From notes made between March 19 and 21, 2008
It’s almost never not funny here in Freetown. There are more signs for social causes here than for consumer goods—quite a surprise considering the astronomical number of things you can buy, at least when compared to what’s available in Kigali. But these Billboards of Good are so earnest you can’t help but laugh:
Stop cutting down trees; stop burning the forest.
Save children from polio.
Only you can prevent AIDS.
Military Men are doing their part: They use condoms.
A woman’s place is as much in government as in the kitchen.
There are signs less full of this secular evangelism, which simply advertising names of things—so literally that they’re funny, surely despite their designers’ best intentions. Lawyers Center for Legal Assistance. Flaming Bible Church. Or, if you prefer, Burning Mountain Church. (Either way, you won’t see me at a church that involves that much fire.)
Then there are things that are funny that aren’t supposed to be. “No naked lights,” at the petrol station, where I think they’re trying to keep you from accidentally torching the place. The beached ice cream truck, which I think hasn’t seen ice cream since before the war, that says “BEN’S WHIPPY” across the top. The attempt to abandon the bluntly uncouth uncouth “Na piss ya”—don’t piss here—and dignify the command with British English: “Donate urinate here. The gray-haired man, at the end of a globalized hand-me-down chain, sweating in a t-shirt that says, “I had a web of a good time at Spencer’s 10th birthday party, September 2004.”
Or this, my most favorite:
I love how the sign says “please.” Do you remember the signs in Kolkata that the police sponsored? Similar notion of naming things and actions I would never have thought to put on a public billboard.