Africa’s Friendly Fire and Collateral Damages
It is the second largest continent on the planet. A continent that is treated in the so-called developed world as a single land, yes even a single village, housing humankind’s poorest of the poor. Dictionaries detail this magical trisyllable continent’s size, population, greatest lakes, longest rivers and highest mountains. In such reference books, the people are categorised under “Arab” (e.g. Sudan’s al-Bashir) and “Negroid” (e.g. Kenyan me) even in the 21st century. But Africa is even today home to every branch of humankind. What is never listed in the references is the staggering wealth of the continent. A wealth that miraculously only causes poverty and “tribal wars” by proxy, corruption that has nothing to do with anybody else but Africans, diseases, some of which could be cured with little more than clean drinking water, mind boggling capital that always flies out of the continent – if it ever set foot there in the first place. Africa, the rich world maintains, is not a “normal” continent.
I agree with the rich world. But in a different context. Africa is the first home of modern humankind, it has the gene pool whose contents are more varied than elsewhere on the planet (my DNA sequencing as a Nilotic Kenyan of Luo descent will confirm that comparison of human genomes would probably show me to be more closely “related” to a Dane – not the canis familiaris variety! – than to another Kenyan), it is the continent where men hardly able to spell their own names declare themselves President For Life and get away with it, it is where a vice president of a nation straddling both developed and developing worlds rapes an HIV woman victim and, for lack of a more moronic excuse, states that he took a shower following his deadly deed – and the VP still gets elected as Thabo Mbeki’s successor.
No, Africa is a pretty “abnormal” continent. Winston Churchill once said, "The truth is incontrovertible; malice may attack it, ignorance my deride it, but in the end, there it is." What Churchill may not have known is the fact that time would pick up a murderous commercial momentum while voices like mine unwillingly remain pariahs in the publishing world.
In my recent book, Darkest Europe and Africa’s Nightmare: A Critical Observation of Neighbouring Continents, I do my best to delineate Africa’s “abnormality” whose roots are both internal and external. If all humankind are a chip off the same block – and we are – then a few things have gone terribly wrong in Africa. But are they irreparably wrong? Not if Africans shed what I term their elements inhuman as well as their collective psychic damage. And not if the West also sheds their own elements inhuman, unbridled greed and collective hegemonic delusions, for here is a clear case where the perpetrator blames his victim.
In trying to define the source of inequality in present-day human fortunes, arguing that they cannot be assigned to human ethnic groups or their physical characteristics, the American scholar and winner of the Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize, Jared Diamond, disputes “the hypothesis that intellectual differences underlie technological differences,” and says that “tests of cognitive ability (like IQ tests) tend to measure cultural learning and not pure innate intelligence, whatever that is. Because of those undoubted effects of childhood environment and learned knowledge on IQ test results, the psychologist’s efforts to date have not succeeded in convincingly establishing the postulated genetic deficiency in IQs of nonwhite peoples.”[1]
Nearly all Africans, openly or secretly, collectively believe that they are naturally brainless. In some of my reading tours in Europe, I meet Africans who argue along the lines of technology never having been Africa’s strongest point. When I mention that modern technology is there now for anybody to acquire, not invent, they turn to the fact that their continent is too poor. When I delineate the wealth of Africa that could be put to good use for technology and any other sciences, they point out (correctly) to corrupt leaders who are “too smart” to let the majority of the citizens receive education. Mention of Christianity sprouting in the Horn of Africa before it got anywhere near Western Europe, only reaps me the equivalence of a So what, we’re still “only” Africans. And poor.
The height of fatalism and resignation. The collective psychic damage.
But how did Africans assimilate these negative qualities and made them inborn? As I argue in Darkest Europe and Africa’s Nightmare – DEAN for short – underpinning these notions are the systematic endeavours of many centuries from within and without the continent.
Ever since the 16th century, it is Africans who have assisted and made it possible for the West to accumulate its incredible wealth. And this under the cruellest and most dehumanising conditions. It was Africans who shed their blood and lost their lives, it is still the Africans paying with their lives to keep up this wealth accumulation that has completely run amok. What’s wrong with the African citizenry? Why are Africans letting themselves be dehumanised once again and this time “willingly”? This cannot be “the normal African trait” even by the benchmarks of the most benign of Gods. All members of humankind are born with innate pride, dignity, self-worth, self-esteem, protection for the self and those of one’s family when there is a common enemy. And the will to fight to the death to maintain these virtues, however poor one is. So why this abject submission by the majority of Africans? After all, they are the only massively colonised continent, yet the only “natives” who managed to drive Euroancestrals out and retain their continent for themselves. Now, many parts of Africa are as good as absolute despotisms with the civil law merely an elaborate jurisprudence system inherited from colonialism. The ordinary citizen has no legal defence worth the description, no redress against oppression by the government and officialdom in general.
Africans are not all lazy at all, but they have had role models in the last four or five decades who, combined with the ever increasing fatalism, have taught them that hard work does not pay. If you set up shop this morning, you should be a millionaire by this evening.
At least hard work does not pay in their own countries, unless one has connections. Connections is actually an ingrained human trait in all societies since time immemorial. Even deities have connections to link them with their worshippers. But in African states the connection is too blatant, crass and disproportionate. There are other factors contributing to the psychological injuries that now seem to be the heart and soul of Africans, the very essence upon which they judge themselves and accept others to judge them, and it is dovetailed to the way their interaction with the outside world has affected their mental well-being. It is a vicious circle. Below is a passage from DEAN:
On the one hand most Africans tend to accuse the Western media of intentionally perpetuating the bad image of the continent. This is not without some truth. The London-based Royal African Society supports this argument. The argument is that after all the West are the corruptors, the plunderers of Africa’s precious natural resources from timber and oil to gold and diamonds, from bauxite to coltran etcetera, and the manufacturers and sellers of the weapons Africans are using to kill each other. All the capital flight from the corrupt leaders and the elite land in Western banks to promote not Africa’s but Western economies. The West is to blame for the under-nourishment, poverty, epidemics, the AIDS pandemic and a variety of evils.
Raymond Baker in an oral testimony to the AAPPG (All Africa Party Parliamentary Group) as far back as January 2001 said, “We have been putting some $25 billion a year of foreign aid into Africa in the most recent years. Compare that with my estimate of the amount of money that goes illegally out of Africa and ultimately into Western coffers, $100-200 billion. In other words, for every $1 of foreign aid that we are generously handing out across the top of the table, we are taking back some $4-$8 in dirty money under the table.”[2]
On the other hand Africans should well ask themselves who is responsible for the child soldiers, expulsion, displaced persons, the dreadful living standards and short lifespan of their people. They should question their own apathy in the running of their political life. Why is the world moving rapidly ahead while Africa is retreating towards archaic forms of living? Africans are the only human beings whose longevity continues to drop while all other human beings are living longer and healthier than ever before, thanks to better nourishment, advanced technology and medical science.
Despite all that has been said or preached, I see the core of problems in Africa as the African people themselves. Most of them are not even aware that they are their own problems. Africans are the psychologically lost branch of humankind. Not without good reason. No other group has been as physically and psychologically brutalised, and this brutalisation lasted all of 500 years. Worse still, the end is not even on the horizon. The practice of keeping a fellow human being as a slave has been implemented throughout human history and goes on even now, also between homogeneous groups of people.
But for Africa and the Africans, after the trans-Atlantic slave trade came the colonisation. This was an experience that was more traumatising than the slave trade. Here was a strange people who appeared out of nowhere to take the land of the African ancestors and there was no stopping them; a handful of them could kill ten thousand warriors in a matter of hours. The now corrupted social Darwinism was not survival of the physically fittest but survival of the militarily mightiest. It took a long time for Africans to recover from the paralysing daze and think up new forms of war strategies and tactics against the victors’ military might. Then, just as independence dawned on African nations, the people of Africa were latched into the toughest chains ever: dictators appointed by the ex-colonialists especially those dictators who lacked any meritocracy, imperialist and kleptocratic rulers who did not shy away from using violence of the most inhuman forms to achieve their goals. All these processes were inconsistent, abrupt, capricious, arbitrary, unpredictable and so intense that the “injuries” Africans sustained are severe and will be irreversible without concerted efforts being made to “heal” the “injuries.”
Finally, globalisation is now forcing not just Africa but the entire planet to its knees, creating new ruthless forms of ethnic and gender discrimination.
In the sociological sense, Africans have emerged through all this with a collective inferiority complex affecting their entire spectrum of thousands of cultures. This is known as the cultural cringe. They (the kleptocratic dictators, political leaders and the elite) feel inferior to nearly all other cultures and peoples and are afflicted with a pathological desire to overcompensate by spectacularly achieving or by adopting extremely antisocial behaviour. It assists nobody to deny the fact that Africans tend to have negative feelings of self-esteem and self-worth that fluctuates between over-evaluation (or idealisation) and devaluation, both of themselves and of others. Particularly African politicians and persons in responsible positions seem unable to realistically accept that, like any other human beings, they have self-limitations. These Africans see insults and slights where even radar could not detect them. They cannot deal with criticism, failures, disillusionment, setbacks and disappointments, but base their sense of self-esteem and self-worth substantially on outside events like subordination, absolutism, Swiss bank accounts, Armani suits, villas in Malibu or Florida, vast domains in England and castles all over Europe.
Three good examples of African elites who suffered from “acquired narcissism” were Dr. Felix Houphoüet-Boigny, General Field Marshal el Haj Idi Amin and Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa The First. Their likes — and quite a few hundred million non-elite Africans as well — are like children in the formative years trying to shield themselves from what psychologists term “the inevitable hurt and fears involved in the phase of personal development.” This phase is normally evident in children aged 6 months to 6 years. By the time these subject “toddlers” above arrive at “adolescence” and “adulthood,” they are drowned in infatuation and obsession with themselves to the exclusion of others. They display a chronic pursuit of personal gratification and attention, infantile verbal abuse and insulting of each other in the media and during parliamentary debates, bragging, social dominance and personal ambition, lack of empathy, insensitivity to other fellow Africans whom they devalue or annihilate senselessly, circumventing hindrances or any sense of responsibility in their daily livelihood and thoughts. Rather than progressing to maturity, they regress to the infantile-narcissistic phase. They feel omnipotent, underestimate challenges facing them and believe themselves to be almighty, misjudge their powers and the powers of their opposition. When the opposition — whether innocent citizens voicing their grievances, organizations and the civil society fighting for a humanitarian cause or political rivals gaining popularity — they simply “get rid of” such opposition. CIA could not do better, cloaked in hegemonic delusions, if but more clandestinely. The ability of such Africans to appreciate the feelings and needs of others as well as to empathise with them rapidly deteriorates. They turn arrogant and haughty, paranoid and sadistic. The dissonance breeds the desire to keep on living in the world of fantasy, grandiosity and entitlement.
Above all else they are in a perpetual feverish search for unconditional admiration which they do not deserve in the first place. Their preoccupation is their fantasy world and daydreams. And, at last, in this mode, they exploit others or pathologically envy them and become quite literally explosive. Whatever they say or do is said and done from a position of omnipotence. Hence the urge to try to Europeanise themselves and to amass castles, villas and Western bank accounts with sums of money that would feed, educate and provide adequate medical services for the entire African continent. The real world keeps on frustrating them and the frustration is acute to the point of being unbearable. Theirs is a world in which everything is either all virtue or all evil.
The African psyche is their worst ailment. But how did they catch the contagion?
More than four hundred years of slavery brought the Africans to culture a mentality of self-negation. It taught them, even in the Bible once their majority were converted to Christianity, that the colour of their skin destined them to slavery and slavery was the prerequisite for their skin colour. They saw their monarchs, their nobility, rulers, leaders, religious and military dignitaries overwhelmed by a military superiority they were powerless against. A military superiority that ordered these monarchs, aristocrats, military nobility, and religious dignitaries to be publicly chained, whipped and dragged to the bowels of ships — by mere menials or other African slaves. These pillars of their society could now protect neither their people nor themselves. And they were taken away, never to be seen again.
