George of the Jungle

Hospital Tales

2011-09-15T12:23:00.000-07:00

by Jackson Biko

Pulmonary Hypertension is a little bastard that sneaked intomy mom’s heart and ravaged her. It wasted away her flesh, tore apart her heart,broke her lungs and turned her into a shell. But even though the little bastard– a terminal disease – has hounded for 9years now, she refuses to let it haveits way with the one thing she retains in the face of its repeated and coldassault; her spirit.

Look up what PH is. It’s not malaria. It doesn’t make yournose run nor does it give you a skin rash. It’s not like a hangover. It’s deathin waiting. So she keeps it at bay with nine sets of drugs every day. Drugsthat thin her blood and drugs that make strengthen her heart veins. Quite oftenshe takes drugs that make her sleep. She takes Viagra for chrissake, a drugthat you all 36yr olds sometimes need to keep the mast up. So, while you,limb-phallused blokes take it see another hard-on, my mom takes it in order tosee another Christmas.

She gets weak, my mom. So weak she can’t walk or eat.Sometimes her lungs swell so much she says it feels like someone has blown ahuge balloon in her chest. Sometimes you can see her heart beat through herskin from a mile away. Those days her eye whites become paper white and herfeet swell and her hands shake like a druggie. Those are the bad days. And theyare many. Every year she gets hospitalized at least once. Every year she givesdeath another reason to think – as my friend, Jean, loves to say – that itpicked on the wrong woman to mess with. But even though her heart has failedher she has found a new ally; her spirit, the guard that fends off PH.

While The Aga Khan Hospital’s third floor was where the gooddoctors handed me a small life in form of my precious one, Mater Hospital hasbeen the place that has always kept me with a mother. These two hospitals areliterally the twin towers of my life because they have both handed me two vitallives. As a form of gratitude I donate blood to Aga Khan Hospital and as anappreciation to Mater, I run in their Heart Run so that some child may have ahealthy heart again – something they struggle to give my mother every year. I’mdeeply indebted to these two institutions and not any amount of tissue or moneywill ever be an adequate repayment.

Ten days ago, my mom was in High Dependency Unit at Mater.The second time she was a guest there, hell, she should have some sandwich fromthe hospital cafeteria named after her. She lay at the last bed, next to thewindow, hooked up on ugly machines that whirred and beeped. Wires ran under herhospital gown, which clumsily hang on her bony body like a costume in a horrorflick, wires that ended up plugged on her chest. These wires monitored herheart which – according to some cardiologist – was failing. Whenever shecoughed, or moved, the machines went gaga with loud beeps. On her head was thiswhite head gear, she looked like a baker who was sneaking a nap as she waitedfor her pastry to get ready in the oven. The HDU is insanely sanitized, thefloors are constantly polished with disinfectant and before you walk in you arerequired to squeeze some liquid disinfectant on your hands to disinfectant it.

She lay under the sheets, frail, weak and with one foot inthe grave. She, with an oxygen mask pressed over her face, looked like a bomberpilot. She looked like a flickering candle. Next to her was a five year old boywhose life, I watched a knot of doctors, fight to save one night, a mostexcruciatingly helpless thing to watch. His mother cried alone in the corridorand I wondered where his father was, whether he knew his son was on hisdeathbed, or whether he gave a shit…even a little. That little boy died thenext day. The missus cried like it was her own son. Children shouldn’t die, Iremember my big sister saying. The next day a middle-aged Somali lady with,renal failure, was brought in to the same bed. She later died. It was harvesttime for death, the grim reaper, and it stared at my mom from across the roomwith its dead beady snake eyes. But, thankfully, God was there to join in thisstarefest.

The HDU is deeply haunting; it’s ideally the gateway fromlife. It’s the waiting room where you sit to wait as your life is debated uponby forces of the universe. In the HDU you feel the two massive forces; evil andgood. The devil pulls from one end and God pulls from the other. And nothingelse matters in HDU, not money, not influence, not family lineage, notprofession, nothing but God. And you bow before him and you say “please” asmany times as you can, because before him you are worthless. And you hope helistens to you just that once. There is a bench outside the ICU where relativeswait for a miracle. If you ever want to see the face of desperation and hope,have a look at the occupants of this bench.

The second day in HDU my father came down from shags withhis mother (probably to hold his hand, hehe, everybody needs their mommy, no?)and we spoke while avoiding eye contact as only two besieged men should. Oneman was losing a wife, the other a mother. Put that on a weighing scale, if youcan.

There was a night I remember, her condition had dropped. Herheart was swollen and it was hanging on a string. She was walking on a tightrope, in the valley of death. I remember leaving the hospital at 9:00p.m andhaving this dark feeling that she wasn’t going to make it through the night,and there is something deeply troubling about leaving your mom in bed knowingwell that she isn’t going to pull through the night. That night I slept with my phone by my side, knowing that itwould ring in the dead of the night bearing some dreadful news. The phone neverrang. Thankfully, she was moved from the HDU a day later and into the generalward. But the oxygen mask stayed on and so did the bakers hat.

Rigged all over Mater are speakers. Small speakers in wardsand corridors. At night these speakers spew low gospel music and short sermons,the soundtrack to desperation. It’s meant to sooth the sick, to encourage them,to fill their hearts with hope. It filled me with dread though, thosedisemboweled sermons depressed me, but then again I wasn’t the target audience.My mom loved them though, even though we aren’t Catholics.

Outside the wards is this small quaint church, an oasis ofamidst this sea of pain and suffering. My brother loved to sit on the steps ofthe church the late nights we spent there, fiddling with his phone, trying tofind strength. He is the kind of guy who derived strength by isolating himselffrom everybody else.

When you spend a lot of time at the hospital you will makefriends with other people in the same boat. Misery loves company. I met thisguy, his wife was sick in the general wards. He spent a lot of time on thebenches outside the church, he looked lonely and downtrodden so one day I ambledover to his bench and said wasup. He gave his name as Pete. His wife had somebirth related complications, almost died giving birth, he told me. I told himabout my mom and somehow the conversation drifted to his own mother and hisstory both embarrassed me and gutted me deeply.

He had to depart Nai at midnight to go pick his ailing momin Kisii. He got there early morning, and an hour later left Kisii earlymorning with his mother and his big sister at the back. His much older unclerode shot-gun. His mother, as it turned out, had a clot in her veins. They tookthe Narok route, it was a cold morning. He played gospel music on the car’sstereo because he says his mother loved gospel music. All mothers do. He wastired because he hadn’t slept a wink. They chatted lightly during the drive. Atsome point before Narok his mother asked for ice cream. “That’s when I realizedthat if an ice-cream was the one thing that would save your life in those areasyou would die,” he smirked. There was no ice-cream until Narok town. Yes,Maasai’s all act tough but they lick ice-cream like everyone else.

He said, during the drive, he kept watching his motherthrough the rear view mirror; she would sleep, wake up, stare out the window,sleep again, make some small talk, stare out the window…He checked up on herevery so often. She barely ate the ice-cream, licked it thrice or so and gaveup. Twenty minutes after Narok, after the ice-cream, he watched her mom take adeep breath, tilt forward a bit then slowly slump back in her chair.

And right there, he knew his mother had died, he told me. Iwas horrified at how casually he said it!

So he pulled over. Opened the door and checked up on her andindeed her pulse was shot. The aunt wailed throughout the journey. And he drovefor another three hours with his dead mother seated at the back seat. She couldhave been asleep. She seemed peaceful. The hardest drive he had to make in hislife, he said, to drive your death mother at the back of the car and a wailingwoman in your ears. At the cop station in Nairobi, Central, he left his motherin the car to report the death so he could get a number for the mortuary. Heleft his dead mother in the car, seated like she was napping to get somedocument. The cops before handing the document came over to verify.

He, Pete, told me he never cried the whole time nor evenduring the burial. He says he felt numb throughout the whole thing an out ofbody experience if you will, as if he was living under water. He says a weekafter his mother’s burial, he sold the Prado immediately, and the night he soldthe Prado is the day he cried for the first time, and it’s also the day hisnightmares began. I couldn’t help wondering that, symbolically, he buried hismother in the Prado when he sold it off. He told me he will never ride in orown a Prado again; he says whenever he sees a Prado on the road he instinctivelylooks at the back seat.

He told me thatyou can’t tell how many Prados there are in Nairobi until you lose your motherin one. Pete, 43, looked like a damaged man, but he told his story with suchcoldness that I felt shy to ask for a lot of details. I ran into him a few times, went to see his wife and hislittle girl named after his mother. “God can never take everything away fromyou, “he explained to me one day, “he will always give you something in return.He is merciful.”

I think that is one of thelessons here today…that God is merciful and kind. That and that my mom asked tokeep the head-gear at the hospital when she was being discharged and I remember thinking to myself, “But you can’t bake.”

2O11 Marathon Finish line. Doug Driediger.

2011-07-18T14:58:00.000-07:00

Fatima Dhanani:

2011-04-10T21:10:00.000-07:00

Business Award

Immigrants of Distinction 2011

Fatima Dhanani’s success story as an immigrant businesswoman is just as eloquent her personal one to inspire any individual with a drive.

Today this Tanzanian native runs a real estate investment business in Calgary with a market value of $157 million as well employing many people in the construction, financing and management of various commercial and residential properties in Calgary.

It is had to believe that Dhanani started her dream to become an entrepreneur while aged only sweet 16 in her hometown of Dar Es Salaam; Tanzania. At this age she lost her father and dropped out of school and along with her mother worked to support her two brothers.

Four years later she met and married Haider Dhanani and along with their children the Dhanani’s moved to Canada in 1972 initially living in Vancouver before finally settling in Calgary in 1976. Dhahani and her children still in Calgary but tragedy befell the family when they lost Haider in 1990.

Haider Dhanani had founded Bri-Mor Developments and was running it while his wife Fatima was pursued interests in art, acting, cookery, floral décor and hair styling. Upon the death of her husband Fatima did not have any experience in running a business.

She was catapulted from being a housewife to a president of a major investment company and she handled the challenging transition with such grace and inspiration that her place as a role model to both women and immigrants is much significant than this brief can accommodate.

And a short while after the death of her husband in 1990, “all but one building she managed were sold,” according to her daughter Saifa Koonar. She adds that at the time her mother was forced with only two choices closure or rebuilding. “She opted to carry on the business…………owning a family business was a dream”
And more than that, the business expanded, more apartments and buildings were acquired o top of providing property management services.

To date Fatima has stabilized the business and she has taught her son Aleem Dhanani the family entrepreneurial spirit. Aleem is now a director of Bri-mor Developments.

