On Saturday, 19 March 2016 22:42:17 UTC+1, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:
...I am saddened to hear about what Nestle did to one of your kid brothers and to an untold number of other souls. Mother's milk of course is the best.
Your Excellency, do ya, ai beg in advance, on behalf of the late JFK: I may be wrong, but if I remember rightly the Nestle Babies Milk debacle had nothing to do with the US Food Aid to our part of Africa and in fact the earliest cases were reported much later - after the 1960s
So, could you please, kindly refrain from trying to deter us (the beneficiaries of the delicious, free Kennedy lunches ) from due adulation of our daily portion of the holy bread. An apology should be called for. And you had better renounce the suggestion, however remote, that the nourishment thus derived from our daily portion of bread and Blue Band Margarine could have in any way contributed to anything like a lowering of our on average higher than normal IQ , at least of my classmates of that generation talking about champions like Neville Jarrett and Sylvester Amibola Young…
But I must confess that in Vidal Godwin's chemistry class or Mr. Inyang's ( from Cross Rivers State) geography lessons, our attention used to sag during the last fifteen minutes or so before lunch as I ( and everyone else) would start getting restless and a little impatient just waiting with some anticipation (the pangs of a gnawing hunger) only finally happy to hear the bell sound for the lunch break – and then we could rush out of class to line up under the huge mango tree each one waiting for his turn, in answer to the prayer , "Give us this day our daily bead!" So, no matter what you come up with, we said and we will still say, "God Bless President John F. Kennedy!" So true what they say, that "the way to a man's heart is through his stomach." And thus our hearts were won.
In the Fourth Form we studied "Animal Farm" with Major Von Bradshaw (an Englishman) and by then everybody knew everything that there was to know about the Bolshevik Revolution, and it was already sealed, the cold war was already won, by The United States & The West; the betrayal of the Revolution was the critique and yardstick by which our future totalitarian leaders and some of the half educated imps who believe in milk and apples exclusively for those who believe themselves to be the "brain workers" and even more educated than the Prophet of Islam ( S.A.W). As Ogbeni Kadiri has famously put it, "Professors of electricity producing only darkness" and some a-them writing a hundred books that nobody ever reads or is ever going to read – writing as it were, just for the sake of writing or as the Last Poets jived, "they ain't fkking for love and appreciation, just fkking to be fkking"
In 1960, we spent 18 months in the third form because the previous January to December school year was extended to June of the following year and henceforth the school year was to be an August to August affair. In no small measure, Kennedy lunches contributed that much extra energy to our enthusiasm - which was needed in the afternoons, because after our heavy midday lunch I for one would be feeling drowsy, the heat – and the gentle murmur of the Atlantic ocean lapping up the shores just outside our classroom window lulling us to sleep as Mr. Chapman M.A. Oxon, took us through Conrad's " Youth and Gaspar Ruiz" and then Sir Ernest Shackleton's "South" on Wednesday afternoons , during our first term in Form 3, in 1960.
I read somewhere that Protein is needed for intellectual development of the child – and in this respect, all that milk contributed by the Fulani cattle should not be undervalued. The Indian Brahmins (Hinduism's priestly, intellectual caste, appreciate Mother Cow's value
Cornelius
On Saturday, 19 March 2016 13:17:31 UTC+1, Obadiah Mailafia wrote:Lord Cornelius,I greet you sir!I would not be in a rush to adulate JFK for his food aid in the 60s. From the records, some of the milk formula that nursing mothers were persuaded to give their children led to serious deformities. One of my kid brothers who was born during that time has an IQ somewhat lower than the rest of us. Mother was persuaded to go off breastfeeding and the poor child was fed exclusively on the American milk. Nestle and other such agribusiness companies tried to push similar milk formulas to nursing mothers in Africa, with disastrous consequences. Was it part of a deliberate policy to keep African children dumb and stupid??On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 5:55 PM, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:Corrected :
For the attention of William Bangura of Sierra Leone and America: APC Scores Big
William,
Just a short note which might run longer than intended at the beginning.
I got married at the US Embassy in Freetown on Hiroshima Day, 1969. As to how and why this happened you'll have to wait for the authorised version - hopefully edited by Professor Harrow & Co – however my cousin ( another first cousin) Lucy Hamelberg was the Secretary at USIS and that also has something to do with it.
I'm thinking along these lines this afternoon, two hours before candle-lighting time in Stockholm, because of your reply to my query which was:
" I should like to ask you and I would like you to explain it to us about you and some of the Negroes over there, how come they are showing such overwhelming love and support for Ohporto Hillary C? Am I missing something? Why not Bernie? What has Hillary ever done to deserve their support?