When it was not their monarchs and dignitaries it was their daughters, wives, mothers, husbands, sons, fathers, sisters and brothers. Those who were left behind were either weak, sick, crippled or hardly out of infancy. They did not know how long they themselves would remain free, left with no spiritual, medicinal, political or military organizations worth relying on. Those who were hauled to the Americas or the Caribbean were even more helpless and lost than those left behind to blindly roam around their vast continent in an attempt to survive. Most continental Africans thus embarked on building temporary settlements and practicing a life of mere subsistence. Not only the stranger who crossed your path but also your general merchant, your neighbour or your ruler was a potential enemy and was not to be trusted. They could lure and sell you or any member of your family to slavers. Those who had cultured a settled life with central organizations before this bizarre dilemma, were forced into a nomadic life, always penetrating inland and away from the coastal areas in order to survive. They mutilated their bodies or the bodies of their children in order to look unattractive or weak to the slavers. Personalities could not thrive where mistrust had such vast grazing pasture. And the worst inter-human relationships took root and became a giant obstructing oak: the defeated African always met the victor European in an attitude of self-negation, subservience, self-effacing and inferiority. To this minute, when African leaders sit with Euroancestral leaders on conference tables or play host to international conferences where the pink face is inevitable, the African self-doubt is a screaming aura around the Africans, thick enough to feel and visible enough to see. Most Africans’ eyes and voices are instinctively lowered as if they have to take pains not to assault the “civilised” sensitive eyes and ears of the Euroancestrals (compared to when they are debating among themselves), their gaits become faltering, their composure laboured and their carriage cramped. The word civilisation rings alarming bells in their psyche, reminding them that their own civilisation had not been good enough to thrust forward, so why bother with it. They exude an all-round air of being ill-at-ease, like schoolboys fearing a reprimand before the headmaster. In the presence of Euroancestrals, the explosions of cannon balls, bombs falling and guns smoking to wipe out fellow African brave warriors wielding spears, arrows, war axes and colonial rifles, shredding these warriors to bits of flying human flesh, from some incredible distance, is branded in the African collective memory and is ever-present — as soon as the pink skin is in the vicinity. The Cultural Cringe. It is the parental as well as an entire ethnic group’s protection and survival strategies passed on from one generation to the next in more than five centuries: Extreme caution. Don’t, if you can’t stop it instantly, even sneeze wrongly before the pink people. Do as has been taught and demanded by them or otherwise face the fatal consequences. Tread only where allowed to tread or else meet the decimation of yourself and yours. Say what is expected of you or else it will be the last time you open your mouth to utter any opinions of your own. Echo the convictions of your mentor, the pink ones, or you will never have the tongue to utter any convictions at all.
In other words, the Africans are generally not at ease in the psychological sense. And it happens involuntarily because it is buried deep in their souls. The fates of Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Omar Torrijos and Saddam Hussein are constant warning threats, the Royal House of Saud a constant example of how to remain safe.
The triumphant European, on the other hand, always met the defeated African with an attitude of self-assertion, self-esteem, lordliness and superiority. Euroancestrals were always the superhuman and the Africans were forever mere objects or at best subhuman. Heathen, and without their own history. Civilised Afro-Orient Christian values, helplessly squeezed in the stranglehold of the new Euroancestral fist, had no room for an alternative in other hands. In the embryonic Christendom that had to function with a militarily-crafted strait jacket, faith had to be juggled around with a flexible morality conducive to human greed. As long as might remained in militarism, it mattered not at all that no European religion ever made it to a world religion. With military might, religion could be misappropriated. Psychopaths or sociopaths tend to be unusually adept at manipulating others, and even the legal, political and spiritual systems, to their advantage. Euroancestrals never came up with a world religion, yet they absconded with Christianity and turned Christ into a native of Scandinavia.
Scientists today say that if all of the world population consumed as much as the wealthy West does, humankind would need five Planet Earths. It is a thin line between the cunning, manipulative socio- and psychopathic behaviour, and the narcissistic. To the Euroancestrals, the Age of Enlightenment was a positive Jekyll and Hyde milestone, with Hyde being the real McCoy. They classified everything from thin air over every creature they knew or could think of, placing themselves at the crown of creation and labelling their pink complexion white (Whatever happened to pink? Even when it is browned to a “beautiful and healthy looking” shade under the sun or at the solarium, the label remains “white”!). Then the downgrading over yellow, red, brown and black. Humankind has inborn negative associations with the colour black. It is reminiscent of the primordial days of dark caves harbouring serpents and scorpions, moonless nights with prowling maneaters, reminiscent of silent, inexplicable dark death. Many citizens of India, Sri Lanka and East Asia are darker-skinned than many Africans. But Asiancestralsä do not refer to themselves as skin colors. Only two human branches stick to being pigmentations.This was and is a psychological booby-trap set up centuries ago to keep on ensnaring Afroancestrals with a constant confirmation of their “inferiority.” While no one is better at setting up such psychological booby-traps than the Euroancestrals, no one is better at the servility required to adopt and haul around with them such a subtly corrosive, damaging notion than Afroancestrals. They have been religiously passing on this corrosive notion to their progenies over at least the last three and a half centuries. One embryonic branch of humankind’s divisive, disordered, dysfunctional behaviour has now permeated the entire species like a terminal virus, but a virus only the Euroancestrals can survive longest.
"All cruelty springs from weakness," said Seneca, (BC4-AD65).
He no doubt did not mean physical weakness.
[1] Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, Vintage, London, 1998, p. 20
[2] “The Other Side Of The Coin” http://www.africaappg.org.uk/download/other%20side%20of%20the%20coin%20PDF.pdf Accessed: 9.12.05
Monday, 24 August 2009
Saturday, 18 April 2009
How To Make a Girl Fall in Loe With You
Source: Vlad Karl in ArticlesBase.com
Let's get started. Getting a girl of your dreams is much like getting the car of your dream. But unlike a car which you can always bargain for, there is nothing like a 20 percent discount in courting the girl of your dreams, she's so sweet a thing to be discounted, you dearly are in love with her and your feelings for her can only be communicated not by the words of the mouth, but by the words of the heart. Getting the girl actually depends on how big your heart is - faint heart, never won fair lady.
The first dating idea for any man is to make a good impression. In your doing so, you don't have to talk, dress or do the common things that all the Toms do to get a decent girl's attention. Be unique, that's all you need. Be a man of his own style. Dress decently - indecency can make one be mistaken for arrogance; watch your language - obscene language gives the impression of immaturity, being uncultured and cheap; be a man of good habits - don't drink or smoke like any other loser.
How to make her fall in love with you? Take your time. Add some romance to your dating style. When in College I had a crush on the most beautiful lady in our first year lot. Though all senior guys were out to get that girl, I managed to divert her attention from the other guys. I wrote her three letters without disclosing my identity and slid into her room secretly; all I said was 'Yours Secret Admirer.' The first letter contained the meaning of her name, this I got by playing around with the initials of her name to make meaning. The second was a funny message that could only be read backwards and it was all about her physique and her smartness. In the third letter I told the girl to be ready to receive a rose flower from her admirer, but only if she could be kind enough to phone him using a number that I had included in the letter. The girl did phone me that very night, and her first words to me were, "Hallo Secret Admirer." So, the story of our love affair came to be. Later she told me that was so creative of me, no one had approached her in that manner. I made her fall in love with me and made a date in the romantic manner.
Befriending and understanding the girl you are out to get is the next important thing. This is what I also did. You have to understand that as a lady, she loves to be loved, adores to be adored and needs to be needed. This will move you closer to the girl and you'll get to know what she's into, what she likes and dislikes, and what her style is. Love is built upon friendship and it always leaves individuals better off having known each other should they break up. I and my College steady were to break some time later but to date, we are the best of buddies. Be sure that bringing out the selflessness friend in you will make her create room for you in her heart.
A shoulder to lean on and some good friend that she can always turn to is all that a lady wants. Please don't hesitate to be helpful and supportive. Be that friend who rekindles her zeal of hardworking and restoring hope back into her life when she looses hope. This above all other things will make you her daily vitamin simply because you bring out the best in her in terms of personality and character. In you, she'll have found that friend whom she can open up to, share with and advice each other on the rights and wrongs, the dos and don'ts of life. Don't forget to always be there to celebrate the good times, and to lend an ear when the girl needs you to listen as a friend.
Make the girl feel special; because she's someone's friend - your friend, and let her know that she too has touched your life in a unique way like no one else could. Compliment her for her company and for being there when you needed her, when you felt sad and all alone. Show appreciations for the comfort the girl offers you and for making you smile.
In your day to day talks, share your dreams, your world, and every aspect of your life with your girl. Always dream with her, build with her, and always cheer her on and encourage her. Tell your girl how you always think about her even when you try not to think about her. Let the girl know that she's your first thing in the morning and the last thing when you go to bed at night.
Her knowing that you were thinking of her when you slipped beneath the softness of your blanket and gave in to the bliss of sweet dreams, will make her go 'my my' and her heart will sing your name all the year round.
You have to be creative and constructive to keep girl's interest in you so full of life. I remember one time I told my girlfriend to be to imagine we are both deaf and dump. We then sat opposite each other on the table and started sharing our feelings for each other using eyes and hand signs. It turned out to be some fun. There was also this time that we were in the library and we decided we are not going to speak to each other verbal, so I wrote a love note on a paper and passed it across the table to her, she replied and on and on we carried on our love on paper conversation till we almost exhausted a whole rim of paper. At sometime, I noticed that some guys sited with us on the table were enjoying our ordeal than their studies. Such are the things that made the girl embrace my world. I remember her suggesting that we play deaf and dump two years after we broke up, can you imagine that?
Never fail to phone her, even when she least expects it. I once called some girl that I was interested in at four o'clock in the morning. When inquiring of what I was doing up so early, I told her I was in thirteenth heaven, where people think of their loved ones when they can't sleep. Wow! First thing early the next morning, she was at my door with a king-sized hug for me. No matter how many dates you take her, don't make any elbow - exceeding moves after any date, just drop her home and with a friendly handshake, wish her good night. Don't kiss her when she expects you to. Your respect as a gentleman will be earned on how patient you are with her when it comes to such matters as kissing her and accessing her inner graces.
The writing is on the wall that you want her, but you can't have her just yet. Increase your demand. Try to show her that men are also hard to get at times. Make her realize that when she feels a little dizzy, a little tired, a little sad, a little sick, a lot bored and very much cold, she's actually missing vitamin you. By this time, she'll be so much into you and since love is truthful and is characterized by open and honest communication, honestly promise her your everlasting devotion, loyalty, respect, and your unconditional love for a lifetime. Prove to her that you'll always be there for her, to listen and to hold her hand, and that you'll always do your best to make her happy, and feel loved. Remember, patience is the key to her heart; be like that gardener watching a fruit as it hangs on the tree, day after day admiring it, but, exercising tremendous self-discipline, neither feeling the fruit, nor pinching it, nor testing it to see if it is ready. And then, one day he holds out his hand and the fruit simply drops into it, ripe, warm and eager to be eaten.
The patience and self-control which you practice will make you more attractive and charming. This will qualify you as her daily vitamin and win you that heart hers.
I wish you to meet the girl of your dreams ASAP, make her fall in love with you, and make her feel the happiest girl in the world!
Let's get started. Getting a girl of your dreams is much like getting the car of your dream. But unlike a car which you can always bargain for, there is nothing like a 20 percent discount in courting the girl of your dreams, she's so sweet a thing to be discounted, you dearly are in love with her and your feelings for her can only be communicated not by the words of the mouth, but by the words of the heart. Getting the girl actually depends on how big your heart is - faint heart, never won fair lady.
The first dating idea for any man is to make a good impression. In your doing so, you don't have to talk, dress or do the common things that all the Toms do to get a decent girl's attention. Be unique, that's all you need. Be a man of his own style. Dress decently - indecency can make one be mistaken for arrogance; watch your language - obscene language gives the impression of immaturity, being uncultured and cheap; be a man of good habits - don't drink or smoke like any other loser.
How to make her fall in love with you? Take your time. Add some romance to your dating style. When in College I had a crush on the most beautiful lady in our first year lot. Though all senior guys were out to get that girl, I managed to divert her attention from the other guys. I wrote her three letters without disclosing my identity and slid into her room secretly; all I said was 'Yours Secret Admirer.' The first letter contained the meaning of her name, this I got by playing around with the initials of her name to make meaning. The second was a funny message that could only be read backwards and it was all about her physique and her smartness. In the third letter I told the girl to be ready to receive a rose flower from her admirer, but only if she could be kind enough to phone him using a number that I had included in the letter. The girl did phone me that very night, and her first words to me were, "Hallo Secret Admirer." So, the story of our love affair came to be. Later she told me that was so creative of me, no one had approached her in that manner. I made her fall in love with me and made a date in the romantic manner.
Befriending and understanding the girl you are out to get is the next important thing. This is what I also did. You have to understand that as a lady, she loves to be loved, adores to be adored and needs to be needed. This will move you closer to the girl and you'll get to know what she's into, what she likes and dislikes, and what her style is. Love is built upon friendship and it always leaves individuals better off having known each other should they break up. I and my College steady were to break some time later but to date, we are the best of buddies. Be sure that bringing out the selflessness friend in you will make her create room for you in her heart.
