demagogue on 8/12/2008 at 06:59

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Well, I personally didn't mean my comment to be as dismissive as it might have sounded, aside from the slight zing angle it takes to get noticed sometimes. Every generation it seems has to relearn the dark sides of war and wartime politics, and notice parts that people wouldn't notice otherwise ... and there are a number of important books in history that have done that.

Africa is a special case because it's wars are really brutal, uncontrolled (non-regular combatants), and really under the radar ... How many people know one of the longest running current wars is in North Uganda, or how many independent warzones there are on the African continent, and why the history of West Sahara conflict is different from Algerian is different from Libyan, Liberian, Serra Leonian, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Sudanese, Somali, CAR, Chad, DRC, Ugandan, Zimbabwe, Rwandan, Ugandan conflict...

Books like this help, no small thing given the odds against it.

june gloom on 8/12/2008 at 14:28

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I bet most of you guys wouldn't know a real African if he needed your assistance moving millions of dollars.

There's a custodian at my (http://srsdeaf.org) old school named Hapsima. He is hands down one of the nicest, most patient people I've ever met, even when some of the monsters who run around that place leave all sorts of awful messes on the floor.

Here's the thing: he was born deaf and was raised as a child soldier in Eritrea during one of its wars with Ethiopia. Now if that isn't some of the worst shit anyone could ever possibly have to go through I don't know what is.

The thing is, you do not want to fuck with him. Nobody does because he's so nice, but we have another guy, a former student turned custodian, AJ, who is from Pakistan. AJ's a decent fellow but sometimes he's a bit of an asshole, and he saw Hapsima as an easy mark and started giving him shit. He got a broken arm for his troubles. And nobody's ever bothered Hapsima since, and he continues to be the nicest person in the school.

Books might help but sometimes the only way to truly understand what these people went through is to actually know them.

june gloom on 8/12/2008 at 20:54

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Pretty much, though I use a hearing aid.

I guess I should revise my poorly worded statement a bit: you can't possibly know what these people have experienced without going through it yourself, but short of that you can get a much better understanding by actually knowing them than you would through books or what some chick with a picket sign might tell you.

Volitions Advocate on 9/12/2008 at 00:05

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Which is part of why I get so interested in this stuff. I've worked in a lot of Service Jobs, usually as a Lead Hand or Supervisor and while working in hospitals and laundry facilities in this part of the continent you meet a lot of Phillipino and Sudanese people. Now there's not exactly a lot of war going on in the Phillipines but it is an incredibly rough place to live, and I hear stories all the time. The sudanese people though.. Its just like Dethtoll said, they are the nicest people in the world, and they've been through things that are hard to describe with all the adjectives at our disposal. My wife is a singer and she's even gone overseas to the phillipines to work and even afghanistan, you'll never truly understand unless you've lived it. But once you've been humbled by seeing the lives these people live, whether or not they're currently in the middle of their crisis, or they've worked to get past it, you really can't look at the way we live in the american continent the same way.

fett on 9/12/2008 at 05:10

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Bring it dethtoll