Ms Campbell has since left the building

As diva as is obnoxious

There was reluctance but one could not help but be captivated by the news that that epitome of diva was making an appearance at the war crimes trial [1] of Charles Taylor in The Hague.

For a supermodel, Naomi Campbell who a few years ago was bedecked in haute couture [2] for each day of appearance for a 5-day community service sentence in the United States to the glare of the paparazzi made exacting demands not to be photographed on her entry to and exit from the venue; one could only suppose she decided to inconvenience the tribunal as much as she felt inconvenienced.

Her appearance in the hopes of the prosecution was to link Charles Taylor to the trade in blood diamonds that were then used to arm rebels in the Sierra-Leone civil war, her testimony providing the tenuous but plausible case against the defendant whilst the defence had hoped the same testimony would be as non-committal as to rubbish the presumed culpability of the Mr Taylor.

In the end, Ms Campbell ruled the airwaves, brought focus to the trial but left most reeling with disbelief on a number of accounts.

As diva as is unconcerned

She was woken up to receive a pouch from strangers send by some unknown benefactor, she reviewed the contents and said they were “dirty-looking” stones, she told Ms Mia Farrow and her assistant Ms White about it and either of them volunteered that the gift might have come from Charles Taylor and she gave the pouch of “dirty-looking” stones to a charity in South-Africa.

Ms Campbell’s reluctance to testify might rightly or wrongly have been in fear of running the gauntlet of Mr Taylor’s hoodlums but it was interesting to note that having received diamonds which have had great value to the benefactor, a lady of her standing would have been more conversant with polished diamonds set in works of fashionable taste and quality than dirty-looking stones.

Surely, these stones (rough diamonds) were hardly the girl’s best friend, in a proverbial sense, pearls were cast at swine and they were trampled on in the mud; much more would have been appreciated of a finished work of craftsmanship in a ring, a necklace or some other fashionable accessory.

As diva as is unaffected

In a show of dead-pan condescension masquerading as ignorance, Ms Campbell volunteered she had never heard of Liberia before that encounter which in essence shows that one does not need brains or an education, talk less of geographic insight to wear good clothes and sashay down a catwalk – Ms Campbell is however no idiot by any stretch of the imagination, she is smart and wily.

She cleverly extricated herself from opprobrium by stating she was ignorant of where the gift was from, she was unaware of the value of what she had received and none the wiser when her lady friends jumped to the conclusion the stones were diamonds given by Charles Taylor.

She appeared at the trial by summons at the behest of evidence offered by her lady friends which did not tally because one talked of a stone and the other of stones but if anything, dare I say that Ms Campbell has suitably made gossips of Mia Farrow and Ms White.

As diva as is inconvenienced

For all the greater cause of humanity regarding the suffering of Sierra-Leoneans and the need to get to the truth, we might be willing to weigh the sacrifice of Ms Campbell’s inconvenience against the greater good but we forget that the whole essence of diva is to be odious, indifferent, unconcerned and be as uncooperative as one can be.

Whether Ms Campbell was a credible witness is neither here nor there but she offered the best test case of how to make yourself unbelievable under oath and frustrate the cause of justice without being implicated.

One lesson that should be learnt by these tribunals is, to strive to get at the facts and the truth but avoid as much as possible the spectacle of diva if your credibility is not to be subsumed to media feeding frenzy for celebrity over the facts and substance of your activities.

Ms Campbell has since left the building.

Sources

[1] BBC News - Naomi Campbell tells Taylor trial of 'dirty stones'

[2] Gaol Couture by Paris [akin.blog-city.com]

Naomi Campbell: I didn't know if 'dirty diamonds' were Charles Taylor's gift | Law | The Guardian

Child twice raped by boys and parental abandonment

A girl raped by boys

In fact, this is the blog I planned to write but the last blog [1] had become too long an introduction to remain as one blog.

In Phoenix, Arizona, in the United States, an 8-year-old girl is lured with sweets into a scheme that must have been contemplated, analysed, planned, hatched and then executed by four boys aged between 9 and 14.

