Reverend Canaan Banana
Specific words and names
How difficult will it be not to be able to use certain words again? The first president of Zimbabwe Reverend Canaan Banana had major issues and one of them was his surname being used as a joke. In 1982, President Banana decided to ban the use of the word, especially in jokes.
As if that isn’t enough of a joke, President Francisco Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea banned the use of the word “intellectual” after failing his civil servant entrance exams three times. He took it a step further to ban private schools and churches as well as killing people who wore spectacles!
He must have been a troubled person because he later banned hospitals only to replace them with witch-doctors and also banned religion and changed the country’s motto to, ‘There is no other God than Macias Nguema.” In Equatorial Guinea, it was also illegal to name your child Monica.
