Pedaloing while London burned

We turned on the TV and saw gangs of young people torching homes and businesses and communities arming to defend life and property; violence creating an opportunity for wholesale looting and for a ratcheting-up of interracial tensions for political gain. We heard questions about whether the forces of law and order had the strength of numbers, equipment or stomach and ability to protect civilians, and speculation about how far known strongmen were orchestrating the violence. There were needless deaths, and heroes and villains in unlikely places, and politicians and pundits trying to sound tough and savvy and in control.

So far, so Congo.

But we were in Bude, Cornwall not Bukavu, South Kivu. The violence and looting was taking place in cities across middle England, an area synonymous with the ordinary: certainly by the standards of most of the rest of the world, a place of comfort, privilege and predictability.

The DRC-hardened humanitarian aid workers in our little group, accustomed if never inured to accounts of such horrors in our working lives, were as shocked and saddened as our friends to see the chaos so close to home. But in dark jokes about the Tottenham Mai Mai and the child soldiers of Peckham there was perhaps a hint of self-satisfaction, a sense that maybe next time there’s talk of villages burning and farmers looted in more far-off places, the proverbial man in the English street may take a little more notice.

My own bent to smugness was somewhat restrained by the knowledge that I’m not currently a useful member of society in any way. My own contribution to the common weal hasn’t risen lately beyond cooking dinner or doing the washing-up; but once the pedalo rides in Cornwall were done, my friends went back to trying to help people caught up in the violence in eastern Congo, where the fires have been burning for some 18 years now.