What does ‘Obama city rally’ mean?
A vendor lays out newspapers on July 24, 2015 in Nairobi. It's another bad-news story for the US newspaper industry: newsroom jobs slumped another 10.4 per cent to the lowest level since tracking began in 1978. PHOTO | SIMON MAINA |
What you need to know:
- One might assume that the rally was scheduled to be flagged off from the centre of some build-up called “Obama City”.
- The logical minded reader would have been led into identifying Obama city with the Kenyan capital.
An example of what a European media critic once dismissed as “…the pseudo-facts of newspaper headlines…” occurred on page one of the Daily Nation the other day: Said the ‘splash’ headline: “Obama city rally to pull 300,000…”
The subjective part — “Obama city rally” — could give you an idea of what and where the rally will be. No, it may not be exactly the same thing as the East Africa Safari Rally. And the resemblance to it and to the related matatu trek is uncanny. In both, the speeding (to nowhere) is hell-for-leather.
OBAMA CITY
One might thus assume that, whatever a latter-day “rally” is, this one was scheduled to be flagged off from the centre of some build-up called “Obama City”. That manner of speaking may confuse only one of those Martian astronauts who, once in a blue moon, land at Obama City spaceport.
Or it mightn’t. For all Martians are well read about the goings-on among the leading Earthling families, especially of the political kind. That was why our visitor from Outer Space knew that, for the nonce, a personality called Barack Obama is the most influential “person” on our entire planet.
The only problem is that the tourist literature and the visitor’s travel agent had not mentioned any urban build-up in terra called “Obama city”. Yet, although terrestrial “rallies” are a dime a dozen, the agent had been correct. Obama city is not the name of a rally. It is the other way round. Rally is the name of Obama city.
I have called it “subjective” because, being the grammatical subject, “Obama city rally” is what controls the verb (“to pull”). Now put yourself in the position of the Martian astronaut who arrived in Nairobi that very morning. It was his first ever visit to terra, as our earthly Latins’ call our planet.
Having a highly educated and keenly inquisitive mind, the Martian’s first interest would be the heap of papers on the pavement at the entrance to the inter-planetary spaceport. From a copy, his first question might be: “What on earth is an ‘“Obama city rally’?” His logico-mathematical pathways would assume that it is a rally in Obama city.
SYMBOLISM
If, as the Nation’s headline writer told us, Obama city is the name of the capital of the country in which the astronaut landed — and since the “rally” was referring to the present detour from his world odyssey — the logical minded reader would have been led into identifying Obama city with the Kenyan capital.
And why not? Kenyans may one day wish to rename their capital after their nephew who now carries the whole globe on his shoulder. The only danger is that certain Americans called “hawks” — scions of the Ronald Reagan school of thought — still pursue globalisaion only as a means of fattening certain American caterpillars.
Symbolism is the mode of expression of the human society. And words, the elements of language — which is one of definitions of the species — are the most symbolic of all.
