ho trovato l'articolo on line in inglese. sarebbe bene tradurlo in
altre lingue...
grazie, c'è qualcuno che si offre?
ciao
giovanni

It's official. I am a diabetic
BINYAVANGA WAINAINA: CONTINENTAL DRIFT - Jul 17 2008 00:00
OK. It's official. I am a diabetic. Sigh. And the world is made of
sugar. Carrots, mist, water, shoelaces, toothpaste, a yawn, any wet
cough, the wrong kind of smile -- all these things are loaded with
hidden sugars.

And diabetes is an epidemic: your cat has it and does not know; India
thinks it is marching to the First World, but it will crash and slump
into a diabetic coma because call centres are busy creating sugar
dreams in their early morning American-accent lessons. Ohhh honey,
sugar, sugar, sweetie, sugah-cake, honeypaaa …

Being an African intellectual, I must first connect sugar to
Colonialism. In Kenda Mutongi's sublime history book, Worries of the
Heart, she talks about the attempts by the Quakers to get the
Maragoli people in Kenya to buy into their idea of God. All efforts
failed. Until they started to serve tea with sugar. Soon, people were
hooked and were in church every day and looking for work to support a
sugar and tobacco habit.

Today, there are old Maragoli grannies who light a cigarette, put the
lit side into their mouths, and smoke away, while riding a bicycle.

In case you did not know, today, Kenya has the largest community of
Quakers in the world. All this because of sugar. Maragoli Quakers
populate literature departments and publishing houses. Also many
amazing Kenyan writers: Andia Kisia, Stanely Gazemba, Kenda Mutongi.
All great prose stylists. Maybe it has something to do with the fact
that the world's librarian Mafia are Quakers. So, these guys got
higher quotas of library books when in school.

We all know, of course, that sugar caused slavery. Yes, and yes and
cotton. But sugar … think about it: chocolate, coffee, tea, sugar --
plantations.

Sugar, like everything else, was invented by Leonardo Da Vinci.
Secret documents that I can reveal will be revealed in The Da Vinci
Code Part 3, have shown that Mona Lisa was smiling secretly because
she had just sipped the first product of the organic latte machine he
had been frenziedly inventing. Da Vinci also invented Colonic
Irrigation, Hip-Hop and the Multiple Orgasm 1400.

He was killed by members of the Illuminati when he announced in an
Inventorholics Anonymous meeting in Venice that sugar was poison and
would infect the whole world.

They injected him with 800 milligrams of finely distilled Austrian
white beet extract.

He was found lying on the floor, a mysterious smile on his face.

Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of Everything Else, and the man who
moved General Electric to Schenectady, the town I lived in until this
spring, tried to create a form of energy out of sugar that he claimed
rivals electricity … it was to be called Confectionery…

But, General Electric's board had a member of the secretive Tongaat-
Hullett family -- Percival Tongaat-Hullett. He received death threats
and the board quickly decided to make a company subsidiary that made
sweet, swirly, baked things … to keep Mrs Violet Tongaat-Hullett
happy.

She liked baking. It was called the Confectionery Project.

Few people know that the British anti-slavery movement began with a
meeting of three diabetics for tea and sugarfree crumpets. William
Wilberforce, who first proposed the idea that slavery was evil
because it helped manufacture sugar, was one of only 15 people in
Britain who was not addicted to it. He hated it virulently. His
mother had once thrust his head into a bowl of icing-sugar and forced
him to inhale.

Most people know that Coca-Cola once had cocaine in it; what they
don't know is that it still has sugar.

Angelina Jolie wants to adopt a gingerbread child. They bought a
gingerbread house near a bakery in some secret location in France.

But seriously: cane sugar was first used in Polynesia and travelled
to India. Nauru, an island in the Pacific, is wealthy because of the
generations of bird shit that has accumulated on the island. Because
of this they spend all day watching American cable television and
eating. They have the highest rates of diabetes in the world, renal
failure and heart disease.

Venice built its power on sugar, silk and spices. The first
industrial sugar refinery was built by the Arabs on the island of
Crete. They also invented caramel -- which was used by harem women to
remove body hair…

"Who has been licking my exfoliator! Fatima, you have a caramel
moustache on your upper lip!"

When you spend a lot of time at airport lobbies, rushing to finish
your column in cafes that serve confectionery and chocolate and
cinnamon and sugar, sugar, sugar, you find yourself unable to care
about the state of Africa, or democracy in Zimbabwe.

Sigh. I want some of that cake.

Source: Mail & Guardian Online
Web Address: http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-07-17-its-official-i-am-
a-diabetic