TRANSCRIPT
I would like to share a story that I heard a little bit over a year ago when I was in The Gambia in West Africa. It was a really intense story, and I share it not because I’m promoting the ideas that I heard in the story. In fact, I don’t feel I can even accurately assess what I heard in terms of its healthiness or lack of healthiness. In fact, I have a lot of questions about it. But I want to share it anyways to open up a discussion about what the meaning of this might be.
What happened is one day I was sitting on the beach, the beach of the Atlantic Ocean in The Gambia, and I was sitting with some local African friends. A man was walking down the beach, and he was carrying a large sort of rubber baton or a stick. He was wearing a camouflaged military sort of uniform. He was extremely muscular, and in his back, he had all sorts of sticks and machetes and things, big knives. They called them cutlasses in The Gambia. He came into where I was sitting, and he sat down and he joined me. I asked him if I could ask him questions because he was by far one of the most unusual people I’d seen in a long time, and he said yes.
What he told me was that he was part of the Gambian Marines. Like, he was a military guy, but it also seemed from what he said that his job was kind of like that of a policeman. And so what he did is he walked around, and his job was to enforce law and order. He would also confiscate weapons from people when they were misbehaving. He said all the things on his back, these big sticks and these big cutlasses, these machetes, were things that he had confiscated from criminals.
He was trained in a jail diversion program. So basically, his job with the other Marines—and he said there were a group of them, I don’t remember how many, 5, 8, 10, 15 guys—what they did is their job was to correct people’s bad behavior when they caught them doing crimes such that these people would not need to go to jail. The reason he said they did this is because the jails in The Gambia, probably a lot like jails most everywhere, mostly didn’t help people. He said people would go to jail in The Gambia, and they didn’t get better. They would come out, and they would have often even more problems than before they went in. It didn’t actually correct anything. So yes, it punished them, but it didn’t change their behavior. So ultimately, he felt it was not good for society.
So I asked him what did he do to help correct people. And so he told me this story. He said there was a big problem with people using drugs and drinking in certain parts of The Gambia, where once they got drunk or got high on these crazy drugs that they would take, they would fight. They would carry razors; they would cut each other up—women cutting men, men cutting women, men cutting men. It was violent, it was crazy, it was out of control. People didn’t actually know what they were doing. A lot of times, they’d wake up the next day, they’d feel remorseful, but they’d just do it again. These were really out of control people—a very small part of the population. Actually, the whole time I was in The Gambia, I never even saw this at all, but I also wasn’t going to certain places where more of these problematic behaviors were happening.
So what he told me—and this is the root of the story, which is what makes it interesting to me—is they, he and these other Marines, would go around patrolling these areas where people would misbehave, often at night, in the middle of the night. And when they would get called after there was a fight, someone got cut with a razor or something like that, they would catch the person, they would bring them back to the barracks, and then they would reform them. That’s what he told me. And I was like, what’s that like?
What he said is they would take the person, they would hold them down, they would take this rubber baton, and they would beat them on the buttocks, on their butt, really, really hard. I said that must be painful because I saw this guy was hugely muscular, and this baton looked like it could cause serious damage. And he said, you’re right in a way, is what he told me. He said it really does hurt, but it doesn’t cause any permanent damage at all. You can hit people really hard; it’s incredibly painful, and they’re going to have trouble sitting down for a while after this, but no permanent damage at all.
He said we hit them on the buttocks many, many, many times, and while we hit them on the buttocks, we explain that this is what we are doing to them because we want them to change. They are doing bad things, and they have to learn to accept that what they did is bad. And the people beg, he said. They beg us to stop, and then we keep doing it anyway. And I said, my God, it sounded brutal and horrible to me. He said it is kind of horrible; it’s horrible. He said they scream. I said, do they cry? He said, well, that’s what’s interesting. He said most of them do cry, and as they cry, we explain to them that they must change their behavior. They are behaving in a way that is not just criminal, but it’s anti-social. It’s against the good civil order. They have disrespected other people; they have harmed other people. They are bad citizens, and they are behaving as bad Gambians and bad people, and we need them to change. We insist that they change, and often they just beg us, please stop hitting me, it hurts so bad. But we don’t stop; we keep doing it.
And I said, and then they cry, some of them? He goes, well, what’s interesting, he says, yes, they break down and they sob. They sob like babies; they cry and cry and cry. It is profound grieving, mourning. And he said the ones that cry like that, they are the ones who change. They are the ones whose behavior changes. He says the ones who do not cry, who hold it in, who refuse to cry, they are the ones who we cannot help.
And suddenly I became curious when he said this because one of the most interesting things that has transformed me in my own life—in fact, the most interesting and profound thing that has transformed me—is deep, deep grieving. Grieving, sobbing, wailing. It hasn’t happened to me much in the last few years, but man, it has happened to me multiple times in my life, in my adult life. And those times were profound. They catapulted me into a new stage, a new phase of consciousness in my mind. It’s like I became so much more embodied. And for me, it was grieving my childhood, grieving the horrible things that I went through, grieving the traumas that I suffered, grieving the neglects from my childhood, from my family of origin, the abuses and violations that I suffered—all the parts of me that I lost. When I grieved like that, it was like something coming up from the well deep, deep inside me and reconnecting, recalibrating. It was like I was becoming a person who was alive, who was full of colors. It was like before that I was a person who was just blue, black, and gray. Now I was green and yellow and orange and purple. And every time that I grieved, new colors and new shades of colors came into my life, into my psyche, into my consciousness. My soul became so much more connected.