Fatima has done much more than being a role model amongst her peers, her suppliers such as Chrystal Creek Homes in Calgary describe her as: “being among Calgary's top developers in terms of competence, integrity and vision of individuals.”
While Fatima's business partners such as BMO say she is; “competing as a woman in a male dominated industry is not easy but Fatima has proven that it can be done.”

Fatima is also a very generous personal and her offer to sponsor a family from Afghanistan, hosting a family of six orphans as well financial support to underprivileged students to ensure they are able to pursue post secondary education. She is also involved with many charitable organizations such as Feed A Need.

Tina Merali:

2011-04-10T21:08:00.000-07:00

2011 Hadassah Ksiensk Distinguished Service Award

Tina Merali is an extraordinary teacher but far from being your typical Canadian. She was born in a small town a few hours from Beirut the capital of Lebanon and lost her father while still an infant.

She was taken to boarding school while aged only three so her mother could work and provide for the family.
Yet At only 15 Merali was whisked off to Calgary from Lebanon where a marriage was arranged in 1980 with a cousin here whom she had never met. The marriage however failed to work and less than two years later they divorced. Merali was left all on her own in Canada without a home, a family and friends and worse; with a murky status in regard to her continued stay in Canada.

She got a job as a babysitter for a Lebanese family in exchange for room and boarding, she also negotiated a visa to remain in Canada as the civil war in Lebanon meant her return would put her in danger. Her babysitting career led her to another family from family from Iran and while doing this job she enrolled in Henry Wisewood High School.

With this sort of history it is expected to wonder what kind of inspiration Merali would be to her students. That is history indeed because Tina’s determination to succeed has led her to impeccable personal success as well as guiding students in her care to set high standards for themselves.

And this support is necessary in Merali’s job as her centre caters for the students’ needs in education, integration, and linking student mentors with their peers says Deborah Sydorchuk from the Calgary Assessment Centre.

Merali has since been a Spanish language, ESL teacher as well as youth counselor and currently works in the administration side of things as the Coordinator of the Wellness Centre at Forest Lawn High School.

It is obvious through all her work that Merali believes in the ultimate freedom of individuals to make decisions that determine their life and lifestyle. And in her job at the Wellness Centre she has cultivated lasting and respectful relationships among 25 services providers to the centre she deals with as well as the students that are the benefactors of those services.

This is evidenced in one particular endorsement of Merali for the 2011 Hadassah Ksienski Distinguished Service Award from Anastasia Kochie a student of Forest Lawn.

“I’m a ‘girl’ but born in the wrong gender, I knew when I was 7 years old. I was scarred of dressing up as a girl. I feared what people were going to do to me in public. I’m so happy seeing Mrs. Merali because she always making me feel safe and confortable in school.

I have lots of friends who went to her asking for help. IN 2009 I have some problem with my family and I had to move out. I didn’t know where to live I was only 16 at the time and Mrs. Merali helped me to find a place to live as well as encouraging me to come to school everyday.

Mrs. Merali is not a teacher to me, she is an awesome sweet mom and I would love to meet you and tell you all how awesome she is who have always helping people and work her butt off to make Forest Lawan High School a better place for everyone to study.”

Merali is married to Taj Merali and they have three children.

Brijendra K. Sood

2011-04-10T21:02:00.000-07:00

Community Service Award

Brijendra Sood is an 84-year-old certified master magician who plays golf and-at a moments notice; is available to perform at community events. However, his nomination for the Community Service Award is for much more accomplishments than magic.

He is a practicing physician, one held in high regard across the country and his son is the famous character Muslim Archie Bunker in the CBC series Little Mosque on the Prairie. Dr. Sood is also a shining star on the mosaic of Canada.

He was born in Kenya and his was the first Indian family to emigrate from East Africa to Canada in 1964, he settled first in Manitoba moving on to Banff and finally finding a home in Calgary since 1974.

From his time in Banff, the Stoney First Nations Chief named Walking Bufalo admitted Sood into the North American tribe as a blood brother. Sood’s status was elevated to honorary Chief Rainbow in 1967.

The recognition that Sood received from the First Nations was a testament to his dedication to the medical profession as well a unique binding instinct to the communities in which he has worked and lived. Throughout his success ridden life’s work he has worked on almost all continents.

In Alberta he is fondly remembered as the first “Flying Doctor” before Air Ambulance Services started in the province. He flew missions to the Arctic to treat injured and sick technicians there in the early stages of oil drilling in the mid 70s.

A bulk of his medical career has been spent with St. John’s Ambulance Brigade to whom he is still employed but his efforts have been recognized across the country. In 2003 he was awarded the prestigious Order Of Canada medal for his merits and service in the medical profession.

Sood is also a gift to the Indian community in Calgary. When his family settled here there almost no other Indians.
However, with the influx of East African Indians to Canada chased away from Uganda by President Iddi Amin Dada-made famous in Oscar winning movie: The Last King of Scotland-,.

Sood founded the India Canada Society. To date the society represents 40,000 East Indians in Calgary. It also led to the establishment of a Hindu temple in the city which caters for the spiritual needs of 15,000 people.

Because of his experience and willingness to share it, Sood is a regular feature on television talks on health issues relevant to East Indian communities.
He has also promoted multiculturalism in the country with his advice to people from East India to identify themselves first as Canadians; “…share their culture with the mainstream community and keep… religion at home.” These views have made him a target by extremists in that cultural segment of the country.
Dr. Sood is married to Narindar and they have three children.

How Soon Is Time?

2011-02-14T19:31:00.000-08:00

How soon is time?
To get your number,
To have you closer,
Sit at tables for two,
at weekend,
At diners,
And stand in pair,
on the dance floors,
In our city….

You’re parked like a gift,
Wrapped like a gem

like a perfect package,
The postman in heaven,
knows His codes right.

I’m glad I got your number,
Now I hope to get a ride,

From my this place,
to downtown,
And Into your space.

Tonight is perfect,
Almost feels like a Friday,
at a cocktail party,
And the sun just set just a few ago,
But let it go,

I love your smile in this night,
It is a perfect option/
for sunshine,
I’m glad I have you….

I baked fine tonight,
We’ll eat and laugh,
Talk and listen,
dine and wine
Fight and win.

KAGAME

Winter

2011-01-31T19:49:00.000-08:00

Coming soon,
TV commercials go on and on,
New movies,
New albums,
Intimate connection ads,

Oversexed girls gyrating on TV,
Asking me to call or text the number on the screen,
Winter is one huge business opportunity to many,

Fall premiers come first,

Holiday season specials,
And the Christmas blockbusters,
While the Oscars are just around the corner.

Winter gets intimate too,
Its gets cold,
So cold it burns,
And I need a cooler,

White covers the land and space,
Just as does cloth cover the body,
Humans become couch potatoes,
And yet The TV does more selling than entertaining,

I get sold condoms,
Beer,
Latest versions,
Of vehicles,
Phones,
Computers,
Kitchenware,
And the play-offs too.

And home delivery is ecstatic,
They talk of
pizzas,
wings
Coffee,
ribs
And aphrodisiacs.

Its winter,
A time when being “strong” is cool,
We dress like zombies,
With Oversized jackets,
Boots,
Hats,
Gloves,
And Coffee to keep all warm.

KAGAME

from Icebox.

BUNGA BUNGA

2010-12-14T18:56:00.000-08:00

Since we have not had this conversation before I assume that you are typically interested in crime stories. Stories with all the twists of drama, intrigue, hatred, playahating human beings, success, failure, envy, joy, peace, sadness, drama and recovery, sex and happiness.

I know also that you may not have gone ahead to name yourself don or even worship at the altar of the mafia, but perhaps you watched the GodFathers; everyone else seems to have anyway.

So I was watching the news this evening and witnessed the best as far as crime stories come.

BUNGA BUNGA
You may have heard of the story of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, his rise to professional respect in law, politics and women. Recently has is said to have “danced’ WITH Moroccan bellydancer. Note: He has helped launched the career of that curvaceous 17 year old girl.
Anyway, the girl said that she danced with the Prime Minister as well as his Bunga Bunga Club members. Private sessions of course!!

EPIC ENDING
Now the story ends up in parliament, they have had to vote on a vote of confidence whilst his esterwhile allies turned enemies on the attack. While the entire media, MPs, EVERYONE OF note and notofnote seriously believed Berlusconi was out. Wapi>>>>>
(thinkThink of any epic story.

But the drama was enchanting as the results of the parliamentary vote were confusing. The results were announced twice and Belusconi appeared to have lost the vote in the first bulletin from parliament.
Most people predicted a loss to his People’s Freedom Party, which itself is a precursor to his earlier party; Forza Italia. Borrowed from a football chant- were indeed disappointed and to show it they burnt all they could find. Of course some of those immigrants that have been chased around the srteets were amongst the people baying for the blood of Ill Cavaliere. The Knight!!!

.

The protesters who were now in jubilation and merry making because of the first results turned violent and burnt down cars and anything they could find other than their historic buildings Rome when the second result came out.
Watching the television I could not believe my eyes; was it some fantasy story, a movie turned news or pure bullshit?
Berlusconi is of original blue-collar mould from some obscure community near Milan. He made his name into high classes the hard way. He went to school, hustled the streets and turned into a politician.

Old Money
Along the way, he toned a well-muscled body, technology took care of the hairstyle and at 71, and stories of him and a 17-year-old belly dancer are not strange. In fact I’d love to look like Berlusconi if I ever make it to 71. But definitely act like him; although I’d love his success too; to be thrown in the package such that at 74 I am still a mover and shaker of both the sane and insane in equal measures.

Berlusconi is scorned upon by the old money and conservative kind; but he rightly belongs in their quarters and so they have to only be stubborn by not welcoming him among their ranks. In fact to show that he is old money enough, he decided to move his earlier left leaning political affiliations to completely right wing.
Along the way alienating and supporting moves to deport illegal African immigrants and throwing the mostly Ghanaian home care workers in the streets.

New Money
Now that the old money kind is on his side he has to deal with the others, which are the new money. He is a success story of every Tom Harry and Dick who leave their hometown street to search for El Dorado in big cities, some in even bigger countries.
As he did with the nobility, old money and conservative kind, Berlusconi invited himself to the wealth table, successfully transforming a street vendor kiosk to an empire, while also pursuing a career in investing in AC Milan.

first time I drove a vehicle,

2010-12-04T14:12:00.000-08:00

Loud and sudden orders,
The instructor is contrasting,
As he is confusing
Almost interfering,
but I am a student.

