“Smile, you’re on candid camera.”

Lying around, a cozy room with big heavy glass windows on the 16th floor overlooking an empty street and an apartment block, I watched for the second time, YouTube couple, J & N’s wedding video. They had become my favourite thing to watch on the internet- a tall dark-black beautiful Sudanese woman and a white good looking Australian photographer and videographer and their family. I had followed their vlog since the one about the birth of her first child. I had seen them eating at restaurants, visiting friends, attending a wedding. I had seen her cleaning (a lot), putting on her makeup, moving into their dream house, choosing the perfect tiles and kitchen lighting (Industrial lights – in black, not gold), drive their dream cars and have their second child.

Why can’t we just get married? I thought. With my back to his face, the screen in front of mine.

“What are you watching?” He asked, leaning over my shoulder. “Those guys again,” he sighed.

“What’s wrong with them?”

“They are giving you such high expectations.”

“Of what?” I retorted.

“Just, everything. You know. That’s not how things are.”

It had taken me from 6:00 p.m the evening before, snailing through the Jinja highway, wading through Jinja Town, dosing off as we drove towards the border, to 11: 00 am, the next day. At the border we had come out, surrounded by guns as the border police showed us the way out of the bus and with heavy boots inspected the interior. Away from the wet bushy shrubs on the left, we had walked, half-running to the migration building as the winding line piled on with more people. The Ugandan line was twice as long as the other one and our passports were being stamped with no sense of urgency or consideration for time, and with more stamps than if we had just arrived at the border of Netherlands. Finally, we were back inside the bus, in the dead of night, on a high way that carried on for hours, now racing past trees and an open landscape.

When we finally entered the city in the breezy morning hours- cars squeezing up against each other, slums, rubbish on the other side of a river-like water channel sweeping through, under a bridge. The morning rush hour made it two more hours before we could reach the bus park. By the time, the uber came to pick me, I was doubting my sanity. I had began crucifying myself a few hours into my journey with strangers on my first inter-country journey on a bus to a country I had never been to. If we all perished, no one would know my name.

The Arab man in the seat opposite mine was being interviewed by the man who sat and slept in the bus corridor throughout the entire journey. I had supposed that he was the conductor but he got out before the official bus stop.

“What were you doing in Uganda?” he had asked the Arab man.

“I have a woman friend I had…”

“Haaaaa!” the man excitedly interjected excitedly. “And how are Ugandan women, eh? Nice, eh? “

The Arab laughed shyly.

I shifted in my seat. Their conversation continued until it finally died down. The bus trudged on.

Westlands, Nairobi-

J & N, I had watched religiously until months before my own wedding. After I got married, I weaned off their marriage. Eventually, I was pregnant and eventually too exhausted to believe the happily balanced mum-hood that both she and another Nigerian and German couple projected. It had been about 6 months since I had seen J & N’ videos and when I checked again, it seemed that they had stopped filming. A few weeks later, they announced their separation. I was shocked.

What about, what about… everything?!

When the other half of J & N put out a video saying that, Nobody had really known what was happening behind the scenes. She gave us as much an explanation as she could, referencing something that looked so beautiful that was so rotten on the inside. I shuddered.

It confirmed my suspicion that most social media broadcasts were highly edited versions of the truth. I wondered too, about children whose every waking moment is behind a screen. What now unknown psychological impact lurks in the background waiting to leap out in their adulthood. What about us, the digital migrant millennial, for whom no moment exists unless it is captured on the [social media] for the world? What superficiality is filling the vacuum inside?

It’s amazing to see the shared world of broadcast- enjoying videos of other families, recaps of friends and strangers’ lives- they sometimes show you the kind of world you would want to create. But if every moment is captured, when do we get time to stop smiling. To argue, to disagree, to compromise, to apologize, to forgive, to make up. And when do we get time to know ourselves – not as the world sees us, but who were really are, without the camera effect.

I’m certain that holding a camera to my face constantly would prevent me from approaching the woman underneath- the one who some mornings walks around the house, sleepily, routinely, before the inner lights go on. And that would mean, I would miss the humble moments in between, the ones not captured, the mundane, the small, the true.

” I don’t want to have fun [only]on camera. I want to have fun in real life”

Simply Niki

Candid Camera was a popular and long running American hidden camera reality television series. Versions of the show appeared on television from 1948 until 2014. The show involved concealed cameras filming ordinary people being confronted with unusual situations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candid_Camera