Nefarious War
Last year we fought by the head-stream of the So-Kan,
This year we are fighting on the Tsung-ho road.
We have washed our armor in the waves of the Chiao-chi lake,
We have pastured our horses on Tien-shan’s snowy slopes.
The long, long war goes on ten thousand miles from home.
Our three armies are worn and grown old.
The barbarian does man-slaughter for plowing;
On his yellow sand-plains nothing has been seen but blanched skulls and bones.
Where the Chin emperor built the walls against the Tartars,
There the defenders of Han are burning beacon fires.
The beacon fires burn and never go out.
There is no end to war!—
In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;
The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,
While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,
Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.
So, men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass,
And the generals have accomplished nothing.
Oh, nefarious war! I see why arms
Were so seldom used by the benign sovereigns.
~Li Bai (701 – 762)
R-L: John Marks, Steve McDonald, John Siceloff, Sylvia Vollenhoven
Search for Common Ground founder and president, John Marks opened the Media as a tool for Social Change in Africa forum with a story from Burundi.
The country was the site of Search for Common Ground’s first entry into the medium of soap operas, after civil war and genocide had afflicted neighboring Rwanda. The main ethnic groups in Burundi were the same ones involved in the Rwandan genocide and there were very real fears that violence would spill across the border. John came up with the idea of using soaps to “change the thinking and mentality of society,” and the SFCG radio drama Our Neighbors, Ourselves, ended up reaching about 87% of the audience in Burundi and ran for over 10 years.
Building on that success, SFCG expanded to other countries, like Liberia where one soap in particular was so popular that the name of a corrupt character, Charles, became synonymous with corruption. “You would hear people saying: ‘He’s such a Charles,’” John said.
The forum held by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, SFCG and The International Center for Journalists, was a dynamic discussion preceded by a showing of the PBS program NOW: “Soap Opera for Social Change,” about the SFCG series, The TEAM. Other panelists included John Siceloff, NOW executive producer and Sylvia Vollenhaven, a Knight Development Journalism Fellow with experience creating soap operas in her home country of South Africa. Discussion was moderated by Steve McDonald, the consulting director of the Africa Program at the Wilson Center.
John Siceloff said that, in general, the market does not favor solution-oriented media. Still he opined that it was a great time for media for social change because communication is no longer 1-way. Audiences are more able to interact with and influence the media they consume. In Africa, Siceloff said mobile phone usage is increasingly important as an inexpensive way to access the web interact with media.
The reason soaps can be effective, Vollenhaven said, was because of compelling narratives. “Soap comes from our mythology,” she said. “It reaches us because it understands our storytelling.” In a more media saturated environment like South Africa, she worried that shows like the TEAM would have to use more sophisticated storytelling. Using the example of Nollywood (Nigeria’s film industry which recently surpassed the US as the second largest in the world) she said that while production values were low, its popularity across Africa and the Caribbean comes from exciting storytelling.
Still, the field of media for social change is an evolving one, John stressed. For SFCG it has proved “and extraordinary medium with exciting and unexpected results,” he said. While public health has used the soap opera format to communicate information and change behaviors, fewer people and organizations have utilized it for peace building and reconciliation. This means there is plenty of time and room to grow and adapt to rapidly evolving media environments.
You can watch the NOW program here.
Every summer, SFCG sends interns to work in its international country offices to gain valuable field experience. Leah Germain is currently working in our Sierra Leone office on projects dealing with media and governance. Look for further updates from Leah and others about their experiences in the field.
First Impressions
By Leah Germain
Leah at the Talking Drum Studio office
Freetown – I have been in Sierra Leone for less than 24 hours when I arrive at Talking Drum Studio (TDS) and the first thing I notice as I walk into the office, is the air conditioning. The sweet cool breeze blasting from a small white AC is a welcome relief from the hot African sun. Between the heat radiating from the Freetown streets and the thick humidity of the city center, the feeling of cold, manufactured air pleasantly engulfs me.
TDS’s receptionist, Mariama, greets me with a warm smile. As she tours me through the business office and then onto the studio, I am showered with grins and welcomes from TDS staff, producers and reporters. I struggle to pronounce everyone’s name correctly but the folks at TDS are very patient. They repeat themselves as many times as required for me to attempt a pronunciation, even if it is spoken with a thick Canadian accent.
