Yesterday, I attended mass at the Catholic church in Ggaba. As usual, the church was packed for the English service: the reverent and joyous congregation numbered at least 500, spilling beyond the airy interior.
I took advantage of a slight delay in starting the mass to read the Catholic weekly newsletter, which has been serialising Archbishop Cyprian's 2010 Easter address. This week's instalment dwelt on the importance of truth in everthing we do, using the Bible's simple message that "the truth will set you free".
In Archbishop Cyprian's words, levelled at politicians, traders, doctors, journalists, perjurers, and others who deceive and mislead the Ugandan populace, "People await.. the truth, but information is given to the public. False accusations are made, but the truth is never revealed. ....... As long as the truth never comes out, we shall never be free from rumour, false accusations and counter accusations". He might have gone on to add that cheating, fakery and the associated failure by the regulatory authorities to enforce proper standards has a corrosive impact on wider ethical standards.
And this situation is by no means confined to Uganda: across sub-Saharan Africa, society is filled with fraud, theft and corruption. The fertile breeding ground of poverty and desperation creates an environment in which these vile charlatans multiply, promoting and peddling their false and unproven goods and services for personal profit in a largely unregulated marketplace, where short term commercialism holds sway over professionalism.
Most loathsome of all are self-styled Christian Pastors who enrich themselves by fleecing their followers through schemes akin to the Middle Ages practice of selling of indulgences for personal profit; and traditional healers, who dream up ever more hideous practices to offer the ignorant and superstitious. In recent years, these have included the burying of human body parts in the foundations of new buildings (supposedly to bring these buildings strength and permanence), and the sacrifice of albinos as a form of medicine. However, on a less-horrifying, but more widespread scale, the absence of well-resourced national bureaux of standards with the powers to take robust and immediate action against retailers and producers offering sub-standard goods for sale to the public leads to widespread product counterfeiting, with all the dangers this presents to the general public. Adulterated cement and fuel and date-expired medicine and foods abound, largely unchecked.
There is a better English word to describe the charlatans responsible for these crimes. The word is "quack", and Africa is full of them. The dictionary defines quack as a person who pretends to have skill, knowledge or qualifications which he does not possess. I had always assumed that its derivation was directly related to the noise a duck makes - hence the picture above - but in fact it comes from the archaic Dutch word quacksalver, meaning "a boaster who applies a salve".
I used to think that there was something comical about the description "quack". Now I know better.
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