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Excerpt from The Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper (est 1844) Saturday
July 26, 2003, Comment A19
"...You couldn't pick a more appropriate place to hold a symposium on Africa-Canada collaboration than Nova Scotia. Think of Africans taken to America during the Atlantic slave trade, then think of those slaves travelling up the Underground Railroad to Detroit and onto Ontario, and the Black Loyalists who arrived in Nova Scotia following the American war of Independence. Then think of how 1,196 of those black loyalists left Halifax on a cold January in 1792, headed for Sierra Leone. This is how history is often written, as the map of our world is drawn on the circular ruins of history, it was inevitable that I would meet Andrew Benson Greene, a young Sierra Leonean activist, in Antigonish. Mr. Benson Greene was in Nova Scotia to share his inspirational story of working with the victims of war in his country. He was also in Canada because the descendants of those Black Loyalists were raising awareness of the role that diamonds played in escalating Sierra Leone's brutal civil war. This year, Canadian NGOs like War Child Canada were able to call on Canadian artists like Rascalz and In Essence to mobilize public support for Sierra Leonean children. Meanwhile, as the national Co-ordinator of the International Education And Resource Network, (iEARN) in Sierra Leone www.iearnsierraleone.org, Mr. Benson Green uses the internet to enable former child soldiers and war affected youth to share their gruesome stories to other similarly affected children around the world. In the scale and context of the problems such as Sierra Leone's, networks like www.nowarzone.org are not going to usher in world peace tomorrow. But when viewed from the increasingly miserly and myopic approach being advocated by our leaders and policy-makers, I found hanging out in Antigonish a refreshing reminder that security comes not from the end of a gun but from the shared values, commitments and responsibilities to each other."-- |