by Kitwala Nginilla
Executive Director, Dar es Salaam Institute of Peace Education
kitwalanginilla@hotmail.com
As I am typing this, the President of the United States of America is on his way to Africa to begin a five nations and six days tour of the continent. In a few hours, he will be met and welcomed at the Mwalimu Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam by his host, the President of the United Republic of Tanzania and the Chairperson of the African Union. As world attention and the international spotlight follows the President and focuses on Africa, the world’s poorest continent, questions are being asked and issues are being raised. How can we provide relief to the victims of disease, poverty and war? What must be done to resolve the crises in Kenya and Chad? Will the U.S. Army’s Africa Command set up military bases on the continent?
The Proposed Dar es Salaam Institute of Peace Education (DIPE), to be formally inaugurated on the International Day of Peace, on September 21st, 2008, envisions itself answering these and many other similar questions. It will discuss and spearhead dialogue on current and relevant local and global issues, provide a forum for peace educators to meet, exchange ideas and plan and execute viable practices, and to be a center of research, training and advocacy for peace education.
The founding of the DIPE was directly inspired by the Plan of Action adopted by the United Nations Teachers Conference on Human Rights (UNTCHR) held on April 28th, 2006 at the UN headquarters in New York City. UNTCHR was also attended via videoconferencing facilities by teachers and educators from the United States of America, Canada, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and the United Republic of Tanzania.
I had the good fortune to be among the delegates who attended UNTCHR, as the representative of Thomas Jefferson Secondary School of Dar es Salaam, where I was teaching English and advising the students’ United Nations Club.
UNTCHR began with a reminder of the main goal of the United Nations - “…to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” (The UN Charter), and the special role that education plays in attaining peace – “…since war was born in the minds of men it is there that the battles for peace must be fought” (The UNESCO preamble). We then exchanged experiences and information on the challenges and obstacles facing us in our endeavor to teach on peace in the world. The ideas we generated were used to draft a Plan of Action for UNTCHR which advocated, among other ideas and suggestions, the integration of Peace Education into national curricula around the world.
Peace Education was defined at UNTCHR by Ms. Cora Weiss, the President of The Hague Appeal for Peace, as “a holistic, participatory process that involves teaching for and about democracy, human rights, social and economic justice, non violence, disarmament, sustainable environment, gender equality, human security and conflict prevention and resolution”. She called on humanity to abolish war in the same spirit and manner as we had abolished slavery and Apartheid. War is the greatest waste of all, she said, destroying lives and livelihoods, and causing great suffering and sorrow.
My experience at UNTCHR inspired me to search for more information on Peace Education on the internet. My search led me to the Peace Education Center and the International Institute of Peace Education (IIPE), both based in New York City, with whom I began and still maintain regular electronic communications, receiving even more information about Peace Education activities. Through that, I learnt of their initiative – the creation and coordination of Community – based Institutes of Peace Education (CIPE) in different locations worldwide. CIPEs aim to make peace education available to more people, and to address local needs and relevant practices.
I was particularly inspired by a message from Peace boat, on it’s 53rd voyage for peace around the world:
“In order to achieve a sustainable world with a global culture whose values reflect a genuine desire for peace and a rejection of violence, Peaceboat believes that it is of paramount importance to make what we call education for peace and sustainability an integral part of our collective learning. In practice, this means making peace education for a sustainable world more accessible to a wider audience, and acknowledging its teaching as a legitimate discipline in the formal educational system”.
Following extensive discussions with other peace stakeholders I felt confident enough to announce my intention to found the Dar es Salaam Institute of Peace Education.
I was also given more confidence by my twenty years of experiences as a school teacher, youth counselor and peer educator. I have worked with and for troubled adolescents, unemployed young people, street children, AIDS orphans, former prostitutes, recovering addicts and other marginalized members of society since I was sixteen years old. In Tanzania I volunteered at Mother Teresa’s House of Charity, Kindwitwi Lepers Village, African Medical Research Foundation (more famous as “The Flying Doctors”) and several orphanages. I founded, advised and worked with numerous non governmental and community based organizations. At Grinnell I was a part of The Alternative Happy Hour team that would visit Moulton Elementary School in Des Moines every weekend. I volunteered for Teach For America and worked in homeless shelters and soup kitchens from New York City to San Francisco. My current community service involvement is with the Elizabeth Youth Group, who are working on converting Hyena Square, one of Dar es Salaam’s most notorious red light districts, into a multi – purpose community center (for full story of Elizabeth Youth Group and Hyena Square visit http://hyenasquare.org).
