Story – Page 5 – PurplePretoria

You know, one of the hardest things about you going away, was that for you, it seemed easy. For me, a part of me was being ripped away.

It was you. It was the world we had built. It was the circles of people within whom we lived, built upon you as the corner stone. It was the way your son looked forward to seeing you every night when you came home. Did you know that you are his superstar?

The lockdown was hard on many. That was well documented, spoken of constantly; but for me, I breathed easier each day that the Human Resource didn’t manage to take you away. I awoke and you were there. I spoke and you were there. I walked to the next room and there you were. I was not keen on the gates reopening. Any talk about you being locked far away for months without knowing when it would all end made my heart fall that I dared not even add to the conversation.

So in peace and contentment, I cooked and baked, maybe every day; and we sat down to watch MasterChef every evening. It was the year before our first born turned two. We watched him grow up, I, you, together, for the first time. I knew that a time like this would never come again.

You were home. You were mine. You were ours.

I never had big dreams before I met you. All I had was people I loved. You became one of them, and for a long time, you were suddenly everything; all consuming, all powerful.

Big goals, big dreams. I learned that from you. I did not know that someone could curate their own world. I had thought that we only took what was given and that was the end of it.

It seems as if I have spent a lot of time looking for someone to tell me who to be, to tell me who I am. To the person who walks to the stranger asking, Do you have any idea who I am? And they truly need an answer.

I felt like you left me to the wind, to deal with me as it pleased, accessible to the wolves of the night. You know nobody wants a lone, reactive, free-roaming particle [an unpaired electron] around their tired, quintessentially upset, breadwinner; nobody, except the solitary wave, on its path into the sea shore.

Now I wonder, if I am becoming who I was supposed to be. Do you remember when I prompted you to ask me what I wanted out of this bubble we surfaced in together? I have always said the same thing. It turns out that it has not changed. But maybe, it was a path I was always meant to discover myself.

…

I can’t believe Milton became more like Lydia and Lydia became more like Milton. The Carl Jung quote is true, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” Milton became more emotionally expressive and Lydia, less easily triggered. In him, she seems to have found the security of being claimed and seen as a standalone piece. Uche had definitely not given her that distinct singularity of person. To him, she seemed to have been one among many. Uche had his own journey of [self]love to make. Oh what it means to be special, to be made special to one! [Most of season 5 Love is Blind is laced with unnecessary swearing, boastfully spoken with the pride of a teenager who wants to fit in with the crowd. I had not really understood what it means to be assaulted auditorily on a daily basis. I make it a point to avoid contemporary American rap.]

Sometimes we look for validation in broken places, unmended scars, hurting people.

The bum of a [B]Ugandan woman is like an asset you can deposit in a bank and get money. The slow confident way its holder crosses the road, is like one who has assurance that they cannot, by any means, be knocked down.

I wish Ugandans would stop saying ‘dey-ta’ and ‘ra-w-t’ to mean data and route. How many times will we be colonised?

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.

Category: Story

Roaming

HAM?