© Numero Unoma
The date window on my very ordinary old watch tells me tomorrow is the Autumn Equinox, though for us in the tropics that doesn’t mean a lot. We do not have to go into mourning over the end of summer, and begin to psychologically brace ourselves for the short, dark and oh-so-bitterly cold and miserable days of winter. For us near the Equator, the days grow shorter, and nights grow longer, only by an hour or so.
In Nigeria the rainy season transitions into the dry season, but the hot sun is there most of the time, anyway. For people in the tropics of the Northern Hemisphere, the September equinox merely, albeit invisibly, brings another chapter to its close.
Therefore, we must seek and find a universal and abstract meaning in the Equinox, this only day until the next equinox in March, when day and night are equal in length. From here until the December or winter solstice, our proximity to the sun lessens, the days shorten, while the nights lengthen, and in the zones north of the tropic of Cancer, the temperature of the air becomes cooler as the outward energy of the sun is felt less.
I read on one esoteric website that “the equinox is a sacred day of equal parts light and dark, facing outward as well as turning inward, and allowing our past and future to merge in the present.”
Equality is the essence of the equinox. Egalité. Equilibrium. Equanimity. Even the date 22 September 2022 (ask the numerologists!) Speaks to balance. In life we must take the light with the dark, the sweet with the bitter, and the rough with the smooth. Especially, when it comes to skin colour, we must take the light with the dark. Which brings me to today, International Day of Peace, for which the 2022 theme is “End racism. Build peace”.
Those who know me, or who read me regularly, are aware that though I am a hopeless yet hopeful romantic, I have become cynical about institutions like the UN, who have sold me romanticisms of peace, togetherness and justice since I was a youth, without having made any tangible difference in my lifetime of now several decades. How is it that in 2022, we are still talking about peace and anti-racism?
My cynicism aside, I ventured to the UN website and virtually attended their ‘Youth Observance’ of the day. It turned out to be a much more enjoyable experience than I had anticipated. Before I go into why, let’s see what the UN Secretary General, António Guterres had to say about peace in 2022:
“…achieving true peace entails much more than laying down arms. It requires the building of societies where all members feel that they can flourish. It involves creating a world in which people are treated equally, regardless of their race.” He also said “the linkages between racism and gender inequality are unmistakable”, as well as “We can promote anti-racism through education and reparatory justice.”
Mr Guterres, we’re going to hold you to that last point, Sir! Absolutely, there is a need for reparations. They should be dialogued and negotiated in a reasonable and realistic manner, so that the wronged feel compensated in some way, and the wrongdoers feel penalised.
Guterres also confessed that his generation has failed, saying that the youth own the future and the present, and their ideas are very important.
First off though, it was good to see our own Nigerian Deputy Secretary-General, Amina Mohammed at the event, a woman with whom I have in the past, had the pleasure of holidaying in Europe, when our children were still growing up. Secondly, this UN gathering was one of mostly very young people of all creeds and races, a few of whom were invited to the podium to speak.
Furthermore, I enjoyed the performance of the famous Blue Man Group, which demonstrated not only the beauty of the diversity of colour, as well as how individual acts add up to a critical mass, but it also served to remind us not to lose our marbles.
I was delighted and impressed by Jaden Asare, a son of Ghanaian immigrant parents, who attends school in the Bronx. He was the only young person who had the manners to address the UN with the befitting opening acknowledgements, and I was proud of him and his folks. He spoke of how he had never seen or felt the colour of his skin, or taken cognisance of being Black, until George Floyd†. He acknowledged that he had lived in a bubble until then, but was now actively involved in spreading awareness. His closing remark was powerful and poignant, as he addressed his fellow youths in that auditorium, and he duly got an amazing applause. (keep scrolling) >>>>
“I want all of us to be the generation that gets to say we ended racism and inequality”. Then came his question as to what we are doing to make a change, which he answered himself: “…not even close to enough.”
Racism is one of those things that, believe it or not, many Africans and Caribbean people do not properly get the full picture on, until they travel. Sure, we have caucasians who come to our countries and swagger around with an arrogant air of entitlement, but mostly we don’t let them get away with it for too long. It is when we travel that we encounter those racist types who veritably relish humiliating us, often poorly trained and grossly unprofessional immigration officials, law-enforcement personnel and even airline staff, usually uniformed drones who wield their power for a personal moment of twisted gratification. And it is then that we feel the pains of our Blackness and brown-ness, and the stains of their whiteness and pinkness.
