Feeling cultural

Although I read a lot, like to listen to music, occasionally visits museums, go to the theatre or the opera, love to watch movies and even hang around at film festivals I don’t watch culture programmes on TV or read the culture pages in the news paper. The reason? They make me feel stupid. They always talk about some artist/writer/musician that I have never heard of and most irritating is that they use a kind of language that gets on my nerves. I believe I am quite well educated and the culture I consume is not the average main stream, but still I feel so left out of these discussions and I feel that these journalists don’t care about weather people are interested in what they are talking about or not; their sole interest is to show off and try to impress or outsmart each other.

So therefore it was a very fascinating and new experience for me yesterday when I watched the programme Kobra on Swedish TV. The reason I watched it in the first place was that I had seen a trailer for the show and heard that they would talk with the author of the book I am just now reading, I like the book a lot and looked forward to hear more about the author. The book is called Wizard of the Crow by the Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and I can highly recommend it. It is about life in a fictitious African country run by a dictator and is describing the absurdity of life under these circumstances, very interesting. For me the country is Zimbabwe, but I guess it could have been any African dictatorship.

Anyhow, I felt very cultural because I had read a book they were talking about on TV! And when they read parts of the book on TV I felt even smarter, as I did not read the Swedish translation! Ok, I did not read it in the original language either, as my Gikuyu is not so great, but at least the English translation is made by the author himself.