A shoulder to lean on and some good friend that she can always turn to is all that a lady wants. Please don't hesitate to be helpful and supportive. Be that friend who rekindles her zeal of hardworking and restoring hope back into her life when she looses hope. This above all other things will make you her daily vitamin simply because you bring out the best in her in terms of personality and character. In you, she'll have found that friend whom she can open up to, share with and advice each other on the rights and wrongs, the dos and don'ts of life. Don't forget to always be there to celebrate the good times, and to lend an ear when the girl needs you to listen as a friend.
Make the girl feel special; because she's someone's friend - your friend, and let her know that she too has touched your life in a unique way like no one else could. Compliment her for her company and for being there when you needed her, when you felt sad and all alone. Show appreciations for the comfort the girl offers you and for making you smile.
In your day to day talks, share your dreams, your world, and every aspect of your life with your girl. Always dream with her, build with her, and always cheer her on and encourage her. Tell your girl how you always think about her even when you try not to think about her. Let the girl know that she's your first thing in the morning and the last thing when you go to bed at night.
Her knowing that you were thinking of her when you slipped beneath the softness of your blanket and gave in to the bliss of sweet dreams, will make her go 'my my' and her heart will sing your name all the year round.
You have to be creative and constructive to keep girl's interest in you so full of life. I remember one time I told my girlfriend to be to imagine we are both deaf and dump. We then sat opposite each other on the table and started sharing our feelings for each other using eyes and hand signs. It turned out to be some fun. There was also this time that we were in the library and we decided we are not going to speak to each other verbal, so I wrote a love note on a paper and passed it across the table to her, she replied and on and on we carried on our love on paper conversation till we almost exhausted a whole rim of paper. At sometime, I noticed that some guys sited with us on the table were enjoying our ordeal than their studies. Such are the things that made the girl embrace my world. I remember her suggesting that we play deaf and dump two years after we broke up, can you imagine that?
Never fail to phone her, even when she least expects it. I once called some girl that I was interested in at four o'clock in the morning. When inquiring of what I was doing up so early, I told her I was in thirteenth heaven, where people think of their loved ones when they can't sleep. Wow! First thing early the next morning, she was at my door with a king-sized hug for me. No matter how many dates you take her, don't make any elbow - exceeding moves after any date, just drop her home and with a friendly handshake, wish her good night. Don't kiss her when she expects you to. Your respect as a gentleman will be earned on how patient you are with her when it comes to such matters as kissing her and accessing her inner graces.
The writing is on the wall that you want her, but you can't have her just yet. Increase your demand. Try to show her that men are also hard to get at times. Make her realize that when she feels a little dizzy, a little tired, a little sad, a little sick, a lot bored and very much cold, she's actually missing vitamin you. By this time, she'll be so much into you and since love is truthful and is characterized by open and honest communication, honestly promise her your everlasting devotion, loyalty, respect, and your unconditional love for a lifetime. Prove to her that you'll always be there for her, to listen and to hold her hand, and that you'll always do your best to make her happy, and feel loved. Remember, patience is the key to her heart; be like that gardener watching a fruit as it hangs on the tree, day after day admiring it, but, exercising tremendous self-discipline, neither feeling the fruit, nor pinching it, nor testing it to see if it is ready. And then, one day he holds out his hand and the fruit simply drops into it, ripe, warm and eager to be eaten.
The patience and self-control which you practice will make you more attractive and charming. This will qualify you as her daily vitamin and win you that heart hers.
I wish you to meet the girl of your dreams ASAP, make her fall in love with you, and make her feel the happiest girl in the world!
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
Of Humans and Hegemonic Delusions
An Essay
„Are Franconians a tribe?“
„Of course not.“
“What about – just to keep the F in things – Frisians?”
“For heaven’s sake, of course not!”
This was a dialogue between me and a participant in one of my communication and intercultural training courses. We had just done a classroom global tour of non-verbal communication and were together doing a little test with multiple choice answers (for example tapping the side of one’s own head with a forefinger to another person, means: you’re an intelligent one but in German it means you’re an idiot or raving mad. Nodding the head in Greece means No and shaking the head from side to side means Yes . And, if a German speaker, you have definitely at one time or another become confused or raised the eyebrows when a Greek picks up the phone and says the sound of NEE! which to the Greek speakers means YES, to the German NO – of course).
I had just explained that Malawians do not look at each other directly in the eyes as a sign of politeness, not because they are congenital liars or are forbidden to look at the so-called “white” people in the eye.
The participant above wanted to know whether my “tribe” - the Luos of Lake Victoria - also consider looking at another person straight in the eyes as bad manners and rude. Taking some small cultural nuances like gender, age and social position into account, they do. But I didn’t tell the participant this straight away. Instead I tried a backdoor approach and asked, “Are Franconians a tribe?”
Of course not.
Frisians?
Of course not
“Okay, let’s take a leap over to… say, the Monegasques? The people of Monaco, the smallest sovereign state (after the Vatican) with a population of 31,900 and an area of 189 hectares. Smaller than the smallest farm of a Kenyan rancher. Are the Monegasques a tribe?”
This time it was the participant who instead of giving me an answer asked in reply, “Monaco?”
I nodded. “In the South West of Europe. An enclave in the South East of France on the Mediterranean.”
“They’re Europeans!” explained the perplexed participant.
“Precisely,” I nodded again. And wondered if this participant would be equally perplexed if I mentioned that the Inuits are Danish and therefore Europeans. Instead I told him that my group of people in Kenya, the Luos, number over six million people, the world is in the 21st century and tribes seem to have been imported from the Stone Age.
“But they live in Africa. Tribes live in Africa,” he insisted. Like: crocodiles live in water and any fool knows that, for heaven’s sake.
Isn’t this a familiar one, I thought to myself, along the lines of: I have nothing against blacks? But I was no Freud or Jung and perfectly unable to sort out psychological damages handed over from generation to generation of the pink ethnic groups going back several hundred years. I was here to lecture on intercultural communication.
In situations like this – which are far too often here in Germany – I sometimes can’t help feeling like a Herero facing a von Trotha who is more than determined to rob me of both land, cattle and soul, come what may.
I too have caught myself being subconsciously enmeshed in my own native culture and upbringing. To give but a few examples: despite having been educated in Europe from a young age I still have qualms about pathologists – they are my untouchables. If my child one day tells me he wants to be a pathologist I wouldn’t stop him. But I would definitely feel uncomfortable mentioning his profession to others. I simply feel that cutting up the dead is sacrilegious.
I wouldn’t go to a male gynaecologist unless my life absolutely depended on it.
I got upset with my German girlfriend when she sold her old car to her own eighteen-year-old son, explaining to me that the child has to learn that “nothing comes from nothing”. In my Luo community she would be a pariah. My friends are puzzled about my insistent on having a separate bedroom from that of my husband, a thing which to me is as normal as breathing. I’m still flabbergasted about the fact that prisoners here are allowed weekends “off” and then actually walk straight back in to jail after the weekend!
When I first took my husband to Kenya for a holiday, we rented a self-drive in Nairobi from a well-known international car hire firm. It even bears the name of Europe. The rental car manager, a Kenyan of British descent, wished us all the best with the car and hoped we wouldn’t get into a fracas with “a bad policeman” in Kenya but reassured us that all Kenyan policemen were “good” anyway. This was no surprise to me. But when I explained to my agitato wide-eyed husband what a good policeman meant, he opened his mouth but found no words to say back. A good policeman is one with whom you can sort out differences with a bit of chai – baksheesh, bribe, call it what you fancy. A bad policeman is that rare fellow who will book you in if you try to bribe him or her in order to get out of your differences. The latter is a rare breed indeed in Kenya.
“Don’t worry, my love,” I said to my husband. “Once the bad one books us in we’ll meet tons of the good ones in there and sort things out all the same.”
I still cringe when I witness children who ignore parental requests and utter swear words back which effectively render the parents powerless:
Clean your bedroom, please.
Not now, I have something to attend to.
What’s so important then?
My own business, gaddamnit! Don’t start giving me stress!
It was only a question! Come back here! Come back he…
Some years ago a European crown prince married a media-touted “party girl”. Not only that. The party girl had an out-of-marriage son. A cousin of mine studying in Washington called me to say that my family were now (yet again!) very glum about the fact that they knew and had told me I was marrying into an inhuman and decadent race on their way to human disintegration. “Kelleb,” I told my cousin in cold anger, “you’re married to an American woman too, remember? And you’re a man – a family cornerstone instead of the chaff on the roof that I traditionally am.”
“An African-American woman, dear Coz. She brought her cooking pots to me, you took yours to the Uncultured Skinless Ones! But give me a choice between Schiffer and Sabatini and I’m dropping dead for Sabatini.” "You missed the one about what gentlemen prefer, Kelleb!"
I thought to myself, so the barbed wire is not so much the country of origin but the colour of the skin, whichever turf one comes from. Every time Europeans fail to live up to the standards of my Luoland people and their Luoland rulers and aristocracy, I get a little jab in the ribs from the family, to put it mildly. Kelleb is my favourite cousin and I knew he was not gloating. In the eyes of my family I had married into a subhuman race and they could in the end prove this to me to boot, thank CNN. To this day I remain a royal K’Orinda-Yimbo, because of the “pure” blood of my parents in my veins which has to be honoured. But neither my husband nor our mutual children will ever be considered K’Orinda-Yimbos. Neither my husband nor my children will ever inherit the titles of princes or princesses.
But coming back to the beginning of my essay. This is one of the phenomena I’ve come to call Megignoarrogance Complex. Mega ignorance coupled with mega arrogance. It is practically inborn. I’m often asked about my “tribe” although the Luos number about six million people. When I’m in Luoland, thank the globalisation of the media, I’m being queried about the “animalistic” sexual practises of the “Skinless Ones” and their growing taste for ordering fellow human beings (preferably the minors) through the ‘Net, murdering each other, cutting up the bodies and keeping them in their freezers for later dinner party stews. This is regarded a “normal” Western aberration among my people.
Policemen in Germany arrest “Schwarz Afrikaner und ein Marokkaner ”. A black African and a Moroccan. A ZDF television newsreader states (about the Sudanese refugees in the ship Cap Anamur): „Sogar die Afrikaner kann man das nicht antun“. Even Africans shouldn’t have that done to them. It is so „normal“ to the newsreader that he does not consciously realise what he is actually saying. Almost like the “Kinder-statt-Inder” – children instead of (IT programmers) Indians – slip of the tongue. That one about the Cap Anamur Sudanese would never be dared here in Germany had it been about natives of the Golan Heights.
The race for the new Pope was heating up. On Sunday afternoon, 17th April 2005, in a programme on ZDF titled “Ein Leben für den Frieden” – A Life for Peace – the commentator got to the part where he was talking about possible successors of Pope John Paul II. He mentioned all the prospective candidates by name and country, giving a brief account of their biographies. Then he concluded: “Es könnte auch ein Schwarzer sein.” It could also be a black. Period. No name, no country, no brief biography, but a pigmentation. This is something that no other country in the West but Germany can get away with in the public media, consequently no other country dares to be so grossly and publicly disdainful of Africans. It is as if we are all Christians but the pink-coloureds are more Christian than others – even if Christianity sprouted at the tip of Africa and Europeans never came up with a world religion. It makes me wonder whether, when we finally all stand at the gates of heaven, St Peter would announce: Oh you good Black Children of the Lord, please line up at the back and let the good Pink Children of God come in first – it looks like a storm is brewing and the Pink Children could get wet!
My colleagues ask me what dialect my so-called "tribe" speaks. I say they speak a language known as Dholuo. Is that „afrikanisch?” they ask. I tell them it certainly is not „europäisch“.
Many of my seminarees can’t unknot the fact that a woman from Africa (even if a German citizen) is teaching them about communication and culture in their own good old Europe – particularly the so-called re-settlers of German stock from the former Soviet Union. To such people I’m the living proof of why German culture is deteriorating. To them I’m rummaging about in the family silver cupboard where I have no business poking my brown nose (excuse the pun). Stuck in traffic jams driving my own car, loud remarks have been callously hurled at me about what else of his, apart from the car, my pimp puts at my service.
I’ve calculated strategies, where I send my staff to negotiate business deals on my behalf until the final signing of the contract. And it gives me great pleasure when I finally put my signature down on the contract with the remarks, “You have been negotiating with magnificent generals – I’m their commander-in-chief.” And my “generals” and I have good laughs over this.