Historically, much of the oppression we have suffered at the hands of racists has been done at gunpoint. There was the enslavement and sale of our kinsmen and women, the conquering and colonisation of our territories, the manufacture of conflict in our countries so as to create a chaos that facilitates further exploitation of our natural resources, and the cold-blooded murder of our best visionaries, leaders and revolutionaries – Mbuya Nehanda of Zimbabwe’s Chimurenga revolt, the Mau Mau of Kenya, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Steve Biko in South Africa, Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, to mention but a few.
In the first decade of the millennium, I remember working on an Oxfam campaign that linked small arms trade to poverty, and aimed to get a small arms treaty endorsed. In fact, I still have the T-shirt. More recently, according to Medact, “ Not only does military expenditure steal funds away from health systems, climate change solutions, social development and essential infrastructures, but the arms trade itself enables, fuels and escalates human rights violations, violent conflict and poverty, as well as causing astronomical environmental damage.”
Furthermore, they tell us that “In modern violent conflicts, 90% of those killed are civilians, of whom 80-90% are killed with small arms.”
As the first decade of the millennium came to a close, following our campaign at Oxfam, this was the rhetoric:
“We need a Treaty that covers all arms – everything from small arms to helicopters to tanks, and their ammunition and components. And we need common procedures so that all international arms transfers are rigorously assessed to keep arms out of the hands of human rights abusers, and away from places where they will fuel conflict and human suffering,” said Seydi Gassama, Director of Amnesty International Senegal, who partnered with Oxfam.
At that time, “a controversial aspect of the UN talks was the closure of some of the substantive meeting sessions to NGOs. The Control Arms alliance said this was an unexpected decision by the Chair, and called for greater openness and transparency in future sessions”.
“The world is one step closer to having a Treaty that will make it harder for war mongers and human rights abusers to obtain weapons and ammunition. A great deal of preparation is now needed by states before the next UN ATT meeting in March 2011 to ensure they deliver a ‘bulletproof’ Treaty that will save and protect lives and livelihoods,” said Anna MacDonald, head of Control Arms at Oxfam.
Twelve years later, and look where we still are on this! No wonder António Guterres has had to admit to having failed as a generation, even as he and we all currently find ourselves in adverse circumstances that can be directly linked to a war that NATO could have avoided if prudence had been exercised. Many years ago, voices like US political science Professor John Mearsheimer, UK MP Jeremy Corbyn and even the Cambridge-Analytica-infamous Nigel Farage warned us that the EU and NATO’s stance would manifest a war in the Ukraine. Even NYU professor Stephen Cohen, while speaking to Christiane Amanpour and Wolf Blitzer on CNN 8 years ago, put the blame for this incitement to conflict squarely on the West.
We agree that we in the tropics do not properly comprehend the consequences of the September Equinox until we leave, and we Black people living in our own countries do not properly grasp the concept of racism until we leave. Similarly, we who do not live in conflict zones cannot fathom how precious and overarching peace is, until we no longer have it. The same applies to economic stability. Luckily the economic stability aspect of the current war has reached us all, and is shaking us down with painful increases in the cost of living, without us suffering the bullets and bombs. On any day of the week, I hear people, including myself, bitterly complaining about inflation. And that is without even feeling the brunt of a war.
In Nigeria we have been sampling the effects of conflict on ordinary life for several years now. Meanwhile, the failed and ever failing generation continues to take things for granted, even as the slippery slope steepens progressively.
I only hope and pray that Jaden Asare will not end up like me, Jaded Unoma, who was once also a youth who believed I held the future of the world in my hands, and could redeem it from the failures of previous generations. I seem to have been insidiously nudged into a place where by association, I have with time become part of the failed and ever failing.
‘Tick tock’ says my very ordinary watch on which you cannot view TikTok. I do not own a Rolex, or any other extravagant status symbol, and would never want to, because if there is one thing I have learned in the time I have been here on the planet, it is that conflict is always a direct consequence of a greed for excessive wealth and power.