We're on the News again!

This time for the African EU summit this weekend. Another round of motorcades with blaring police sirens down the street, of alterations to the route of the 708 bus which takes us down through the Park of the Nations, and of the busloads of world media shipped in to transmit the happenings around the globe.

It was a bit surreal to walk down to our local Vasco da Gama shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon and have to dodge around cameras on tripods and pass between two rival factions of protestors from Zimbabwe. On the one side, a noisy band of anti-Mugabe protestors singing and dancing, and holding up slogans denouncing torture, murder, oppression, and on the other side a handful of people (who, by the way, looked most un-Zimbabwean and unenthusiastic) holding aloft a banner that read “Hands off Zimbabwe – stop illegal sanctions!”

Besides the presence of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, the local press was also rather awestruck by the arrival of Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. The headline ran “Gaddafi sets up camp in Oeiras” (a prosperous suburb of Lisbon). There, the local population have been somewhat bemused by this North African leader who shunned the five star hotels, and requested the authorities provide him with an open space on the edge of the city to set up tents for himself and his entourage of more than 200 people and fully armed. Tapera our Zimbabwean colleague in the language school, only commented “these dictators of ours, you know, they need to watch their backs!”

(I kind of liked this photo - I scanned it from the magazine section of Saturday's newspaper - but it wasn't taken in Lisbon, its in the corridors of the European Commission in Brussels)

The Summit was heralded as a “Summit of Equals” with our Prime Minister Jose Socrates calling it a meeting of equals, not just in terms of human dignity but also of political responsibility. But it's hard to match this equality with the reality behind a protestor's discarded placard which I noticed as I returned home. It read “as you eat your caviar remember that we’re dying”.

Let the last word be from Oliver Mutukudzi, the great songman from Zimbabawe, and my favourite African singer.

"Life is how you make it. The quality of life is measured by the kinds of steps you take as you walk through it. If you happen to see a footprint in the road, it means someone has been there before you, and there's something to be learned from that person's life and that person's story. 'Tsimba Itsoka'. There is no footprint without the foot (Shona Proverb)."

What kind of footprint am I making, and what kind of footprint am I leaving for someone else to follow?