Sins of the Fathers

There's a saying oft repeated in the Old Testament, which I used to misread as something meted out as judgment: "The sin of the fathers shall be visited upon their children unto the third and fourth generation." How profoundly unfair, I would think.

I begin to see that this was more of a declaration of reality than a promise of divine retribution. What we do in our lives -- the simple acts that define us -- bear fruit for the future. It bore repeating because humankind, en masse, prefers to believe in temporality. (This is a topic for another day, but this also goes to the problem I have with utilitarianism's attempt to make itself into a moral argument: it rarely, if ever, removes itself from first-generation concerns, often serving as a means of placating a public that has little, if any, idea of how it should make decisions.)

How often we ignore this very simple doctrine of consequences! War is ripening in East Africa: deaths have occurred in protests about constitutional changes and flawed elections in the relatively peaceful states of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. Uganda's President Musuveni, co-architect and supporter (some would argue) of the rise of Hutu Power, stifles protest in his own streets as he faces the most serious political challenges of his life. Sudan and Congo are hotbeds of death and unrest: 2.3 million are currently displaced in the DRC after civil unrest started by Rwanda's Kagame and Uganda's Musuveni invaded in 1998. Hundreds of thousands are dead. The good work being done in Rwanda will be unraveled, should war break out; Burundi will follow Rwanda's lead. This will, I'm convinced, be the unlabeled World War III: unlabeled because the "sin of the fathers" that so plagues Africa still haunts us today. The evil of colonialism, peculiarly unmentioned in the article above (that's sarcasm), persists in our own stubborn insistence that Africa's problems are its own: what do we care, or why should we care, if warring tribes decide to kill each other? Their deaths go uncounted; they are faceless, nameless hordes with unpronounceable names and unmanageable problemes. Let them solve it themselves, indeed. What will be their final solution, I wonder?

The article implies that Africa's problems are the result of democracies emerging out of dictatorships in lands plagued by poverty. That is only half true, and the half that is false contains the cause. To paraphrase a favorite author of mine, there is something one must factor in before one can figure it out: three generations ago, or perhaps four, the western world came calling. It killed Africa's best and brightest with abandon, enslaving entire peoples under the guise of the "holy calling" of the Hamitic myth; if it is plagued by social ills stemming from bad leadership, we cannot fail to acknowledge the dehumanizing aspect of colonial leadership and its deliberate restructuring of traditional systems of empowerment. When the colonial powers shrugged off their African burden, they washed their hands clean and missed the point entirely: what happened then spurs what happens now. And for our generation to ignore Africa in this moment is to repeat our ignoble history of selective inattention.

This is more than a rant. This is a shame-on-me for not doing more than this, for not pushing forward as strenuously as I could for change. I suppose, then, it's also a challenge: we must find ways to get involved. The Africans say they are hoping that no one turns to war; that seems so impossible right now that I can't imagine that hope being anything but futile.

Stay tuned. Read the article. Start thinking.