UN Awakening: On the 50th Anniversary of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights
Alexandra Stein
1998
(Published in slightly different form in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, 10 December, 1998)
Declaration
On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ... Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and "to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories."
(From the United Nations 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html)
I first learned about the United Nations in 1963 when I was a small and bespectacled resident of north London’s Primrose Hill Primary School. I was nine then and the UN was just twice my age. This year the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights celebrates its 50th birthday and I, at forty-four, still feel close to its purpose, as I did when I was young.
Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
Class One was on the second floor of Primrose Hill School, which was built, along with the rest of the neighborhood, in the late 1800s: its red brick and fake turrets backed up onto Regents’ Canal whose tow path led to Camden Lock. The lower floor held the Infants’ classrooms and the Nursery where I had started school as a tearful five-year old. I had inhabited each of the other classes in chronological order. Still, this did not make me feel at home. My accent was South African but when queried on this many of the English children could not believe I was from Africa. “Where’s yer grass skirt then?” I often heard, or “Yer not black then, are yer? - you ain’t never from Africa!” I felt a permanent stranger (a condition I would become used to) and predictably made fast friends with the latest arrivals who joined our class from some other far corner of the world. Their foreigness matched my own and as outsiders we stuck fast to each other.
Article 15.
(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
On my left in class sat Irini, her olive skin faded to a kind of grey by London’s lack of sunlight. Her family was Greek but she spoke in a broad native-born cockney accent which did not stop her teaching me to count to 10 in greek, a linguistic skill I have long since lost. Irini wore crumpled cotton dresses and was one of my special friends.
Premila was serious, like me, and I felt I knew why when I visited her home: there was something solemn about her family. Her mother wore a sari and seemed bowed down somehow as she moved carefully around the small rooms overfilled with furniture. Her father dressed in soft white cotton pants and shirt. Premila, true to children’s unkind teasing, really did smell different, of garlic and curry, and when I went to her house the smell was there too in the dark rooms of the brick house.
Wayne sat in the front row of the classroom – probably because he was naughty and this was a disciplinary measure that allowed Mr. Peters to keep an eye on him. His parents were immigrants from the West Indies, but he was born in London. On my other side sat Nicholas, son of a soon-to-be-famous and already-divorced writer, his head topped with tassles of blond hair soft as corn-silk. Nicholas was English, both sides English, born in England – although his class position made him almost as foreign as I in that working-class school. At that time Nicholas and I were the only middle class kids in our class.
Article 26.
(1) Everyone has the right to education.
Our neighborhood, formerly a wealthy Victorian area, had been run down for a long-time and was only now being rediscovered as a place for the young intelligentsia to buy cheap but high-ceilinged and salvageable properties. And these families, as they climbed the economic ladder, put money into their houses, unblocked fireplaces, stripped layers of pre-war wallpaper and exposed the Victorian elegance again, soon to be complemented with central heating and clever 60’s art hung upon the walls and sometimes created by the very artists who began to move in to the self-same neighborhood.
Article 27.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Meanwhile Irini, Premila, and Wayne’s families rented, shoulder to shoulder with us of the middle class, but without money or remodelling to fix up draughty houses or to heat with anything other than kerosene heaters.
In the smaller streets behind these big Victorian terraces were worker’s houses too dismal and decayed to become candidates for gentrification. Eventually they would be demolished to make way for new developments. But when I was at school many of my classmates lived in them. Among them was Muriel who was Irish and thin-faced with a lanky athletic body and dishwater-colored hair. She was the daughter of a char-lady, though not the same Irish char-lady who cleaned our house every Wednesday, a luxury that announced our move from poor intellectuals to the eventual (though not solid) wealth my father’s publishing business would generate.
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Muriel had a gift for writing confidently and at length. Her multiple-chapter 30 page story written carefully in longhand concerned the adventures of a kangaroo, and provided my earliest inspiration and artistic rivalry – to be able to write a chapter book! Despite her evident talents she left school early, at sixteen, to become a bank clerk.
Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
My classmates and I passed through each others’ homes, moving through cultures and carrying pieces of them with us into each others’ lives. But our daily school dinners served by uniformed dinner ladies began to merge our odors into one. London County Council provided not only our exercise books and pencils, but also a common diet: thin, grey slices of beef, real mashed potatoes, grey string beans. Or Bubble and Squeak: mashed potatoes, cabbage and bacon mixed together and baked. (Now I wonder about Premila and how the religious dietary restrictions were handled?) And the puddings…a favorite was chocolate sponge cake, hot and heavy, and generously covered in chocolate custard poured from a stainless steel LCC ladle. The custard appeared again, vanilla this time, over suet pudding, a lard, flour and raisin mixture that was sweet and satisfying. The custard must have originated during the War, whose effects were still felt then, in the late fifties and early sixties: the war-time rationing of eggs and sugar persisting until 1954. This was custard without eggs: it came from institutional-sized cans lined up in rows in the school kitchen, and smaller versions of which could be found in the kitchens of those of us with English roots. Birds Eye custard contained corn starch, coloring and not much else; but the addition of boiling milk and sugar made it creamy and delicious.
Wayne, Premila, Irini, Nicholas, Muriel and I ate solid British food together five days a week.
Clearly British Colonialism – its economic and cultural domination – brought these children here, although none of us could have named that then, and certainly did not choose to think about it. As for me, the combination of the anti-semitism of Tsarist Russia, and World War II, had brought my parents together, thus producing me: part Lithuanian and South African Jew, part English/Dutch and both sides intellectuals at least a couple of generations back. 1963 found me sitting in this working class classroom in the middle of London, my head still spinning with the twists and turns of our travels.
Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Playtime came after lunch and then we circled in the playground, arms flying, shrieking laughter, running full speed from the boys, feuds developing between the boys and girls, alliances and friendships forming, kids picking on other kids who were too fat, or slow, or different in whatever ways, the rest of us whispering, by turns, about them by the high brick walls that hid from us the view of the slow barges on the muddy green canal.
Wayne was big for a ten year-old and the deep brown skin of his face and knuckles was usually covered in a pale layer of dust and dirt from either play or scuffles in the gravelled playground to which, mercifully, we were all released three times a day. Like me Irini was boyish, flounced her dress in defiance of the rule that determined girls, then, at Primrose Hill School, in 1963, should not wear trousers. At play-time we would tuck our skirts into the leg-elastic of our knickers and thus forming a kind of ad-hoc pair of shorts, do cartwheels and handstands and carry each other piggy-back around the playground, that also, by this age, was segregated by sex. The Infants, presumably not being pre-pubescent, were corralled in one red-brick-walled square of asphalt regardless of gender. One of Wayne’s many transgressions was the persistence with which he led his group of boys on forays into our Girls Playground which title was inscribed in 1800’s vintage stone over the entranceway.
When the bell rang announcing the end of playtime we lined up by gender under the Girls and Boys entrances. We returned to the classroom and took our places at wooden schooldesks where porcelain ink pots were still in use, either for fountain pens, for those who could afford them, or for the old dip pens still wielded by children then. Mr. Peters was in charge of the thirty of us ten year-olds. He wore a gray suit every day, black glasses and slicked back his black hair with grease leaving his high forehead hugely open which, when he was angered, bore shinily down upon his victim. He was not an unkind man, though, and, at least to me, seemed fair, though both loud and large.
Article 26.
(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
One afternoon Mr. Peters announced that we had a special visitor to speak with us. Beckoning through the glassed portion of the classroom door he welcomed in a tall, broad-shouldered man, who entered with measured steps and in his very bearing emanated courtesy and respect. After Mr. Peters shook his hand he turned to stand in front of us. The class immediately stilled, Wayne included. This was an unusual occurrence, to have, first of all a stranger in the classroom, and then this prepossessing man in a black suit, white shirt and black tie, black shoes shined to a high polish echoing his trimmed and glossy black hair which framed a handsome face the smooth color of the horse chestnuts we collected every autumn on Primrose Hill.
The man in the black suit introduced himself. He worked at the United Nations and he was here to tell us about that institution. From the shine of his hair, his even brown skin, and his meticulous, but colonial British accent, I recognized that he was from India. I will call him Mr. Chowdhary as I no longer remember his name.
