Elections

11.11.08
Earlier this week was the American presidential election, and the buzz in this part of the world has been pretty incredible to experience. It has led to what I think are very important conversations about tolerance and diversity and democracy more generally.
Mali, since its independence from France in the early ‘60s, has been help up as a fairly model fledgling democracy. There is a minimal amount of civil strife and the lack of violent governmental overthrow is truly astounding for this part of the world. Leaders are democratically elected and there is a well-established federal-regional-local hierarchy.
The Peace Corps gives us Newsweek. Six-week-old Newsweek, which I don’t understand at all. It’s the international edition, and I don’t imagine that Newsweek sends out six-week-old international editions to ex-pats all around the world. But also, let me tell you, Newsweek International Edition is Funny, with a capital F. It is clearly published for a different audience than the edition I’m used to. An audience with more money. Which I think is funny, because in my head when I am thinking of the kind of people who buy Bentleys and keep Rolexes in trust for the next generation, they aren’t reading Newsweek, but the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker. But, there are lots of good pictures in Newsweek, and maybe they, too, like pictures in their news magazines. Pictures with captions that make sense. And then at the end there is a section called “for people richer than you’ll ever be” and it is full of fancy stuff you can buy for your house and fancy places to eat and stay – I love it.
Anyway, six weeks ago, Fareed Zakaria wrote an article about freedom, democracy, and land liberalization. It’s a good article. I would recommend reading it. He says, “Holding elections is a defining feature of any liberal democracy.” But the article is about how that is not really good enough. That there are plenty of other elements that go into making a democracy and making it work. He focuses to a large extent on land reform. I’m interested in attitudes. Attitudes that could drive a nation to hold elections or reform their land tenure system. And also attitudes that underlie the way citizens treat each other, their children, and their futures. Respect, creativity, tolerance, ambition, compassion, and responsibility.
I think maybe the importance of these attitudes is easily overlooked by us Americans because they are so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that it is difficult for us to imagine being without them. I’ve been having a difficult time with these conversations with the brussey village Malians I associate with about democracy because these fundamental attitudes that I take for granted don’t exist here.
School can seem a drag, but every day an American student goes to school it is because America as a collective believes that each individual not only has a future, but has the potential to make his or her future matter. And then when he goes to school and sees that there is more to his life than just eating and sleeping and Young American Citizen Doe realizes that there is a greater world out there than just the one he can immediately see, the ideals because of which America works are reaffirmed. In Mali, children don’t all go to school. Especially not girls. In part it is because feeding a family takes so much time-intensive physical labor that everybody has to help out – everybody goes to the fields to farm, and then the girls help prepare the meal – but mostly it is because it doesn’t occur to uneducated parents that there could be a life for their children other than the one they are living. And schooling is not a requirement for that life. And then without going to school, the younger generation doesn’t get the opportunity to develop the creativity to imagine a changed life for themselves or their children. And without the creativity to come up with new ideas they never develop the ambition to strive for them. In America we go for the opposite of that; in America we cultivate possibility.
One of the things that limits the cultivation of possibilities in Mali is that there is very little variety. Every day is the same, every meal is the same. In a lot of these villages, I am the first white person that many of the children have ever seen. It doesn’t make any difference to the really little ones, but when they get to be about 2 ½ or 3, they begin to see that I look different from everybody else in their world. Now, in America, diversity is celebrated, and besides that, it is unavoidable. But in Mali, differences are not celebrated or encouraged. Differences just don’t exist, and if they do, they are suppressed. So instead of reacting to this strange person who looks different from them with interest or curiosity or even suspicion, little children react to me with terror. They scream and cry and run away. And the reason this is so disappointing is because the first opportunity these Malian children have to see a way of life other than the one they are living is so traumatic that it re-emphasizes naturally conservative tendencies and makes them even more intolerant of diversity. And, in contrast, just being able to walk down the street and see people of different colors – heck, people with different hair colors – opens up a world of possibility to young Americans. Because everything is not always the same, and the world is not a static place.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that it is easy for us to overlook all the great things that America does have going for it, even and especially when the country is angry, confused, poor, and struggling. But it is as much the intangible things that set the first world apart from the third as the tangible ones, and it is also the intangible things that are the hard ones to figure out how to share.
As far as our elections go, I think there is a little confusion about exactly who Obama was elected president of. Because if I were getting all my world news from Malians I would be pretty sure that he had been elected Lord King of All Creation for all Time. And the idea that he might focus on America over Africa is also one that is a tough sell out here. Paolo, down the street, puts up Malian billboards about Obama, and in the latest, Paolo is predicting an end to terrorism in the world. I fear that when the world discovers that he is going to be the president of America, and that he is going to preside in America’s interest, there is going to be a little disappointment.