12 African Proverbs

Monoko Mbele, makola ndunda.* 

People enjoyed Sunday's African proverb so I dug out some more and here they are. I have a list - not sure where I got it from.

There are dozens about animals you probably wouldn't encounter in Birkenhead Precinct, and many more involving trees.

There are also plenty that are identical to our own, and quite a few more that are so obvious as to veer away from the term 'proverb' into the territory of common bloody sense. 

So I've  savaged the list and whittled it down to a short-list of my favourites. I think we can all learn something here.

In no particular order:

'Every hill has its leopard.'
Bahaya proverb


'Who takes a hut, also takes the rats and cockroaches.
Ntomba proverb.


'Do not grab your heel until the ant has bitten you.'
Ekonda proverb.


'If you carry the egg basket do not dance.'
Ambede proverb


'The wind does not break a tree that can bend'.
(Sukuma proverb)


'The elephant dies, but his tusks remain'.
(Bamfinu proverb)


'The wind helps those without an axe to cut wood'.
(Bamileke proverb - Cameroon and parts of Nigeria)


'We rest our legs, but never our mouths'.
(Bahaya [Haya] proverb, Tanzania)


'A knife does not recognise its owner'.
(Mongo proverb, Democratic Republic of Congo - former Zaïre)


'Pretend you are dead and you will see who really loves you'.** 
(Bamoun proverb)


'Only when a tree has grown can you tie your cow to it".
Jabo proverb,Liberia)

How about making up some more for me?  They have to involve a wild animal (preferably a predator) and/or a tree...

* Just a a reminder to those who missed the previous post that the phrase is Lingala (Congo) for: 'Your tongue is a sword and your legs are vegetables'  which is certainly true of me, I don't know about you.

** Don't try this at home, children, it frightens your parents.

Excuses, excuses

In my last blog I mentioned the time-honoured (and in this case true) excuse of 'the dog ate it.'

We all come up with excuses for our failures, omissions, bad behaviour, stupidity, delayed action, clumsiness, laziness or sin.

But why admit to anything if we can blame someone or something else, put it down to forces beyond our control or rationalise our way out of it being in any way our fault?  It wasn't me it was the the weather / chemical imbalance / market forces / somebody - anybody - else.  Early Apple Mac's used to come out with a whiny American voice when certain Bad Things happened saying: 'It's not my fault.' Seriously. 

With imagination there are plenty of original excuses you can come up with, and the more far-fetched and unlikely-sounding the more believable - with-in reason. 'I couldn't come to your soiree because my grandmother was abducted by aliens' or 'my homework ate the dog' might be pushing it a bit. 

There are some whacky excuses for missing work here including; 'I've been taking ex-Lax and Prozac. I can't get off the john but i feel good about it' and 'The dog ate my car keys. We're going to hitchhike to the vet.'

But for your basic error there are two excellent catch-all excuses:

1. Persian carpet-makers always leave one mistake in their patterns to acknowledge that only Allah may achieve perfection.  I used this extensively during my banking years where it generally fell, to borrow another religious metaphor, on stony ground

2. 'The Cartographer's Folly'  I am indebted, as ever, to the Inkyfool blog for alerting me to an equally catch-all but more prosaic general excuse for error. Map-makers, he tells us, have often put a deliberate error in their work so they can prove whether someone has plagiarised their work. 

"It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one."    George Washington

For other occasions where you may be looking for an excuse, I have provided a Top 40 Excuses in the form of a poem below, but what's the best (or maddest) excuse you've ever come across?

Excuses, excuses

The dog ate my homework.
All my friends do it.
I left it on the bus.
I forgot.

I'm new.
I'm ill.
I have a headache.
It's in the post.

I didn't get your message.
I thought it was tomorrow. 
It was an administrative error.
This has never happened before.

The voices in my head said to.
It just came off in my hand.
I only took my eyes off him for a second.
She had it coming to her.

It is destiny.
It was inevitable.
It just… happened.
It was the beat of a butterfly's wings

It goes against my principles.
I was under pressure.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
If we don't do it somebody else will.

I only had a pint.
I was only doing 30.
He just came from nowhere.
There was nothing I could do.

All my friends were doing it.
We knew no better.
I wasn't thinking.
I was only obeying orders.

(c) Clare Kirwan

That certainly taught me a lesson!

I read on the Keeping You Awake blog several months ago what the author had learned from different jobs over the years.

It got me thinking - every role we take on teaches us something about the world, ourselves - well, mine have certainly taught me a lesson or two! Then I forgot about it for a while. But when I wrote my recent post on what I learned from being a special constable, I returned to the question.

So I thought I'd share a list of what I've learned from where I've worked. 

