Global Changemakers

On Mondays, http://www.global-changemakers.net turns into Speakers’ Corner: members of the network and community have their say on their work and the issues that concern them.

Sending a ‘loving’ message

The picture below shocked me to the core when I first saw it. Shocked me in a way I have not been shocked in a long time and made me think long and hard about the state of the world in which we live. But first I suppose I have to explain what it is.
The girls in the photo are Israeli, and they are in an army barracks writing messages on missiles that include words like “From Israel with love”. The author of the website which showed the photos to the world asked himself a question which rung true, do these girls realise that those missiles will be used to kill little girls just like them whose only crime is being Lebanese?

But for me the question ran deeper still. What happens when the prejudices of our fathers, of our grand-fathers and all the ancestors who came before them are distilled down to the youngest of the young and passed on to the newest generations? The answer is what has always happened since the dawn of time: war, intolerance and hatred spread in the name of us against them, right against perceived wrong, me against everybody else.

Because in the end it is not enough to talk about breaking old habits and destroying prejudices and easing tensions if those exact same habits are to be passed to us the generation that is responsible for building the future. It is like building a new house with bricks from the old one that collapsed and killed our favourite cat; the house might be new but our favourite pet is still not safe. So this is the time that we the new generation, the real change makers in every sense of the word have to ask ourselves; have we really changed as a society, as a family, as individuals? Do we carry the values that we personally preach or have we unconsciously carried them in our psychological baggage to be transmitted to the following age ad-infinitum?

I have asked myself that question and as an individual I have found a lot of things I have carried with me from a past I do not fully understand into a future I cannot fully vouch for as a result. As a Zimbabwean I must confess, that some of the tribal stereotypes were still hanging around my neck when I interacted with fellow Zimbabweans. I did not go as far as some of my friends do who will hate someone simply because they are of a different tribe but it was still there and I had to deal with it. As a Christian living in a Muslim country I have encountered many negative perceptions from my hosts but realised that as I stepped off the plane in Algiers I myself carried images of bombs and fanaticism in my head; I have had three years to deal with and change all those. Ask yourself the question; what stereotypes do I still carry with me? Deal honestly with the answer.

It also underlines the work that all of us are doing in our communities worldwide, working with young people and opening up a whole new world of possibilities. Be it a project that touches one person or a thousand we are dispelling and dealing with the past and opening up a future that can be, for once, different from the past that came before it. The world is no longer just about those who do not have versus those who do have, it is those who know against those who do not know as well. There is some important book or school (can’t remember what, could somebody help me out here please?) that has the motto, “Know thyself”. I remember being struck by the power of those two words years ago and I cannot help but wonder that if those girls truly knew what those bombs meant in relation to themselves and their targets, they would not be smiling.

We have to start from the ground up, rainbow constitutions do not guarantee rainbow nations, having religions that teach about love doesn’t mean people still do not go at loggerheads with each other. Bill Clinton once said, “We have the chance to build a 21st century world that walks away from the modern horrors of bio and chemical terrorism and from ancient racial, religious and tribal hatred…we can do it – not by going back to the past, but by going together into the future”.

As we walk into the future, let us just make sure we do not leave ourselves or those little girls behind.

- Bongani Ncube, Global Changemaker

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