NTA maximalism

If boredom should strike one while in Nigeria, there is always the option to turn to NTA. The news is a constant source of mirth and hilarity, if one knows how to find it. If it is not for the extravagancies of costume (see the fine example of regal agbadahood to the left), then one can readily admire the extravagancies of the language. The English spoken on NTA is a uniquely distinct dialect of the language. Its provenance is 100% organic colonial: a sort of Africanised Etonian twang which results in weirdly contorted somewhat nasal locutions and odd syllabilic emphases.

Best of all though are the maps behind the newsreaders. To amuse myself, sometimes I imagine there is highly sophisticated intent behind them. My analysis takes me in two directions: either it is a nod to Pangea, that hypothesised super-continent said to have existed millions of years ago before Africa, America and Asia went their separate continental ways.

In this case, the map is a subtle reference to Africa being the origin of homo sapiens, and therefore the wisdom of ages is visually (and symbolically) accrued through a neat geographical sleight of hand. On the other hand, I take the fact that according to NTA, Spain has now linked up with North Africa, the UK has melded with Normandy (and lost Scotland to the icy wastes of the far North Sea in the process), the fact that the Mediterranean Sea has now become three separate lakes (losing its saline character in the process I imagine), thanks to some very odd growths occurring to Italy and Greece, and finally, the very odd bloidal blurrings taking place in South-East Asia (with Australia linking up with the Indonesian archipelago and Japan yearning for a Kiwi kiss) to all be signs of a magnificent and cartographically grandiloquent optimism for the future. Thousands of years from now, we humankind will have developed such brotherly and sisterly love for one another, that combined with our technological capacity to redirect plate techtonics (using nuclear fission and interplanetary energy sources), we will make a universal geo-political decision (at a future version of the UN) to reverse the previously ineluctable separation of continental landmasses, and decide to link up with one another – as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end. In other words, the NTA map is perhaps the most futural object on our planet, and should be celebrated as such.