Anger and Violence

Continuing his series on art, Colm Brophy recounts an experience of anger and violence in Zambia and its effect on him.

Some images force us to think about difficult realities. Anger and violence begin when there is injustice. I’ve had a few personal encounters with violence. This is one of them.

I had just parked when the door of my car opened, and I was attacked by a powerful man who dragged me out and threw me to the ground, tearing the skin on the right calf of my leg. When I landed on the hard tarmac, I found another man was holding a gun to my head while my car was being robbed. I found my immediate reaction to the assault very unexpected. At the time it was happening brilliant thoughts of how I could reverse the situation were flying through my head. I felt absolutely no fear. What I felt was rage at being robbed. I said to myself maybe this guy doesn’t have a bullet in the gun, it’s just an act. It’s a toy gun. I could easily grab the barrel. I don’t want my car stolen. But then

I felt his hand shaking violently, the pistol touching my head as he shook. I said to myself, no, the gun is loaded. This poor fellow is really scared that he’ll have to shoot me. I was lying there thinking all this at two minutes to ten on a bright April morning in 1998 outside the gates of the Irish embassy in Lusaka, Zambia. It was due to open at ten. The gates might open any minute. I had passports and visa applications in the car, which I was delivering for others. I thought, I don’t want to lose them. My first assailant was still trying to start the car. Maybe I can shout over to him and tell him he can have the car but please throw out the documents on the ground. But then if I do that, I argued with myself, this fellow with the gun to my head will react and shoot me. So I stayed quiet, lying flat out, not afraid, but fuming and furious. Then the engine started. The driver reversed fast missing my leg by inches. The man with the gun jumped in keeping the gun trained on me. They were gone, raising the dust. I stood up and shouted at the watchmen opening the embassy gate, ‘Give me a car I want to catch those fellows’. ‘Take it easy’, they said, and the next minute the ambassador was there phoning the police and inviting me in for a cup of tea and a place of calm.

I made this rough sketch of myself lying on the ground with a gun to my head a few days later, when it really hit me what had happened. I wanted to help get it out of my system. Often our art gets a difficult situation into the open and maybe then out of the system.

The injustice here was that the two who took my car were not the real thieves. At the police station, after giving my statement to two kindly young policemen, one of them said, ‘Can you give us your statement?’ ‘I’ve just given it’, I said. ‘Yes, we were listening, but we need to write it down now.’ And then, half way through my second statement, one of them looked up at me with a kind of sad face and said, ‘We are really very sorry sir about your car, but there is nothing we can do.’

‘What? Isn’t the whole point of the statement so that you can do something to find the thieves?’ ‘Yes sir, but you see there is nothing we can do because our elders are involved.’ At last the penny dropped. Some older policemen at that station were in league with business men who hire young men for a small reward to steal cars for them. I suppressed my anger at the injustice. Could I have done more?

In the Easter story, we are aware that the story being told is one of suffering, of lack of resistance and then triumph over evil and death.