She was entranced by their entreaties, took the bait and got held down for 10 to 15 minutes as she was sexually assaulted [2] by seemingly innocuous and innocent kids. Basically, she was raped by what some parents would call their little angels.

It was her screams that saved her from a more unspeakable ordeal, but whatever had happened was unspeakable already.

Innocence, resistance and consequence

The girl was only 8 years old, it is possible that she would have been none the wiser that she should not take sweets from strangers, but the strangers we are taught to refuse sweets from are grown-ups not our peers.

It is not said if the boys were known to the girl such that she would have had nothing to fear, but once lured and then kidnapped, it is impossible to see how an 8-year-old girl would have fared in resisting and overpowering 4 boys, two of whom were 13 and 14 to prevent her defilement.

This is sad enough, that boys can scheme to have an entitlement to sex and force it on an unsuspecting girl without any thought of the consequences of such an outrageously despicable act.

Sex and kids

When sex enters the picture, it is difficult to look at the situation as a boy and girl thing, sex is primarily the domain of adults, experimentation as kids can be seriously life-changing and the sexual abuse of children is just too dastardly for words.

The 14-year-old boy will be tried as an adult, which makes one wonder about the age of innocence and the consequence of actions that one takes as a kid only to be visited with force of the law as an adult. Many lives would be destroyed by the evil acts that lasted 10 short minutes.

The bane of fossilised Diaspora

However, back to the girl, the trauma of being raped, defiled, dishonoured, dis-virgined and violated under duress cannot be fathomed, this is a time when a child should be able to run into the waiting empathetic arms of their parents and find succour, support, care, concern, love, understanding and strength to begin to put the tragic event into distant memory.

In what I can only call fossilised Diaspora – I’ll explain – the tendency for those in Diaspora to take their root cultures to new lands and then find themselves left behind by both their original culture and their host societies – the parents have disowned the 8-year-old girl citing she had shamed them and did not want her back.

Making the victim a perpetrator

I think, this is an outrageous burden to place on a child for all sorts of reasons but one that stands out unforgivably is the implicit view that anyone raped is partly responsible for being a victim.

By saying the 8-year-old girl, and remember, this girl is 8 years old, has shamed them, they have placed a greater responsibility than can or should have be expected on a girl who could never have been aware of the trap that was being set for her. An innocent defiled is made guilty by intemperate belief systems.

Twice raped by violation and rejection

The concept of fossilised Diaspora is evident because the people involved are Liberian immigrants living in America, the President of Liberia added her voice to the disquiet when she said the parents were doing “something that is no longer acceptable in our society here.”

By implication, certain societies stigmatise and castigate the rape victim, making the victim just as culpable for being raped. Where the milk of human kindness and compassion should provide succour the family takes on a pall of shame and disowns the victim who becomes an unfortunate victim, twice raped by the act and the rejection.

Thankfully, this horrible act did not happen in Liberia where it probably would have gone unpunished but in the United States. It appears these Liberian immigrants need to be dragged like slaves of old kicking, screaming and so reluctantly into the modern age now.

Parental responsibility

The girl is now under the care of the Arizona Child Protection Services (ACPS) and would probably have to be adopted and raised by some more understanding and loving family.

More so, it speaks volumes about an aspect of African child-rearing that rarely gets talked about where providing shelter, food and education is automatically equated with love when those elements are just matters of fundamental responsibility.

Because if there was real parental love, it is unlikely that the girl would have been disowned in the moment of her greatest need. In fact, one would have expected the parents to treat this as an affliction as serious as a very ill child, but they had been schooled in despicable old cultural norms which had been superseded by modernity.

This is abandonment, simple

In what smacks of deplorable political correctness, the police have suggested of the parents, “They didn’t abandon the child, they committed no crime. They just didn’t support the child, which led to CPS coming over there.”

I see things differently, if you do not support your 8-year-old child because of something that happened to the child apart from death, you have abandoned that child and it should attract the heaviest sanctions possible. This is in the realm of basic parental responsibility in which whatever happened to that child cannot be entirely divorced from the kind of upbringing the parents have given the child.

