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The journey of a
thousand miles begins with a single step, - so the ancient Chinese
saying [Lao-tze of China, the
“Old Master”, circa 604 – 531 BC, reputed founder of Taoism.]
has it, - and thus in April 2004, I embark on an attempt to place on
paper my considered thoughts on a life that has involved about two
million miles of air travel to over 70 countries in all Continents
(except Antarctica), and also to the islands of the Pacific, Atlantic,
and Indian oceans. The fields of service varied from the Caspian Sea
in west central Asia, to Lake Titicaca in the Andes Mountains, and from
the palm fringed shores of the Coral Sea at Papua New Guinea, to the
barren islands of Cape Verde in the Atlantic ocean three hundred miles
off the coast of West Africa. I have argued the case for socially just,
sustainable development, at innumerable meetings, in the ivory towers of
the World Bank and ADB, and in the United Nations Agencies, as well as
in the mud huts of African villages, and in bamboo houses on poles above
tidal areas in the Indo-Pacific.
When I was appointed
as an Assistant Professor by the University of Rhode Island USA, in
1967, (just 12 years after leaving school on my 15th
birthday, and starting work on the family fishing boat), an Aberdeen TV
journalist remarked on his local magazine programme, - “did he think
at 15 years of age when he packed his canvas baggie and headed for the
boat that first day, that it would lead to this”? Well, I certainly
did not. My fishing work commenced around the Republic of Ireland where
I experienced the kindness of the Irish, as well as their wit and
wisdom. The work continued around Scotland, from The Firth of Clyde to
the Orkney Islands and the Moray Firth. Then by one of those quirks of
fate, I was offered a remarkable opportunity to serve in Africa.
However, I believe
my real career in global fisheries development and management did not
blossom till 1973 when I was sent by the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organisation to the vast, mystical and populous land of
Indonesia to manage one of the UN’s most ambitious fishery projects.
The fisheries work will naturally colour most of the accounts in this
book, as will my Scottish roots and background, but what I trust readers
will find most interesting are the observations on life and events that
occurred during those past sixty years, and some selected community
memories that stretch farther back.
Apart from what I
gleaned from history, from the press and the media, and personal
observations on world events, I have always had an interest in how
ordinary people view these matters, and how they make sense of our
amazing participation in the beautiful, perplexing, and sometimes
frightening reality of life. These ordinary persons have been Scottish
and Irish fishermen, housewives, teachers, African peasants, Russian
students, World Bank economists, political prisoners, mission workers,
military personnel, refugees, Arabs and Israelis, Sinhalese and Tamils,
Chinese and Malays, academics and politicians, conformists and
radicals, hippies and drop-outs, religious zealots, agnostics, secular
humanists, musicians, writers and poets. The list of those I have been
privileged to come in contact with, and to learn from, is as broad and
as rich as life’s tapestry itself.
I have tried to
reflect their views, concerns and aspirations honestly and without
prejudice. If I give special weight to some, it is because their
contributions have come out of deep suffering, - out of painful years of
affliction or oppression or from the grinding mills of poverty and
hardship. I think of esteemed late friends and colleagues who were
survivors of Passchendaele and Ypres, of wartime ghettos and
concentration camps, of poverty and unemployment during the depression,
of the holocaust, the killing fields, of the refugee camps, of Robin
Island or Muntinlupa prison, or of personal and family struggles with
ill-health and misfortune. As my dear late friend, Peter Buchan, the
fisherman poet, described them, they are, “the folk wi’ the wind in
their face, a’ their mortal days”.
Having worked in
universities, colleges, training centres and extension services, I have
an interest in how knowledge and skills are passed on to future
generations. Learning by rote was the norm in our grandparents days,
and that approach continues in much of the developing world. New
approaches to education that are practical and flexible offer much hope
in my view. I refer to some of these ideas and innovations in the later
chapters.
In addition to the
world-view of a range of persons across the globe, I have commented on
some of the world’s leaders and major political events. I went to
Africa at the tail end of the era of the British Empire, and was
recruited by the Technical Cooperation Department of the Colonial
Office. On my first African assignment I observed first-hand the
transition from Colonial rule to self-government to full independence,
former Northern Rhodesia becoming the state of Zambia under President
Kaunda. I saw over the border in Southern Rhodesia / Zimbabwe, the
seeds of indifference and inaction on gross inequalities in ownership of
land, being sown by the Smith regime and the UK Government, which would
give rise to the brutality of Mugabe’s later rule.
The early 1960’s
period also covered the era of Belgian withdrawal from the Congo, the
Katanga secession under Moise Tshombe, the death of Dag Hammarskjöld in
an apparently engineered plane crash, and the abominable U.S. choice of
Mobutu to lead the new country of Zaire (the Congo). South Africa
continued to be governed by the apartheid regime of Afrikaans
whites, oblivious to basic human justice and to world opinion.
I was working in the
United States when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were
assassinated. That was during the period of campus protests against the
Vietnam War, the rise of the hippy culture, and the election of Richard
Nixon as President. As I was familiar with the names of all the Nixon
Cabinet, I later took a deep interest in the Watergate affair, watching
the hearings on television, reading every book on the subject, and even
staying a night in the Howard Johnson’s motel (from which the bugging
was monitored by the ‘plumbers’ unit) located across the road
from the Watergate complex. Occasional assignments with the World Bank
allowed me to spend time in Washington DC and to get a flavour of that
nation’s capital, and of cultured international Georgetown, nearby
across the Potomac river.
