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URN News Digest Vol 018: Of Kent Mangoes and “ill fated” Vehicles

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It’s yet another beautiful week, and I can’t wait to see someone pull a Pulitzer Award Story through the website.

Looking at the past week, I saw two fair attempts at Pulitzer and just as I was cheering up, the story just waned through a dark pipe. My friend Aldon, a passionate reporter promised, a Pulitzer Prize story, and I am patiently waiting.

Tom Malaba’s Kent Mango story made my editing day on Sunday. I could smell this Kent mango, being carried all the way from Mt Meru, to Uganda’s Kampala city. The Mangos have names linked to their qualities and properties. Just like “Kawuzi” is called so, because of its mesh of strings, that remain stuck in the teeth long after the juices have settled in the stomach, leaving the eater struggling to pull out the remnants out of the teeth, my curiosity pushed me to find out why the Kent mango is called Kent.

I am not a Wikipeadia fan but my curiosity took me right there and I found myself trying to read it and find out why the Kent Mangoes. Are they named after a small town In London- Kent? May be, maybe not. This is how I ended up having breakfast with Wikipeadia – not a good company though, trying to find out why Kent Mangoes are called Kent and not Kenya mangoes.

“The original tree, a seedling of the Brooks cultivar started in September 1932, was planted on January 1, 1933 on the property of Leith D. Kent in Coconut Grove, Florida,” according to Wikipeadia.

And Just as Tom was about to pull the Pulitzer Prize, he crowned by talking about the nameless business people taking the mangoes to South Sudan.  I missed several sights- the story of the orchards, the manpower involved in picking and packing the mangoes, the original story of Kent Mangoes.

Suggestion: Tom should go to Mount Meru and tell the story of Kent Mangoes right from the orchards, to their journey right from the tree, to their confinement in the silent dark boxes, and the long trek to Uganda. Stop with the mangoes, move with them, see how consumers are scrambling for them and let the reader see and hear the sound of a blender squeezing juice out the Kent mango. I really yearned for the smell and flavor.

Nevertheless, Kudo’s to the reporters who are trying to sift through the official statement chaff and clinging on to the URN’s strongest desire to “tell the tales that matter to audiences”.

My week always has those news picks that stick in my eyes each time I scan through a sentence in the story. And my latest catch is the use of the term “ill fated car” in a sentence.

My study of literature not only earned me a paper, but plunged me into a sea of readings, by different writers and from genres as diverse as prose and poetry, novelets, large novels, and drama pieces. In each of these I surely learnt some thing new, striking, useful and evergreen. The dictionary defines “ill fated” as marked or promising bad fortune. For example:

• Their journey was doomed from the start “an ill fated journey”.

• That car was not favored by fortune. “an ill fated car Now let me turn to our stories. I refer to the original version of the story; 3 perish in Mbarara accident. “The ill fated car was traveling to Nyakisenyi in Rukungiri when it overturned”.  Three Implications

1. The reporter knew before hand that the car was “ill fated”, and the editor by the powers conferred to them, by the editorial muse endorsed “yes the car was “ill fated”

2. Going by the definition of ill fated, does it come as a surprise that the ill fated car was involved in an accident?

3. Why would anyone attempt to board, let alone travel in an “ill fated” car?

Going back to one famous philosopher, Aristotle, “Tragedy has several characteristics, one of which is that the protagonist must choose his fate. In this case, neither the passengers nor the drivers choose their fate.  Therefore the common use of the word “ ill fate”, shows how the editorial can keep pushing the wheel of clichés, making them words of common use, when in actual fact they are statements of absurdities and recipes of sadism.

Quote of the Week: A person with a new idea is a crank, until the idea succeeds”, Mark Twain

National Perspective: Vol.023:The East African Community; Time for Political Integration? (audio 30mins)
National Perspective Vol.023: The East African Community; Time for Political Integration? (program summary)

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