Show a little more intelligence when editing newspapers
Newspapers along Nkrumah Road in Mombasa on August 18, 2015. PHOTO | KEVIN ODIT | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
The question is: if you continue to think of other human beings merely as tools for self-gratification, where exactly does your specific intelligence lie?
The question will pose itself with greater force as black people begin to excel in all techno-scientific fields.
Although I frequently discuss it here, tautology remains among the most embarrassing failings in Kenya’s journalism. Collins defines tautology as “the use of words which merely repeat something already stated”. To “reverse back” is a frequent example in our newspapers.
For if to reverse already means to turn back, to reverse back must mean to turn back doubly. It is to use the adverb back twice inside the same semantic brackets. A headline on page 27 of The Standard of September 18 screamed: “Governor joins effort in a bid to conserve water.”
The question is: what is the difference between an effort and a bid? In this context, a bid is exactly the same thing as an effort. That is why to make an “effort in a bid to conserve water” is like saying that the effort was different from the bid.
The only reason I applaud our founding fathers for having adopted English for our own official use in education, in governance and in international commerce is that, because of certain historical happenstances, English is far more experienced in world affairs than any of its local counterparts.
To be sure, many of those happenstances were extraordinarily nasty to the natives of the countries over which Europe rode roughshod for donkey’s years all over the world. Yes, the Caucasian arrogance by which colonialism was perpetrated dehumanised Africans.
TREAT NATIVES
But, from all human history, I know a chapter when my own Nilotes, the world’s blackest-skinned human beings, colonised much of the Middle East all the way to the Indian sub-continent and that the Nilotes did not always treat the natives with kid gloves.
In short, throughout mankind’s history, all nations, races, religions, genders, sectors and tribes have treated one another in ways that do not bear witness to the arrogance by which we nominate ourselves as natural selection’s most intelligent species. A self-respecting Caucasian called William Shakespeare would plead that intelligence should be “made of sterner stuff”.
Any human being who mistreats another on account of his or her external bodily differences succeeds merely in exposing his or her profound ignorance of the origins, history and present-day bodily differences of homo sapiens sapiens as a holos.
No, I wouldn’t claim that such historical phenomena as colonialism, racism, sexism, the slave trade, tribalism, war and today’s lopsided trade relations (known to political economists as imperialism) are Caucasian crimes tout court. Throughout mankind’s relatively short history, all human tribes have committed similar crimes against other tribes.
Even as humanity prepares to conquer the solar system, there remain individuals all over our earthly microcosm who think of themselves as superior to all other human beings on account merely of their skin colours or sexual equipment or, as in Kenya today, of their tribe.
The question is: if you continue to think of other human beings merely as tools for self-gratification, where exactly does your specific intelligence lie? The question will pose itself with greater force as black people begin to excel in all techno-scientific fields.