The precision of a machine,
A test of concentration,
The response of the body,
The thrill of beating gravity,
A meeting of God and man,
A battle of wits and nerves,
On the highway,
The ultimate pass code,
To freedom,
As is known in the west.

The car screeches forward,
The mind works,
Is it a thought or action?
The mind asks.
Sight, touch, sense and feel,
Alert.

The first time I drove a car,
“How old are you?”
The instructor asked?
27, far near 28 I answered.
“And you have never driven a car?”
He asked again with disbelief.

Today I hit an electric pole,
Practicing,
Parallel parking,
Shocked;
immediately I asked to go home,
It was scary.
Failed the parallel parking,
New lessons.

Daily news hound for years,
A man about town,
Attending Events and issues,
daily,
Never drove a vehicle.

Walking offers much more freedom,
No rules,
Just raw street smarts,
And mobility on foot is no problem,
No explanation.

1000 dollars today,
To learn driving a vehicle,
and road rules,
Thank God I can afford it,
No, Thank God for this country.

Kagame.

Facebook

2010-11-21T19:58:00.000-08:00

The first time I met her,
She sat across the table,
With her exotic eyes,
and perhaps the brightest smile,
Like the morning sunshine.

It was A random moment,
A moment of happiness,
drinks and meals on the table,
friends,
new and old Merry,
IT WAS A BLESSING.

Dining and talking,
UP in Nyamirambo in Kigali,
The city of the genocide,
The city of rebirth,
The symbol of failure,
Kigali; that ray of reconciliation,
and STATEMENT OF HOPE,
and of dignity.

At the Indian restaurant,
Down by the corner to Sun City,
In the troughs of the valley,
Where the sun sets,
Amazingly,
Quietly,
daily.

I got her first name,
And gave her CUTE as the second one,
I asked her number,
I saved it under CUTE.

IT was the wrong number,
A lost connection.

But Kigali sets things straight,
And in Kigali there's talk,
Talking up and down,
In the highlands of East Africa,
Words walk.
Across valleys and mountains,
where the People meet.

With the fake telephone number,
she disappeared,
Just like a winning lottery ticket,
Worlds separated us,
But the souls didn't.

Facebook connected us,
Again,
As friends!

In a perfect world,
We would be in a ‘relationship.’
And the world is not perfect,
But friendship can be perfect.

KAGAME.

The Shitzens

2010-11-10T19:40:00.000-08:00

He is quite a fellow; in fact I have never met him for the two years we have been neighbours, but I know he is a mid level to senior peace officer in investigations circles somewhere in the Citi.

Perhaps that’s is the reason we have never met despite occupying the same block; I harbour not so good feeling towards people of uniform. He may have heard that I am a journalist as well; a sleazy one at that and one he would rather avoid.

He has some children but since there are so many children that play in my courtyard- just like they do in all the courtyards in the neighbourhood-I cannot tell which ones are his and which aren’t. I assume that the ones that appear healthier in the bunch are his kids.

He drives a car or his is driven in one. I don’t know which kind because I have not seen it. I hear it once when by coincidence we both happen to be in the neighbourhood.

But it is good that the policeman and me have not seen eye to eye. I harbor many suspicions about his trade just as I assume he detests mine too. Since by calling, God had stationed us on opposite sides of the street-considering the not so cordial professional relationship between the police and the media –Citi was determined to set us straight.

SHITZENS

But telling you about the policeman neighbour without introducing the neighbourhood would tantamount to giving you the bone rather than the meat of the story.

CLAIM TO FAME

It is located just behind the famous penitentiary in Citi where inmates are serving time for participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Citiland as recently as 1994.

A large prison enclave populates the suburb, it hosts over 7,000 inmates serving time for their role in messing up Citiland; they are known as shitzens.
The prison is our only claim to fame, commerce and is symbolic of the Citi, it is also a large presence in all our stories.

large presence

Shitzens as the inmates are known wear a bright colour uniform and in the evening they watch TV; passersby hear the sound of Citi TV news in the evenings. And we are irritated by it.

There is no water connection and the electricity is also very shady in thevillagebehindtheprison, but the large prison makes its own electricity from the shit of the war criminals hence the name shitzens. They call it biogas and when the villagers see the shitzens walking about in the street with their colourful outfits they cannot help some envy.

Behind the fence of this gigantic structure lies semi detached houses where yours truly and some other people working to oil the economic machinery of Citi reside. The suburb is simply known as theVILLAGEBEHINDTHEPRISON.

Amongst those people is my closest neighbour, a policeman with whom we haven’t met but maintain an amicable relationship aided by a network of emissaries involving children, housekeepers and other neighbours.

I still cannot understand why said police officer chose to reside here; from the look of his house and the wall fence around it is clear that he could afford to reside elsewhere in the Citi. There’s a lot of irony on some days like today.
You see the shitzens have these schemes where they can work their sentences away.

Working Time

Say if one is in for 30 years for butchering his neighbours-and God forbid if said neighbourhood is this one behind the prison- works away at their chosen trade and the earnings are converted in terms of time. So if he worked for 10 years his sentence reduces by 20. So weekends like today the shitzens some of whom are engineers, masons, teachers and farmers are building a new modern residence.

A lone prison guard in full gear closely watches events and proceedings; my neighbour stands in his courtyard and lazily walks about not even aware and concerned about the close proximity of war criminals, children, house girls/boys, wives and motorcyclists.

In my mind I picture a scene where the shitzens turn on the guard and attempt an escape but they would be stopped in their tracks by the guards of said peace officer. Yet the shitzens cannot escape because they are in a tricky situation. First them colourful uniforms come off as signs of privilege; they are driven around the Citi like they are some important people.

Second because if the shitzens were to escape they would not survive beyond the warmth of the prison fence with its television and electricity. Shitzens would also be vehemently prosecuted by the kind of mob justice that I fear to imagine leave alone write.

To be continued

KAGAME.

Foreign hours, foreign people

2010-11-07T20:13:00.000-08:00

The bright light in the bus shows all the tales,
Especially those of fatigue and to pay bills on the faces,
But I don’t see fatigue,
I see irony.

As we wait at the bus stand,
We stuff earphones,
In and on our heads,
We dance.

Some nod,
Some whisper to the tunes,
Others speak in foreign tongues,
We all might as well be thinking in some foreign dialect.

Foreign dreams,
Foreign jobs,
Foreign hours.

Visibly tired people,
yap away on cell phones,
In foreign tongues,
To people perhaps in foreign countries too.

A lone man walks about picking cigarette butts,
Burnt out and thrown away,
On the ground.

The Indians walk far off the Bangladeshi,
The Filipino away from the native,
The Ethiopian away from the Somali.

The awaited bus arrives,
Off go the cleaners,
Nurses,
Cooks,
Kitchen hands,
Factory workers,
More cleaners,
More foreign people.

Because the work shift is over,
And the bus shift must start.

Kagame

The message

2010-10-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

first the communication went dead,
at first, the words came as torrents,
then they disappeared,
the music went dead,
then resurrected again
music always does.

the communication went dead,
the updates died down,
the hammock stopped swinging,

there was a STOP.

Then the silence,
the awkward moment,
the busy air,
the hard breathing,
the hard life.

then came the mind,
working,
the time.

life,
A day alive,
happy a moment,
the works of God.
gratitude and humility.

George

From The Hammock: IMIHIGO superman

2010-10-14T19:50:00.000-07:00

BY GEORGE K

Last week at the UN offices in New York world leaders were feasting in the guise of meetings, it was a big occasion for everyone interested in economics and world development aka networking.

The leaders were evaluating their own performance in regard to the eight Millennium challenges that they set in 2001 when they committed themselves to reducing human misery. The millennium challenges are set to expire 2015 bar a proverbial extension.
With the seriousness that attract precision skills of a seasoned photographer, the leaders in New York signed documents that committed them, individuals, corporations and business leaders to act passionately and reasonably with justice and generosity. Fighting poverty became a call; a duty, an industry, a guilt pleasure, gimmick, and Hollywood people took to the thing with the kind of passion that is espoused only by sports fans.

MDGs
Beginning with 2001 the reforms to tackle these challenges became a benchmark of respect among leaders across the globe. A Bangladeshi man that understood the economics of microfinance won a Nobel Prize and started a citizen bank.
Microfinance agencies and cooperatives then reappeared; some benefitted women exclusively and when the women started accessing the money they also taught about better home management skills. The women started being more trustworthy, more responsible, more important and more effective. The family was back.

With hindsight relevant reforms were undertaken to lay the foundation for a new world order; in Africa the leaders started the New Partnership for African Development-NEPAD-WHICH has since died and the African Peer Review mechanism, APRM.
People took these challenges very serious, not least of all the leader of my village. Mtupu circulated a document with a list of items that I was required to have in my house. He INFORMED me that the standing committee of the Akagari ka Kinamba behind Mhima had been presented with Imihigo.

The Mihigo would be a list of questionnaires that required information about the property in my house and the property in my head too. The results would be tabled in a league format and performances rated in percentages. At the end of the year the best district won a grand prize in the ceremonial Amahoro.

The Mihigo list also required me to give an account my average day and the information would be deduced in percentages not explanations and official statements. It also had a clause where my marginal propensity to participate in genocide ideology was determined.

Eliminating Genocide Ideology
In a related incident, As if the performance contracts were not enough, sometime in 2008 some crafty members of parliament visited a certain school in Gicumbi. They were horrified to find and report that one school was guilty of espousing genocide ideology by a whopping 97 percent.

The MPs aware of the challenges caucused and formed even more committees, draft reports and conferences; these led to the formation of the law against dirty ideologies. Mtuptu called them “Umwhukah mubbi,” in his list. The members were not satisfied with the laws; they also set up a commission appropriately named National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide.

Thankfully my village performed admirably in the reports of all Tureres, in no small part due to my having a radio, three garden chairs, cooking pans, a toilet, a bathroom and a good explanation about the nature and goal of my social and marital lifestyle.
But my neighbour was even better, he had a walled fence which was a requirement by city administrators.; even before the wall he had a nice hedge fence around his house and passersby never gazed in his courtyard.

The village won a prize and the local leaders also known as Bayobbozi organized a fete. All the homesteads in the cell were required to attend or be well represented; we had to make appearances that suggested the village was getting along quite well. And in case we were not doing quite well there was primus for the women and MUTZIG for men but that was only through the back door!

Virgins
It was always a good combination. We also took very good care of our children and ensured that they led responsible lifestyles early on; as a result we contributed our part in forming a national organization to encourage and promote virginity.

