There is a reason why headlines are often abstract

Like all other Third World countries, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda have long ago deliberately adopted a European language as their tool not only of upbringing in aesthetical, ethical, religious, social and scientific terms but also of political and other forms of social governance and inter-personal self-control down here on earth.
No, it was not at all accidental. It was only because, at that time, English was the only language that could unite the educated leaders of the various ethnic communities in their fight for national independence. There was, of course, Kiswahili. But English was the only language by which our colonisers, the Britons, had introduced a measure of world awareness to all members of what would soon emerge as Kenya’s educated elite.

NILOTIC LUO
No, Kiswahili could not yet do it because, for one example, my own people — the Nilotic Luo — were at that time almost wholly ignorant of that coastal Bantu tongue. But that carries with it one perennially niggling problem. It is that, in Bantu, Nilotic, Semitic and others of what Europe’s historians of language still call “Afro-Asiatic”, there are no equivalents of such grammatical articles as a, an and the, which are vital to English and most other related languages, especially among Euro-North America’s Latino-Germanic super-family.
If, however, these were the ones that the mentally bloated Western European and North American Caucasian upper classes and other such interests imposed on human beings the world over until as recently as the 20th century, in Kenya’s English-language newspapers, we still daily come across a good number of linguistic chimeras paraded as Elizabeth Regina’s own royal fiat.

PSEUDO-FACTS
The point then is that such words as a, an and the, which teachers of language call “articles”, are good instances of what a European media critic once upon a time dismissed as “…the pseudo-facts of newspaper headlines…” That is the question. Why did that highly intelligent European social commentator consider newspaper headlines to be nothing but pseudo-facts?
Because — due especially to extremely agonising space constraints — newspaper headlines must be composed of as few words as possible. However, the words must be as many as is necessary in order for them to make the greatest possible sense inside the head even of the least formally educated newspaper reader.

DEPICT REALITY
Headline writing is, therefore, always a fierce and often mentally bruising battle between meaning and economy of words. It is a problem, that is to say, of whether the headline writer — namely, one of the sub-editors — is capable of creating and conveying the most impressive meaning using the smallest number of words.
Of course, in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, one problem is that newspaper headlines have to be written by individuals for whom English is not the mother tongue. As the European critic above would have put it, the problem is that this constraint means that newspaper headlines are frequently far too abstract to depict any reality in the experience of most normal human beings the whole world over.

Philip Ochieng is a retired journalist. [email protected]