Withdrawing support is too fanciful for words, just imagine if life support were withdrawn from the parents, what fanciful twist of words would be offered to explain the consequence of that?

The parents need evaluation

In the least, those parents should in the circumstances be deprived of custody of this child, if there are other siblings, the circumstances in that home should be evaluated to ensure that parental support does not get withdrawn on the whim of some other old cultural norm – they should be under the threat of losing the custody of any siblings and future siblings.

Furthermore, as the President of Liberia suggested, they are in need of radical counselling, first to understand parental responsibility in the modern age, then to appreciate the vagaries of child-rearing and also be educated about the trauma of child sexual abuse which should be more about how it affects the child and not about their standing in society. Shame on those shameless parents.

No society or community, indigenous or in Diaspora should be able to stand and be counted when keeping face trumps dealing compassionately and tenderly with the sexual abuse of a child and most especially when it is rape.

Sources

[1] Thought Picnic: Preserving childhood sexual innocence

[2] BBC NEWS | Americas | Outcry over disowned US rape girl

The Iron Ladies of Liberia

Explaining practical democracy

This afternoon, I watch the Why Democracy? BBC Series with the title; “Iron Ladies of Liberia”. Now, one might be tempted to dismiss Liberia as a West African backwater hardly matching up to a Bantustan, but that would be to our great peril – Liberia through that one-hour showcase has a lot to show, to offer and to give in the emancipation of Africa in entirety.

14 years of civil war masterminded by the despotic tyrannical Charles Taylor who presently languishes in detention hardly 70 kilometres from my doorstep is a sign of great progress in a country that has suffered a lot and in dire need of strong progressive leadership lacking in a majority of countries of that continent.

The new revealed in Liberia

“Fellow Liberians, the days of the imperial presidency of a domineering chief executive are over, I would talk to the women …”

Women, indeed, women because on January 16, 2006, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was inaugurated as the President of Liberia signalling a change, a hope, a new vision, a new direction and those were her first words as president.

Within weeks she had appointed ladies to the most senior positions in the police, commerce, finance and justice ministries; those ladies had their work cut out most especially the finance minister who eventually obtained a complete write-off of debts owed to the United States.

She reigns with wisdom

President Johnson-Sirleaf carries the authority, the gravitas and respect of not only a political leader but at 68 exudes the wisdom of a good mother and loving grand-mother – attributes that completely lacking in the persona of the Grand-Despot Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

She has to make political compromises as she struggles with her conscience – her words – but I noticed that she has an amazing grasp of her brief, she pays good attention to the detail and then crystallises each opportunity with effective direction and decisions made in the quality of the assessments she has made.

I am not aware of when the full video of this episode would be available, but there were examples over the 52 weeks of this documentary where she was able to diffuse tense situations and arrive at useful workable and implementable solutions.

The lady of the people

Rather than seclude herself in the corridors of power, she went out to engage the people and their concerns whilst demanding excellence from her ministers and reports.

She engaged the market women in the discourse that ensured market space was properly allocated and the roads were also free for transport, when the so-called veterans of the wars constituted themselves into a mob, she listened to their concerns but also juxtaposed their demands against the crimes the same veterans had committed against the more docile populace in the villages.

She extracted an undertaking from these men that they would no more cause tension in the country, but her brief is a difficult one; many would enjoyed the spoils of Charles Taylor’s despotic rulership are still about trying to foment trouble and unrest, she has to be on guard and ready to be quite decisive.

Especially when as the host of 3 heads of state last year, part of the Executive Mansion caught fire, arson could not be ruled out and ensured that all of her intimate security detail were screened again before they returned to their posts.

However, one part which epitomises how President Sirleaf-Johnson intends to run things in Liberia was where employees of Firestone National Rubber Company of Liberia had called a strike and the unrest had lead to the death of a few.

