Opinions for Africa
On Twitter, Ashleigh Stewart (@Ash_Stewart_) asked Kiwis if they used the phrase “for Africa?”
“Like, ‘there was cake for Africa?’ Cause I said it in the company of Canadians yesterday and they were horrified. Truth is, I’d never even thought about it – picked it up from Mum,” she wrote.
Google seems to think it’s a New Zealand thing. It’s when there’s too much of something, you can give it away, like a charitable donation, hence “X for Africa”. It’s New Zealand slang for too much of something. Every Christmas, my mother makes fruitcakes for Africa.
Then, in the thread that follows, a delightful free-ranging collection of reckons: it may come from our Band Aid period (feed the world). Hang on, people in South Africa use it as well. Or from exasperated Kiwi mums admonishing their fussy kids at the dinner table with “there’s children starving in Africa”.
I don’t see it as derogatory. I’ve always understood it to be a metaphor based on Africa being a very large continent with lots of people, so if you’re doing something for Africa, you’re doing unimaginable amounts of something.
But … but why were the Canadians horrified? Is it that immediately mentioning another culture is seen as an insult? Like why we can’t say Mexican wave any more or Venetian blinds? Ha, it’s literally the name of my business, knives4africa.co.nz. … Cake for New Zealand doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Hey, Dick, why is your profile picture so old?
I like to judge people’s profile photos. I did this openly with a colleague one day, when I noticed how young he was in his. He was living in the past and needed to embrace middle age, right? I gently suggested that maybe one a few decades on might be more *cough* authentic. He disabused me of that notion and explained the remarkable story behind his profile picture. “That photo is special to me because of what you can’t see,” he said. “The man who took the photo was a dear friend, Blind Mike.” Yes, he was blind. “When we went out, Mike liked to take random pictures for his blog. On one particular occasion, a woman walked past, and I could feel a wee hitch in my chest when I caught sight of her. As Mike points his camera in her general direction, I lean into his shot.” Dick saw the woman again, a few weeks later and talked most of the night. “But then I got a new job in California and we kept in contact for a few years,” he says. A decade later, he came back to Atlanta and they reconnected. “I was single, and she was divorcing. A year later, we were married. And have been for 11 years now, 10 of those living in New Zealand. That photo represents so many things to me. A blind-photographer friend whom I miss dearly and the first picture of the woman I’ll spend the rest of my life with … taken a decade before we were married.”
AI not perfect, but can be funny
WineFriend’s Yvonne Lorkin was stumped by an AI transcription of an interview she did this week: “It’s given me this line – ‘So we’ve just been unwanking for a week’... Puzzled, I trawled through the original recording and reader, it turns out they were in Wellington for a week.”
Eye roll of the week
Wayne Brown truly is a master of his own domain. The charity debate hosted by Molloy last week at his Viaduct bar HQ night proved it. As reported by the Herald, the moot was “that all media are drongos” (because they hold people with the power and purse strings to account). Wayne charmed the pants off everyone, welcoming “the sluts and whores, dickheads and f...wits”, then moaned about the media not covering what he wanted.
Graham Henry suggested Leo Molloy had erectile dysfunction before whining about how the media treated the All Blacks “like shit”. Then Shane Jones got to trot out his brush with scandal; charging a bit of hotel porn on his ministerial credit card, and Judith openly admitted that her party was light on the ladies. The mock menu was a wild ride, but a few specials on the B-side were missed…
- White-baiting fritters - small fry issues, overcooked in a climate crisis and served with a sense of massive entitlement.
- Pale stale tamales - served with irrelevancy sauce and all held together in a mould with Aspic - like they did in the 1970s.
- Carpetbagger steak - beyond well done and marinated in bleach. A multitude of totally cooked sides, all too small to cross the taste threshold.
- Braised Plunket - sauteed in its own bile, slow-cooked in an incel Dutch oven. Taken off the menu everywhere it’s featured.
Send your Digital Bonfire suggestions to contactsamways@gmail.com
