Author Archives: Lionel Stanbrook

Ahem The idea of a leisurely tour of southern middle England took shape after I was presented with four separate and fortunate opportunities taking place within two weeks of each other. These were the celebration of my niece Fleur’s wedding to husband Almero in the Temple Church (see masthead); the kind offer of my cousins […]

Ahem Modern global media seems to destroy more than it creates. In Africa, cable TV pushes its normal fare: international sitcoms and films, the Simpsons, Premier League, Brazilian soaps, porn channels and detective series, while local content is dominated by Nollywood, national football matches, and urban music videos. By contrast the pan-African oral traditions of […]

Ahem At work, I have been grappling with an administration that had difficulties in comprehending that I had both retired and immediately become a consultant, officially impossible but allowed thanks to a special waiver signed by the President. Apparently I am the first employee in recent history to have achieved this feat, for which force […]

Ahem The annual reception for the staff of the African Development Bank provided a suitable curtain-raiser for Alli’s first visit to Abidjan for two years. Within three hours of her landing in Abidjan, we were arriving at the reception just in time politely to applaud the last of several apéritif speeches. The dress code was […]

Ahem Abidjan is crammed with signs. From huge hoardings for big brands to rickety little notices nailed onto trees announcing personal services, and glorious swirly motifs justes adorning taxi bumpers, Abidjan informs, adverts, and persuades its world in words and pictures. On the back-bumpers of the suicidal rust-gripped taxis, popularly known as ‘woro-woros’, many of […]

Ahem In Basel’s Euroairport the same broadcast security warning in English has been running for many years and over Christmas I heard it again. In so doing I recalled that it has annoyed the hell out of me every one of the hundreds of times I have heard it since its first broadcast over 15 […]

Ahem The temperature around me dropped a full thirty degrees when I returned from Abidjan in mid-month, just three days after Gwen’s 20th birthday, a momentous event that convinced me that time accelerates faster every year. This sensation is apparently called zenosyne. I explain it to myself by recalling that when was five years old, […]

Ahem While I and my colleagues at the Bank are paid good salaries, even by European standards, most families in the Cote d’Ivoire have perilously low incomes and virtually no long-term savings. I can’t prove it with statistics but I estimate that I am earning in a month what an average working adult in Abidjan […]