Zenji – Page 2 – PurplePretoria

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?

Is this what it feels like to grow old[er]?

I imagine, that this is what it felt like for people who had only known how to walk with their bare feet when they had to squeeze their toes into alignment and pad them with leather into what is now an indispensable clothing item called shoes. This is what it must have felt like for those whose overseas communication had only meant the post office to speak on the telephone. My grandfather used to always ask with a spark of joy and excitement, “Are you really in South Africa? Right at this moment that you are speaking to me? Are you really there? You are lying to me!” [translated from my local dialect].

We were the dot.com generation. Our parents called us ‘computer wizards’ because we knew how to start and shut down a desktop computer. Our first encounters with computers are documented in the Word Art pictures we saved and the bright bold three dimensional fonts we experimented with in Microsoft Word. Yet now future children may never need to know how to write. Why will they write in a book with a pencil when then can just type it out in clear standard handwriting on a glass screen?

Within the same lifetime that personal computers and mobile phones went from thought to tangible, from experimental to mass market, an even more complex mode of technology has emerged- Artificial Intelligence. With a handful of brains on the earth, an information and command system has developed that could potentially handle the workload of millions of brains and of hundreds of hours in just a few minutes. Some quantum theorists are promising that “the ones and zeros that created the worldwide web might soon become an abacus”. I do not even know what this really means at all, technically.

“It is what the train did to horses and what the light bulb did to candles.” It feels inevitable.

To live 100 years is strange. What was impossible at the beginning of a century might become commonplace at the end of the same century. Racial segregation was once public, accepted and enforced by law but has been relegated to a privately held view and as morally incorrect when it is publicly exposed. People for whom it was once impermissible to sit side by side in a classroom setting with some others, have now seen their children hold professions they themselves had not dreamed of ever being allowed to have.

When COVID came and shut down the way we did everyday life, we were told by our elders that this was not the first time the ‘world’ was being shut down. Though this time, because of how interconnected the world has become, a patient zero in Wuhan can pause life everywhere. It was a pandemic!

After the pandemic, many millennials are reported to have resigned from their corporate jobs. It was called the great resignation. Being absorbed into a big corporate organisation was once considered the height of professional success. It was the safe secure path to financial and career success. After the pandemic, many corporate workers re-evaluated the ‘9 to 5’ (the 8 to 5.30). They questioned why they had to come in to an office building to work, why they had to attend meetings in person or even wear suit bottoms for those meetings.

Furthermore, now that millennials are parents, the current psychological premise of parental ineptitude causing life long trauma no longer sounds wholesomely without flaws. Millennial parents have since been reporting experiencing ‘trauma’ like feelings arising from [raising] their children.

This is how it feels. Sometimes it feels like the world is evolving faster than we can comprehend. Sometimes it feels like the old way was better. Why are the children being taught sounds instead of the alphabet. What is wrong with school uniforms?

Sometimes it also feels like some things should evolve faster; like what it means to go to driving school, take a driving test and then have a permit less soul climb onto a two wheeled vehicle, enter a highway, grab passengers along the way, without ever having studied a traffic light, heard of the standard look left, right and left again protocol or even caught a whisper of the concept of right of way. While in other countries, you can actually fail a driving test, multiple times!

Even though driving school was not legitimate and for many of us, our real driving lessons were from our parents [and some people from taxi drivers], we at least had a semblance of it. Passing driving school and getting a permit is like most things, it goes to whoever can pay with money. Although some driving school instructors make it clear that female students may pay in some other way. It is another one of those things here that, if you are too eager to do it properly, the system will punish you for not conforming. “Do you really think you can operate a manual car?” “You really think you can pass the reverse parking test? ” “You will fail and lose all the money you paid.” … Someone I was born with was once thrown in a police cell for quoting a traffic law to a traffic police officer.

Growing older makes you think about things like, why do we always have low standards for ourselves? The rest of the world is courting us, trying to recruit us for all purposes both good and evil but we still don’t see our value. We don’t have boundaries. We take whatever we are given and try to mutate it into an African purpose, deleting traditional structures, creative skills, musical instruments, stories, languages, dressing, agricultural and animal rearing practices, professional skills, talents and even colour because someone else supplanted it with their own. At least, the thought patterns that led us there could be taken into account or were our ancestors completely useless?

Growing older also makes you realise that you might be the last generation to speak your mother tongue.

… From mathematicians to scientific calculators, from Erikson to Apple, from Facebook to Metaverse, from google to Chat GPT. Maybe it’s like evolution, if the climate changes, sometimes you lose your fur and become an elephant.

Do village churches know what they sound like discordantly blasting their donated keyboards at every interlude? Don’t they realise that maybe drums and buchenche are more suitable to that style of music?

…

Our children will never know about or even consider the dominant national primary schools of our day when we first prepared to attend primary school. None of them exists now, some razed down and most others so substantially untenable that they in essence really do not exist.

Category: Zenji

The System

Generations