Undo

Following one's preference in this world is a quick way to exit from it..."
                                                  -Bartleby the Scrivener

The so called calipso dance has so overtaken conscience, young kids, old men, kindergarten chaps are so into it you could raise the subject be included on the national curriculum. This is written by a chap who scorns dancing it or rather cannot dance it.

OmaGod! Is every dance supposed to turn out calipsoed? Music plays dance strokes start with calipso and end with calipso. It makes for weird thinking-that every musician wants to have a calipso in their videos even when the true look of things cast the dance out of place.

Well, the people are happy about it, as is wont the nature of pop culture, no one can stop it especially when you greatly despise it, it will wane and reappear in another form of annoying stroke of magic, perhaps. It keeps overtaking itself, building on until we don't even remember who exactly can claim to be the re-inventor.

It's disputable. Who among the 21st century Ugandan musicians re-introduced it? This here is a salon argument that would last the whole day. Some say it was Bobi wine's Bada fame; some allege it couldn't have come together but for the efforts of Phina Mugerwa Masanyaraze. No, it Bebe cool. Aaahaa! It's Rebecca Jingo.

This argument is taking us no where. I find it better to settle with the thought that the one who dances it worst must have re-introduced in here. Simple, Ugandans are good at copying and bettering any thing new. Didn't they hijack Lingala?

There is space though for question, now that kids have abandoned the awkward kiddish dances for calipso. What is that new form of calipso they are dancing called? You know, it's not the mechanical calipso, its improvised, rule less and a formidable creative art that involves half strokes, staring lapses, and a break dance in between. I don't really hate calipso I realize.

 For the lack of interest, tomorrow is cancelled...

                                               Ruby-kaizer chiefs 

It may not have blasted Kampala radio waves yet, held in the northern fold thumbing, thrusting off many systems (radios) in many households and night hangout places. But Luo music is hot stuff.

It has created many 'superstars'. Forged a new generation of bling, style, badass, and cool. Even with the intrusion of outside music (music hitting radio waves in Kampala), the creation of a hip-hop, luo-pop, gulu-pop class has taken music to a twist of popdom.

So that when the music starts. Bobi wine stands along with Otim Bosmic, DJ Laguna, Lumix, Twongweno boys, Smokie and as is with these lists you can't finish the names. It's a society on the rise, role-plays, wannabes, fakes and the real stuff all haggling out their tunes of pastiche.

The stars are visible on the streets, they own the streets. They could as well declare be a road of superstars. Bosmic sang that...the world changes, turns, and luck comes around...and everyone has a bite..." It's their turn to bite.

The stars wear some of the fanciest cloths, something you will not find in Gulu's boutiques, white sneaks are fav. Dog tags, baggy jeans, bulky T-shirts to swagger cool with their CDs in hand waving for the 'crowd'. They drive flashy coronas with shiny rims playing loud music elbows thrust out "Kabanlole" style.

Their music takes in a lot, talks loudly of a society suddenly observant of change leaving them for the better. There are the sad ballads, rather painful and burrowing into what is etched on many souls. Themes of 'war is over, no more suffering, peace is here' being overtaken by a free spirit chant about courting the woman of your heart.

 Then there are the obsequious songs, these we keep for the independence cerebrations. Having caught on with the fad in Kila, people just wanna pare (party) with themes of 'lets party the whole night'.  Its much more appealing healing music. In the dance halls, the excitement is eminent. You feel it ebbing into the crowd like a controlled breeze, who can't help singing along.

A projection of a different society now.  Leaving behind all ambivalence, a kind of post poignant abandonment of empty nestings, having tasted a new strange fruit of hope, embraced its taste, aroma and become addicted to the sweetness. The consequence of the radio era has hit hard. It's reminiscent of the radio scene of Kampala 93-95. Everyone suddenly is welcome to the 21st century.

You may want to ask how it all began, but then, its more incomplete to surmise it's a result of a far away ray of that happened to flash a second glance this way. It's unstoppable-where it is, it's headed for unfathomable straightness. No one wants to stop, there are no red lights on this street way, and no one is bothered.

