Misinformation
By Sheriff Bojang
Mar 5, 2005, 07:34

Email this article
 Printer friendly page
Wednesday this week, a reader of Observer online called to vent spleen on what he regarded as our newspaper’s part in the unholy complot in our country to encourage mediocrity. He was vexed because, according to him, in just one week, we carried two ‘self glorifying bull..t third rate PR articles on our newspaper stories on a GPA public relations officer who called himself "a trained Libyan intelligence operator-cum-journalist" and a lawyer, Henry Carrol, who saw himself in cloud nine and vaingloriously relishes being in the league of geniuses like Einstein because his bio-data was included in the so-called ‘Great Minds of the 20th Century’ list by some biographical institute.

I went to some extent to explain to the man that he must have read the two articles in another newspaper since we have published neither. But I agree with him that mediocrity is a gangrene eating our social bodypolitic.
I told the man that if I were an editor, the next story I would carry on Henry Carrol would be when he wins the Nobel Prize for his long-awaited book he announced he was going to call ‘Cocktail of Academic...’ something or when the goodly Dr Henry Carrol becomes the head of the Legal Department of the UN Environment Programme.

Out of bonhomie, I also told the man that if I were a music critic, I would have advised Mam Tamsir to give it up a long time ago since the albums he release every other month contain substance but no sushi - cliched messages, no artistry - and that is the death of art.

Mediocrity and false humility are like a gangrene eating the heart of our society. In serious matters, we should do what we can do best and leave the rest to others. And it is the duty of society to stop the posturers and tell them they are candles without a glow whenever they pretend to be the noon-day sun.

But then, so many things are false. Once many, many years ago, a wise man called Mathias George, summoned the 50 precocious and not-so precocious kids in his academy for some practical lesson on how information is distorted and accepted.

Mathias began by whispering into the ears of Nas, the pretty girl who sits in the front of his class this message: "Samson is strong", and asked her to relay it to Njaimeh, who sits next to her and for Njaimeh in turn to relay it to Prince, who sits next to her and so on.

By the time Mathias’s message reached the fiftieth student of the academy, it had become, "Samson is the grandson of Moses," that stammering prophet who used to speak to God from behind the bushes.

I was in that academy of Mathias and have since wondered why people like adding colour and spice to plain information as if they were making Basmati rice at Clay Oven and swallowing it.

So fascinated was I with that thought of information and its distortion that when I began working on a handbook for Gambian journalists (yet to be published), I decided to include a brief chapter, "Historical Misinformation", an alphabetical cocktail of the things we thought were but that are not.

For example, almost everyone has beard of the charming book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and most readers assume that its author, Lewis Carroll, was primarily a writer of juveniles. Actually, his name was Charles…. something …….Godgson and he was a Mathematics lecturer at Oxford. He was shy and stammering and a very boring lecturer. However, the world of little girls delighted him, and for one of them, Alice Liddell, he wrote the book that accidentally made him famous. It was said that Queen Victoria was so entranced with his Alice work that she asked him to send her his next work. So he did; it was, An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, a bundle of abstruse mathematics!

It was then the British Queen knew how boring Dogson really was. But 115 years to date, not many people know that London’s Big Ben is neither a clock nor a tower, but the 13 ton bell named after a man called Benjamin.

And neither do many people know that the expression, "Between the devil and the blue sea", has nothing to do with the ruler of the Kingdom of Evil, the devil here, being the seam in a wooden ship’s hull on or below the waterline!

Talking about water, who coined the term, "Crocodile tears" and cooked up the theory that crocodiles shed (hypocritical) tears while eating their victims? Indeed, crocodiles have no tear glands. So how could they shed tears?

And like the crocodile don’t shed tears, so do fish don’t drink. The water they need is supplied by the moisture content of their food. Therefore, to accuse Lang Sambujang of drinking like a fish is high falutin.
And higher indeed is the Andes Mountain, Chimborazo, than Everest…..by a clear two miles if they are measured in terms of how far they stick into space from the centre of the earth.