The Megignoarrogance Complex has tons of 19th century baggage. My favourite news report is the Weltspiegel in ARD on Sundays. There, viewers get morsels like “the Mau-Mau tribe of Kenya”. A ritual filmed in Lesotho (size: 0,0377% of the African continent) is cloaked with the words “It’s a widely spread African tradition”. Is the Oktoberfest a widely spread European tradition from Vladivostok to Dublin? Is the RAF a tribe of Germany? A Kenyan TV newsreader would never make such a blunder about Europe or Asia or any other part of the world outside and within Africa. Yet the Western world with its unlimited sources and resources for optimum education and information, from the minute one is conceived to the day they are buried, are not even alarmed at being so arrogantly ignorant about a continent that dominates the global map flickering on their TV sets hundreds of times a day. It’s a complex complex. It has the elements of both enormous fear and guilt. My stumbling stone of wisdom here is the famous journalistic 5 Questions. The WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE and HOW. When all is said and done, "racial" (all humankind are of one single "race") arrogance and ignorance are an integral part of the human factor. Only some have the ways and means to spread the contagion more disastrously and faster than a virus on its own fertile environment. www.akinyi.princess.de
***
„Are Franconians a tribe?“
„Of course not.“
“What about – just to keep the F in things – Frisians?”
“For heaven’s sake, of course not!”
This was a dialogue between me and a participant in one of my communication and intercultural training courses. We had just done a classroom global tour of non-verbal communication and were together doing a little test with multiple choice answers (for example tapping the side of one’s own head with a forefinger to another person, means: you’re an intelligent one but in German it means you’re an idiot or raving mad. Nodding the head in Greece means No and shaking the head from side to side means Yes . And, if a German speaker, you have definitely at one time or another become confused or raised the eyebrows when a Greek picks up the phone and says the sound of NEE! which to the Greek speakers means YES, to the German NO – of course).
I had just explained that Malawians do not look at each other directly in the eyes as a sign of politeness, not because they are congenital liars or are forbidden to look at the so-called “white” people in the eye.
The participant above wanted to know whether my “tribe” - the Luos of Lake Victoria - also consider looking at another person straight in the eyes as bad manners and rude. Taking some small cultural nuances like gender, age and social position into account, they do. But I didn’t tell the participant this straight away. Instead I tried a backdoor approach and asked, “Are Franconians a tribe?”
Of course not.
Frisians?
Of course not
“Okay, let’s take a leap over to… say, the Monegasques? The people of Monaco, the smallest sovereign state (after the Vatican) with a population of 31,900 and an area of 189 hectares. Smaller than the smallest farm of a Kenyan rancher. Are the Monegasques a tribe?”
This time it was the participant who instead of giving me an answer asked in reply, “Monaco?”
I nodded. “In the South West of Europe. An enclave in the South East of France on the Mediterranean.”
“They’re Europeans!” explained the perplexed participant.
“Precisely,” I nodded again. And wondered if this participant would be equally perplexed if I mentioned that the Inuits are Danish and therefore Europeans. Instead I told him that my group of people in Kenya, the Luos, number over six million people, the world is in the 21st century and tribes seem to have been imported from the Stone Age.
“But they live in Africa. Tribes live in Africa,” he insisted. Like: crocodiles live in water and any fool knows that, for heaven’s sake.
Isn’t this a familiar one, I thought to myself, along the lines of: I have nothing against blacks? But I was no Freud or Jung and perfectly unable to sort out psychological damages handed over from generation to generation of the pink ethnic groups going back several hundred years. I was here to lecture on intercultural communication.
In situations like this – which are far too often here in Germany – I sometimes can’t help feeling like a Herero facing a von Trotha who is more than determined to rob me of both land, cattle and soul, come what may.
I too have caught myself being subconsciously enmeshed in my own native culture and upbringing. To give but a few examples: despite having been educated in Europe from a young age I still have qualms about pathologists – they are my untouchables. If my child one day tells me he wants to be a pathologist I wouldn’t stop him. But I would definitely feel uncomfortable mentioning his profession to others. I simply feel that cutting up the dead is sacrilegious.
I wouldn’t go to a male gynaecologist unless my life absolutely depended on it.
I got upset with my German girlfriend when she sold her old car to her own eighteen-year-old son, explaining to me that the child has to learn that “nothing comes from nothing”. In my Luo community she would be a pariah. My friends are puzzled about my insistent on having a separate bedroom from that of my husband, a thing which to me is as normal as breathing. I’m still flabbergasted about the fact that prisoners here are allowed weekends “off” and then actually walk straight back in to jail after the weekend!
When I first took my husband to Kenya for a holiday, we rented a self-drive in Nairobi from a well-known international car hire firm. It even bears the name of Europe. The rental car manager, a Kenyan of British descent, wished us all the best with the car and hoped we wouldn’t get into a fracas with “a bad policeman” in Kenya but reassured us that all Kenyan policemen were “good” anyway. This was no surprise to me. But when I explained to my agitato wide-eyed husband what a good policeman meant, he opened his mouth but found no words to say back. A good policeman is one with whom you can sort out differences with a bit of chai – baksheesh, bribe, call it what you fancy. A bad policeman is that rare fellow who will book you in if you try to bribe him or her in order to get out of your differences. The latter is a rare breed indeed in Kenya.
“Don’t worry, my love,” I said to my husband. “Once the bad one books us in we’ll meet tons of the good ones in there and sort things out all the same.”
I still cringe when I witness children who ignore parental requests and utter swear words back which effectively render the parents powerless:
Clean your bedroom, please.
Not now, I have something to attend to.
What’s so important then?
My own business, gaddamnit! Don’t start giving me stress!
It was only a question! Come back here! Come back he…
Some years ago a European crown prince married a media-touted “party girl”. Not only that. The party girl had an out-of-marriage son. A cousin of mine studying in Washington called me to say that my family were now (yet again!) very glum about the fact that they knew and had told me I was marrying into an inhuman and decadent race on their way to human disintegration. “Kelleb,” I told my cousin in cold anger, “you’re married to an American woman too, remember? And you’re a man – a family cornerstone instead of the chaff on the roof that I traditionally am.”
“An African-American woman, dear Coz. She brought her cooking pots to me, you took yours to the Uncultured Skinless Ones! But give me a choice between Schiffer and Sabatini and I’m dropping dead for Sabatini.” "You missed the one about what gentlemen prefer, Kelleb!"
I thought to myself, so the barbed wire is not so much the country of origin but the colour of the skin, whichever turf one comes from. Every time Europeans fail to live up to the standards of my Luoland people and their Luoland rulers and aristocracy, I get a little jab in the ribs from the family, to put it mildly. Kelleb is my favourite cousin and I knew he was not gloating. In the eyes of my family I had married into a subhuman race and they could in the end prove this to me to boot, thank CNN. To this day I remain a royal K’Orinda-Yimbo, because of the “pure” blood of my parents in my veins which has to be honoured. But neither my husband nor our mutual children will ever be considered K’Orinda-Yimbos. Neither my husband nor my children will ever inherit the titles of princes or princesses.
But coming back to the beginning of my essay. This is one of the phenomena I’ve come to call Megignoarrogance Complex. Mega ignorance coupled with mega arrogance. It is practically inborn. I’m often asked about my “tribe” although the Luos number about six million people. When I’m in Luoland, thank the globalisation of the media, I’m being queried about the “animalistic” sexual practises of the “Skinless Ones” and their growing taste for ordering fellow human beings (preferably the minors) through the ‘Net, murdering each other, cutting up the bodies and keeping them in their freezers for later dinner party stews. This is regarded a “normal” Western aberration among my people.
Policemen in Germany arrest “Schwarz Afrikaner und ein Marokkaner ”. A black African and a Moroccan. A ZDF television newsreader states (about the Sudanese refugees in the ship Cap Anamur): „Sogar die Afrikaner kann man das nicht antun“. Even Africans shouldn’t have that done to them. It is so „normal“ to the newsreader that he does not consciously realise what he is actually saying. Almost like the “Kinder-statt-Inder” – children instead of (IT programmers) Indians – slip of the tongue. That one about the Cap Anamur Sudanese would never be dared here in Germany had it been about natives of the Golan Heights.
The race for the new Pope was heating up. On Sunday afternoon, 17th April 2005, in a programme on ZDF titled “Ein Leben für den Frieden” – A Life for Peace – the commentator got to the part where he was talking about possible successors of Pope John Paul II. He mentioned all the prospective candidates by name and country, giving a brief account of their biographies. Then he concluded: “Es könnte auch ein Schwarzer sein.” It could also be a black. Period. No name, no country, no brief biography, but a pigmentation. This is something that no other country in the West but Germany can get away with in the public media, consequently no other country dares to be so grossly and publicly disdainful of Africans. It is as if we are all Christians but the pink-coloureds are more Christian than others – even if Christianity sprouted at the tip of Africa and Europeans never came up with a world religion. It makes me wonder whether, when we finally all stand at the gates of heaven, St Peter would announce: Oh you good Black Children of the Lord, please line up at the back and let the good Pink Children of God come in first – it looks like a storm is brewing and the Pink Children could get wet!
My colleagues ask me what dialect my so-called "tribe" speaks. I say they speak a language known as Dholuo. Is that „afrikanisch?” they ask. I tell them it certainly is not „europäisch“.
Many of my seminarees can’t unknot the fact that a woman from Africa (even if a German citizen) is teaching them about communication and culture in their own good old Europe – particularly the so-called re-settlers of German stock from the former Soviet Union. To such people I’m the living proof of why German culture is deteriorating. To them I’m rummaging about in the family silver cupboard where I have no business poking my brown nose (excuse the pun). Stuck in traffic jams driving my own car, loud remarks have been callously hurled at me about what else of his, apart from the car, my pimp puts at my service.
I’ve calculated strategies, where I send my staff to negotiate business deals on my behalf until the final signing of the contract. And it gives me great pleasure when I finally put my signature down on the contract with the remarks, “You have been negotiating with magnificent generals – I’m their commander-in-chief.” And my “generals” and I have good laughs over this.
The Megignoarrogance Complex has tons of 19th century baggage. My favourite news report is the Weltspiegel in ARD on Sundays. There, viewers get morsels like “the Mau-Mau tribe of Kenya”. A ritual filmed in Lesotho (size: 0,0377% of the African continent) is cloaked with the words “It’s a widely spread African tradition”. Is the Oktoberfest a widely spread European tradition from Vladivostok to Dublin? Is the RAF a tribe of Germany? A Kenyan TV newsreader would never make such a blunder about Europe or Asia or any other part of the world outside and within Africa. Yet the Western world with its unlimited sources and resources for optimum education and information, from the minute one is conceived to the day they are buried, are not even alarmed at being so arrogantly ignorant about a continent that dominates the global map flickering on their TV sets hundreds of times a day. It’s a complex complex. It has the elements of both enormous fear and guilt. My stumbling stone of wisdom here is the famous journalistic 5 Questions. The WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE and HOW. When all is said and done, "racial" (all humankind are of one single "race") arrogance and ignorance are an integral part of the human factor. Only some have the ways and means to spread the contagion more disastrously and faster than a virus on its own fertile environment. www.akinyi.princess.de
***
Monday, 20 October 2008
The African Bestseller - If You're...Pink
Writing African Bestsellers
APKY
Euroancestral reporters and novelists in Africa (including Keith B. Richburg, the African-American who wrote Out of Africa and is glad to be a descendant of slaves rather than of continental Africans) are a breed out of heaven knows where. Especially to the Africans. Let’s take Kiragwe Nzili of Botswana. After seeing him on Weltspiegel, a German weekly television reportage of news around the globe, eating dust on a plastic plate with his son outside his miserable little hut, I made up my mind to find him the next time I’m in Africa. The journalist in me was angry about this because I believe that journalists must not degrade another human being this much just for the sake of money. It degrades the profession. It degrades the entire humankind’s achievement in civilisation.
It took me two days to locate Mr Nzili. In the lounge of my hotel I interviewed him about the dust dinner. He told me the journalist and his camera crew had interviewed him about the hunger situation in his country, where the people had been told not to eat the genetically manipulated maize that had been donated from the USA. After telling the journalists that he and his son often go hungry for days “eating only dust”, which is a euphemism in his language, Setswana, and means “eating nothing at all”, the German team offered him five dollars for the “eating dust” filming. Five dollars is a lot of money for a poor man in Botswana who has no job but a son to feed. You can on the other hand imagine how much money the journalists earned with their “sensation”.
I think this kind of journalism is a disgrace to all decent journalists.
Yet this is the kind of voyeurism the West wants to project of and into Africa – so that they can feel – what – truly superior? Or just good civilized Christians? Take the bestseller lists of books about Africa and Africans. Excision. Cannibalism. Modern slavery. Child soldiers. Forced marriages. The famous “sexploitation” material – are “they” as biblically good in bed as is rumoured? And the good old ghosts, spirits and the witchdoctor. But in their intoxication with their hegemony, Euroancestrals forget that Africans may be poor, but they have long since learnt how to get those dollars or euros out of the pockets of such hegemony- drunk Western journalists, ethnologists, the lot. The thicker you lay it on – the needy African has learnt – the more dollars/euros you reap. The more bizarre the more extra hard currency. If decadence is what they prize as journalistic or ethnological material, they can have it and a lot more as spices.
