OUT TO LUNCH

You’re going to have to try and keep a straight face with this one. I must admit that, when I first saw it, I thought it was a brilliant AI deep-fake spoof taking the mickey out of loony academics. But my extensive research (Googling) has revealed that it’s true and that you really can earn a decent living engaging in utterly pointless research at a South African university. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Professor Jonathan Chimakonam, like so many of the highly remunerated critical race theory consultants who blight our more expensive private schools, hails from Nigeria; a country well known for financial and other scams. I’ve lost count of the number of SMS’s I’ve received telling me that a relative of mine with the same surname has snuffed it and left an enormous fortune which is all mine providing I follow the simple steps laid out below.

Chimakonam is attached to the department of philosophy at the University of Pretoria and is also said to be a specialist in African philosophy, race and decoloniality studies which all sounds hugely pretentious to me but maybe his lectures are gripping and unmissable.

Professor Chimakonam has co-authored a research paper that has discovered that the name ‘Africa’ is, of itself, racist and suggests that the entire continent needs to be renamed, maps need to be redrawn, the term ‘African-American’ needs to be amended, songs like ‘Scatterlings of Africa’ need to be banned, the African Union needs to be renamed and grey parrots also need to start casting around for a new name.

Prof Chimakonam’s extensive and illuminating research has found that the ancient Greeks and then the Romans (early colonisers?) identified that large land mass south of them with names that translated literally as ‘without cold’ and ‘hot’ respectively. The good Prof describes both these names as a ‘slaw’ (I assume that means a ‘slur’) because they ignore the far more important aspects of the continent such as the identity of the people, the civilisational accomplishments of the continent and instead concentrate on what he calls ‘harsh weather conditions’.

He then goes on to describe other ‘derogatory’ terms which referred to the darkness of the African skin charred under the hot sun and is convinced that, thanks to the Greeks and Romans, the roots of racism such as the ‘N’ word lie therein.

In fairness, Prof Chimakonam does point out that the Greeks and the Romans were only referring to the northern part of the continent of Africa at the time. The real damage was done by the European marauders in the 16th century onwards because they couldn’t be bothered to think of a new name and just referred to the large land mass as West Africa, East Africa, Central Africa and South Africa; hugely offensive if you think about it.

Which is why, given all this colonial baggage, Prof Chimakonam’s research has come to the conclusion that the name ‘Africa’ should be changed to something more appropriate and less triggering.

In a country which holds the world record for unemployment, where a frighteningly high number of children are unable to read for meaning, where corruption at high levels appears to go unpunished, where gender based violence is endemic, where kids go to school hungry and are expected to use pit latrines and where a gas leak can blow a road up in the central business district of a financial hub and not be repaired more than a year later one might have thought that a university research paper could have come up with something more useful than a suggestion to rename the entire continent.

After all, renaming Grahamstown hasn’t done much for water supplies in that unfortunate place.

But, let’s be honest, this has very little to do with righting past wrongs and everything to do with the very lucrative industry which fosters black insecurity. How do you keep people compliant and in their place? You remind them, as often as possible, that they are second class citizens or that they are victims of oppression. The appetite for wallowing in low self-esteem seems insatiable among a proportion of our population.

If it’s any comfort to the good Prof I also come from a place where the Romans just pitched up and decided to name things. It may well be that we primitive Britons were too busy trying to stay warm and fend off sabre toothed tigers to come up with names for things but it’s still pretty rich that a bunch of Italians turn up uninvited and say this place shall be called ‘Londinium’; which doesn’t even translate to anything we could take offence to. Although I suspect a deep dive into the etymology would reveal that it means ‘place of perpetual grey cloud and rain’.

Of course I could be horribly wrong about all this and Prof Chimakonam’s ground breaking research may well reverberate around the world with all sorts of countries discovering the hidden racial slur in their name. If the inhabitants of Iceland are the next to kick up a fuss I’ll send a written apology.

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Mrs B sometimes tells me that I am becoming old and curmudgeonly and she’s probably right. Apart from hankering after the good old days when we weren’t slaves to our smart phones and when shops wouldn’t dream of refusing cash payments I am also very reluctant to travel these days.

The reasons are varied but the cost of an airfare to Europe is more than twice what I paid (admittedly down the sharp end) five years ago when I last visited London. However, the real reason I am reluctant to travel any more is that I know I won’t enjoy it. I don’t much like what I see of London anymore or of what is happening in England with regard to freedom of expression. I used to enjoy visiting old haunts in the City of London and wandering the streets but many of those old haunts closed during COVID and never re-opened and if I wander the streets now I have a reasonable chance of being stabbed by a twelve year old.

If I spend R700 on a ticket for a West End show the chances are I will be caught up in a massive pro-Palestine demonstration en route to the theatre. If I choose to spend a day at the Tate or National Portrait gallery I may well find someone with blue hair and multiple body piercings chucking tomato soup over my favourite Richard Dadd painting. And then there’s the weather and the absurd cost of food and drink to consider. So no thanks.

Europe is similarly uninviting and I’m very fortunate in that I have visited places like Athens, Florence, Barcelona, Venice, Madrid and Amsterdam back in the days before you had to book two days in advance online to visit the Sagrada Familia. Venice was almost empty when I was there, as was Florence but today these places are so crowded as to make a visit pointless unless you just enjoy being jostled by large crowds. That’s before you have to cope with the locals turning up en masse to tell you how much they hate tourists.