It is not clear whether the idea was from the church or the state though but the details withstanding; GLOVIMA promised a good reward and respect for being virgins and abstaining from sex until the wedding day.
I remember laughing off the whole thing, it was possible to abstain from sex but even the holy bible before Glovima did not add a wedding to the already tough requirements.

So at the party boiled corn was served and some crazy brew that tasted as if it was prepared by a middle aged guy high on marijuana and the brew. It was a nice sunny evening, children played about and women gossiped about each other as the men cursed there being no Mutzig at the party.

reporter
Being a reporter I have attended many events and can predict their itinerary the way insurance experts predict death; so I had carried my water bottle filled with the water, which I had fetched on the way to church earlier on in the morning. This is when I played my superman card and offered to share my water with the men who were not tied on the petty coat of the women that were not participants of the gossip circuit.

donuwagiwabo@gmail.com

From the Hammock : World Challenges

2010-10-04T11:22:00.000-07:00

First it was southern and northern hemispheres that divided the blocs of the world in two, the hemispheres metamorphosed into first and third world.

There was no second world. Today we are dealing with the developed and developing nations, which is somewhat a more politically correct dissection.

But along the way there were anecdotes introduced in determining how to correctly address the differences between the global class systems. They took the way of the west, the east, and the non-aligned, as well as the extremists, moderates, fundamentalists and now we even have the jihadists.

They are currently named like modern computer software programs. We have the G7 plus 1, the G20, G77 and OECD.

My generation came of age when the hemispheres were gradually getting out of abstract letters to a more contextual meaning and henceforth there were no more east, west, south and north hemispheres. The world instead had rights and challenges.

Applications

Millennium Challenges, MDGs-Millennium Development Goals, CBOs, CSOs and my favourite, world famous wealthy men willing to share their monies with poor people whom they don’t know in foreign places.

By 2001 when I was joining high school, the challenges of the world were determined to be eight and therefore the United Nations was given a new mandate to shape the development of the world.

The UN was coming through a generation where it had played an observer role in the skirmish of the independence and cold wars and even watched shamelessly when a million Rwandan Tutsi were exterminated in 1994.

The same UN had also observed when Charles Taylor, jewel shops in Europe, RUF and FodaySankoh ransacked Sierra Leone for diamonds.

Eight challenges

The role of establishing a mechanism to deal with the challenges by leaders of the UN was also a test for the UN to reshape its relevance and image.

All the noise about arresting some leaders such as Sudanese Omar Bashir, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Libya’s MuamarGadaffi-and it was even shamelessly rumoured that our own President Paul Kagame was wanted.

All this was a sideshow, background music. But the UN enjoys the soundtracks much more than the action and therefore five years before challenges drive expires; they are still talking about implementation.

Some people were quite serious in taking on the challenges though not least many international Hollywood stars. I have seen many of these folk around Kigali promoting this or that cause. I covered Ashley Judd when she visited Rubale to launch safe water drinking tablets known as PurEau.

I also heard Mat Damon, Mathew McConaughey, Rick Warren and George Bush were in town promoting a solution to one challenge or another. And their efforts paid off in some cases; like when Stephen Lewis went a step further and mobilized funding for a pilot Millennium Village in Mayange and seven other similar villages in other parts of the world.

The results are obvious to Professor Josh Ruxin who runs the Mayange Village. Ruxin says that more children go to nearby schools and fewer are falling sick. And in case they fall to sickness; Nyamate Health Centre is fairly well equipped to effectively deal with any serious incidents.

The Village has supplied bed nets to guard against malaria-infested mosquitoes and thereby tackled one of the eight challenges. As a result the vicinity of Mayange has had malaria incidences reduce by 64 percent to only 4 percent of the health related issue the local clinic handles per day.

Mayange Village

The Village has also established a service to supply good quality seeds for food crops and come harvest season; farmers in Bugesera are some of the happiest in Rwanda. This has seen average prices for a plot rise a hundredfold and price discrimination applies when the buyer originates in other parts of the country other than Bugesera.

To deal with education; the First Lady piloted a school project funded by some generous Americans, the state of the art boarding school will sponsor female children from low income families but with good grades to pursue their education as far as possible.

And as if the government is keeping its ear to the ground; they have decided to construct an airport right about town in Nyamata. The mayor of Mayange who some years ago wrote to the president that his municipal was the poorest in the country is evidence of the changing fortunes of Bugesera. He is a busy man.

And the government went a step ahead further by promoting a new gender balance whereby women outnumbered men on the most crucial challenge table; the parliament and cabinet.

And like the other municipals are keeping things abreast; they have decided to emulate the system of Bugesera. And this has put Ruxin in an even busier situation than the Mayange mayor.

Ruxin is the mentor of the Access Project, which is designing programs that local government authorities can adopt to increase efficiency in health service delivery across Rwanda. And they are working. HIV/Aids prevalence is reduced to officially 3 percent but really JUST below 6.

The people living with HIV/Aids have also been attended to better in Rwanda than IN most African countries and life expectancy per capita has in turn increased.

The changes and linkages in the case of Bugesera and the wider narrative is that most of the challenges were dealt with by the effort of individuals blessed with particular skills and generosity.

It helps that Stephen Lewis was a high profile official of the UN and that Josh Ruxin is also a professor at Columbia University. Having met the latter I was left with the impression that he does his job with a passion and desire that border on instinct, the way Bill Clinton organizes his Global Initiative; which is another successful effort by one individual to change the attitudes of other individuals instead of the banal idea of changing the world that many espouse.

At the UN they are still talking and drawing resolutions and this week they were busy with the Ahmedinejad and the MDGs. Perhaps that’s what the UN does, talking about things and other people doing the things.

The Llamas.

2010-09-26T12:04:00.000-07:00

I mistook em for sheep though,

According to Josh, a friend and a man of the bible, “Jesus considers himself a shepherd to human beings whom he refers to as sheep.

God created us and loves us therefore we are his sheep. Jesus was sent by God to save and keep us (the thieves and robbers are not just Satan, but the consequences of our own fallen situations and bad choices) we recognize the voice of Jesus and follow it to find life. Not just the afterlife, but a better life here, sustenance, and abundance, also unity. One flock, one shepherd.”

I am not very informed in matters of the bible but I know for sure that using sheep to describe human beings is common in God speak. Maybe after-all sheep are cool animals. Don’t tell that to my tribesmen.

WE’RE NOT THE SHEEP

They treated the thing with disdain and intrigue and myth. Eating sheep was in fact forbidden; it was said that the people who ate mutton developed a permanent running nose; that irritating mucus dripping from one’s nose.

The cattle keepers maintained that sheep was helpful in protecting herds of cattle from being hit by lightening and so each family had some sheep that occasionally provided entertainment with their awkward bullfights.

But as children we never knew what happened to the sheep finally; it was unheard of eating their meat and we never had the equivalent of lamb too. As such it was considered an insult to call a person a sheep. Sheep was amongst the highest marks of stupidity.

The Baganda our neighbouring tribesmen in central Uganda treated the sheep with even more disregard.
In this culture for a person to address another as a sheep or to say anything insinuating that the person addressed was like a sheep; it was held as highly offensive. Nobody wanted to be called a sheep; it looked down all the time and even had a very terrible sound.

One could imitate the sound of a cow, a cat, a goat and even a dog but imitating a sheep had something irritating about it.

Personally I did not consider sheep as worth representation of human beings, there are cooler animals; say dogs, ironically, referring to somebody as a dog is also considered offensive in most cultures yet humans associate with dogs universally more than they do with cows; cows are certainly cooler than sheep they give us milk, cheese and meat.

God could therefore have called us cows but not sheep maybe chimpanzees. But they look weird, it is said those chimpanzees and gorillas are our cousins after-all but who wants to a cousin of that thing which is not cute?

How about rabbits; Mr. Hare is a cool guy. Somebody said the other day that owls are even cooler.
They have eyes at the back and front of their heads.
Cleary I did not hold sheep in high esteem till recently when I changed my mind on sheep while I was walking in the wilderness next to my neighbourhood.

I was out riding a bicycle in the village where houses are so awesome they have “Buwani” or sun glasses as the English call them. The driveways to the entrances of the chateaus in this village tease the observer.

Like looking at a person with cool shades and you imagine how their face looks like without the shades. When I saw the houses they seemed to be chilling behind the shades; grand, artfully designed and highly reserved. Nothing looked misplaced in this village other than me or so I thought of myself.

Then I saw them animals in the backyard of one home. They were the mothers of all sheep. They were big and tall and they gave the impression they smiled when something unusual happened nearby.

Now that is some sheep.

These four elegant sheep are quite something, their teeth curve at the front to form a V shape looking backwards inwards the mouth and watching their open mouth gives you the impression that they are smiling at you or something below because their eyes are facing down and since they are so tall and I need to tilt upwards my head to be able to see their chin they seem to leave the impression that they are laughing at me. They are like giraffes only they have wool on their bellies and shoulders.

Nobody was watching these sheep-and the owner having appreciated that his animals are indeed not your regular sheep, leaves the four things in close but safe vicinity and clearly visible to passers-by. No human being was in sight other than a dog, which stood guard of the sheep, and it barked the closer I came to the sheep.

As I walked closer I was still wandering whether they were giraffe or sheep.

I was thinking when I watched them that perhaps they are the sheep that they speak of in the bible; and they are the sheep I wannabe.

(Ed’s note: The photos show Llamas and not sheep. Although early writers compared llamas to sheep, their similarity to the camel was later recognized. The llama (Lama glama) is a South American camelid, widely usedas a pack and meat animal by Andean cultures since pre-hispanic times. Thank you)

Beautiful British Columbia

2010-09-21T19:36:00.000-07:00

As a compulsory topic in geography studies in all East African secondary schools British Columbia is taught with utmost seriousness, in my class we were taught about trees with funny names.

The rivers that transport trees as well the mountains that regulate the weather of the trees and then Vancouver in which the trees turn into paper and dollars.

Sometimes knowing the planting, felling and harvesting season of British Columbia trees stood between a national exam fail and pass.
As a result the study of North America became a lucrative business and made many celebrity teachers in Uganda who todate publish books and pamphlets. My own class teacher was known as Kula’zikulabbe, translated in English, “grow up and you will see.” MANY OF these teachers never even owned passports leave alone ever visiting BC.

Their familiarity with British Columbia like ours ends in class, as students we hated it just as much we hated studying European history; who wants to remember tongue-twisting names of foreign places. Outside of class none of use even knew how to draw the map of North America and we never cared for Douglas fir, red herring, spruce and hemlocks. It was all fantasy, academic bullshit.

That being a prelude I visited British Columbia and I’m still recovering from the pleasant shock of the Canadian west coast. British Columbia simply stuns you. Even to those that have been many times, every visit is cherished.