The same with the novelists and “Africa experts”. Here, I’ll give you more tips, Western voracious writer with the hegemonic delusion.
To write about Africa, start with, say, a breathtaking sunrise as you climb into your chauffeured four-wheel-drive. Describe the sunset in details for at least one page. Don’t forget your driver – sorry – your black, or better still, pitch black driver. Whatever your good eyes tell you, the African’s skin colour is black. Give him three or four sentences which must dwell only on his characteristics that differ from Euroancestral characteristics. The complexion is very important especially if you’re a Scholl-Latour-type writer, because it is the one thing that uplifts him from the rest of humankind: the tall black man had bronze skin, a fine European-like nose, whereas his bride had flat, navel-region-long breasts…. etcetera, etcetera. The whiteness (hallelujah!) of his very big, widely-spaced teeth with that ear-to-ear broad smile of his is so very worthy of praise. Especially because he smiles all the time. The Ohoven-like lips and the hair texture – very relevant. The curiously pink palms of the hand and soles of the feet – a phenomena where nature had surely freaked out.
Then off to the safari. But, better still, off to meet a corrupt dictator. If you write about his government later in your prospective bestseller, don’t – absolutely don’t – forget to refer to it as a black government. Governments in Africa are for some reason or other black, even if half of the cabinet ministers are pink or olive. But let’s keep to the shooting safari.
Have your driver be drunk at the end of the day and wonder why. Then remember that he had been disappearing behind a bush every now and then, when he was not holding the zoom lens or a film role for you, while you had been working hard all day taking shots of the Big Five (but no shooting them because playing Hemingway or Holden is not politically correct anymore, and the animals have their own very powerful two-legged Weighty Watchers lobbyists. Your bestseller would be a flop). This being the state of your driver, a state he denies vehemently, you have to drive back to the hotel yourself, you treasure your life. The driver is snoring in the back seat before you even turn the ignition key. Say how you ignore that and concentrate on the magical beauty of Africa. This time it is the marvellous sunset covering the savannah like a thin sheet of molten gold. Give it all you’re worth in descriptive imagery. Don’t even think of mentioning the chirping birds and the crickets. This is Africa at her most dangerous, malicious, threatening self! The heart of darkness! Lions roaring, buffaloes stampeding, a fifty-plus aunt elephant herd with dozens of calves roaming, mosquitoes on the rampage with all the most resistant viruses and bacteria hovering in their flimsy proboscis – here, worry at length about whether your malaria protection was in time. The hyenas are laughing like maniacs, the leopards dropping down from acacia branches (at least three of which should drop on the roof or bonnet of your 4WD), the gazelles and antelopes galloping across the excuse-for-a-road you’re driving on threatening to make you a killer – but you give them no chance. You swerve dangerously into a ditch just to let them cross the road. Here you must give details of your Paris-Dakar-like style of driving. Hit your head a few times on the roof of the 4WD, then (as your head throbs with pain), that huge, beautiful, golden African sunset on the horizon more than makes up for the pain and fear. But from one nanosecond to the next, the huge orb is gone.
Time for phase two of darkest Africa. Pitch darkness except for your headlights and the occasional firefly, and then it happens. You plunge into an entire crater on the road that defies being referred to as a road. The 4WD flips over belly up. Both front tyres are busted. You are unconscious for you don’t know how long. The black driver is draped over the seat, bleeding from various cuts but still snoring. Be very amazed at the robust nature of the African. Crawl out, your body all but mangled, then retrieve your expensive camera and laptop equipment. And, belonging to human beings who plan ahead, you also pull out your portable tent and sleeping bag, glad that you had rightly brought these with you. Don’t forget all this while to constantly mention the dangerous Africa around you, roaring, stampeding and so on. You realise that now you don’t even have the safety of your 4WD. And Africa starts attacking with her long, long thin as a bicycle pump or thick as the outline of your toilet s-bend crawling creatures. At this very moment the headlights of the 4WD go out in a slow yellowing and flickering way. The battery is out. Your robust African is still snoring away despite his wounds. He must be alright. But you’re a plan-ahead kind of person so you pull out your powerful battery operated torch from your gear. Directing the torchlight at your Doc Marten boots your heart misses many beats – you’re wearing shorts! Those long, long thin or thick things crawl, and the mosquito is on the rampage with God knows what virus and African ants are a legend as torture machines!
Now is the time for you to attack Africa. Describe your anger and fear. Damn this horrible darkest Africa, the stone- aged Africans who can neither build roads nor remain sober to drive a decent person to a photo shooting safari and back again. Pull the bloody idiot out, but here worry first about whether you have gloves – damn, you don’t! He’s bleeding all over, you see. Check whether you have any wounds on your hands or arm – you don’t, thank God. The idiot has cuts because he had not fastened his seatbelt. With these black Africans you always have to think for them.
Damn and curse Africa a bit more under your breath as you check the wounds or cuts without actually touching them. Get out the first aid kit and do your very best, you’re the thinker and protector of poor, childlike, unable Africa. He’s awake now but seems to take things as normal as if he had only had a nap before a picnic and now he could join the picnickers. All the same ask him how he feels. The ear-to-ear smile as an answer. Tell him to change the tyres. The snoring seems to have made him almost completely sober again. He fiddles around the boot of the car, you check the engine and discover it is seriously damaged and hanging at an odd angle because it had been fastened in place with metal coat hangers. No wonder the headlights gave up the ghost. But Africa, this strange village, is very generous with dilemmas. Amid all the threatening animals and mosquitoes and God knows what else, she offers you yet another: there are no spare tyres, the black driver says, smiling ear-to-ear. But I especially sent you off to go and pick up not one, not two but four spare parts I had paid for at the dealer’s! you scream with anger, disbelieve, desperation, fear – the lot.
Here is where the child-African comes in. The driver hungs his head like a reprimanded child, says he was indeed on his way to pick up the spare tyres yesterday, when he spotted his “very close brother” and stopped to shake hands. Then he learnt from his “very close brother” that the mother, who is by all means also the driver’s “very close mother”, was sick and needed to be taken to a doctor. So he made a quick little detour with this close brother, picked up the close mother, took her to the cheapest but very good doctor where there was a very long queue. By the time the close mother had been checked and treated and driven back, the tyre dealer had closed his workshop. And this morning, he and you left for the safari shooting so early that the dealer had not opened his shop yet. But instead of tyres, he says, he has a fetish in his pocket which he got from his grandmother a long, long time ago and the grandmother had got it from her grandmother a much, much longer time ago. This fetish is going to protect the two of you even better than the tyres and then tomorrow…
You tell him to shut up in the most disparaging tone of voice. The idiot tells you this now, the dirty Ni… this stupid black fool! Tells you this now when you’re caught in Africa’s dangerous darkest fangs like a canary in the fangs of a large cat! You want to whip him to death on the spot but memories of Carl Peters, von Trotha and the Hereros probing your guilty conscious stop you. All this while, inject in tarrying scenes of the danger around you, the live jungle and whistling mosquitoes…
But planners have no time to waste especially when threatened. The black nincompoop is not yet that steady on his feet – fetish or no fetish – and that’s why you hitch the tent and sleeping bag on his back, not the expensive camera and laptop equipment. Explain that it is not that you want to imitate David Livingston and use the native as a beast of burden, it is just because you want no damage done to your expensive tools of trade. Describe how you are the one who guides the two of you in a long night match – unless he is a pygmy. Short African natives wearing bark loincloths are always brave and innovative. Otherwise Africans have no sense of orientation, you had read in a book by professor this and that, that’s why before colonisation they roamed around their continent without establishing any proper borders. Of course you had never read any such book but his kind of genial invention makes your book sound authoritative, well researched. The invented professors need not have names. An English Professor or a German Ethnologist will do very well. Everybody will believe you because anything written about Africa by anybody with a pink skin is the Gospel Truth, nobody will check the facts, and the natives who know the truth will never read your bestseller, let alone afford to buy a copy.
By pure chance you reach a tiny village ten miles from your site of accident. But before this, have the torch run out of power and snuff out after the first two miles, and your mobile phone useless – not because the battery has run low but because … well, this is Africa. They haven’t got around to transmitters yet.
Have the villagers welcome you in the middle of the pitch black night with the abandoned noisiness of little children. They grab you all over. They dance around you and clap, God has arrived amid them. Eat only your biscuits and drink only your bottled mineral water. Be careful to give the impression that you only have one biscuit and very little bottled water – the way you learnt in your survival course before you set off for Africa. You’re not mean, only realistic. Planners are also observers and note-takers especially among “primitive tribes”. So notice everything. Notice that everybody here goes to “bed” on mats spread out around the open fireplace which is in a corner of the tiny round hut with no windows but a lot of foul-smelling smoke. Each mat is shared by the whole family. There are no blankets but mention that this is in fact a very ecological and environmental-friendly tradition of keeping the whole family warm. Mention that the village chief has a bed made of one-foot-high stilts driven into the mud floor and spanned with branches, twigs and leaves. You just know he is the chief from your information gathered in the books written by Euroancestral sociologists. No, ethnologists. Sociologists are strictly for European societies. Don’t forget to put in details of the chief also sharing his bed with wife Number X and their three children, one of which is an infant. The infant’s limbs are half hanging out over the open fireplace. Through your cultured instinct you have a funny feeling about this.
Get into your sleeping bag in your zipped up tent but don’t sleep a wink all night – the lions are still roaring, the elephants trumpeting, the black mambas calculating how to chew their way into your tent. Also mention that you have to watch over your expensive equipment which the natives, you had noticed, had taken a bewildering interest in – peering at the camera from the wrong end of the lenses and so on. The laptop, as you were sending off an Email to your five-year-old son, had made even the black chief jump and run away. Until you had explained to everybody that the images flickering on the laptop are not a population of ghosts who can steel their souls. Your half-sober black driver, acting now as your translator, had told the natives just how much, in dollars, your equipment is worth, how it could fetch one up to – how many dollars? – oh, very, very many dollars in the city. And the city is only about fifty miles away, a distance the native could cover in a couple of hours of steady jogging with your equipment worth the immeasurable sum of dollars tucked under the arm. Here, mention how you try to get such thoughts out of your mind.
As you try to get the frightening thoughts out of your mind you suddenly remember the books you read about armies of red safari aunts matching into tents in a trillion zillion, and stinging the occupiers all over, even getting into their underclothes. And if these ants were migrating from a spot in the jungle where they had adequately fed themselves on the carcass of a dead monkey, and if the monkey had died of Ebola or AIDS… You cannot sleep. Africa is scaring you to death again. All because you had been stupid enough not to bring that aunt-terminator chemical from Bayer – the latest – which one only needed to spray outside the tent in a circumference six inches away for the tent walls! Curse Africa with all the devils known to you. In this damned continent one had to equip oneself like a visitor to Chernobyl! This godforsaken continent – you’re never going to set foot on it again. Never ever. Well, perhaps you will, but only when your sponsors insert a new clause in your contract allowing you to hire convoys of 4WDs plus a light aircraft with a European (but no Russian or Ukrainian) pilot, just in case one or two 4WDs land in a crater in the middle of these no-roads in the jungle surrounded by Africa’s darkest, wildest, most evil dangers-to-civilised-humankind…
Africa tears you away from your morbid thoughts and tired bones. It warmly caresses you like a smitten lover. It sends your heart racing. It intoxicates you. You slowly crawl out of your tent without being conscious of the fact because it has sent you into a trance. You stand outside with your eyes glued on its divine beauty. Glued on Ra, the ancient Egyptian sun god. The African sunrise in all its gloriously divine enchantment. You had never quite understood the books about Africa’s intoxicating splendour until this moment. Africa the schizophrenic. Africa the biblical myth. Africa of the mysteriously divine magic. Africa of the prehistoric beauty. Africa the innocent. Mention that you’re clicking your camera with tears running down your cheeks as Ra rises majestically on the horizon to set the entire savannah glowing orange-red.
Keep this up for about five pages.
And now is the time to give yourself a thorough mea culpa flagellation in penance for having cursed and damned Africa and her people and her animals, insects etcetera. Africa has got you cradled safely in her warm bosom. You shouldn’t have screamed at your driver just because Africans are always there for each other and disregard time with finality. You should have remembered to tell him to fasten his seatbelts, dear God, he has never driven in Europe! And didn’t the villagers welcome you, A Strange Stranger Out Of The Dark, in their middle and offered you something to eat and to drink? It was sensible to refuse eating their food and drinking their drinks, but your tin of biscuits and bottles of mineral water should have been shared around or, better still, given to the children. These children with sad old eyes too big for their heads and visible Shakespearean ribs supporting their global bellies. Why, a single night of a bit of hunger and thirst wouldn’t have killed you…etcetera, etcetera.
