An Open Letter To Nicolas Sarkozy

You know those things that you always come across on your Facebook, funny pics and photos that have you rushing to click 'share'. Well I stumbled across a gem of a letter the other day that I shared on my profile but the problem is it was entirely in French, a language the good majority of my Facebook contacts don't understand. So here, in part for all my Anglophone contacts, and mostly for Chris Nqoe, a very outspoken friend of mine who will understand why I so admire this letter, I reproduce it in full, and in English. Enjoy. 

The French People
Here and Elsewhere Road
99999 France

Monsieur SARKOZY Nicolas

Elysée Palace

55, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré

75008 Paris

BAR-LE-DUC, the 7th of May 2012

RE: Spontaneous Candidature to the (Violated) Post of President of the French Republic

Mr SARKOZY, 

We would like to take the opportunity to thank you for the interest you have shown in the position (and most of all its numerous perks).

We have received your application for the continuation of your term but we regret to inform you that your profile does not at all correspond with the one that is necessary to fulfil all the requirements of this post. That is why we have come to the regrettable decision to withdraw our employment contract of which you have been a beneficiary since May 2007 (the current EU crisis has also obliged us to lay off a large number of personnel...).

We sincerely hope that you will continue to consult our future employment offers in the hope of finding a new job, we draw your attention to the numerous courses for the jobless, which we are hoping to implement in the near future, and which would allow you to become a flutist, a coppersmith or perhaps a magician (being economic sectors unaffected by the current downturn and in which you have shown considerable natural talent).

We would be very grateful if you would please leave the keys to the Elysée Palace (and those of the Airbus A330) in the vase by the front door. We however, in our infinite mercy, leave you free to dispose in any way you see fit that hideous Italian vase that is cluttering the lounge...

Nevertheless please allow us to wish you success in the pursuit of your career (you see, we also know how to lie).

Allow us, Monsieur Sarkozy, to express our highest regards to your pathetic self,

Best Regards,

The French People

If Mark Zuckerburg was Zimbabwean

Mark Zuckerberg! This is an open letter to you, and if by some miracle someone knows someone who knows someone who knows you (six degrees of separation remember!) then I pray they pass it along the social networking chain till it lands on your Facebook Homepage.

Ever since I watched the movie, The Social Network, I’ve envied you. Green is a colour I hate but I have to confess my heart turns a sickening shade of green when you are mentioned anywhere in my hearing. I mean you and I share so much and yet we are worlds apart. We both apparently have a fascination with technology and people, we both studied Computer Science, though I can smugly say I actually finished my course whereas you didn’t. But of course to be fair, I have to mention that you are orders of magnitude richer than I am at the present moment. But in order that I may sleep at night and just to console myself, I wonder from time to time what would have happened if you and I had swapped places. Specifically where you would be had you been born in Zimbabwe all those years ago.

You see Mark, your choice of birthplace has quite a lot to do with your success. I found myself being awarded a Birth Certificate crowned with the National Crest of Zimbabwe, whilst you on the other side of the planet were born to the star spangled banner and from there on your life was on a roll. Now imagine for a moment, Mark, what would have happened had you been born here? Well first of all let me tell you, the likelihood of you having a first name that was actually a verb or an adjective would be infinitely higher. Probably you might have been called Prosper Zuckerberg, Brilliant Zuckerberg, or maybe even Delight Zuckerberg. You see, people in my country have this amazing and as yet unexplained predilection for getting inspiration for their children’s names within the pages of dictionaries. But that I suppose is me making mountains out of molehills. Your face would still look good on the cover of Time Magazine whether your name was Mark or Lovemore.

Priority Zuckerberg just doesn't have the same ring to it does it?

But that begs the question would you have made it to the cover of Time in the first place? Let us see. If you were Zimbabwean you probably would have followed basically the same path your life took in the first two decades of your life: a rather pleasant life (in the beginning), a strong academic background & your parents encouraging you to take up Sciences or Engineering courses at the University of Zimbabwe. But there I think you would hit your first barrier. Let me put it this way; try telling a Zimbabwean parent that you are dropping out of University to start a website and they will either (a) Smack you with a sjambok till you can’t walk and you forget any notion of dropping out (b) Call a meeting of your extended family and take you out to your rural village to consult with the ancestors as to why you were straying (c) Take you to a prayer meeting at Word of Life International to chase the demons out of you. You see it’s not easy being a Zimbabwean. Now let’s for a moment assume that you were made of stern stuff Mark and you got through all those obstacles and still quit school, after all the movie made it seem even the faculty of Harvard couldn’t take you down.

