinds of emotions it can arouse or release.

I told Claudia about The Man We Called Juan Carlos, a self-reflexive documentary made in 2001 by my friend David Springbett with the help of his wife, Heather MacAndrew, that examines the pitfalls of humanitarian intervention. As a young filmmaker, David had gone to Guatemala with Oxfam America to make a film for CBC/Man Alive that looked at questions of short-term aid versus long-term development in the aftermath of the devastating 1976 earthquake. An American NGO, World Neighbors, had worked with a small community of highland Maya to help them learn how to improve their yields of corn. In a few years, the community had become almost self-sufficient and relied less on picking coffee for cash on the large ranches or estates. Classes for women in health and nutrition followed. “Each one teach one” was the credo. A young Mayan father named Wenceslao Armira, also known as Juan Carlos, went on to work with neighbouring communities that were also struggling with subsistence agriculture. It was grassroots development in the best sense, but inevitably all these changes pushed up against entrenched power structures, especially the big landowners, who preferred their potential labour force poor and uneducated. Juan Carlos, who had started to use David’s 1976 film as a teaching video, was fingered as a troublemaker to be eliminated. As political repression intensified, he joined one of the guerrilla groups and fled to Mexico. His children were killed by army death squads while he was in exile there, and his wife never forgave him.

Unsparingly, The Man We Called Juan Carlos examines the culpability of the filmmakers in these subsequent events.

Claudia shook her head slowly. “We need sensitive people working in this area.” She glanced at the clock on the wall, then ripped a page from her notebook and wrote down the names of her Outreach colleagues in four of the countries to which I was heading. Her handwriting was bold, the spacing generous. I was glad to find myself included under her protective umbrella.

My host in The Hague, Jane Warren, suggested after dinner one evening that we bicycle over to see Scheveningen prison, where those charged by the ICC and other international tribunals with war crimes and crimes against humanity were incarcerated for the duration of their trials. It was a short hop from her house on Kanaalweg to the unimposing compound with its antiquated castle gate, turrets and gun slots. Two small kids on skateboards, in the company of their father and a brown dog, were cavorting in the parking area. The renovated prison, once used as a lock-up by the Nazis for Dutch resistance fighters, was anything but primitive inside and would have put local hotels to shame, with its 160-square-foot rooms equipped with coffee maker, desk, radio, bookshelves and satellite TV. Detainees also had the use of library, gym, recreation room, flower garden, prison shop and family visitation rooms. Security appeared lax, as the prison door was ajar and no one seemed the least bit interested in the fact that I was taking photographs through the opening. In the UN wing behind this wall, Slobodan Milosevic had been interned and died before he could be convicted of war crimes, defying the court and causing no end of dismay to his surviving accusers. For all I knew, Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, recently apprehended, might have already taken up his lodgings here, with or without his beard. Was he chatting up Thomas Lubanga Dyilo in the court yard, enrolling in guitar lessons or playing Ping-Pong with Jean-Pierre Bemba, a popular Congolese militia leader and presidential contender charged with crimes against humanity?

A COUPLE OF hours had passed since leaving Heathrow. My religious seatmate had dozed off and was emitting a delicate snore, the open Bible page-down on her lap. The dapper gentleman in the window seat on my right had set aside the Times and selected a movie that appeared to involve some sort of vendetta. I was determined not to be lured from my reading by high-altitude misadventures on a diminutive screen, but the changing colours and movement in my peripheral vision kept sucking me in. And the fact that the film was about the search for justice, however self-administered, made it difficult to ignore.

During my time in The Hague, I had met with a French national named Patrick, who worked in the court’s public relations sector, and two more women in charge of departments at the ICC. While he gave me a tour of the facilities, Patrick told me how much he had appreciated meeting Simone Weil, the famous writer and Holocaust survivor who had decided to lend her name to the work of the ICC. As Patrick explained, Weil was not impressed with, or convinced by, the notion of international justice, which she considered occasional, random and, at best, unreliable, but she had strong feelings about the rights and protection of victims.

