Read Online Not on Our Watch by Don Cheadle, John Prendergast - Free Book Online
Authors: Don Cheadle, John Prendergast
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hear about things like floods in Bangladesh or famines in Africa, I wondered why someone like my superheroes couldn’t save the victims.
But of course there are no superheroes in that sense and we don’t really ‘save victims’. It is about working with others in defence of justice and human rights. And that means some element of sacrifice, even if it is just a few minutes on a computer to write a letter. After the Al-Jazeera interview, the correspondent asked me, ‘Aren’t you worried for your safety? I keep hearing about you running into trouble. Why do you do it?’ My response: ‘Anger. I can’t accept that we just stand idly by while entire peoples are being extinguished because of the actions and advantage of a few people. Every time I think I will walk away from this and become a sportswriter, focusing on my beloved Kansas City Chiefs, I see something like this and it just flames me up again. I’m doomed to do this for as long as I live.’
But last I checked, the contract for this book doesn’t say ‘autobiography’, so I will spare you the details of my childhood. Save that one for some future movie of the week. The far distant future. Or maybe my baby brother Luke can write it; he remembers everything. I mean everything. For the purposes of this story, however, the journey really begins later, in my early 20s, when I was a somewhat clichéd rebel without a cause and a crusader in search of a mission.
After bouncing around the United States and going to four different universities, I ended up back in my adopted hometown of Philadelphia, working for a congressman and going to Temple University at night for my fifth and final undergraduate stop. (Papa was a rolling stone, a frozen food salesman to be exact, and this apple didn’t land too far from Jack’s tree.) I was doing all kinds of stuff focused on urban problems in the United States: my job with the congressman allowed me to get involved in many things. I also was a Big Brother to kids in the Big Brother/Little Brother programme, as well as to kids I met in the homeless shelters where I was volunteering. (That’s the next book.)
I loved my work and loved what I was studying at school on urban policy, but in 1983 a story broke that changed my life forever. The famine in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea emerged into the public consciousness very slowly, as these kinds of issues do, if they ever do at all.
The ‘Ethiopian Famine’ of 1983–1985 resulted from the tactics of war pursued by the Ethiopian regime at the time against Eritreans fighting for independence and Ethiopians fighting for a more inclusive government; these tactics were exacerbated by drought. Many of the war tactics used by that regime have been replicated by the Sudanese government in Darfur. For more information and a cheap plug, see John Prendergast and Mark Duffield, Without Troops and Tanks, Red Sea Press (Lawrenceville, 1994).
I kept seeing these pictures of mass starvation (mostly on those post-midnight fund-raising paid programmes that organisations buy to highlight the horrors they are trying to ameliorate with their food and medicine) and reading into them messages of a world that just didn’t care enough to do whatever was necessary to end the suffering of those people. There were images of hundreds of thousands of homeless Ethiopians and Eritreans in makeshift camps—people living and dying in the worst circumstances humanly possible. I was overwhelmed by the pictures; all of my empathetic and protective tendencies went into overdrive. I hadn’t studied any of these issues, but I knew at the bottom of it all there must lie a massive core of injustice, overlaid by a blanket of apathy.
In 1984, I decided to go to Africa to investigate for myself. After reading all those comic books and believing in the ultimate triumph of good over evil, it was time for Captain America’s number one fan—naive but determined—to spring into action. I believed very innocently
But of course there are no superheroes in that sense and we don’t really ‘save victims’. It is about working with others in defence of justice and human rights. And that means some element of sacrifice, even if it is just a few minutes on a computer to write a letter. After the Al-Jazeera interview, the correspondent asked me, ‘Aren’t you worried for your safety? I keep hearing about you running into trouble. Why do you do it?’ My response: ‘Anger. I can’t accept that we just stand idly by while entire peoples are being extinguished because of the actions and advantage of a few people. Every time I think I will walk away from this and become a sportswriter, focusing on my beloved Kansas City Chiefs, I see something like this and it just flames me up again. I’m doomed to do this for as long as I live.’
But last I checked, the contract for this book doesn’t say ‘autobiography’, so I will spare you the details of my childhood. Save that one for some future movie of the week. The far distant future. Or maybe my baby brother Luke can write it; he remembers everything. I mean everything. For the purposes of this story, however, the journey really begins later, in my early 20s, when I was a somewhat clichéd rebel without a cause and a crusader in search of a mission.
After bouncing around the United States and going to four different universities, I ended up back in my adopted hometown of Philadelphia, working for a congressman and going to Temple University at night for my fifth and final undergraduate stop. (Papa was a rolling stone, a frozen food salesman to be exact, and this apple didn’t land too far from Jack’s tree.) I was doing all kinds of stuff focused on urban problems in the United States: my job with the congressman allowed me to get involved in many things. I also was a Big Brother to kids in the Big Brother/Little Brother programme, as well as to kids I met in the homeless shelters where I was volunteering. (That’s the next book.)
I loved my work and loved what I was studying at school on urban policy, but in 1983 a story broke that changed my life forever. The famine in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea emerged into the public consciousness very slowly, as these kinds of issues do, if they ever do at all.
The ‘Ethiopian Famine’ of 1983–1985 resulted from the tactics of war pursued by the Ethiopian regime at the time against Eritreans fighting for independence and Ethiopians fighting for a more inclusive government; these tactics were exacerbated by drought. Many of the war tactics used by that regime have been replicated by the Sudanese government in Darfur. For more information and a cheap plug, see John Prendergast and Mark Duffield, Without Troops and Tanks, Red Sea Press (Lawrenceville, 1994).
I kept seeing these pictures of mass starvation (mostly on those post-midnight fund-raising paid programmes that organisations buy to highlight the horrors they are trying to ameliorate with their food and medicine) and reading into them messages of a world that just didn’t care enough to do whatever was necessary to end the suffering of those people. There were images of hundreds of thousands of homeless Ethiopians and Eritreans in makeshift camps—people living and dying in the worst circumstances humanly possible. I was overwhelmed by the pictures; all of my empathetic and protective tendencies went into overdrive. I hadn’t studied any of these issues, but I knew at the bottom of it all there must lie a massive core of injustice, overlaid by a blanket of apathy.
In 1984, I decided to go to Africa to investigate for myself. After reading all those comic books and believing in the ultimate triumph of good over evil, it was time for Captain America’s number one fan—naive but determined—to spring into action. I believed very innocently
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