Firestorm at Firestone

Rather than pontificate from her Presidential throne, she first went out to see the people, where they lived and asked if their children went to school – the accommodation was appalling and the children did not go to school; armed with this information, she when into a meeting with the management and told them off big-time.

Her words appear below:

Firestone has been here since 1926

There is no reason for the workers in Firestone to live under the conditions they live

We are not going to accept it

We are not going to accept the fact that people live in houses that have no windows

That people live in houses where there is no schooling for their children

Firestone has made enough money in this country

To have treated the Liberian workers in a better way

Our responsibility as the government

Is to make sure that the workers rights are protected

That their benefits are fair

That they are treated properly

And this government is committed to that

Because that is the message we are taking to the workers

She went out to the workers and addressed them that accommodation and living standards would improve but the 30-something percent rise they have demanded may not be achievable. I thought that was pragmatic because the issue was about living conditions and amenities more than just having more pay, the muscle of a conglomerate would better achieve the elevation of standards than each individual trying to create those circumstances.

The lessons to be learnt

However, there are lessons contained in this simple telling-off and these should be the mantra of any government or representative of a developing or emerging economy.

• Appreciate the facts on the ground before you enter into negotiations
• Understand your responsibility to your constituency and exercise it judiciously
• Determine clearly the terms that are non-negotiable and state them clearly, you can then negotiate on the other matters but the resolve and determination must be clear and enforced without resorting to blackmail or appropriation under duress.

These are the non-negotiable terms of governance, government, political leadership and corporate engagement.

• Employees must be paid a living wage that allows then to live in affordable and decent housing whilst being able to send their children to school.
• Workers’ rights must be clear, known and protected
• Workers’ benefits must be fair especially when they contribute to the profitiability of the company they work for
• The workers must be treated properly, as human-beings, as intelligent beings, humanely and with due consideration and respect.
• Finally, the company in a community must engage and affect the community positively in amenities, resources and opportunities.

The responsibility of the government

Above all, within the responsibility of the government is the undertaking to be principled, trustworthy, honest and truthful in all their dealings – Utopian as these might sound, a government respected rather than feared because of tyranny and menace would always thrive with the goodwill of the people.

It is also not a socialist charter but economic development with raising the people above the poverty line especially when they are in the employ of a profitable concern or international conglomerate should be a firm commitment in any business dealings.

Again, it is not about looking for solutions which can be sold with a populist intent to grab attention and pecuniary political advantage but it is about connecting to the concerns and aspirations of the people.

If the issues in the Niger Delta were addressed with this kind of smart negotiation, I am sure things would have been a lot different from the despicable security situation we have in that place now.

In Liberia, the ladies are doing one fine job and the male chauvinistic pigs that rlue everywhere else had better start learning a few new tricks and giving some kicks too – to corruption, deadwood mandarins, ineffective administrators and most of all heads of government who condemn their people to unspeakable suffering just to bolster their political ends.

Then there is a lady called Olubanke Yetunde King-Akerele who is now the Foreign Minister of Liberia having once been the Commerce and Industry Minister of Liberia methinks she has a Yoruba heritage with three of those names; Yoruba is spoken in the South-West of Nigeria. A speech she gave at the WTO Public Forum 2007 a few days ago.

Justice must not be denied through refusal

Piqued, but who cares?

Charles Taylor the former despotic and tyrannical president of Liberia who is being tried for crimes against humanity in The Hague, The Netherlands has refused to make an appearance at his trial.

I would spare a thought for those who could not refuse to be raped, those who could not refuse to lose their limbs and those who could not refuse to have their youth stolen from them in a war so savage and primitive, the world had to move.

The litany of crimes reads like the Spanish Inquisition was a joyride.

Acts of terrorism (WC)

Murder (CAH)

Violence to life, in particular murder (WC)

Rape (CAH)

Sexual slavery and violence (CAH)

Outrages upon personal dignity (WC)

Violence to life, in particular cruel treatment (WC)

Other inhumane acts (CAH)

Use of child soldiers (VIHL)

Enslavement (CAH)

Pillage (WC)

CAH: Crime against humanity

WC: War crime

VIHL: Violation of international humanitarian law

He must see justice

It would appear Charles Taylor wants to play the system such that his prosecution fails on technicalities - the presiding judge should brook none of this nonsense.

