airplane conversations

On the flight to Entebbe, Kampala, I sat next to  a young man from Eritrea named Aday.  He was lightly built and athletic looking, with dark skin, a narrow face and a noble aquiline nose, I would have guessed he was from neighboring Somalia—his appearance was very similar to two Somali twins I taught years ago.  He was telling me that he had some passport trouble in Cairo, and had had to live at the airport terminal for three days. He spoke perfect English with a slight English accent, but no Arabic, and was upset with the Egyptians who would only speak Arabic to him, and would not help. 

   He was headed to Kampala, which has a large Eritrean community, to help care for a sick uncle.  On the plane, a woman in a white muslin dress that wrapped up over her head heard him speaking his native language, and asked if he could complete her immigration form for her.  Soon he had several to work on.  There were many Eritreans on the plane.  As he looked at her passport he said to me, “She was born in 1935—the things she must have seen!”.

  Aday was just coming of 10 years of military service in Eritrea—mandatory service.   He had been an architecture student, but had been drafted (which he said was ironic—get it?) midway through his studies.   Now that he was free, he hoped to “see the world”, and resume his education to become an electrical engineer.

   I say “free”, but that’s probably not the right word.  Eritrea’s governments is one of the most oppressive in the world.  Its press is regarded as less free that North Korea’s.  And it does things like invent a 10 year mandatory military service for young men and women.  Furthermore, Eritrea has been at war with Ethiopia for 50 years, on and off.  I had some sense of this, and of Eritrea being an highly oppressive and somewhat aggressive country, and it occurred to me that this articulate 28 yr old Eritrean must have been in some active combat.  The things he must have seen!

   In my mind, two questions often occur to me when I think about the impact of war in Africa.  First, how can people who have seen and perhaps done violent and horrible things seem so gentle and, well, normal?  And, why is it that, after seeing and perhaps doing violent and horrible things in war, do Americans seem to suffer PTSD more than Africans?  Emmanuel Jal, for example, was one of the lost boys of Sudan.  He was a child soldier.  His youth was full of abuse, starvation and unthinkable cruelty and deprivation.   Yet he seems to have recovered--though he is still haunted by his experiences.  At the same time, many US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan come home damaged, perhaps permanently incapable of re-integrating into society.

   Naturally, it also occurs to me that these questions make assumptions that are totally absurd.  A hallmark of people that struggle with integration into society is that you don’t see much of them.  If there are Africans with profound PTSD, these are not the Africans who write books, fly around on airplanes and go on speaking tours.   In the US, too, PTSD gets a great deal of press because it is a social problem that represents a cost of war.  In a country with a totally unfree press, would such people ever be discussed?

   And yet, Aday and I agreed that there was something to it.  He told me a horrible story about a friend who used to laugh about an incident involving an Ethiopian who seemed to refuse to die.  This guy walked away from the incident, and is perfectly normal.  Aday’s hypothesis is that if you live in hard circumstances, surrounded by violence and political oppression, constantly reminded of the reality and proximity of likely injury and death, war is not that different from your normal reality.  The way you cope with war is the same as how you cope with life.  American soldiers, he suggested, come from a safer, more plentiful world than Africans.  War is a shock to the system.  For Africans, the shock is less.  If this is true—and I am not saying that it is—it’s a hypothesis that needs research and study—it explains a lot, and makes me even sadder, really, if it is true.

  I hasten to reiterate that I don’t think that all US service men and women are damaged by their experiences, and that I don’t think that no Africans are.  My question may well derive from an illusion, and thus itself be illusory.   There’s nothing wrong with asking uninformed questions, in fact, it’s necessary in order to gain information and find out what assumptions are lurking in the background.