"It was like a big fat nightmare on the plate"

                                              -My big fat obnoxious Fiancé

Acholi Bur, 11:30:  We are very hungry. We all woke very early and skipped breakfast. We have basically finished with the days’ work. The bus from Kampala will be arriving soon and we hope to catch it to Kitgum town. We can’t wait any longer so we enter a restaurant. The menu is rather enterprising for a Kampala stomach,

Viz: -

-       Anyeeri (Edible rat)
-       Malakwang (bitter vegetables)
-       Otigo (okra)
-       Lacede (okra mixed with tiny fish popularly called mukene)
-       Roast meat in simsim paste
-       And accompanying food included; Millet bread, Cassava, Potatoes. 

In excitement we all order Anyeri at 3000 a plate with all accompanying foods. We didn’t have to wait long. My plate came with a rat head staring at me, its front teeth fanged out, facing the lump of millet bread, part of its chest hidden under the potatoes.  High paste soup gleams in rich grey waves that lap at the inside edges of the plate.

My heart missed a beat, I swallowed a lump of saliva so loud everyone looked at me and wondered what kind of appetite I had. Shock, awe, trepidation and panic. The other plates arrive without heads, laugher! Nothing funny here. There was something ghastly about that plate head when it came. The blacked out ghoulish eyes, the tiny burnt ear orifices, the five thin white incisor teeth, and the sneaky rat head trying to burrow into the millet bread. No way!

 I offer to exchange plates but no one wants a rat head staring at them eat the rest of the rat. I ask the woman why she has given me the rat head; ‘you are the group leader and the group leader eats the head.’ She answers simply, “you are visitors and the special dish for visitors is anyeeri.”

What? Laugher! I tell her to bring me another plate without the head. All talk of the ‘head’ is luck is bull. There was no way I was going to eat a rat head. If I can’t eat a fish eat how can I eat a rat head.

So, when you finish washing your hands, how do you dry them. Do you flip them till they dry or clean them on your trousers?

“No one is bothering to ask where this Pickup truck is going.”

9:14am: We are crammed at the back of a pickup truck. My clothes are dirty and I haven’t even started the journey. There are 12 women and two small boys seated atop two layers of sugar sacks and an assortment of plastics destined for Koch Onyaco. Four men have taken strategic position on the roof of the pickup and two men at the front seats.

I am seated on a sack right at the back of the driver’s side. My legs ache from that awkward position. If I raise my leg a little, I will step on the woman immediately squeezed near me, the only option would be head out further atop so that I might kind of join the men at the top but it’s so squeezed up there and I am not sure I will keep my hold when the vehicle starts moving.

Daphne is seated right below me at a valley created by two sacks; she is quite pretty from where she is. Her brown shawl, her face sunk downwards. The outline of her face equanimous and ready for the challenge. Some kind of innocence crept over her. It was something she shared with the other women. An integration with the sacks, seamlessly, no shifts of discomfort like I am experiencing. There is an easeful recline in their postures, like they are ready to go right to sleep.

A kind of silence enshrouds the boundary of the pickup. Like the vehicle has cast a spell onto us, all around us are pickups going to different destinations with rowdy touts and passengers exchanging all kind of noise. There seems to be nothing in particular keeping us here. If you looked well at the pickup, there is no space for an extra person unless they are going to sit on top of the women. If you ask me, no one is bothering anymore to know where this pickup is going. All the touts have shifted attention

Setting out on a journey engenders a strange emotion, one is seized by the feeling that he is free not only from the land that he has just left behind him, but also from the time that he is vacating                                                                                                        Forbidden Colours-Yukio Mishima

 

8 o’clock saw the bus finally leave Kampala behind. The process of waiting for the bus to fill being such an unpleasant experience to ones patience, you could see the change in the faces of the passengers as they drew in the last air before shutting off the outside. Travel mood had set in. It was time to settle down in position for sleep perhaps, or pull out novels and newspapers to read, or stare out of the windows. So, we reached.

