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by Mputhumi Ntabeni

G21 Staff Writer

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canaries of the coal mine

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Mputhumi Ntabeni

Queenstown, SOUTH AFRICA - The US likes to claim the status of being the moral force for good of the world. The unnecessary tragedy of city of New Orleans has exposed the hypocrisy under this claim. The Big Easy was allowed to sit in the Hurricane Alley, as this part of the Gulf coast is known, with walls and levees against flooding that were well known to be unable to withstand the severest storm -- a storm that would inevitably happen sooner or later. This resulted in an unnecessary loss of many lives when Hurricane Katrina came. How was that possible in the world's richest nation? The only answer possible is that it could be allowed to happen because they were mostly black and poor.

A colleague of mine, Nicole Pepinster Greene, who is Associate Professor, Department of English, Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans wrote:

As we sat watching these images of the thousands of displaced and suffering black people at the Superdome and Convention Centre, a commentator remarked: "They're looking as if they're coming from some place else ... this just isn't America." These scenes conjured up another New Orleans landmark, Congo Square, where Africans used to await sale and transportation as slaves.

But this is America today and this is another diaspora. A black doctor treating young African Americans who had walked 130 miles from New Orleans said their feet resembled those of runaway slaves. People who had never left their neighbourhoods before are being forcibly moved to other towns and other states: Texas, Arkansas, Iowa, West Virginia. This "some place else" they are arriving from is unfamiliar not only to the rest of the world, but to many Americans. It is the New Orleans most do not know; the New Orleans that is 66 per cent African-American; the New Orleans where one third of the people, black and white, live below the poverty line; the New Orleans that has always stayed behind; the New Orleans that has all but been abandoned.

W ill New Orleans remain? The centre has held: the French Quarter, the central business district, the warehouse district, the garden district, Audubon Park and Zoo, uptown, the universities and medical centres, among them Loyola, Tulane, Xavier. Entrepreneurs will prosper, and the middle classes will rebuild. Musicians have already vowed to return to the city that we love. But without its people, New Orleans will be an unimaginably different city. As I write, a thousand bodies are being identified and Mayor Nagin predicts thousands more will be found. Hundreds are still trapped. And having lost everything, this population will not be able to return without huge efforts.

The role of Xavier University may also change. It is much too early to say.

At present, the only certainty is that we must redouble our endeavours in the Catholic community to continue the work of St Katherine Drexel; we must not keep silent when we see injustice and ignorance; and we must diligently and by example remind our students of Xavier's mission to promote "a more just and humane society".

It has been the terrible fate of the unique and beautiful city of New Orleans to expose to the world's painful gaze the buried fault lines and flaws in American society, especially over race. With corpses still floating in the streets and a predicted final fatality count of 10,000 or more from the horrific flooding that has inundated the city, it has become the legendary "Valley of the Shadow of Death."

Confused chains of command, the involvement of a plethora of ill-coordinated agencies, official complacency, incompetence and bureaucracy -- even corruption -- doubtless all played their part in ensuring that the short-term emergency caused by Hurricane Katrina became a long-term disaster. The spectacle should shame the American conscience and condemn the American government.

We're told that New Orleans nurtures a unique blend of African, French, Spanish and Southern American races and cultures. We must also remember that it was once the capital city of slavery in the Deep South, the ultimate place to which the phrase "sold down the river" referred.

I'm sure none will dispute that it's racial history is relevant to the role race has played in its current catastrophe -- as our esteemed publisher has been at pains to point out here. It explains the broad if unspoken acceptance across America that black people were fated to be poor and excluded, as if it were either their natural state or their own fault.

I often hear people talk about 11 Sep 2001 being a tragic day that was a defining moment for the contemporary world and wonder how many of them understand the depth of truth in that statement. In a tragedy there's a hero who, though claiming our interest and admiration, has a latent weakness, a blind spot in his nature. In the interplay of events of life the hero's blind spot involves him in the train of circumstances that eventually bring upon his downfall.? The tragedy is in the fact that the unhappy ending is foreseen and could have been averted at any point -- if only the hero's blind spot hadn't such a strong grip on him.

The hero in a drama of our times is the United States.

A saying comes to us through Horatio that says: 'When the kings go mad the people are smitten.'? Substitute 'kings' with presidents and the idiom gains an urgency of pertinacity for our times. You discover anew the consistency of human folly and how there's very little new under the sky. If America really wishes to be regarded as a moral force for the good of the world, it has to attend to the beam in its own eye first.