Mr. Chowdhary spoke to us gravely. Addressing us as if we were ourselves diplomats, he recounted to our class the history of the United Nations. After the millions of deaths of the First World War, he explained, the League of Nations had formed. But without the support of key nations such as the United States, the League floundered and the world’s nations collapsed into the further horrors of World War II. Out of these atrocities, (which I knew of through the Diary of Anne Frank and the story of Hiroshima’s Sadako, a girl my age who folded her lost hope for life into 1000 paper cranes) the Allies made another attempt to create an international peacekeeping body and founded the UN in 1945.
Mr. Chowdhary impressed upon us that this attempt must succeed. I looked around at my classmates. Even Wayne was still paying attention. We knew about The Bomb. At Easter I’d already marched with my family on the annual Aldermaston demonstrations to Ban The Bomb. The need for countries to cooperate was no abstraction, at least to me, and I felt the responsibility this man from the United Nations was handing over to us. I knew well, too, that in South Africa, the country of my birth, such a classroom could never exist - us children would not be allowed to sit together, eat, learn, or play together, and an educated man such as he would never be allowed the dignity he offered us.
Article 4.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Mr. Chowdhary introduced us to the Declaration of Human Rights, spelling out these touchstones of human life. I felt the weight of his words and looked over to Wayne slouched at his desk, listening with an unfamiliar expression of concern on his face. We were connected, Wayne and I. This classroom connected us as our parents’ and grandparents’ paths crossed for that moment in us, their journeys criss-crossed in a restless travelling, flowing in the currents of history, pulled this way and that, locked in the gravitational pull of the globe’s economic, military, political and cultural upheavals. The image of Mr. Chowdhary, surrounded by his chalk diagrams of the Security Council and the General Assembly, stayed with me, along with the rough and complicated impressions of my variously-colored classmates – each one with a life and a story of their own threading back generations, like mine, to some other country and history which had arrived, then, at that moment, within the red-brick walls of Class One.
Later, when I grew up, I met Hector, a young man from Argentina. To Hector, as to my classmates years before, human rights were no abstraction. They were basic. Hector was a sewing-machine repairman and in that trade had travelled around the clothing factories of Buenos Aires using his mobility to organize seamstresses into trade unions. For this he had been arrested, tortured and imprisoned for five years by Argentina’s dictatorial government. I came to know him when he was a refugee newly arrived in California. Apart from the scars inflicted on him by the torturers, Hector had also brought out of prison with him the ability to read and write, skills his fellow prisoners taught him. He brought hope as well as trauma, and a wish to keep alive the spirit of the women and men he’d left behind, some still imprisoned, some dead, others simply ‘disappeared’.
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
When Hector told me his prison stories I thought of how many in South Africa had been tortured or killed in prison. I thought of friends who’d lost their lives in the struggle against apartheid. From the day Mr. Chowdhary taught me about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these rights had never been abstract to me either.
Now my own children are about the same age I was then. Last year my son Carlos learnt about the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child in his school. For homework he had to choose which of the rights was the most important to him. He picked the right to a name and nationality. I think about this and wonder if it because he is adopted from Honduras that he selected this particular right. But when I question him he cannot explain his choice.
The UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child was registered in 1989, ten years after the Convention on women’s rights. In the years since Mr. Chowdhary’s visit to my classroom the UN has expanded its work into these two new documents representing a growth in thinking internationally, based on years of struggle by humanitarians around the world.
These documents represent real people, real rights, real pain. They are an attempt to declare that, as human beings, we share a past, a present and a future. There are universal needs and rights that all of us deserve. This is something that children often understand better than adults.
Article 25.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Today, as I write this in Minneapolis, there is a pleasant smell in the air. I think it’s the barefoot Somali woman across the street who is watering her front lawn, splashing up the scent of wet grass into the dense heat. She, too, is a refugee, resettled now in this northern city.
Article 14.
