Selamat everyone,
It is a great pleasure to read several thought-provoking posts on the
recent hot issue: democracy. It is also disheartening to see people engage
in petty name calling rather than debate the issue based on sound
arguments, pro or con. (BTW, it is very comforting to be a "silent
dehaier".)
When people talk about democracy and why we need to have a democratic
culture, and governments that accept, respect, and protect the
constitution, I would like to see it as a call not for the next year or so,
but for the coming generations. Anyway, let me state my opinion--trust me,
I am neither an American nor a philosopher, thus missing two-out-of-three
definitely makes me not an Americo-Eritrean Philosopher :-)
As far as the literacy of our people vis-a-vis democracy is concerned: one
of the central themes of democracy is tolerance to views and opinions other
than your own. When talking about the people of Eritrea, we are talking
about people who respect not only each other but also, and with full heart,
their beliefs. [Tewelde and (part 1 of) wedi-Hamde (I don't remember seeing
part 2) had beautiful stories on this last year.] We have the culture of
respecting even the religious beliefs of others, a Muslim respecting the
Christian and vice versa--that's why we still have churches next to
mosques, that's why you see in some villages the Muslims contributing to
building a church and Christians helping Muslims build a mosque. If we
think that we could teach this people democracy, I believe our efforts are
misplaced. We should bang our heads together in perfecting the
village-style democracy into a national agenda, for our own sake. We could
teach them a lot of different things, but it just seems to me that when the
subject is tolerance to views and opinions of others, we are, and we should
be, the students. Let's just figure out what made them live with each other
and what is increasingly making us (their off springs) live side-by-side.
So, please let's stop this arrogance of 'you can't have democracy with
illiterate people.' Finally, since we are accustomed to asking the
definition of every word, let's stop for a moment and ask our selves:
illiterate in what?
Mobae
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