If he would not take representation, the more fool of a man who is being condemned and stays tongue-tied when his mission is in no way messianic.

What bothers me more is than The Daily Telegraph reports that court might not be adequately financed to see this case through - well, I think they are not being inspired and resourceful on this matter; where best would conflict diamonds be to any good if the moneys from selling those bloody jewels can be used to judge and punish a man with so much blood on his hands, the man who brought conscience to the diamond trade.

Charles Taylor must see justice and the decent world must ensure that his example is properly relayed to the Grand Despot of Africa - Robert Mugabe.

Not in my local shop

A cure for nostalgia

It is always a pleasure to pass by the African shop run by an Igbo lady from Nigeria just at the entrance to the metro service at Amsterdam Central Station.

She stocks all the essential ingredients from Nigeria that I never really find that I am nostalgic about food stuffs that one can get from home.

However, for those who cannot find a shop to visit to feel the yams, smell the pepper or get stained with the red of palm oil there is an online outfit called NotInMyLocalShop.

Indeed, those things are not in my local shop which happens to be on the ground floor of my dock-side apartment. The last time I tried something called dasheens which are corms very much like our traditional cocoyam, the result was only fit for the bin.

If the bin were living, it might have regurgitated the stuff; well that is what bins are for, things you cannot stomach.

Healing the pain of sickles

In fact, the only thing she does not stock is Prickly Ash Bark (Orin ata in Yoruba), which is a savoury chewing stick which is supposed to have properties that help alleviate the pains and travails of sickle cell anaemia.

I remember that vividly because, I once was school mates with three kids who unfortunately all had sickle cell anaemia and when my mum found out about it, she recommended the prickly ash bark to them, it became like chewing gum for them, but the elder died whilst I think the others did thrive. I hope they are well now and probably in their late 30s.

Prickly ash bark is said to have quite a number of medicinal properties that I found myself asking for the stuff from Nigeria because I heard of an unusual case of a little white boy suffering from the sickle cell disease.

Well, I thought it was impossible or someone in his lineage might have been of a West African background for there to be a trait to be become obvious in him.

My friend swore to me that his parents and forebears were peasant folk that it is very unlikely that any might have gone for either the exotic of the Nubian. We learn strange things.

Who do you think you are?

I could take his word for it, but after watching a few episodes of “Who do you think you are?” programme on the BBC; where celebrities trace their genealogy going back up to 8 generations or more and learning of their ancestry; we can come from anywhere and sometimes the truth is just too hard to bear.

Beyond the condiments at the shop, I noticed that two other commodities raced off the shelves before they had time to gather the next morning’s dew; false hairs or hair extensions and skin-lightening creams.

Both of which seem to elicit some commentary whenever I get to the shop because it is one of those occasions that I get to speak Pidgin English – not the best because many a time, I have to switch to English to get a point across.

Skin-lightening creams illustrate a dichotomy of needs as Caucasians seek a tan and Africans seek a tone, no one seems to be satisfied with how they look. It is a mad world.

Disguises in the guise of the opposite sex

However, I could not help but observe as her son was unpacking the new deliveries of hair extensions how useful they would have been for Charles Taylor as he tried to escape from Nigeria at a border crossing to Cameroon.

That episode would still develop wings as it is possible that President Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson of Liberia was ambushed and blackmailed into making Charles Taylor a priority in her visit to the US.

How that really helps the Liberians fails to impress me, but it is not the first time that the US has made aid conditional on fulfilling self-interest.

I could imagine a disguise with hair extensions giving the effeminacy that let the ex-Nigerian Governor Alamieyeseigha escape justice in the UK but was lacking for Charles Taylor to leave Nigeria.

For once, it appears the Nigerians were a lot more vigilant than the British who were fooled by a big black man in drag who had just undergone a tummy-tuck in Germany.

Alas! We see a lot but observe very little.