Build wells, not walls

It's been six months since Mamadou Tanou Barrywasshotand killed along with five other worshippers at a mosque in Quebec City. Before that fatal night, the tech worker and father had a dream: he had wanted to build a well for a village in Guinea.

Journalist and activist Will Prosper shares how Barry's death affected him, and why he's determined to finish what his fellow Quebecercould not.

On the fateful evening of January 29, 2017, my heart sank as I learned the tragic news: there had been a shooting at a Quebec City mosque. Details were spreading like wildfire over social media.

As the media were still struggling to make sense of what had happened, some of us already suspected what we felt too damn well: this was a white supremacist terrorist attack.

As an activist and journalist, I knewthe hate didn'terupt overnight.

The volcano had been fuelled by some of Quebec's City's most popular radio talk shows, aided by politicians stirring the lava.But despite the extreme ambient heat, most had refused to see the smoke.

That same mosque had been vandalized a couple of times before the shooting.

For months, myself and others had already been pushing for a public consultation on systemic racism, but the government of Quebec has only recently responded to our requests.

As James Baldwin once said, "These people have deluded themselves so long, they really don't think I'm human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means ... they have become moral monsters."

Over the years, racialized folks in this country have raised red flags, and still we remained dehumanized in the eyes of so many. The anger at this denial was like a fire within me.

Walls that divide

My heart sank again as I wondered, after all these years on the path of activism, whetherI had lost my way and started to buildwalls inside myself; walls growing higher and wider. I built them to protect myself, to remain efficient and to prevent myself frombeing consumed in this era of fast news and knee-jerk reactions.

As I grieved our fellow Quebecersin the days that followed, my sadness somehow started to make me feel more alive, more connected, more human.

I could not stop myself from thinking of the killer. What he feared of Muslims had ultimately provento be true of himself: he was a moral monster, incapable of seeing humanity in his victims, and society had helped him erect those walls.

Walls have been dividing us, and oppressing us, and numbing the empathy in so many of us for centuries.

All these barriers still stand between us, and yet our fates remainintertwined. One day, we'll need to face this reality and acknowledge that here, in Canada, we have our very own walls that urgently need to be to taken down.

Lost in my thoughts, still grieving but reconnected with my humanity, I came across an article that showed me a different way forward.

Dig deeper

The article mentioned that one of the six victims, Mamadou Tanou Barry, had the goal of building two wells in his village of Conakry, Guinea. I posted the article with this comment: "one life broken, how many more affected."

Right away, friends came forward to help me get in touch with Barry's family. We proposed to help fundraise for hiswidow and his two young children to fulfill Mamadou's legacy. They were very happy to have been contacted by total strangers, from different origins, working together because of the humanity we shared with a typical Canadian. Mamadou had been a parent, an IT professional and a man trying to make a better world for his or should I say our family abroad.

Although I've never had the chance to meet Mamadou, I'll forever be grateful to him.

His lost life was now allowing me to reconnect with my life and humanity, to shatter my own walls and to readjust my own path.

The father of two indirectly reminded me, in a metaphorical way, that when you build a well, when you dig deep below the surface, you can land in a scary place. But in these dark spaces there's still life flowing all over, and from that source, you can bring life to the surface.

For all the sacrifices Mamadou Tanou Barry made, it's only right that we fulfill his legacy.