I called my father today, and in the middle of our conversation, he casually mentioned that he had just finished reading Lee Kuan Yew's biography (From Third World to First)—a book I had handed him earlier this year, after trading away my copy of Long Walk to Freedom. Much like Mandela’s memoir, the biography is no lightweight, easily towering over 800 pages. When my father had finished with my collection on South Africa, I eagerly passed this one along to keep his mind occupied.
My father is an old man, retired and seeking ways to fill his time. In an attempt to keep him engaged, I’ve been giving him books to read, and this makes the fourth one in line. His recent enthusiasm for reading brings to mind how, years ago, he insisted that we watch the evening news—every single day.
We were one of the few households with a television that had access to cable. It wasn't the sleek satellite dishes of today; no, ours was a rudimentary setup. A manual dish perched atop a tall bamboo pole that required frequent recalibration, often carried out by my elder brother who twisted the bamboo until the static gave way to a fuzzy channel. Meanwhile, I served as the lookout, my eyes glued to the screen, ready to shout when the signal was strong enough to stop turning. At best, we would manage to tune into 10 or 15 channels. Sometimes, the channels would vanish altogether as if they’d never existed.
But there was always one constant: CRTV. Every evening, without fail, my father would tune to it for the 7:30 PM news. As technology advanced, he expanded our viewing to CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera. Besides these international additions, our local news tradition held firm. The radio also brought its own flavor of information, particularly the 4 PM news on Mount Fako FM, which became something of a local institution, broadcast in lively Pidgin English. I can’t recall the name of the program now, but its impact remains vivid.
This daily diet of news molded me in ways I didn’t appreciate at the time. At school, we had a segment during assembly for news updates, and I soon became infamous for volunteering. My hand would shoot up eagerly, and I’d march to the center of the assembly ground to share whatever tidbit I had gleaned from the previous night’s broadcast. My peers took to calling me the "show-show kid," a title I wore—perhaps unknowingly—with pride.
Reflecting now, it is clear that my father’s insistence on news-watching planted the seeds of my curiosity about the world. While I sat there, often begrudgingly, absorbing stories from places I had never been, I was developing a lens through which I could understand global affairs. Unbeknownst to me, I was being introduced to the vastness of human culture, history, and politics. This early exposure shaped my understanding of people and places far beyond the horizon I could see as a child.
Now, as my father spends his days immersed in the lives of figures like Mandela, Kofi Annan, and Lee Kuan Yew, the roles have subtly reversed. Where once he opened my eyes to the wider world, I now find myself handing him the tools to explore it anew. His twilight years are filled with the stories of leaders and visionaries from other lands, and I take pleasure in hearing his thoughts on them, just as he once did with mine.
In this exchange, I see a circle completing itself. My father, in his gentle way, gave me a gift in my childhood: the gift of perspective—the ability to see beyond my small corner of the world. And now, as I share books and stories with him, I’m offering that gift back, as if paying forward the very curiosity he sparked within me years ago.
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