I have been committed to peace ever since I was a child. I became a bookworm at an early age and had already read, when I was ten years old, the epic stories of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. When I was fourteen years old I was writing poems and essays on world peace, and represented Tanzania at an International Children’s Peace Festival in Bulgaria (1985). Then began a long association with the Model United Nations, where I won awards for outstanding performances in Dar es Salaam (1985), Nairobi (1988, 1989), The Hague (1989), St. Louis (1990) and Chicago (1990). In 1988 I was awarded the European Council of International Schools Award for International Understanding. In 1999 I was a consultant for the United Nations in Tanzania, working on the Sustainable Cities Project. In 2004 I was a founder member of the Youth of the United Nations Association (YUNA) in Tanzania. In 2005 I organized, with the generous support of the American Embassy, the Tanzanian International Model United Nations. In 2006 I was a founding member of the Friends of The United Nations in Tanzania.
The Proposed Dar es Salaam Institute of Peace Education will bring together peace educators and stakeholders such as religious institutions, members of the armed forces and the police, and non governmental organizations. This will make it easier to organize and provide support, resources and training for peace educators and stakeholders. In the words of Tony Jenkins, the General Coordinator of the International Institute of Peace Education, “There are educators practicing peace education in nearly every corner of the world, yet we know little of the existence of each other and the work that we are doing. The IIPE has brought together people in solidarity from around the world, but little has been done to bring people together at the local level………..a world of experts exists amongst the daily practitioners of peace education……….as a community of learners we have much to learn from and with each other.”
The Institute also aims to create a forum for the community to address current and relevant local and global issues. Every community has its own distinct culture and history. Prioritization of issues differs too varying from community to community. For example, in one neighborhood, the greatest disruption to peace and source of conflict and tension might be gang violence. And in another neighborhood it might be hunger and starvation, addiction and substance abuse, the HIV/AIDS epidemic or ethnic rivalry. Whatever the scope of local or global issues, it is for each community to choose for itself which issues affect it most.
We visualize the Institute providing support for school and community based peace education initiatives and advocating for the adoption of peace education by formal and non-formal educators locally, nationally and globally. DIPE will support educators who are already teaching peace education, and reach out to educators who either do not know or do not care about peace education. DIPE will be a prime force for educational change, pressuring power-holders and policymakers to integrate peace education into the national curriculum.
DIPE will spearhead research and new developments in the field of peace education, documenting and analyzing the diversity of approaches and practices of peace education in the world, and creating and implementing peace education methodologies and strategies. At the UNTCHR I was amazed by the incredible amount of stories, experiences, ideas and theories that were discussed. Actually, the conference ended with many delegates still wanting to talk which provided proof that peace education is very intensive and very young, our latest new frontier.
Dar es Salaam is the Kiswahili word for “Haven of Peace”. Because of our history (our shores have seen, since before Christ, the Chinese, Greeks, Persians, Omani Arabs, Portuguese, Indians, Germans and British come, settle, intermarry and create the Swahili civilization, a multicultural society) and the vision of Mwalimu Nyerere, our country’s founding father, who successfully united Tanzania’s 125 ethnic nations, we have avoided the fate of our neighbors, who are plagued by ethnic tensions and divisions. It would not be wrong to say that Tanzania is the most stable and peaceful country in Africa. It is therefore appropriate that we host an institute for peace education. If we can help our neighbors to learn to live in peace as we are doing it would be good for them, saving them losses in lives and property. And it would end our reputation (costly and potentially destabilizing) as the country with the most refugees in Africa.
The Dar es Salaam Institute of Peace Education is to begin operating in late September, 2008. We are seeking funds to finance rent, staff allowances, office materials and equipment, transport and communication costs, staff orientation, research, training (workshops, seminars, lectures, conferences) as per the attached budget. We plan to begin operations with a core staff of ten people (to man the following units – administration, research, training, outreach and advocacy). As the founding Executive Director of the Institute, I will place special emphasis on documentation and dissemination of information about the institute’s activities and events through periodic print and electronic multilingual newsletters, and hold regular internal meetings to monitor and assess the institute’s conduct . A major personal goal is to sensitize the public and to pressure governments to integrate peace education into national curriculums worldwide. I envision implementation of the UNTCHR Plan of Action, clause by clause, nation by nation, world-wide. The sustainability of the institute is based on public acceptance of the importance of peace. Once peace is seen as an asset worth protecting, then the institute will be recognized as a solution to our political and economic woes worth investing in, and as worthy a recipient of public funds as any other public interest endeavor.