Charles Onyango-Obbo
23 August 2007
column
Nairobi — ONE OF THESE DAYS, adventurous and mysterious Africans like Tony Brascons, a 27-year-old Malian, will rule the world.
As The Independent told the story last weekend, the young Malian gave no explanation of why he was wandering alone on the highest peak in Spain, in the windy, snow-capped Sierra Nevada - clad only in a T-shirt, light trousers and slippers.
He sang as he strode, and told the group of climbers who crossed his path that he was called Tony Brascons, was 27 and came from Mali. But he wouldn't tell them, or the police who later detained him, how he came to be lost so far from home on a rugged mountainside where temperatures had dropped below freezing point in recent nights.
Brascons carried no provisions, and the well-equipped mountaineers who met him feared for his physical state. They persuaded him to accompany them to a nearby refuge. They asked if he wanted more help, offering to contact the authorities, but he pleaded with them in sign language not to tell anyone.
Before they had even walked out of sight to resume their own climb, Brascons sneaked out and disappeared amid the snowbound peaks of the highest mountain in Spain. A forest ranger later found him near the top, and brought him down, and called the police.
Speaking neither French nor Spanish, he somehow managed to convey to the baffled authorities that he owed his feat to "strong legs, strong legs".
When we last heard, police had freed him, undecided whether or not to repatriate him for having no papers. We say, that is the stuff of which history is made, for many European explorers too "discovered" African lakes, mountains, and rivers in the 19th century when they were wandering, lost in our jungles just like Brascons.
May Brascons' pioneering spirit never desert him.
We shouldn't be surprised that Brascons should attribute so much to his legs, because the leg - or to be more precise, the foot - is a far more revolutionary piece of equipment than most of us imagine.
The average person takes between 8,000 and 10,000 steps a day. That adds up to a mind-boggling 160,000 kilometres walked in a lifetime - the equivalent of walking around the Earth at the Equator four times over!
On the question of explorers and things that happened in the last century, The Guardian reports that Danish culture minister Brian Mikkelson recently apologised for the action of the hordes of bloodthirsty Viking raiders who, 1,200 years ago, descended on Ireland, pillaging monasteries and massacring the inhabitants.
THOSE WHO ARE CAMPAIGNING FOR full apologies and reparations for the African slave trade, which reached its peak between 1785 and 1794, and colonialism, should take note.
If 1,200 years is how long it takes for European repentance to mature, then that unequivocal apology for slavery will come in the year 2994, and the one for colonialism around 3160!
Another novel idea that might take a couple of hundred years to see the light of day has come from a Catholic bishop in the Netherlands ,who proposed that people of all faiths should refer to God as Allah to foster understanding.
Bishop Tiny Muskens told Dutch television that God didn't mind what He was named and that in Indonesia, priests used the word "Allah" while celebrating Mass.
Well, what do the Dutch think? A survey of 4,000 people for De Telegraaf found that 92 per cent disagreed with the good bishop's view.
Now, if you didn't know it, this year, the bra is celebrating its 100th birthday. To mark the centenary, many newspapers and magazines have been running articles on the glorious undergarment.
It might be hard to conceive of today, but one of the early feminist organisations in the USA was called the National Dress Reform Association. They were fighting for what they called "emancipation garments"; or what in the plain language of our times we might call "comfortable clothes".
Understandable, because according to The Independent, one early proto-bra came from a Mr Henry Lesher of Brooklyn who offered women a rigid metallic structure, like a dustbin, to help them hold their bits in place.
An important milestone in the history of the bra came in 1912. In that year in New York lived an engineer called Onto Tizling. One of his neighbours in the boarding house, a voluptuous opera singer called Swanhilda Olafson, complained that she needed a garment to hoist her vast bosom aloft every evening. Tizling obliged, using some cotton, elastic and metal struts.
Unfortunately, he failed to patent the device, and in the early 1930s, a Frenchman, appropriately named Philippe de Brassiere, began making a suspiciously similar object.
Tizling took him to court, but the unscrupulous Frenchman won the day. And that is why the garment all women are wearing is called a brassiere, not a tizling.
The point we are trying to make here is that one of the most important addresses in town is the one most people can't be bothered about - the Patents Office, ladies and gentlemen, the Patents Office.
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