I was at the Goethe Institut this Thursday night and although it was for work, this is not to say that I am one of those journalists who practice a brand of news reporting called “Goethe Institut Journalism”. You want to know what Goethe Institut journalism is? Read a recent but not-so-recent edition of Loose Talk in which we hosted journos as our guests. What I know for a fact is that the particular Loose Talk in question was well read. I do not know for a fact if it was well received but I know that it was widely read. In that Loose Talk we talked extensively about the different types of news reporters and their defining traits. And so on point I was on that day, that my hard-earned reputation as a seasoned, slightly x-rated poet was unanimously confirmed. The number of peeps who envy me for my literary dexterity shot up sharply and dramatically. The moral of the story so far is that if I can poke fun at the swag of news reporters and yet these are my own blood, then I equally won’t seek permission to write about the sources that give us the news in the first place. That is why I opened with a line about the Goethe Institut and how they have this annoying habit of pumping news reporters with hourly inbox notifications of yet another film makers’ or poets’ or visual artistes’ event. I have warned the Goethe Institut media team time and again that I’m not an email person but all my wise counsel has fallen on their deaf ears and so the emails just keep gushing in. That is how I ended up at Goethe Thursday night. Anyway I went to check out an art exhibition themed The Journey, by a group of young Rwandan aspiring paparazzi. One of them is Yakubu, who is actually the more experienced of the lot. Yakubu’s real names are Jacques Nkinzingabo but who cares? It’s only the backpacker types and foreign embassy staff and people who work in such places like the Goethe Institut that know him as Jacques. However to all his African street hustler friends, he is simply Yakubu. Yakubu has many African street hustler friends because he is also an African street hustler. Yakubu is the right and natural-sounding name for this dude. This is because Yakubu sounds closer to West Africa (Nigeria) and we all know that Yakubu looks like a Nigerian. The hair on his head is also tough like Nigerian hair. Other times he looks like a chubby and happy baby gorilla. Yakubu should feel lucky that I attended his event because just this other day I made a deep personal vow to not attend any more such events involving people with much hair that is either mangled up thickly like his, or all together dreadlocked. These usual fall under the category of filmmakers, paparazzi, and visual artists. Every time I have been to their events and exhibitions and sought a comment from them, their response has left me wondering if they suckled from the same you-know-what. They say “I’m busy meeting with clients”, instead of “I’m meeting clients”.
