A brave new world - In the struggle for a new normal

Learning from our deadly COVID-19 circumstances, two questions availed themselves

one, Do we continue living in the mould of the old ways; or two, Do we see in this vicious pandemic an opportunity to re-construct life anew?

The answer to that universal dilemma was alluded to by an author named Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), whom I studied in a graduate course while pursuing my teaching credentials at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Strachey was featured in one of the course books titled “Bloomsbury: A House of Lions”, authored by Leon Edel.

The book celebrated some forward-looking peace activists in the Edwardian era, including the celebrated economist, John Maynard Keynes (famous for his role in the Treaty of Versailles, after the Second World War); the novelist, Virginia Woolf; the biographer, Lytton Strachey; and a few others.

For now, Strachey (nicknamed a “scholar-eccentric”) might have discerned that we were caught in a dilemma with both options equally “grievous”.

He noted in his book, “Eminent Victorians”, that “when a soldier finds himself fighting for a cause in which he had lost faith, it is a treachery to stop, and it is a treachery to go on.”

In a nutshell, this generation seemed caught in a Catch-22 situation: We might be damned if we craved a new world, uncertain as that could be; and damned if we persisted in this current one.

Contradictions

On one hand, the world as we knew it before the pandemic was already so blessed and we didn’t even know it! As adults, we’ve lived a life that the children growing up today may never know of. To see how things have changed, imagine this teary observation by a Ghanaian friend living with her husband in

Whittier, California, when we spoke over the phone.

Her daughter had come to visit the loving parents with a husband and a teenage child; and not only were they all wearing masks, each perched at safely arranged distances observing the protocol to stay metres away from one another.

All afternoon of that visit, none dared come close, to kiss, hug or touch each other for fear of being infected or contaminated by the killer virus. That is the reality of today’s circumstances.

But, on the other hand, others felt we were already damned in our previous circumstances and didn’t even know it: The reason was articulated by Brene Brown, an author and a lecturer at the University of Houston, Texas.

She forewarned as follows: “We will not go back to normal.

Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalise greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack.

We should not take long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all the humanity and nature.” A superior world was recommended from that point of view.

Brave new world

Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” was a fictional attempt to engineer a utopia: an experiment which turned out to be anything but perfect.

The lesson being that the advancement of science, if anything, needs to elevate humanity wholesomely and not destroy it.

In the preface to the novel, the author advised: “If you behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better the next time.” He then said, “The badness should be hunted out, acknowledged and, if possible, avoided in the future.”

But the suggestion for fixing whatever was broken, in this case, in Africa, and getting on with it offered no comfort to the many African youth escaping the continent in droves.

News clips of dead bodies of African men, women, and children floating bloated on the bare shores of the Italian and other European coasts were chilling reminders of the victim’s extreme desperation to escape poverty and hopelessness.

What could be more dreadful than the real danger of risking one’s life going to places where one is clearly despised and not wanted?

The footage of dead bodies being laid out on the dockside of the Italian port of Lampedusa in 2013 was described as a “continuous horror”, horrific, like a cemetery.

At least 130 African migrants died and many more were missing after a boat carrying them to Europe sank off the southern Italian coast.

Recently, during the outbreak of Covid-19, I received a video clip recorded by a Ghanaian living in a certain Italian town. It was unbelievable witnessing the hollowed emptiness of that town. And to think that once upon a recent memory Africans had flocked to this ghost town at the cost of their dear lives.

Green grass of home

In February 2018, I was asked to participate (at the Alisa Hotel, Accra) in a BBC debate, “Is the older generation failing Africa’s youth?”

The answer to that question was a simple one: Why on earth – as never before – do Africa’s youth continue to quit the continent in droves on perilous journeys across the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea?

Kwame Nkrumah spent a lifetime – from his mature years to his exile in Conakry – bemoaning “the false belief that providence created some to be the menials of others.”

With the advent of Covid-19, the need for Africa to get its own act together has never been greater and clearer.

The grass is greenest in one’s own yard. Amen!

Email: anishaffar@gmail.com
Website: www.anishaffar.com