I will admit at the outset that I am better at remembering faces than names. This morning I embarrassed myself for yet another time after I approached a middle aged man at Mwanza Hotel and told him he looked familiar.
He remained quiet but he looked at me with an intense stare that exuded authority and I said: "Have you visited Butiama before?"
He relaxed slightly and told me Butiama is a famous national location and - I interjected: "Then I probably met you at Butiama."
He said: "I am Brigadier-general Balele." As I said earlier I remember faces better than I remember names. But now I understood very well why he exuded near absolute authority when he stared at me. You cannot command soldiers without possessing an aura of authority.
Brig. Gen. Balele is the former regional commissioner for Shinyanga region and I, as someone who reads news reports quite regularly, should have effortlessly matched his name to the familiar face I thought I had seen at Butiama.
As he sat having breakfast a distance from my table I googled his name. Some of the results, given my experience so far this morning, could be rightly described as miraculous. One social networking website had announced his death on 1st March 2011. Someone was lying.
I concluded that the social newtworking site had concocted one of the more memorable lies of 2011. Confronting that stare again to question his existence was out of the question.
2 comments:
I think we should use the social networks more sensibly. Sometimes you may find yourself publishing a lie from another lair. No research, no data, no right to speak.
I totally agree. The other problem with some of these sites is that the lies remain online permanently and there is little effort directed towards retracting them.
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