Zenji – PurplePretoria

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.”

It is hard to fight a system. Everyone who has worked in a bureaucracy will tell you that the system is a Goliath only few can defeat. It is not just found in the highest forms of bureaucracy, say in a government office, it is in any form of organisation- in families and in companies, any group of people who have the same objective and are tied by purpose, gain, chance or birth to pursue it together and whose behaviour directly affects the wellbeing of the other.

So, while it might be hard to fight a system, it is even more difficult to fight a culture. A culture is usually unwritten but heavily entrenched. It is the go-to where there is a lacuna in the system. It fills in the answer when there is no one looking, no one auditing, no one caring. A culture is usually not what the mission and vision say, the principles recited or written on the notice board. It takes time to understand a culture when you are from the outside coming in. Usually, you either adopt it or become a misfit, a sour loser.

Who creates culture? Is it the top or the bottom, the leader mirroring people or people mirroring leader principle? Is it the first arrivals or the ones who silently adhere to what they find? A coerced approval or a tacit one. Is it the ones who sit with quiet power yielding the most damning pronouncements on others while yelling loud hellos or is it the ones who don their power like an extra-large clock sweeping with dust whoever queries or comments about anything concerning their use and misuse- the ones who use it to settle personal squabbles. Or, is it the ones who watch everyone, knowing everything and how it operates, whom it disadvantages and who it benefits* the most, and hold their peace knowing that they have the power to change things? Is it the threat of war or the peace of the status quo that keeps them voluntarily numb and mute?

In terms of the ordinary way of things changing, our country is changing too. We seem to be becoming more international, and not just on the streets of Kabalagala. I have been seeing white skinned people buying from our local shopping malls, Asian people at small takeaways by the roadside, a young Chinese girl on a scooter on a hot Sunday in Namugongo and a teenage white skinned boy and girl trekking the ‘un-white’ suburbs behind Bukoto. Until recently, there seemed to be an unspoken culture that some places were only for certain races, some clinics only for expatriates and only one hill selling all the meat, wine and cheese of that same community. [Is it the decreasing race-culture gap that TikTok and YouTube shorts have successfully influenced? We all seem to relate to each other’s jokes and childhood. And on that note, who will fix the childhood trauma that our parents carry and distribute in small doses?]

I reminisce and have written about my experience of finally coming face to face with the race equation and our very low place in the eco-pyramid. Before that, I had seen only very few white skinned people up-close (a few metres away)- one at a primary school assembly teaching us Christian songs while playing the guitar and another one in A-level, preaching to us about the biggest evil in the world- the idea of socialism. The others were the ones on the street in multicoloured clothing and slippers, but always, they were too different to be a part of our world as more than just anthropological observers. Now, we are about to bump into each at the Bank like we do with the Chinese who carry huge laptop bags of cash. I don’t know if anyone has told them that it is not safe to do that here.

The World Before

Besides the shirt-less Sezangakhona and the seduction by power and majesty in Dingiswayo formerly known as Godongwane, keeping the ways of the world before the first missionary and the first coloniser came, a strange mystery, the new MultiChoice series Shaka iLembe has led me into the intrigues of the culture and system of life in which our ancestors lived; a world where our biggest enemy was each other – the clan next door, the tribe with a different [but related] language. How we slaughtered each other! Happily, literally and with no need for a reason.

Some people view the past only with the lens of the present without allowing the passage of time, the knowledge and influence of other ways of life and the imposition of new things. One of those is that since the coming of the first missionary, a large group of Africans now find their names weird and are only going by their English names. [I thought the name Dingiswayo may have been made up by my ‘SouthAfrican History’ teacher] I heard that some of our names are connections to the spirit world, but then I heard the ‘English name’ of Johnny Depp’s Lawyer being Rottenborn, and he seems to be doing well for himself.

Was colonialism really our biggest setback or was it the thing that exposed our biggest weaknesses – our inability to be or live as a united front, our inability to allow enough peace to enable our minds to wander off and think about digging out large chunks of earth and replacing them with structures which we could walk upright in or maybe even think about creating atomic bombs that we could use to destroy the entire earth?

It seems to me that we had a culture of war, of miscommunication, mistrust, of greed, betrayal -but then again what were Elizabeth I and Queen Mary of Scots fighting about? Who was bloody Mary? Is it because they wore more clothing or that their names don’t need vowels in between that it is their story, culture and system that is more glorified? Or is it just plain simple, they are the conquerors and we are the conquered?

Either way, we may need to reorganise the smaller systems that we actually do influence. Possibly we could start with our minds- an honest candid internal monologue [Some people’s culture of only speaking behind turned backs might lead them to deceive and disparage their own selves].

I am here because someone related to me lived more than 1000 years ago. My lineage can be traced to the beginning of humanity.

I heard my 5 year old recently say that chicken come from eggs. I guess he has solved the chicken egg causality dilemma?

There are some people who have never actually walked on the streets of Kampala; literally ever walked on a street in Kampala. They are chauffeured to the door step of their every destination. There are others who know the ins and outs of Kamwokya dancing Kadodi on top of cars attracting massive acclaim from their peers.

Why does meat, according to The Food Network, have to fall off the bone and melt in the mouth? Don’t we have teeth?

Sometimes we expect friendship from colleagues, intimacy from friendships and loyalty from situational relationships. That is the definition of disappointment, expecting more from less and expecting more from people to whom you are less.

The term ‘we are pregnant’ is so misconceived, honestly! He brought the seed, it met with an egg, travelled to a uterus, through fallopian tubes, grew and somersaulted (my experience) from a dot to a baby. How is he pregnant too? You can both be having a baby but you definitely, are not both pregnant.

Ugandans and using the word ‘apparently’ inappropriately…”Apparently [meaning currently], I’m a photographer…” Are you or are you not? Or do you not know either? Don’t use the word.

*benefitting- is that an English word or is it like the word ‘paining’. Our Ugandan way of making nouns into verbs remains. Is ‘un-plaiting’ a real word?

Why don’t we use the word film anymore?

Category: Zenji

The Big Question

The System