Thomas Clarkson wrote his essay and sent it in to the prize committee. When he heard some time later that he had won and was called to the formal ceremony at which his winning entry would be presented, he wasn’t at all sure whether or not he ought to go. Perhaps he should, and in his acceptance speech refer to the shadow that lay over the British nation like an evocation of unjust human suffering?
He did in fact attend and received his prize with due ceremony, but he said nothing about his real thoughts.
Thomas Clarkson’s first incumbency as a clergyman was in London. Early one spring morning he mounted his horse and set off for the capital. It was a very pleasant day, but the closer he came to London the more he worried about all the implications. Around midday he stopped and dismounted from his horse. He was in the vicinity of Wadesmill in Hertfordshire, where there is nowadays a motorway that became the first one in England to apply toll charges. He sat in the shade of the tree that I searched for in vain some two hundred years later. His horse grazed nearby. It was a peaceful spring day, but a storm was raging inside Thomas Clarkson. He knew that he had to make up his mind.
Clarkson left no written or oral account of how long he sat there in the shade of the tree before making his life-changing decision. The distance between Cambridge and London is about sixty-two miles, so he had time to sit there for quite a few hours.
When he finally stood up, re-saddled his horse and continued his journey he had made up his mind. In fact, he had done so a long time previously, but it was only now that he spelt it out for himself and for the God he would always remain faithful to.
He was not going to become a clergyman. He was going to spend his life devoting his strength to the abolition of slavery and the setting free of all slaves. The literary competition he had entered by chance had turned his life upside down.
Thomas Clarkson lived long enough to see the passing of the Abolition Act, which made slavery and the owning of slaves illegal throughout the British Empire.
His life was never straightforward, often dangerous. The powerful enemies he had made when he first visited the centre of the slave trade in Liverpool continued to harass him. He survived several assaults and attempts to murder him, but he lived for another sixty-one years after making his fateful decision, and eventually died a natural death. He knew that his life had been worth all the pressure he had placed himself under.
Today Thomas Clarkson is more or less forgotten. Apart from the plaque on the tree that I never managed to find, there are no significant memorials to him – just a few busts, the odd painting and of course the memories in his book about the people who eventually brought about the abolition of the slave trade.
Thomas Clarkson is one of those shadowy heroes – men, women and surprisingly often children and young people – who belong to the highest ranks of humanity. They have been active in a vast range of subject areas: they have taken enormous risks and overcome the fear they must all have felt many times over.
But what I have written isn’t quite true. The slave trade does still exist in the modern world. Even if Thomas Clarkson and others cut through the roots of the slave trade that existed within the laws of many countries, the brutal attraction of earning money by selling people never went away. Nowadays slave trading is widespread throughout the world. It is no longer sugar cane that is harvested in the Caribbean islands or cotton in the scorching hot fields of the southern USA. Now the slave trade often involves prostitution, child labour in horrendous conditions and people being forced to pick tomatoes, berries and nuts in slave-like circumstances. Those involved have no rights, are often swindled out of their wages and forced to live alone, separated from their families.
Prostitution in the world may currently be worse than it has ever been before in the history of mankind. Those who are exploited are often very young. They are forced into submission by violence.
As in the past, individuals protest. Opposing violence and oppression is not only something we have a right to do, but something we actually can do. We must never accept it.
Even today we need people who dismount from their horses and sit in the shade of a tree while they make crucial decisions.
They are always there somewhere. Despite everything.
37
While the child plays
I am not religious, and never have been. as a child I tried to say my prayers in the evenings, but it didn’t feel right.
Now that I have cancer I often think about people who derive consolation from their faith. I respect them but I don’t envy them.
But I am certain about one thing when it comes to the people who might be living on our planet many thousands of years after long and difficult ice ages. It is that they will possess a fundamental joy of life, a feeling of happiness at being alive.
People cannot survive without that. It would be like amputating a person’s soul.
We may have developed no end of survival strategies, but the basic source of energy behind our successes is our zest for life. If that is coupled with constant curiosity and thirst for knowledge, we have an image of the completely unique ability of mankind.
Animals do not commit suicide. Human beings do so when they have lost their zest for life, often due to severe physical or psychological pain. Who was the first person to take his own life is a meaningless question, because it is not possible to answer it. But we have copious documentary evidence for the fact that suicide has haunted humans like a shadow throughout the ups and downs of civilisation. Even if Cleopatra didn’t actually use a snake to bite her, we can be sure that she committed suicide. Throughout history vast numbers of people have hanged themselves, drowned themselves, shot themselves or poisoned themselves. In many cases we can understand why somebody finds life impossible to endure; in other situations we are worried and astonished, filled with fear to discover how little we knew about the person who has just died.