When Fiona McKay found us outside the elevator, she was running late. She directed me to a seat in the visitors’ lounge, so I knew our encounter would be brief. McKay had practised law briefly in the U.K., but was now head of the ICC’s Victims Participation and Reparation Section. We discussed the differences between courts using common law and the proceedings of the ICC, where witnesses are not cross-examined to evaluate and possibly dismantle their testimony. Like Claudia Perdomo, McKay had a team in Africa who interviewed victims and potential witnesses, using similar techniques of town hall meetings and role-playing. I asked if, given the unreliability of memory, this latter practice might not contribute to something like false memory syndrome, in which a patient too readily accepts a psychiatrist’s suggestions about the source of distress.

Fiona knitted her brows and leaned into the question. “That’s not my mandate. I want you to understand the nature of witness participation. For one thing, witnesses in this court are voluntary, not mandatory.” She explained in detail Regulation 81, which concerns effective participation by victims and witnesses and programs designed to provide them with legal counsel and financial assistance. Given the huge number of victims involved, I suggested, and the extreme nature of their losses, reparations could hardly be more than token. Add the legal, financial and psychiatric implications of bringing witnesses and their representatives all the way to The Hague . . .

Fiona glanced at her watch. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I have to make a pre-arranged call to my team in Uganda in ten minutes.” The interview was over, but she invited me to continue the conversation by e-mail. Back in Victoria, I would follow the weekly reports from the ICC that provided updates on various cases and witness programs, but I did not take Fiona McKay up on her offer. However, the contact she gave me with a lawyer named Joseph Manoba in Kampala proved to be the most valuable piece of information I gathered from the ICC.

With only a day left in The Hague, I was anxious to speak with someone from the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC. My call to Florence Olara, a Ugandan staffer, proved lucky. She arranged a dinner meeting for me with Béatrice Le Fraper du Hellen, a former French diplomat with the intimidating title of director of the Jurisdiction, Complementarity and Cooperation Division, Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), International Criminal Court.

In her late forties, trim, alert and with a disarming candour, Béatrice put me immediately at ease. She was ready to answer all of my questions, even about the two major impediments to the ICC’s credibility: time and numbers. Didn’t the length of time it took to apprehend suspected war criminals, plus the drawn-out judicial process, with its countless delays and appeals, encourage skepticism about the court’s effectiveness? And with so many perpetrators slipping through the net, were the victims’ rights to justice ever likely to be satisfied?

“Radovan Karadzic’s arrest took thirteen years,” I said. “His trial could take several more.”

Béatrice beamed. She reached out and touched my arm. “That’s the thing, Gary, even after thirteen years, justice will be done. The message is out there, loud and clear. If you commit war crimes or crimes against humanity, you won’t sleep well anymore. I love it. I’m very excited about this arrest.” She was a true believer, her enthusiasm infectious. “We know the message is getting out. I’m receiving phone calls daily from both the Russians and the Georgians wanting to discuss the situation that is unfolding there. People want to talk to us.”

We moved next to the concept of “winner’s justice,” a term that originated during the Nuremberg Trials in reference to the Allied atrocities that were ignored. How might this affect the credibility of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which was convicting former génocidaires but ignoring war crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the movement formed by Tutsi refugees to overthrow the repressive Hutu regime? Then there was the question of NATO’s possibly illegal attacks in Yugoslavia, where 25,000 bombs were dropped, many of them on civilian targets, killing upwards of a thousand people and causing billions of dollars of destruction to infrastructure, including the Grdelica bridge, which sustained damage when a passing train full of people was hit by two NATO missiles. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) had not taken charges of war crimes against NATO leaders and politicians, including Bill Clinton, Jean Chrétien and Tony Blair, seriously enough to open an investigation. Michael Mandel, an expert on international law and Osgoode Hall Law School professor, claimed the NATO attack on Yugoslavia was nothing less than a U.S.-led strike against the authority of the UN.

That led to another question for Béatrice: Does the fact that the U.S. is not a signatory to the ICC make it more difficult for her to conduct her business, especially when so many of the small, troubled states are dependent on the U.S. for military equipment and economic aid?

