Letter of the Day | The silent voices amid ugly wars
Published:Friday | September 20, 2024 | 12:07 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
I had forgotten about the Biafra children of the Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s to early 1970. The images published in the local newspapers of very dark-skinned starving children with large heads, sunken eyes, protruding rib cages above distended bellies, for many years afterwards became the stark stereotypical representation of life in the African continent as a whole.
These images came rushing back to mind as I recently read Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s Half of a Yellow Sun. A work of fiction, it is set against the backdrop of familial relationships and real-life experiences of an attempt by Igbo people of southwest Nigeria to set up the separate state of Biafra from the larger Nigeria and the resultant civil war fuelled in part, some reports and analyst say, by Britain, the then Soviet Union and other nations, not as rivals, but in an unholy alliance against the would-be independent Biafra state. There was oil to be exploited.
Adiche’s evocative narrative of pre-war optimism, being wiped out by the reality of massacres, food shortages, fleeing families, and bodies being dismembered even amid attempts by refugees to eke out some semblance of normality amid intensification of hostilities made those images of my then five to six year-old childhood’s casual newspaper browsing as real as today’s news headlines from elsewhere.
Over many centuries, wars have wiped out large swathes of populations. Contemporary films glamorise wars and the push back by some leaders and their allies have bullied newspapers and television news editors from publishing contemporary stories and pictures, in the name of sensibility, in all their ghastly ugliness.
Yet within the context of the serious toll on the human psyche, I often wonder at the silence of Christians who can mobilise to demonstrate against the hoisting of a multi-coloured flag in an embassy; who can demonstrate over an obscure court case in Scandinavia, but are not stirred even to make a public statement about the genocide in Gaza. And there is no need to go so far afield. Jamaica has its own killing fields.
Hensley Lewis penned a hymn in 1867 that, in part, raised longing questions and ended with a plea for divine intervention.
Where is thy reign of peace
and purity and love?
When shall all hatred cease,
as in the realms above?
When comes the promised time
that war shall be no more,
and lust, oppression, crime
shall flee thy face before?
Cynics, will undoubtedly dismiss similar contemporary pleas as misplaced idleness. But what of the activist Christians who believe they can discern the times and have a mandate to lead the charge for a better world?
COLIN STEER