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Calls to Help Motherland Go Unheeded
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I never open any new thread but I wanted to have your opinion on the subject matter below.
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Diarre
This article was posted in the Washington Post Today.
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Calls to Help Motherland Go Unheeded
By Courtland Milloy
Wednesday, August 6, 2003; Page B01
Vera Oye Yaa-Anna, a native of Liberia now living in Washington, was disappointed. Her efforts to generate support for her war-torn African homeland had not been as successful as she had hoped -- especially among African Americans.
"I've been calling around for three weeks asking for help, and the response has been zero," Yaa-Anna said during a recent telephone conversation. "The big shots, the same people who go around talking about 'the Motherland this' and 'the Motherland that,' don't return my calls. I say, now that your Mother needs you, where are you?"
Yaa-Anna, 53, left Liberia in 1990 to escape an ongoing civil war that has reportedly claimed hundreds of thousands of lives since it began 14 years ago. She moved to the District from Los Angeles in 1996. She volunteers as an advocate for Liberia and uses her culinary and storytelling skills to teach history and geography to at-risk children.
"A simple vegetable like okra, the children don't know it; they've never seen it," she said. "They don't know it comes from Africa, so I use it to take them on a little trip back to the roots."
Getting black children interested in Africa, however, has proved to be a lot easier than stirring up political and financial support among adults. When U.S. Marines sat idly off the coast of Liberia instead of going ashore as part of a peacekeeping operation, most African Americans sat idly by as well.
The Congressional Black Caucus did write a letter to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, urging him to "apply your influence on the U.S. Administration to convince them to come to the assistance of Liberia."
But not much came of the request.
"I've called many, many people asking for help, but if they don't know your name, they don't respond," Yaa-Anna said. "I try to leave my name, but the secretaries can't pronounce it. They say, 'What kind of a name is that?' "
It would be easy enough to attribute Yaa-Anna's frustrations to her lack of political savvy and her unfamiliarity with how policy decisions are made in Washington. Except that America's lack of interest in Africa -- even among African Americans -- is nothing new.
In 1991, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based think tank, interviewed 80 black leaders about their attitudes toward Africa. Although virtually all said they were "strongly interested" in the continent, they actually were interested in certain countries -- such as South Africa, Angola, Mozambique and Namibia. "Very few interviewees mentioned Ethiopia, Sudan, Liberia or other African nations that are now experiencing civil war, human rights problems and/or economic crises," the center's report noted back then.
Also, 87 percent of the black leaders agreed with the statement that "black Americans don't pay nearly as much attention to foreign affairs as they should." A preoccupation with "pressing domestic issues" left little time for foreign affairs, the leaders said. The fact that few blacks could trace their family history to a specific place in Africa didn't help.
As Yaa-Anna saw it, not much appears to have changed since the study was published. "African Americans have become so isolated," she said. "They are not a part of the global village. They are stuck."
She believes that Liberia would be an obvious place for African Americans to begin reconnecting with the world. It was founded in 1820 by freed African American slaves along with the American Colonization Society.
In the absence of an effective lobbying effort on Liberia's behalf, African Americans (all Americans, really) could at least support the Tajuo Angels Society. Tajuo means "children of war" in Liberia, and the organization raises money to provide food, clean water, blankets, medicine and other supplies.
The Tajuo Angels also hold auctions featuring the artwork that wounded Liberian children created in their art therapy classes. The proceeds go to the children.
For more information, call Yaa-Anna at 202-773-5446.
"I know we have powerful ancestors and we keep faith in God," she said. "But I am crying today because my people are being slaughtered while the world just watches."
E-mail:milloyc@washpost.com
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