It has been noticed by one of my loyal readers that this blog has been disproportionately focused on Malian anal-cleansing and farting practices to the detriment of this nation's proud heritage of song and dance. I agree that this is indeed a problem, and yet I feel that it would be a tragedy if Zacstravaganza were to veer from its focus on one of the most pressing issues of our time: the butt.
Lo and behold, in the Obamanian spirit of reconciliation, it turns out that one of the most popular dance crazes to sweep the Republic of Mali as well as the rest of West Africa is the "Bobaraba" In Bambara, the slang term for the butt is bobara - literally, the 'poop gourd' (in a land where Tupperware is prohibitively expensive, dried gourds are customarily used to hold anything and everything). A Bobaraba is a 'big poop gourd', or rather, a really big butt, a J.Lo booty if you will. And according to traditional West African ideals of beauty, to have a few extra pounds of fat on you is demonstrative of ample food supplies and promise as a potential mate - here to have a Bobaraba is considered quite... ahem... sexy.
And as consequence, everyone from Gao to Manantali is getting down and shaking their Bobaraba.
Harari and McWhorter on Gaza, Israel, and Columbia
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Yuval Noah Harari and John McWhorter have written important essays on the
the Israel/Hamas war (Harari, in Haaretz) and the response on American
campuses (...
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