July/August 2005

Featured Story

The Disarmament Conference

By Hajb the Mad Poet

The Yoruba people in West Africa tell a story of Ogun, an Orisha associated with iron in all of its manifestations: empire building, warfare, agriculture, technology, fatherhood, and hunting, as well as numerous aspects of murder and mayhem. Because Ogun was so powerful in battle, the people persistently begged and nagged him to become their leader. Despite his strong preference for a reclusive life, he eventually gave in to the nagging and led the people through many glorious victories. One day, however, he got so drunk that he couldn’t differentiate friend from foe. He slaughtered his own people.

Unlike Obatala, an Orisha of healing who gave up drinking upon sobering up to the gravity of earlier drunken errors, Ogun (Yoruba traditions tell us) although saddened by his errors, continues to drink.

My topic is disarmament. But what does that mean in a time and place when biomedical research is used to develop weapons-grade diseases? Where does the disarmament process begin when military funding helps to develop gadgetry for consumer use, because economies of scale will make the same technologies cheaper and more reliable for the next generation of weapons systems? Who will comprehend arguments for disarmament when the creators and disseminators of weapons of mass destruction grow so fearful of weapons of mass destruction that they curtail their own liberties and launch endless wars on numerous fronts? What logic can be appealed to when they do everything but stop creating and disseminating weapons of mass destruction?

Of course, if we could get Ogun to stop drinking, we wouldn’t have these kinds of problems. But then again, drinking may be Ogun’s way of dealing with all of the disgusting stuff we are constantly begging and nagging him to do. Ogun knows full well that we are quite happy to put up with massive discomfort elsewhere in exchange for massive comfort here. And so do we. It’s a very old and ugly fact that we try to conceal in tattered ideological garments, but to no avail.

Nowadays everybody is championing democracy, which came from ancient Greece—a loose collection of constantly warring, slave-holding, hedonistic city-states. It must have been a hell of a place. American democracy, however, was born with the “inalienable right” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The pursuit of happiness included waging genocidal holocausts on the native population, on the populations of neighboring lands, and in distant lands that were tapped for slave labor. The rights remained inalienable, however, because as a New Zealander pointed out to me years ago, the United States is the only country in the world that refers to foreigners as aliens.

As the reigning World Empire, the USA is currently fair game for heavy criticism. But the fact is that every empire throughout history, whether religious or secular, no matter where it was on the Earth, attained and maintained empire status by seeking out the services of Ogun. The evidence can be found in the gloriously told and retold stories and histories, both sacred and profane, of each and every great world empire, and also of many smaller states that never achieved any real greatness, but that just told great stories. The irony is that Ogun does not and never has aspired to power, preferring the solitary outdoor life, facing the elements and living heartily in the jungle with his hunting dogs.

But this empire is different. Or at least we want it to be different. So we decide to hold a disarmament conference at Ogun’s hut in the jungle, because that’s the only way we can be sure that he will show up. We open the conference by expressing gratefulness for his help in the past, and then we tell him that we want to discard our armaments. He looks at us incredulously, shakes his head and reaches for the nearest gourd of palm wine. He doesn’t drink any, however. He stops instead to watch us whine and throw temper tantrums all over his hut, in the same way that we did when we wanted him to fight for us. But now we are begging and nagging incessantly for him to stay sober and help us.

“You will have to help yourselves with this one,” Ogun says. “The warrior’s strength lies in the clarity of heart, not in the power of weapons. Until you release the greed that makes you kill and subdue each other for land and resources, you will remain enslaved to your weapons.  Until you release the bigotry that justifies your genocide, your weapons will be your masters. The iron implements that you fight with are not the problem. The people that you fight against are not your enemies. Right now you are fighting over fossil fuels, which are dwindling to the point of worldwide crisis anyway. Think like real warriors for a change and turn the crisis to your advantage. Give up your automobiles. Drastically reduce your fossil fuel consumption and pave the way for a peaceful transition to renewable energy. Discipline yourselves to resolve the crisis that all of you face together. In that way you will develop much more powerful tools than the silly armaments that you have come here to annoy me about.”

Ogun calmly observes the mixture of horror and disgust on the faces of his visiting delegation.

“Then again, you are afraid that you will end up living like me,” he says. “You are right, of course. Until you are willing to sacrifice for peace, with the same heroism and in such large and well-disciplined numbers as you sacrifice for war, you will always have good reason to be afraid. Go now. You are not yet mature enough to survive in the jungle after dark. You are already free of your armaments and have always been so. Keep or discard them as you like. Whatever you are willing to sacrifice for is what you will have. This has always been so and always will be.”

Ogun raises the gourd of palm wine to his lips as if to drink. The terrified disarmament conference delegates scramble over each other in a mad rush to our waiting SUVs and Hummers. Soon the jungle roars with the sound of powerful engines as disarmament delegates drive like the devil, hell-bent to make it back into the safe confines of our various Empire cities before sundown.

Ogun does not drink any of the wine. He simply returns the gourd to its place.                                                      

Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey (a.k.a. Hajb the Mad Poet) is a writer, musician, and storyteller in the San Francisco Bay Area. His e-mail address is hajb@ peacejungle.net, and his Web address is www.peacejungle.net. References for creating the Ogun character in this story included Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New, edited by Sandra T. Barnes, Indiana University Press, 1989; A Treasury of African Folklore by Harold Courlander, Marlowe & Company, 1996, pp. 185-254; several works by Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, including Ake: the Years of Childhood, Aventura, 1983.