I was surprised by her candid response. “The refusal of the U.S. to be one of the signatories is, in a certain sense, a problem for us, but it’s also an advantage. When we are talking to an unsympathetic African state, trying to get them to help us apprehend a suspected war criminal, they often ask if this action has been prompted by the U.S. And here we can assure them that the U.S. has not only refused to sign but also, thanks to George Bush and his éminence grise, John Bolton, set in place The Hague Invasion Act, allowing the Americans to attack this city if one of their nationals is brought before the court. On the other hand, when we are speaking with the Arab states, many of which have close links with the U.S. and its foreign policy, it’s useful to be able to say that the Americans are more rather than less onside. So, a certain amount of ambiguity can be put to good use.”

By now we’d moved to another table and ordered dinner from a young waiter who kept apologizing for not being able to speak perfect French with Madame. I shared his embarrassment, though my dinner companion seemed perfectly comfortable in English. Justice was being done, at least to the bottle of Pinot Noir.

We talked for a while about what had led Béatrice to the ICC. Championing human rights was a sure way to end your career as a lawyer in France, she told me, especially in government or corporate circles. And burnout? There were days when the strain of dealing with such weighty matters was intense. In Colombia, many of the people she met had been victimized, even the well-to-do.

“I’d be sitting having dinner at someone’s house and would ask who the woman was in the painting, only to be told it was my host’s wife, who had been killed by paramilitaries. Another would confide about a kidnapped child. And the Chileans—can you imagine, after what they’ve been through—have not signed on with us. There’s something incomplete, a sort of paralysis from not facing the legal implications of what has happened there, not demanding justice.” Béatrice turned her face away from me to regain her composure.

I wanted to know what Béatrice thought about the role of foreign mining companies in the ongoing violence. In Darfur, she informed me, she had brought together companies in the conflict area and asked what they wanted most. Was it mere profit or a stable society in which to do business? In public, their response was obvious, she said: yes, we prefer a stable society. I laughed and mentioned Madelaine Drohan’s book Making a Killing : How and Why Corporations Use Armed Force to Do Business, which argues that most of these companies favour instability, especially if it means getting a better deal from a rebel leader waiting in the wings to assume control. That was certainly the case with Laurent Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Luis Moreno-Ocampo—the fiery and dynamic new chief prosecutor of the ICC, who had come through the turbulent ’80s in Argentina with its torture and disappearances—was especially concerned with the “corporate factor,” Béatrice said, the role of resource companies in conflicts worldwide. The OTP’s team of lawyers investigating war crimes had been allowed to interview victims, rebel militias, even soldiers in the DRC, but their activities were cut short by the government the moment they tried to interview the white managers and executives of foreign companies in the conflict zone.

All this talk of universal justice left me troubled. While I could see many elements in African and Asian societies—including stoning, the chopping off of hands, female circumcision, forced marriages, child labour and slavery—that cried out for change, there was no ignoring the travesties of justice in the West, where money, plea bargaining, evidence tampering and jury rigging often precluded a fair trial, where innocent people could be put away for life and killers walk free. I had come across a telling anecdote about the communal aspects of justice in Patrick Marnham’s book, Fantastic Invasion, in which he talks about justice in Africa:

In the eighteenth century King Damel of the Wolofs captured (after a fierce battle) his neighbour King Abdulkader, who had invaded his country on a Moslem jihad and who had announced his intention, for the glory of God, of slitting King Damel’s throat. By tradition the victorious Damel should have placed his foot on Abdulkader’s neck and stabbed him with a spear. Instead, Damel asked Abdulkader what he would have done had he been the victor. Abdulkader gave the traditional account of behaviour and said that he expected the same treatment, and make it snappy. Damel declined, saying that if he made his spear any redder, it would not build up his town or bring to life the thousands who had fallen in the woods. Instead, he kept King Abdulkader as his slave for three months and then, at the request of the king’s subjects, released him. This story was cited all over Senegambia as an example of wisdom and justice. Doubtless King Damel’s merciful behaviour was exceptional, but it reveals that the indigenous African sense of justice had no need to be bolstered by the Northern legalism that has supplanted it.

CONVERSATION AT MEAL times on international flights is difficult to avoid. There’s something faintly ridiculous about stuffing your mouth in such close quarters with fellow humans, hands raised like a squirrel’s to negotiate the limited space, and maintaining a strict silence. I was preparing myself to engage with my seatmates when the woman beside me spoke.

“Would you mind holding my tray while I get up? I’m sorry about the timing, but I have to visit the washroom.”

