PurplePretoria

There is a new move towards erasing the African identity in the most effective and profound manner anyone can erase an identity- by name. Africans of undiluted ancestry, dating back thousands of years ago are going by names like Derek Shepherd and Anita Glory.

I wonder if some of the movements behind this standardisation of all groups of people would be just as happy themselves to go by any other name – a Larry Ssemanda perhaps, untraceable to their original ethnicity. Maybe we should all colour ourselves with paste, make ourselves all uniform. Some of the most esteemed women in this town are already orange-black, and not by birth. Old photos are cropping up like evidence once thought buried.

“What is in name? That which we call a rose by any other name would still smell just as sweet.” Elon by any other name, maybe Melon, would sound just as suave- Melon Musk. Yet, even an app such as X, is constantly referred to only by relation to its first name Twitter.

It’s not only names that are being disposed of, our low sense of self has now spread to accent. As usual, we Africans are so ashamed of being African, that we are afraid for any native tongue bias to be detected in our speech. A BBC article recently reported that Nigerians are paying well for new accents in order to speak in a more American way. I have a feeling they are not being trained to speak the Black American way. We Africans are notorious for being un-united in any sphere that requires unity- not at home and definitely not in foreign places.

Our own public speakers are already now rattling words in an American accent. The American accent being one among many- they forget that there is more than one way to be European. There are French, English, Italian and Greek accents. [Are Greeks, European? Their debt situation might have made their genealogy suspect.] Though, even in Britain and France, it is said that people from different regions speak distinctively differently and can be identified by origin solely by the way they speak. In Wales, they speak a Celtic language which is nothing similar to English.

So, while we are still struggling with how to pronounce “twenie twenie three” and “twira”, while sounding like Obama or Biden, other people have the liberty to actually focus on the nuances and delivery of their message without worrying about the approval of a global certification of accent. I’m not immune to the constant realisation [even this word “ri- a- lize” versus “ri- alize” – is being targeted] that I say hop for both hope and hop [I was alerted to this] and I say “bo-da” for both border and boda-boda [ after reading an article written by an English man where he said that the word “Boda” morphed from the word “Border” in Busia town, I realised I had just pronounced the words exactly the same.] I wonder when in Busia town- the letter r was ever enunciated in a word like border. Bad for bad and also bird. Hat for hat and also heart. Just when I’m wondering if it is necessary to learn all the new ways to speak [ignore the Gen Z grammar deficit- This hair is hairing, This outfit is giving], I hear Japanese and Koreans’ attempt to speak Hingrishi and things fall apart .

It is hard to focus after hearing “Ey-braham” and “Sera” and the god of the heathen “bale”. I wonder sometimes if some supernatural force indeed is using accent differentiation to prevent the message from coming across. It is even stranger that most of these names are in Hebrew and not English. The name Goliath for example, is pronounced “Goli-at” in Hebrew. It is the equivalent of insisting on calling Iraq, “ai raq” when its inhabitants have over and over again, showed you that it is pronounced “eraq”.

If everything we are is of such low quality, why did we not go extinct? Isn’t it the law of nature that everything of a weaker form is eventually subdued by the stronger?

It is not enough that drums and dancing are reserved only for cultural celebrations, and badly played keyboards on maximum sound are the only musical instruments allowed in village churches, but now our names must disappear too.

Why are we always keen on being anyone but who we are? We do not need to embrace it all. We can accept what was bad for us and leave it behind and then treat with reverence what was good. We are not the ones who made ourselves a gold calf after seeing God. We are also not the ones who created the guillotine.

Yes, a full English Breakfast sounds more sophisticated than Katogo, but some group of people stuck to eating with [chop] sticks and it became arguably the most admired exotic cuisine; and, however wispy or sparse their hair gets, I have not seen a non- African woman wearing an afro textured wig. If it was possible to get a hair transplant that grows out as Brazilian hair and a lace front, our hair would be extinct by now .

The Jackson five didn’t escape it. Worldwide fame didn’t help the ever flowing fountain of evolving hate that Africans love to drink from. We don’t even believe we deserve better. We would rather live in filth and then travel to Netherlands to marvel about how clean their streets are. We feel like we don’t deserve love. We don’t really believe we deserve care. We certainly don’t deserve the best, unless someone else created it for their own people.

That is why most of our schools teach us how to eat bean weevils and why the askari will maul you for tasting chicken. Now some Ugandans are offended when anyone associates them with grasshopper eating but they are quick to jump onto the ‘sea food experience’. They will happily eat mussels, squid, octopus and prawns. They will also excitedly try escargot.

We are like a child whose own mother never loved them, the child who is always at the neighbour’s house looking for love and acceptance. The neighbour only has food enough for her own and no matter how much she tries to include him, she just can’t take him along when her own children are going for swimming and she definitely cannot take him for the family photo.

If it were not for the rich percussion of African drums, powerful enough to raise the hair on your skin, African music would have ceased to exist. [The poetry we enjoy in Luganda music and between the bride and groom’s parties at Kwanjula’s; and the poetry in Kwevuga should not be just a passing amusement. It should be harnessed somehow, not exploited, not cheapened, but protected. ]

We give flavour to the world. Without us, all the laughs would be a hollow ha ha ha, not a rumbling nondescript sound from deep within, shaking our stomach and making us gasp for air. We have the tightest curl pattern and the darkest skin. Our way of living in harmony with nature conserved the earth.

***

If you were not part of dress choosing or fitting, you’re not the first on the makeup line and the makeup artist does not even know your name, you don’t know where the venue is and you’re in an unspoken state of “what are we?”, you are not the Matron. Attend or don’t attend, you are not crucial to the occasion.

