Those of us who have been waiting for the past three years to catch up with the fate of Hawkins Indiana have recently been blessed by a fifth, and final, season. For those of you who don’t know, Stranger Things is a fantasy story set in the 1980s and rooted in the pop-culture of the time, including the playing of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a fun story, if a bit gruesome – actually very gruesome, I have a cushion to cover my eyes for the worst bits. In honour of the victory of good over evil in the pumpkin farming Midwest, I shall be assuming you are all fans and littering this assembly with Stranger Things references.
As well as being fun and clever, Stranger Things is a study of friendship, initially a group of four eleven-year-old boys but expanding to include other valiant adventurers against the evil and chaotic, including the star of the show, Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown, who is a girl of the same age who has psychic powers but who had little social experience before she met the group – the stand out line for me is when they explain friendship to her as “Friends don’t lie” – a principle she holds onto throughout.
For more on friendship, and the alternative, I turned to William Blake – poet, painter, printmaker and peddler in idiosyncratic philosophies – he adhered to a version of Marcionism which dismissed the God of the Old Testament as a malevolent demi-urge which, you might imagine, went down poorly with the established church of the time. He wrote a poem called a Poison Tree:
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I waterd it in fears
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretchd beneath the tree.
A friend is not someone with whom you’re never angry, someone who never hurts you, someone with whom you just rub along – a friend is one who, when you’re angry, you tell them, argue it out, and resume your friendship, and this is a dynamic that the Stranger Things fans amongst us have seen acted out across the years – the kids are a long way from perfect and their friendship is, at times, a rollercoaster of emotion, but they do, eventually, tell the truth, they do get over their differences.
The alternative, Blake tells us, is a foe, an enemy against which anger is watered in secret until it grows, becomes envious and covets all the joys of the foe and thus, ultimately – in poetry and fantasy at least - kills. I say in poetry and fantasy because you can’t trust poets and, of course, in real life getting cross with someone doesn’t mean you’re going to kill them – even if you never make up the quarrel, even if you call them your enemy it’s an unlikely outcome. And yet people do get killed – and I’m stepping into the real world now, real lives ended in violence.
And I’m starting with mankind’s first war. The war of Jebel Sahaba, thirteen and a half thousand years ago, during the Mesolithic, middle stone age. This isn’t the first violent death – individuals were, we know, killing each other for all kinds of reasons before this – it’s just the first time two groups of people took to killing each other – and, to be quite scrupulous about it (which I know you all expect), we don’t exactly know that this was the first war, it’s just the first one for which we have archeological evidence. It took place among the Qadan people of the Nile Valley in the north of what is now Sudan. There’s a lot we don’t know about the war, but 64 skeletons have been found with injuries that suggest a series of ambushes and raids with arrows and spears and the best guess of archaeologists is that a shortage of resources, of water and food, forced two groups of hunter-gatherers to fight for what there was. In a twist to interest fans of the Duffer Brothers, three of those skeletons have gone missing between being dug up and their arrival at the British Museum – the official line is that their location is uncertain.
More certain is the continued role of warfare in the history of Sudan. We’ll pick up the story again in 1821 when the Ottoman ruler of Egypt invaded southwards, up the river Nile. At the time, the Ottomans ruled a large empire in the eastern Mediterranean with different regions shared between governors answering to Constantinople. The administrative genius of the different layers and sizes of eyalets, viyalets and sanjaks is worth an assembly itself as is the history of how a small state came to occupy such a large amount of land, but neither of those are what we’re here for today so I shall leave them to dangle temptingly before you as potential academic interests and passions.
Over the next 50 years or so, most of modern Sudan was conquered and the Egyptian rulers improved infrastructure such as irrigation – something that you probably remember from your primary school history as being important in the Nile Valley. In 1879 the Egyptian government was faced with a rebellion by a group that opposed financial mismanagement, corruption and the involvement of foreign powers. The ruler, Tewfik Pasha, asked the British for help and so they moved in and occupied Egypt, leaving Sudan to its own devices until the 1890s when it became clear that the French and Belgians might want parts of East Africa as well as their possessions in to the west, and so the British moved southward and added Sudan to their empire.
It's easy when looking at history in this kind of way to wonder about who the good guys are and who are the bad ones, but I don’t think that dichotomy exists outside fantasy (in which I’m quite happy to assert that the mindflayer is a bad guy and deserves everything it got). Everyone thinks that they are the good guys – nearly everyone has a coherent reason for what they do, from their own point of view and we can criticise their priorities or their decision-making but we have to realise that our own are imperfect: we are all sometimes more selfish than we might be, we all have an in-group that we would make an effort for and an out-group that we wouldn’t bother with, we all misunderstand some situations, or don’t think hard enough, or just don’t know enough, have enough experience to manage the challenges as well as we’d like. The difference between friends and enemies is that with friends you ask why they did that, listen, argue, apologise and accept apologies, and move on and with enemies you assume the worst of them and grow your wrath.
