A Real and Present Danger?

Recently, the writing group I belong to challenged members to write on the topic: What if it was the beginning of the end?

The end of what? I wondered.

After some thought, I decided that I would go for the big one. The world. Not the world as Earth: This body is here to stay, going round and round in its heavenly orbit, and nothing is likely to shake it loose for a while yet. Not for another 4b or 5b years, perhaps? Yes, b as in billion. When, and if, that happens, none of us would be around to mind.

What I think should be engaging us is the loss of a collective common sense, which seems imminent. Just  three months ago, the Brits lost theirs when they voted to leave the EU. It was not, as we know, a massive vote, but enough to show that democracy works, tipping the balance in favour of Brexit. This, I fear, may just be a beginning. A possible next step in this march of folly could occur soon when, in another important democracy, the United States, people will vote for who they want to be their president for the next four years. By the way things are going, it looks as if the vote might very well go in favour of Donald Trump, a choice that, by most estimates, will be worse than bad, not only for America, but for the rest of the world too. If this were to occur, the best that can be hoped for for avoiding world anarchy is that a Trump presidency will be a brief one of just one term. Not enough to inflict terminal injury to the world order, one hopes.

I use the word “anarchy” deliberately.

In the February 1994 issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, someone wrote an article titled The Coming Anarchy. That article, now famous, or notorious, depending on perspective, opened by describing conditions in West Africa, and Sierra Leone in particular, as the starting point for what the author thought would happen in the new millennium that was, then, just round the corner. In that opening paragraph, the author, Robert D Kaplan, deplored the wretchedness of the country which, he said, stemmed from lawlessness and ignorance, quoting an unnamed government minister whose sad, yellowed eyes, Kaplan said, were like egg yolks, an after-effect, he explained, of some of the many illnesses, malaria especially, that the man had suffered from. Kaplan did not reveal the basis on which he made this medical assessment. Not surprising. Medicine is not Mr Kaplan’s field. Neither, it would seem, is prophesy. But he went on to prophesy as well.

When he observed that yellow-eyed minister, Kaplan, journalist and essayist was on an information-gathering tour of the world. His premise, it appeared, was that really bad things were bound to happen, come the 21^st century. He saw climate change and resource scarcity as part of a toxic mix that was likely to drive countries sharing borders to greater bellicosity toward their neighbour. The main witness for the prosecution, as it were, was the late Ali Mazrui, who Kaplan quoted as saying that re-formatting of borders was a near certainty in Africa. However, the only border readjustment that has come about on that continent so far this century is the carving out of South Sudan from the old Sudan. It is true that South Sudan has turned out to be a basket case, but that has nothing to do with border changes. And, looking at the continent in the round, no country has tried to swallow up its neighbours. Even Nigeria, with all that trouble with Boko Haram in the north-east, has avoided cross-border raids in the efforts to rid itself of its troublesome mullahs. And, for that matter, neither has its federation splintered, in spite of what policy wonks in the US State Department had predicted. 

He reminds us that one hundred years earlier, the Balkans was the trigger point for the Great War that engulfed the world from 1914-18: The Africa of 1994, Kaplan says, was similarly primed for sparking off twenty-first century worldwide chaos. “Primitive, elemental, unchecked, foreign embassies closing everywhere, contact with the outside world taking place only through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts”, he portends... Well, the last time I looked, the United States, Kaplan’s own country, still had 51 embassies on the continent of 55 countries.

Nevertheless, Kaplan insists, plenty of opportunities exist for bad things to happen. Keeping his attention trained on Africa’s health matters, Kaplan recruited that old Victorian trouble-maker, Richard Burton, for whom Africa was “deadly, a Golgotha, a Jahannam”… that, according to Kaplan, sets the stage for consigning the continent to a future more deadly than the Victorian’s worst nightmares: True, a number of previously dormant or new diseases have emerged to scare the world since The Coming Anarchy was published: SARS, MERS, Ebola and, most recently Zika, have all surfaced, but no wide pandemics have occurred, averted by well-formulated science-based responses. Kaplan didn’t factor those in.

The Kaplan metaphor for the dissonant world of the future consists of riding in an air-conditioned stretch limo - read the rich industrialized nations- on the potholed streets of an urban landscape of slums peopled by menacing residents- read the rest of us- benighted by disease, poverty, ignorance and a disposition to do evil. This scenario could well play out. But what Kaplan omitted to include in his screenplay is the ghetto within the blighted landscape wherein Africa-America dwells and where police officers feel empowered to shoot and kill at will. Not surprisingly, the neighbourhoods simmer and, occasionally, erupt into fiery confrontations.

