I’m still reading Shake Hands With The Devil… haven’t had a lot of time to read lately as I’ve been so busy, plus this is a fairly heavy book to read… heartbreaking is more the word maybe. I was reading a passage from it this morning, when I came across these words, which cut me to the bone…

“As to the value of the 800,000 lives in the balance books of Washington, during those last weeks we received a shocking call from an American staffer, whose name I have long forgotten. He was engaged in some sort of planning exercise and wanted to know how many Rwandans had died, how many were refugees, and how many were internally displaced. He told me that his estimates indicated that it would take the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans to justify the risking of the life of one American soldier.

I don’t even know what to say in response to that. I’m not American, and I don’t want to pick on America, because the UK and other developed nations were no better… but what???! Why should an American (or British or Irish or whatever) life be worth more than an African life? We have a lot to answer for. I have a lot to answer for. In what ways do we still perpetuate this idea that African lives are worth less than ours? How do we overcome it?