I am patiently waiting for a reply from you which will be grounded on "facts and comprehensive research"
When it comes to the US, perhaps because of the information overflow, and our extreme focus on the US - for me, since the days of Dean Rusk up to these most recent days , I am surely more informed and opinionated about the US in general than about Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Bamako, Cairo, Soweto , Brazzaville and Kinshasa combined. Perhaps because of all that literature, poetry , jazz and dance , rhythm and blues, soul and rap - not to mention the civil rights struggle etc.
In secondary school in Sierra Leone, we had a lunch programme - i.e. US – Aid donated bags of flour to our school and just as you have heard that Jesus turned water into wine, so too that US flour was regularly turned into bread - our lunch - hot buns with some blue band margarine (a little salty) smelted in and we baptised those loaves, called the school lunch "Kennedy". I hereby grant you permission to believe that this was our own secular version of what Catholics call "the holy Eucharist" – the main difference being of course that whereas the Catholics believe their holy Eucharist to be " the living body and blood of Jesus", we were only exceedingly grateful to JFK for our free daily bread and butter - especially those amongst us who prayed " Our Father Who art in Heaven, hollowed be Thy Name , Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven , give us this day , our daily bread…."
And thus love for JFK grew in the same tradition as he who is alleged to have fed the multitudes with two fishes and five loaves of bread. So, be not surprised dear William when I tell you that in the fourth form - circa 1962 I represented the US in our mock session of the UN General Assembly debate ( the bombastic Mukhtarr Mustapha a few years older but already a great orator - represented Cuba and dutifully conveyed his greetings from Fidel Castro); suffice it to say that after the debate the American Ambassador came over to shake hands with his boy. Well, I had done my research.
From the beginning of the Peace Corps initiative in Sierra Leone right up to 1965 during which time my cousin Cyril Rogers-Wright jnr (a first cousin) was the liaison officer in Freetown, we always had a couple of peace corps volunteers staying at home (usually African- American – but also toubabs) to help familiarise them with the Krio language and Sierra Leone Creole culture. Surprisingly, every once on a while one of our Soul brothers would be recalled – back to the states – and the reason we were given was : wanted by the FBI for this or that crime under investigation…. Now I leave it to you to go figure.( This was at a time when the main news in print ( about world & US) was TIME and NEWSWEEK…
About my own personal US connections in those days – some of the returnees - those who had studied in the US and returned to Salone, and the many peace corps acquaintances and the dozens of exchange students that I went to school with and who were my good friends, and the many American teachers I've had in various places during the period 1966- 2016, not to mention all the American friends and acquaintances in Sweden ( some of them radical exiles) and in the United States have contributed immensely to that awareness and different understandings. In my last days in Freetown , before moving to Magburaka I remember playing table tennis with the US Ambassador's kids at their home…and by the way, one of the last people I met I my very last visit to Sierra Leone in April 1970, was Mukhtarr Mustapha – still in his Harry Belafonte hairstyle - we had a drink at Kit-Kat and I'll have you know that although we were good friends and had the same close friends – Desmond Easmon, George Morgan and that group, it was only years later that I got to know that Mukhtarr was not Temne but Creole ! And that was during a discussion about Mukhtarr Mustapha's marriage with the daughter of Nana Akufo-Addo, a former President of Ghana. " You know that Creoles like marrying Ghanaian women " I was told and replied " But Mukhtarr is not Creole, he's Temne" and everybody laughed and asked me, " So is his father, M.S. Mustapha Temne?" and I answered "Of course" and everyone burst into laughter, one more time!
Anyway, as the saying goes, " home is where the heart is" ( I'm talking about your s, your heart) and since you're always talking about it – and about them (your hobby horse ) – Sierra Leone's APC , well here's some more : things are happening and here's the latest : APC Scores Big followed a few days later by some heads rolling in the mighty rumble: the cabinet reshuffle . Your petition " I cry for Tonkolili " gained traction – and I suppose that we would like to hear from the horse's mouth - in response to some of the responses in that thread. C'mon. You are a man of the Temne people and the Temnes and the other Sierra Leone people would like to hear your voice on these matters of great importance.
"Knowledge and truth our forefathers spread, Mighty the nations whom they led"
" Make Sierra Leone Great again! You're only flesh and blood with a memory capacity less than my neighbour Jonas Von Essen.
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