M&D/GR/V-related

[Doug Millison]

Couldn't help but think of the portrayals of Europeans in Africa in TRP's
novels while I read this article in the New York Times today, "Mandela's
Note in Praise of Missionaries" by Gustav Niebuhr, on the Web at
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/religion-column.html

I wonder how we might understand Pynchon's treatment of Europe in Africa in
the light of this sort of testimony from Nelson Mandela and another African
leader mentioned in the article, UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan

Excerpts:

"Early generations of Christian missionaries from Europe and the United
States often fared poorly in the popular media. They have been depicted in
novels and films as arrogant or, worse, tools of colonial adventurers.

"This week, however, the work of missionaries, specifically in education,
received a word of praise from a source widely regarded as one of the  late
20th century's moral leaders, President Nelson Mandela of South Africa.

"Mandela turned up as a nearly unexpected but quite welcome guest on
Sunday, Dec. 13, at the Eighth Assembly of the World Council of Churches,
meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe.

".... In part, he went to thank the council for its support in the 1970s
and 1980s for organizations like his African National Congress, in their
struggles against white-minority governments in southern Africa.

"In 1969, the council initiated its Programme to Combat Racism, which
eventually called for an end to bank loans to South Africa's apartheid
government, advocated economic sanctions against South Africa and, in a
contentious move upsetting some of the council's own members, gave cash
grants (for humanitarian purposes, the council said) to groups fighting for
majority rule in South Africa and in the former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

" "Your support," Mandela said to delegates gathered at the University of
Zimbabwe, "exemplified in the most concrete way the contribution that
religion has made to our liberation, from the days when religious bodies
took responsibility for the education of the oppressed because it was
denied us by our rulers, to support for our liberation struggle."

"Earlier, he singled out the work of missionaries in education, ad-libbing
his thanks to missionary teachers who worked in South Africa when he was a
child. "My generation is the product of church education," Mandela said. By
contrast, he said, the government of his day "took no interest whatsoever"
in educating Africans, people of mixed race or Indians. "



D O U G  M I L L I S O N  [http://www.online-journalist.com]
"The rain ceases, and a bird's clear song suddenly announces the difference
between Heaven and hell." --Thomas Merton