Continue the mea culpa flagellation while folding up your tent and sleeping bag. The sleeping bag – give it as a present to the chief, you can easily buy another later when you get to the city. Oh, and the rest of your biscuits and mineral water are for the children’s breakfast. Definitely. Well, maybe you should keep a bottle of water for yourself because the day ahead will be long and hot. This is only sensible.
Carrying your sleeping bag for the chief, tin of biscuits and bottles of water for the babies and children with Shakespearean ribs, let Africa slap you resoundingly in the face. With a scene from the Palaeolithic era.
About a couple of dozen half naked people are squatting in the dust in a circle outside the chief’s hut. In the centre of the circle is something charred black placed on a few leaves on the ground. You’re not sure but you think you know what it is. Locate your now-sober-driver-cum-translator. He explains things to you. You are right. Your cultured instincts of last night and a while ago had served you correctly. It is the chief’s dear infant. He fell off the bed some time in the night. Straight into glowing coals in the open fireplace. The coals are actually dried dung of any and all animals roaming the savannah. The best suppliers, almost with a monopoly, are elephants. Sober Driver – what was his name again? Ask him. Make note of it but later in your manuscript give him the name of Babugu Wugaduba because this sounds so authentically African to your readers of exotic places with exotic people and exotic names. Babugu Wugaduba explains all this to you and you feel an anger engulf you, an anger that is larger than the wrath of God. Couldn’t these primitive fools think even half logically and know that the helpless infant should at least sleep in the middle of their family contraptions? Well, it would be better not to give the chief the sleeping bag after all – he could burn down the whole village with it in the middle of the night! And just as you are giving Babugu Wugaduba the biscuits and water for the children, you see the chief hacking away at the little charred head. Here you have to dwell on the movements of his machete, his grunts, the sounds the bones make etcetera etcetera, before you run to behind a bush to vomit your guts out.
But now more than ever you know you have the best bestseller.
You come back, not to stop the horror, but to motivate Babugu Wugaduba with a five-dollar bonus if he translates in every detail and answers your questions or nods yes or no to your statements. A five-dollar motivation seems to send Babugu Wugaduba’s imagination and fantasies to ecstatic domains, you suspect, but the domains are the very fodder your readers have been hungering for. Boy, this is IT!
Charred Infant’s head complete with eyes, ears and brain go to the chief because this was his first and only son with Wife Number X. Whereas Wife X is entitled to the lungs because lungs are too airy for male consumption, the chief also gets the heart , liver and gall bladder – an organ considered too bitter for a woman to eat because it could ruin all her ovulation functions. The chief gets all the inner organs for his potency, Babugu Wugaduba explains to you. Really, Babugu? (this is where you start addressing him with his first name but without letting him know yours). True, true (mention that he has the habit of always repeating certain words like many, many and very, very and true, true and today, today). True, true. From tonight on the chief is not only going to sire twin sons across the landscape of his wives each single night, no, no. Tonight and for the next full six months he is going to sire twin sons right across the landscape of his subjects’ wives and daughters, true, true.
Here you mention that you give Babugu a little smile with a condescending pat on his back because Africans appreciate condescension. Say that the only small problem is that Babugu’s t-shirt is not the cleanest and is soaked with his sweat. But you will continue patting Babugu’s sweaty back in several occasions just to show the man that you’re not General von Trotha. Let the readers know that Babugu’s T-shirt has Mr Natural Viagra sprawled on it back and front. I suppose the chief doesn’t need viagra either, suggest with a smile because you’re now Babugu’s other side of Carl Peters – the side that liked native things. Do a little paragraph of how amazing it is that Africans (it is a village, don’t forget this) seem to catch on on the latest Western trends they have never even seen. Mention the teenaged boy in the street yesterday who was wearing a t-shirt announcing: The Cannibal of Rothenberg. But get back to the breakfast scene again quickly before the reader gets bored. The bit about all girl children born this month being turned into delicacies or offered to ancestors so that the ancestors do their duty of protecting the people and their children properly. The ancestors are guilty of not having protected Chief’s Dear Male Infant. This seems too outlandish to be true, but you remember that colleague of yours who commented on the credibility of such titbits from their translator, saying these were most likely simply made up stories for a few dollars more. Poor chap had his publisher demanding the advance payment back and no editor even reads his Emails or faxes. You’re right here in the thick of things: a million sold copies in three months with translations into fifty languages including Japanese. Film rights in eight months…
Babugu now explains that the femurs, tibias, skull, ribcage bones and so on are all going to be used as jewellery on scooped out earlobes, pierced nostrils and lips. Make sure you have at least five chapters on The Charred Infant Breakfast – interviews with the chief, the women, the older children etcetera. It is a bit late to take photos of the Charred Infant now but in your manuscript you still have the chance to run off and get your camera instead of running off to vomit your guts out. But take photos of the rest of the events and interviews, Shakespearean ribcages supporting global bellies suspended above small male genitals. Also see to it that you take close-ups of eyes and noses covered with labouring flies. Look around, you will definitely find some great, big gush of a wound oozing greenish-yellow pus mixed with blood. Photograph this from all sorts of angles.
But – what’s that? It’s Wife Number X. And she is holding her infant baby son on her hip! You recognise the child immediately because last night you had held his black little fingers as he played them on the keyboard of you laptop! Babugu Wugaduba has cheated you! But don’t confront him with this. Pay him the bonus dollars you promised him. You are going to write your best bestseller, by God, and he will be your alibi. He told you it was the chief’s infant son, didn’t he? Well then, your conscious is clean. And monkeys are near enough to human beings to legitimise this breakfast as cannibalism.
End the book with that ambivalent umbilical cord about Africa. It leaves you the big chance to come back for the sequel/s and your publisher will notice this need at once. Yes you will come back to this disgusting and intoxicating “land” Africa. Because once Africa seduces you “successfully” so to speak or simply emotionally, you’re hers to do whatever she likes with, for the rest of your life. You already know that you will come back. Soon.
With the film crew.
APKY
Euroancestral reporters and novelists in Africa (including Keith B. Richburg, the African-American who wrote Out of Africa and is glad to be a descendant of slaves rather than of continental Africans) are a breed out of heaven knows where. Especially to the Africans. Let’s take Kiragwe Nzili of Botswana. After seeing him on Weltspiegel, a German weekly television reportage of news around the globe, eating dust on a plastic plate with his son outside his miserable little hut, I made up my mind to find him the next time I’m in Africa. The journalist in me was angry about this because I believe that journalists must not degrade another human being this much just for the sake of money. It degrades the profession. It degrades the entire humankind’s achievement in civilisation.
It took me two days to locate Mr Nzili. In the lounge of my hotel I interviewed him about the dust dinner. He told me the journalist and his camera crew had interviewed him about the hunger situation in his country, where the people had been told not to eat the genetically manipulated maize that had been donated from the USA. After telling the journalists that he and his son often go hungry for days “eating only dust”, which is a euphemism in his language, Setswana, and means “eating nothing at all”, the German team offered him five dollars for the “eating dust” filming. Five dollars is a lot of money for a poor man in Botswana who has no job but a son to feed. You can on the other hand imagine how much money the journalists earned with their “sensation”.
I think this kind of journalism is a disgrace to all decent journalists.
Yet this is the kind of voyeurism the West wants to project of and into Africa – so that they can feel – what – truly superior? Or just good civilized Christians? Take the bestseller lists of books about Africa and Africans. Excision. Cannibalism. Modern slavery. Child soldiers. Forced marriages. The famous “sexploitation” material – are “they” as biblically good in bed as is rumoured? And the good old ghosts, spirits and the witchdoctor. But in their intoxication with their hegemony, Euroancestrals forget that Africans may be poor, but they have long since learnt how to get those dollars or euros out of the pockets of such hegemony- drunk Western journalists, ethnologists, the lot. The thicker you lay it on – the needy African has learnt – the more dollars/euros you reap. The more bizarre the more extra hard currency. If decadence is what they prize as journalistic or ethnological material, they can have it and a lot more as spices.
The same with the novelists and “Africa experts”. Here, I’ll give you more tips, Western voracious writer with the hegemonic delusion.
To write about Africa, start with, say, a breathtaking sunrise as you climb into your chauffeured four-wheel-drive. Describe the sunset in details for at least one page. Don’t forget your driver – sorry – your black, or better still, pitch black driver. Whatever your good eyes tell you, the African’s skin colour is black. Give him three or four sentences which must dwell only on his characteristics that differ from Euroancestral characteristics. The complexion is very important especially if you’re a Scholl-Latour-type writer, because it is the one thing that uplifts him from the rest of humankind: the tall black man had bronze skin, a fine European-like nose, whereas his bride had flat, navel-region-long breasts…. etcetera, etcetera. The whiteness (hallelujah!) of his very big, widely-spaced teeth with that ear-to-ear broad smile of his is so very worthy of praise. Especially because he smiles all the time. The Ohoven-like lips and the hair texture – very relevant. The curiously pink palms of the hand and soles of the feet – a phenomena where nature had surely freaked out.
Then off to the safari. But, better still, off to meet a corrupt dictator. If you write about his government later in your prospective bestseller, don’t – absolutely don’t – forget to refer to it as a black government. Governments in Africa are for some reason or other black, even if half of the cabinet ministers are pink or olive. But let’s keep to the shooting safari.
Have your driver be drunk at the end of the day and wonder why. Then remember that he had been disappearing behind a bush every now and then, when he was not holding the zoom lens or a film role for you, while you had been working hard all day taking shots of the Big Five (but no shooting them because playing Hemingway or Holden is not politically correct anymore, and the animals have their own very powerful two-legged Weighty Watchers lobbyists. Your bestseller would be a flop). This being the state of your driver, a state he denies vehemently, you have to drive back to the hotel yourself, you treasure your life. The driver is snoring in the back seat before you even turn the ignition key. Say how you ignore that and concentrate on the magical beauty of Africa. This time it is the marvellous sunset covering the savannah like a thin sheet of molten gold. Give it all you’re worth in descriptive imagery. Don’t even think of mentioning the chirping birds and the crickets. This is Africa at her most dangerous, malicious, threatening self! The heart of darkness! Lions roaring, buffaloes stampeding, a fifty-plus aunt elephant herd with dozens of calves roaming, mosquitoes on the rampage with all the most resistant viruses and bacteria hovering in their flimsy proboscis – here, worry at length about whether your malaria protection was in time. The hyenas are laughing like maniacs, the leopards dropping down from acacia branches (at least three of which should drop on the roof or bonnet of your 4WD), the gazelles and antelopes galloping across the excuse-for-a-road you’re driving on threatening to make you a killer – but you give them no chance. You swerve dangerously into a ditch just to let them cross the road. Here you must give details of your Paris-Dakar-like style of driving. Hit your head a few times on the roof of the 4WD, then (as your head throbs with pain), that huge, beautiful, golden African sunset on the horizon more than makes up for the pain and fear. But from one nanosecond to the next, the huge orb is gone.
Time for phase two of darkest Africa. Pitch darkness except for your headlights and the occasional firefly, and then it happens. You plunge into an entire crater on the road that defies being referred to as a road. The 4WD flips over belly up. Both front tyres are busted. You are unconscious for you don’t know how long. The black driver is draped over the seat, bleeding from various cuts but still snoring. Be very amazed at the robust nature of the African. Crawl out, your body all but mangled, then retrieve your expensive camera and laptop equipment. And, belonging to human beings who plan ahead, you also pull out your portable tent and sleeping bag, glad that you had rightly brought these with you. Don’t forget all this while to constantly mention the dangerous Africa around you, roaring, stampeding and so on. You realise that now you don’t even have the safety of your 4WD. And Africa starts attacking with her long, long thin as a bicycle pump or thick as the outline of your toilet s-bend crawling creatures. At this very moment the headlights of the 4WD go out in a slow yellowing and flickering way. The battery is out. Your robust African is still snoring away despite his wounds. He must be alright. But you’re a plan-ahead kind of person so you pull out your powerful battery operated torch from your gear. Directing the torchlight at your Doc Marten boots your heart misses many beats – you’re wearing shorts! Those long, long thin or thick things crawl, and the mosquito is on the rampage with God knows what virus and African ants are a legend as torture machines!
Now is the time for you to attack Africa. Describe your anger and fear. Damn this horrible darkest Africa, the stone- aged Africans who can neither build roads nor remain sober to drive a decent person to a photo shooting safari and back again. Pull the bloody idiot out, but here worry first about whether you have gloves – damn, you don’t! He’s bleeding all over, you see. Check whether you have any wounds on your hands or arm – you don’t, thank God. The idiot has cuts because he had not fastened his seatbelt. With these black Africans you always have to think for them.