I held the tray of unopened items until the woman disappeared down the aisle, then returned it to her folding table. On impulse, I picked up the Bible she’d left on the seat, pleased to see it was the King James Version, which at least delivers its tales of rape, murder, mayhem and redemption with a poetic flourish. The soft, black pebbled leather cover, marbled endpapers and gold-edged pages were also tasteful. I could not resist checking to see what she had been reading, indicated by the position of a narrow linen bookmark sewn into the binding. The Bible opened invitingly, and the soft onionskin pages spread flat in my palm with none of the stiffness and resistance of ordinary paper.

“I see you’re not only an avid reader yourself, but also a curious observer of the world at large. And what exactly is the good lady reading?” inquired my neighbour in the window seat who, up to that point, had been plugged into earphones. Damn, I thought, caught in the act.

I replaced the Bible and undid the screw cap on my tiny bottle of red wine while I considered my reply. “Given that I need a drink to cover my embarrassment, it would not have surprised me to find she was reading from Proverbs 20:1: ‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.’ However, the truth is she was reading from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 13:13: ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity and the greatest of these is charity.’ It would be extremely charitable if you ignored my bad manners.”

“Andrew,” he said, extending a very large hand. I mumbled my first name and nodded. Then, in his plummy Oxford accent, he added: “I did not take you for a religious person.”

I managed a poor imitation of a grin, took another sip of wine. “What are the distinguishing characteristics of a religious person? Don’t be deceived by these civilian clothes; I could be a plainclothes priest or a terrorist.”

“Is there a difference? At least you’re well-read, whatever species. Toujours la manière. If we’re all to die or be pummelled in the interests of virtue, it’s nice to know it will at least be done with style.”

“I’m a word addict,” I confessed. “I quote from cereal boxes, too. Sometimes, if the words are clever, beautiful or in just the right order, they nest in my ear. My wife considers my punning a pathology. I trust you won’t disclose my indiscretion to the lady.”

Andrew laughed, broke off a piece of bun and dipped it into the remaining chicken gravy on his tray. “Mum’s the word,” he said. As the lady in question slid into her seat, the conversation was once again submerged in engine noises, a public announcement about potential turbulence and the drinks wagon coming down the aisle. Andrew replaced his earphones and resumed the movie. Our trays were removed, the lady’s meal untouched.

I was too wired to sleep, so I spent the final three hours of the flight to Entebbe reading a play by the Nigerian Wole Soyinka called Death and the King’s Horseman and looking through my dog-eared copy of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, its title drawn from W.B. Yeats’s apocalyptic vision of the world in his poem “The Second Coming.” Set amidst Nigeria’s Ibo tribe, Achebe’s novel offers a unique perspective on Caucasian-African relations, showing how foreign priests are advance troops in the process of pacifying and colonizing the “natives.” A slave boy, who is offered to atone for the death of a girl from the tribe, is later required to be killed. Refusing, for fear of appearing weak, to exempt himself from the ritual murder of this child, whom he has come to love as a son, Achebe’s central character, Okonkwo, brings shame and bad luck upon himself and goes into self-imposed exile. He returns home after seven years only to find the old ways are under threat by the colonialists. When Okonkwo asks his friend Obierika if the white man understands local customs, he gets this reply: “How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.” If justice and hope were in such short supply in the fictional world of African writers, I thought, they were likely to be even scarcer on the ground.

I was already familiar with Soyinka’s essays and fiction, where it is not so much the “oppressive boot” of colonialism that is held up to scrutiny as irreconcilable notions of foreign justice and native spirituality. Yoruba tradition, I learned as I immersed myself in Death and the King’s Horseman, requires that when a chief dies, his personal horseman must commit suicide and follow his leader into the afterlife; otherwise, the chief’s soul will wander aimlessly and create chaos for the people. In the play, Elesin, the dead chief’s horseman, celebrates life to the fullest as he prepares to meet his obligation. However, the British district officer, Mr. Pilkings, intervenes, insisting the ritual is degrading and primitive. The disruptions of community life resulting from this break with tradition are manifold: Elesin is cursed by his neighbours; his son returns from medical school in Europe and, for the honour of his family, commits suicide in his father’s place; the father then kills himself in despair, condemning his soul and bringing disgrace to the community. The blame for Elesin’s failure to complete the ritual remains ambiguous, a complicated mixture of vanity, cultural misunderstanding, fleshly indulgence that saps the hero’s resolve and blind foreign intervention. Pilkings, still in his skeletal party costume and surrounded by the carnage his intervention has created, asks Elesin’s loyal wife, Iyaloja: “Was this what you wanted?” She gives him an earful.