Albert Camus wrote some famous lines: ‘There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy.’
The answer to that question is: the zest for life.
Just what comprises zest for life is something we know much more about now than we did only thirty or forty years ago. It is ultimately to do with chemical processes. Whether we like it or not, our spiritual experiences are a matter of various measurable physiological happenings.
When I wrote before about the young man who has decided to become a neurologist, it is these processes that he will try to investigate and understand. The efforts to do so are strenuous and the results are difficult to analyse. But our understanding of the innermost processes that make us human beings is growing by the day.
There are those who react negatively when they hear that even the most passionate feelings of love are basically a matter of chemistry. We think that love and erotic passion must be something different. And indeed they are something different. These chemical processes that blossom forth thanks to the magic of love lead to actions – everything from the giving of gifts to the writing of poetry, endless sleeplessness, jealousy or all-consuming happiness. But to start with it is cells and chemical processes that decide how we feel and how we think, how we love and how we suffer from the humiliation of jealousy.
I find it difficult to understand how these chemical processes should be thought to involve a degradation of human passions. On the contrary, I am bound to say. Michelangelo would not have painted any less brilliantly if he had known what we know today about the wonderful, invisible processes that drive the most important events and decisions in our lives.
But zest for life? It seems to me this could be illustrated as follows: a young child is sitting alone, playing. Totally absorbed in its own games and its own thoughts. And the child is singing – a wordless, humming song.
The child is like an island in an ocean, with waves flowing gently towards the beach. There are no dark banks of cloud, no threats, n
o fear, no pain. Life is quite simply a pleasant experience when one is able to play and hum to oneself.
Time has stood still. It doesn’t exist. The walls of the room are soft and billowy. Looking out or looking into oneself is the same thing.
The child hums and plays. Life is perfect.
Perhaps the fact is that there are emotions so strong that they can’t be expressed in words, but have to be sung? The child’s humming expresses the same thing as a Portuguese fado singer, or a soprano singing the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute.
Without a zest for life, human beings cannot exist. Anyone who has been robbed of his dignity and is fighting to recover it is fighting just as hard to recover his purpose. The people who try to escape from attacking armies or poverty-stricken agricultural communities to the richer parts of Europe and are washed up dead on the beaches of Lampedusa and Sicily were also on a journey to recover their desire for life.
Many of the emigrants who enter Europe illegally are often dismissed scornfully as ‘fortune-hunters’ or ‘gold-diggers’. Which of course they are. We all are. Why did millions of Europeans emigrate to North and South America 150 years ago? For exactly the same reason.
The humming child is always sitting there on the beach or in the garden or on the pavement.
There is no humanity, no civilisation, without the humming child. In the spartan world of biology the only imperative is that we should keep reproducing. But a more penetrating definition of the meaning of life would say that every generation has an obligation to pass on unanswered questions to the next, which must attempt to find the answers we have failed to discover.
One day, of course, this long-dance we embarked upon deep down in the mists of time when we bade farewell to the chimpanzees and went our own way, will come to an end. One thing we do know about our history is that sooner or later all creatures and species die out, or are transformed into something quite different. There is no reason to believe that this will not happen to the species we belong to. The fact that we are the most successful creatures we know of is unlikely to prevent us from dying out one of these days.
Nobody knows when or how. We might well suspect that we have such inbuilt destructive forces that we shall exterminate ourselves. But we can’t know for sure. Even today a madman with access to large nuclear weapons arsenals can put an end to everything simply by pressing a button.
Against what I have written here one could set up something I would call ‘The History of Barricades.’ All revolts or revolutions are ultimately about people at the bottom of the heap in a society demanding their right to a zest for life. Just as often as they occur, these revolts are suppressed brutally by people who claim to have the right to decide the living conditions of others.
After the student revolt of 1968 in Paris, the French authorities asphalted over the streets around the Sorbonne. Nowadays it is impossible to break up the paving stones that lie underneath. But of course nothing can prevent revolutionaries from finding other ways of building up their barricades.
Meanwhile the little child continues to play, humming its wordless melody.
38
Elena
But not all children play.
Here is a story about two children who devoted all their time to surviving.
About fifteen years ago two brothers lived in the street just outside the theatre where I work in Maputo. One of them was about five years old. He wasn’t sure, but between us we were able to work out that his brother, whom he took care of, was three.
Yes, a five-year-old looked after a three-year-old.
For a while they slept in an oblong-shaped cardboard box that had been used to deliver a refrigerator in the days before new refrigerators were wrapped up in plastic. When the big cardboard boxes were no longer used, many street children lost their homes.
