Harrowing tales from Africa show-up tragic West.
By Catherine Parish
I’ve just been reading a few stories from Gogo Mama by Sally Sara, stories of various African women who have contended with war, genocide, mutilation, rape, torture, AIDS, dislocation, extreme poverty, in their lives.
The stories are appallingly harrowing. Someone like me with my comfortable, middle class, ordered existence, cannot begin to comprehend the magnitude of suffering these women have been through and are still living with.
Their spirit is indomitable. Especially in a couple of the most dreadful stories, the courage, the inner strength, and the real forgiveness for the horrors inflicted upon them, is palpable and singularly uplifting. There was no feeling of hatred or vengefulness that came through any of the stories. If it had been there initially, all these women had somehow, incredibly, got past it.
There may have been times when they wanted to die, but they struggled on through apparently hopeless and tragic and frightening situations. They do not wish upon others their suffering, they wish to improve the lot of their people so that what happened to them need not keep happening to others.
Above all, there is implicit in each story a sense of the value and dignity of themselves as human beings, as being of worth. The outrages inflicted upon them seem to have somehow entrenched that notion in their hearts and minds – that their lives are worth living, worth fighting for, worth hanging on to. In several cases, all that has kept them going is needing to survive to care for their beloved children or grandchildren. But never do they wish they did not have these precious children, despite the horrors into which they are born. Their self-sacrificing love and determined struggle to make their children’s lives better than theirs have been so far is incredible.
And then one turns to our own western society where one hundredth of what we take for granted would be like a miracle of unimaginable wealth and plenty to these African women. We are richer, safer, more comfortable, largely unaffected by war – yet we habitually abort tens of thousands of our own children every year.
In Britain, pushes for the law to be changed so assisting suicide is no longer a crime; in Queensland, the abortion law being challenged with the hope of liberalising it and legalising abortion; in Perth, a man given legal sanction to starve himself to death in a nursing home without staff feeling compelled to intervene.
A western world where old and sick and disabled people are made to feel useless and burdensome, to feel there is no reason for them to keep living to their natural end, and are aided by the law to end their lives prematurely so as not to be a burden on their families or the medical system.
A natural corollary to viewing human life as conveniently disposable from its beginning is the same attitude to human life at its ending.
Pope John Paul II was right; we in the western world are living in an entrenched culture of death. How terribly, tragically ironic to find amidst the chaos, war and appalling savagery of many African states a thriving, loving and courageous culture of life and a deep understanding of how precious life is in the hearts of some of these beautiful African women.