A. M. K

“Smile, you’re on candid camera.”

Lying around, a cozy room with big heavy glass windows on the 16th floor overlooking an empty street and an apartment block, I watched for the second time, YouTube couple, J & N’s wedding video. They had become my favourite thing to watch on the internet- a tall dark-black beautiful Sudanese woman and a white good looking Australian photographer and videographer and their family. I had followed their vlog since the one about the birth of her first child. I had seen them eating at restaurants, visiting friends, attending a wedding. I had seen her cleaning (a lot), putting on her makeup, moving into their dream house, choosing the perfect tiles and kitchen lighting (Industrial lights – in black, not gold), drive their dream cars and have their second child.

Why can’t we just get married? I thought. With my back to his face, the screen in front of mine.

“What are you watching?” He asked, leaning over my shoulder. “Those guys again,” he sighed.

“What’s wrong with them?”

“They are giving you such high expectations.”

“Of what?” I retorted.

“Just, everything. You know. That’s not how things are.”

It had taken me from 6:00 p.m the evening before, snailing through the Jinja highway, wading through Jinja Town, dosing off as we drove towards the border, to 11: 00 am, the next day. At the border we had come out, surrounded by guns as the border police showed us the way out of the bus and with heavy boots inspected the interior. Away from the wet bushy shrubs on the left, we had walked, half-running to the migration building as the winding line piled on with more people. The Ugandan line was twice as long as the other one and our passports were being stamped with no sense of urgency or consideration for time, and with more stamps than if we had just arrived at the border of Netherlands. Finally, we were back inside the bus, in the dead of night, on a high way that carried on for hours, now racing past trees and an open landscape.

When we finally entered the city in the breezy morning hours- cars squeezing up against each other, slums, rubbish on the other side of a river-like water channel sweeping through, under a bridge. The morning rush hour made it two more hours before we could reach the bus park. By the time, the uber came to pick me, I was doubting my sanity. I had began crucifying myself a few hours into my journey with strangers on my first inter-country journey on a bus to a country I had never been to. If we all perished, no one would know my name.

The Arab man in the seat opposite mine was being interviewed by the man who sat and slept in the bus corridor throughout the entire journey. I had supposed that he was the conductor but he got out before the official bus stop.

“What were you doing in Uganda?” he had asked the Arab man.

“I have a woman friend I had…”

“Haaaaa!” the man excitedly interjected excitedly. “And how are Ugandan women, eh? Nice, eh? “

The Arab laughed shyly.

I shifted in my seat. Their conversation continued until it finally died down. The bus trudged on.

Westlands, Nairobi-

J & N, I had watched religiously until months before my own wedding. After I got married, I weaned off their marriage. Eventually, I was pregnant and eventually too exhausted to believe the happily balanced mum-hood that both she and another Nigerian and German couple projected. It had been about 6 months since I had seen J & N’ videos and when I checked again, it seemed that they had stopped filming. A few weeks later, they announced their separation. I was shocked.

What about, what about… everything?!

When the other half of J & N put out a video saying that, Nobody had really known what was happening behind the scenes. She gave us as much an explanation as she could, referencing something that looked so beautiful that was so rotten on the inside. I shuddered.

It confirmed my suspicion that most social media broadcasts were highly edited versions of the truth. I wondered too, about children whose every waking moment is behind a screen. What now unknown psychological impact lurks in the background waiting to leap out in their adulthood. What about us, the digital migrant millennial, for whom no moment exists unless it is captured on the [social media] for the world? What superficiality is filling the vacuum inside?

It’s amazing to see the shared world of broadcast- enjoying videos of other families, recaps of friends and strangers’ lives- they sometimes show you the kind of world you would want to create. But if every moment is captured, when do we get time to stop smiling. To argue, to disagree, to compromise, to apologize, to forgive, to make up. And when do we get time to know ourselves – not as the world sees us, but who were really are, without the camera effect.

I’m certain that holding a camera to my face constantly would prevent me from approaching the woman underneath- the one who some mornings walks around the house, sleepily, routinely, before the inner lights go on. And that would mean, I would miss the humble moments in between, the ones not captured, the mundane, the small, the true.