Even the residents of province know it well; highway posts from Nanaimo to Tofino remind you that; “you are in perhaps the most beautiful place on earth.”

The opportunity to travel to British Columbia was presented to me by Josh a friend from my local church. Josh is a young, he was Canadian born and raised in Red Deer Alberta and he is everything Canadian. He is a professional speed skater, of African descent and he can also be genial too.

Being relatively new in Canada my contribution to the trip was not really worth anything, I cannot legally operate a car in this country and I don’t know the names of places on the grid or worse; I cannot speak with this accent that makes rapping so easy for them Americans.

With this mini predicament I was left in a position of only observing and being enchanted by the natural beauty of BC. And yes, we came across the: “enchanting forest.”

Josh provided most of the observation and it does not mean I was keenly watching him like a work of Michelangelo but whenever we came across that most ubiquitous of Canadian questions: “Where do you come from?” I could not help to watch Josh explain himself.

Being black, Josh was always faced with a second "where do you originally come from sort of look?"
“I’m from Red Deer and now I live in Calgary,” I’d see doubt and disbelief on the face of the enquirer. And when the same question was directed at me and I answered east Africa I’d see approval.
Like: “I knew you were not from around here anyway.”

At one point on Long Beach I noticed a gentlemen chatting with his son, the son was draped in a Barcelona jersey and I asked both if they were football fans. The father responded with a question: “where do you come from?” I said Calgary upon which he added: “I thought you come from an exotic place like Ghana.”

Now: Really what type of question or answer was this, Chilling at Long Beach on the Pacific Ocean in Vancouver Island and this man thinks there’s a more exotic place no earth?

I thought it odd to talk about some of these incidents with Josh but he made it simple when he asked me: “what was it like growing up in a black country, surrounded by the black community?”
I did not have a particular answer so I also asked him how it felt for a black person to have grown up in a country surrounded by white people and whether he felt any sense of brotherhood with the black ones.

Josh answered me back that most times he faced a dilemma whereby his fellow countrymen were reluctant to accept and approve of him as belonging to them. Or even doubting his being a Canadian So he had to prove himself by speaking and after a while based on the things he said and how he had said them, he would be considered a bonafide Canadian. I asked him if it was frustrating growing up in this community.

On the other hand being a strict practicing Christian meant that even among his fellow black community he was in the minority too; “I am a man without a country,” he told me.

To compound his mystery, Josh earns his living teaching that most white of sports; speed skating, josh also offered to give me my first lessons In speed skating for free.
You don’t even want to hear what we talked about me, so I’ll save you the boredom.
That mostly ended our mature conversation

Skating is a game of delicate balancing and speed and when a person with a slow brain as mine needs those two skills it is a recipe for disaster. We went to Stanley Park for my first lessons; (if I were to write about Stanley park in Vancouver I’d never finish this story, so you can google it.)

Skating is quite a trend in East Africa but with our unpaved and potholed roads and even errant drivers it is not a common activity. In fact it is not even a sport, it is a marketing tool that is used by crafty politicians, musicians and businesspeople to announce new things. In fact they are known as productLAUNCH OR ROANCH as they call skatesboys in Kansanga.

The kids that skate are wizards.

Personally I learnt about skating from a television advert of the Olympic Games, IT was in late 2006 while I was finishing university and the advert always ended with a question: “When was the last time you did something for the first time?” after which there would be a guy perhaps from a Nordic country trying to skate on winter for his first time. He stumbled a number of times on the skates but finally made it and celebrated with fists raised. The advert was recorded during the 1988 Olympic Games in Calgary.

That advert left an enduring image of Canada in my memory and it was great having to skate in Vancouver.

Josh also owns a small Volkswagen beetle car that was both our means of transport and accommodation; save for some nights we spent on the beach party at the Pacific Rim in Tofino.

Caption: this little car served as our hostel too, it did not have any mechanical troubles save for a broken parking brake at Noisy Creek. I nicknamed it Volksferrari during the day for its speed and VolksFairmont at night for providing super excellent sleep.
Volksferrari increased its distance almost by 3000 kilometres from Calgary to Vancouver.

Activities

After skating we headed to watch a Baseball game at Scotiabank field inside Nat Bailey stadium with Ben Nachiman.
Josh Kron my friend from Rwanda introduced me to Ben his cousin who studies in McGill. The match was between Vancouver Canadians, (yes, as if Canadians need to remind themselves who they are, they keep having the name of the country as a brand for many things from sport to my pub favourite; Canadian.), and some team from Michigan or Missisippi.

So we watched baseball, and really what is there to write about the match? A team in white was playing another in black. There’s a lot of running, throwing, big sticks, head helmets and a mascot called chicken. The chicken dance is a crowd favourite. The crowd itself is young, vibrant and sociable. We met Ben’s friends a Fred, an Allan and a Scot.

Vancouver is rich, it is beautiful, and the city sits on a continent that hosts New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles,and an ocean that hosts Tokyo. no superlative can describe the city more eloquent than the names of those cities. In fact Vancouver is so important that is a small brother of Hollywood in movie making. It is the true Canadian WEST.

But like a magnificent sculpture; Vancouver also has a very ugly face. After touring Stanley Park, playing football, and using free Internet at the public library we went to check out downtown Vancouver at night.

Vancouver is home to the largest Chinese community in Canada, the small-scale private sector is almost run entirely by the Chinese and Asian community, there are also other communities that work in the forests, fishing and tourism industries. Vancouver is also among the most diverse metropolitans in North America.

At a Broadway restaurant Five dollars afforded me two cold beers and a very decent meal.

We reached downtown core at about 10pm and by that time Vancouver was deserted of all its glamour, the expensive cars, elegance and braggadocio for which the city in renown; was off. There were instead homeless people, hungry people that congregated in circles resembling Internally Displaced Camps; bleu collars pubs, marijuana pushers and the riff raffs.
People just watching time, people who watch Vancouver every other day their entire lives in the same way I was watching it for the first time.

Yet even amongst this crowd in the city centre there was free and safe drinking water for pedestrians provided by the city, there were also smoking areas where young girls and boys sat and were in conversation till late in the night.
Street industry was at work; people vended cheap and fake contraband of all kinds, touts were screaming as if it was mid morning. One was selling a pack of Marlboro lights at a meager 5 dollars.

Seen closely, Vancouver is just another big city full of hustlers, posher people, the nobles and fine people; each running a different show and pretending to get along just fine. But seen from the ocean and the mountains that stare down upon it, it is the most beautiful place on earth.

Whether it is the most beautiful place on earth you can argue, what you cannot doubt however is that the greater Vancouver area has the most beautiful scenery ever seen on earth.

Mountains, trees, water, waterfalls, lakes, architecture and anything else that symbolizes beauty, power and man’s industry they have. In fact one does not need to be a professional to take a good picture in British Columbia, everywhere you focus the camera captures amazing features. On their vehicles the message is even more clearer: “Beautiful British Columbia.”

Vancouver Island
There’s nothing really to write about the island. It is simply covered by forests, mountains and surrounded by the ocean.

Like the entire BC it is also a favourite holiday spot, on the roads Canadians and international visitors dragged along parts of their lives to enjoy the beauty of the Canadian west coast.

Vehicles pull boats, carbins, go-carts, dogs, and motorcycles. I wondered what is the whole point of holidays when everyone seemed to be dragging along a part of his or her lives on the road that they seemed not intent on leaving behind.
There seemed to be no gate away after all.

This seemed to make sense when all conversations involved; “what did you do today?, did you go fishing, did you surf?, did you hike in the forest, most times I had no answer to these questions. I was happy enough that I was on the island.
There was always enough time to do everything. Or nothing. After all, most times being here was less about doing and more about just being in this magic place.

We slept in the safety of the Pacific Rim National Park and set up tent by the beach, this place hosts many campers especially young students from other parts of Canada who come during the summer to work and have a good time.

Whenever Josh spoke of the next plan I wanted to scream at him, in fact he was so occupied with planning that while we were on this trip he was planning his next activity. And as if to show that even the best laid plans can have unforeseen turns, while returning back we were stopped along the highway as an accident had blocked off all traffic going east from Schuswap.

The Volksferrari hence detoured and spent sometime in schuswap flea market before heading to Noisy Creek to spend a night in the jungle by the lakeside. The drive to Noisy creek (that is the most misleading of names as Noisy creek is among the most noise free places.)

First it is a 60 km drive from the highway and almost all homes are built by the riverbank or lakeside. There are huge ranches, cornfields, factories and old colonial buildings.

A parked Mercedes Benz that looks like it has been in that mode for many years signals a turn off at one roadside junction leading to a country house.

Because of the enormous mountains and elegant trees in British Columbia lakes and rivers appear almost out of nowhere. Driving on the road you’ll think there’s a lake or river at every turn of the highway.
The highway itself is very busy with people traveling between the major cities it lines, these cities include Calgary, Abbotsford, Winnipeg, Regina to the last frontier of Canada; Vancouver.

Kagame,
ends.

2010-09-20T21:33:00.000-07:00

Musoni said government had abolished tax charges on agricultural products in the country; however he said the increase of food prices was because of increasing fuel prices.

He called upon Rwandans to be more active in determining the standards of the commodities they consume; “Rwandans should be more active consumers. They should question the sellers (of services and goods) instead of relying on government to make all the decisions.”

Increasing food prices have been the cause of political violence and death in and will present future concerns like war according to UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon

From the Hammock :The tale of the feet and the hair

2010-09-13T15:11:00.000-07:00

By George Kagame.

It’s not the fault of hair that the feet are hidden far away from the pedestal of the anatomy and therefore like a front display rack in a shop; the head is perfectly organized and made beautiful beyond its natural disposition while in all matters feet are literally and figuratively down the pecking order.

The feet and the bum
The feet and their immediate neighbour; the bum are sometimes taken with delicate concern and attention.

The sort that requires concentration skills only acquired by scientists of note, forsome women and lately men, the hair and bum are two issues of paramount importance.

Even the WEIRD, (Western Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic); where they mock Africans for our love of “booty”, they also revere bums as is illustrated by respectable East African Charles OnyangoObbo;

“In many countries, even health-conscious women who exercise to lose weight worry about the bottoms shrinking with the rest of the body. As a result, there are many quack regimes for losing weight in all parts of the body, but the “bumper”.

The business of bums and the hair indeed is a major industry in their own right. Particularly for hair it is not just a couple follicles coming out of the scalp; and for others it is a line between opportunity and catastrophe.