 

On land, after several hours, it feels fresh. Even with the wash of Gulu heat that welcomes us. The journey had been quite disorienting. Locked windows, the hum of built up pressure and the awfully loud music through out the journey. Yet here is Gulu town in its afternoon laze. Any venture out of shade is a sweaty mess and a dusty one too. You may think crossing Kampala roads is hard till you meet some Gulu roads. Think Ben Kiwanuka road. Then think of it worse. There is a certain unruly law at road here, bicycles, motorcycles, are the major speed traffic here, then the vehicles set in, faster. There is no time to settle in. The vehicles are mostly SUVs with tint glass, those without tint are NGO’s owned. While vehicles are not that many they drive at such scarily speeds. The pedestrian has to fit in uneasily. I stand at the bus park near a music stall listening to a song by Otim Alpha called ‘alany pa coo’, I am not alone in this idleness…there are several people waiting for buses to various destinations, the park has several taxis and pickup trucks and no bus. I am waiting for Edwin, who is give me a ride. It may be sad to say the best parts of Gulu are out of town, most times I come to this town and I think, where did I leave off last time.

NEXT on DAY…the first moments before embarking on a Pickup truck ride.

 

Coming to you soon

DAY

 

19 April 2007

 

 

DAY is a clip from my diary following several days of traveling. It's not going to give you the whole story though but a read .....

Rain could be back in full, this spells groom in the book of unreasonable behaviours of the weather for a city dweller. Okay, in the hot weather, which is also unreasonable. I am bound to fret. Does it really matter, the weather itself doesn't know what it is lately turning into. The University should sooner introduce a Degree course in Unpredictable Weather Studies. Because we need teachers who are going to teach the pupils in primary that Uganda experiences one kind of weather…unpredictable weather... The dry and Wet season are now things of the past, since no one can really tell which is going to be the dry season and which the wet. It’s coming onto September and the sun will be positioned overhead the equator, this means…a little geography stuff here which I have to consult Inno about …and much rain. So this surely, this wet day that turns out wet for the whole length of the day must be it, the rainy season. But Men!

A week ago I was in Sembabule, the first rain that fell there was met with everyone hurrying to the garden to sow maize and other foods. While they are not sure of the rain lasting, they have to hope, considering their beliefs that first rain after a really long dry spell is usually the precedent to bigger rains coming. Well, they could be right. Only, it rains everyday at my place and whenever I get a call from the friends in Sembabule they say the last time the rain fell there was when I was there. The ground there is still patched and their gardens don't show signs of sprouting green life. The people in one village beat up an old woman whom they claimed was frustrating the rain. This old woman apparently has a grown "mutuba" tree, which is evergreen. They claim this 50-year-old tree positioned on a small hill sucks at the rain cloud that gathers over it every other day. Well, this is another interpretation of global warming.

This rain is unnerving in its decision to slither down for more than 3 hours. On Friday it got me to stay in office till 9:00pm and when I finally roused courage to walk through it, the vehicles that would have taken me a short distance to the taxi park, were parked. There was a traffic jam that stretched the whole length of Kampala road. Actually the it stretched from Wandegeya to Jinja road. The drivers claimed they were not working; they had their doors open and were comfortably drinking tea with katogo.

The food women had capitalized on the occasion and were walking around peddling their tea. The newspaper sellers, the umbrella sellers, everything was consumable on this wet lonely car stuck day. Cars were parked off the road, people hang out of their vehicles, engines turned off waiting for the traffic to clear. They reasoned that hanging in the queue was a waste of time and energy…continually sucking out all hope, belting frustration at the sheer inability to even inch for an hour along the road. This day was a day everyone dreamt about that bed that was waiting for them, or the hot cup of coffee they could be gulping now and listening to splackavellie on Sanyu Fm was not appealing.

As it seemed the only logical thing was to walk, walking was bound by certain breaks in traffic, where if you come round and looked onto what was making a crowd grow in a particular place, it turns out to be a large pool of water blocking the road. Here you would find scrawny fellows standing knee deep in the dirty water beckoning anyone who was in such a hurry or maybe desperate to go home to hop onto their back for a  ride. No one was jumping onto the back rides that would cost 300 shillings. No one was desperate enough to fall into the pool on such a wet day, people just stood there chatting eerily. no one suggested how they were going to go past this. once in a while someone would pull up their clothes, shoes held over the head and wade through the murky water, cross the 20 metres stretch then continue on dry land.