Leaping forward again, we get to modern Sudan, which gained its independence in 1956 and has since existed in a state of civil war interspersed with coups d’etat and military governments with just a few, brief periods of civilian, peaceful rule. The dynamics are, as you might imagine over 70 years of history, complex but broadly there are three regions of Sudan: the North African area which contains the capital Khartoum and has dominated the government, a western portion called Darfur that is culturally and ethnically more similar to the countries around the Congo river, and a southern region that is closer to East Africa, Kenya and Uganda. The first and second Sudanese Civil Wars were fought between the north and the south, had the largest civilian death toll of any war since 1945 and eventually finished in 2011 with the creation of South Sudan (although that country has since had its own civil war that took up six years and from which it is still recovering). The Darfur conflict took place between 2003 and 2020 in the west of the country with the government of Sudan siding with a militia group called the Janjaweed against the non-Arabic people of the region. The Darfur genocide describes the first years of this war in which there was a systematic killing and displacement of the indigenous peoples.
Since 2023 there has been a third civil war in Sudan between the military ruler of Sudan, Abdul Fatteh al-Burhan, backed by the Sudanese army, and his deputy Hemedti leading the RSF (Rapid Support Forces) and backed by the Janjaweed. The current situation is that the government occupies Khartoum and the north whilst Hemedti is in Darfur and observers fear that the Janjaweed are finishing off what parts of the genocide they left undone in 2020. It’s a story that doesn’t yet have a happy ending – we’re not even close to one, not in the last season of bloodshed. This war has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, has Amnesty International and the International Criminal Court investigating war crimes and has created a humanitarian crisis in which 25 million people are facing extreme hunger and over 12 million have been displaced from their homes.
Our assemblies are usually about our life together, about kindness and scholarship as practised in Steel House. Mornings are, as Dustin tells us, for taking attendance not, you know, existential dread. I don’t, however, want you to live in a bubble or ever to forget the privilege we have of living in a peaceful city, of spending our days learning and making friends. Those privileges mean that you will head into adulthood ahead of most of the world’s population in terms of your ability to make a difference and whilst I don’t see how any of you can make a difference to problems as difficult as those of Sudan, I think maybe you will and that you should at least be aware of them. Therefore, each year, the second half of Resilience term is fancifully named “Resilience for a Better Tomorrow” – the reason for which is buried in a 1980s card game – and in Resilience for a Better Tomorrow we think about oppression, prejudice, unfairness and we learn about stories that are often untold, minority and marginalised voices. At this point I return to Stranger Things and the way it depicts relationships that wouldn’t be seen on TV in the era in which it was set – friendships across classes, races, subcultures and sexualities. It’s a show that celebrates outsiders. Throughout Resilience for a Better Tomorrow I want you to celebrate outsiders: not to be filled with existential dread, but energised by the thought that there are ways in which you can make the future fairer, kinder, more peaceful. I think the first step is to learn lots, think hard, gain qualifications and skills – this doesn’t surprise you, of course – so that when you see the problem that it’s your life’s work to fix you’ll be ready to step into it. Maybe you won’t be able to sort out the shortage of resources, or the superabundance of jerks, or the difficulty of hatred nursed across generations, maybe you will – never say never – but I’m sure that you will find ways of making a better tomorrow for your part of the world.
Of course, though, you leave the church to go back to school and make a better today and there are two messages for you here: the first is friendship – my best friends are those who tell me when I’m wrong, who argue passionately with me, but with whom the disagreement is less important than the humanity, the friendship. Find such friends, who will stop you being a jerk but never abandon you because you were one – be such a friend to as many as you can – and do your best to minimise the times you’re a jerk, try to be less selfish, to treat others as being worthy of listening to, understanding even when, especially when you don’t agree with their decisions. Don’t be prejudiced against people who think differently or look differently to you. And second, if you have an issue that you think needs discussing in Resilience for a Better Tomorrow, that you would like to talk about in assembly then please let Ms Scott know and she will work with you to put something together that’s good enough for this stage, and for this amazing audience.
Oh, and for the record, I really liked the season finale, but if you want to know whether or not I believe you’ll have to come and talk to me.
Footnotes
1. Resilience for a Better Tomorrow is an annual fixture - recent assemblies on the time include: Amar Sonar Bangla and the history of Bangladesh; It's Unfair which goes on to talk about Learning Disability; The Good and The Merry which is concerned with the plight of women in Afghanistan.
2. Sudan, and particularly Darfur, is discussed in Anxiety and Darfur (also from Resilience for a Better Tomorrow).
3. We know that poets can't be trusted because of This Above All.
4. William Blake and his Marriage of Heaven and Hell is partly responsible for inspiring People are Strange.