My period of service
in Indonesia and the Philippines allowed me a close glimpse of the
strong-man rules of Presidents Soeharto and Ferdinand Marcos. It also
provided a view of the corruption and nepotism prevalent in much of the
developing world. Almost as interesting as the presidents mentioned,
was the behaviour and amassing of wealth by their wives, Tien Soeharto
and Imelda Marcos. I was in the region when Benigno Aquino was denied
election as Governor of Manila (by blatant manipulation), and when he
was murdered on his return to the Philippines, and when the peaceful
‘people’s revolution’ took place, effectively removing Marcos from
power.
Some years were
spent in Rome, Italy, and while enjoying that experience, I never failed
to be fascinated by the political movements varying all the way from
fascism to communism to anarchist groups, and the Italians’ unfailing
capacity to bring a semblance of order out of the seeming chaos. I
happened to be in Rome the day Pope John Paul ll was shot by Mehmet Ali
Agca, and I used to visit a family near the Adriatic coast where they
lived next door to the high security prison where Agca was incarcerated.
As a young teenager
I spent a summer holiday in the south of Ireland with a wonderful
elderly lady, a niece of the Irish MP of the early 1900’s, John
Redmond. She had taught music to the family of the Emperor and Empress
in the Hoffburg Palace in Vienna Austria, before the First World War.
To a 14 year-old Scottish boy in 1954, Vienna was on the other side of
the moon, and I sadly took little note of her tales and accounts of that
period, but to my surprise, in 1986 when on an assignment for the United
Nations Industrial Development Organisation located in Vienna, I was to
visit the Hoffburg Palace often to see a friend who worked there for the
Austrian Foreign Ministry.
During the later
period of the Vietnam War, and the time of the horrendous killing fields
regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, I was working in S.E. Asia. I
came to know and assist in small ways, some of the “boat people” who
fled Vietnam and spent years in refugee camps in the Philippines and
other parts of the region.
Later I spent a
memorable year in Vietnam, working with its fine, serious and
industrious people. One of the friends I had in Hanoi was among the last
group of children to escape from South Vietnam when hostilities ended.
He returned 25 years later as a successful businessman, determined to
help his country’s return to economic prosperity.
I was greatly
honoured to be asked by FAO and the ADB, a few years after Pol Pot died,
to lead a development project to design, and later to implement,
management of the rich but vulnerable fisheries of the Great Lake of
Tonle Sap, and the Mekong River. It was an enriching and encouraging
experience to see the people of Cambodia rebuild their land despite its
blood-stained past, and conserve its natural resources for the benefit
of the whole nation.
Observations in
regions and territories that had been ravaged by war, and conclusions on
the impacts of these conflicts, confirmed and increased my deep
abhorrence of military actions, and my serious doubts about the wisdom
and the true motivation of those who commit their countries forces to
conflict and bloodshed. In these conclusions I found to my surprise,
that I was supported by many former generals and senior military
officers, writers and war correspondents, as well as by the world’s
greatest pacifists. (Practically none of the politicians and diplomats
in the USA and UK who agressively promoted the Iraq war, had ever served
in combat themselves, and none of them or their most ardent supporters
would send their own sons to die in that conflict.) My anti-war views
were naturally shared by civilians who had suffered terribly, but also
by serving soldiers and airmen, many of whom recalled their active
service duties with extreme dislike. I received such personal accounts
from soldiers, sailors and airmen who served in the 1st and 2nd world
wars, (on both sides), and ones who fought in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and
other scenes of conflict.
The madness of war
and its brutalising effect on combatants was in stark contrast to the
nobility and magnanimity displayed by its innocent victims. I found
similar attitudes among those who endured oppression or injustice. The
courage and integrity of unnamed and unrecognised heroes and heroines in
the wastelands of man’s inhumanity resembled delicate flowers blooming
in the desert. Individuals I knew or met, who were survivors of the
Holocaust, the killing fields, the apartheid regime, or of one of
the numerous brutal dictatorships, often had a beauty of character, and
a serenity of soul, despite all they endured. It was, as the Russian
dissident and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn
[The Gulag Archipelago, volume 3,
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Harper & Row, 1978]
described the triumph of human spirits against impossible odds,
“poetry under a tombstone, truth under a stone”.
From these and many
other experiences in different parts of the globe, I have compiled a
simple patchwork quilt of reflections, impressions and observations. I
dare to hope that readers might find them entertaining, enlightening or
even amusing in parts, and perhaps glean some encouragement for present
times, and hope for the future.
David B Thomson
* Note on poetry and
quotations: Most of the quotations from books, poems and songs, are
selections only. I have made slight amendments in places for the sake
of grammar or clarity, and occasionally altered a word or phrase that
did not accurately reflect my train of thought. Where such liberties
have been taken, the quotation is marked by an asterisk. I trust that
the few deviations from the originals in no way misrepresent the
esteemed writers whose works are quoted. |
