Georgetown’s Slave History

Georgetown’s Slave History

New York Times columnist Rachel Swarms wrote a fascinating piece about Georgetown’s slave history. She tells  the story of the sale of 272 slaves in 1838 to keep the institution solvent.

Then she describes efforts underway today to find the descendents of those slaves.

Georgetown was founded and run by Jesuit priests. The Jesuits owned and ran plantations in nearby Maryland that were supposed to give financial stability to Georgetown College. But they had not been very successful and the college was deeply in debt.

“At the time, the Catholic Church did not view slaveholding as immoral, said the Rev. Thomas R. Murphy, a historian at Seattle University who has written a book about the Jesuits and slavery,” Swarms reports.

The importance of the issue grew with student activism over race in the fall of last year. There is a “university working group that is studying ways for the institution” to deal with Georgetown’s slave history.

“And they are confronting a particularly wrenching question: What, if anything, is owed to the descendants of slaves who were sold to help ensure the college’s survival?” Swarms says.

Like the question of reparations generally, there are no easy answers. But some are proposing, at a minimum, scholarships for descendents of those slaves to attend Georgetown. That seems like a wonderfully appropriate idea to address Georgetown’s slave history.

Chibok Girls Video

Thursday marked two years since the girls were kidnapped from their school in Chibok, northern Nigeria, by the Boko Haram. A vigil was held in New York on Thursday evening.

Several media, including BBC, reported that a new video showing fifteen of the girls was sent by Boko Haram to the Nigerian government a few months ago.

UN Regions

No one responded with the regions of the United Nations. So I had to look the information up myself, because I didn’t know either!

“As of May 2014, the 193 UN member states are divided into five regional groups:^[1]

• the African Group, with 54 member states
• the Asia-Pacific Group, with 53 member states
• the Eastern European Group, with 23 member states
• the Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC), with 33 member states
• the Western European and Others Group (WEOG), with 28 member states, plus 1 member state as observer.”

Thanks to Wikipedia for the information and the map!

I think it’s slightly humbling that the U.S. is included in Western European and Others. There’s not even a North American region for us and Canada as one might expect!

Instead we’re part of a region that includes Europe, Canada and Australia! I’m glad. How do you feel about it?

Who’s the observer in our region? Do you know? Your name in lights, or at least bold, for the first right answer!

Candidates for Secretary General Answer Questions

There are now nine candidates for the job of secretary-general of the UN. This week four of them answered questions from the members of the general assembly as well as questions sent in by email.

You can watch three of them briefly in this Times video.

The question and answer session was not at the UN, but rather in downtown Manhattan.

“The four candidates who came to Civic Hall, out of the nine who have so far declared, face longer odds against success and therefore had less to lose,” the Guardian says.

Julian Borger, the Guardian’s world affairs editor, continues, “All of them come from eastern Europe, from where UN tradition dictates the new secretary-general should be drawn . . .”

According to the UN Foundation’s newsletter, “The candidates were questioned on their plans to create a more efficient and fair organization, gender parity and the need for a strong secretary-general.”

The Guardian says there will be another debate in June in London, so another chance for all the candidates to show up. Such a major change for the UN!

Agadez, Smugglers, and Desert

Thomas Friedman’s article from Agadez three days ago made me smile, even though he is writing about desperate men who seek a better life but are unlikely to find it.

I smiled because I remembered that fifty-three years ago I was in Niger.

I was with two men. One was my Peace Corps colleague Roger. The other, John, had been “deselected” from our Peace Corps training group but had gone to Nigeria on his own to teach.

It was the summer before our second year in Nigeria.

We wanted to drive to Agadez, near the center of Niger, but we were in a VW bug. It was the rainy season.

We had stopped for a couple of nights in Zinder, in southern Niger. We talked to a lot of people about driving further north.

Everyone we spoke to said, “Vous ne pouvez pas conduire à Agadez en août dans un VW. You cannot drive to Agadez in August in a VW.”

The men Friedman describes are not on vacation. They are men from all over West Africa who are trying to leave their homes because there is no work, there are no opportunities, and in some places, there is devastation.

They or their families have raised the hundreds of dollars to pay the smugglers who will get them to Libya. Their hope is to reach Europe from Libya.

There has been drought, on and off, for nearly two decades in much of West Africa. Climate change is having a major impact.

People lack smaller brush, so cut trees for firewood. That, coupled with poor land use practice, means that when rain does come, it washes away the topsoil, gradually turning land into desert.

This process of desertification is destroying large areas of the region. The picture is from the website earthonlinemedia.com.

Agadez used to be a tourist destination. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site. But now it is a center for human traffic.

Friedman wrote about the smugglers who await their human cargo in Agadez. When night falls, men emerge from parts of the city and gather to form a convoy of 100-200 vehicles crossing the desert to Libya.

But, Friedman says, there is also a stream of people returning. These are men who had reached Libya. They found it inhospitable, with no greater opportunities than the homes they had left!

And there was no path to Europe for most of them. Hopes dashed, they struggle to get back to their homes.