(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
She is wrapped in a bright red shawl that covers her from head to hips, and beneath that her gold-patterned skirt is lifted up to her knee so it doesn’t get wet. Her calves, thus exposed, are the most I’ve ever seen of her body. Neemo, her youngest child, is ten and the same age as my daughter Rosa. On summer days they bike the neighborhood together, sometimes with Carmichael, a black American girl who lives two houses down, or other times, with Jacqueline and Vanessa, two white sisters from the next block. Apart from ‘black’ or ‘white’ I don’t know the specific ethnic origins of these US-born children. Neemo’s family are Moslem and so she wears long dresses or pants even on the hottest days, but she does not yet have to cover her head. When I pace my own lawn between paragraphs I’m aware of my skimpy blue shorts, my white legs and my tank top.
Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
My Somali neighbor and I smile and wave to each other through her spray of water. Our children make good neighbors of us both. We support each other, her and I: by welcoming each other’s children into our houses, by keeping our yards in order, by an open friendliness that doesn’t demand a common culture. It’s a delicate tightrope we walk though, allowing each others’ difference. And only made possible because our two families do not fear each other. Some basic things link us: love for our children, respect for our neighborhood and for each other, the right to privacy, to each have our beliefs…even a love of nature, such as we have it on a summer’s day in Minneapolis.
The Declarations and Conventions of the UN are controversial, fought over by those who claim they are Western-dominated, or ultra-feminist, or not far-reaching enough – there are many arguments both for and against. But they are an attempt to create a common ground of human standards upon which we all can walk. Children and adults alike need universal standards within which we can feel safe with each other regardless of the entrancing complexities of the historic, economic and cultural pasts we each carry forward into our futures.
Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Irini, Premila, Nicholas, Muriel and Wayne have grown up now. Sometimes I think of them, and of Hector too, who I lost touch with years ago. I wonder what has happened to each of them, how they’ve reached their middle years in this increasingly complicated world. Are they all still alive? Which of them has children? Perhaps their children also learned about human rights at school. I wonder if any of my old classmates are thinking about Mr. Chowdhary, on this, the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and remembering how he taught us, thirty-five years ago, that everyone has rights.
The full text of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be found at:
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
1998
(Published in slightly different form in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, 10 December, 1998)
Declaration
On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ... Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and "to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories."
(From the United Nations 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html)
I first learned about the United Nations in 1963 when I was a small and bespectacled resident of north London’s Primrose Hill Primary School. I was nine then and the UN was just twice my age. This year the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights celebrates its 50th birthday and I, at forty-four, still feel close to its purpose, as I did when I was young.
Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
Class One was on the second floor of Primrose Hill School, which was built, along with the rest of the neighborhood, in the late 1800s: its red brick and fake turrets backed up onto Regents’ Canal whose tow path led to Camden Lock. The lower floor held the Infants’ classrooms and the Nursery where I had started school as a tearful five-year old. I had inhabited each of the other classes in chronological order. Still, this did not make me feel at home. My accent was South African but when queried on this many of the English children could not believe I was from Africa. “Where’s yer grass skirt then?” I often heard, or “Yer not black then, are yer? - you ain’t never from Africa!” I felt a permanent stranger (a condition I would become used to) and predictably made fast friends with the latest arrivals who joined our class from some other far corner of the world. Their foreigness matched my own and as outsiders we stuck fast to each other.
Article 15.
(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
On my left in class sat Irini, her olive skin faded to a kind of grey by London’s lack of sunlight. Her family was Greek but she spoke in a broad native-born cockney accent which did not stop her teaching me to count to 10 in greek, a linguistic skill I have long since lost. Irini wore crumpled cotton dresses and was one of my special friends.
Premila was serious, like me, and I felt I knew why when I visited her home: there was something solemn about her family. Her mother wore a sari and seemed bowed down somehow as she moved carefully around the small rooms overfilled with furniture. Her father dressed in soft white cotton pants and shirt. Premila, true to children’s unkind teasing, really did smell different, of garlic and curry, and when I went to her house the smell was there too in the dark rooms of the brick house.
