Vigilante justice

As we drove into Kumba on our return from Limbe, there was a dead body lying on the road covered up with a few banana leaves weighed down with rocks. Kara’s parents said the body was there when they left that morning, but it was naked and in the middle of the road. We shook our heads and tsk-tsk’d about the sadness (not to mention the smell) of leaving a body to lie out in the open like that for such a span of time, undealt with, and in such a climate.

When we reached the Lutheran compound and told the Cameroonian worker there about it, he said it was a thief who got caught and felt the wrath of a mob. Occupational hazard, he suggested with a shrug.

The next day, another Cameroonian said she had the goods on it from her daughter’s friend who was there when it happened. The man had fathered a child but the girl’s parents were incensed and wouldn’t allow him to see the child. They speculate he tried to see the girl and/or the baby and suffered for it. “He had a hole in his back,” she said, so he must have been knifed somehow.

Frankly the second story sounds a lot less believable, and has an awful lot of holes in it for an eyewitness account. Either way, I suppose, it’s a tale of vigilante justice, and I’d say it’s a tragic thing any way you look at it.

Comments

Tom said…

I agree it's sad, but if you think about it, all earthly justice is vigilante justice. Here in the 'developed world', we've got a lot of fancy ideas about how to mete it out, but ultimately we're just human beings deciding how to deal with other human beings. Sitting in special rooms with special titles and a long list of paper laws will never change that completely.

January 1, 2008 at 8:58 AM

My favourite nativity scene

“There’s no accounting for taste.” That’s my dad’s favourite way of explaining personal tastes that are incomprehensible to him, like living downtown, and riding bike in winter. The inexplicable factors which determine an individual’s likes or dislikes are probably the only way I can explain why my favourite nativity scene contains a horribly caricatured black magus, a random adoring child attired – to my fancy – like a Roma person, an old shepherd carrying some sort of blunderbuss. And a haloed holy family with an 18-month-old baby Jesus. This is the "Christmas Manger Set – the Christmas story in beautiful cut-out scenes and life-like figures." See how the 1940s-era family admires the realistic flourishes, like raw wood beams and straw protruding from the edge of the roofline; the rough, broken wood of the stalls; the tasselled camels; the richly dressed magi; the woolly sheep; the Bethlehemites on the path in the background, ostensibly out to get water, judging...

Upside down economics of Jesus: household action and global change

--Presented at a CAWG event in Altona -- In Living More with Less , Doris Janzen Longacre shares a story about envelopes from Marie Moyer, a missionary in India, who was studying Hindi with Panditji. Marie writes: “From his philosophic mind, which probed the meaning of events and circumstances, I learned more than Hindi.” Just before her teacher’s arrival one day before Christmas, she’d received and opened a pile of Christmas cards and discarded the envelopes as he walked in the room. She writes: “He sat down soberly and studied the situation, then he solemnly scolded me: ‘the reverberation of this wasteful act will be felt around the world’.” Marie was stunned. “What do you mean?” she asked him. “Those envelopes,” he said, pointing to the wastebasket. “You could write on the inside of them.” “Chagrined”, Marie apologized and rescued the envelopes with the help of Panditji, who “caressed each one” as he pulled it out of the garbage. This forever changed Marie’s relationship to p...

Broken people...

After reflecting with one coworker on how often churches in all their forms really mess up and hurt a whole bunch of people in the process -- and how "we gotta do better" -- I stumbled into another conversation with a coworker which highlighted our brokenness, and I suddenly realized what was wrong with my take in the first. I wanted the church to be better at fixing our mistakes, or better yet, at not making them in the first place. But maybe this "fix-it" attitude is partly the reason we keep blowing it again and again! My friend recollected an experience when a church community was in a terrible place: compounded mistakes, hurts, and frustrations had blown up, spewing pain all over all parties. (I'm sure anyone with a long history in the church can think of one, if not several, such occasions in their past.) A new Christian who observed all these goings on responded in an unexpected way. Instead of "you people are a bunch of screw-ups! How could this pos...

kar0ling

Search This Blog