Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe, Oh My!
The BBC reports with pretentious objectivity and balanced-and-fair condescension in “Anger over Mugabe tirade in Rome”:
The US ambassador to the FAO, Tony Hall, said Mr Mugabe, as well as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who also criticised Western policy, “chose to politicise an event that was meant to be about feeding the hungry people of the world”.
Zimbabwe is struggling to feed an estimated 3.8 million people in the rural areas, and has to import at least 37,000 tons of maize a week.
Since I do not watch whatever reality TV show the president of Zimbabwe may have, I will take the high-level view. I see this: It is easier to starve to death, die of disease or be killed by conflict for Africans today than it was in the days before Europe discovered the hot dinner (with zesty spices). The assumption here is that all of us would have died off long ago when we assume that what is happening in Africa today is a natural consequence of Africans being African (when almost all of African human life was in the “rural areas”). Further, when we use what little science is left in American pop culture we may remember that all humans descend from Africans—this suggests that no one would be alive today to talk crap about Africans because those “crazy” Africans would have killed each other to death way back up off at source of the Nile—only a few kilometers from the real Middle Earth.
The same view looks upon this bird flu and mad cow shit. There is something happening now that was not happening thousands of years ago. I am sure there are hundreds of refined academic “gentlemen” out there who can explain away these colored concerns but I never trust a “gentleman” from a cultural/linguistic mindset that requires the word “gentleman.” How many people not gentle inspired the word “gentleman” to be accepted into the English language? Were they from outside of England?
When I hear the word “gentleman,” I hear it coming from the mouth of a Los Angeles police officer testifying against a young Black teenager, describing the youth as a gentleman, overflowing with sophomoric sarcasm… Deen Ipaye, in “Fela at the African Shrine,” here at kintespace.com records the words of Fela:
I no be gentleman at-all, at-all, I be African-MAN, original!