Ota Benga Alliance For Peace, Healing and Dignity

Dear Friends,

I am writing this from Brazil, but I was born in the DRCongo, in the land that was violated to provide uranium for the bombs which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 350,000 people. To this day, no one really knows what happened to the miners of Shinkolobwe. The colonial record was painted as nicely as possible for those who continue to think that the colonial enterprise was mostly altruistic.

On this day, it is my hope that anyone who can do something to remember the real and generic Hibakusha of the atomization of the world, shall do so not just in words, but in reversing the continuing rush to satisfy the genocidal mindset started a few centuries ago with two of the most virulent roots of capitalism in Africa and North America.

Remember those who did try to stop the genocidal mentality, whether from Saint Domingue, from Rwanda, from Namibia, from Armenia, from Auschwitz, from Nanking, from Timor Leste, from Palestine, from Dresden, from the Amazon, from the Andes, and so many regions on the Planet. Remember Ota Benga, remember Kimpa Vita, a Joan of Arc of her time who did her best to denounce slavery, but is still considered evil.

Remember from the deepest recesses of your mind and body what it means to be part of nature, to be part of humanity. Remember the words of those who denounce the genocidal mentality in violent outbursts that make others uncomfortable. Remember the poor of Haiti who were driven to poverty like cattle to the slaughterhouse, simply because they had done the unthinkable: tell the slave masters that their way of living was unacceptable. Remember the revenge of the slave masters. Then, that way of life was unacceptable. It is now described as "unsustainable", meaning there is still room before it becomes unacceptable.

Whether it is Kenzaburo Oe, whether it is Primo Levi, whether it is a San, a Dogon, a pygmee from Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, Oceania, all of them have been trying to say the same thing: it is possible to live in harmony with each other. Their anxiety is reflected in the fear that they cannot find the words to touch us because we have no idea what they saw, what they felt. They have all expressed truths we find too uncomfortable to echo.

Those who have tried, and continue to echo those calls for sanity, have been demonized, discriminated against, humiliated, kidnapped, tortured, put in solitary confinement, isolated, dissolved in sulfuric acid. It happened to Lumumba, to Cabral, to Sankara, to Samora Machel, to Aristide, to Mumia, to Malcom X, to Martin Luther King, to Walter Rodney, to Toussaint L'ouverture, to Dessalines, to Garvey and to so many unknown soldiers for the cause of total and complete emancipation from the suicidal mindset nurtured and advertised to death by capitalism.

From Hispaniola to Hiroshima, humanity and then the atom were split apart in a continuous search for dominating nature, for killing life. From Hispaniola to Hiroshima, voices of generic Hibakusha have continued to echo in our consciousness. Voices of the ignored, voices of those sick from the consequences of an unlivable system, continue to vibrate, but we have grown comfortable with blocking our senses, with rewiring our consciousness.

How shall we, humans as part of nature, reverse a mindset we have grown comfortable with? How do we try to change our thinking? Al Gore, in his movie "An Inconvenient Truth," got close, but then was too frightened of what might happen to him if he did not end the movie the Hollywood way by sugar coating what is called for. Will Al Gore be willing to listen to those voices which, way way way back spoke like the Hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Will he be willing to listen in a non-folkloric way to the voices which were silenced so that they could then be honored, à la Hollywood, in museums to the glorification of what has led to globalisation?

With love, respect and solidarity,

a generic Hibakusha