“No, child, it is what you brought to be, you who play with strangers’ lives, who even usurp the vestments of our dead, yet believe that the stain of death will not cling to you. The gods demanded only the old expired plantain, but you cut down the sap-laden shoot to feed your pride. There is your board, filled to overflowing. Feast on it.”

I admired Soyinka’s play for a quality it shared with the plays of Bertolt Brecht: Death and the King’s Horseman was subversive, challenging audiences to rethink issues, question accepted values. I slipped the play into my backpack and removed a collection of interviews, Conversations with Wole Soyinka. In discussion with Jane Wilkinson, Soyinka insisted that change begins one individual at a time and that drama is both a healing process and an agent for the radical transformation of society:

In the black community here, theater can be used and has been used as a form of purgation, it has been used cathartically; it has been used to make the black man in this society work out his historical experience and literally purge himself at the altar of self-realization. This is one use to which it can be put. The other use, the other revolutionary use, may be far less overt, far less didactic, and less self-conscious. It has to do very simply with . . . opening the audience up to a new existence, a new scale of values, a new self-submission, a communal rapport . . . Finally and most importantly, theater is revolutionary when it awakens the individual in the audience, in the black community in this case, who for so long has tended to express his frustrated creativity in certain self-destructive ways, when it opens up to him the very possibility of participating creatively himself in this larger communal process. In other words, and this has been proven time and time again, new people who never believed that they even possessed the gift of self expression become creative and this in turn activates other energies within the individual. I believe the creative process is the most energizing. And that is why it is so intimately related to the process of revolution within society.

In a second interview that caught my attention, recorded fifteen years later, Soyinka was asked about his poetry collection Mandela’s Earth, in particular a poem called “Cremation of a Wormy Caryatid,” which the interviewer suggested was pessimistic. Soyinka objected to the interviewer’s reading: “Whether we like it or not, in terms of effecting change art does have its limitations. And I keep emphasizing that recognition of this is not a negative or pessimistic view of art. For me it is a positive one. Certain kinds of artistic production in my society are left to rot, deliberately. It’s part and parcel of the persona of a work of art that it is meant to vanish, to be destroyed in order to be able to reproduce itself. This is the organic nature of art.” As an example, he offered wood carvings, created in full knowledge of their perishability. “Yes, there is this work of art, and it is quite possible for little termites to eat into it and destroy it. But those termites cannot . . . destroy the creative essence that produced the work of art.” While he acknowledges the sorry state of the world, a view he shares with Achebe, Soyinka has tirelessly promoted democratic values and shamed the reactionary political forces in his country on the international stage, often at great risk to himself. He never advocates putting down the pen and taking up arms, but continues to condemn the corruption and violence eroding the fragile unity of Nigeria.

Having also spent much of my creative life convinced that writing is a subversive act and that literature is one of the healing arts, I was thrilled to have this brief interlude at thirty thousand feet with Wole Soyinka. I knew my ignorance of the necessary languages, history and traditions would be a liability on my travels, but I welcomed the moral support of Soyinka’s company nonetheless.

As our plane descended over Lake Victoria—its brilliant surface illuminated by the moonlight—my seatmate Andrew offered me his copy of the Times and some unexpected advice.

“Don’t believe everything African writers tell you. Half of them are living in the past, the other half prostituting themselves to impress Western intellectuals. Once you give up your own language, you’ve lost both your real audience and your integrity. You’ll get more accurate information about Africa talking to people on the ground through a translator—farmers, miners, teachers, journalists, cassava merchants and especially women, who do most of the honest work on this continent.”

A blanket of moist tropical air enveloped me as I stepped out onto the tarmac, redolent of exotic flowers and decaying vegetation, a primal funk that reached back to the beginning of time. I was here, at last, for whatever might be in store.

