guest column:Fr Oskar Wermter SJ THERE was a time when the people of different continents knew very little of one another. They could only think of their own relatives, people of their own clan or nation. People had no idea that they belonged to something much greater, our common “human family”, though more scattered all over the globe. Now we know that the first human beings probably originated in East Africa. The people of Europe were not the first, let alone the only ones who travelled by ship to other continents, America, Africa, Arabia, India, China, Japan and Australia. The Chinese, Indians and Arabs came to Africa long before European travellers. People from Nordic countries stepped on American soil before Christopher Columbus “discovered” the “New World”. Contacts between Europe and Africa go back a long way: We know Oduala Equiano (from Benin, today southern Nigeria, a former slave who reached Britain) very well because he wrote his own biography. He eventually bought his freedom. The earth became one globe, and people and nations could see that they formed one humanity. Tragically, they did not act on this awareness. Europeans and other conquering nations got to know these “new worlds”, only to subject them to their rule, and plunder their wealth in humans (slave trade), minerals (gold, silver, copper, coal, etc), land (farms), water (fish), forests (timber). It was indeed tragic that the first encounters between different nations on this earth were often violent for the sake of gain, exploitation and power. The climax of this most unfortunate development was colonisation and the two world wars in the 20th century. The biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11: 1-9) demonstrates to us the hopeless confusion of languages and the inability of nations to live with each other in peace. This tower was a symbol of pride and arrogance. It was an attempt to have totalitarian and absolute power. “There the Lord confused the speech of all the world. It was from that place that [God] scattered them all over the world.”(Gen. 11: 9). The world was one and humanity was one and the same everywhere, and yet they lacked unity. The basic concepts of human dignity, human rights (freedom, equality and fraternity) as propounded by philosophers and theologians were accepted universally only very slowly. War and violence were not questioned. They were regarded as types of behaviour natural to human beings. Military technology (drones, nuclear armament, fighter planes) has become extremely sophisticated. Times of peace, understood as absence of war, are the result of mutual deterrence with ever greater arsenals of weapons on all sides, and the fear of mutual self-destruction and annihilation. But wars and armed violence are now so excessive that more and more people on this war-torn earth ask how humanity can rid itself of this immense evil. Either we put an end to warfare or else humanity will commit collective suicide. For the first time peoples and nations of the world made an attempt after World War 1 (1914-18) to create a
