It's
Official - I Am A Diabetic,
Discovering Sugar As The Actual Root
Of All Evil
Posted By Binyavanga Wainaina
July 17, 2008
OK. It's official. I am a diabetic. Sigh. And the world is made
of sugar. Carrots, mist, water, shoelaces, toothpaste, a yawn,
any wet cough, the wrong kind of smile -- all these things are
loaded with hidden sugars.
And diabetes is an epidemic: your cat has it and does not know;
India thinks it is marching to the First World, but it will
crash and slump into a diabetic coma because call centres are
busy creating sugar dreams in their early morning
American-accent lessons. Ohhh honey, sugar, sugar, sweetie,
sugah-cake, honeypaaa …
Being an African intellectual, I must first connect sugar to
Colonialism. In Kenda Mutongi's sublime history book, Worries of
the Heart, she talks about the attempts by the Quakers to get
the Maragoli people in Kenya to buy into their idea of God. All
efforts failed. Until they started to serve tea with sugar.
Soon, people were hooked and were in church every day and
looking for work to support a sugar and tobacco habit.
Today, there are old Maragoli grannies who light a cigarette,
put the lit side into their mouths, and smoke away, while riding
a bicycle.
In case you did not know, today, Kenya has the largest community
of Quakers in the world. All this because of sugar. Maragoli
Quakers populate literature departments and publishing houses.
Also many amazing Kenyan writers: Andia Kisia, Stanely Gazemba,
Kenda Mutongi. All great prose stylists. Maybe it has something
to do with the fact that the world's librarian Mafia are
Quakers. So, these guys got higher quotas of library books when
in school.
We all know, of course, that sugar caused slavery. Yes, and yes
and cotton. But sugar … think about it: chocolate, coffee, tea,
sugar -- plantations.
Sugar, like everything else, was invented by Leonardo Da Vinci.
Secret documents that I can reveal will be revealed in The Da
Vinci Code Part 3, have shown that Mona Lisa was smiling
secretly because she had just sipped the first product of the
organic latte machine he had been frenziedly inventing. Da Vinci
also invented Colonic Irrigation, Hip-Hop and the Multiple
Orgasm 1400.
He was killed by members of the Illuminati when he announced in
an Inventorholics Anonymous meeting in Venice that sugar was
poison and would infect the whole world.
They injected him with 800 milligrams of finely distilled
Austrian white beet extract.
He was found lying on the floor, a mysterious smile on his face.
Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of Everything Else, and the man
who moved General Electric to Schenectady, the town I lived in
until this spring, tried to create a form of energy out of sugar
that he claimed rivals electricity … it was to be called
Confectionery…
But, General Electric's board had a member of the secretive
Tongaat-Hullett family -- Percival Tongaat-Hullett. He received
death threats and the board quickly decided to make a company
subsidiary that made sweet, swirly, baked things … to keep Mrs
Violet Tongaat-Hullett happy.
She liked baking. It was called the Confectionery Project.
Few people know that the British anti-slavery movement began
with a meeting of three diabetics for tea and sugarfree
crumpets. William Wilberforce, who first proposed the idea that
slavery was evil because it helped manufacture sugar, was one of
only 15 people in Britain who was not addicted to it. He hated
it virulently. His mother had once thrust his head into a bowl
of icing-sugar and forced him to inhale.
Most people know that Coca-Cola once had cocaine in it; what
they don't know is that it still has sugar.
Angelina Jolie wants to adopt a gingerbread child. They bought a
gingerbread house near a bakery in some secret location in
France.
But seriously: cane sugar was first used in Polynesia and
travelled to India. Nauru, an island in the Pacific, is wealthy
because of the generations of bird shit that has accumulated on
the island. Because of this they spend all day watching American
cable television and eating. They have the highest rates of
diabetes in the world, renal failure and heart disease.
Venice built its power on sugar, silk and spices. The first
industrial sugar refinery was built by the Arabs on the island
of Crete. They also invented caramel -- which was used by harem
women to remove body hair…
"Who has been licking my exfoliator! Fatima, you have a caramel
moustache on your upper lip!"
When you spend a lot of time at airport lobbies, rushing to
finish your column in cafes that serve confectionery and
chocolate and cinnamon and sugar, sugar, sugar, you find
yourself unable to care about the state of Africa, or democracy
in Zimbabwe.
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