Ugandan pop star Bobi Wine records song to beat coronavirus
KAMPALA (Reuters) - A Ugandan musician and political challenger to the country’s aging leader released a song on Wednesday to help efforts to stem the spread of coronavirus in the east African nation.
In the song, 38 year-old Robert Kyagulanyi, who also goes by his stage name Bobi Wine, and fellow artist Nubian Li, croon to a tune laced with East Africa’s signature rhumba melodies about the importance of personal hygiene.
They also exhort people to regularly wash hands, keep a distance and look out for symptoms like fever and cough.
Uganda on Wednesday confirmed five more cases of COVID-19, bringing its tally to 14, four days after it recorded its first patient.
“The bad news is that everyone is a potential victim,” Kyagulanyi says in the lyrics.
“But the good news is that everyone is a potential solution.” President Yoweri Museveni’s government has already taken a raft of measure including sealing off borders, closing bars, and banning public gatherings to contain the outbreak.
Music has previously been instrumental in tackling other outbreaks in Uganda.
Songs about HIV/AIDS by another Ugandan crooner Philly Bongoley Lutaaya, who would later die of the disease, helped spread awareness in the 1980s and 90s and bring down skyhigh infection rates.
Kyagulanyi, long dubbed the “Ghetto President” for his star power and songs highlighting urban poverty, has been a headache to the ruling party since joining politics in 2017.
After declaring he wants to stand for president, he quickly emerged as a formidable opponent of Museveni, who has ruled since 1986 and is widely expected to stand for re-election.
Joel Ssenyonyi, Kyagulanyi’s spokesman, told Reuters the singer had distributed press releases on COVID-19 and handed out jerry cans and soap to drive up hand washing in communities.
“One other creative way of communicating is through music,” Ssenyonyi said. “Most people love to listen to music so what better way to put across a message than through music.”
In Senegal, activist hip-hop group Y’en a Marre have recorded a rap about washing hands, disposing of used tissues and avoiding crowds in their latest release: ‘Shield against Coronavirus.’
Ugandan musician turned politician Robert Kyagulanyi, who also goes by his stage name Bobi Wine (REUTERS/ James Akena file photo)
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Americans are employing humor as a balm to soothe nerves during the coronavirus pandemic, flocking to new Instagram stars like Quentin Quarantino and sharing Facebook memes about taking off bras and pants and putting on weight in selfquarantine.
Late-night TV hosts and hometown comedians are providing a mental health safety net for Americans living amid COVID-19 trauma, and medical experts say humor is a vital part of surviving the cascading catastrophe.
“We’re just trying to find the lighter side of the crisis with articles that tell readers that this is temporary, ‘Let’s just get through it together,’” said Jonathan Jaffe, whose New Jersey-based satirical newsletter, The Jaffe Briefing, has had a 40 percent spike in readership since the first coronavirus patient died in the United States on
Feb. 28.
Snarky but very positive, the daily bulletin updates readers on such news as AnheuserBusch’s efforts to switch production from beer to antiseptics.
“NEWARK – The Sultan of Sanitizer? The Highness of Hand Hygiene? The Ayatollah of Antiseptic? Someone has to devise a new, snappy nickname now that The King of Beers is mass producing hand sanitizer.”
Mental health professionals say humor is a balm for soothing nerves, not just by tickling funny bones but also by decreasing stress hormones. Clinical evidence shows high levels of stress can weaken immune systems.
Jokes at a time of crisis, however, should be rooted in commonalities rather than in differences. If not, they risk the resounding criticism directed at comedian Ari Shaffir after he tweeted sarcastic humor about the January death of basketball great Kobe Bryant.
MENTAL ARMOR
At an otherwise grim news conference to update on the state’s COVID-19 death toll and infection numbers, Kentucky officials this week showed photographs of sidewalks chalked with light-hearted sayings, and Public Health Commissioner Dr. Steven Stack told reporters, “Humor is healing.”
Comedy can serve as mental armor to ensure safe passage through tragic times, says psychologist Sean Truman of St. Paul, Minnesota.
“It’s a really powerful way to manage the unmanageable. Just to make fun of it and to gain control by laughing at it. That’s a really powerful psychological move we can make,” Truman said.
With New York at the epicenter of the U.S. crisis, Governor Andrew Cuomo enlisted comic actor Danny DeVito to drive home the very serious message about self-quarantining.
“Stay home,” DeVito, 75, said in a widely aired public service announcement. “We got this virus, this pandemic, and you know young people can get it, and they can transmit it to old people, and the next thing you know - ‘Gghhhhkk, I’m outta there!’”
After production of their late-night television talk shows was shut down, comedians Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah are streaming their monologues online.
Millions watched as Fallon sat on his front porch and rewarded himself for landing jokes told only to his laptop computer by pressing a button that delivered canned laughter and applause.
A recent episode of “The Light Show with Stephen Colb-Air - We’re All In This Together,” recorded on Colbert’s front porch, featured a mock horse race.