Wayne sat in the front row of the classroom – probably because he was naughty and this was a disciplinary measure that allowed Mr. Peters to keep an eye on him. His parents were immigrants from the West Indies, but he was born in London. On my other side sat Nicholas, son of a soon-to-be-famous and already-divorced writer, his head topped with tassles of blond hair soft as corn-silk. Nicholas was English, both sides English, born in England – although his class position made him almost as foreign as I in that working-class school. At that time Nicholas and I were the only middle class kids in our class.
Article 26.
(1) Everyone has the right to education.
Our neighborhood, formerly a wealthy Victorian area, had been run down for a long-time and was only now being rediscovered as a place for the young intelligentsia to buy cheap but high-ceilinged and salvageable properties. And these families, as they climbed the economic ladder, put money into their houses, unblocked fireplaces, stripped layers of pre-war wallpaper and exposed the Victorian elegance again, soon to be complemented with central heating and clever 60’s art hung upon the walls and sometimes created by the very artists who began to move in to the self-same neighborhood.
Article 27.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Meanwhile Irini, Premila, and Wayne’s families rented, shoulder to shoulder with us of the middle class, but without money or remodelling to fix up draughty houses or to heat with anything other than kerosene heaters.
In the smaller streets behind these big Victorian terraces were worker’s houses too dismal and decayed to become candidates for gentrification. Eventually they would be demolished to make way for new developments. But when I was at school many of my classmates lived in them. Among them was Muriel who was Irish and thin-faced with a lanky athletic body and dishwater-colored hair. She was the daughter of a char-lady, though not the same Irish char-lady who cleaned our house every Wednesday, a luxury that announced our move from poor intellectuals to the eventual (though not solid) wealth my father’s publishing business would generate.
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Muriel had a gift for writing confidently and at length. Her multiple-chapter 30 page story written carefully in longhand concerned the adventures of a kangaroo, and provided my earliest inspiration and artistic rivalry – to be able to write a chapter book! Despite her evident talents she left school early, at sixteen, to become a bank clerk.
Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
My classmates and I passed through each others’ homes, moving through cultures and carrying pieces of them with us into each others’ lives. But our daily school dinners served by uniformed dinner ladies began to merge our odors into one. London County Council provided not only our exercise books and pencils, but also a common diet: thin, grey slices of beef, real mashed potatoes, grey string beans. Or Bubble and Squeak: mashed potatoes, cabbage and bacon mixed together and baked. (Now I wonder about Premila and how the religious dietary restrictions were handled?) And the puddings…a favorite was chocolate sponge cake, hot and heavy, and generously covered in chocolate custard poured from a stainless steel LCC ladle. The custard appeared again, vanilla this time, over suet pudding, a lard, flour and raisin mixture that was sweet and satisfying. The custard must have originated during the War, whose effects were still felt then, in the late fifties and early sixties: the war-time rationing of eggs and sugar persisting until 1954. This was custard without eggs: it came from institutional-sized cans lined up in rows in the school kitchen, and smaller versions of which could be found in the kitchens of those of us with English roots. Birds Eye custard contained corn starch, coloring and not much else; but the addition of boiling milk and sugar made it creamy and delicious.
Wayne, Premila, Irini, Nicholas, Muriel and I ate solid British food together five days a week.
Clearly British Colonialism – its economic and cultural domination – brought these children here, although none of us could have named that then, and certainly did not choose to think about it. As for me, the combination of the anti-semitism of Tsarist Russia, and World War II, had brought my parents together, thus producing me: part Lithuanian and South African Jew, part English/Dutch and both sides intellectuals at least a couple of generations back. 1963 found me sitting in this working class classroom in the middle of London, my head still spinning with the twists and turns of our travels.
Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Playtime came after lunch and then we circled in the playground, arms flying, shrieking laughter, running full speed from the boys, feuds developing between the boys and girls, alliances and friendships forming, kids picking on other kids who were too fat, or slow, or different in whatever ways, the rest of us whispering, by turns, about them by the high brick walls that hid from us the view of the slow barges on the muddy green canal.