But generally many of us never care about the shape and features of our feet; but ironically it is safe to state that a man without hair and without a pair of shoes is indeed a mark of poverty, one we would rather avoid on the street.

And there’s some truth in the modern proverb that a man without hair spends his money and time on his feet=MOBILITY.

A case for Hair
Some Indians wrap their hair up in a weird robe to resemble a pyramid on top of their anatomies; the Iranians have just decreed a legally accepted haircut while the mullahs in Afghanistan have long imposed a strict beard policy.

In my little island hometown on a lake, I saw village women literally burning their skulls with hot combs to perm their hair into curls. It seemed there was a decree that African men were not allowed to grow long hair such that they would be able to take care of their womens’ hair.

Try not facilitating your woman’s visit to a salon and you’ll know what that means.
Hair control was very liberal toward girls and later in puberty when the girls decided to wear things on their heads that resembled the feathers of the rear side of a chicken, not an eyebrow was raised.

But even historically, women’s hair and what they did with it were never a threat to the periodical rulerman of past and present. Forget what you read about the Islamic Burka.

At boarding school; boys were routinely required to report for a mandatory haircut on weekends. Nobody asked if the nails were cut or teeth brushed, ears cleaned but the hair had to be short at all times.

In the unlikely event that a boy let his hair grow long or took effort in his appearing it was taken as a sign of crafty behaviour. And the widely held opinion was that boys who took too much care in their appearance were gay.

And being gay was so horrible that imagining the thing was in itself an evil.
Psychology books arrived and informed that us that actually men were more scared of being bald than impotent and to eliminate the fear of a bald; modern African man decided that keeping a clean shaven head was an eternal solution.

The colonial had of course the short hair policy baldness withstanding.The colonialist in Africa decreed that the people in his control were prohibited from growing more than an inch of hair.

Heaven forbid if your hair grew longer. As happened, all those that were not direct beneficiaries of the colonialist grew long hair as a protest.

The colonialist not a fool, decided that only devil worshipers and socially inadequate people allowed their hair to grow long.

The marine cut
The army men apparently insist on a hair policy because it exudes hygiene and discipline or so Tony my brother says he was told in training.

“Short hair is a mark of hygiene and discipline as is brushing your teeth in the morning.” Hair, its style or texture is stuff I must not bore you with on a Sunday afternoon but it is something else altogether — singular in its capacity to command interest and carry cultural baggage.

And allowing my hair to grow longer recently has created situations and the catalyst for a conversation that begins with style but quickly transcends outward appearance and ultimately transcends many images and symbols.

According to TIME magazine, nobody has put more significance on hair than US first lady Michelle Obama, the changes in her hairstyle from coiled strands to fully straightened on occassionshas brought to the table the question; “Is it the chemicals of heat?” and what is the normal and accepted symbol for black people’s status in terms of beauty, acceptance and power?

donuwagiwabo@gmail.com

Head boy; head girl and the Walkman

2010-08-31T12:48:00.000-07:00

GEORGE KAGAME

As students we were meant to discover and learn our individual career paths and launch ourselves to the world.
Some of my classmates decided they wanted be lawyers, some soldiers, others Pan humanists, doctors and policemen.

The school administration prudently divided our class into two parallel segments; each announcing the intentions of the members as “sciences” or ‘ARTS.”

In the event that one changed their minds along the way and wanted to change directions we had a big man eloquently titled as “Career’s Master,” it was always a guy and many usually spotted a weird moustache. That kind you see on streets resembling wings of an eagle above the upper lip.

Among the supposed functions of a careers’ master was to teach us things like writing resumes, cover letters for jobs on top of advising about the link between potential; profession and impact.

But in most cases the careers’ master was also the disciplinary master; the later was eternally hated. He enforced the rules of the school to the letter. The problem was that his rules were more numerous and demanding than those of the school.
The disciplinary master on one occasion addressed me in front of assembled students; “George; I’m going to put you on a kiboko diet,” the next seven days after this statement I reported at his house in the morning to be lashed ten times.

I disrespected this man and his office; I could never bring myself to face him leave alone career advice and in fact I detested his profession.
According to him it was easy to find undisciplined students; they wore caps, never tucked in their shirts, talked to girls, “A lot,” liked music and grew long hair. If at all one of the above features described one; they would be under the watchful and nosy eye of Ngobi.

But the careers’ master was not the only culprit in making teachers look like a page from a dictators book. The entire teaching staff reveled in fear and awe; they made laws, made us kneel for them, fetch their water and for some girls, to make their meals.
They operated like a nobility, identifying students that were good and different from the undisciplined cases.

The good students sang in the church choir, attended all prayers, talked with teachers a lot and always tucked in their shirts; many were appointed into leadership positions. Even the timekeeper possessed considerable authority so as to make a student’s life miserable.

The students’ body was the bridge between the school management team and the students and was on paper meant to be voted and representative of the students’ community. And yes; we participated in the elections but they were a sham as the teachers appointed whomever they felt deserved to be what in the guild.

The entire students guild were teacher favourites; from the awkwardly named “head boy” and “head girl” to the timekeeper. And then there were others chosen in the service of the lord. They were our age mates but we referred to them as; “elders” because of their wisdom and dedication to all matters church.

It seemed the teachers were only interested in grooming students who were keen on becoming teachers, activities like fashion and design were even abandoned and heaven forbid if a student dressed in a manner that suggested popular style.

It happened onetime; a girl wore a short skirt to the dining hall where the disciplinary master was holding fort. Upon seeing the girl approach the serving table Mr. Ngobbi literally detained her and the poor girl was sent home to bring her parents who would have to explain where it is that their girl had learned this style of dressing.

After this incident, Ngobbi decreed that the school uniform was the only accepted clothing for students during the school term. Heaven forbid if at all a student was caught with a shirt or t-shirt that was not part of the school uniform.

The most dramatic decree however was the ban on anything that produced sound; having or listening to a radio was tantamount to calamity.

Consider that in our time music was different from what it is today; a Walkman was an important gadget to have; the mother of all gadgets. The kid with a Walkman was the coolest kid in town. The Walkman had FM radio that played the latest tunes “hit after hit” and the savvy of us connected the thing to small speakers for communal and hence a party. Friday night was particularly popular with “Rasta rob on the master knob.”

But walkmans were banned in the school and if a student was found with one; (a), the Walkman was subjected to many lashes of the cane until it broke up into many un-adjustable particles, (b) the student was subjected to 20 lashes plus the usual mowing the lawn of the compound and “masters quarters.”
Depending on the day, some teachers just confiscated the Walkman instead of smashing it into pieces on the floor.

Beyond sinning however was to the act of escaping from school to go off campus; it was abominable. Jose Chameleon was one of the usual suspects and culprits of the crime of escaping from school to go to Wobulenzi, a nearby city and from this point the mark was laid on Chameleon that he is “a bad boy,” and boys like him were promptly expelled from the school regularly.
To be continued….

A VIP and supermodel’s night at a party and day in court

2010-08-17T00:37:00.000-07:00

By George Kagame

A story about Africa involving some important and fine; and even ones that Nigerian legend Fela Kuti called Vagabonds in Power-VIPs is in the offing.

But it is so far away from here that even writing about it is a tough wit game, which is afforded only to a columnist. It is far away in the priorities of relevance, proximity and eminence. But a story is never strange; after all it is just that, a story.

The theatre is at The Hague in Netherlands and Supermodels and cameras grace it with one of those catwalk galleries that are decorated.
And they don’t come bigger or even better than Naomi Campbell; that graceful of women and she is appearing in a de’ja’vu scene where ghosts are playing tricks on her. She even now looks troubled or trodden; I swear, look at her face.

Her cast involves Charles Tayor playing the role of illegitimate African leader and the drama is completed with wigged lawyers; they look like Father Christmas.

I have been in one such court at Arusha where a cousin of The Hague; the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is trying genocide suspects. It was like a play, life was reduced to eloquent elite debate laced with figures, colours, cars and talk; everyday I walked into that court I was tempted to spit at the fat security guards and even fatter bureaucrats.

But who wants all that narrative really?

A day in court

In other news; Naomi Campbell; she of the long neck, beautiful eyes, even more beautiful legs that stretch up to her shoulders and curves that only God can design. But you can put all that in past tense now.

Charles Taylor drools upon her at one party in Pretoria in 1997, they get cozy and flirt; looking deep in their exotic Africa eyes.

Taylor, in the game of wooing and perhaps even reveling in the benefits of wooing decides to gift Naomi Campbell with a diamond. Read that again; a couple diamond stones.

It is even juicier for us common folk. We talk about cars, houses, envy the fine people and even dream of having custom made women like Naomi. It takes diamonds my friend. Diamond.
I have never seen a real diamond myself and I can’t comprehend why the goddamn stone along with gold is used as a measure of prestige and power the world over. And why they attract women the way pollen grain attracts bees. Hell, I cannot even tell the difference between diamond and silver.

I hear they got the thing aplenty in Congo and it is traded in Goma for just two hundred dollars but true; haki ya mungu, even after visiting Goma many times; I have no idea what is the BIG DEAL. I see hustlers selling fake jewel on the streets in east Africa but I have never bought a stone other than those used in construction.

I have heard that stones have many movies about them, movies about guns, grim looking African chiefs, even grimmer muscled guys with machetes, as well as a couple massacred women and babies’ bodies putting in appearances.
True; in the name of God; diamonds are a HUGE DEAL. I have watched Tears in the Sun and Blood Diamonds both based on true stories.

Forget all that about the oil and its petro dollars ah well, maybe we shall keep the oil secrets for another day; there’s a possibility that Omar El Bashir of Sudan offered supermodel Tyra Banks an oil well; you never know!
I hear The Hague is also keen on getting the Arab man for torturing his black countrymen in the south; never mind that these ones have no stones yet.

Back to our story, think of a climax; no make that a threesome, VIPs and super beauties mingling and flirting a recipe for disaster.
That exactly leads to the scene in the International Criminal Court at The Hague where diamonds, superbeauties, powerful men and parties swing from possible one nightstand and its wits.

Naomi is asked to tell on herself in the court of law, the gift of diamonds from Taylor and their late night party in South Africa; she says: “seriously, I have never heard of Liberia and I don’t even know where it is on the map.”
Never mind the diamonds actually came from Sierra Leone; but that is a story for another day.
Damn it, Naomi must treat diamonds the way you treat your food.

Imagine the difficulty you’d face if you had to explain the details of the food served on your table everyday. Are you expected to know about fries, chicken, vegetables and milk? Who grows it, who is responsible for its constant flow, how is it planted? Are the planters paid anyway? Do they have children?
Hell; even my nosy neighbour would be cautious asking such many questions at every single meal!