Whenever I informed people of my summer travel plans, I had repeatedly been asked: “Why?” And as I made my way from the airport to the country’s capital, I found myself asking the same thing. But upon arriving at the TDS office, I knew the answer because it is impossible not to feel the energy flowing throughout the building. It is unlike anything else I have ever experienced. The staff is excited to be here and so am I. In the short time since my arrival, I’ve already discovered that Talking Drum Studio is both well known and highly respected among Freetown locals.
With offices in Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia, Talking Drum Studio has become synonymous with peace and stability in Western Africa. TDS was established by Search for Common Ground in Sierra Leone as a means to harness the power of media and promote peacebuilding and conflict transformation after the country’s civil war. Today, TDS produces radio, video and multi-media programming that acts as a source for social and political commentary by critically examining national issues.
Alimamy Kamara has worked for TDS since 2003. He began as an intern and helped produce the studio’s flagship radio program, Common Ground News. Today, he produces his own radio show, Wellbodi Challenge – a critical news magazine that examines the country’s recently established free healthcare policy.
The show has two objectives. The first is to inform citizens of the policy which provides free health care for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under five. Sierra Leone has some of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates and the policy, implemented in April of this year, is meant to reverse those statistics. Kamara’s Wellbodi Challenge began broadcasting in February, two months before the healthcare reform was passed, so that Sierra Leoneans had a chance to fully understand the new legislation. Now, the show focuses on looking at issues of transparency and accountability following the policy’s implementation.
Kamara says that like the content heard on Wellbodi, Talking Drum Studio’s other programs have also encouraged critical commentary throughout Sierra Leone.
“We are very popular,” he says. “When TDS came to Sierra Leone in 2000, the only media that was available was the government media. People did not have the opportunity to have an input. They didn’t have an opportunity to have their voices heard. TDS has given them that opportunity … and this [sentiment] resonates across the country.”
When asked if TDS will continue to be in high demand in coming years, Kamara doesn’t hesitate to answer: “People are hungry for information and people are hungry for accountability.” And according to Kamara, that is exactly what TDS provides.
World Cup Special: Five Orgs Working with Sport for Social Causes
In no particular order:
Girls Kick It
girlskickit.org
An organization empowering and rehabilitating young women and girls in Northern Uganda – who have been disproportionately effected by the civil war – through football. Building self-confidence, and other skills, the organization hopes to help more women become leaders and feel that they can take charge of their own destinies. Equally important it allows them
Fugees Family
Coach Luma and players
Also using the power of football, Fugees Family works with child survivors of war. It provides year-round soccer, after-school tutoring, a private academy and an academic enrichment camp. Kids learn to cooperate and work as a team. Participants sign and adhere to the contract which stipulates, among other things, that he will not play in games if they have missed tutoring or practice and that they will be good role models in their communities. The organization and its founder, Coach Luma Mufleh, were honored with a Common Ground award in 2009.
Homeless World Cup
from guardian.co.uk
The cup was born out of a desire to find a universal language to unite homeless people around the world. That language was football. Empowering disenfranchised men and women through soccer, the homeless world cup has been hosted annually since 2003. They beat the FIFA WC to S. Africa, which hosted the cu p in 2006 in Cape Town. That tournament was the setting for Kicking It, an excellent documentary on the cup! The 2010 tournament will be in Rio de Janiero this September. Many players have stopped using drugs and alcohol after participating and others have enrolled in job or educational training and are no longer homeless.
Alive and Kicking
Barack Obama talks Alive & Kicking with A&K Kenya's director Martin Barnard (left). (from aliveandkicking.org.uk)
Alive & Kicking is an innovative charity that hand stitches leather balls in Africa to provide balls for children, create jobs for adults and promote health awareness through sport. They currently work in Kenya and Zambia but their balls are distributed to children in schools, orphanages, refugee camps, and youth groups across Africa.
Right to Play
Players with the right to play ball (from zoomandgo.com)
Right to Play is the leading international organization using sport for development. They work in 23 countries affected by war, poverty and disease. Founded by Norwegian speedskater and four-time Olympic champion Johann Olav Koss, the organization uses sports to teach children about a myriad issues including fair play, self-esteem and conflict resolution. They’ve seen reductions in aggressive behavior and increased community capacity as a result of their programs.
From the team's stop in Addis Ababa (from thekickabout.org)
Also check out Kickabout: where a team of five has been traveling overland from the UK to South Africa, footballs in hand, to celebrate African football and spotlight humanitarian projects and heroes who are making a difference, especially in the field of sport and development. It’s a great story with fabulous photos to go along with it.
