MacGyver Meets West Wing in Kenya

I'm not sure when it started, but by the time I got back from Kenya, my brother's attachment to the TV show '24' was strong. He spends the entire TV season avoiding it. Trying not to watch commercials, read news articles, listen to water cooler conversations, and, of course, the TV show itself.

The show, which is like 'MacGyver' meets 'West Wing', is set into 24 episodes, each an hour long, representing a hellacious day in the life of counter-terrorist Jack Bauer. While always on the right 'moral' side of the equation, he often finds himself on the wrong 'legal' side in individual situations, which makes him a vital asset and a dangerous ally for the domestic security bureaucracy.

My brother watches '24' on DVD only. He does this so that he can watching them straight through, all eighteen hours in one sitting. “I watch it like Jack lives it,” he's told me more than once. He says this with pride, though he's aware that this pushes him toward the dubious category of being a fanatic.

Perhaps that is why he's not just content watching '24'. He pushes it onto his friends, loaning them the DVDs. And many of them find themselves wrapped up in Jack Bauer's world. Everyone is a possible target, everyone is a possible betrayer.

A few months ago, Geoffrey, an officemate of mine, asked me if I had ever heard of the show '24.' Of course I had and I suspected he was talking about it because it's being shown on one of the local stations (KTN; one of five, not four, local stations like I had previously written).

He told me that he had bought a pirated VCD of '24' and just watched all of Season Five the previous Friday. He too watched it “like Jack lives it.” Geoffrey lent it to us. It took us about three weeks, but we finished it.

'24' is now one of Halako's favorite shows.

We just bought a pirated version of Season One. It cost 250/- ($3). You can buy them openly on the streets and few people even seem to be aware that these are pirated. The police doesn't usually bother to enforce copyright restrictions and it's the heart of its own booning business.

I didn't think Halako would enjoy it as much as she does. The show is very fast paced, and hangs on suspension created by subtleties in the dialog, which is American English. Thankfully whoever put together the VCD burned it with subtitles. (Though the subtitles strangely replace all the lowercase l's with uppercase I's.)

(For all my linguistic ambitions coming to Kenya, I've found that Halako and I still primarily communicate in Swahili, though we've added a lot of English these past few months. Call it the Nairobi Effect. But I'm not entirely comfortable using my American English and slang American English with her. I probably should so that I can challenge her, but I'm not sure that constantly challenging in this way would be good for our relationship.)

We've watched a few American movies together and Halako isn't always the biggest fan. She was moved by World Trade Center, intrigued by The Last King of Scotland, but bored by Die Hard, Nowhere in Africa, and a couple of other random movies.

For Halako, most of these movies don't even hold a candle to a more local product: Nigerian movies. We'll save that topic for another time.