Joglo Parent for Non Violent Class as part of creating a culture of peace in the family. February 2024 at peace Place Pati. Petrus Photo’s
” When ruthless power reigns, courage is defending the truth “
Mahatma Gandhi
In the Basic-Advanced Creating Cultures of Justice and Peace training, in a session on bringing out the good in oneself, I had a problem with how to bring out the strength in myself, let alone bringing out the good in others. Afterward, one of the mentors mentioned that this was one of the legacies of colonialism. It made me think hard.
I realized, for the first time, that colonialism and imperialism occurred not only in Indonesia’s sociological-anthropological space but also entered our minds, undermining the autonomy of our minds and imprisoning our conscience, making it difficult to find the truth.
Indonesia’s long experience of colonialism and imperialism prior to independence left a lot of wounds, trauma and loss of life. Humans living in today’s post-colonialism still feel the impact of colonialism and imperialism. The experience of colonialism has affected the worldview of people in the former colonies and shapes their ideas and attitudes in ways that perpetuate those impacts.
It takes a long time for the colonized mind and mentality to realize how deeply and powerfully colonialism has gripped and rooted itself. It requires waking up from a long sleep and building a new consciousness, an enlightenment on how to free oneself from the history of colonialism that creates a syndrome of fear, insecurity and the inability to find one’s authentic self.
In the River of Life exercise, I saw that we have power to make changes today and tomorrow. Realizing that we have the power helps me to imagine a tomorrow we have changed. Power and change are two words I reflected on throughout the training.
“There will be no wide-scale revolution until there is a revolution of the self, on an individual level. The revolution has to happen from within first,” said Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors. The big structure of our society will not change without being sparked by conscious individuals. Without consciousness, individuals are just zombies.
Awareness will allow us to have a more creative imagination and resist the old oppressive mentality. To start stopping the colonial legacy requires knowing we can be confident, capable, creative, caring, engaged, connected, courageous, authentic, and pure.
“An authentic human being is a human being who not only lives for himself, but also for his society, and not just lives, but lives with a clear meaning and purpose”, says Pakistani poet, Sir Muhammad Iqbal.
Yogyakarta, March 5th 2024
Alumnus Basic-Advanced Training in Culture of Justice and Peace Alternative to Violence Project, Peace Place Pati, 2024
Ahmad Salahuddin Mansur is a social movement and peace activist based in Yogyakarta. He led several youth movements and taught Islamology and dialogue at several Christian universities. He incorporated the values of peace and the paradigm of nonviolence, especially among young people. As a person who previously received a poor educational pattern regarding diversity in his family and experienced domestic violence, he is motivated to encourage other young people to experience encounters and learn together for a better world amidst the banality of violence around us, whether in levels of family or society. He seeks to convince more young people who may still carry scars when they want to become adults so that they do not continue the spiral of violence to the next generation.