Understanding my "why?" - Damu Smith, Franz Fanon and thinking about health

[NB: This is the first in a series of blog posts that I’ll be writing about why and how I made the transition from working in international economic policy to helping people optimise their nutrition and overall health. Be sure to sign up to receive updates when I post the next part of the series.]

On September 11, 2001 I was in Washington DC. The planes hitting the world trade center were the news that greeted me as I was settling into my day at work. My partner was at the Amnesty International office opposite the Pentagon and saw the Pentagon on fire.

I can clearly remember the air of panic and then the eerie calm that took over the city. I can also remember the hunger for vengeance that seemed to be everywhere. There was, even on that day, an assumption that the US would retaliate and that the retaliation would cause even more death and havoc than what had happened in New York and Washington DC.

There were a handful of voices calling for something different. One of those voices was Damu Smith. I knew of Damu through his role in the Environmental Justice movement. He was the founder of the Black Environmental Justice network. After 9-11 he also helped to establish a group called Black Voices for Peace. He was, as I say, one of a handful of rational voices calling for adherence to international law rather than just retribution. His arguments were strong in part because he had spent time travelling the world. He talked about his time in Angola and the damage that was still being caused by land mines that had been purchased in the USA at the time when the US was funding wars in the region.

Damu was a powerful voice and a powerful activist. Most of us knew him because he would always be hosting conversations on the local Pacifica outlet, WPFW, where I also ran into him once or twice. I was a very young activist at the time but he was always laughing and jovial with me. A very kind man.

But in May of 2006 at the age of 55, Damu’s life was cut short by colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer is the 3rd most common form of cancer world wide and is more common among some minority populations including Black Americans. Some of that may be genetics, but most likely it’s stress related.

While I barely knew Damu, the experience hit me hard. Damu had been a core piece of a very small activist community in Washington DC. Of course we would carry on without him, but what could we have been with him? That’s a question which will never have an answer.

Of course we’ve all experienced loss and we’ve all experienced the loss of a friend whose loss was sudden and unexpected. "Before their time" is the cliche.

But for me as someone who was interested in how social change and transformation happens this started raising some questions. Of course there’s an element of luck when it comes to things like cancer. But there’s also an element of lifestyle. Could Damu’s death be connected to the kind of high pressure lifestyle he was living? Could it be connected to things like diet? Like most of my friends, I don’t think Damu cared that much about what he was eating. He ate what was around him. I think he tried to eat healthy but did he even know what that means? And what about exercise, meditation and other lifestyle factors?

Now at the time I didn’t have answers even to the question of nutrition. I thought that vegetarianism and veganism was the answer and I thought that what I was doing was going to work for everyone. Little did I know that what I was doing not only didn’t work for everyone, it didn’t even work for me. But my health problems started about a decade after Damu died.

Looking back on it what Damu’s death did was to begin to get me asking questions. What could we be doing differently as a community to take care of our own? How can we begin to prioritise self care and especially the care of our own health while also doing the hard work of making the world a better place?

At the time I didn’t have answers to these questions but I began to understand that they were questions worth struggling with. I remembered the case of Franz Fanon, one of the most gifted anti-colonial thinkers of the 20th century whose life was cut short by leukemia at the age of 36. What might have happened had Fanon lived even just another decade? More importantly, what about the next person with that level of genius? Would we lose them too early to preventable disease?

Damu's death shook me. It shook all of us in the activist community. Not just losing a friend, but the implications of that. But it wasn't until the issues struck closer to home when one of my best friends was diagnosed with cancer that I got serious about trying to find answers.

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