Happy World Cup!
By Rob Hughes
From the New York Times
JOHANNESBURG — Everyone is here for the soccer, but let’s not pretend this is going to be like any World Cup ever before. The stakes are raised tenfold. This may be the 19th soccer World Cup in 80 years, but it’s the first to be held on this continent.
An event of this magnitude and cost, so demanding on the resources of the host nation, was unimaginable in Africa until now. And in South Africa, which 20 years ago was still barred from international sports because of its racist apartheid policies, this would have been unthinkable while Nelson Mandela was still behind bars.
Mandela said 20 years ago that soccer was the game of the townships, the game some of his fellow prisoners on Robben Island played to keep themselves sane. And it’s the game he wanted to see on his soil in its grandest form — the World Cup — before he died.
Indeed, he begged for it. He went to Zurich not once but twice to use his influence and his legacy to persuade FIFA, global soccer’s governing body, to bring its gargantuan, 32-nation, 64-game circus to South Africa.
Trust us, he told the officials, we have the human resources, even in this once-broken land, to safely host the month-long global soccer showpiece.
There is hope that he will attend the opening match on Friday and the final on July 11. That, given Mandela’s frail health, might require him to summon every last ounce of fortitude in his 91-year-old body.
What history that would make. Both games are at Soccer City, the same giant stadium between Soweto and Johannesburg where Mandela, prisoner 46664, made his first public speech after his release following 27 years as a political prisoner. An estimated 85,000 people filled the stadium that day, on Feb. 13, 1990. On Friday, there will be an expected 94,700 in the renovated stadium to watch South Africa kick off the tournament against Mexico.
This dwarfs the magnitude of the rugby union World Cup in 1995, soccer’s African Cup of Nations in 1996 and the cricket World Cup in 2003, which all were part of Mandela’s use of sports as a tool of reconciliation.
The soccer World Cup will strain every facet of South African life, test every aspect of co-operation between the public and private sectors to keep this show running and to keep it safe. It goes far beyond who wins and who loses, and beyond our fascination with whether Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, or possibly this time an African — Samuel Eto’o or Didier Drogba, if he plays despite injury — shows himself to be the finest player in a team game.
Get the next 31 days right and it will add to Mandela’s already great legacy. It might also cement that of Sepp Blatter, the FIFA president, who put his own leadership on the line by urging everyone to believe that Africa’s time had come.
“We have practically a moral obligation toward African football and the African people,” Blatter said. Ever since, his mantra has been: “The victor is football. The victor is Africa.”
The sentiment is commendable, yet there is an implicit contradiction. The world has come to play in a land where unparalleled beauty coexists with unspeakable poverty and where 50 human beings are murdered daily.
There are 10 new or newly renovated stadiums that might soon be obsolete, overpriced white elephants towering over the teeming township slums. But there are also highways, high-speed trains and modern airports built to cope with 400,000 World Cup visitors and to carry longed-for tourism into the future.
So perhaps soccer is driving hope, working as a catalyst toward restructuring the new South Africa?
Bidding for the World Cup outlasted Mandela’s span as the country’s president. In fact, three heads of state — Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and now Jacob Zuma — have seen the process through to reality. One man, however, has driven the bid from beginning to end: Danny Jordaan.
Jordaan is the chief executive of South Africa’s 2010 World Cup organization. He has sustained the effort throughout the process, pursuing the goal with determination and stamina.
“I have no doubt,” he said last month, “this will be the most unifying moment in South African history. We did not have walls or wars like East and West Germany had, but we had separation of people, black and white.”
Such lofty rhetoric is rare from Jordaan. He has long been known to leave the oratory to the presidents. His tenacity has been matched by a watchfulness, a wariness, born of knowing that careless words could cost precious votes. The word most often heard from him is hope — hope for a fairer chance in South Africa than previous generations got under apartheid.
Another phrase he often uses, learned no doubt from Mandela: “You have to be magnanimous.” He repeated it on the BBC the other day when asked how the majority of South Africans can forgive what they endured under white minority rule.
Jordaan does not have Mandela’s charisma, his easy eloquence, his “Madiba magic.” Who else in this world does?
But he knows who will be held accountable if anything goes disastrously wrong at this World Cup. It was Mandela’s dream, but it is Jordaan’s responsibility.
Read the rest of the article here.