• From the bank I learned my alphabet. I knew it already, of course, but years of filing cheques and statements into name order made it more instinctive, innate. 
• From my secondment to a help desk in another area, I learned never to assume anything – especially the level of intelligence of the average person. I also learned that a lone young woman living in a hotel is rarely in want of company.  
• From the kibbutz I learnt many things: In the baby house there I learned just how fierce and protective a mother's instinct is... I mean, I drop one baby* and they go crazy!  In the kitchen,  the art of cutting. In the communal dining room, that nothing ever stays clean. 
• From working on a local newspaper I learned that not everything is gospel, that being in print makes mad people's words assume a gravitas they don't deserve. 
• From self-employment?  That my mum was right about that ‘you are a hat in a shop window’ thing and that I am inclined to put too low a price on myself.  Also, that people take advantage of that – even nice people.  Maybe they don't even know they're doing it. 
• From the voluntary sector?  That one person can move mountains, but it's bloody hard work and there'll be lots of people standing around saying ‘Great idea to move mountains! They should be moved!’ but then don't help and are merely critical of how you're moving them and where to. Also, that some mountains just might as well stay where they are. 
• From running training courses for tenants groups, that people, even quite unpromising ones, sometimes have the capacity to go and move their own mountains when someone finally gives them a bit of encouragement and a few tools.
• From giving grants?  That, depending on who you're giving it to – the same sum of money is one person's peanuts and another's pool winnings. 
• From public sector?  That everyone's too busy covering their backs and following (or writing) the rules to ever, ever do something merely because it would make the world a better place.
• And from the library? Erm, that'd be the alphabet... again.
• What have I learned from writing?  That you don't always measure or understand what you've learned, what you know and how you feel about it all until you put it into words.

So what have YOU learned from what you have done?

* No babies were permanently hurt and there were mitigating circumstances.

 

Holy Wind, Batman!

I've been wanting to talk about wind for some time but I've been waiting for a really windy day.

You know how it is with winds - you're ages waiting for one than a bunch of them come all at once.

Dogberry of Inkyfool started me thinking, way back at the beginning of July with Some Winds where the windy origins of the words kamikaze and Chinook were discussed in his characteristically erudite manner.

But for me the most interesting thing about wind is this: Hebrew has far fewer words than English, and many words have to do the job of two or three English ones.

The word 'ruah' (the 'h' pronounced as in Scottish loch) is the word for wind, but also for breath, spirit and ghost. 

This explains why the 'Father, Son and Holy Ghost' of my youth became 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit'. I'm only disappointed they didn't settle for 'Holy Wind' or 'Holy Breath', but I get that what they're talking about is Holy 'Unseen Force' (and I hope you're impressed that I'm not adding 'Batman!' to the end of any of these - showing tremendous restraint, don't you think?)

There's more about 'ruah' in the Old Testament at the Franciscan Cyberspot - no, I'm not making that up - and the Vatican's website.  I particularly like the fact that the Vatican, when thus perplexed, has this to say: "In this regard it is better to give up in part the pretenses of neat reasoning in order to embrace broader perspectives." i.e. Translate it as fits best to your nefarious practices.

All of this only confirms one of my favourite quotes:

'Religion is man's attempt to communicate with the weather.' (origin unknown). 

Here's that part in The English Patient, where Count Almasy speaks of winds described by Herodotus (there's a transcript here about two thirds of the way down the page):

Blows me away, this!

Austerity Measures

Times of austerity are here, they tell us – a reigning in (of wild horses?), the tightening of belts, the empty larder, the gathering clouds, the doom, the gloom.

But which of us can say, hand on heart, that we don't have too much stuff, that we could get by without the lava lamp, the novelty egg timer or the impulse-bought 'must-have' espadrilles crafted by the tiny grubby fingers of child labourers? (insert your own foibles here)

The aesthete would say that a life of simplicity is the ideal - just enough to eat, no worldly distractions, self-sufficiency. A loaf of bread, a cup of wine, and thou...sands of books at your local library - for now (though they wouldn't dare trying to close Wirral Libraries after what happened last time.)

If Osbourne wants a list of which services to cut back on, here are 10 suggestions of what should be first up against the wall:

• Public sector award dinners
• 50% of all meetings
• Bankers' bonuses
• 'Think-tanks'
• Tank tanks
• 75% of public sector PR and marketing
• Local authorities sponsoring football teams
• Subsidies to farmers not to grow stuff
• The space programme
• ...oh, and the war, the weapons, the bombs, the missiles

But don't panic! There are plenty of things we can all do to 'pull in our horns' (that's one for the Inky Fool), save money and make our own lives more sustainable: 

• Re-use and repair old jokes
• Shop around for cut-price air – it's just as good as full-fat
• Only eat second hand food
• Get rid of the dog and buy a bargain-basement budgie... some of them really go cheap!
• Sell your soul on eBay - top prices paid
• Use your library - spend your days sitting near the thrillers smelling of wee
• Save water costs! Share a bath with a neighbour
• Turn off your brain at the mains when you're not using it
• Repair any broken promises or hearts (you might need a 'handy man' to do this)
• Become a 'friend of the preserving pan' (pictured)

Next week:  How to grow your own gazebo from seed  

Related post: Time of the Signs - more amusing political posters

The End of the World

"It's not the end of the world." So easily said, so often true.

