This was what I remember dancing to at my farewell party in Ngaoundal, Cameroon, in 1986. Prince Nico Mbarga's small tabletop TV would have been at least 9 years old by then, probably older. Prince Nico Mbarga was born in 1950 of a Cameroonian father and Nigerian mother, he died in 1997. He was considered a bit of a "one hit wonder" for his iconic tune "sweet mother", sung in pidgin English, which has become the "happy birthday" of mothers day music in my family (embedded towards the bottom of this post).
I'm a white man, with a little black used television. Here is a black man, with a little white used television... How does poetic language make us afraid to trade with one another?
While I think that a Prince Nico Mbarga outfit would be a fantastic Halloween costume, I cannot say that I find it scary. But his little white television set has been labelled a big, big, e-waste problem, worthy of laws to keep the next Prince Nico Mbarga from ever buying another used RCA. Today I want to look closely at the TV in the 1977 photo, and ask how poetic language can make something seem more ghoulish, more noble, more scary, or more heroic.
The United Nations Environmental Program has definitively shown that 85% of used electronics imported to Nigeria are reused (70%) or repaired (15%), and the remaining 15% is a figure very close to the 11% of new-in-box returns at Wal-Mart. The trade in used electronics, like the trade in used cars here in the USA, was found to be... um... dull.But the legislation HR2284 finds the trade in used electronics to be anything but dull.... It declares them harmful and dangerous. HR2284 would put a stop to this. Why are we sooooo afraid of Prince Nico Mbarga's little white television?
It's Sunday, and sometimes my blogs go off on a tangent on Sunday. As I listen to Prince Nico Mbarga, and I recall the pidgin English of my years in Cameroon, I'm struck by the similarities in emotions I feel to the first poem I ever learned by heart. H.W. Longfellow, The Village Blacksmith, was about hard work done by hand.