Meanwhile, election cycles come and go and, as I said at the beginning, there is real danger, in this one, that Donald Trump might become the President of the United States. "Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation," Mr. Trump declared when addressing his supporters at the convention that affirmed his candidacy. "The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life." And, right through his nomination campaign, and now the campaign for the presidency itself, candidate Trump promises to make America great again, by means that he does not clearly articulate but which seem no more creative than the use of invective, the building of walls or the threat of punitive bombings.

Hold on to your hats, peeps.

Tell Fren Tru

From Rio To Tokyo

The Games are over for another four years. As everyone heads home, it is time for counting the costs and thinking of what might have been.  One thing is clear: the price tag of $4.6 billion may not have been a bargain for Brazil’s underclass.

By and large, however, most participating countries came away apparently satisfied with the outcome as far as medals count goes. Four years ago, when I was in a similar lookback mode, I wondered why it was that African countries could only manage just a handful of medals. (“If it was that easy, why weren’t you there yourself running, jumping, diving or whatever?) This is elite territory, friends, where only angels dare. The rest of us must just sit, watch, and enjoy and wonder how is it that only a few can attain Olympian glory. The answer, I thought then, as most others do, principally lie in the genes.

          If genes are the likely key, why then do Africans not perform as well as the Jamaicans, for example? Where Jamaica’s 2.8 million people produce 11 medals in 2016, Africa, with a population of 1.2 billion, should have netted 4714. Ridiculous, of course, since only about 900, in total, are typically up for grabs. More sensibly, the approximately 364 million people living in the western African region, where most Jamaicans have their roots, should have been able to procure a decent haul of a few sprint medals at least. None there were. Nigeria, after a shambolic, not to say farcical entrance, managed to look in at all its football fixtures coming away with the bronze, slim pickings for a nation of 187 million. Having said all that though, it is somewhat of a relief that Africa is not the worst underachiever. India (2 medals, Rio 2016) carries the bucket. So, a big population is not necessarily an advantage, nor is a small one necessarily the opposite. Population, therefore, is not the key, as China has experienced, to its embarrassment this time, when it came third, behind GB. Heads might roll in the Middle Kingdom.

What is it then, if not genetics and/or population number? Perhaps it is money? Money, we know, talks. But evidently it runs, jumps and lifts as well. Medal positions reveal a clear dependence on national income: by and large, the higher the gross national income, or GNI, the more medals a country bags. This is true for most, except among the four countries with the highest medals count. China disrupted the trend among this gang of four, somewhat, when, in 2012 it carried off a haul much bigger than its $7500 GNI would have predicted. At the low end of the GNI scale Jamaica (again) disrupts, when its purchasing power of only $6500 GNI should, by rights, have procured a more meagre harvest.

The island won big, however. And this was not just a 2012 fluke. They have been doing it for years and have repeated the feat again at Rio 2016. Because of this, people have come up with all kinds of explanations why they do so well, particularly in the sprint events where they excel so spectacularly. Genetics, slavery, diet and even schooling have all been invoked as potential explanations for Jamaican performance, not only in the popular press but also among academics as well. The narrative can be summarized something like so: Jamaican sprinters are descendants of African slaves forced from their ancestral lands, transported under the appalling conditions of the “middle passage,” to the Caribbean. Here, they had to endure the hardships of plantation slavery. In this school of hard knocks only the very strong, genetically endowed, survived. That supposed survivor gene was nimble too, enough to encrypt in its inheritors the desire, the will and the energy to revolt against the slave masters. Those Jamaicans of old had grabbed their freedom, and become “Maroons” who, in the latter part of the 18^th century, occupied the central mountain region of the island. The English, who had wrested the island from the Spaniards, were never able to defeat the Maroons in frontal combat, but instead, used perfidy to get them to lay down their arms. Most of the Maroons were subsequently transported to Nova Scotia in Atlantic Canada. Those who remained on the island thrived on a diet of yams that boosted their considerable genetic endowment, it is claimed. Many still live there in a parish called Trelawney where the modern-day Maroon child starts running as soon as he or she gets out of the cradle. Once in school, they follow a regimen of training that culminates, for the cream, in the annual “Champs” secondary schools sports competition.

And that is how they come to win. Orlando Patterson’s  recent essay in the New York Times goes over this territory well but he points out also that one aspect of Britain’s colonial policy in the 1920’s was the introduction of  public health measures that infused wellbeing into the Jamaican body frame that has sustained till today.

Now cut and paste this picture onto the Sierra Leone landscape, for example: Some of the slaves taken to the Caribbean almost certainly originated from that country. It is more than likely some survived to contribute to the stock that became Maroon freedom fighters, first against the Spanish and then the English. When the latter gained ascendancy, they shipped the most bolshie of the lot to Nova Scotia in 1796; then in 1800, 550 of the least tractable were transported again, now to the newly-established refuge for African slaves, Sierra Leone, where they were settled in Maroon Town on the western side of the infant city of Freetown. Maroon Town Church, Trelawney Street and the former Westmoreland Street are just a few of the relics of this reverse migration that brought descendants right back to the place from which their forebears had been taken.

