23 September 2022

Unblessed Trinities?

Some readers may have heard that, out of the disorders of revolutionary France, eventually emerged the graciously unifying formula

LIBERTY EQUALITY FRATERNITY

A paper in the current number of The Coat of Arms enables us to survey the plethora of deft and subtle verbal trinities which proliferate(d) in the mottoes of (mainly) Francophone colonies in Liberated Africa.

Benin FRATERNITY JUSTICE WORK

Burkina Faso UNITY PROGRESS JUSTICE

Cameroon PEACE WORK FATHERLAND 

Central African Republic UNITY DIGNITY WORK

Chad UNITY WORK PROGRESS and WORK DEMOCRACY PEACE

Congo UNITY WORK PEACE

Equatorial Guinea UNITY PEACE JUSTICE

Gabon UNITY WORK JUSTICE

Gambia PROGRESS PEACE PROSPERITY

Guinea WORK JUSTICE SOLIDARITY

Namibia UNITY LIBERTY JUSTICE

Senegal ONE PEOPLE  ONE GOAL ('but') ONE FAITH

Sierra Leone  UNITY FREEDOM JUSTICE

Tunisia LIBERTY ORDER JUSTICE

Zimbabwe UNITY FREEDOM WORK

Upper Volta UNITY WORK JUSTICE

[In the motto of Senegal, there is surely an enticing allusion to the particular genius of Herr Hitler and his spindoctors.]

 Locked away somewhere in the detritus of my passing decades, I think I still have some elegantly designed coins carrying the trinity WORK FAMILY FATHERLAND. Perhaps it was in this source ... I do wish I could remember where those rather dishy coins came from ... that the distinctively and single-mindedly African enthusiasm for WORK finds its origin.

Is this diverting genre now extinct beyond the possibility of any revival?

 

10 comments:

Joshua said...

DIVERSITY INCLUSION EQUITY

Joshua said...

TRAVAIL FAMILLE PATRIE (motto of Vichy France)

Ben Whitworth said...

With rising costs, stagnant wages and a pension age that creeps inexorably, like Achilles' tortoise, into the future, I fear that the motto of the UK could soon be changed to WORK WORK WORK.

Jhayes said...

When I arrived in Algeria for the first time many years ago, I was surprised to see that the masthead of my breakfast newspaper had the slogan "De chacun selon ses capacités, à chacun selon son travail" where I expected “ses besoins”. It was the government policy.

Neill said...

You can add Pakistan to your list: Unity, Faith, Discipline.
In reality, instead of unity we have fighting and quarrelling, instead of faith we have public hypocrisy, instead of discipline we have total chaos.

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

Dear Father. Since ecumenism infected the Church and became as controlling as it is debilitating one can notice the modern Catholic Version of Masonry in that it is now assumed that all men are good, that all men have the liberty to worship whom they desire in the way they desire and that the first two virtues will result in peace.

Modern Rome: Goodness, Liberty, Peace.

frjustin said...

ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIAL GOVERNANCE

frjustin said...

There is also a counter-revolutionary trinity, mainly in the Americas:

TRADITION FAMILY PROPERTY

The TFP was born from the idea of a Counter-Revolution, a reaction that would embrace every field of human activity, but especially art, ideas and culture.

Central to the TFP mission is the idea that the various crises threatening American society and the Church cannot be seen as separate and disjointed. Rather they originate from a single cause: the Revolution.

https://www.tfp.org/the-counter-revolution/

Moritz Gruber said...

Er, and of course Germany: UNITY AND LAW AND FREEDOM. In a somewhat more critical mood, we might add: "And in precisely that order. Guess how much room that leaves for freedom."

(Where "Travail Famille Patrie" comes from has already been said.

Moritz Gruber said...

Note: the German motto is apparently sometimes translated as "unity, justice and freedom". This is inaccurate (critical mood: it doesn't get as good as that...). "Recht" can mean "right", but then it gets an aricle or a qualification of "whose right", etc; but here it means more properly "law". It certainly is not "justice" which would be "Gerechtigkeit".