Blessed Peacemakers. Robin Jarrell
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apartheid, making an international name for herself as a singer, Makeba delighted audiences with the richness of her voice and her exotic African songs. Harry Belafonte took her under his wing (together they recorded a Grammy-winning album), President John Kennedy insisted on meeting her, and Marlon Brando was one of her admirers. Her only regret was that South Africa revoked her passport in 1959 in retaliation for her public criticism of her home country, her performances at Martin Luther King-led civil rights demonstrations, and especially her appearance in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa.
Things changed for the worse almost overnight when Makeba married Black Panther Stokely Carmichael in 1968. Scheduled concerts were cancelled, radio stations refused to play her music, and recording studios refused to work with her because of her association with Carmichael. Dismayed and angry at the racism she encountered in the United States, Makeba soon moved with Carmichael to Guinea, where she lived for the next fifteen years (she and Carmichael divorced in 1973). She continued to sing around the world, but refused for years to perform in the United States even after public outrage over her marriage had died down. In addition to opposing South African apartheid, she became a vocal critic of racism around the world. Her enemies tried to play down her outspoken anti-racism by claiming that she was a disgruntled hater of whites or a political opportunist. But Makeba vigorously rejected the accusations. “People have accused me of being a racist,” she said, “but I am just a person for justice and humanity. People say I sing politics, but what I sing is not politics, it is the truth. I’m going to go on singing, telling the truth.”
During the final years of apartheid, Makeba kept up the pressure by publicly urging an economic boycott of South Africa. She was awarded the United Nation’s Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize for her energetic opposition to racism, and admirers of both her social activism and her music began calling her “Mama Africa.” When apartheid officially ended in 1990, she returned to the land of her birth after a thirty-year exile. Although popular in Europe and North America, especially after her musical collaboration in the 1980s with Paul Simon that resulted in the album Graceland, she was largely unknown by young South Africans. That the younger generation who benefited from her years of opposition to apartheid neither knew nor cared much about her music was an irony that she took in stride. To the end of her life, Mama Africa continued performing internationally, and actually died while giving a benefit concert in Italy.
4 March
Ludwig Quidde
23 March 1858—4 March 1941
The Foolishness of Vengeance
Kaiser Wilhelm II, the vainglorious and mustachioed German emperor who led his nation into the disastrous First World War, loved all things military. Diverting a goodly portion of the national economy to building up his army and navy and surrounding himself with generals and field marshals, he seemed out of touch with the real world in which ordinary people lived. So in 1894, a mild-mannered stutterer named Ludwig Quidde wrote a short pamphlet he hoped might serve as a reality check for the emperor. Titled Caligula: A Study of Imperial Insanity, Quidde’s essay was ostensibly a study of ancient Rome. But anyone with a discerning eye quickly saw that in fact it was an implicit criticism of the Kaiser’s infatuation with the military.
Caligula didn’t land its author in jail, although Quidde was imprisoned on several other occasions for his outspoken pacifism. A member of the German Peace Society, an organization that still exists despite being suppressed under Hitler, Quidde advocated disarmament and international law under three German regimes: the Wilhelmine reign, the Weimar Republic that replaced it, and the Nazi stranglehold that destroyed the Republic. He suffered for his convictions under all three. The Kaiser charged him with lèse-majesté several times and had him thrown into jail. When World War I erupted, Quidde was accused of treason after he traveled to The Hague to dialogue with French and British pacifists. The charge was dropped, but he was hounded by German authorities for the war’s duration. In 1924 the Republic imprisoned him for blowing the whistle on its secret buildup of the German Army. And when the Nazis came to power in 1933, Quidde was forced to flee the country. He settled in Switzerland, where he lived for the remainder of his days.
At the end of World War I, Quidde was one of the most vocal opponents of the harsh reparations levied against Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. Many of the treaty’s critics disliked it because they believed it besmirched the honor and autonomy of the German state. Quidde’s opposition was based on something else entirely: he feared that the economic penury into which the reparations would throw Germany would create a climate of anger that would inevitably spawn another war. “A humiliated and torn German nation condemned to economic misery,” he warned, “would be a constant danger to world peace, just as a protected German nation whose inalienable rights and subsistence are safeguarded would be a strong pillar of such world peace.” War is a bad enough destroyer of peace. But post-war acts of vengeance by the victors upon the losers only perpetuate the cycle of violence.
Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1927, Quidde argued in his acceptance speech that world peace could only be based on the security provided by international law and order, not by military might. His hope was that new technology would make the killing power of weapons so terrible that nations would recoil in horror from their use. That hope has yet to be realized.
5 March
Hussein Issa
September 1947—5 March 2000
Peace as Mother’s Milk
Palestinian peacemaker Hussein Issa once said that “peace and democracy education should be given to infants with their mother’s milk.” In light of the events that overtook him and his family when he was still an infant, it was a remarkable observation.
Issa was born just two months before the UN voted to partition British Mandate territory into two states, one Jewish and the other Arabic. The following year, when Israel declared itself sovereign, Issa’s family was relocated from their ancestral farm in Ramle to a refugee settlement just outside of Bethlehem. His father died soon afterwards—of a “broken heart,” according to Issa’s son Ibrahaim—and Issa grew up in abject poverty. His harsh childhood and youth inspired him to find ways to rescue future Palestinian children from the same fate. Graduating from Bethlehem University in 1980 with a degree in education, Issa shortly afterwards opened a day care center that blossomed in a few years into a primary and secondary school. It was called “Hope Flowers.”
From the very beginning, Issa’s vision for Hope Flowers was to educate children in conflict resolution and reconciliation. Recognizing that enmity between Israeli and Palestinian adults in most cases was too entrenched to allow for fruitful dialogue, he pinned his hope on their children. Separatists on either side, he believed, were misguided. Because “Israeli and Palestinian destinies are inevitably tied,” he was convinced that there was “no choice but to work together to try and forge a culture of peace.” To that end, Issa regularly brought Israeli and Palestinian kindergarten children together so that they could see beyond the stereotypes and begin to build relationships.
After coming of age in a cramped and noisy refugee camp, Issa knew how starved Palestinian settlement kids can be for glimpses of nature. So he purchased land for a communal farm where Hope Flowers students could work, making contact with the soil as well as producing fruits and vegetables to eat and sell. He also arranged regular day trips out of the refugee camp that took students into the countryside. He believed that the excursions were essential for the development of inner tranquility, which in turn was the foundation for nonviolent conflict resolution.
Issa died of a heart attack when he was only fifty-two. But Hope Flowers, now supervised by his son, continues its work of teaching rising generations of Israeli and Palestinian children the way of peace. It is the mother’s milk that will nourish them throughout their lives, and hopefully help build a less troubled relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.
6 March
Sulak Sivaraksa
27 March 1933—
Sowing Peace
At the deepest level,” says