We Need Witnesses

I do not speak of witnesses as an idea. I speak of them because, at a crucial moment of my life, I was forced to become one myself. I learned early to distrust violence, not from books but from lived experience: from the harsh challenges of boyhood, and later from a civil war that turned neighbors into enemies and children into child soldiers. When I fled Sierra Leone for Guinea, I carried no certainty except this: that hatred, if left unchallenged, would finish what war had begun. Teaching displaced children often without pay, joining a campaign for the restoration of democracy, I learned that love is not sentiment. It is labor.

What follows is not theory for me. It is the language I learned while helping children study literature, while building peace programs with no budget but faith, while guiding young people shattered by violence toward collaboration instead of revenge. Through a unique foresight, I chose to believe that healing was possible, that technology could be a bridge, and that education could become an act of defiance against terror. This call for witnesses rises from a call to act.

I hear in this meditation a faith that morning can absolve us of what the night has done. And yet, if I may speak plainly, morning does not erase the night; it interrogates it. The sun does not deny the snow; it reveals what the cold has preserved. What we call a new day is not an escape from yesterday, but a reckoning with it.

Love is the only force large enough to hold our contradictions without lying about them. But love is not soft, and it is not naïve. Love is a discipline. It demands that we look directly at the machinery of hatred, at the ways wars are manufactured by fear and profit and indifference, and then refuse to participate. To love is to resist the lie that violence is inevitable, or that some lives are expendable so others may feel secure.

We are told no one deserves to live under terror, and this is true, but it becomes meaningful only when we accept that terror is not an accident of history. It is something human beings do to one another, and, it is something we can decide to stop doing.

If we are to be gardeners, then we must first confess what has poisoned the soil. Peace does not emerge from forgetting. Brotherhood is not born of slogans, but of courage, the courage to love one another without illusions, without escape routes, without alibis.

The world does not need more warriors convinced of their righteousness. It needs witnesses; people willing to live as proof that love is stronger than fear. And if we can manage that, even briefly, then perhaps the sun will not only warm us, but teach us how to see one another clearly at last.

Peace,

Andrew.

MSL Candidate, Francis King Carey School Of Law

BA International Relations, Civil Law, English. Fourah Bay College.

Jeanne Sauve Scholar at McGill University

UN ITU Telecom Fellow 2011.

WSIS 2003