Random things

This is not a story.

When I last wrote about Somalia, I mentioned they had retained their language having been colonized by France, Britain, Italy and some parts under Ethiopian domination. You see on the one hand, I think we, as Africans ( I must admit here the difficulty of having a precise definition of who an African is) have to decolonize the mind. Suggestions have been made to decolonize the social sciences and language education (pdf). There is need for a common language and it doesn’t have to be English which my professor thinks is not rich and I tend to agree because I swear, there were occasions in Somalia I felt so frustrated.

Nabokov in Lolita broaches a very *delicate* topic in sexuality- pedophilia. I am not going to discuss Nabokov’s book, I suggest you read it for yourself. The reason I bring it up is because of another book, this time by Mark Greif; Against Everything where he argues the sex revolution of the 60s and 70s did not liberate sex but led to a liberalization of sex. He argues we will be able to talk about sex liberation only when it is thought of as we would a coffee date. On the subject of pedophilia he asks why the allure in youth when all the adults who engage in it were once youth?

In the same book by Greif talking about Octomom, he makes some very interesting critique of the media in the US of A but this can apply at home here too. He says when the financial meltdown happened in 2008-09, the media concentrated on a woman-Nadya and a Jew- Maddoff but not the bank and insurance execs who swindled peoples savings while these were known to them. The same seems to be happening here with our faux outrage on corruption. The media’s fingers seems to be tied. They can’t bring themselves to type the name of the banks or name the individuals involved in these banks but splash pictures of hapless conduits. For shame, the mainstream media. You are complicit in the crimes committed by governments and their operatives.

To be continued…..