Kizua Mwangola: Part 7: Kick'em while they're down
Saturday, January 09, 2010
So yet again our hopes were dashed. These past couple of months since we arrived here, up to last Friday, have been nothing short of amazing. The whole country was involved in a giant wave of positiveness, as if nothing could stop us now; as if the long war and the troubles were something that could and had been overcome; as if, like England, Germany or Vietnam, we too had the right recover from the war and build something, to move on. It was great to be part of this wave. But, just like in the past, it felt really bad to see it crash, hard against the rocks. Angola just seems to be one of those luckless countries.
Truth to be told, the bullets didn't steal any of the roads, bridges, hospitals, school's or even stadiums: those are still standing. The losses feel far greater though. The bullets stole Togolese and Angolan lives, and they stole the Angolan belief in a hard-earned decent future, a future paid in blood and with interest. They made everyone realise that, no matter how hard things were to earn, they can be harder still, forever out of one's reach. Just like the bombings in London or in Madrid, a very small number of people managed to inflict extremely severe damage to millions. Unfortunately, unlike Madrid and London, no-one will remember this incident as a terrorist attack; instead, the insanity was to ever conceive the idea of having "a high-profile tournament held on a country were civil war is rife", as a commentator put it on the BBC's forums.
As I walk through the long, wide avenues of Benguela, admiring a few of our new sidewalks and the manicured gardens behind fences, as I see a bunch of young boys joyfully going to basketball practice, I cannot help but think that the world's view of Angola will never change. And I cannot help but to be cynical. I wonder how many of those who are now incensed about "countries rife with civil war" even watched the last CAN or the CAN before that. If deaths occurred then, media coverage would have been next to non-existent, nothing but numbers flashing at the bottom of the screen. Now that their teams' backbones are in Africa, suddenly its at the top of the global news agenda.
Yesterday, the mother of a good friend of mine said: "You're wearing that t-shirt? They've started killing people already". I looked at my CAN top with the palanquinha and sighed. She spoke in a nonchalant, matter-of-factly sort of way — the weary voice of someone who's been through it before. Too many times before. "Too good to be true, hey?", my nod said without needing words.
Lord have mercy. Lets pray we can still make something out of it.
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