It's funny how you come upon little bits of Ireland in even the remotest parts of Africa. On my last visit to Zimbabwe, my taxi-driver bore the name of Oscar, the mythological grandson of Fionn MacCumhail. Oscar owed his name to the Irish missionaries who had raised him in an orphanage.
Even today in many parts of the world, you're liable to stumble upon a dusty backstreet named after the hunger-striker Bobby Sands. And you'll find most educated Africans are conversant with, and highly interested in, the problems of Northern Ireland. They may find it hard to get their tongues around words like Sinn Fein, but they often have a sophisticated understanding of the North's politics. Contrast this with our appreciation of conflict situations in Africa and other parts of the developing world. Most of the reports you hear concentrate on individual acts of violence or disaster - killings, bomb explosions, troop movements, famine, disease, and so on. The Western world - or more precisely, the Western media - is too self-engrossed to bother providing much analysis of conflicts in the poorer parts of the world.
If people in Africa know anything about Ireland, it is generally because of our nationalist history or because they have read news reports of the violence in Northern Ireland. The Irish struggle against colonial oppression is something many in the developing world can identify with, especially those like Oscar who were educated by Irish missionaries. For leaders as diverse as Mahatma Gandhi and Robert Mugabe, Irish history has been an inspiration and a source of tactics.
In contrast, the modern-day Ireland of the Celtic Tiger is a faceless beast that holds no special resonance for Africans. This Ireland is a minor member of the elite club of nations that controls the world's purse-strings and dictates the terms of trade to the poor nations of the world.
The language we use to describe conflict situations in the developing world is often loaded. Thus we frequently hear about "tribal" conflicts in countries like Kenya or Rwanda, but this word is hardly ever used in reference to the Northern conflict. There is also a supposition that the violence in the North could never get as bad as that seen in many African conflicts. There are arguments for and against this thesis. On the one hand, 3,000 or so deaths in the North seem minuscule when set against the million victims of the Rwandan genocide. But then the North has a smaller population than any of the hotspots with which it might be compared.
But on the other hand, individual acts of violence committed during the past 30 years of conflict on this island easily match the atrocities committed in many other scenes of war. Some people believe the North could descend into a more murderous civil war. However, the majority view is that Britain, the EU and/or the US would never allow the situation to deteriorate to such an extent. This can hardly be said of Rwanda, where we have learned in recent months that the US, France, the UN and other players all knew before 1994 that plans for a genocide were afoot, and yet did nothing to prevent it. Rwanda's misfortune is that it is small, bereft of resources, remote (from the West) and easily ignored. Ireland, while hardly a world power, is too close to the centres of power to be neglected. Or is it - as many Bosnians would ask?
Post-apartheid South Africa is often cited as a model for the kind of reconciliation needed in the North, and its Truth and Reconciliation Commission is singled out as an initiative which would work well in an Irish context.
But other countries, such as Argentina, Mozambique or Ethiopia, have largely overcome the trauma of recent conflict to create societies that offer their citizens hope for the future. And isn't that what it's all about?
