Independent consultant and blogger in Dar es Salaam
I could have sworn the Cold War ended in the last millennium, like the Jheri Curl. Television had been invented by then and I am willing to bet that I saw it happen over the course of all the boring family newshours that bedevilled my younger youth.
Something to do with a wall in Berlin falling down which excited people. Then a guy, Francis Fukuyama, wrote a book with the most intriguing title The End of History. Premise being that liberalism had won, begone autocracy, reason would prevail. Thus taunted, history ignored him and time marched on. But for a moment the idea of an all-involving World War seemed to recede.
Until the current Russia-Ukraine conflict flared up.
Of course the end of the Cold War didn’t signal that people had become any better than we have ever been. There have been wars around the world, terrible conflicts, some ongoing to this day. I once saw a time-lapse of armed conflict around the world in the past 100 or so years that looked like the world was catching a very bad and infectious rash all over itself over that period of time. Conflicts don’t really seem to go away and every week there seems to be another one kicking off.
By contrast, we have mostly settled into an unspoken consensus that the intended trajectory of history could remain somewhat positive, progressing towards a peaceful future of plenty. And why not? Technology is improving at an amazing rate, the quality of life for most of us has never been better overall, by so many measures of human welfare.
Time goes by
Sure, North Korea has been shaking an angry fist at the world but it seems to have lost its hold on us as time goes by, the threat unfulfillable perhaps.
Russia under Putin is a different calibre all together, though. Here I am dismayed to watch Russian men leaving families behind to flee conscription. The absurdity of it all continues to rise on a daily basis.
For those who fail to dodge the war, there is apparently documentation available on how to surrender oneself on the battlefield and have a chance at becoming a prisoner of war, protected by international treaties.
All of this happening during a strange moment of wondering how serious President Putin’s allusions to the use of nuclear weapons are, in a world where the rise of autocracy can’t quite be ignored.
How did we get here? I have never met a war that I found reasonable, beyond necessary self-defence.
It all comes across as primitive, this urge to kill and dominate, a vestige of a past we can choose not to live with in the present or enable in the future. Even civilisation can evolve as a concept, those stuck in the philosophy of Empire are fossils.
However, bloodily we got to where we are now, we don’t need to carry on like this.
The first weeks at the beginning of the war I spent far too much time trying to understand what was going on, and why. I absorbed everything I could find from every source I could find and went so far as to listen to impassioned arguments by Tanzanians who supported Russia and Putin in particular.
There were surprisingly few who were strongly pro-Ukraine. What I learned was that my country might have serious gaps in our public information on international affairs. And a penchant for glorifying strongmen that I find confusing and threatening.
Food shortages
As for the links between this conflict, the rise in the price of oil and gas, what this is doing to most economies, the possibility of food shortages and how this whole mess is part of why the cost of three daily meals is starting to rise outside the grasp of many East Africans.
Not really a part of the general conversation.
In the age of information, we live in a globalised world but on the periphery where the romance of one president standing against the bullying West is compelling. There is something to consider here.
We like our villains safely in the creative and film industries don’t we, where they can be neatly packaged and vanquished.
Meanwhile, a single man, running a family or a country can be imbued with powers beyond safety to affect the lives of millions and that’s just fine by us. We rarely look at the bigger picture not think of consequences, or of victims be it of abuse at the more intimate level or state brutality.
It often stands in shocking contrast to our rhetoric of wanting welfare and good in the world, for ourselves and for the coming generations. How do we not see it?
War escalates
I am completely unreassured that there is anyone who can guarantee what President Putin might or might not do as the war escalates. It is infuriating that children and youth are yet again suffering for the folly of their elders, and by extension many economies are floundering.
And yet life goes on, puzzlingly calm in the bubble of my writing niche that is miles — or maybe only minutes — beyond it all. Watching as high-waisted jeans make a reappearance which suggests that maybe the Jheri Curl too isn’t quite done with us.
Elsie Eyakuze is a consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report: E-mail: [email protected]