I had confirmed but not paid for my connecting flight on RwandAir and was anxious to find the ticketing agents so I could relax, catch a nap and do some reading in preparation for Kigali. I strode the length of the building half a dozen times to stretch my cramped legs, while an airport employee disappeared with my passport and promised to locate the ticket agents.

Despite its centrality and function as a hub for United Nations flights in Africa, Entebbe airport was quiet this morning, a few dozen passengers like myself waiting for connections, two bored Ugandan soldiers making periodic appearances and a solitary cleaning woman barely awake at the handle of her three-foot-wide dust mop. The airport employee escorted me to the RwandAir ticket counter, where I paid my fare by credit card, then went back upstairs again to the departure lounge for the long wait.

I purchased a copy of “Exterminate All the Brutes” by Sven Lindqvist, ordered a coffee and a woeful cheese sandwich at the bar, and found a vacant table next to two backpackers from Illinois who were sucking at bottles of Nile beer and debating the relative merits of trekking to see gorillas in Rwanda or Uganda. As I sipped my tepid coffee and worked towards a negotiated settlement with the stale bread and brittle slab of cheese, the young man addressed me. He was wearing hiking boots, jeans and a bright red T-shirt advertising Roosevelt University and was seated beside a backpack so festooned with gadgets and metal bottles it resembled a tinker’s display.

“Hey, man, you here for the animals, too?”

I thought of the interviews awaiting me—sexual abuse, mutilations, unspeakable atrocities—and considered a smart-assed rejoinder, but found myself saying, instead: “Nothing quite so clean or so straightforward as animals.” He looked puzzled and took another pull at his beer. I said I was in Africa to learn about human rights abuses and how indigenous systems of justice were addressing these matters.

“I read about some of those things in the Lonely Planet guide,” his companion interjected, leaning across the table in my direction. Head shaved bald, she was similarly attired, except for a nylon photographer’s vest with a plethora of stuffed pockets, and appeared to be studying the operating directions for a plastic water filter, the pieces spread out on the table. “Too bad the violence is impacting the animals,” she said, looking up at me with very intense blue eyes. “It’s bad enough that we kill each other, but we’re replaceable. Not so the animals.”

I spent the next seven hours on a badly upholstered bench in the main hall of the terminal building, trying without success to sleep, worried about my safety and inadequate preparation for this journey. Scenes from Irvin Kershner’s film Raid on Entebbe, with Peter Finch as Yitzhak Rabin and Horst Buchholz as one of the hija ckers, alternated in my brain with images of Idi Amin from ²The Last King of Scotland. I’d been in tight spots before—on a Taliban visa in Kabul two weeks before 9/11 or facing water cannons and a hostile military in the streets of Santiago—but had always been lucky and had learned to trust my own instincts and serendipity. If your plans don’t work out, something unexpected and more interesting is likely to transpire; that was the essence of the pep talk I gave myself as fragments of conversation, boarding calls, discomfort and a full bladder kept me half awake.

When the first call for passengers travelling to Kigali on RwandAir came over the loudspeaker, I made my way to security. I removed my shoes and took the computer from my pack for closer inspection, Soyinka’s words still turning in my mind. He’d found his protective spirit, Ogun, also known as the orphan’s shield, and had come to terms with both death and the fact that some works of art are more time-sensitive than others. So be it. The backpackers from Chicago were ahead of me in line, their heads not visible behind their enormous backpacks. They resembled two giant ants. The lady with the Bible, also heading to Kigali, waved to me.

“God bless you,” she said. “I’m a genocide survivor going home for the first time since ’94. And I’m a bag of nerves.” Thus the scar, the uneaten meal. I was so embarrassed by my unfair assumptions about her that I did not have the presence of mind to ask if we could meet to talk in the coming days.

As I stood in line in my stocking feet, I felt vulnerable, insignificant and ashamed of my paltry record as a champion of human rights: too much time at the desk, too little in the arena facing the lions. If it were me rather than my luggage passing in front of the X-ray, I thought, the screen would be blank. When my turn came to surrender bags, shoes, belt and computer to security personnel, I was waved through, as if to confirm my sense of being invisible. Only later did it occur to me that I might have benefited from the last remnant of a whites-first colonial hangover.