Watermelons and Orange - what is the link?

Do you ever listen to a sermon where the pastor explains some sort of cultural background information that the the people of the time would have known and it totally changes the meaning of the text? And then you wonder to yourself if the link really have been THAT obvious to people in that culture or not."

I can think of many examples I've heard in sermons. Recently I heard a sermon on the Golden Calf and Moses coming down the mountain and breaking the tablets. The pastor explained that covenants and legally binding agreements were often written on clay tablets. Breaking them would signify breaking the contract and so this signified more than just Moses getting overly angry.

Or how about references to yeast, where yeast is supposed to represent sin? The link is not evident to me.
Still, I know intuitively that there are evocative phrases that if used today will automatically bring along a whole set of background information and images: You can't say "I have a dream," without evoking Martin Luther King, Jr. to your listeners. Drop a song lyric into a speech or blogpost and people will get the reference.

On a recent trip back to Mali, I encountered one of these instances where an image automatically conveyed something to the Malians that was not clear at all to the Westerners present. 

One of the cell phone companies in Mali is "Orange" - a french company and present across much of Africa. I had for several years now seen there ads that included a picture of a watermelon.

 I knew that it had to do with buying cards to recharge the credit on your phone. The text read "For Sale here, "Nafama" phone credit". "Nafama" means useful or advantageous.

But I still had not clue WHY the watermelon was used as the symbol for this. So I asked at coffee break one day and all my Malian colleagues told me that it was because with watermelon, you buy slices of it - as much as you want and no more. You don't have to buy the whole watermelon. They were all quite clear on this being the reason for the advertising without any disagreement.

Now, I had seen watermelons for sale in the market for years. You can buy entire ones, but there are also vendors who slice up watermelons and sell you just a slice to eat right there. I had even sampled these on occasion, making sure to get one underneath the plastic so flies could not land on it.

I had seen the signs like the one below indicating that you could recharge your phone account according to your needs - from 100F CFA (20 cents), to 500 F CFA ($1), all the way on up to 5000 and even 100,000 f CFA ($200).

 

Several years ago, I even took this picture while out cycling near Bamako. I found the image of the watermelon with different prices marked to be rather ludicrous. Now I wonder if the vendor was really selling "zèrè" (watermelon) or possible selling phone credit. You can even see a smaller "orange/watermlon" ad stuck to the door.

It took me a while to digest the "watermelon" metaphor. Why not just use an ORANGE, which is after all the name of the company, and happens to break down into nice slices?
Upon reflection there are two reasons:

1. An orange is small and you never buy just part of one, even if you can break it down. 
2. Oranges in Mali do not peel easily and so are rarely broken down into sections, but rather eaten by cutting off a bit of the top and sucking out the juice. 

And a watermelon is really the ONLY fruit that is big enough where you might need less than one. Certainly it is the only one that is every cut up and sold in pieces. Watermelon can also be shared easily with others. I'm not sure if that comes into play with the phone credit, as it is something that can be transferred to others and shared.

So there you have it. An image that was clear as day to Malians in their context and obtuse to me, even someone who had lived there for 18 years and had eaten watermelon slices on many occasions, and bought various amounts of phone credit through the years according to my needs. 

This is something that translators call "implied information" and is the sort of thing that often needs to be made explicit when translating if what was implicit to the original hearers is not at all obvious to the target audience.