Organisers of Big Brother Africa appear to be too busy to read about the culinary career of Charles Taylor and Idi Amin. One of Taylor’s commanders was at one point found braaing a human arm chopped off a blood-diamond victim.
Impatient that the arm was taking too long to cook, he would occasionally lift it off the open fire, tear off a mouthful with his teeth and put it back.
Amin is said to have kept bountiful and different human-meat cuts in a cold room the size of the BBA house.
The point is this: in a continent where there are still pockets of cannibalism, organisers of this reality show took a really huge, possibly criminal risk over the weekend when they starved the housemates of food for more than 48 hours.
Everything that happens in BBA is scripted.
The organisers knew that the food in the house would run out before the next date of replenishment.
They knew this because they are armed with research data that links idleness with gluttony. Save for the artificial ‘activities’, BBA housemates are idle most of the time and tend to fill those hours with cussing, smoking and eating.
You can prove this link yourself. Idle youth unable to get into tertiary education institutions spend most of the time either lying in bed or watching TV, all the time eating.
For that reason, the low enrolment rate at tertiary institutions this academic year means that food budgets of families with teenagers turned away by the University of Botswana will skyrocket drastically.
The food deprivation may have been part of the game but for a moment there you felt a chill run down your spine when this huge guy from somewhere in Africa began to display the behaviour of a predator stalking prey.
Now he would steal furtive glances at Kaone, lick his huge lips, then swallow hard, flare his nostrils and mutter to himself as he circled around. He did that about five times on Saturday evening.
This is the problem. Kaone is the smallest and carnivores have this habit of eating the smallest creatures as appetisers.
Exactly how the hungry man should be rewarded is a bit tricky.
Voting to keep him in the house seems the most obvious thing to do but that would put Kaone in grave danger.
As meal fit for a cannibal, Kaone is a particularly desirable acquisition because he is an all-in-one snack: locks of his own dreadlocked hair can be used to build a bonfire on which he can be braaied.
Science has not educated us enough about cannibalism and consequently, people around the world are unable to respond appropriately to the threat it poses.
We still don’t know whether cannibalism is hereditary and absent such knowledge, it is possible for an Amin descendant to resurface here in Botswana and take up a scarce-skill post in the public service.
The BBA organisers would have put together psychological profiles of the housemates but it is unlikely they have run a thorough background check on their medical history.
For example, has anyone of them ever suffered from ‘kuru?’
That is a transmittable disease caused by consumption of the human brain.
If all this sounds macabre it is because BBA, and practically all other reality shows, are evolved from a macabre spectacle that took place at The Colosseum in ancient Rome.
The ruins of The Colosseum are now a major tourist attraction in central Rome, Italy.
The largest elliptical amphitheatre ever built in the Roman Empire, The Colosseum sat 50 000 spectators and then ‘blood on the floor’ was not used as casually as it is nowadays.
The amphitheatre was used for gladiatorial contests and public spectacles such as mock sea battles, animal hunts, executions and re-enactments of famous battles.
In the 21st century, you cannot have Colosseum-like spectacles but the passage of time has done nothing to eliminate dark human impulses in those who crave extraordinary entertainment.
And so they came up with shows which dance around the law while providing entertainment that brings back the spirit, excitement and atmosphere of The Colosseum. Thus you end up with shows like American Idols, My Star, Fear Factor and Big Brother where contestants are routinely insulted, starved, humiliated and symbolically murdered.
In the case of BBA, cannibalism may not be far off.