 

people stood here cold perhaps entertaining sinister thoughts about the end of the world. Especially when the only possible route home is wading through the thick flow of knee high dirty water. The vehicles never bothered to move any nearer the water. choosing to go back where they came from.interesting how people had resolved to stand and wait for the pool to drift...

 

Mean looking people shouldn't work in clinics. I just gotten a prick to test for malaria but $%*&^9! The point still itches.
 That woman unkindly poked that needle far too deep, she was smiling. I tried to look on quickly to where exactly it would cut into me and she denied me this, widening her palm outwards she hurriedly… whoop!…jerk!…she then takes her time…but didn’t let go of my finger which I desperately wanted to soothe…the fingertip was gleaming with rich dark ugly red stuff…. She carried my small finger with some caution and force like she was holding some naughty porklerros to slaughter… She pressed the finger hard and spread its warm sap on two small clear glass slides.

Then, she handed me back my finger with some cotton wool to wipe it, she looked at me, still grinning wickedly …come back in 20 minutes, she whined…falling onto her seat ahh?… what did I want to say before she gave me a stare…Ah yes…do you enjoy seeing ‘fellas’ in pain?...The small star shaped hole doesn’t stop bleeding and any one asking…

How did I get here anyways…that mosquito net has hang over my bed for over a year now without doing its job…and the Doom(mosquito spray seems to keep off cockroaches better… there a better article on Malaria at HipFlaskSwigger’s blog

My! my! what a wonderful weekend one can decide to have. I had with me a piece of machine acquired from Game 6 hours earlier. Many people I have met say Game things work for two days and go kaput but man this was such a bargain-is this the undoing?

A blender. With my stock of mangoes, pineapples and passion fruit you can imagine how I must have jumped out of the taxi to go stick the machine  into the power supply. grrrrrrrr! finito, where is the glass? Gluuump! gluuump! HAaaaaa! Sit back, admire the machine…

A blender gives you what you expect in a quick fix-RESULTS-the fullness of listening to sultry soul crooning from the stereo in the late nite taxi with you seated at the back with the full window AC blasting onto your face. The ghostly quietness within the taxi. The  drone of the taxi as it coasts through the deserted road marked with trees and buildings rushing away. The conductor high on something nodding far faster than the beat throbbing from the stereo sound above his head and you are going through undulating motions of lightness and fulfillment. Life is made better. Where once you gnawed at a mango, here you just sit back and lazily wait to drink mango juice.

Man this blender! If a thief came I would tell him to take everything and leave this blender. The thick juice it produced can only compare to the one I drank at that Food co…restaurant at Garden City…with a damage of 2500/= to the pocket.

Two mangoes, two passion fruits and a quarter of pineapple made me a bellyful refreshment. I cannot wait to go back to my blender…anyone coming?

A beer in about three months should feel good. You close your eyes to savour it, breathe in softly to let it saturate the insides until you feel it in the heart. When your heart is revving up beauty you then breathe out slowly to let the spirit wander around while your eyes loll in the next fixation…drinkinspiration.

But this turned out different. The beer was warm. I had barely sat down and was myself warm, just in process of weaving myself to this euphoric moment and the beer just went the wrong way-It spoilt a moment of ‘umami’ (fifth taste).someone thought that was a meaty taste but...what gives...

I had nothing to do but just drink on...certainly I had to leave the celebration to another moment...which came an hour later in a less spirited place with good beer. I don't know if things just interchanged...maybe, but you cannot have everything in heaven...Hmmmm... of recent this word is very much in my 'voc' since a certain fella decided to tune me to a 'preacher-tele-phone' 

Ah well, I haven’t stepped in any ecclesiastical abode in several months and I am bordering on agnostic( I hope the preacher-caller is not ‘watching’ this).

The second beer went well (the cold one that is) and except for the dis-spirited fellas manning the bar…it comes… to a good endz. This is a bad ending…okay, the second beer went down well, while I lolled in this serene lofty place with year old pictures of babes that sound better now…