"‘A Society That Can’t Speak is Like a Body That Doesn’t Feel Pain’: An Interview with Anjan Sundaram"

"President Kagame almost whimsically had declared that he felt the thatched roofs were primitive. And the local authorities, in their extreme zeal and desire to please Kagame, went out and ordered people to take off the thatch from their roofs. And because people were unable to speak … who were they going to speak to or complain to? There was no one. There was no media, no recourse to justice. The people simply complied with the order; they had no choice. And so they pulled down the thatch from their roofs. And then they asked the authorities, “Now where do we go?” And the authorities shrugged and said, “Well, we’ll have to wait for replacement houses to be built.” It was an education for me because it was a moment when I realized the extent of the catastrophe that is possible when a society cannot speak and when there is no free speech. And this is when I saw the effects of the dismantling of free speech in the country. A society that can’t speak is like a body that doesn’t feel pain. If our body were not to feel pain, we could cut off a limb and we would not know it because we would not feel it. And this is what I felt was happening in Rwandan society. Great harm was being done. And because it was not being reported, people weren’t aware of the full extent of the harm and they continued almost mindlessly sometimes. Because there was no one to cry out and stay stop, this is hurting...

How do we know that the things we’re building represent progress to people? The only way we can really know is when people can speak freely and tell us how they feel. And this is something that is rarely done in Rwanda. People like to speak for Rwandans and say, “Oh, they have nice roads, they have a good health care system, they have this and that. They should be happy,” without asking Rwandans who are unable to speak freely whether those Rwandans would accept the trade-offs that are made on their behalf by the world."

http://hazlitt.net/feature/society-cant-speak-body-doesnt-feel-pain-interview-anjan-sundaram

"A society that can’t speak is like a body that doesn’t feel pain.", that is a beautiful truth - beautiful not good but in the clarity of the meaning and its communication.

There are so many things that humans are capable of, so many states of being.

FB: This is a gorgeous interview "Gibson, before he left the country, taught me how to look at Rwanda and how to look at a dictatorship in a certain way. He taught me that we can both see the same thing but have a completely different experience of it. These streets that were Rwandan symbols of progress—that were well paved and that I’d been on many times—Gibson pointed out to me that those roads were empty. And it was true. They were empty, but it had never struck me."