How my poor tech marred my date with a distinguished class

The BBC is a respectable and time-tested media institution. But I am not hired in this business to lavish praises on obvious competitors. The NMG “Nation Africa” is, if you ask me, incomparably superior to any outfit you care to mention.

In any case, the “BBC” we are talking about here is not the one of London, with the signature RP Standard English accent, which is sadly but inevitably fading under the onslaught of globalisation.

The “BBC” of our conversation is me (good grammar should be “I”) and my company, especially as we function or, more frequently, malfunction in the communication arena.

The “BBC” label for Mwalimu Bukenya’s generation stands for “born before computers”.

It is not quite a complimentary identity but most of us oldsters take it in good humour for two reasons.

First, we feel that our nearest and dearest, our children, grandchildren and former students, who are most likely to call us “BBC”, do so mostly with affection and understanding.

Magic machines

Indeed, our youngsters often use the anagram to indulge our blunders or clumsiness with the magic machines.

Secondly, we “analogues” also have our secret laughs at the swaggering “digitals” in their labelling of everything pre-1970 as “BBC”.

We “prehistoric” survivors from the 1930s and 40s know that there were computers even then.

Claiming that those were pre-computer days may be reading from a faulty algorithm.

That said, however, Mwalimu Austin Bukenya and his “BBC” team must humbly admit that cybernetics, AI (artificial intelligence) and information communication technology (ICT) have grown exponentially since the days of their youth.

Here we talk of a revolution without any fear of exaggeration. Moreover, the fundamental changes in digital communication show no signs of slowing down, let alone ending.

Every new invention, every discovery, triggers a cluster of other possibilities, making the process a continuous hectic adventure.

This means anyone who wants to keep operating effectively in our environment must keep struggling to keep abreast with as many of the essential developments as possible.

Otherwise we will be bypassed and rendered “irrelevant” to our society, a possibility of which we ageing dodderers live in constant fear of.

This dawned on me a fortnight ago when my friend, Musyoki Muli, invited me to what promised to be a thrilling and uplifting virtual event.

Muli, a leading personality in the publishing industry, was my student at KU, before he became one of my publishers. He told me that he and his KU Language and Literature classmates, who graduated in 1990, and appropriately call themselves KULL90, meet once every year to socialise, relive their memories and share life and career experiences.

This year, however, their 30th since graduation, amidst coronavirus and lockdowns, they could only meet online. Still, they wanted me to join them, virtually, and maybe share with them a few reflections about midlife and mid-career challenges and prospects.

 You can imagine with what joy, gratitude and eagerness I accepted the invitation. After all, it is not every day that a group of eminent people want their teacher to give them yet another lecture, 30 years after he taught them.

Pride was there too, because when I say these people are eminent, I mean “eminent”.

I am always wary about mentioning names, partly because I cannot do justice to all of them and partly because I do not want to sound a lot like a “name-dropper”.

Just imagine, however, that in this KULL90 class there were such high profile leaders as Hon. Abubakar Zein, our former Member of the E.A. Legislative Assembly, and Interior Cabinet Secretary Dr Fred O. Matiang’i.

Among the moderators of the event I noticed my friend and colleague, David Aduda, and my English books co-author, Prof Martin C. Njoroge, also Deputy VC Academic at the USIU.

One of the last speakers I noticed on the screen, before the technology did me in, was my beloved “oraturist”, activist and top university administrator, Dr Mshai Mwangola.

Rude interruption

Yes, it was the rude interruption to my participation in the event that brought home to me my lack of computer proficiency in current communication contexts.

I could, of course, blame it on the primitiveness of my equipment.

I realised too late, for example, that my mobile 4G internet connection was pathetically inept in my remote village setting.

I also lacked the skilled backup that we take for granted in office and studio situations.

Truth to tell, however, I just had not prepared adequately for the Zoom session that our event was.

Ndugu Muli had taken me through the paces of how to log on and which buttons and icons I had to click on the screen for the mics and cameras.

But in the heat of the moment, everything went haywire on me, and my audience and I ended up getting increasingly frustrated by the jerky and fragmented contacts we were managing.

I apologise here to my KULL90 hosts, and thank them all heartily for loving me.

I will have to practise more and get reasonably accustomed to the video and audio teleconferencing facilities available to us, and now increasingly necessitated by our drastically changing lifestyles.

Regarding the inspiration I got out of my former students’ virtual get-together, my feeling is why don’t we do this more often, more systematically and on a wider scale?

 It is always constructive for any group of human beings to recognise the noble and useful features that identify them and seize on them to unite, share and act.

In the university system, membership of the same school, faculty, discipline or year of attendance are well-established characteristic of identity and unity.

As I have suggested before in these columns, such identity groups would be ideal channels for endowing and contributing to the growth of our institutions, as they are elsewhere in the world.

KULL90 could, for example, consider sponsoring a Francis Imbuga Chair of Dramatic Arts, or a Mwalimu Austin Bukenya Orature Conservatory, at Kenyatta University.

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