Week of Oct. 28-31

This week was entitled, "Race and Global Violence." Notably, we spoke about child soldiers in African underpriveleged countries on Wednesday and Dr. Tchouaffe spoke on a paper of his own writing on Frday (Halloween), which I regrettably missed due to my inability to send in for an absentee voter ballot which caused me to have to leave early in order to be able to submit my vote for CHANGE. Reading for this week included the aforementioned Olivier Tchouaffe paper on child soldiers, "Necropolitics" by Achille Mbembe and a screening of the film Blood Diamond (2006), which is a wonderful film that looks at the issue of child soldiers through the lens of a diamond hunter in the war-torn country of Sierra Leone. 

In the film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the aforementioned diamond hunter, he accompanies a man who is looking to find his son in the rebel bands of fighters so that he can take him home with him and reunite his family. In the end, the finding of his son uncovers so much more about the reason for the conflict than he ever intended to do and he helps to bring down the blood diamond trade, thus helping to cut funding to groups opposing peaceful governing forces in the countires where the diamond trade is conducted. The child soldiers are only utilized because they are easy to hypnotize into beleiving something and will rally behind a leader, who seems parent-like, when they are lost and cannot find their own. 

We watched a clip of a man speaking about his book on child soldiers and he himself, managed to find a way to get away from the rebel bands and how long it took to rehabilitate him back into nomal civilian life once he was freed. he spoke of the horrors of having to be fed many different types of drugs and the experience that this provided for himself and his fellow child soldiers. Some of the drugs he was given even contained dangerous mixtures of crack cocaine and gunpowder, which have probably damaged him for life. It is a strange situation which none of his, haveing grown up in this country, can even begin to comprehend the magnitude of.