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Peter Gabriel, musician and human rights advocate, on "In the Shadow of the Buddha"

Peter Gabriel’s music and lyrics have impacted me deeply. More than twenty years ago at an Amnesty International rock concert I heard him sing ‘Biko’. That song was an introduction to Stephen Biko and to human rights abuses around the world. But perhaps more importantly, listening to that song was a call to act to combat such abuses.

I wrote about that day in “In the Shadow of the Buddha”:
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“I first came to know about human rights when I was sixteen at a music concert in Italy in 1988. I was attending high school as an exchange student in Ravenna, the same year Amnesty International’s Human Rights Now! concert toured the world with Bruce Springsteen, Sting, and Peter Gabriel headlining. With our peace and anarchy pins secured to army satchels, my friends and I attended the show in Turin along with sixty thousand screaming fans. I signed a few petitions on the way into the soccer stadium, not knowing anything about the causes to which I was putting my name. We listened to Tracy Chapman and Sting speak about the fortieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but we were really just waiting for the music.

After six hours, Peter Gabriel took the stage. He began telling of an oppressive country where racism was enshrined in its constitution, and of a man, Stephen Biko, who dared to stand against such injustice. Biko was an antiapartheid leader in South Africa who was jailed, brutally tortured, and murdered in police custody in 1977. For me, Biko seemed the very epitome of courage and strength, and a man who spoke truth to unjust power, paying the ultimate price. The feeling that I experienced when Peter Gabriel sang “Biko” branded my heart with a call to work against social and political injustice, and I took the words of the song, “and the eyes of the world are watching now, watching now,” as a personal call to expose crimes of any government.”
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In 2010 when I finished writing “In the Shadow of the Buddha”, I sent a copy of the manuscript to Peter and asked him if he might have time to read it and jot down a thought or two. Peter wrote back saying this:

“Matteo Pistono chose a journey that, inside and outside, would lead him into unfamiliar territory. He followed the path of one of Tibet’s great mystics through the Land of Snows, but what he encountered was a mass of contradictions: the elusive past and the intrusive present; brutality and torture greeted with nonviolence and compassion; his own anger against all the abuses; and a desire for peace and enlightenment. It is this tension of opposite forces and Matteo’s desire to transcend them that makes this story fascinating. –Peter Gabriel ”

I am profoundly honored to have Peter’s words on the cover of my book, but more significantly, to know that we are all part of the great effort to bring justice and fairness and a voice to those who live under authoritarian regimes—be that in our own community, country, or for others whom we may have never met.

Please check out and consider supporting WITNESS, the international nonprofit organization that uses the power of video and storytelling to open the eyes of the world to human rights abuses. It was co-founded in 1992 by Peter Gabriel, Human Rights First and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation. Click on Peter’s photo to the left for more information or go to www.witness.org
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