By Garda Ghista
Our sister Amina was freed from death by stoning on the last day of September, 2003. Many of us did not know Amina Lawal was a divorced woman from Katsina State in Nigeria, sentenced to death by stoning for adultery on the grounds of becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Many of us did not even know that our sister was in danger – we did not even know that we had a sister. We live in an age that is called post-human - an age wherein humanity is posthumous. For many of us, Amina was a flickering figure that appeared on a news sound byte. This is what post-human means. People are reduced to disposable, ephemeral images manipulated by a remote. These images describe her in the traditional modernistic labels of “Nigerian,” “Muslim,” and “woman.” What these labels do is to create a feeling that she is “alien,” and hence we have no responsibility to even care. Essentially the nationalism of the modern era of humanism is, as former UN General Romeo Dallaire said, just another kind of racism.
