otherPriorities.com was supposed to become a site for texts and think pieces, written exchange and debate on Africa, the West, and the Rest of the World. It didn’t work.
Since early 2021, I use it to offer short stories in which I pursue the origins of humanity and explore what has since gone differently in Africa and the West. The stories are based on facts, occurrences, and images from the media and science as well as my personal and professional life as a Swiss diplomat in Africa.
I invite you to follow the evolving story. And a notice to the reader: All of this is eclectic, anecdotal, and apodictic.
Dominik Langenbacher
‘Mwalimu’ is the Swahili word for teacher and the modest Swahili I speak, I learned from Mwalimu James. Someone recommended him to me when at the arrival of my first stay in Nairobi, I wanted to learn the local language. I must immediately add that my Swahili is not modest because Mwalimu James was a bad teacher. It is so for two different reasons: First, contrary to Tanzania where Swahili alone is the official language, in Kenya, English joins Swahili as official language and much of public life happens in English. Official publications of the government, the leading newspapers,
As their union with nature and the gods and spirits was broken, humans continued roaming the forests and plains, hunting and gathering. But something essential, a sacred dimension of their life and the world around them, was missing: That spiritual sense of being part something bigger than just the here and now. Humans felt that the spirits were still there, they were powerful and beyond the humans’ known and observable world, they were running the universe. Homo sapiens had to find a way to reconnect with the gods and the spirits. This was in their interest because there were
So, humans are primarily driven by their physical instincts of survival and procreation, by some aggression, and by the mental sense of community, and morality. But there is more to human life than that, again a human feature that by far surpasses what we find in any animal regarding its intelligence, cognition and consciousness: The metaphysical sense of spirituality.Beyond the plant and animal life of the environment, Homo sapiens observed the movements, the vibrations, and the flow of the world around him: The infinite ether of the universe with the interchange of the sun and the moon and the