Working class people getting along

In fact lets getaway with the questions about fair trade, imaginations and even the self-righteousness. Lets have a good conversation, lets talk about gender relations, a woman, a president=gender and power relations, a presidential backpack that carries dirty diamonds to a late night party and a super model. Working class people getting along

Imagine a black supermodel in England, with all the attention and attraction in the world, then Taylor an African corrupt leader walking about as a pimp.
Ah wait, he is a descendant of freed African slaves in North America who were forcibly returned at the end of slavery and resettled in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The former slaves in turn became kings and queens in the free countries; they even renamed one city Free Town. Many of the returnees became princes and chiefs in literal and figurative forms. Ever wondered why so many West Africans come with names such as Prince, King, and Chief? Just like you hear those arrogant British go around with Sir, Lord, viscount, Earl and my favourite duke.

The prosecuting team in the case against Charles Taylor is smooth; you have to give it to them for getting their case to the front pages and even hidden ones like the one you are reading right now.
Because would you really not give Naomi Campbell a diamond if you had some?
And; is it not ironical that the blood diamonds were sold and worn in Europe and now it is in Europe that their retribution is taking place?

Of celebrity baby mountain gorillas

2010-08-08T23:12:00.000-07:00

Insights :

GEORGE

Zoya is not your regular baby; he is the coolest baby in town. Even I am not familiar with his details but I know of his baptism day. You see his baptism day is so important that soon future babies of his kind will have a national holiday declared on the day they get baptized.

Zoya comes from Citi and in that country matters of religion are very important, make that crucial. So like many of his countrymen, among whose names are such statements of commitment such as sonofGod, slaveofmaria, oneforyezu,godgivesbirth, and onewhotrusts, feature prominently.

As a result, People with such names take matters of God serious and therefore on the occasion that their not so distant cousin Zoya gets christened everyone of note in Citiattends without fail.

Zoya’s baptism party is so important that the first Citiman attends, and no not just him; how about Natalie Portman, Jack Hanna and Don Cheadle, he of Hotel Rwanda?

Damn it, on the day I got baptized I went to the gym right after the ceremony and to cap off the day I went to an evening shift. And these two are so important that a whole managing director of a national daily newspaper has to call me urgently to cover it or else I see the cold of the night of Citi. That is not a predicament you’d want to be in at any moment of your life, or wish even to your enemy to be in. This place can be cold!

As I lazily walk up to these baby gorillas I try to search anything that can get me a story, a story of today. Do they have longer hair, are they smiling these days, do they blink, do they want to ask me; “seriously, what are you doing here?” And maybe even tell me a proverb about my stupidity in their language telling of their opinions about my presence.

But they cannot and if they attempt any games I have my press card ready so I will be explained if Zoya and Wakawaka call for security, wait a minute do they even know about security?

All the posh people, fine people, not fine people, peasants, and the noblemen of Citi show up at the cathedral of the mountain gorilla’s baptism party, each to pay their respects.

The cynic of this most prestigious of ceremonies in Citiwill call it drama; they will dismiss the event and protest by continuing to live their even more boring lives. But people of note know what is important, so on the day that Zoya and friend get baptized, the red carpet is thrown out full circle.
True of God, hakiyamungu I was there. I saw with my own eyes.

I watched Zoya with interest and even tried to catch his/her stare. I could not tell if he was boy or girl. He is a gorilla for Christ’s sake! I cannot ask him, I don’t speak his language neither does he mine. For me he is an assignment I have been sent here all the way from my kingdom in the town and I’m hungry, this place with its forests, mountains and people who are staring at me like I’m a picture.
MAYBE I’m a picture; I can make much more sense without words. They say a picture is a thousand words. People appear smarter before they speak.

So I don’t want to ask the whereabouts of this Zoya kid and friend, and for me he is not just an animal; it his birthday party and that is a story. I have many questions about his coolness. How does he do it, get all these important people to attend his party?

Do you know how hard it is to have a party in your honour? Ask yourself how many parties have been held for you? Who attended, who laughed, who took pictures, were they published in international newspapers and magazines around the world?

Clearly I’m jealous of these two.

I saw earlier in the tent guests were signing autographs, taking pictures, drinks, speeches, laughter and handshakes. I was not interested in all that. I wanted to meet this Zoya. By Zoya’s side was another baby mountain gorilla baptized as Wakawaka on the same day.

Now two mountains gorillas having a baptism party and they are hidden far away from their own fete? Maybe they asked for some privacy and only wanted to come out to wave to the crowd just like Nelson Mandela during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa recently.

And talk of South Africa; that is where the name Wakawaka became memorable with Shakira being its most eloquent acquaintance.

While I was walking towards the ceremony I met a man on the roadside, he is a local and his people have lived in Citi for hundreds of years. He was short, in fact too short that I thought he was a young boy; I wanted to ask him, “Are you married, do you have kids?” Turned out he is a father of three children and the eldest is 21. His second wife is expecting a forth child.

He appeared to be wondering how things in Citi had changed, two baby mountain gorillas were big celebrities, almost signing autographs and he was just watching things unfolding like he was watching a horror movie.

Footnote: mountain gorillas are highly endangered species and need the utmost attention of all mankind, as they are our closest related creatures. So please Giv a little less attention to your cats and dogs and think about mountain gorillas and their birthday parties too.

THE EASTER STORY: GOD IS NIGERIAN, VIRGIN MARY IS ZULU, AND JESUS?

2010-08-03T14:49:00.000-07:00

he Easter holiday, the time when We mark the betrayal, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is upon us.
It is thus our duty again, to make sense of this story from a Pan-Africa point of view.
Of course we can’t talk about Christ’s death and resurrection, without taking note of how it all started.
So if the Bible and Christianity story all-African, from which country would God come from?
•I THINK GOD WOULD BE NIGERIAN. Only a Nigerian would be cocky enough to be God. One day, good people, Nigeria will rule Africa.
•I THINK MARY THE VIRGIN WOULD BE A SOUTH AFRICAN WOMAN, SPECIFICALLY A ZULU. Zulu women most approximate the quiet dignity of Mary the Virgin.
•JOSEPH WOULD BE CONGOLESE. He had that mix of sweet naivety and Stoicism which is abundant among Congolese men.
•THE MAGI’S: It is very difficult to place the magi. First, I think they were gay. It's mostly gay men who have magi-type sensitivity. They would likely be from the islands, possibly Cape Verde or Principe and Tome.
•PETER: He betrayed Jesus before the cock crowed three times. To figure out from which country Peter would come from, we need to look to the countries which are most uncomfortable in their African or Arab skin: That is Ethiopians, Egyptians, and Moroccans. I THINK PETER WOULD LIKELY BE AN ETHIOPIAN.
•JUDAS Iscariot the Traitor: Africa is not short of traitors, but in recent times the lies and betrayals that have led to the death of over 200,000 people in Darfur, and the displacement of over another one million, are the worst. JUDAS ISCARIOT WOULD BE NORTHERN SUDANESE.
•The Roman Emperor PILATE: PILATE was a complex character. He wanted to let Jesus off the hook, but he succumbed to the pressure of the masses and had him executed. This wavering between principled action, and acting according to the dictates of opinion polls is most evident in Kenya. And I think PILATE COULD EASILY BE Kenya’s PRIME MINISTER RAILA ODINGA. He is equally complex.
•JESUS CHRIST: This is a tough one, for to be Jesus you need to demonstrate an extraordinary ability to take pain over a long period. There have been many wars and heroic struggles in Africa, but perhaps none reached the extremes of the Algerian war of independence against France, although it lasted only from 1954-62. The Algerians showed remarkable grit. JESUS, THEREFORE, WOULD BE ALGERIAN.
•Finally, Mary Magdalene who was “loitering” outside Jesus’ tomb. Magdalene could only have come from Uganda. And Doreen Lwanga will agree that Magdalene would have been a Muganda woman.
HAPPY EASTER
LET’S PRAY.

WHY AFRICANS LIKE LOTS OF BOOTY ON THEIR WOMEN

2010-08-02T11:39:00.000-07:00

The pan-African reality show Big Brother Africa is a few weeks old now, and this time they dubbed it Big Brother All Stars – because they recycled housemates from previous episodes.
Zambian housemate Paloma, with her large backside, is back.
She makes for an intimidating presence. To the uninitiated eye she was not the most desirable woman in the House, but she has quite some following. Interviews have been shown of people saying "she is a true African woman" or "just my kind of woman". When this Big Brother Africa thing was on last year, I went with a group of friends to Club Afrique in Nairobi’s Museum Hill (it has since closed).

Lo and behold, it turned out they were holding the semi-finals of the chakacha dance. Most of the competitors, all female, were slim or medium size with reasonably rounded rears. Then dancer No. 11 came on.
She was pretty-faced, had wonderful skin tone, but she was big and her tummy wobbled as she did the chakacha. One of the three judges, an unflinching dreadlocked fellow, took her performance apart saying, in the manner of American Idols' Simon Cowell, that it was rubbish.

The club nearly rioted and heckled him down. No. 11 was not just the biggest dancer, but she seemed to have the most friends in the club. Women like Paloma and No. 11 will always flourish in Africa, where the slender variety much favoured in the west tends to be sneered at. A man will be ridiculed if his wife has not filled out in the right places after a year in marriage. It could be construed to suggest he is mean, an unloving husband, or a wife beater.

Likewise, a husband who is still thin after a year or so in marriage reflects badly on his wife. She is a bad wife, the in-laws will conclude. In Cote d'Ivore, women inject all sorts of things in their buttocks so they can grow big.
In many countries, even health-conscious women who exercise to lose weight worry about the bottoms shrinking with the rest of the body. As a result, there are many quack regimes for losing weight in all parts of the body, but the "bumper".

Why this African obsession with large booty? My sense is that in poor societies fat women - and men - are fancied because they represent that which is in short supply; prosperity and well being. The promise of an abundant tomorrow. Thin women, on the other hand, symbolise need and scarcity. This seems to be the case, because in Africa there are many women who struggle to be and to remain slender.

However, they are overwhelmingly middle class, where the desperate search for solace from symbols of prosperity one sees among the working and peasant classes is little or absent. One can expect that as soon as per capita income in most of Africa averages $2,000 and above, the prospects for ample women will nose-drive, and the premium for the slim ones will rise. Otherwise, for a long time to come, most thin women in Africa will mostly be confined to dating expatriates, a life of single motherhood, or marriage to men with well-endowed mistresses.

