From Here to Dignity

From Here to Dignity

The lord and master rides by on his horse and the peasant bows lowly and silently farts
(a clever old saying… apparently)

I came across the above saying in my readings on: shame pride and freedom… Shame is one of the most powerful tools in the hand of oppressors; it is one of the most painful and potentially destructive experiences known to human beings. Shame emerges when one has been made to be seen as: weak, worthless, bad or inferior. Those adept to manipulating power often perfect the art of humiliating others as a form of subjugating them without even resorting to physical violence.

Although shame is usually a personal or family experience, whole groups of people can be shamed too (by other groups of people who try to privilege themselves over other groups), many contend that Hitler’s rise to power actually relayed on his anti-shame and pride building approach with the German people… capitalising on their need to avoid shaming (or repeated shaming) following Germany’s defeat in WWI. In accordance scapegoating and grandiose needs to be seen as superiors was part of his rhetoric and inevitably those who felt humiliated the most were his first supporters….

… Rings ominous bells with our own ‘Hitler of Africa’ and his ‘Hitler youth’… doesn’t it? (they call it victims of victims syndrome in the field…)

The concern over avoidance of shame is both a shield and a sword in the hands of Isaias Afworki… every time he fears that his subjects might contemplate questioning his existence… he fills them with the ever present fear of the shame of loosing ‘independence’… loosing the very Eritrea that their children the martyrs bled and died for… every time anyone questions his actions, inactions or anything in between he is ever so quick to point to all the known, imagined and hypothesised enemies that are all armed and poised to pounce on us and obliterate us into inexistence…and this gains him followers from peole with fear of the shame of identity loss…

Simultaneously, he uses shame as a means of social control; making the entire nation an object for his shaming… so much so that we have all internalised this collective shame (admit it… how many times have we heard the term ‘deyrebiH hizbi’ ‘Himaq weledo’ etc)… the more we internalise this the more his control of us as a nation… in hindsight much of what pfdj have done inside Eritrea had the net effect of humiliating Eritreans… starting from the devaluation of social norms, disrespecting the elderly… desecration of religion… normalisation of immorality… the humiliation of elderly mediators… humiliation of intellectuals and academics… humiliation of university students… humiliation of grieving mothers… anything that the Eritrean society had held as sacred has been an object of pfdj’s campaign of attacking Eritreans without necessarily resorting to physical violence… Even where violence has been engaged e.g. torture of young people in the military training centres the main objective seems to be humiliating the subjects… and seem to have had the desired effect of complete subjugation… for how else is it possible for a father whose son disappeared in the Sinai and whose daughter became a colonel’s concubine and whose wife has to queue up for his two breads a day; would silently carry a loaded Kalashnikov and goes out combat training at 4:00 am before his morning shift at 6:00 am? Internalised shame that is how… the despicable dictator’s worst crime against my people so far as I am concerned is the fact that he reduced my brave and upright compatriots renowned for their courage to shadows of their former selves…

God I hate pfdj!!!!  

…Isaias Afworki isn’t the first dictator who tired to humiliate the gallant Eritrean public… all previous rulers have done more or less the same… but in the good old bad days… the humiliation didn’t result in total shaming… we had a superior position as a nation… we were fighting back and we were fighting them good and hard… our freedom fighters were doing worse to them than they could ever do to us… was the most prevalent response to all attempts of trying to shame Eritreans… even when they made people in towns and cities bow down to them… the response was an internal resolute resistance for that greater cause… the collective fight back that enabled every Eritrean to walk with heads held high… (much like the peasant who conforms and bows to the master on the high horse but farts as his form of silent resistance...)

…this is where the fight against pfdj should really start… restoring dignity in Eritreans, for what turns humiliation to shame is actually self blame or internalisation of the humility… rather than a credible counter-attack.  In other words accepting the derogation…when a group (or a person) is paralysed by self blame the response to humiliation (and shame) is destructive anger often projected at entities other than the original source of shaming…in our case pfdj… and hence in our case projecting it on each other… or worse on ourselves (our young people believing that they deserve nothing better than fleeing the country regardless of the dangers… could be due to the underlying feeling of internalised shame…i.e. worthlessness…)

As mentioned above humiliation however mean doesn’t necessarily turn into shame and hence doesn’t always translate into a self destructive force… people who hold on to a morally superior position wouldn’t feel shame and people like these are better placed to produce a credible response to pfdj than those who have nothing to hold on to…

A telephone message from us telling our people that they are not worthless pawns in the board that pfdj shifts one way or the other… but precious people that have put up gallant resistance in the past and can well do it again… may be a very very minute move towards restoring dignity and preparing the ground for active resistance against pfdj… but restoring the dignity of our people is a massive move without which the change we are looking for is impossible! This is precisely why I am so proud of my colleagues at ArbiHarnet and all their work in doing just that… taking all the care in the world to construct messages that communicate the value and regard with which we hold our people instilling that very value back to the national psyche…

In the silly hours that we stay upto to finish all the drafting, editing, awareness raising and begging for $3.00 the image I hold on to is a gentleman on his bike on his way to the retched military training with a glint in his eyes because his phone rang the previous night and he got the message that 10,000 others also get that gives him some little thing to hold onto to counter pfdj’s humiliation from turning into shame… at my most sleep deprived hours I even imagine him saying something like: ‘ezom deqi ko geromlom eyom lomzeben!’… (with an unmistakable glint in his eyes)… and I smile back and say ‘were gena!’

Happy Independence Day… my people!

Forget pfdj…celebrate Eritrea!!! (…if it weren’t for the sensibilities that still persist  it would have been another F word too!!... oops did I say that out loud? Please don’t tell my Mum… and the priest… and probably the hubby and the children too!)  


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