Africa dreams Abrahamland: shanty-town voices on Israel-Palestine

A few days ago, lost in one of Douala’s shanty-towns, I came across this place where the unemployed get together. All day long, the men kill time by playing board games there. As they play they talk about everything under the sun. Usually, the talk is of football, but this time a tragic event had stirred them up: the suicide attack by a 29-year-old Palestinian woman on a restaurant in Haifa, Israel.

A crack player, finding himself cornered in a game of draughts, had raised the subject in order to play for time: “There’s been another suicide bombing in Israel. By a woman. She killed about twenty people.”

“A woman suicide bomber! Did she die? Amazing! I thought only men had courage like that!” marvelled someone.

“A suicide bomber is someone who commits suicide for a cause, causing material damage or deaths in the enemy camp,” added a third, pedantically.

A fourth added, in pidgin English: “A woman who commits suicide, killing others… Our fathers taught us that women, as the givers of life, protect life better than anyone else. What’s wrong with the world?”

“It’s not so strange really,” someone else butted in. “The hatred between Arabs and Israelis has been passed down from generation to generation. It happens the moment a child’s born. It’s the first thing they learn, after their mother’s breast – to hate one other, to fight each other to the death.”

Victor Youmbi lives in a shanty-town outside Douala, Cameroon. He wrote this article by hand, walked three kilometres to transcribe it onto a friend’s computer, copied it to disk and took it to the nearest cybercafé, fifteen kilometres away.

These poor, unemployed Cameroonians were doing their best to understand a conflict which had gone on and on for fifty years, making a banality of violence, turning the Holy Land into a sort of ‘Wild West’, where people killed each other for absurd reasons. These were men who had felt the indirect consequences of that war on their own lives, through the steep rise in the cost of living. Just as the oil crisis which shook the world in 1973 had dashed the development hopes of African countries, terrorism was doing the same now, tying up everything in security, sending insurance prices rocketing.

Unfortunately, as they were saying, you can’t throw an entire land into jail.

The conversation then took a new turn:

“What’s so odd is that these Arabs and Israelis, who share a common ancestor, Abraham, should keep hating each other all this time. Or some of them, anyway.”

“A single father? Really?” asked a young man of about twenty.

“Yeeees! Sworn enemies they may be, but they come from one father, Abraham – it’s written in the Bible!” This young man was clearly not a regular at the church or the mosque. “Abraham, God’s friend, had a wife, Sara, and a slave, Agar. Sara was mother of Isaac, ancestor of the Jews. Agar was mother of Ishmael, father of the Arabs.”

An old man, deeply revered – this is Africa, after all – got to his feet, shook his head to show that he had an answer, and declared slowly: “Yes, I get it, I see the root of the problem now. We all know what happens in divided families. The children don’t obey their fathers, they do what their mothers tell them…”

Someone interrupted:

“A wife always wants her children to be the only legitimate heirs, not the lover’s, or the second wife’s.”

“No, it’s not that – Sara was the legitimate wife, Agar was a slave. The two just aren’t equal!” put in a mature university student.

To which a man in his 60s replied: “Young man, you understand nothing. A man always imposes his will on his wives in family matters. Agar was a slave; that’s what the Bible tells us, as you say. But that makes no difference to Ishmael’s rights. A child, even the child of a slave, is still a child. Our tradition says that they have just the same rights as the first wife’s child. Any child born in the court becomes a prince, or princess.”

A woman cigarette vendor, who had been following the conversation, jumped in, keen to counter the harsh judgment being passed on her sex:

“When things go wrong in a family the woman takes the blame. When children turn out well, fathers take the credit – suddenly, the great achievement of years is all down to them! But a child who’s a bit slow is always ‘like her mother’. Listening to you, it’s obvious that this is a war like all the others – it pits men against each other. But the ones who really suffer are the women, the children and the old people.”

“All I know is this”, she went on, “men’s pride is usually at the bottom of it. In the Magnificat we sing at prayers every evening, the Virgin Mary – a woman – says: “God will always favour Abraham and his people.” And she means all his descendants, Jews, Arabs or Christians. We’re all Abraham’s people, in blood or in spirit.”

“Mammy here” (in Europe he would have said ‘the lady’) “wants to put us all back in school! Been there, done that! Our future’s been sold!” said a young man who had slightly lost the thread of the argument.

So the debate raged on. People took their arguments from all over the place – from African tradition, the Bible, the Koran, or the press. Reason, affection, and passion were all tangled together. What baffled them all was how two families who shared a common ancestor could end up hating each other so much.

Worse still, these were two deeply religious families, ones whose very greeting was a polite salaam from the Arabs, shalom from the Jews, meaning “peace” – not just a word, but a state of mind. How had this salaam-shalom managed to weld into the two communities that darkest of emotions, hatred, that is what they wanted to know?

“They’ve worn out he word ‘peace’, they’ve made it ordinary,” as somebody put it. “They don’t live it any more, that’s obvious. What a calamity!”

“But these people have founded religions which have spread all round the world!” someone else chipped in. “Moses, Jesus Christ and Mohammed are all part of their great family. Jerusalem is the holy city of the three great religions that their parents founded, as you know very well. Islam and Christianity are the religions of Europe, the Americas, large parts of Africa and Asia. Our own civilisation stems directly from Abraham. The Arabs have got the oil and courage, the Israelis have got the technology and determination – they’ve made the desert so fertile that it feeds them! We Africans could learn such a lot from them.”

“Yes, if only we Africans could learn how to irrigate the sub-Sahara and the desert countries, we’d be able to feed ourselves. If only we could bring peace to the region – just think how we’d benefit. There’d be no more famines. No more desertification, with all the disaster it brings. We’d be able to kiss goodbye to George Bush and his GMOs. Think of the huge profits America and the European powers reap from these wars by selling weapons to us all. How cynical can you be!”

They concluded that the war being waged in the lands which God had offered to their father Abraham condemned its leaders, and those who were stoking the flames of the conflict, to a sorry life on earth and in the hereafter. You cannot go killing your brother in the land of your ancestors. How easy it would be to make a lasting peace, if only the two sides would just remember Abraham, their common ancestor!

For them, Yitzhak Rabin was a visionary who, like so many others, would not be truly valued until long after he was dead. And Yasser Arafat had missed a rare opportunity by not making a deal with Ehud Barak. The Palestinians would have done better to accept the little bit that Barak had offered them, that’s what they were saying.

In their dreams, my compatriots looked forward to the birth of a great, prosperous, peaceful country where the two communities would live in a perfect peace, one where Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine would be provinces of a single state. “Abrahamland”, they called it, this utopia of theirs. Jerusalem would be its capital, and everyone there would obey the teachings of Moses, Jesus Christ and Mohammed, none of which contradicted one another.

This land which had suffered so deeply from colonialism and the shoah would help to wipe from the face of the earth all racism, hatred and abuse of man. Through their nobility of spirit, these people would understand the suffering of the other peoples of the earth. They would lead other nations to justice and peace.

How well they would understand Africa’s plight today, this continent which had been ground down now for almost five centuries! How well they would understand her longing to be free of the insidious toils of neo-colonialism! And thanks to the age-old relationship which Abraham’s people had had with Africa’s, how much they would be able to help her development…

As noon drew on, the talk died away, as stomachs started to grumble. They were going to have to find something to eat. Each day, at around that time, this problem of food came up. It brought them back to reality, to the harshness of their everyday lives. So they went their ways in silence, reminding each other that they would meet back there again in the afternoon.

Translated from French by Julian Kramer