Meet John Dau

A few nights ago, I went to see an installment of UWM's distinguished lecture series. The speaker was John Bul Dau, billed as an authority on the "lost boys of Sudan." (I think "lost boys" is a media/marketing title that the International Rescue Committee came up with; since most of them were sitting in refugee camps for a decade or so, they were displaced, but not exactly misplaced.) I went at an invitation of a political friend, and expected a political event. Sudan is a political topic these days. The local peace movement has made resolving the civil war afflicting Darfur a major campaign. I don't know much about it, except that I suspect things are not as
one-sided as portrayed. (I also think I was encouraged to go because a previous African speaker, a high government figure, had received almost no audience when he had come to speak, and this was a means of demonstrating respect that was missing before, which suggested a general lack of interest or respect for the continent and its people.)

Dau turned out to be a somewhat celebrated survivor, a former lost boy, who put his story in a book and was the subject of a documentary. Thousands died. John became famous, although not famous enough for me to have ever heard of him. Although I expect most DLS speakers to have a strong academic background from which to speak, I think life experience is an appropriate credential. Rigoberta Menchu has something to say worth listening to, so why not John Dau?

So I listened as John described his tale of trial and triumph surviving war, hunger and disease on a thousand-mile, 14-year journey from his escaping as a boy from an attack on his village, trekking afoot cross-country to sojourns in refugee camps in two neighboring countries. (Some of this is filled in from subsequent inquiry because of missing details in John's account.) It was a compelling story.

But there was absolutely no political context. He said nothing about the current conflict except for a passing mention, and maybe some indirect innuendo. I'm not sure he ever said who was shooting at him in Ethiopia: government soldiers or rebels. The conflict that displaced him was not examined. He appeared uninterested in its being solved.

Let me recant one part of that. He did insert a tiny bit of history, saying that Sudan has had frequent wars from the first century. He did not say what they have been about. Some in the audience clearly believed at the end of the night that Muslim forces were fighting early Christians a thousand years ago, impossible by at least six centuries. There was no distinction made between the international conflicts with Chad or Eritrea, with Pharaonic or Roman, or English, or whomever, or current movements in the East, West, or South in conflict with the central government.

At the end of hislong windup came the pitch: a Bill Cosby sermon about personal responsibility, and a request for money for his foundation. John said that priming the audience for this little bit of homespun ideology was the entire purpose of his narrative.

Now, I am reluctant to attack John. He went through hell. His story is a real one. It's hard to attack someone in that position. I tend not to doubt his honesty and motives for the most part. I think there's some fuzzing and sifting that he's doing to spin his message, but probably that's all. He could be a major fraud but nothing really conclusive to suggest so. It's too easy to see him as nine tenths honest. But the point is not the man himself. It is what he is saying, which is toxic. It may be that if he explained himself further, he could trim the most disagreeable points of his philosophy. Indeed, he explicitly contradicted some of the worst conclusions of this meme. But I want to respond to what he actually presented in all its ramifications, which I think was just horrible, horrible.

The ideology is one I've heard a thousand times before, and it's utterly tiresome to me: All that stands between you and success is the will to achieve it. Don't give up. You can have everything you want if you just believe and try. Some of that is fine. Focus on the future, sure. Practice forgiveness. Concentrate on what you can do for your own future. Help others who have helped you. All good. Perservere. Fine. The problem is not that one has no influence over the course of one's life or should not keep going if one is on the right track. Obviously, there's a basic dumb truth in this message. It's a message like "be proud of yourself" that some need. But...

It's dumb because it's unidirectional, un-nuanced, just plain dumb. Like "eat more": good for anorexics, bad for compulsive eaters. I forgot who said that patriotism was a kind of message that was good for small countries with esteem issues, but bad in places where an existing overdose of nationalism lay at the root of imperialism, aggressive war, or internecine destruction; the same is true here. It's a message that I think selectively targets the people who need it least.

