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Two tributes to Adam These two tributes, written by CCTS members, missed being included in the collection referred to above, so it seemed good to include them here. Adam We were enormously influenced by Adam, of course, as anyone involved in work with conflict during several generations must have been. We were fortunate enough to be able to ‘apprentice’ ourselves to him occasionally, and learned a lot. Among the many memories, one stands out. We were walking through the wet snow from our flat in Belfast to an Indian restaurant, where Adam insisted that the only way to judge a restaurant was to try their onion bhajis, so we did, and they got good reviews. During the meal, we got to talking about Adam’s work between Nigeria and Biafra during the civil war there in the ’60s. At a particularly difficult moment, Adam was meeting with General Gowon, head of the Nigerian federal state, who had a message he wanted delivered to his opposite number in Biafra. He asked Adam, “Will you be able to deliver this message?” Adam replied that, since no direct connections were allowed, he would have to fly to Lisbon, thence to Sao Tome, and onward to Enugu in a very small plane. General Gowon pointed out that his army would be trying to shoot down any plane heading in that direction. Adam’s reply? “Well, if you want your message to get through, you’d better hope they miss.” This helps me keep the perspective that not only the mediator, but the parties need to learn to value the process, if anything is to enable them to break out of the boxes they find themselves in. Needless to say, the plane got through, as did the message. It did not bring a breakthrough to end the war, but Adam was always convinced that the generosity of federal soldiers toward the defeated Biafrans came in part from this kind of indirect communication between the heads of the two armies. ADAM CURLE: Reflections and memories “May your gifts of Compassion, Generosity, Courage, Wisdom and above all, Love, flower within and around you in these strange times, and forever.” So ran Adam’s last Christmas card. So ran his life, or at least the part of his life that I was privileged to share in a little. I started communicating with Adam in the very early 1980s when I read his Swarthmore Lecture, True Justice, for the first time. I was so fired up by what he said, and by the inextricable juxtaposition he elucidated of the challenge of peace and the personal commitment to it, that I wrote to him out of the blue, to say so. He replied, full of encouragement. Subsequently I devoured two of his other earlier books, Mystics and Militants and Education for Liberation. He was a major spur to my becoming engaged in the peace movement full time, from a background of more local activism in CND, CAAT and other organisations. He was also directly responsible for my wife Jane and me becoming QPS representatives in Southern Africa. We had been recruited with a family of three. When it transpired that we were actually about to have a fourth child, QPS announced that they were withdrawing the offer. It took a visit from Adam and Anne, followed by an unrecorded intervention by Adam in Friends House politics, to reverse this decision. As it happened, our relatively large family (still quite small by regional standards) proved a major factor in our being able to develop social relationships, a crucial part of the job. Adam came to the first of the Working with Conflict courses set up by Responding to Conflict (RTC), in 1993, and shared his wisdom freely and with engaging diffidence, as he always did. With all his previous experience of mediation, he enthralled the course members by saying how he was having to unlearn so much of what he knew and had practised, as a peacemaker, in the new post Cold War world. And it was clear that this was a pleasure to him. Learning, reflecting, probing, was his forte. We came together at the early meetings of CCTS, in 1994, around the issue of Rwanda in particular, about which he was passionate. He was a great companion down the years, so often humorous and deep at the same time – and an excellent brewer of beer. Anne was a wonderful partner for him, a very live wire, supportive yet quietly attentive not to let him get an exaggerated sense of his achievements. One evening, we had been discussing Adam’s work with peace activists during the war in Bosnia and she suddenly said: “Everyone loves Adam, but they are always disappointed with his workshops.” Even Adam was lost for words, if only briefly. I last saw him in Wimbledon a few months before he died. He was, as ever, writing another book, and was preoccupied by the presence of a dark cloud which he sensed had begun to settle over humankind since the first world war, made up of accumulated miseries and atrocities. He saw the cloud as traumatising our psyches and paralysing humankind, preventing positive action. We talked at length about how to resist and transform this cloud. He offered to come and work with RTC’s programme in the Middle East. At ninety? ‘You must be joking’ was my first thought. But this time he wasn’t. His commitment to the struggle for justice was undying. He lives on through his books, his quiet, often brave actions, and above all his unquenchable, loving spirit. |
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