Zenji – Page 3 – PurplePretoria

No space on the road? Add tuks tuks.

So, here we are again. Right where we started. Except this time, it is you who has left and it is me who has remained here, in this “the youngest population in the world” country. I remember what you said to me on that breezy morning twelve years ago. It was January at about 4:00 a.m. and I was leaving for the first time in a series of travels that I would make for four years.

A few days after you left, I had a meeting with important people. The other party- the most important party- even in his own opinion- to the discussion did not turn up and did not even give an excuse. He too, like us, is part of the young generation.

I left in a hurry, angry that I had moved my world to make it, even when we had not had a caretaker for our little children, only to be met with the disrespect of a fattening official who had no regard for anything else but quick sand riches gained from being the beginning and end of his worries. He is like the man who eats and drinks and then throws his rubbish at the side of the road he will use the next day. It was easier when this attitude was pinned on the soldiers Amin left, who run down the businesses they had taken over by force. It was easier when this way of thinking was pinned on the children of peasants who had never known wealth. It was easier when it was pinned on the effects of a developing nation throwing off the wretchedness of colonialism.

As I prepared to leave, I saw the packing ticket attendant gingerly walking towards my window. At a leisurely pace, he printed the parking ticket and held it to himself for a moment before deciding to give it to me.

“How many are they?”

“Two. But you give me three. I also want water.”

It was my reparation for the sins of the corruption in which he assumed I had partaken; a small atonement for his days spent issuing tickets in the sun while I drove away on my steel horse. He too is part of the young generation.

Just as I began to gain momentum, a craggy uneven motorcycle pretending to be a car, slid into the road in front of me and rattled on at 10km/hour. What had not worked for India was supposed to work for us. As if motorcycle taxis are not enough! Until the ratio is 1:1 motorcycle to citizen and the convoys cannot get to wherever they are always rushing to, the two wheelers keep multiplying.

During the week that you left, the headline was about the national airport. Apparently there had been continuous cases of irregularities and extortion within that long running construction site. How would we know? Our experience there within the same week had led us home with a broken and ransacked suitcase after waiting two hours at the luggage conveyor belt. The woman in uniform and badges that we talked to shortly before the bags mysteriously appeared? She is part of the young generation.

In transit, it was hard to miss the girls in matching clothes and veils whose colours bring disharmony to the retina. They are full of life and full of hope. What is the opposite of an expatriate? That is what they are. All of them were part of the young generation.

At least they are not like their brothers. They have survived the curse of the ghetto generation- The ones who went through the state run ‘school for all’- the ones who, once full of promise are now bound by a drug and theft culture- jobless and killing on a whim for a smart phone from a fellow young one on a New Years Eve, the ones whose representative was deemed to “local’ to lead because of the way he could not explain ‘fiscal policy’.

Now, you too have gone. Are big cars no longer enough? Must the roads be good too? Are a semblance of buildings not enough? Must they also have medicine to administer to sick people? Are big offices no longer enough for you? Must officials also do their job? Is the middleclass dream not big enough for you? Must you seek higher dreams?

Winnie Madikizela. Original uMkhonto we Sizwe. His shadow. His fire. His fight. His rage. His pain. Her pain. Her children’s pain.

I suppose, finally content with the fertile hilly soils, they decided to settle here. Colonialism found them here and in 1921, when the walls were going up, they were to realise that they were no longer just Bakongwe, Ba Mwisa Murengye, they would be Bakiga, but above all there would be forever be known as Ugandans. And with their taabes, and their anklets, their beads and animal skins, their gods too small, their names too singular, half dressed for the modern world, they entered the new era. There would be no more wars with their neighbours for loot and for women. It was time for school, for work, for nationality.

They were known for their strength and their stout figure, hardly unsurprising for a body built to climb steep altitudes. They are disparaged for their dialect- haughtily laughed up for speaking so crudely. Any deviation from the figure which has been cookie cut out for them is seen as mishap- not known for their beauty, for their soft spoken-ness or for their measured slow steps. No, that was not what their society hailed, then, it prized the strong, those who could cultivate and have dominion over the land and even the food they ate, was meant to build a machine.

But there was and is beauty in the culture and in the people, and once the comparisons end, it always begins. Skin colours appear, mystically, to range from shades of bright yellow to a warm black. But the tooth gap is no longer exaggerated by picks. There are no more heavy metal anklets worn up to the knees- those are for loose women. And so, even though, what was prized then, is no longer what is prized now, it is good to remember that, even the pharaohs were once great.

For a people who were well known for battle and dominance, the strive to keep the blood pure did not become one of the core values. They were not full – not of themselves- they- picked and mixed intonations and dialects of a similar language, pouring into and taking part of various ethnicities. Finally, the belittling and the complexes of others surrounding them have seeped into the genetics of the remainders- others have renounced the name, renounced the language for fear of being derided. Sweeping things under the carpet, calling spades big spoons, hiding behind the bush- these are new age tactics. They must be learnt. Every thing that doesn’t grow, will soon die. I guess. That is what they say.

If a factory is torn down but the rationality that built it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves. – Robert M Pirsig

The time has come for a nation and faced with enemies other than ourselves, stronger, more powerful, quicker and futuristic, we as Ugandans and Africans should have made ourselves as one, but we crumbled at first exposure.

We have given all excuses as to why we have not redesigned the future we hope for, the word colonialist, a stale taste in the mouth. We gained the independence to destroy what was left. Every election season since I could vote, I have shuddered at the little things- the first to go would be the natural hair community vlogs- what, with refugee status- how can one afford to think about what curl pattern they have. I have not allowed myself to think about the other more serious things- only in my dreams do they confront me- blood. loss. ashes.

It’s the African curse. Once built, always crumbles. Stealing from the generation to come, stifling their own chance to survive, always to fill the black hole of greed, with the shortsightedness of a drunkard – drunk with power who would commit their own kind to years of damnation, generations whose conversations will not be, of vaccines, rockets and skyscrapers but civil war, poverty, genocide, strife and military coups. Cry the beloved country.

Category: Zenji

The Young Generation

Land of my ancestors