Worst, because it's unnuanced, it logically entails all sorts of bad and evil conclusions. It contends, ultimately, the only thing that affects one's personal outcome is their own ambition. So what does that say about those that reach bad outcomes? What of the thousands of John's travelling companions who fell prey to hunger, thirst, corcodiles, gunfire, or disease? It implicitly blames the victims of misfortune, irrationally discounts the huge effect of luck, and lets the villainous and selfish off the hook. It also puts all its marbles on ambition and resolve rather than on morality, smarts, and unified struggle. Sure, step one is not to give up, but step two has to be something more than marching in the same damn circle. John's message is in the beginning and at the end a fascistic ideological cesspool that breeds abandonment of the needy, rationalization of extreme disparities, and the erosion of comity and ethics. It's a message that stills demands for change, protecting and flattering the privileged, and narcotizes and promotes pathological conduct among the disadvantaged.

John actually said that you can take any rich person, and you will find someone who struggled and achieved. They don't have inheritance in Africa? He actually said he had never gotten vaccinated against any disease, yet has never become sick, due to his own personal will not to fall ill. In other words, he's a walking potential carrier that could infect others, and if they die, it will be their own fault for lacking sufficient willpower to resist. (Nevertheless, he wants to build a clinic in the Sudan. Hopefully it will be a clinic that practices modern medicine and not faith healing.)

I hate this meme. Every get rick quick huckster and phony preacher uses it. It combines an immature animistic view of the power of beliefs, with the idea of a God who guarantees that every fate good or bad is always deserved. John dropped a lot of Christian references, as did members of his audience during the questioning. A church brought him to America and he now lives across the street from that church. The black woman next to me was muttering hallelujah at intervals throughout the ending parts of the talk, by which point its status as a sermon rather than an academic exposition had become clear. I was grateful to get out without a baptism or an Amway distributorship.

Although I have said that I give John the benefit of the doubt that he was being mostly honest, and that he has some decent beliefs and holds his belief in this key meme ignorant of its contradiction of everything good he believes, nevertheless, there were some aspects of the talk that gave me doubts. The main thing was that the message was so predigested and unchallenging. No analysis. No hard concepts. No demands for any ongoing involvement. This fit in with his repeated flattery of the audience that Americans are unbelievably generous, which does not seem to square with either the general facts of the world (other industrialized countries spend much larger portions of their GDPs on humanitarian aid) or with the facts of John's story (where he lived off the largesse of the UN, Sudanese rebels, and two poor host countries before ever seeing an American or any American aid). He created a foundation to help American children before creating one to help Sudan. He even flattered the host forum by instructing students to study hard and give back money to the school. He wore a perfectly crisp white shirt, no jacket, and perfect pressed plants, which was the ideally earnest and nonthreating ensemble. He included just a tiny drop of history and geography. He avoided controversial issues, save for a few flashes of popular conservatism: marriage is for one man and one woman (unlike among traditional Dinka); he asserted that moderate Muslims who did not vociferously denounce extremists at every opportunity ought to be considered just as extreme (though he never breathed a word against Christian extremists). He favored his people assimilating to America, but keeping unthreatening aspects of their original culture, like family cohesion. He dropped the names of Hollywood celebs who are now his friends, while affirming by denial that this was a boast.

By the end, I had started to wonder about parts of his story. What was he leaving out? He was very obscure about his family, leaving the impression they were dead until he suddenly mentioned reuniting with his mother at the end of the night. Why? Did he have reason to feel before this that he had abandoned them? What moral compromises did he make? He said he was put in charge of a thousand kids, then later there are 28,000: was he intentionally leaving the misimpression that his responsibilities had exponentially grown? A story he told about enjoying corporal punishment of his students at a refugee camp seemed a little more ominous in retrospect. Any why does he have so many foundations? Did he really make enough at McDonalds to build a four bedroom house, or did he pay himself at these charity groups?

Anyhow, all the last of this is too speculative. I'll let those thoughts dissipate before I sound too much like one of those right wing bloggers that see conspiracies everywhere. Main point: I came for an analysis of a humanitarian crisis, but got no analysis at all, no clarity, just an insistance that we were already generous enough and a pitch to be endlessly optimistic and push on in all matters without assessment. Bleh!