Story Writings:

Death valleys of democracy - so far so near

Padma Edirisinghe

The United States of America today is hyped as the world’s top democracy. No doubt about it especially after all the Whites there got together with the non-Whites of a myriad of hues ranging from bright yellow to a burning orange and pitch black and voted for a semi-Black as President. Will that magnanimity be ever orchestrated in our island is a M-dollar question which would be shelved by irrelevant answers as “The hues of humans here are not that myriad and can be counted on one’s fingers.”

Dream speech

Anyway coming back to the main issue just note that as late as the 50 decade a Black passenger in an American bus had to get up and give his or her seat to a White passenger. Rosa Park who later developed into a volatile civil activist was the first passenger to defy this law year 1955. Needless to say Rosa was a Black. In fact this issue of discrimination of Black passengers, to put it more correctly, Afro-American passengers had been settled in the USA as late as 1956 when during European history lectures in the campus we sat at our tables and obediently took down copious notes on the glory of the American democracy as dished out to us by our Gurus...

I cannot remember Rosa Park figuring in any of these lectures as one of the ushers of democracy. In the 1960s most of us who sat dumbfounded at the vast wisdom and knowledge of our Gurus (never mind the lapses) had experienced the birth pangs of delivery. Perhaps the new motherhood had erased interest in such matters in many of us unless they were of the extrovert or very academic kind. So perhaps they did not know that at this time Martin Luther King was dreaming his fantastic dream and delivering his Dream speech.

“I have a feeling that my children sometimes will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”.

Did we have issues of that sort in the 1960-decade? No ‘Our society was much more egalitarian than US society then. There was no discrimination against those who differed in race or religion. But as the decade tapered towards the end Jews and Asians in the US were still fighting for equal rights with the Whites of European descent. It was late as 1968 that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot by an angry man, angry that King was fighting for the cause of the discriminated.

Let us move over to South Africa, another State drawn into the jaws of colonialism. By the way a local saying aptly describes the phenomenon of colonialism. It is, “Ittawage guhavata kaballawa ringa gatta wagei”

This saying capsules the intense harassment the original dweller of a habitat is subject to by a trespasser. Of course some blessings accompanied the Damnations among which the chief damnation was the erosion of identities built over centuries as the Whites just bulldozed into them heartlessly. In South Africa a severe harassment of the original denizens commenced by the White invaders, a policy that began to be known as Apartheid. A Black man with an enigmatic smile and bouncing steps was responsible for putting an end to this. He was the famous Nelson Mandela and he achieved this feat.

White democracy

From 1950 onwards ie. from our Senior Prep classes we as schoolgirls sat reading on the glory of White democracy or lending ear to same in schools shadowed by imperialism. All this while poor Mandela was flexing his muscles against the cruel White domination suffered by the Blacks in their own country. He was a founding member of the African National Congress, an organization gone into hiding after it was outlawed. Later on a charge of treason he was imprisoned in Robben Island.

It was as late as 1990, a period when our own little kids had reached the prime of their lives that Mandela was released from jail come to think of it, the world in general is not that bad. Mandela was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace and next year he climbed the Chair of the South African President.

Perhaps Nelson Mandela went more than half way in his policy of reconciliation, making it up with the Whites against whom he was not bitter at all despite all that tortuous past. Evidence of his readiness to forgive and forget is that he continued to use the Western name of Nelson given to him by teachers in his Primary school probably run by British ladies while his native name of Rolihalahla went underground, with its native music.

This essay is incomplete as it leaves out many a noted freedom fighter but as leaving out the great Mahatma Gandhi is almost a heinous crime.

South Africa

The Blacks were suffering in their own country because a White-hued race had come to occupy it. Gandhi saw the injustice not only in South Africa but in his own country again prey to colonialism. He himself had been much subject to racial discrimination in South Africa despite his professional status as a lawyer with a British education. Fuelled by what was happening in South Africa and in his own country he began to fight for India’s independence through a policy of non-violence (satyagraha). Mahatma Gandhi was a haunting figure of India during our school days, his very name spelling magic to some. But not to all.

Many of the sophisticated calibre disdained this ‘half crazy man’ dressed in simple loin and cotton attire and even spinning cloth from a crude spinning wheel used in rural India. But today he is hailed as India’s foremost freedom fighter. He was shot dead by an assassin in 1948, the year of our independence. He died jubilant that he was the architect of a freed India but he died also sad at the fact that India bifurcated itself immediately after Independence into two states.

One, even as great as Mahatma Gandhi, cannot have all dreams fulfilled in exactly the same way hoped for. Yet he was so far, so near to us as he worked hard in the Death Valley of Democracy, where those born and bred in one’s own land continued to be trampled by the heavy boots of colonial rulers come from miles and miles afar .....