Cameron Duodu
LETTER FROM THE NORTH
They’ve started it already. According to a Jazz-FM station DJ, who maddens me daily by playing pop instead of jazz, and who interrupts good jazz with idle chatter – I get particularly mad when a guitar solo is truncated – the “product of the century” is the paper clip.
Yes, he says, this was the opinion of the readers of Forbes magazine. The paper clip? Okay, so it does have its uses: have you ever straightened one, while having lunch – stressed to the gills over how you’re going to finish an assignment – and used it to pick your teeth with? Or to lift the grime out of your finger nails? Forbes readers obviously have.
But what about the jet plane, for god’s sake? Can’t that be the product of the century? After all, it has reduced the time one stays rigid with mortal fear, as one cringes inside the belly of an aeroplane, by about a half.
The first time I ever flew – from Accra to Moscow – it took six hours to get from Accra to Kano alone; next Tripoli; then a night stop in a Beirut shattered, even then, by the sound of gunfire; back- pedalling later to Cairo; on to Rome; then Prague; before finally Moscow. About a day-and-a-half altogether – dead at every touchdown; buried at every gbi-gbi- gbi take-off.
Now, what about the computer? As someone who recently lost 1 000 files through an unexplained crash, I say the computer it is. What other thing can get you madder than your wife/husband?
What other machine has the audacity to say: “This programme has performed an illegal action and will be shut down.” This programme? Yes! It refers to itself imperiously in the third person, as “this programme”, so you will think someone else is to blame, not Microsoft. My Windows 98 often refuses to shut down, claiming there’s been a “fatal failure”. And this is not the product of the century?
Of course, Forbes readers don’t know how computers have caught on in places like Ghana. Last year, all the rage was about mobile phones. Except that they aren’t called mobile phones or even cellphones over there. They are called “I’m-on-the- way” (‘Nam Kwanso).
The “burgers” (emigrants to Europe) returning home, who were the first to introduce these phones on a mass scale, liked flaunting them about. They would stand outside the house of a girlfriend and call her.
“Hello?”
“Hello.”
“Can I speak to Akua?”
“Okay hold on.”
“Hello? Is that Akua? Oh, this is Burger. You remember I said I’d be there at five?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m-on-the-way.”
Two minutes later, he would knock at her door. “But you just rang!” the amazed girl would shout. And Big Burger would smile in a self-satisfied manner and show her his instrument. “It’s this thing I brought from Hamburg. It enables you to phone when you’re ‘on-the-way’.”
And the girl would exclaim, “Oh, blaa [bro]! It’s so cute! You must leave it with me when you’re going back!” And Burger would smile in a non-committal manner that spoke volumes.
Well, I’m glad to report that “on-the- way” is old hat now. It has been overtaken by “dot.com”. Cyber cafes – or “communications centres”, as they’re known – are all over the place. So after that chat in the restaurant or bar and it’s time to part, one doesn’t say, “I’ll phone you later.”
No. One now says, “I’ll dot.com you later, okay?” Which is to say, “I’ll e-mail you later and say, on the screen, all those things one was too shy to say face-to- face.” Do Forbes readers know about the revolution has taken place in romance thanks to the dot.com?
I bet they’ve all seen the film You’ve Got Mail but their imagination is so jaded that they could not relate to the global importance of e-mail in the lives of people for whom an air-mail letter can take three months to arrive, and an internal mail letter, two, three, or four weeks.
Personally, I’ve practically turned into an illiterate as far as my friends in Ghana, South Africa and other places with a lousy mail system are concerned, because the idea of writing a letter and having it delivered by a snail, with the reply brought by a tortoise, does not at all suit my temperament. You will understand why I say this, when I tell you that with the arrival of the fax I thought my problems were over, only to discover that it could take four days of near-continuous phoning before one could send a fax from London to Lagos or Accra, if at all.
And as for telex – god almighty help us. As the BBC man in Accra, I used to file stories, leave them at the “cable office” for them to be “punched” on to tape and transmitted, only to come back with a new story, three days later, to find them among a huge pile that had not yet been sent.
When queried, the telex operators would wail plaintively, “Sir, the lines are cycling.” I had great difficulty preventing myself from yelling, “Well, bloody well put the lines on a bus or train.” It wouldn’t have been any use – trains and buses are practically dead in Ghana. Are there any investors listening?
When the lines were not cycling, you might find that some barely literate corporals the government of Jerry Rawlings had put at the cable office as censors had failed to comprehend something you wrote and so hadn’t passed your story for transmission.
Me – I vote for dot.com as the product of the century.