on hope

Been hard to get into gear today. I'm paralyzed by too much to do, and not knowing what to prioritize, what to drop. Wanting a magic formula that will tell me exactly where to put my energies. Wanting an absolute guarantee of positive outcomes.

Someone just emailed me to ask for an article I wrote almost two years ago, when I was Books and Arts columnist for the weekly Pambazuka News. The piece was an obituary and personal memoir of Ellen Kuzwayo, South African writer, anti-apartheid activist, feminist icon. Re-reading it was a perfect clarity check. Especially Ellen's lines:

before you feel hopeful for your country, you must feel hope for yourself; if there is no hope for you, you can’t look ahead.

Just last week, in Nairobi, I talked about hope with other members of Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice. We were trawling for reasons to keep working towards a solution to this crisis, in the face of the crazy intransigence of the Kibaki regime. I remembered my favorite definition of hope, by Vaclav Havel:

Hope is not the optimistic conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Click here to read:
Bigger Than Fear: Remembering Ellen Kuzwayo