If the lowest common denominator of the group keeps making fun of you, or speaks to you in a condescending way, you are the second lowest common denominator of that group and you are competing for last place, you just don’t know it.

Where did the men go?

Not a Sunday goes by without the pastor of the controversial church I attend assuring the 30 year old age range women in the crowd that there is still hope for them to get married. [The controversial nature of the church is mainly based on the Princely can-do-no-wrong nature of the status bestowed upon the leader. This superhuman nature which is sometimes highlighted but also sometimes turned down by the pastor himself, I choose to obliviate from my observations since the more conservative church I used to solely belong to was too scaled down to help me when I faced matters which were beyond the natural laws of normalcy. If you have ever been caught in the supernatural, the soothing undisturbed rhythm of Sunday church as usual may cease to be enough for you. Just twenty years years back, this now somewhat conservative church was so radical that it was branded a new religion all together and I know for certain that one could be disowned for attempting to be wed in it.]

Anyway, Where Did The Men Go?

Why are women hunting husbands like they are the last Dodo bird?

I have written before about why I think that the nature of Apartheid South Africa and Racist [Slavery and Jim Crow]America have created the same type of men, enraged, violent, invisible, un-husbandable fathers with very low goals as far as employment and education are concerned. Meanwhile, the women, unloved involuntary century old holders of the community’s collective psychological trauma become single mothers, superwomen, can-do-it-all, a PhD is the limit high achievers.

The question should no longer be, why are women not getting married, the question should make an inquest into why marriage is not attractive to men anymore. Is it because of what these young children saw or maybe never got a chance to see when growing up? A stable home. A father and mother present as caregivers and providers living within the same household respectfully. How can they possibly recreate what they do not know?

As usual, women trying to fill in those gaps as hormonally and emotionally gifted nurturers, to recreate the mummy and daddy dynamic by sourcing for husbands everywhere they can find them, even if it is in another woman’s household. For some boys, their mummy-daddy game only replicated abuse, for some women, the mummy daddy game is only transactional- the bizarre ‘dzaddy’ peculiarity- a house and car arrangement in exchange for sexual intimacy to the highest bidder.

I wonder if the working culture is partly to blame. A way of life that allows men and women to spend long periods of time apart [first, no more lunch at home to no more weekends at home] naturally leading to a deficit of love, care and attention that is promptly satisfied by the new [or as old as the time when women entered the workplace as secretaries] phenomenon of work-wives and now, work-husbands. It is now becoming normal for husbands to leave for years, to far away locations, away from their primary wives and children. Our national leader himself stressed that he was away for six years fighting for our liberation from corrupt regimes and his own daughter thought he was some strange black fellow when he arrived at their doorstep having last witnessed her as an 8 month old.

Is this something to be celebrated? A Mandela moment perhaps? What happened to Mandela’s girls? For a country he sacrificed so much for, it seems his family paid the ultimate sacrifice for his absence. A hero to all and a hole where love and support should have been.

Should men not fight? Should they not become martyrs?

It seems as if to many men, you can either be great or you can have a stable family. Maybe the adage is true, you can’t have it all or maybe as Oprah said, you can have it all, but not at the same time. So for many men seeking greatness, Love is stupidity, Multiple trysts a norm and The all bearing, aging woman of virtue at home, bringing up the boys who will never see the need for a marriage, the standard.

I know, the change, I have seen it. Most men with dreams change when that first bundle of joy is placed in their shaky hands. The alarm bells go off. They suddenly remember the dreams the dreams they once had as boys, the ones they never achieved, the ones they had postponed, the ones they will have to fulfill for this their new responsibility.

Before I was pregnant, I knew that like most women, after giving birth I would forever after, always come second after my child. It is an idea that I contemplated, leaving space to remember who I was, before. It turned out to be true, but mostly from the people around me, that somehow my identity and dreams, if any [I can’t remember them] should be hidden under heaps and heaps of environmentally unfriendly diapers. Some women wake up to an empty nest at 60, lamenting about what they could have achieved. Though, the paradox is that, the very lamentation is a blessing some women do not even get to make.

So where is the balance?

I saw in one of the endless Korean vlogs I spend my money [data] watching, that South Korean men can claim up to a year in paid paternity leave at least three years after their child is born. Of course, that may be too much to ask in a country which can happily drown itself in plastic, fumes and muddy water when the rain falls because we despise the very regulations that could keep our population alive and effectively working for many years and also too much to ask since the number of children a Ugandan man pro-creates is a taboo topic.

Among the many things the lockdown taught us was that, people were waking up to spouses they had last seen clearly on the wedding day. Newspapers reported serious dysfunction. Parents couldn’t stand their children, some wanted their daughters [and now sons] back to school because they needed protection from drunk uncles and houseboys. Spouses could not wait for offices to open because that is where their hearts lay.

It is said that the family is the smallest unit of a community and that a group of communities makes a nation.

Is busyness and an unavailability a sign of productivity? We should have the German train system in East Africa by now.

For every Anselm, there is a gap which could have only been filled by the superstar of every child’s life.

When you are operating in a crowd, you see people as a crowd. It is easy to hurl insults at them, demean them. But when you meet the individual of the different tribe or group you disparage, you are face to face to with a person just as human as you are. That is why you can’t go to war without making a monster out of the people you are fighting. Most people, as individuals are complex intriguing characters, unless of course they are so absorbed in their identity as a group and have nothing to offer in personality.

I appreciate how the ATM sound for withdrawals does not change regardless of the amount withdrawn.

It is strange to see everyone grow old around me.

“Mummy, I saw God crying.”

“Where did you see God? People have been looking for him.”

“When we were going to the airport [school trip], I saw God crying.”

“Why was God crying?”

“Because He doesn’t have friends.”

HAM?

The Big Question