I’ve always said that maybe one ah de reasons chirren doh learn is not dat dey head hard or dey fall victim tuh electronics, not even that they parents know less bout parenting dan I know about astrophysics, but because of the mountain ah irrelevant nonsense de education system does put in yuh head. When I founded VMOTT the second most popular comment was..AH WISH DEY USED TUH TEACH DIS IN SCHOOL. ….Yeah, I wish too, den ah cud write ah wishy washy textbook and get rich. Back to de point now, ah was browsing some ah mih ole schoolbooks this evening and ah noticed one page which had mih perplexed as a small child. It have a picture of ah cow an in de cow belly have ah word bubble with the by-products of said bovine. Beef, leather and milk I familiar with since I used tuh drink Frico tuh collect the small plastic spaceship toy in de tin, mih already massive feet (size 8 at age 7) were squeezed into tight, shiny school shoes and I was standing in line when Marios introduce what I still think is the bess burger ever in 1987. What had me more confused than ah marginal voter though were the two other by-products which was fuel briquettes and abeng….I recall mih very thoughts all dem years ago….WHAT DE HELL IS ABENG?? None ah de teachers cud answer and dis was long before google so it was many years later as ah budding historian (age 15 to be exact) that ah was given to understand that Abeng is a bugle made from the cow horn and used by the Maroons of Jamaica to signal the approach of British soldiers during the First Maroon War. THEN I understood why this was irrelevant since in my childhood space there were no abeng-toting maroons, except ah large robust man we used to call Madman Joseph who coulda qualify since he was ah hermit living deep in de bush behind the school. Fuel briquettes from also had mih at sea since I had good ideas about livestock farming. I went to school near ah very modern dairy farm owned by ah nice fellar named Winston (now deceased) and every so often teacher would take us on a walking field trip to see the cows being milked. Also, every Saturday morning, papa would take us to the dairy farm run in Palo Seco by the oil company for two gallons of the freshest, best milk ever. Morover, the hillbilly people near the school (ah from deep countryside ppl) had some scrawny cattle they used tuh graze in de school playing field which left numerous slippery obstacles when we playing cricket or football and which once chased ah boy through the school when he was playing we third favourite sport which was tuh wave ah handkerchief under the nose of the bull. In NONE of this close encounters of the beefy kind had I EVER seen cattle being burned as fuel. If somebody had explained that in lesser developed parts of the world, Barrackpore for instance, dried cowpies were a source of fuel, dat woulda enlighten mih…as it was, twas many years later in Form 5 Geography that the mystery was satisfactorily explained. Lastly the same book has a drawing of the thirsted waif lost in the desert slashing a cactus and lavishing in a stream of pure water. I tried that with some cacti mama had growing in clay pots . I slashed but no water would come….the center WAS wet and pulpy, so ever hopeful, I chewed. If you used to think Buckley’s Cough Mixture was horrible, try chewing on a piece of ornamental cactus…..It did not relieve my parched lips but did leave them with a disturbing numb feeling and a piece of picka (thorn for yall proper folk) embedded in mih tongue…..see what ah tell yuh? De postcolonial textbooks were as bad as the precolonial ones which teach yuh bout snow and ice but not sea and sand.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 00:41:27 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015