The girls of Chibok have a right to dream

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/16/chibok-nigerian-schoolgirls-release

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How can the kidnapped girls of Chibok school still be missing? World leaders promised swift action over this most appalling of crimes. Thousands around the world tweeted their concern. Michelle Obama, Cara Delevingne, and the cast of The Expendables 3 posed for solemn pictures holding signs reading “#BringBackOurGirls”.

And yet somehow, despite the intervention of a bewildered Sylvester Stallone, the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram has resisted the world’s pleas to release the schoolchildren it seized in northern Nigeria in April.

Excuse the tone. It’s too easy to mock celebrity participation in social media campaigns, and Stallone, Delevingne et al were at least doing something. But six months after the girls were taken, the contrast between the rampaging outrage of the Twitter campaign and the conspicuous absence in Nigeria of much urgency about their plight is so grotesque it is almost comical.

When 50 protesters, among them children who escaped from the militants, tried to march to the presidential villa in Abuja on Tuesday to demand action for the 219 who are still missing, they were surrounded by riot police. Yes, riot police. Supporters of the villa’s resident Goodluck Jonathan, meanwhile, have co-opted the hashtag, urging voters in February’s presidential election to #BringBackGoodluck2015.

All in all, it’s been a mixed week to be a girl at school. Malala Yousafzai may have won the Nobel peace prize, but in her homeland of Pakistan many have been persuaded that the education campaigner is a western stooge. Across the world, 58 million children who should be in primary school are not.

I want to turn off the lights and curl up in a little ball when I think about this stuff. And yet … Progress on access to education may have stalled, according to the NGO A World at School, but it points out that since 2000, when the Millennium Development Goals were agreed at the UN, 40 million children who would otherwise have been excluded from school have been enrolled. In the coming year it hopes to gather tens of millions of signatures holding world leaders to their commitments to ensure every child can study.

I was reminded of the Chibok girls when thinking about another young woman who was commemorated this week, the 19th-century mathematician Ada Lovelace, regarded by many as the world’s first computer programmer. When Lovelace was 12, based on her examinations of birds wings and the topology of the land she wrote a book called Flyology, having resolved that she wanted to fly.

The girls of Chibok and Pakistan, and of Gaza and Syria, have every right to dream the same dreams.

Keep Belfast festive

I watched ’71, Yann Demange’s thriller about a British soldier stranded in the streets of Troubles-era Belfast, with a mixture of lockjaw tension and vague recognition. Much of Belfast is unrecognisable now from the scarred terraces that I remember from my Northern Irish childhood. The city’s bars and restaurants are rammed, while its arts scene is more vibrant than it has ever been.

So there was dismay when Northern Ireland’s tourism minister announced earlier this month that a fund used to kickstart local community events was to be cancelled, throwing the existence of many of the 65 events and community festivals affected into question overnight.

It is a story repeated with depressing regularity across austerity Britain, where cash-strapped councils often consider the arts to be the thing their residents can most easily live without. But in a city that is still establishing community traditions that transcend its divisions, the loss of its newly festive culture would be a tragedy.