Lal'i Os

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Lal’i Os
nationality
Ariddian; became West Ariddian with the birth of that nation in 2012
famous for
revolutionising the A'ae Eil Church through the introduction of Christian communism
born
1975
died
2061

Lal’i Os was a Wymgani woman who revolutionised the doctrine of the A'ae Eil Church by positing an inherent similiarity of values between communism on the one hand and Christianity and her people’s traditional lifestyle on the other.

Born among the Indigenous Wishi people in the south-west of Limea island, Ariddia (now West Ariddia), Lal’i Os was baptised at her request at the age of 14 and joined the A’ae Eil Church. She studied at the community’s school, without leaving the Wishi’s lands. Expressing a desire for further education and contact with the outside world (meaning the non-Indigenous population of Limea), she moved to Aqeyr at the age of 19 to study history at the University of Aqeyr. She spoke only Wymgani, and therefore enrolled through the university department catering to Indigenous students. It was her first experience not only of city life, but of life outside her self-contained, autonomous native community still living a traditional lifestyle in the island’s thick semi-tropical forests.

By the time she returned home three years later with a university degree, Os had been exposed to many new ideas, and most notably those of communism. The Democratic Communist Party had come to power in Ariddia in 1985, and the country was undergoing significant socio-economic change. Lal’i Os studied the Party’s ideals and policies in great detail, and concluded that its emphasis on social rights, solidarity, communal work, human dignity and Indigenous rights bore a striking similarity with her people’s ancestral values and lifestyle. Wishi values had been, since the 17th century, intimately linked with the values of the A’ae Eil Church, and Os theorised that a fundamental link also existed between the message of her Church and that of communism.

She explained this idea in detail to the Wishi, and it rapidly gained in popularity. By the end of the 1990s, most members of the Church had integrated communism into the Church’s doctrine – making it one of the few explicitly Marxist Christian Churches in the world.

Os was interviewed by the national media, and was apparently surprised at the interest her theories had generated; video records from the time show her smiling shyly at the camera, looking a little startled at the presence of journalists in her remote home community.

At the age of 23 she married a young Wishi man, Els Sho’ol, at the local A’ae Eil church. They had four children over the following years, who were raised communally in accordance with traditional practice. Lal’i Os never left her home community again for any significant period of time, and remained a practicing member of the Church and a thorough student of Scripture for the rest of her life. She never pubished her ideas in written form; that task was accomplished much later by her grand-daughter Ual (Christian Communism and the A’ae Eil Church: The Philosophy of Lal’i Os, 2070).

In 2015, three years after the secession of Limea and birth of capitalist West Ariddia, journalists travelled again to the Wishi community to ask Os about her views on the island’s new government. She stated her opposition to its “fundamentally un-Christian capitalism”, which she believed was “contrary to the dignity of life” preached by the Church. She began voting in national elections, and did not hide her support for the Democratic Communist Party, but was never active in national politics.

Lal’i Os is buried in the Wishi’s church graveyard, and her tombstone is kept in good condition by the community. There is no monument to her, but a street is named after her in the nearby small town of Woodstone Green.