Lies My Teacher Told Me

dictatorship, a parliament, or a

communist dictatorship. Voice or no

voice, the people can always be

brought to the bidding of the leaders.

That is easy. All you have to do is tell

them that they are being attacked

and denounce the pacifists for lack

of patriotism.

—GERMAN FIELD MARSHALL HERMANN GOERING, NUREMBERG, APRIL 18, 1946^2

When information which properly

belongs to the public is

systematically withheld by those in

power, the people soon become

ignorant of their own affairs,

distrustful of those who manage

them, and—eventually—incapable of

determining their own destinies.

—RICHARD M. NIXON^3

MANY AFRICAN SOCIETIES divide humans into three categories: those still
alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose
time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead.
They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who
can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in
anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves
the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are
not forgotten but revered. Many, like George Washington or Clara Barton, can

be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference.^4

Because we lack these Kiswahili terms, we rarely think about this
distinction systematically, but we also make it. Consider how we read an
account of an event we lived through, especially one in which we ourselves