Ok, so now you have started what would become Facebook in the garage of your best friends’ parents. You are now spending hours coding away and busily creating the codebase that will hopefully become what Facebook is today. There you are, you’ve just created the function that dynamically refreshes status updates in real-time on both the sever and connected clients. You sit flush with success then wham!! The electricity goes. You see in Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority has a very liberal definition of what the verb ‘supply’ actually means. We have suffered rolling blackuts in all major centres for the best part of a decade. And there goes the 800 lines of code that you spent six weeks creating. I can hear your Zimbabwean alter ego screaming in frustration from this universe. Sigh.

The people at ZESA don't quite understand what the verb 'supply' means....

But again, let’s assume you are made of metal Mark. You go on to create a function that saves all your work as you create it so that power cuts don’t really bother you. And when push comes to shove, you use the car battery of your mom’s Datsun to power your laptop. Facebook is growing, but much more slowly than it did at Harvard because let’s face it, Zimbabweans are not exactly the most connected people in the world. When the only computer with internet connection is a paid for one at the local internet café, it is far much easier not to get addicted to social networking sites. But you are a genius Mark and you figure out that launching Facebook on mobile is going to get you further than it would on the PC. Off you go to code a further 10 million lines of code for the different mobile platforms and you present your product to the country. Users are excited and Facebook seems to be taking off…but there is a slight problem. You see Mark, in Zimbabwe, cellphone data coverage is still more of an art that it is an exact science. Even standing next to a base station, with your phone fully charged and showing full signal bars, Opera Mini will still tell you that there is no data connection, please try later. Yes that scream you hear is the sound of Zimbabwean Mark, clinging to his sanity by a thread.

But Mark, I have faith in you. You are a genius. After all, why else would they name you Person of the Year? You figure a way round it by somehow hacking into Econet’s, Telecel’s and Net-One’s servers and fixing what seems to have stumped all the engineers who currently work there. Facebook takes off and is a roaring success, spreading from University to University like wildfire. The South Africans come and invest US$ 20 million dollars and before you know it, you are installing servers in basements all over Harare and Bulawayo. Then one day a ZESA power surge destroys them all! Okay let’s be kind and assume that would never happen. Facebook is growing in leaps and bounds; you appear on the cover of the Harare Herald as the man about to change the face of computing forever. You sit in your mansion in Borrowdale Brooke, calmly contemplating your bright future, when you hear an ominous knocking at your solid mahogany door imported from Lebanon (you see if you were Zimbabwean you would feel the need to include such details in your daily conversation).

The door opens to reveal a trio of men in black Saville Row suits and Oakley sunglasses. When they leave three hours later, you are left staring at the document that as they, painstakingly, explained gives them the legal right to sift through all the user date in every single one of your servers for information that could compromise the security of the Zimbabwean Republic. Yes Mark, if you thought the United States Senate was being difficult on you for not protecting your user’s data, you have not met the Zimbabwean government who assume they own all your user’s data. Sigh. But again, you show yourself to be a man of integrity and morals and you begin what becomes a titanic battle between your company and the Zimbabwean government at the African Union’s Human Rights Commission. Let’s assume the African Union is full of amazing individuals who protect the rights of all Africans and you win your case. Bazinga! But seriously just for the sake of it, let’s just assume you win and Facebook shrugs off the lawsuit and you set your sights on the stars.

Oh Mark. I wish I could tell you it ends well. Your Zimbabwean alter-ego has so far shown resilience in the face of power cuts, ingenuity in the face of poor services, moral uprightness in the face of the Secret Police. Surely this story ends happily? Well, there is the slight problem of that pesky last name of yours. Zuckerberg. It’s not Zimbabwean enough. I know, I know, you were born in Zimbabwe but so were a few thousand white farmers who got chased off their farms. The day will come when your company is served with papers from the Ministry of Indigenization, notifying you that the Zimbabwean government is taking over 51% of your shares for the nominal price of US$2.50. This spooks all your investors who immediately abandon ship and next thing Google and Yahoo! make a joint buyout which the Zimbabean government, as the controlling party in your company, approves. Facebook is ‘restructured’ as a feature of Yahoo! Mail and after a few months, is quietly shelved into oblivion by Yahoo!

