Page 6 - THE RHINO Issue 001

05
BY JUNE JAMBI
OUR COLUMNIST
Jambi is a political anthropologist who enjoys getting to the root of the words, ideas and beliefs that shape our world.
The Deputy President of Kenya is a SABOTEUR. He is engaging in acts of SABOTAGE and has abandoned his post to take up the mantle of deliberate obstruction of this administration using the people of Kenya as his pawns.
What’s worse, he has done an awfully good job of convincing us oth-
erwise.
I suppose that many people have not thought about the origins of the word sabotage. And rightly so, it’s not a word that frequently comes up in conversation. But the word has a very interesting, and appropriate history. There are two stories that claim to best clarify how the word came about, and both come from 19th century France
during the Industrial Revolution.
The most popular- and least reliable- goes as follows. French textile workers found them- selves replaced by faster, and cheaper machines. So, in protest they would throw their wooden shoes into the new, evil, machinery to destroy the equipment that had replaced them. And so the saboteur was born; coming from the French word- ‘sabot’ for their wood- en shoes.
In the second account, the original saboteurs were inspired by two anarchists. Fed up with the changes of the Industrial Revolution, they recommended that French labour unions adopt a policy of work slowdowns and inefficiencies to frustrate the industry to get what they wanted.
THE RHINO
Speaking Facts to Stupidity
SABOTAGE:
FOR DUMMIES
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