Weekly Program - Peace
As we have recently seen in current events, the focus on PEACE in our world remains a vigorous challenge. Our sympathy is extended to those in France who lost loved ones last week in the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, and our applause goes out to the peaceful solidarity of the nation with a highly successful peaceful anti-terror rally last Sunday. Our program this week is Boyd Varty’s talk which brings together many fascinating moments: a tribute to Nelson Mandela (who passed away just hours before Varty took the stage at TEDWomen 2013), incredible footage of animals shot on the Londolozi Game Reserve (which Varty’s family transformed from a hunting ground to a game reserve in 1973, and where Varty works.
and memories of a dear tracker friend named Sully (who greeted everyone at his door with the words, “Hello, I love you” and once saved Varty from the jaws of a crocodile). Varty’s talk brings together these threads to illuminate a concept.
“While it’s true that Africa is a harsh place, I also know it to be a place whose people, animals and ecosystems teach us about a more interconnected world,” says Varty in this emotional talk. “[Nelson] Mandela said often that the gift of prison was the ability to go within and to think, to create within himself the things he most wanted for South Africa: peace, reconciliation, harmony. Through this act of intense open-heartedness, he was to become the embodiment of what in South Africa we call Ubuntu. ‘I am; because of you.’”
Ubuntu is a beautiful — and old — concept. According to Wikipedia, at its most basic, Ubuntu can be translated as “human kindness,” but its meaning is much bigger in scope than that — it embodies the ideas of connection, community, and mutual caring for all. Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee (watch her TED Talk) once defined using slightly different words than Varty: “I am what I am because of who we all are.”