Etcetera II

SANDY GRANT | Monday November 17, 2008 00:00

Fast catching up are the celebrations of local anniversaries, which are coming at us from both left and right.

Not so long ago there were the anniversaries of the Police and of Molefi Secondary School and recently we have had the 80th anniversary of St. Joseph's College, Kgale - which really does need comment at a later date - then there has been the National Museum's 40th. Planned for the nearish future are the anniversaries of Shashe School and Moeng College - with doubtless dozens of imminent others about which I know nothing, amongst them presumably the BDF.

 I am very much in favour of celebrating sensible anniversaries although it is very much easier to recognise why it is the educational institutions, rather than, say, hospitals, which tend to bang this particular drum.

They know that these celebrations provides them with invaluable publicity, strengthens their institutions, obliges them to re-discover lost history, helps to develop and strengthen linkages and relationships, and underpins crucially important notions of individual identity, achievement and self-worth.

But then all educational institutions, much like churches, can exploit their high achieving graduates as marketing evidence of their undoubted worth. In contrast, a hospital cannot provide a comparable list of its best patients over the last 40 or so years, or say, the best of its operations. Similarly the Prisons Department would become a major joke if it tried to advertise its achievements in terms of those inmates who it had managed to turn around and whose post-prison careers had enabled them to rise high in civil society.
This kind of problem was very evident in the 40th anniversary exhibition mounted by the National Museum. Presumably, there were dozens of museum staff meetings held over many months to consider how best to organise its anniversary celebrations.

A decision to display the best of its collection was merely routine although the outcome proved to be loop sided with art heavily over- weighting ethnography. Perhaps it was because the museum recognised this problem that it decided, unusually, to fill the gap by displaying row after row of individual portraits of those who have been employed there during the last 40 years, the high and low, the big ones and the little ones and the quick and dead. In other words to honour the server rather than the served. Normally, people visit museums to enjoy whatever is on display and are unaware that there are staff working behind the scenes.

This is as it should be. For the public, it is the artefact which is of interest, not the staff. When those norms are inverted, it's obvious that something is very wrong. Anyway, enough of that. The artefacts and art works that are on display are of much interest and well worth a second visit. And what a pleasure it was to be able to admire again that remarkable victory kaross presented by the Bangwato to King George VI and given to the museum on loan by the Queen. But now the rain has come, the mosetlha trees are in glorious flower, the traffic lights have stopped working and lightning has knocked out many hundreds of phones.

Why is the Telecomms Corporation incapable of organising its systems so that people ringing one of those dead phones are immediately aware that this is the situation. Instead the caller hears the phone ringing - but with no one there to respond - or an engaged tone. In both instances, the indication is that the phone is working normally.

Would the BTC please introduce a distinctive buzz or jingle, which would tell the caller that the phone he/she is ringing is completely dead? It's done elsewhere. Why not here?