” I don’t want to have fun [only]on camera. I want to have fun in real life”

Simply Niki

Candid Camera was a popular and long running American hidden camera reality television series. Versions of the show appeared on television from 1948 until 2014. The show involved concealed cameras filming ordinary people being confronted with unusual situations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candid_Camera

“I learned more about who I was from my [enemies] than I [learned] from myself. “

She wanted to be like everyone else. She didn’t understand that she never would. She was not just his perceived eyes and ears, she spoke too. And most times, she spoke as if she dared not say too much.

It would always be hard to tell whether a smile was meant for her or her father, whether it was for a calculated purpose or a genuine acquaintance. Any careless remark she made could be used against her in the unofficial office group. Isn’t it the trend on Whats app,to have side chats about group chats and groups about groups? Her careful demeanor did not help matters because she always seemed to sit in judgment over them as they spoke.

There was also a thumping of chests you know. Some who shunned the smiles and came straight for battle. They wanted her to know, that she was not her father and they would never bow to the Lion’s cub.

And so she waited in vain, that one day some conversations would not be reserved for when she left the room and that one day she would not have to prove her right to be there. But this was a privilege of those for who had not received either a silver plate or spoon. They comforted themselves with the belief that they had worked singularly to be where they were. They allowed themselves and their kind, the chance to learn, to make mistakes. They were allowed not to know, some things, but for her not to know, it was damning, eternally damning and crudely satisfying.

Now, the boss was a well known man, well known among his peers, well known in his field and well known to his long time friends. It was this well known man from whom, in her adult life, she had created a caricature of who he might be; generous, humble, kind and good at what he did. As a child she and her siblings had seen him watch CNN or Sky Sports during late evenings when he came home from work. On the way to school, when he took them to school, only BBC Africa spoke. Sometimes, he commanded them to stop being lazy and do some housework. But most of the time, they only peeped at who he might be, when he sat among his friends and in a confusing state of awe when he danced, because it was the only time he let himself be free, with joyful abandonment.

It is therefore easy to see why, when he, for the first time spoke about what her destiny would be, she had listened. She was not cut out to be a journalist, no, she was too quiet and calm. What would she do with a Literature degree- her mother had piped in- “A professor of English perhaps?”

In a few seconds, for he never spoke longer than a few minutes to them, the past ten years of her life came to pass- a Bachelor’s degree in Law.

When she chose her electives, she did so like someone who, having committed to the Historical Foundations of Roman Dutch Law continued to receive kisses on the mouth from Poetry, Literature and Foreign Language. But after darting from class to class, she found herself intrigued by both the introspective dissection of the human condition and an introduction to the external machinations of the world.

She realised quickly in the first week of work as a lawyer that uniformity, conformity and YES SIR was more important than self expression. If she could just blend in and maybe even disappear within the multitude of grey coats, she would have done very well. As a comment to an opinion she had written about regulations for a nuclear power plant, she had told the boss that she did not believe that the country was ready for a nuclear power plant. It was too dangerous an attempt. He laughed. Not in a loud boisterous way, not in a prolonged pretentiously-amused way, but like a scoff that said she had a lot to learn.

At first, it was hard to be the kind of person who was interested in another people’s business. At first, she read the notes, letters and papers until she dosed off. Four years had come to this, she thought, 6:00 a.ms, coffee, a uniform and always having to please. That was how she was initiated into the working-life cycle.

Money was, …well, she had no idea what to do with it and when it did increase, it made her fearful. What did it mean? Had she done enough to deserve it? Money had always been intangibly in the vicinity- building houses, paying school fees and plane tickets, buying cars- but now that it was in her hands, it made her wonder just how much she weighed in money.

For a long time, she remained a stranger in the workplace, not knowing what role she was there to play, not sure what she was supposed to be fighting for or if she was supposed to be fighting. It was strange, she thought, that all this time we took in school without knowing why.

She had been an intern in another work place before, during University holidays. The money was a token, the work- non-existent, smiles abundant and she had made more friends in three weeks than she would in 5 years at the Boss’s place but she had not been the Boss’s daughter (1). She had been just another intern.

Quote by T.D Jakes from Don’t Let The Chatter Stop You.

Author: A. M. K

The Boss’s Daughter (2)