Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

of No Return at the back of the fort, dropped onto the beach and loaded into boats to be rowed out to the anchored slave ships. I shut my eyes and breathed in the humid, stale air, imagining my wild despair if I or my daughter had been kidnapped and sold into slavery.

I later learned about efforts to eliminate a cultural practice that I consider another form of enslavement, female genital mutilation. In the village of Saam Njaay, an hour and a half from Dakar, a revolution in women’s lives and health was in the making.

Molly Melching, a former Peace Corps volunteer, had stayed in Senegal to co-found Tostan, an innovative nongovernmental organization that set up small-scale village-based business and education projects. As a result of Tostan’s work, women began speaking up about the pain and terrible health effects―including death―they had seen or experienced because of the ancient practice of cutting the genitalia of prepubescent girls. After Tostan organized a village-wide discussion, the village voted to end the practice. When male leaders from that village traveled to other villages to explain why the practice was bad for girls and women, other villages voted to prohibit it. The movement snowballed and its leaders petitioned President Abdou Diouf to outlaw the practice throughout the country.

When I met with President Diouf, I praised the grassroots movement and endorsed the villagers’ request that Senegal pass legislation banning the practice. I also sent a supportive letter to Tostan, which they used in their campaign. A law banning the practice was passed within the year, but enforcing it has been difficult. Deeply engrained cultural traditions die hard.

This example of popular action to improve people’s lives gave me hope as we traveled on to South Africa, the paramount symbol of change on the continent. Nelson Mandela was one of the leaders of that change. Another was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the vocal conscience of the anti-apartheid movement who inspired Mandela to establish the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I met with Bishop Tutu and members of the Commission in Cape Town in an ordinary conference room where they were taking testimony from victims and perpetrators of violence as a means of exposing the truth and encouraging reconciliation among the races after generations of injustice and brutality.

Mandela and Tutu understood the challenge and the importance of institutionalizing forgiveness.

Under the process they established, those who had committed crimes could step forward and confess in return for amnesty. And victims could finally have answers. As one victim put it: “I want to forgive, but I need to know who and what to forgive.”

Mandela set the example of forgiveness. When he gave Chelsea and me a tour of the prison on Robben Island where he was confined for eighteen years, Mandela explained that he had years to think about what he would do when and if he got out. He went through his own truth and reconciliation process, which led him to make the remarkable statement I had heard at his inauguration when he introduced three of his former jailers. Forgiveness is not an easy task anywhere, anytime. The loss of life or liberty is always painful, more so if it results from what Dr. Martin Luther King called “the stale bread of hatred.”

For most of us mere mortals, forgiveness is harder to summon than the desire to settle old scores. Mandela showed the world how to make the choice to forgive and move forward.

Like the rest of the continent, South Africa still has to contend with overwhelming poverty, crime and disease, but I was encouraged by the hope I saw in the faces of students―

from the uniform-clad children learning English in a classroom in Soweto (thanks, in part, to a USAID project) to the budding scientists and poets at the University of Cape Town. And when I gave a speech on a dusty patch of land at the edge of Cape Town, I met women who were actually building a better future for themselves and their children. With ceremonial markings painted on their faces and voices raised in song, they pushed wheelbarrows, poured concrete and mixed paint for their new dwellings. Homeless squatters who had lived in deplorable conditions, they had formed their own housing and credit association, modeled on the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India that I had visited. Pooling their savings, they bought shovels, paint and cement, learned how to lay foundations and put in a sewer line and started their own community. When Chelsea and I visited, they had built 18 homes; when I brought Bill there a year later, there were 104. I loved a line from one of their songs that translated roughly as “Strength, money and knowledge―we cannot do anything without them.” Good advice for women everywhere.

I left South Africa well aware of the challenges its leaders faced, yet optimistic about its future. But in Zimbabwe, its landlocked northern neighbor, I found a country whose great promise was being stunted by disastrous leadership. Robert Mugabe, the head of state since the country’s independence in 1980, had grown increasingly autocratic and hostile to his perceived enemies. President Mugabe said little during my courtesy visit with him in the presidential residence in the capital, Harare. He paid close attention to his young wife, Grace, while I made conversation with her, and he periodically broke into giggles for no apparent reason. I left believing that he was dangerously unstable and hoping he would relinquish power. My opinion has been borne out in recent years, as Mugabe has suppressed all political opposition and sanctioned a terror campaign to drive white farmers off their land and to intimidate blacks who challenge him. He has plunged his people into chaos and famine.

I later met with a group of women in politics, the professions and business at an art gallery in Harare. They described the tension that exists between the rights they hold on paper and the ancient customs and attitudes that still prevail. They recounted stories of women being beaten by their