YOU AND I ARE NOT THE SAME
“Human beings have limits. You can say all you want about the world being unfair and people rising above the atrocities done to them, but everyone is different. Some are hard as steel, but some are fragile, and you never know which one you’re going to get” quoted from David Baldacci’s book Memory Man.
It is not every generation that finds itself in the heart of a conflict, some actively seek it, and to others it is delivered at their doorstep. It is of two men who lived in the latter generation that I speak of today: Steve Biko (founder of the South African Students’ Organisation) and Titus Adungosi (Chairman of the Students Organization of Nairobi University). To understand the depths of these two characters would require more than one piece, but it is the similarities between them that I choose to highlight today and not only that, but what they represent as well.
Adungosi was at the helm of SONU when it was established in 1982 becoming its first chairman, a force to reckon with, he could easily move crowds with his oratory skills as he championed for students’ rights and naturally this attracted the attention of the state. In the aftermath of the 1982 attempted coup Adungosi was among those detained, accused and eventually jailed for a sentence of 10 years, dying in 1988 in what Kenya TJRC Volume 2A outlines as denied medication.
Biko is well-known in anti-apartheid history, as leader of SASO he rallied for black consciousness, pushed by the desire for black identity outside the constraints of oppression. He would later be arrested at a roadblock and die under cruel circumstances in the hands of the police in what South Africa TRC Volume 4 outlines as inappropriate and negligent care of a detainee by district surgeons.
The backdrop of these two individuals gives a link between their positions, their ideology and the ways in which they met their death. They are persons who rose to a challenge that would eventually bring about their end, they believed in their causes, and were ready to take up difficult positions. This would in no way excuse the actions of the different state powers or the outcomes of the struggles, but it highlights choices that man faces daily in dealing with conflict.
Different men are different in many ways. It is also the case that within these conflicts there were countless others who chose a different path. Though captured in fewer books, there were those who felt caged by these conflicts. Trapped in a life that they did not choose, neither could they easily escape. Some felt that they could not struggle for the freedom of the ‘faceless mass’ and others though willing could not sustain such a struggle and maintain psychological or emotional stability. In many cases some were forcefully conscripted to fight where they did not have the spirit to, others fled and sought a life away from the entire problem area. Arguably, there are those who managed to escape, but not always. It saddens me that not only does conflict tear people apart, but it also forces those who cannot sustain it to a position where they must.
Of South Africa, Gillian Slovo wrote that ‘The struggle has taken children away from their mothers and childhood away from the children’ because they ended up joining the uprising. It also leaves behind victims whose pain is so potent it would almost seem as though the action of aggression occurred yesterday, and indeed in the mind it did. We cannot pretend to know what a victim faces, unless we are in one’s place, of which no two people experience the same thing in the same way. But as we approach human beings, remember our differences, they are part of who we are.