Damn and curse Africa a bit more under your breath as you check the wounds or cuts without actually touching them. Get out the first aid kit and do your very best, you’re the thinker and protector of poor, childlike, unable Africa. He’s awake now but seems to take things as normal as if he had only had a nap before a picnic and now he could join the picnickers. All the same ask him how he feels. The ear-to-ear smile as an answer. Tell him to change the tyres. The snoring seems to have made him almost completely sober again. He fiddles around the boot of the car, you check the engine and discover it is seriously damaged and hanging at an odd angle because it had been fastened in place with metal coat hangers. No wonder the headlights gave up the ghost. But Africa, this strange village, is very generous with dilemmas. Amid all the threatening animals and mosquitoes and God knows what else, she offers you yet another: there are no spare tyres, the black driver says, smiling ear-to-ear. But I especially sent you off to go and pick up not one, not two but four spare parts I had paid for at the dealer’s! you scream with anger, disbelieve, desperation, fear – the lot.
Here is where the child-African comes in. The driver hungs his head like a reprimanded child, says he was indeed on his way to pick up the spare tyres yesterday, when he spotted his “very close brother” and stopped to shake hands. Then he learnt from his “very close brother” that the mother, who is by all means also the driver’s “very close mother”, was sick and needed to be taken to a doctor. So he made a quick little detour with this close brother, picked up the close mother, took her to the cheapest but very good doctor where there was a very long queue. By the time the close mother had been checked and treated and driven back, the tyre dealer had closed his workshop. And this morning, he and you left for the safari shooting so early that the dealer had not opened his shop yet. But instead of tyres, he says, he has a fetish in his pocket which he got from his grandmother a long, long time ago and the grandmother had got it from her grandmother a much, much longer time ago. This fetish is going to protect the two of you even better than the tyres and then tomorrow…
You tell him to shut up in the most disparaging tone of voice. The idiot tells you this now, the dirty Ni… this stupid black fool! Tells you this now when you’re caught in Africa’s dangerous darkest fangs like a canary in the fangs of a large cat! You want to whip him to death on the spot but memories of Carl Peters, von Trotha and the Hereros probing your guilty conscious stop you. All this while, inject in tarrying scenes of the danger around you, the live jungle and whistling mosquitoes…
But planners have no time to waste especially when threatened. The black nincompoop is not yet that steady on his feet – fetish or no fetish – and that’s why you hitch the tent and sleeping bag on his back, not the expensive camera and laptop equipment. Explain that it is not that you want to imitate David Livingston and use the native as a beast of burden, it is just because you want no damage done to your expensive tools of trade. Describe how you are the one who guides the two of you in a long night match – unless he is a pygmy. Short African natives wearing bark loincloths are always brave and innovative. Otherwise Africans have no sense of orientation, you had read in a book by professor this and that, that’s why before colonisation they roamed around their continent without establishing any proper borders. Of course you had never read any such book but his kind of genial invention makes your book sound authoritative, well researched. The invented professors need not have names. An English Professor or a German Ethnologist will do very well. Everybody will believe you because anything written about Africa by anybody with a pink skin is the Gospel Truth, nobody will check the facts, and the natives who know the truth will never read your bestseller, let alone afford to buy a copy.
By pure chance you reach a tiny village ten miles from your site of accident. But before this, have the torch run out of power and snuff out after the first two miles, and your mobile phone useless – not because the battery has run low but because … well, this is Africa. They haven’t got around to transmitters yet.
Have the villagers welcome you in the middle of the pitch black night with the abandoned noisiness of little children. They grab you all over. They dance around you and clap, God has arrived amid them. Eat only your biscuits and drink only your bottled mineral water. Be careful to give the impression that you only have one biscuit and very little bottled water – the way you learnt in your survival course before you set off for Africa. You’re not mean, only realistic. Planners are also observers and note-takers especially among “primitive tribes”. So notice everything. Notice that everybody here goes to “bed” on mats spread out around the open fireplace which is in a corner of the tiny round hut with no windows but a lot of foul-smelling smoke. Each mat is shared by the whole family. There are no blankets but mention that this is in fact a very ecological and environmental-friendly tradition of keeping the whole family warm. Mention that the village chief has a bed made of one-foot-high stilts driven into the mud floor and spanned with branches, twigs and leaves. You just know he is the chief from your information gathered in the books written by Euroancestral sociologists. No, ethnologists. Sociologists are strictly for European societies. Don’t forget to put in details of the chief also sharing his bed with wife Number X and their three children, one of which is an infant. The infant’s limbs are half hanging out over the open fireplace. Through your cultured instinct you have a funny feeling about this.
Get into your sleeping bag in your zipped up tent but don’t sleep a wink all night – the lions are still roaring, the elephants trumpeting, the black mambas calculating how to chew their way into your tent. Also mention that you have to watch over your expensive equipment which the natives, you had noticed, had taken a bewildering interest in – peering at the camera from the wrong end of the lenses and so on. The laptop, as you were sending off an Email to your five-year-old son, had made even the black chief jump and run away. Until you had explained to everybody that the images flickering on the laptop are not a population of ghosts who can steel their souls. Your half-sober black driver, acting now as your translator, had told the natives just how much, in dollars, your equipment is worth, how it could fetch one up to – how many dollars? – oh, very, very many dollars in the city. And the city is only about fifty miles away, a distance the native could cover in a couple of hours of steady jogging with your equipment worth the immeasurable sum of dollars tucked under the arm. Here, mention how you try to get such thoughts out of your mind.
As you try to get the frightening thoughts out of your mind you suddenly remember the books you read about armies of red safari aunts matching into tents in a trillion zillion, and stinging the occupiers all over, even getting into their underclothes. And if these ants were migrating from a spot in the jungle where they had adequately fed themselves on the carcass of a dead monkey, and if the monkey had died of Ebola or AIDS… You cannot sleep. Africa is scaring you to death again. All because you had been stupid enough not to bring that aunt-terminator chemical from Bayer – the latest – which one only needed to spray outside the tent in a circumference six inches away for the tent walls! Curse Africa with all the devils known to you. In this damned continent one had to equip oneself like a visitor to Chernobyl! This godforsaken continent – you’re never going to set foot on it again. Never ever. Well, perhaps you will, but only when your sponsors insert a new clause in your contract allowing you to hire convoys of 4WDs plus a light aircraft with a European (but no Russian or Ukrainian) pilot, just in case one or two 4WDs land in a crater in the middle of these no-roads in the jungle surrounded by Africa’s darkest, wildest, most evil dangers-to-civilised-humankind…
Africa tears you away from your morbid thoughts and tired bones. It warmly caresses you like a smitten lover. It sends your heart racing. It intoxicates you. You slowly crawl out of your tent without being conscious of the fact because it has sent you into a trance. You stand outside with your eyes glued on its divine beauty. Glued on Ra, the ancient Egyptian sun god. The African sunrise in all its gloriously divine enchantment. You had never quite understood the books about Africa’s intoxicating splendour until this moment. Africa the schizophrenic. Africa the biblical myth. Africa of the mysteriously divine magic. Africa of the prehistoric beauty. Africa the innocent. Mention that you’re clicking your camera with tears running down your cheeks as Ra rises majestically on the horizon to set the entire savannah glowing orange-red.
Keep this up for about five pages.
And now is the time to give yourself a thorough mea culpa flagellation in penance for having cursed and damned Africa and her people and her animals, insects etcetera. Africa has got you cradled safely in her warm bosom. You shouldn’t have screamed at your driver just because Africans are always there for each other and disregard time with finality. You should have remembered to tell him to fasten his seatbelts, dear God, he has never driven in Europe! And didn’t the villagers welcome you, A Strange Stranger Out Of The Dark, in their middle and offered you something to eat and to drink? It was sensible to refuse eating their food and drinking their drinks, but your tin of biscuits and bottles of mineral water should have been shared around or, better still, given to the children. These children with sad old eyes too big for their heads and visible Shakespearean ribs supporting their global bellies. Why, a single night of a bit of hunger and thirst wouldn’t have killed you…etcetera, etcetera.
Continue the mea culpa flagellation while folding up your tent and sleeping bag. The sleeping bag – give it as a present to the chief, you can easily buy another later when you get to the city. Oh, and the rest of your biscuits and mineral water are for the children’s breakfast. Definitely. Well, maybe you should keep a bottle of water for yourself because the day ahead will be long and hot. This is only sensible.
Carrying your sleeping bag for the chief, tin of biscuits and bottles of water for the babies and children with Shakespearean ribs, let Africa slap you resoundingly in the face. With a scene from the Palaeolithic era.
About a couple of dozen half naked people are squatting in the dust in a circle outside the chief’s hut. In the centre of the circle is something charred black placed on a few leaves on the ground. You’re not sure but you think you know what it is. Locate your now-sober-driver-cum-translator. He explains things to you. You are right. Your cultured instincts of last night and a while ago had served you correctly. It is the chief’s dear infant. He fell off the bed some time in the night. Straight into glowing coals in the open fireplace. The coals are actually dried dung of any and all animals roaming the savannah. The best suppliers, almost with a monopoly, are elephants. Sober Driver – what was his name again? Ask him. Make note of it but later in your manuscript give him the name of Babugu Wugaduba because this sounds so authentically African to your readers of exotic places with exotic people and exotic names. Babugu Wugaduba explains all this to you and you feel an anger engulf you, an anger that is larger than the wrath of God. Couldn’t these primitive fools think even half logically and know that the helpless infant should at least sleep in the middle of their family contraptions? Well, it would be better not to give the chief the sleeping bag after all – he could burn down the whole village with it in the middle of the night! And just as you are giving Babugu Wugaduba the biscuits and water for the children, you see the chief hacking away at the little charred head. Here you have to dwell on the movements of his machete, his grunts, the sounds the bones make etcetera etcetera, before you run to behind a bush to vomit your guts out.
But now more than ever you know you have the best bestseller.
You come back, not to stop the horror, but to motivate Babugu Wugaduba with a five-dollar bonus if he translates in every detail and answers your questions or nods yes or no to your statements. A five-dollar motivation seems to send Babugu Wugaduba’s imagination and fantasies to ecstatic domains, you suspect, but the domains are the very fodder your readers have been hungering for. Boy, this is IT!
Charred Infant’s head complete with eyes, ears and brain go to the chief because this was his first and only son with Wife Number X. Whereas Wife X is entitled to the lungs because lungs are too airy for male consumption, the chief also gets the heart , liver and gall bladder – an organ considered too bitter for a woman to eat because it could ruin all her ovulation functions. The chief gets all the inner organs for his potency, Babugu Wugaduba explains to you. Really, Babugu? (this is where you start addressing him with his first name but without letting him know yours). True, true (mention that he has the habit of always repeating certain words like many, many and very, very and true, true and today, today). True, true. From tonight on the chief is not only going to sire twin sons across the landscape of his wives each single night, no, no. Tonight and for the next full six months he is going to sire twin sons right across the landscape of his subjects’ wives and daughters, true, true.
Here you mention that you give Babugu a little smile with a condescending pat on his back because Africans appreciate condescension. Say that the only small problem is that Babugu’s t-shirt is not the cleanest and is soaked with his sweat. But you will continue patting Babugu’s sweaty back in several occasions just to show the man that you’re not General von Trotha. Let the readers know that Babugu’s T-shirt has Mr Natural Viagra sprawled on it back and front. I suppose the chief doesn’t need viagra either, suggest with a smile because you’re now Babugu’s other side of Carl Peters – the side that liked native things. Do a little paragraph of how amazing it is that Africans (it is a village, don’t forget this) seem to catch on on the latest Western trends they have never even seen. Mention the teenaged boy in the street yesterday who was wearing a t-shirt announcing: The Cannibal of Rothenberg. But get back to the breakfast scene again quickly before the reader gets bored. The bit about all girl children born this month being turned into delicacies or offered to ancestors so that the ancestors do their duty of protecting the people and their children properly. The ancestors are guilty of not having protected Chief’s Dear Male Infant. This seems too outlandish to be true, but you remember that colleague of yours who commented on the credibility of such titbits from their translator, saying these were most likely simply made up stories for a few dollars more. Poor chap had his publisher demanding the advance payment back and no editor even reads his Emails or faxes. You’re right here in the thick of things: a million sold copies in three months with translations into fifty languages including Japanese. Film rights in eight months…
Babugu now explains that the femurs, tibias, skull, ribcage bones and so on are all going to be used as jewellery on scooped out earlobes, pierced nostrils and lips. Make sure you have at least five chapters on The Charred Infant Breakfast – interviews with the chief, the women, the older children etcetera. It is a bit late to take photos of the Charred Infant now but in your manuscript you still have the chance to run off and get your camera instead of running off to vomit your guts out. But take photos of the rest of the events and interviews, Shakespearean ribcages supporting global bellies suspended above small male genitals. Also see to it that you take close-ups of eyes and noses covered with labouring flies. Look around, you will definitely find some great, big gush of a wound oozing greenish-yellow pus mixed with blood. Photograph this from all sorts of angles.
