A. M. K

A big tourist-lodge operator recently shared a list of questions he is most commonly asked by tourists about the country. One of them was an inquiry into why there are so many people standing or sitting idle by the roadside. I have an answer to this, I think. It is because standing or sitting by the roadside is just an African thing. People love to be in community most of the time. I see it in the early morning when men gather at trading centres to drink tea and eat chapati and sumbusas from the woman who passes by the same place at the same time daily with a bucket and a packet of thin see through kaveera. I see it in the camaraderie at wedding launches and every and any cause for a celebration. Also, everyday, is market day. Someone is always selling something to eat and the street or roadside is the perfect place to find customers.

I began my 31st year with sleep-laden eyes, many kilogrammes less in weight, [the same old] abstract thoughts of running away and equipped with a new breast gadget to extract a milk supply that had already started to dwindle within four months. I went to the only place I could think of, a spa. I had been taking care of a new born and a three and a half year old, with no hands or voice besides mine for hours and sometimes, it seems, days at a time. I needed someone to take care of me.

When I finally sat down, my ears were sharply attuned to the sound of flowing bubbling water in the small fountain nearby. I was a fugitive. Nobody was going to hand me a crying child, nobody was coming to ask mummy-mummy-mummy for anything. I was just any other human being on the outside. On the inside, I was the woman who had burst out of a hospital door, 4cm dilated with contractions, with my suitcase, ready to fight, for the first time in a long time, for who I know myself to truly be. I had been a victim once, at the first hospital, after the first birth. I was not ready to be one again. I hoped the nurse would try and push me around this time, call a security guard to come hold me down.

I spent most of that night awake, watching a woman and motherhood talk show after washing my hair with the full wrath of beautiful smelling golden-orange coloured sodium sulphate in singular use bottles. I had been meaning to wash it a month or so before, but time had been a luxury too great to afford. So I looked up at the ceiling, wondered if baby would manage to sleep, if someone had found the duvet I had left on top of the car. Two hours beyond the time I had planned on leaving, I had run out of the house hurriedly without looking back, just in case my main support system at the time, suddenly had something more urgent to do- something about turbines, discussions and meeting bosses and friends. A few kilometres away, I turned back. Stealthily running back inside the gate, I threw the duvet which I had in the moment decided to pick up, on top of the car. I contemplated taking it to the door and quickly changed my mind. It was hanging in one direction so I straightened it, took a glimpse at the balcony, looking for a sign of upheaval, then, willing myself to walk away, I walked back outside unnoticed and drove away.

…

Church street, Pretoria, is silent, lined by trees and the sidewalk is paved by white sand and stones. I could walk for three minutes or more and not see anybody. Any scampering in the trees meant that I was about to be robbed on knife or gun point. Every now and then, a car with loud shouts of menacing white superiority occasionally grazed the road at super speed.

There are no people selling Kabalagala or boiled maize on the streets or the roadside. The roadside is for hobos and other unemployed people with cardboard boxes asking for any kind of job. Nobody sells pineapples or mangoes from a wheelbarrow. Nobody talks to you. You seem to disappear unseen in the dry windless air, the scalding sweat-lessness in the summer, which is when I usually walked, from my residence to the only African salon that side of town.

…

I slowly lunge backwards onto my pillow and stare at the ceiling behind the mosquito net. I think about the child I once was. The child who was terrified of the dark, who could not sleep alone in a bed by myself. That was even long before the soundless footsteps in the dark, the door I thought I had shut swinging eerily from side to side, long before it became a part of my subconscious; the memory of me following them with a faint smile and humour, thinking it was one of the children, a funny story I would tell later, only to come face to face with the black night, opened up by the empty space where the back door should have stood closed.

There is a smell about new beginnings in new places that is etched in every memory of that place. Our first apartment was like that. It was solely ours, new and novel. It was home, because it was ours and it was ours even though, I spent most of our time there, a lone soul staring through the glass balcony doors where most of the sunlight came through, centering the rustic wooden table in the kitchen where two more beings would eventually sit. They were the same glass doors through which they would enter, those who work while others sleep and sleep while others work. A small cough here and there, breathless, there was something in the air. One child was in his room, door closed but not locked, the child who had wailed all day, red faced, was in the room opposite ours, door wide open so that we could hear him when he awoke. The television was, large and black and still, the laptop lay shut on top of the armrest, the tea in the cup left half drunk in the cup, next to the phone next to the book I was attempting to read. They left empty spaces and a souvenir of cement-grey fingerprints and an array of knives on the chair where we had once sat and talked and smiled and laughed. … My four year old recently told me that he was afraid of the dark. Attempting to logicize his fears, I promptly asked him what he feared about the dark, and he said, “The dark”.

I wake up most days feeling tired. I don’t know if it is because of the red light of the night lamp next to me. Sometimes I wake up just in time for the lingering presence of hands upon my neck to disappear. Sleep paralysis it is called. The power has been off every few days. Just like many things here at home, you must know somebody or be a somebody before someone performs a job that they are paid monthly to provide. Most times, you must be a someone from the same tribal grouping, otherwise you are too proud and need humbling. You are to consider yourself lucky if you receive anything on time or up to a standard of any level.

I lay still and wait for sleep to whisk me away. Sometimes I turn to the side and glare at the residential unit of the big commercial complex they built next to us. Sometimes I see the glow of the TV. Most times I just stare at the still indoor plant in the glass windowed corridor. The glass is a light reflecting glass so I can only see through it with the light of the moon. My ears lay at the foot of my babies’ beds and I whisper constant incoherent prayers hoping God is close enough to hear me. Many times I have turned to the emptiness expecting lifelessness and loneliness to consume me, and I have instead found power, love and sound mind.

Pickled an avocado by mistake, and true to form, in an hour, it looked like it had aged at least 20 years

God, my source.

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.

Author: A. M. K

The Year of the Night Lamp

HAM?