On August 21, 1994, my grandmother Tomasa gave me the Dictionary of the Spanish Language. Thousands of words packed into a classic and recognizable edition. The Dictionary, with capital letters. It is one of the gifts of my life.
Although not much time goes by without me opening the volume out of necessity or leisure, I now, for obvious reasons, consult the online edition more. In addition to being a repository and light of words, the Dictionary has something like a daily newsletter: the “Word of the Day.” The one on January 12 was ‘ahechar’, a term with the smell of an old job, of the countryside, of disappearance. And, with the curiosity of the beginning of the week, from ‘ahechar’ I went to ‘harnero’. And from there to the ‘screener’, who is nothing more (nor less) than the professional who builds or sells the screens (or sieves) that are used to fold (or separate) the cereal from the chaff, the important from the insubstantial.
I had accessed the Dictionary page to consult one of the concepts that Carlos Lopes talks about in the interview that you will find a little later. The Bissauguinean economist had participated a few weeks earlier in the V Meeting of Spain-Africa Journalists, where he had addressed an open letter to journalists that could well have been delivered in any Faculty of Communication Sciences in the world. As a great headline, he asked us to open the window wide to look out and see the reality of the continent more broadly, not only staying with the obvious, with what our bad habit is receptive to picking up (famines, droughts, coups d’état, various corruptions…), preventing with our omissions that society knows what is also happening in Africa.
That’s why, when I arrived at the mill, I felt that we journalists should be a little like that: builders of tools that allow us to sift what is relevant from what is not, creators of stories that deserve to be told (even if some are not interested), observers of transcendences that go beyond the macroeconomic tables.
Tasks, all of these, with which we do not always comply.
Thanks, Carlos, for the lesson.
Thank you, grandmother, for everything.