This time last year it was the end of the world for me.

I was in Ushuaia - the southernmost* city in the world. It's in the far south of Argentinian Patagonia on the island of Tierra del Fuego - all the place names around there are evocative, the Beagle Channel (no sightings of beagles, but plenty of seals, sealions and cormorants), the Magellan Straits, and further south again, Cape Horn.  They call it 'El Fin del Mundo.' It's quite a selling point for the tourist industry, I suppose.

It's not the first time I've dabbled with the apocalypse. 

I once explored the clammy tunnels under Har Megiddo in northern Israel. You might have heard of it as Armageddon. No sign of Gog or Magog but I did get a snog. That's a whole other story. If it was the end of the world it's kind of the way I'd want to go.

The thing about the end of the world, like so many other things, is that it seems really humungous - something you cannot even grasp the idea of, let alone the reality. It seems completely implausible that you would find yourself at it.

I mean how do you even get there? And do they have a B&B?

As it happens, you simply take the bus - 3am from El Calafate to Rio Gallegos, across the border into Chile by ferry across the Straits of Magellan, back into Argentina, arrive in time for a tea tenedore libre in Ushuaia town centre. I say 'tea.' I also say 'simply'. I mean one thing just leads to another.

It's a bit like real life. Coming events, tasks or goals can seem impossibly daunting and unattainable. But break them down into smaller steps, each one taking you nearer, and even mammoth tasks are achievable. The trick is not looking at the end point - just the next step.

Some religions - notably the Baha'i faith - believe we are already in the end of days. And the Zoroastrians must be wondering too, having prophesised, among many other abominations, that men will: "... become more deceitful and more given to vile practices."  The Mayans think it's going to happen in 2012. Pretty well everyone agrees it will feature a panoply of natural disasters - earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves, the sun rising in the west etc.

But it is most likely that people are generally right when they say: 'It's not the end of the world.' Mostly they say this during moments when you are in great personal distress - as if it would somehow make you feel better. It so rarely does. 

And even if it is the end of the world, it might not be as bad as you think it's going to be. As long as you have a bus ticket and the right outfit.

* Pop quiz. If Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world, can you tell me without looking what the equivalent northern latitude would be? Guess which city in Europe? 

Related post: We apologise for the eruption of normal services

Re-inventing history

My good chum Moptop has been waxing lyrical on the subject of Telling Stories (or porkies as they call them where I come from), and how stories made up for her own amusement can assume a life of their own.  It got me thinking about how maleable 'truth' can be.

We've read about governments changing history retrospectively in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, although of course they would NEVER do that in real life (ahem).  But my mum has no such qualms.

She is the consummate re-inventor of history. The man I married who she thought was wonderful but turned out to be a bastard? 'I never liked him.'  That business with the shoes - never happened. Homes we've lived in, arguments  we've had, people we've known have been erased or altered, retro-fitted to fit her current world view.  Former friends and neighbours have been vilified or deified in the best tradition of the tabloid press.

I like to rationalise things, to look at the past as though all that happened was for the best. She  goes one step further and changes the facts to fit.

Dad tries to keep diaries, obsessively documenting dates and occurrences, but he has to be careful - mum also compulsively gets rid of anything that hasn't 'been useful' in the last 6 weeks (it's a wonder she keeps him - and God help me if I'm ever in a persistent vegetative state.)  She threw all my old school stuff out while I was travelling.  She calls it 'having a clear-out', I call it tampering with the evidence.

I've  been trying to find the name of an artist I came across once who described her performance art using a page of text and with a single photograph:

1. B&W photo of naked woman mid-air with text describing how she trampolined naked in a darkened room for two hours, instructing a photographer to come in once and take one photograph at random
2. B&W photo of her surrounded by inflated plastic bags with text explaining how she collected every breath in plastic bags for 12 hours
   

It was all very arty farty but the point of it was that none of it was  real - performance art only exists as it is documented.  It's a bit like PR, but don't start me on that.

Flimsy things truth and history.  Do you re-invent your history? do you embroider or omit parts of your past - and what, and why?  

If you like the de-motivational poster, you may like to look at my earlier post on the subject.

(More on my mum's plans for world domination HERE.)