The Changing Mask of Fear
LONDON - BBC has decided to release 2004 Reith Lectures as DRM-Less mp3 files which are downloadable until June 7th 2004, after this date the lectures can be listened to using Real Player. This year’s Lecturer is Wole Soyinka and his first lecture is titled ‘The Changing Mask of Fear’.
Here, I must confess to my own immersion in personalised fear. It was nothing but fear that schooled me into traveling with only hand luggage. True, I have always been a light traveler but the habit became de rigeur under the terror reign of King Sanni Abacha of Nigeria. So unscrupulous were the methods of that dictatorship that its agents did not hesitate to introduce contraband, specifically hard drugs, into the luggage of the opposition, then alert the Customs officials at destination of the approaching drug baron. If I lived under any real fear during the struggle to unseat that dictator, it was definitely that, over and above anything else.
That preamble simply explains how the fear of Abacha had turned me into one baggage-less passenger you could swear by on any flight, and thus the very first passenger out of the Customs area. I ensconced myself in the bus that had been provided to take us to our hotel, settled down to read. Minutes passed, then an hour. Impatient now, I got down from the bus to find out into what hotel we were booked, then look for a taxi. I recognized some of the passengers from my flight huddled around a Mobile telephone, while others queued up for the single public contraption nearby. Thus did I begin, at long last, to suspect that something truly out of the ordinary was responsible for our turnaround. Only then did I learn, nearly eight hours after the event [Sept 11], that the world I knew was supposed to have disappeared, or become altered unrecognizably
It is certainly true that you need a dictionary handy because for every couple of lines I found a word I had never heard my life.
Tags: General, Nigeria
Comments (2)
LMAO… u need to update your vocabulary…okay you threw me off with that comment so i have to come back and read Mr. Soyinka’s words and put more thought into it!
Well I didn’t actually read it - I just listened to the speech whilst I was doing other things. I think it is more interesting to listen than attempting to read (speech was at least 20mins long) - there were a couple of funny remarks along the way.
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