Wayne was big for a ten year-old and the deep brown skin of his face and knuckles was usually covered in a pale layer of dust and dirt from either play or scuffles in the gravelled playground to which, mercifully, we were all released three times a day. Like me Irini was boyish, flounced her dress in defiance of the rule that determined girls, then, at Primrose Hill School, in 1963, should not wear trousers. At play-time we would tuck our skirts into the leg-elastic of our knickers and thus forming a kind of ad-hoc pair of shorts, do cartwheels and handstands and carry each other piggy-back around the playground, that also, by this age, was segregated by sex. The Infants, presumably not being pre-pubescent, were corralled in one red-brick-walled square of asphalt regardless of gender. One of Wayne’s many transgressions was the persistence with which he led his group of boys on forays into our Girls Playground which title was inscribed in 1800’s vintage stone over the entranceway.
When the bell rang announcing the end of playtime we lined up by gender under the Girls and Boys entrances. We returned to the classroom and took our places at wooden schooldesks where porcelain ink pots were still in use, either for fountain pens, for those who could afford them, or for the old dip pens still wielded by children then. Mr. Peters was in charge of the thirty of us ten year-olds. He wore a gray suit every day, black glasses and slicked back his black hair with grease leaving his high forehead hugely open which, when he was angered, bore shinily down upon his victim. He was not an unkind man, though, and, at least to me, seemed fair, though both loud and large.
Article 26.
(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
One afternoon Mr. Peters announced that we had a special visitor to speak with us. Beckoning through the glassed portion of the classroom door he welcomed in a tall, broad-shouldered man, who entered with measured steps and in his very bearing emanated courtesy and respect. After Mr. Peters shook his hand he turned to stand in front of us. The class immediately stilled, Wayne included. This was an unusual occurrence, to have, first of all a stranger in the classroom, and then this prepossessing man in a black suit, white shirt and black tie, black shoes shined to a high polish echoing his trimmed and glossy black hair which framed a handsome face the smooth color of the horse chestnuts we collected every autumn on Primrose Hill.
The man in the black suit introduced himself. He worked at the United Nations and he was here to tell us about that institution. From the shine of his hair, his even brown skin, and his meticulous, but colonial British accent, I recognized that he was from India. I will call him Mr. Chowdhary as I no longer remember his name.
Mr. Chowdhary spoke to us gravely. Addressing us as if we were ourselves diplomats, he recounted to our class the history of the United Nations. After the millions of deaths of the First World War, he explained, the League of Nations had formed. But without the support of key nations such as the United States, the League floundered and the world’s nations collapsed into the further horrors of World War II. Out of these atrocities, (which I knew of through the Diary of Anne Frank and the story of Hiroshima’s Sadako, a girl my age who folded her lost hope for life into 1000 paper cranes) the Allies made another attempt to create an international peacekeeping body and founded the UN in 1945.
Mr. Chowdhary impressed upon us that this attempt must succeed. I looked around at my classmates. Even Wayne was still paying attention. We knew about The Bomb. At Easter I’d already marched with my family on the annual Aldermaston demonstrations to Ban The Bomb. The need for countries to cooperate was no abstraction, at least to me, and I felt the responsibility this man from the United Nations was handing over to us. I knew well, too, that in South Africa, the country of my birth, such a classroom could never exist - us children would not be allowed to sit together, eat, learn, or play together, and an educated man such as he would never be allowed the dignity he offered us.
Article 4.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Mr. Chowdhary introduced us to the Declaration of Human Rights, spelling out these touchstones of human life. I felt the weight of his words and looked over to Wayne slouched at his desk, listening with an unfamiliar expression of concern on his face. We were connected, Wayne and I. This classroom connected us as our parents’ and grandparents’ paths crossed for that moment in us, their journeys criss-crossed in a restless travelling, flowing in the currents of history, pulled this way and that, locked in the gravitational pull of the globe’s economic, military, political and cultural upheavals. The image of Mr. Chowdhary, surrounded by his chalk diagrams of the Security Council and the General Assembly, stayed with me, along with the rough and complicated impressions of my variously-colored classmates – each one with a life and a story of their own threading back generations, like mine, to some other country and history which had arrived, then, at that moment, within the red-brick walls of Class One.