But – what’s that? It’s Wife Number X. And she is holding her infant baby son on her hip! You recognise the child immediately because last night you had held his black little fingers as he played them on the keyboard of you laptop! Babugu Wugaduba has cheated you! But don’t confront him with this. Pay him the bonus dollars you promised him. You are going to write your best bestseller, by God, and he will be your alibi. He told you it was the chief’s infant son, didn’t he? Well then, your conscious is clean. And monkeys are near enough to human beings to legitimise this breakfast as cannibalism.
End the book with that ambivalent umbilical cord about Africa. It leaves you the big chance to come back for the sequel/s and your publisher will notice this need at once. Yes you will come back to this disgusting and intoxicating “land” Africa. Because once Africa seduces you “successfully” so to speak or simply emotionally, you’re hers to do whatever she likes with, for the rest of your life. You already know that you will come back. Soon.
With the film crew.
Friday, 5 September 2008
Ever Had a Dim Sum
I don’t know how often I’ve eaten dim sum, even in Thai or Korean restaurants. Lori Allen of AWAI Travel Division explains that dim sum is actually Cantonese and literally means "heart's delight." Well it's mine, especially when it's freezing cold. Beats steaming Spagetti Bolognaise any day.
Dim sum is a variety of Chinese snacks like steamed pork buns, dumplings, shrimpballs, noodles, and more which come in small portions and may include meat, noodles, vegetables, as well as desserts. In the States, Chinese dim sum is usually served in the morningbefore noon or at specialty dim sum restaurants all day. There are two types of restaurants that serve it:
** 1. Restaurants that offer dishes a la carte, which is fun
** 2. Restaurants with servers who walk the aisles pushing carts of steaming dim sum, stopping at every table to peddle their wares which is even more fun.
I had the pleasure while travelling by train from Shanghai to Zhoujou. Especially as it was a cold winter day. The very best dim sum is still in China, where each region has a different specialty. In Shanghai, for example, the soup dumpling - served steaming in bamboo baskets, each dumpling filled with a delicious savoury soup, is the most popular item on the dim sum menu. Crowds of people line up at the world-renowned Nanxiang Mantou Dian restaurant to slurp up the piping hot dumplings, where you can get 16 for a dollar. More details here: http://www.akinyi-princess.de
Dim sum is a variety of Chinese snacks like steamed pork buns, dumplings, shrimpballs, noodles, and more which come in small portions and may include meat, noodles, vegetables, as well as desserts. In the States, Chinese dim sum is usually served in the morningbefore noon or at specialty dim sum restaurants all day. There are two types of restaurants that serve it:
** 1. Restaurants that offer dishes a la carte, which is fun
** 2. Restaurants with servers who walk the aisles pushing carts of steaming dim sum, stopping at every table to peddle their wares which is even more fun.
I had the pleasure while travelling by train from Shanghai to Zhoujou. Especially as it was a cold winter day. The very best dim sum is still in China, where each region has a different specialty. In Shanghai, for example, the soup dumpling - served steaming in bamboo baskets, each dumpling filled with a delicious savoury soup, is the most popular item on the dim sum menu. Crowds of people line up at the world-renowned Nanxiang Mantou Dian restaurant to slurp up the piping hot dumplings, where you can get 16 for a dollar. More details here: http://www.akinyi-princess.de
Friday, 25 July 2008
CNN Doing What's It's Good At
The MAIN MAN had a whopping quarter of a million audience riveted on him yesterday at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate – a politically sacred place in the city. And somebody is mad. Very many somebodies actually are stark staring bonkers. Let’s take CNN (unfortunately I don’t have the means to watch Fox in Germany). CNN’s “by-line” was: Obama wins the hearts, but not the minds, of Germans. See it? Or did CNN mean that Germans are chronic dimwits anyway? Afroancestrals are always the Heart People and not the Mind People - most Euroancestrals would have the world believe. Now, when all humankind could be that, be Heart People, I couldn’t think of a better world. Minds are autocratic and should be left well alone to think their thoughts, only checked in their stride when the thoughts are tantamount to destroying nature, humanity very much included. But hearts have that natural (read Godly, for it’s not for nothing that the Christian Faith teaches us that God “made us in His image”) soft spot where they finely pick between good and bad – no grey zones in the human heart, unless warped by our own malfunctioning environment. So Barack Obama won Biiiig in Berlin and (pink) conservative America have their knickers in a gorgeous twist about it. The righteous first shall be the first, says my bible – and don’t you forget that Christianity is Afro-Orient. Euroancestrals have never in history come up with a world religion. Open your eyes people. I said it yesterday – pink people know how to steal a good thing and make it theirs. Otherwise Odin, Thor or Wotan would have been theirs to spread around as gods – whether as Celts, Visigoths or Germanics. So why didn’t they? Because somebody else in Africa and the Orient had a more powerful spirituality with an extremely volatile conviction to toss to the world. Pinkie grabbed it and made it theirs. Like the American continent. Or Australia. Or the technology that sprouted from the Islamic world and was mainly stolen and kept secret by the Vatican. Keep track - that's how it's done.
Stay glued, I’ll be back - because we have an exciting week here in Europe. That 50% Luo genius who spoke for over an hour without any written speech to look at, is meeting Sarkozy in Paris next – Sakorzy a lover of a nude-skin kind of woman. Not our Michelle at all. But then, Barack Obama remains the sole spectator of a clad-skin Michelle. A true Luo honourable! Sorry – short of about 5% German and 37% English (what's the opposite of prudery?)!
Stay glued, I’ll be back - because we have an exciting week here in Europe. That 50% Luo genius who spoke for over an hour without any written speech to look at, is meeting Sarkozy in Paris next – Sakorzy a lover of a nude-skin kind of woman. Not our Michelle at all. But then, Barack Obama remains the sole spectator of a clad-skin Michelle. A true Luo honourable! Sorry – short of about 5% German and 37% English (what's the opposite of prudery?)!
Thursday, 24 July 2008
Barack Obama is German
click below to view fotogallery
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=1.html
Sit tight, this is a knock-offer! Pink people never see a good thing and keep their hands off it. Or, in this regard, off him. The Democrat Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is 4.6875% German, the German renowned weekly, Die Zeit, claims in their today’s 24th July 2008) issue. A poll has found out that 72% of Germans wish him to be the next President of the USA. In the capital city of Berlin, Barack Obama had a reception today that tops the one once given to John F Kennedy in the same city. In cafés, bars and pubs the Big Question is: Why don’t we have one such as him? reports Die Zeit.
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalarien/6328824,f=slimg,image=2.html
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=3.html
They’ve dug up his entire Germanness from one Christian Gutknecht, born in 1722 in the town of Bischweiler. At the age of 24 he married one Maria Magdalena Gruenholtz and three years later they migrated to the USA, arriving on 13th September 1749. Christian anglicised his name first to Goodknight – the German word Knecht actually means manservant, farm hand or slave. But the good manservant Christian wanted a nobler surname. He soon took out the “k” altogether and became Goodnight. Maria Magdalena and Christian had a son, Samuel Goodnight (born around 1760 in Pennsylvania). Samuel married Magdalena Berkheimer (born 1764), and they had a daughter Catherine Goodnight born in 1794 in Pennsylvania. Catherine married Jacob Dunham, born in 1795 in Virginia. Their son Jacob Mackey Dunham (*1824, Virginia) married Louise Eliza Stroup (*1837, Ohio). Louise and Jacob Mackey had a son, Jacob William Dunham (1863 in Indiana), who married Mary Ann Kearney (*1869 in Indiana). Jacob William and Mary Ann begat Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham in Kansas in 1894. Ralph Waldo entered holy matrimony with Ruth Lucille Armour (*1900 in Illinois) and the marriage produced another son in 1918 in Kansas named Stanley Armour Dunham. Stanley married Madelyn Lee Payne who was born in Kansas in 1922. Which led to the birth of Stanley Ann Dunham (*1942 in Kansas) who married Barack Hussein Obama (*1936 in Kenya). This last couple are the parents of Barack Hussein Obama Jr, born in 1961 in Hawaii.
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=4.html
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=5.html
According to the weekly, another German lineage was traced by the genealogist Williams Addams Reitwiesner – www.fivethirtyeight.com - to the German city of Heilbronn in 1616. The genealogist came up with the maths:
Luo 50.0%
English 37.3%
German 4.6875%
Another researcher claims that Obama’s success lies in his embracing German values which he absorbed further in his state of Illinois, an enclave of descendants of German migrants. These “Protestant German values” are: impartiality, environmental consciousness (I’m a Luo and you should have heard me laughing!), transparency, innovation, education and peaceful solution of conflicts.
Wait a minute, who started (and lost) the two Great Wars?
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=6.html
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalarien/6328824,f=slimg,image=7.html
A couple of months ago when H R Clinton was still getting a good run for her money, this same weekly, Die Zeit had another glaring front page headlines with head photos of Obama and Clinton, asking the readership who the next US president would be: FRAU ODER SCHWARZ? At the time Obama was nothing but a pigmentation possibly from Pluto. At least Clinton had a gender. And now, with 72% for Barack Obama? He’s their main man!!
http://nagazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrchten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=8.html
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=1.html
Sit tight, this is a knock-offer! Pink people never see a good thing and keep their hands off it. Or, in this regard, off him. The Democrat Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is 4.6875% German, the German renowned weekly, Die Zeit, claims in their today’s 24th July 2008) issue. A poll has found out that 72% of Germans wish him to be the next President of the USA. In the capital city of Berlin, Barack Obama had a reception today that tops the one once given to John F Kennedy in the same city. In cafés, bars and pubs the Big Question is: Why don’t we have one such as him? reports Die Zeit.
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalarien/6328824,f=slimg,image=2.html
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=3.html
They’ve dug up his entire Germanness from one Christian Gutknecht, born in 1722 in the town of Bischweiler. At the age of 24 he married one Maria Magdalena Gruenholtz and three years later they migrated to the USA, arriving on 13th September 1749. Christian anglicised his name first to Goodknight – the German word Knecht actually means manservant, farm hand or slave. But the good manservant Christian wanted a nobler surname. He soon took out the “k” altogether and became Goodnight. Maria Magdalena and Christian had a son, Samuel Goodnight (born around 1760 in Pennsylvania). Samuel married Magdalena Berkheimer (born 1764), and they had a daughter Catherine Goodnight born in 1794 in Pennsylvania. Catherine married Jacob Dunham, born in 1795 in Virginia. Their son Jacob Mackey Dunham (*1824, Virginia) married Louise Eliza Stroup (*1837, Ohio). Louise and Jacob Mackey had a son, Jacob William Dunham (1863 in Indiana), who married Mary Ann Kearney (*1869 in Indiana). Jacob William and Mary Ann begat Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham in Kansas in 1894. Ralph Waldo entered holy matrimony with Ruth Lucille Armour (*1900 in Illinois) and the marriage produced another son in 1918 in Kansas named Stanley Armour Dunham. Stanley married Madelyn Lee Payne who was born in Kansas in 1922. Which led to the birth of Stanley Ann Dunham (*1942 in Kansas) who married Barack Hussein Obama (*1936 in Kenya). This last couple are the parents of Barack Hussein Obama Jr, born in 1961 in Hawaii.
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=4.html
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=5.html
According to the weekly, another German lineage was traced by the genealogist Williams Addams Reitwiesner – www.fivethirtyeight.com - to the German city of Heilbronn in 1616. The genealogist came up with the maths:
Luo 50.0%
English 37.3%
German 4.6875%
Another researcher claims that Obama’s success lies in his embracing German values which he absorbed further in his state of Illinois, an enclave of descendants of German migrants. These “Protestant German values” are: impartiality, environmental consciousness (I’m a Luo and you should have heard me laughing!), transparency, innovation, education and peaceful solution of conflicts.
Wait a minute, who started (and lost) the two Great Wars?
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=6.html
http://magazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrichten/bildergalarien/6328824,f=slimg,image=7.html
A couple of months ago when H R Clinton was still getting a good run for her money, this same weekly, Die Zeit had another glaring front page headlines with head photos of Obama and Clinton, asking the readership who the next US president would be: FRAU ODER SCHWARZ? At the time Obama was nothing but a pigmentation possibly from Pluto. At least Clinton had a gender. And now, with 72% for Barack Obama? He’s their main man!!
http://nagazine.web.de/de/themen/nachrchten/bildergalerien/6328824,f=slimg,image=8.html
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