Climate of Fear by Wole Soyinka Page A

sacrifice. Yet the entitlement to dignity, enshrined among these human rights, does not aspire to being the most self-evident, essential need for human survival, such as food or physical health. Compared to that other candidate for the basic impulse of human existence—self-preservation—it may even be deemed self-indulgent.
    Here is another incident from real life, involving, this time, not an individual but a nation, an attempt at breaking out from a walling in, a contesting of the reduction of volition, this time largely of the economic kind. About six years ago, I was approached by a Cuban ambassador to Nigeria with whom I had developed a warm relationship. He felt that I might know some influential individuals within the United States government or in the intellectual circles that relate to its policy makers. His government, he informed me, was anxious for a resolution of the state of undeclared war between the two nations (these formal and informal probes are part of public knowledge, so I am not revealing any privileged communication). Cuba had weathered the general economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. reasonably well, he said, but after the infamous Torricelli Act, whose provisions extended the ban on trade with Cuba even to her existing foreign partners, threatening them with sanctions unless they severed such relationships, that small island began to feel the economic stress of claustrophobia, and sought diplomatic means of breaking the deadlock.
    The ambassador said, Cuba is ready to meet and talk with the U.S. on any platform, formal or informal, with no preconditions—oh, except one:
Cuba will not compromise her dignity.
It struck me as a remarkable statement, even then. We are a small people, he declared, we are powerless compared with the United States, but we will not compromise our dignity; we would rather starve to death.
    That declaration—
We
shall not sacrifice our dignity
—is very much the language of nations, or states, to one another. During conflict negotiations or their aftermath— and I refer here to those unpublicized sessions, familiar to arbitrators—that phrase, an insistent, minimal appeal, surfaces with remarkable constancy, even when all else has been surrendered: let us leave these negotiating chambers with, at the very least, our self-respect. It is very much the historic cry of a defeated people, defeated either through a passage of arms or on the diplomatic field, when they discover that they have no more bargaining chips left. What their representatives are saying is simply: the very least we can live with is an agreement that does not reduce us to slaves of imposition, but makes us partners of consent. Yes, we are compelled to make peace, we submit to force majeure, but leave us at least a piece of clothing to cover our nudity. This is the motivation behind every formula of diplomatic contrivance that is sometimes described as face-saving, and wise indeed is the victor who knows that, in order to shield his own rear from the elements, he must not denude his opponents.
    Considerations of this intangible bequest, dignity, often remind me of a rhetorical outburst in the United Nations by a Nigerian representative—no, that desperate rhetoric did not lead to hysteria as identified in an earlier lecture, except if one chooses to remark the barely suppressed hysterical laughter in the hallowed halls of the General Assembly. The occasion was the nation’s arraignment before the General Assembly on charges of violations of human rights and the denial of democracy under the dictatorship of General Sanni Abacha. In what our apologist must have considered the definitive argument on the subject, he challenged his listeners to combat in more or less the following words:
    What exactly is this democracy, these human rights that we’re talking about? Can we
eat
democracy? The government is trying to combat hunger, put food into people’s stomachs, and all