Later, when I grew up, I met Hector, a young man from Argentina. To Hector, as to my classmates years before, human rights were no abstraction. They were basic. Hector was a sewing-machine repairman and in that trade had travelled around the clothing factories of Buenos Aires using his mobility to organize seamstresses into trade unions. For this he had been arrested, tortured and imprisoned for five years by Argentina’s dictatorial government. I came to know him when he was a refugee newly arrived in California. Apart from the scars inflicted on him by the torturers, Hector had also brought out of prison with him the ability to read and write, skills his fellow prisoners taught him. He brought hope as well as trauma, and a wish to keep alive the spirit of the women and men he’d left behind, some still imprisoned, some dead, others simply ‘disappeared’.
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
When Hector told me his prison stories I thought of how many in South Africa had been tortured or killed in prison. I thought of friends who’d lost their lives in the struggle against apartheid. From the day Mr. Chowdhary taught me about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these rights had never been abstract to me either.
Now my own children are about the same age I was then. Last year my son Carlos learnt about the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child in his school. For homework he had to choose which of the rights was the most important to him. He picked the right to a name and nationality. I think about this and wonder if it because he is adopted from Honduras that he selected this particular right. But when I question him he cannot explain his choice.
The UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child was registered in 1989, ten years after the Convention on women’s rights. In the years since Mr. Chowdhary’s visit to my classroom the UN has expanded its work into these two new documents representing a growth in thinking internationally, based on years of struggle by humanitarians around the world.
These documents represent real people, real rights, real pain. They are an attempt to declare that, as human beings, we share a past, a present and a future. There are universal needs and rights that all of us deserve. This is something that children often understand better than adults.
Article 25.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Today, as I write this in Minneapolis, there is a pleasant smell in the air. I think it’s the barefoot Somali woman across the street who is watering her front lawn, splashing up the scent of wet grass into the dense heat. She, too, is a refugee, resettled now in this northern city.
Article 14.
(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
She is wrapped in a bright red shawl that covers her from head to hips, and beneath that her gold-patterned skirt is lifted up to her knee so it doesn’t get wet. Her calves, thus exposed, are the most I’ve ever seen of her body. Neemo, her youngest child, is ten and the same age as my daughter Rosa. On summer days they bike the neighborhood together, sometimes with Carmichael, a black American girl who lives two houses down, or other times, with Jacqueline and Vanessa, two white sisters from the next block. Apart from ‘black’ or ‘white’ I don’t know the specific ethnic origins of these US-born children. Neemo’s family are Moslem and so she wears long dresses or pants even on the hottest days, but she does not yet have to cover her head. When I pace my own lawn between paragraphs I’m aware of my skimpy blue shorts, my white legs and my tank top.
Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
My Somali neighbor and I smile and wave to each other through her spray of water. Our children make good neighbors of us both. We support each other, her and I: by welcoming each other’s children into our houses, by keeping our yards in order, by an open friendliness that doesn’t demand a common culture. It’s a delicate tightrope we walk though, allowing each others’ difference. And only made possible because our two families do not fear each other. Some basic things link us: love for our children, respect for our neighborhood and for each other, the right to privacy, to each have our beliefs…even a love of nature, such as we have it on a summer’s day in Minneapolis.
The Declarations and Conventions of the UN are controversial, fought over by those who claim they are Western-dominated, or ultra-feminist, or not far-reaching enough – there are many arguments both for and against. But they are an attempt to create a common ground of human standards upon which we all can walk. Children and adults alike need universal standards within which we can feel safe with each other regardless of the entrancing complexities of the historic, economic and cultural pasts we each carry forward into our futures.
Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Irini, Premila, Nicholas, Muriel and Wayne have grown up now. Sometimes I think of them, and of Hector too, who I lost touch with years ago. I wonder what has happened to each of them, how they’ve reached their middle years in this increasingly complicated world. Are they all still alive? Which of them has children? Perhaps their children also learned about human rights at school. I wonder if any of my old classmates are thinking about Mr. Chowdhary, on this, the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and remembering how he taught us, thirty-five years ago, that everyone has rights.
The full text of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be found at:
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html