The two brothers slept huddled up closely together in the cardboard box. In the mornings the elder boy used to wash the younger one. But of course, they were unable to change their clothes. I have never met anybody, before or since, who was so utterly devoid of personal possessions. They lived in the spirit of St Francis of Assisi, even though they had no idea who he was.
During the day they wandered around the town, begging. Naturally enough many people were emotionally touched by the two brothers – but as Maputo was full of orphaned street children who lived like rats or stray dogs, they were not especially successful in their begging. As dusk fell they would creep back into their cardboard box.
They lived there in the street for several years. We allowed them to sleep inside the theatre when the weather was too awful. We also gave them clothes, which they immediately changed into something to eat by selling them to other street children for crusts of bread. Despite the fact that they were totally dependent on what others gave them, the elder brother had a strange but completely natural dignity. It was as if he knew that he was carrying out an impossible task brilliantly well – being the parent of his brother.
But I never saw them playing. Their life consisted of surviving, and not much else. There was a grim, or perhaps rather a dogged, seriousness about the elder child’s desire to keep his brother reasonably clean, and to make sure he got something to eat every day. There was no time or space for play.
They were usually silent. When the elder brother spoke to the younger one, he always did so in a soft voice, speaking close to his ear, as if he had important secrets or pieces of confidential information for him alone.
One day some people from a Roman Catholic mission came to collect the boys. A week or so later they were back in the street again – but by then their cardboard box had disappeared. The house had been taken over by other street children. They spent some time sleeping on a staircase before they managed to find another cardboard box – a smaller one this time as it had been the container of a freezer rather than a refrigerator.
One afternoon they appeared, dragging with them a scruffy-looking puppy. God only knows where they had found it. It had to squeeze into the cardboard box together with the two brothers. One day it had gone again, just as suddenly as it had appeared. Somebody had seen the boys selling it to another street child for half a chicken.
I tried to talk to the two boys, but the elder one kept watch like a hawk over his brother. He wouldn’t allow anybody he didn’t trust to come anywhere near – and he didn’t trust anybody. Street children seldom have any reason to trust adults.
Street children have existed ever since early civilisations began to break up the system of tribes. And street children are not only a problem in the poorest countries and cities in the world: even in the richest metropolises there are children who live out their lives on the streets.
During all the years I have spent in Maputo I have stubbornly tried to make friends with various street children. It could sometimes take several years before I could establish contact that wasn’t restricted to untruthful responses to my questions. Often these children died because their lives were so brutal. Some overdosed, others died of malaria or diarrhoea. A few were murdered.
But in the end I was able to converse with the two brothers. I gathered that they belonged to the large group of children who voluntarily run away from impossible family circumstances. The behaviour of male lions who take over a herd and kill off the offspring of previous dominant males is replicated in human life. If a man marries a woman who already has children, he sometimes throws them out into the streets. Or he makes their lives so intolerable that they run away of their own free will. And the mothers affected cannot protest: if they do they can be starved or even killed. Or prostitution becomes their only way out.
Never did I see anybody walking past them in the street who might have been a relative. The boys lived in a vacuum, without a past and without a future. Literally all they had was each other. An empty and barren universe began for them at the very end of their street.
But at the same time it was a deeply moving love story. When the younger boy had stomach ache
, his elder brother would tenderly stroke his dirty hair. Expressions of love and care seem to be inherited, not learnt.
I was never sure about their names. The elder boy said he was called Joao, but then he suddenly changed it to Armando, as if that was the most natural thing in the world. The younger brother might have been called George, or perhaps Vitor. I never knew for certain. And they didn’t have a surname at all. Naturally, neither of them had any identity papers.
One day the two brothers vanished. They must have been nine and seven when they disappeared. I never saw them again, although I often looked for them when I was out walking or driving through the city. Nobody I asked knew where they had gone to. They were simply no longer there.
However, something tells me they are alive. And that they are now grown up. Despite the fact that street children often have short lives, I believe that these brothers have survived. Because they had one another.
Other street children also survive sometimes. Some years ago I met a girl called Elena. As a newborn baby she had been found in a gutter by some Roman Catholic nuns. If she had been there for one more hour, she would have died. Her mother had left her there shortly before dawn, and then disappeared: she was never tracked down. Perhaps the search for her wasn’t all that persistent because everybody knew it would be impossible to find her.
Elena was placed in a children’s home where she grew up, went to school, and had a decent life. When I met her she was eighteen and was just about to start at university. I asked her what she would be studying.
‘I want to become a lawyer,’ she said. ‘And I’m going to specialise in children’s rights. I know quite a lot about that, of course. I was born in a gutter, after all.’
I always think about Elena whenever the two brothers crop up in my thoughts.