Jill Rees: Welcome Press

Happy New year to everyone who reads this column. In the aftermath of the over-eating and over-drinking that characterises Christmas in the UK, this quiet time between Christmas Day and the New Year’s Eve revelling is a good time to nurse one’s hangover and reflect over our achievements and experiences of the Old Year, and make our determinations for the next twelve months.

So how did we do last year? Personally, 2007 was the year I discovered Africa. This time last year I hadn’t been to Africa nor particularly thought about what it is like. I had met Africans in Europe of course, and they impressed me as relaxed and friendly people. I had met Africans from wealthy families, who were well-educated, well-fed, and doing well in their chosen careers. And I had met students f rom Africa, mostly serious and studious young men intent on doing well. Like my friend Ade, they were often huge and muscley, obviously well-fed. So I never quite bought into the ‘Bob Geldof’ version of Africans, little swollen-bellied starving children, or farmers too ignorant to plant and tend their crops. Then in April I was invited to drive from France through Spain and Morocco, through Mauritania into Mali. As I arrived in Bamako I remembered the reaction of Mohammed Ali when he first visited Zaire for his ‘Rumble in the jungle’ in the early sixties.

Mohammed Ali expressed his surprise and his feelings of betrayal in having been led to think of African people, therefore his people, as being poor, unintelligent, uneducated and incompetent. While the Charities have to show poor people in war zones or famine zones to raise money, they are ‘raising awareness’ not of Africans, but of the results of war and corruption, which are the same whatever the continent. The shocking images of starving children with flies in their eyes is a gross misrepresentation of Africans. Mohammed Ali realised during his visit that a lot of the information he had taken as gospel, was racist in bias. This heightened awareness enabled him to refuse to fight in the Vietnam War, to be imprisoned and have his career ruined and his championship medal taken from him. He had no way of knowing at that time that he would one day make a comeback, regain his championship status back in Zaire in 1973, and be one of the three humanitarian leaders studied in schools worldwide, alongside his contemporary Martin Luther King and the Indian leader Gandhi.

An old, sick man, he later corrected journalists saying, ‘I’m not famous as a boxer, but as a Muslim.’ The vision and understanding of the world from the global perspective that his visit to Zaire and the Vietnam War gave him, enabled him to grow in spirit to become one of the world’s greatest heroes. A religious man, a pacifist, and a humanitarian, he makes a perfect hero for all peoples on the planet, admired and respected the world over ‘not for the colour of his skin, but for the content of his character’*. In 1999, Ali was crowned ‘Sportsman of the twentieth century’, an undisputed champion of life, as he had been of boxing.

It’s obvious in a way that all human beings are the same, and the differences between us are very minor. At the same time, human beings are primarily social, our survival depending on our living in groups, which means we tend to gang together. We tend to associate with those most like us, our families and school friends, people living the same kind of life. A recent study on social groupings in schools showed that bullying occurred when a member of a group started behaving differently to the group, doing something considered prohibited. However someone in a different group who did the prohibited behaviour was not bullied. This shows that the identification with one’s group and conformity within the group is of paramount importance. In the ‘wild’ as it were, being ostracised from one’s group would mean you die, as human beings can rarely survive alone ‘in the jungle’. Conforming with one’s group is a very strong calling. Emotionally, we like to feel we belong.

Yet even if you look at your nearest and dearest, at your friendship group or your work colleagues, a lot of the reason you are together is circumstance. Even colleagues you work with for years, go out together on Fridays and send the best Christmas wishes to, once you’ve changed jobs become strangers once more. On a personal level, you may have little in common. Real intimate and lasting friendships are built on having the same values, when you can trust a person’s reaction to events because they hold the same basic principles as yourself. Connections at this level override nationality, tribality, religiousness, language, appearance and all other superficial attributes. We may be closer to a person on the other side of the world than our next door neighbour. Globalisation means precisely this. Our social groups span continents.

Some things in Africa are easy to grasp. The idea that your identity is linked to a region or a tribe for example, which we also have quite strongly in the UK, especially between northerners and southerners, and don’t get them mixed up Nigerians or you’ll be in trouble! Other things are really baffling, like why an ordinary worker will wait to be told exactly what to do and not show initiative, or why the director of a company will sit in a waiting room for six hours to deliver his company’s brochure, or the way Nigerians will promise they will be able to do something or get something when there is no chance of it happening. It would be a mistake to try to interpret this in terms of one’s own culture, you’ve got to get right into the local way of thinking, and that is no easy task and no quick task.

Like Mohammed Ali, comparison with Africa has made me realise that the social conventions and separations in my own country are entirely arbitrary. Otherwise how could they be so different elsewhere? Learning about life in other countries is like having your skin stripped from you, leaving your true values and sense of right and wrong as the main part of your being. Seeing beyond the superficial is what gave Mohammed Ali the strength and moral courage to perceive the heart of the matter, and to stand up for what he believed in. This inspires me to try to be a better person this year, and to try to have the courage of my convictions. That’s why this year my New Year’s resolutions aren’t to lose weight or get up and hour earlier, though that would be nice! I want to try to be a better person, and perceive the hearts of other people beyond the superficial, to be more humanitarian in my outlook and in my behaviour, and to continue to make friends around the world.

1172 words

© Jill Rees

23 December 2007

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