One thoroughbred “Does This Cough Mean Anything?” vied for the lead with “Maybe This Will All Blow Over.” And the winner “by three lengths!” announced the breathless sportscaster, was “Generalized Anxiety.”
1. Outfit for good listener (4)
3. Work in secret as an underground movement (10)
9. Village in Wakenaam without worry, according to the French (4,5) 10. Roman emperor who turned up in Florence (4)
12. Backward Ted leaves derelict with artefact (5)
13. Moving to Saturn, a space traveller (9)
14. Small part of poem accurately recalled (5)
16. Wrongly ordering a meal is causing illness (7)
17. Standard past name for model (7) 19. Live with wife in valley (5)
21. Large amount supporting merging (9)
23. Surrounded by some roaming nomads returning (5)
25. Touched soft fabric (4)
26. Choose to be verbal to type of problem now in Guyana (9)
27. Vibrates as on trees shaking (9)
28. Thin slice of cold body joint (4) Down
1. Intestinal vapour with first t-bone roasted in can (7)
2. Cancel yearly issue as it is one article short (5)
4. Due to ANC, I arranged schooling (9)
5. Amin back to being silly one (5) 6. From latest info I learn what can protect food (7)
7. Countryman swallowing a bishop’s tale (9)
8. Section of autopsy chosen for
Hitchcock film (6)
11. Last year’s eye problem (4)
15. Training some smart little monkeys (9)
16. Mother loiters and pretends to be ill (9)
17. I left soft drink with energies (4) 18. Greedy-guts is large in stomach and overweight (7)
19. Scarcity of food ultimately where we live (6)
20. Fielder making minor error behind limb (7)
22. Miner threatening somewhat to be unmoving (5)
24. One of Marx brothers returning with Winfrey (5)
ranging from great humour to bawdiness to tragedy. Among the common motifs for which these narratives are famous are sex, adultery and debauchery, mercantilism, the middle class and a harsh criticism of the clergy, with religion and the Roman Catholic Church painted in corrupt colours.
The ravaging of the pestilence in Florence is thus echoed by these tales that reflect the worst clandestine relations of the clergy from monk to Monseigneur, who were at the height of politics, government and power over the populace. At the same time, those in the merchant class were rising as freemen with wealth above the serfs in a feudal society. The 10 fictitious youths were members of that class, and they represented the emerging middle class who would eventually infringe on political power.
There is another work of note, but it belongs to very modern times. Written in the twentieth century, it harks back to the Bubonic Plague. Red Noses is a play by British playwright Peter Barnes, written in 1978 but first performed in 1985 by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). This was a very successful performance at The Barbican, the RSC’s London tramping ground. It was done in all the pageantry of mediaeval drama with much costuming and colour, but on a post-modern stage.
Bloomsbury Publishing provides the most compact description. “Red Noses is a black comedy about the black death, a vibrant and slapstick hymn to the power of laughter and the human spirit. There’s no cure for the plague, and Auxere in France, 1348, is populated by the dying.” Marcel Float, a good Christian who wants to do good, starts a group which travels around the gloomy and afflicted countryside to bring cheer, joy and laughter to demoralized humanity.
It is black comedy, which evokes humour from the grim and the serious. The play is farce and sometimes slapstick – another hangover from the ‘Mediaeval Morality play’. It is indeed funny in many parts and satirises the religion of the times from the Flagellants – groups of pilgrims who whip themselves to atone for their sins, to the high order of the Catholic church. It dwells on the way an affliction like the plague can devastate a society, deteriorating it to ridiculous levels. It comments on the resurrection of the human spirit from the depths of spiritual and political degradation. It dramatizes the want of this kind of salvation from a politically and morally depraved society.
Among the most horrifying Gothic tales of the haunting collections of Edgar Allan Poe is the short story “The Mask of The Red Death”, which is one of the starkest condemnations of the abuse of power and the uncaring decadence of the mighty. Published in the USA in 1842, it is nevertheless a gruesome take on the black death of 1348. A dangerous plague known as the Red Death is wiping out people in the kingdom, and Prince Prospero selfishly decides to escape it. He gathers a company of many other wealthy nobles and goes off to hide in his abbey. While multitudes are perishing in the city, in his safe seclusion he hosts a masquerade ball. But an unknown masquerader, wearing the costume of the Red Death appears as a mystery guest. Prospero confronts him, but when the figure is unmasked, it turns out there is nothing but emptiness inside the costume. The Prince falls dead.
Obviously, it is the Red Death itself that invades the abbey, a citadel in which the Prince and the nobles thought they were safe from the plague. It suggests retribution and that the decadent wealthy will not escape their misdeeds or their callous indifference to the suffering of the unprivileged.
Of all the tales, this Gothic horror, “The Mask of the Red Death” speaks most plainly to the link between a plague which takes a toll on the health of a nation and political atrocities which do the same thing. It also suggests the need for action towards the common good rather than selfish pursuit of power.