The new indigenized Facebook logo
(c) Ministry of Ingenization (Yes we have a Ministry called that!)

Which leaves you where dear Mark/Priority/GodKnows Zuckerberg? There there. Maybe you will have the sense to move to South Africa and start Twitter? You see Mark, I am on your side, this entire article notwithstanding. So whenever you have a bad day Mark, read this article slowly and carefully, and thank all your ancestors who somehow conspired to make sure you were born as far away from Zimbabwe as you actually were.

Bazinga!

Rest In Peace Trayvon; I no longer can

Trayvon Martin is a name that I really wish I didn’t know right now. It’s a name that will haunt my dreams, a name that pops up every time I see a black teenager walking down the street innocently minding their business yet loaded with so many stereotypes they might as well just dig a hole and crawl into it. Trayvon Martin, unlike so many victims this world has seen, is a name still too fresh to consign it into the history books as one of those issues that happened in the bad old days, it’s something that happened a few weeks ago, while I watched TV or sat reading ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’. While I sat here enjoying the liberty of being alive, Trayvon Martin was shot to death for the crime of being alive.

For those of you not familiar with the case; Trayvon was a 17 year old black teenager living in the state of Florida in the United States of America. On the evening of the 26^th of February 2012, Trayvon decided to go to the shops to, amongst other things, buy a bar of chocolate for his little brother. On the way home he was spotted by George Zimmerman, who for reasons best known to himself, started following Trayvon. Zimmerman called 911 to report a suspicious character, telling the dispatcher that Trayvon “looked high”, and was staring at buildings. Meanwhile Trayvon who was on the phone with his girlfriend told her he was being followed. She urged him to run, he refused, but as panic began to set in he fled, quickly followed by Zimmerman.

This is not a fairy-tale; they did not suddenly come to a realisation of the absurdity of the situation, they did not meet as two people who lived in the same neighbourhood and share pleasantries about the weather. Against the advice of the 911 dispatcher Zimmerman cornered Trayvon, who apparently was now in a panic, and shot him. In the chest.

He is dead. I wish I could say that he is on CNN right now telling reporters about the absurd encounter in his own neighbourhood, laughing about it as the passage of time robs those fateful moments of their horror but no. He is dead and lying in a grave, his chocolates swept into a gutter somewhere, the chocolates that turned into his only defence against a man almost twice his age. He is dead and the silence is deafening, social media has not been set ablaze the way it burned with #Kony2012. Oprah hasn’t yet interviewed his family whose grieving at the senseless death must be just as valid as those who ‘grieved’ on Facebook at the innocent victims of Kony’s rampage. As I type this, halfway across the world in France, police are holed up outside the home of a suspected shooter yet in the United States of America, George Zimmerman is sitting at home, I picture him drinking hot chocolate and watching a rerun of Days of our Lives.

There is an injustice here! Do you see it? Do you see it marked out in big letters, screaming between the headlines. There is a 17 year old boy who is dead because a man took it upon himself to label him, in the same way we label strangers we meet every day. The woman wearing a headscarf must be oppressed by Islam, she needs to be saved. The black guy standing at the traffic lights selling sunglasses must be a high school dropout. But unlike us, George Zimmerman took those labels and made them real, made them living things, out of thin air George Zimmerman imagined the crack Trayvon must have been smoking. George imagined the slum Trayvon must live in, imagined that the only reason he was walking down the streets of Zimmerman’s neighbourhood was because he was planning a robbery. He was black, perhaps he was uneducated, illiterate, perhaps he didn’t understand English. How else does one explain George’s apparent failure to engage Trayvon in a conversation, ascertain in a non-lethal manner what “he was doing here”.