And so I clued into what he was saying. And what he said is those people grieved. And I talked a little bit to him about my grieving experience, and he said, yes, that is what we are aiming to make these people do. That is what we are trying to help them do. And when they do that, we tell them, good, good, good, this is what we want. You must do this; we love you. And I said, do you actually love these people? He said, we do. We want to help them change. The people who cannot access those feelings, who cannot cry, who cannot sob, they can never realize what they are doing is wrong.
They cannot realize who they are. They’re good parts on the inside. And I said, do you think that they do bad things because of the bad things that happen to them? Because that’s my experience with my own life and in watching other people. And he said, I think so. And I said, but you beat them? You beat them on the buttocks with this hard rubber cane while men are holding their arms and legs down? He says, yes, there is no other way. These people will get to that. Is such a thing true?
Well, I know for myself I was never beaten by people holding me down and beating me on the buttocks to make me grieve because of bad things I did, even though I never did anything so bad as that. I did a different path. But this is what it really made me question: is there validity to what he was saying?
Then he shared more. He said, after they beat them and after the people cry, he said, then what we do is we keep them there. We keep them there for often one whole day and we make them work. He said, we tell them, then here is a field. You must stay in this area. It’s a yard. There’s a fence around it. You must weed the entire field or you must hoe this entire field and prepare it for planting. Or if there’s a woman who would… I said, you do this to women too? Yes, we treat women just like men. We treat everybody fairly and equally. We will beat the women on the buttocks too and hard.
I said, I mean, you don’t hold back? Because no, no, we… I said, I hit them as hard as I possibly can. If I hold back, it does not help. I said, okay. I said, so you make the women work too? He says, yes, we make them cook. We make them do the laundry for every person who’s a marine. I said, isn’t that kind of like forced labor? He said, no, we are teaching them about how to be civil members of society. These are people who have lost their connection with being civil members of society and we must help them.
I said, so you’re forcing them to work? I mean, do you give them food and water or do you deprive them? He says, no, we give them food and we give them water. We give them good food too. When they say, I am hungry, we give them food. When they say, I am thirsty, we give them water. We do not deprive them. We give these people love.
And I said, you really love them? He says, we do love them. We care for them. We want these people to change. That is our hope. And we tell them that the whole time, from the minute we catch them and bring them back and while we are beating them, we tell them, we love you. We want you to change.
And then I asked him, I took a step back and I said, well, what are the results over the long term? Do these people actually change? I mean, maybe they change for a week or two? He goes, no, no, no. Most of these people, when they cry like that, they change. They come out different people. They are not the same because these people, they respect us and they love us back.
I said, so you see these people? You see them afterwards, like out on the street when you’re walking? He says, yes, all the time. He says, we’re a small country. This is a small area. He says, every day I see people who we have held down and given this treatment to. I said, how do they treat you? He said, they come up and they take my hands and they say, thank you. Thank you for what you have done to me. Sometimes they become fishermen. We were right out on the beach and there were fishermen already because I see this many times. The fishermen, they come, they say, here you are, the man who saved me. You saved my life. Thank you. They give me free fish so I can bring home fish to my wife because they are so grateful. I see this a lot.
And I said, but sometimes you have people who don’t change. Because they’re not very common, but there are some. And he goes, those are the people often that end up in jail because we cannot help them. They keep doing bad things. And maybe the best thing is to just take them out of society, even though maybe it doesn’t help them. Society deserves to be protected from these people who cannot change.
So now I’d like to take a step back, return to America where I’m recording this video, and see what I can say about analyzing it. I think how I’d like to analyze it in brief for starters is saying that at some level I believe what this man did, what his marine colleagues did, is they did induce grieving in people. And it’s very interesting the way that they did it. I don’t have any personal experience in this, but I would like to say I think that they did induce grieving.
However, my criticisms, and my criticisms aren’t binding criticisms. I don’t know that I’m right. It’s more like I guess I just wonder if he’s really telling the truth. I think that’s the fundamental criticism I could say: was this man really telling me the truth about what happened? I think sometimes people can exaggerate. Sometimes people can distort the truth to tell about what they wished would happen when maybe it’s not what actually happened. I’m not saying this is true or not, my criticism, but it’s just a question in my mind.
So before I really take a really strong stand to say this guy knows what he’s talking about, as disturbing as it is, I probably like to witness it. I’d like to meet some of these people. I’d like to meet some of these people who supposedly gave him fish afterward and hear their side of the story about their personal experience of what they went through. So that is very important to me because I do think, again, sometimes people who tell stories like this can infiltrate their version of the story with their own bias to make themselves look good.
So that’s probably my basic criticism. Also, I just don’t like violence. And I also wonder, maybe there’s a better way to achieve this without violence. Now, I have seen this in many other cultures in the world. And I’m not talking just in Africa. I’ve been to several African countries, but countries in Asia, even in Europe, and I’ve seen it in some places in America, North America too, where certain cultures and subcultures can be more violent—violent toward adults, violent toward children. And I find it very disturbing, especially violence toward children. In fact, aside from in areas of complete and total self-defense, when someone is attacking me, I don’t like violence at all. I have no desire to practice violence on anyone. I would rather go for non-violent alternatives.
However, I just wonder what non-violent alternatives in that system in The Gambia might be. And I don’t know that I have any good answers to it, but this is just a question that comes to my mind.