Maroon descendants still live there, the genes still circulating. They, too, eat yam as an important part of a diet in which the tuber has almost spiritual significance. “If you yams white, cobba am,” a saying goes*. The children go to school and, significantly, participate in sport, culminating in the annual secondary schools competition, the Sierra Leone equivalent of “Champs.”

Why do Sierra Leoneans not win medals, then? Why don’t they even qualify? Sure the GNI is low (very low) but Maroon blood runs in their veins and they do everything else that a bona fide Maroon would do. And yes, they also have the Champs, named the Annual Secondary Schools Sports, an event that should be the entry ticket for athletes who aim to perform at the higher level. But what has been happening, instead? The emphasis, sadly, appears to be elsewhere.

But to truly understand the calamitous status of athletics in that country, all we have to do is observe the headlines that blaze across newspapers at the beginning of March, each year, the time when the competition takes place. A couple of direct quotes are illustrative.

“As Inter-Sec ends today… Kids Advocacy Network call for peace…”

“…assistant Director of PHE (Physical Health Education) of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has disclosed that they hope to have a successful sports meet this year that will be free from violence…”

You get the drift? One would be forgiven if one asked, “Do they have the right priorities?”

 Tell Fren Tru

*Translation: Do not be showy when you have success.

Brexit Wrecks It

I am sitting in a quiet corner in Toronto, watching the shenanigans that are shaking up the world’s greatest democracies. Two weeks ago, I would not have believed it if you told me that the citadel of the once-great British Empire would be enmeshed in the coils of a drama the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades, even in political soaps. It all goes to show how tenuous my hold on historical precedence is. But more able students of the subject would remind us that the last two hundred years or so have, in fact, been untypically tranquil and orderly in the way that government transitions take place in England and the kingdom precariously united under it. So, really, things are merely reverting to type and the status quo that used to be during the many centuries that preceded the last two. True, no blood has stained the floor during the internecine wars that are currently raging along several corridors of power. Not even fake blood. But, exsanguination of a kind has occurred, nevertheless. And, most horribly, we see those who wield the assassin’s knife, becoming themselves impaled by the same instrument they employ to stab former colleagues. (“Friends” would not be the word to use here). The backdrop to this internecine war is of course the people’s vote that, narrowly, instructed the government to get out of Europe. In the end, two women were the ones who remained standing in the contest to lead the governing Tory party that had made the mistake of calling the referendum. Then there was one. She, Theresa May, now has the Tory chalice firmly in her grasp, but she may be well advised to pause before she takes too full a draught from it.

          On the other side of the UK’s political divide is the Labour Party, which is going through its own self-immolation project. Here, again, the most proximate cause for the infighting is the Brexit vote which, the leader’s detractors accuse, he did not do enough to influence in a positive way. Hence, they claim, the bad outcome. Most in his parliamentary caucus want him out and many in his shadow cabinet have deserted him, whilst he, in turn, has sacked a few others. And, he says, he’s going nowhere because the party at large put him where he is, insisting that their democratic will be respected. The big beasts in the party have called for a leadership vote from which Corbyn was to be excluded: “See you in court,” he says, if that vote went ahead without his name on the ballot paper. In the end, his name was allowed to go through.

          Meanwhile,  in that other great democracy, they are enduring their perennial angst as to how to assign equal value to the life of each of its citizens. Don’t get me wrong. We are all different. But to say that being in, or of one group means that you should be consigned to a segment of the populace in which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is denied makes a mockery of the principles which that great nation espouses. So, for one week in July we see, in real time, black men going about their legitimate business, being murdered by police in the streets. In retaliation, a black man murders five white policemen and wounds seven others before being blown to bits by a robot bomb deployed by a police force that had run out of answers on a hot night in Dallas. All of these events occur in the backdrop of a presidential election campaign in which the most improbable candidate ever, all but bags the nomination of the Republican Party. Mr Trump, the man I speak of, has shown himself to be a most divisive individual, saying explicitly what some of his constituents think but are too embarrassed to utter themselves. The other candidate for the presidential vote, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, Hilary Clinton, and the one I hope will win come November, is having to traverse a minefield of outlandish accusations laid by Trump and those who support him. True, Trump also irritates his Republican Party no end, but they must live with him. It’s him they’ve got, for better or worse. But it was they who encouraged his kind of nonsense in the first place by making it impossible for Obama to deliver, in the matter of gun control, for example. I cannot wait to enjoy my moment of schadenfreude when the lot of them lose in November. But counting chickens before they are hatched is definitely not good husbandry. Ask David Cameron.

However, if things go well, the prospect of Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon running things is très délicieux.

Yum Yum.

Tell Fren Tru