But then again, why did Trayvon have to justify his existence? Was his presence in that neighbourhood a crime against humanity? Was his world not designed to have rolling lawns and gated neighbourhoods, was his life one pledged to a gang, was the thing he was holding in his pocket a gun, ready to shoot the first innocent bystander? Surely George Zimmerman was saving the world. Some woman could sleep better that night knowing that Trayvon was shot dead, some poor High School cheerleader was not going to get raped and George’s flat screen Samsung LCD TV wasn’t going to be stolen. Surely, George Zimmerman is a hero, acting in self-defence, surely there must be a law hidden away in the Constitution of Great America that authorises a “pre-emptive strike”, a strike just as pre-emptive and just as deadly as that against Iraq in 2001. Surely there must be because, weeks later, the police are still looking for that clause as they let George Zimmerman prowl the street to save the young women and children of America from the likes of Trayvon Martin.

Armed with a chocolate, talking to his girlfriend on his way home from the shops, Trayvon must have represented the single greatest threat to American civilization since Rosa Parks threatened to contaminate an entire bus filled with whites. Black as he was, there was nothing good that he could have done; nothing innocent about walking the street that fateful afternoon. We shall never know, Trayvon lies in his grave, and perhaps the thought of him as an eliminated threat shall allow Zimmerman to sleep better at night. Meanwhile I shall sit here and continue to wish I had never heard his name because it all doesn’t make any sense. In this world of Obama’s and Universal Declarations of Human Rights, it just doesn’t fit in at all. I would be better off forgetting the name. The problem is I can’t, and if it means anything to you to live in a world that is free and fair and just; neither will you.

#RIPTreyvon

A 1001 apologies plus a free gift

According to all the blogging guides out there I have committed the cardinal sin when it comes to blogging: not being regular. It has been almost a month since I blogged but apparently according to my Analytics account readership hasn’t gone down, it has remained at a fairly constant average and I have finally hit the 1000 hits mark. So bugger all those blogging guides!!! 

I have been apparently busy doing nothing. Yes, you heard me right, I have been really doing nothing. Besides a few excursions to Johannesburg with my friend Thabani and my cousin, I have never been this completely without anything to do in a very very long time. You would think that it would mean I had more time to blog and catch up on all the things I do in my spare time but unfortunately I don’t work like that. You see, when I am under extreme pressure, for example studying for an exam or travelling, that is exactly the time I seem to manage to do everything at once. I will manage to find time to catch my favourite series, write a short story about a little old lady I meton a bus, hang out with my friends and study for the exam all at the same time. Give me free time and I somehow grind to a complete halt. I am quite convinced this is a medical condition.

But of course even in the midst of doing nothing I did manage to force myself to do some programming. No, when I say programming I don’t mean setting up the microwave to automatically defrost my supper. You see dear reader, by profession I am a Computer Scientist [insert applause here] which means I join the ranks of people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg and Steve Jobs minus of course the USD 60 billion dollars in my bank account (I’m still working on that, have no worry). But trust me, being a computer scientist is not all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, the minute people hear the two words, they immediately imagine I repair computers for a living. Or that somehow that means I know every trick there is to know about Windows 7. No dear reader, that is not what Computer Science is about.

According to what some call the father of Computer Science, Edsger Dijkstra:  "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." A huge part of Computer Science actually has nothing to do with computers anymore than mathematics is the study of calculators. So the next time someone asks you what I do tell them that Bongani studies the mathematical and scientific approach to data treatment (that will shut them up!). Which brings me back to my apology. In my efforts to make sure that I didn’t completely forget what my professors spent four years drilling into my head I went back to the drawing board (or to be more accurate, keyboard) and designed a small piece of software that I call Sandman. It is a simple program that you give a specific time period and after the time has elapsed will shut down your computer for you. Yeah I went to varsity for four years to learn how to do that. Varsity is over rated sometimes, no wonder Mark Zuckerburg quit after one year!!! So as a token of my utmost apologeticness (and no that is not a word), I offer you all a free copy of Sandman, the product of several sleepless nights trying to figure out how the progress bar in Windows works.

Download Sandman here, and tell me what you think of it. In the meantime I’ll try to think of something else to blog about. My next blog is tentatively titled, “Africa is one big cry baby”. Till then, adios.

PS: To the guys who complaining that they can't comment on my posts, I have tried to fix it, it should work now :)