About, fishes, have you ever wondered why the people of that southern Kombo coastal town of Gunjur are so cerebral? Hatab Bojang, Bun Jeng, Dr Sabari Janneh, Dr Amadou Janneh, Star Janneh, Abdoulie Barow and so on and so on….. The answer might lie in the fact that they eat a lot of fish and fish is said to be "brain food", rich in phosphorous-containing compounds. But then, if eating fish is the secret of the Gunjur people’s canniness, why are the people of Brufut not so bright, since they also live by the sea? Tarry a while and disprove not my theory about fish as "brain food", for I found out that the Brufut people would rather sell all their catch and make do with turtle soup for dinner served in their deep silver bowls!

And German silver has no silver. It is made from copper, zinc, and nickel. Next time Babou Faal wants to sell that bangle to you, tell him that there is no silver in German silver and that all the G-silvers he sold to the women in your home have lost their radiance.

Writing of radiance, strictly speaking, the radiance that surrounds the head or figure of saints, etc, in paintings is not a halo, which is a general term for any disc or luminosity (like that seen around the sun during eclipse), but a nimbus. Nimbus, since pagan times, has specific application to the radiance said to surround godlike figures when they appear on earth, even in Iran.
Iran, indeed was how the people of that country called it for centuries. Quite mistaken will you be to think that it was all along Persia. Persia was simply what foreigners insisted on calling it. The proud Iranians, tired of accepting somebody else’s name for their own country, announced in the mid 1930 that henceforth they shall answer to no name bar Iran.

On misunderstood names, former president Jawara’s parents neither named him Dawda nor Kairaba. The latter, meaning ‘Great Peace’, is a reference to Sir Dawda’s genial nature. This accolade, which stuck like that of ‘Mahatma’, meaning ‘Great Soul’, to Mohandas Ghandi, was given to Jawara by either Sanjally Bojang or some kora playing jali.

And do you know the devices they call lie detectors do not and cannot, actually identify lies? All they can do is to record certain physiological phenomena associated with lying, things like abnormal respiration, heartbeat and perspiration. That is why its findings are taken with a grain of salt by magistrates and judges. And it can be fooled. Persons who are truly unaware that they are lying, when in fact they are, cannot be caught by such a device.

And I wonder, where the preachers read, saw or heard God call satan, Lucifer? In the Bible, there is only one mention of a lucifer and it does not refer to the Lord of evil, but rather the King of Babylon.

The Germans often brag that there are two cars; The Mercedes Benz and the others. But where did this motor that is regarded as a symbol of German solidity, come from? Nobody named Mercedes had anything to do with the production of the Mercedes Benz. So where did the name come from?

Talking mysteries, a some years ago, the highway near Dumbuto, Kiang was cut off by a rainstorm and it became fodder for the local philosophers. Their most ingenuous theory being that a Ninki Nanka (dragon) passed across the road and scraped of the tar surface. There is nothing like a dragon. They were but mighty snakes that European adventurers found in the jungles of Africa and Asia, and certainly, they do not puff fire, are not reddish yellow and do not have mirrors on their heads!

And was it not Andy Warhol who talked about every man getting his quarter hour of fame? Well, Jarra, the Malian watchman at Kololi Club, got his when he spun his fantastic tale about the Mandinka talking owls that attacked him some years ago. After overpowering one of them, Jarra said the bug-eyed nocturnal bird pleaded with him, "Please, do not kill me. Why do you want to kill me?" But Jarra failed to get himself in the Book of Records with his incredible tale. Maybe because he failed to tell us that the owl told him its name was Fatmatta Cham and came from Sukuta? Some much for transmutant owls, dragons and idiots!

© Copyright 2003 by Observer Company

Top of Page


Essay
Latest Headlines
MisinformationThe Jali and his JookaA serious matterOf parrots and rattlesEssay
Waiting to exhaleNot in his nameLetter to My Son The SchismLetter to my sweetheartAbstain...otherwise use condoms
Bishop Johnson preaches




---------------------------------
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
 Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html

To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/CGI/wa.exe?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