Mountains

2010-07-31T23:04:00.000-07:00

The Great Canadian Rocky Mountains

2010-07-31T22:57:00.000-07:00

www.newtimes.co.rw/index.php?issue=14338&article=4129&week=30

From the Hammock:

Lessons

LAST week I joined a group of friends to climb some of the most amazing Rocky Mountains in the world. As a first, I learned some important and priceless lessons that I would like to share with you today.

Many of you reading this would most certainly know much about mountains, is it not amongst the Great Lakes Region of the Great Rift Valley that you were born?

Therefore I run the risk of becoming Mr. ludicrous from those of you that might have climbed the likes of mountain Kilimanjaro and Rwenzori, even those of you whose highest peak might be Rwenzori water and Kilimanjaro beer.

The trek

We trekked a 16 kilometre uphill before we started the real mountain climbing, at this point waterfalls spewed from a mountain lake which was fed by mountain springs. The springs gave us the only luxury water bottles would be too heavy to carry; we hid them in the bush.

Observing the features from the base of the mountain was a lesson in humility; there were spots that seemed as though man would never capture them even with his facebook, twitter and Iphone, a place where even the precious wallet and camera were so much weight.

After a while, The crusts and dust of civilization were blown off faces, bodies were indeed interrogated, tortured and manipulated. A temporary victory of the mind.

As the altitude increased even the mind was having ideas of retreat, an interruption in the speech of somebody speaking to another was so much bother. The words that each person spoke as the angle of the mountain became ever steeper and sharper became fewer.

There was energy only to trek and you spoke only if you had to and if you were interrupted it was indeed offending.

I learned that climbing a mountain is as much a life skill and sport as a university degree or even a marathon. You start that journey as a closely knit group but the more distance the group covers the more isolated each individual becomes; by the time you reach the top you are alone and the satisfaction is also beyond words. I never got to the top of the peak but even from my vantage point I felt good and deeply was ego was bruised.

Breathtaking

A breath matters so much that as you climb you save up whatever energy is on your body. After walking for 12 kilometres in two hours we came across a waterfall rising above with its white colour and thundering myths, it appeared both mystical and majestic like the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. You had to raise your head at a high angle to be able to see where the lake was, above the waterfalls. Normally it is the other way around.

The only way upwards to the lake was by climbing a near 100-foot wall of cliff –the chain bolted into the mountain was the only thing keeping you from falling off the mountain.

At this point, a person getting out of their way to give you directions on where to place your foot and where to hold your hands onto seemed like a gift that only mothers give to their babies as they move from crawling on the ground to taking their first steps.

As we moved upwards to ever-sharper escarpments and ridges, holding a rock with bare hands and taking steps was indeed holding onto dear life. There everybody was holding on their own life’s, I’d hear only the breaths of my friends; words became too heavy.

At these moments each of us was alone and the simple decisions of where to step meant a choice between life and death. One mishap would mean falling off the mountain.

The higher we climbed the more we each separated from the group and went into a beautiful loneliness. First David Reize went with his wife Nikayla and after a while even they separated and took different routes.

Never tell the abilities and inabilities ofa person based on their gender

The adage that you can tell a book from its cover may hold true for books but it is far too misleading to be used while describing human beings and what they can and cannot do.

I learned this the hard way. I had initially been scared out of climbing up the high cliffs but when I saw a lady who I estimated to have the same body weight as mine I motivated myself that if she had made it up there; I too would make it. (PS. Nikayla; it was not you, it was the couple we met before climbing the first chain.)

Later I not only learnt that I was wrong but it was also a disrespectful statement to say a woman. While I was talking about this incident with Nikayla, it turned into a big debate about the status of women and what men think them.

I was even scared that it was becoming a discussion about class and race relations. I had to defend myself that I come from a country run by women.

And I never needed any proof about women and their strengths after all. Is it not Jane Mbabazi that raised my four siblings and me?

Mountains have many faces like humans

I also learned that like a human being, a mountain has many faces to it, when you stand at the bottom, the top, and west or wherever you always see different perspectives of the rocks, the gullies, waterfalls and the vegetation.

And they all tell unique and different tales.

AFRICA'S MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN - AND 'HANDSOMEST' MEN!

2010-07-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

Every day I get requests to do interviews, articles, book and thesis reviews, name it, about Africa. This week I got the strangest one.

I was asked which African country I thought had the most beautiful women, and the most handsome men! The researcher was actually doing some serious work on African aesthestics and how environments shape physical make up.

I will exclude Ugandan women and men in my listing, but you can be sure they CAME AMONG THE TOP SIX IN BOTH the female and male category in the top 10.
So here is a shortened list of the top 6 African countries with the most beautiful women and handsome men.

•MOST BEAUTIFUL AFRICAN WOMEN
1. Malians
2. Ethiopians
3. Angolans
4. Tanzanians
5. Rwandans
6. Somalis

MOST HANDSOME AFRICAN MEN
1. Senegalese
2. Cameroonians
3. Mozambicans
4, Rwandans
5. Egyptians
6. Burundians

*Don't ask how I reached the list. I decline to talk to the press.

Memoirs of a Mtwa, the forrest and the gorilla

2010-07-17T00:28:00.000-07:00

BY GEORGE KAGAME

A Korean proverb goes: “When two sharks fight; the shrimp suffers,” if that does not make sense as you may not be familiar with sharks and shrimps.

The local version of the proverb drives the point quite straight into your head and it goes: “When two Basopes fight; the Mtwa suffers” and he suffers for an extended period even after the two giants have stopped their fight.

You see the Basopes are not even giants after all but over the years they have built stereotypes against my people and me that it is cliché that a Mtwa is a pygmy; that rare thing that you only read about in storybooks. But my neighbour in the forest was a tall man, so tall he was always requested by the women in our forest community to pick fruit that was way up on the apex of fruit trees. Yet he was a Mtwa, his father Gudulia was well known too.

We lived in the forest; we loved the forest and knew how to take care of trees and bushes such that they would never dry or be cut down. We also existed peacefully with the animals too since mostly the animals acted as our defense shields against unwanted visitors; the animals were also too big for us to kill for pleasure.

Basope arrive

But our peace was disturbed when the Basope started arriving in our ancestral areas and started creating barriers. Barriers for crops, for their homesteads, barriers against other latecomers as well as barriers to keep us away from ever getting nearer these barriers.
The Basope subjugated us; we became the banter of their jokes.

even more Basope

But a short while later another group of people also came in the area and they also wanted a piece of our land for settlement. The new people who were similar in many ways to the earlier Basope negotiated their way to settling in. And settling in they did.

But soon afterwards the two were at each other’s neck and feet. Cue in violence, hatred, intrigue and downright madness. Apparently the First Basope were upset with the new Basope for cutting a share of the land to themselves, thereby reducing the portion of the first Basope. The second Basope did not stop on land; they also came with cows and even established a system of control and order. Placing themselves on top, lording it over the second Basope and they in turn lording it over us.
Baby bonanza and extermination

The population of the two visitors grew sporadically; with the first Basope reproducing at a rate that even spiders envied. My people and I were forced to move further into the forests ever vacating space for newly minted Basopes.
But even in the forests we were invaded as agriculture and further population growth found us. The first Basope were determined to win the battle of mothers and babies, their wives were particularly fertile in large parts thanks to the fertility of lands.

Perhaps that is the reason that the first Basope; having won the babies contest by far, even attempted to exterminate the second Basopes.
When the first Basope had issues with the later Basope the two were separated after widespread violence and death. The aftermath of this skirmish left the second Basope homeless and cultureless and in later years the First Basope attempted to wipe out their rivals completely that in JUST 100 days one million second Basopes were cut into pieces and thrown in rivers.

Who is watching who? the Mtwa and the gorilla

As a result of the contest between the two, we the Mtwas were reduced to nothings, we were not considered as equal human beings but little creatures upon which the Basopes poured their scorn and ridicule.

Somewhere along the way of their ‘development,’ the Basope stopped their violence and ventured deeper into the forests where we had been pushed. Inside the impenetrable forests they found that we were living amicably with a blessing of creatures that were not even heard of in other places on earth.

Oozing With arrogance and contempt, the Basopes now wanted us to vacate the forests for these animals and trees, how absurd?

That’s when we became what we are today. A bunch of incognitos, reduced to numbers sighted for sheer academic interest. We have been rendered landless, and are now living as squatters, surviving as potters and beggars, some of my childhood friends have resorted to crime, while even more have found a prosperous career in rebellion.

It does not matter what rebel groups we join, as long as we also have a right to the violence that for so long we have been subjected to. As a result I normally chat with my friends who are affiliated to several rebel groups-some of these groups in fact fighting against each other- but we don’t care. We have been reduced and forced into mercenaries.

Once we lived peacefully with the gorillas and the chimpanzees but unfortunately somebody came and took the pictures of the gorillas and chimps. These pictures attracted strange coloured people who came with even more cameras. The next we saw gorillas posing for pictures. People were paying in foreign currencies to watch the gorillas. Our comrade gorillas in the forest!
They were now very important.

Their pictures were beamed across the world, the animals acquired spin around them that even the most powerful Public relations firm could not achieve. Yet in all this nobody took our pictures and our stories, how we took care of the gorillas all those years in the forest before even the Basope arrived.

Our story has now become so blurry it resembles a puzzle.
That is because we are nowhere to be seen. The authorities have created game reserves and forest conservation areas where we once lived. Our land now belongs to the prestigious gorillas. Uhm, I wonder since when did animal rights become more important than human rights!

We are like a sore thumb and the authorities are eager to keep us far away from the visitors and their cameras.
My friend Mugabanya Mkolofi who was once very popular with the community belles is now a guide for these visitors that come to see the gorilla. But deep in his heart he is hurting. Reminiscing of the past times, he knows that if the Basope and others had not interfered with his abode he would be a powerful lord.

We could persevere through the foolishness of the Basopes; what we fear most however is the Mai Mai. These are cannibals; not only do they stop at displacing us from our environs as they search for gold and whatever else, they eat us. Like roast meat. According to the Mai Mai a serving of a Mtwa heart is a magic portion for bravery, a sort of Viagra for war!

donuwagiwabo@gmail.com

vox popping

2010-07-14T23:28:00.000-07:00

"Now Sancho tell me what everyone in the village is saying about me. Don't make anything up-I promise not to shout at you.”

“Well,” said Sancho, “the common people say you are mad and stupid. The posher people don’t approve of you calling yourself a nobleman, and the noblemen think you are getting ideas above your station. As for the rest of it, some people call you, ‘brave but unlucky,’ others, ‘polite but interfering,’ and others ‘bonkers but entertaining.”

Don Quixote

Miguel De Cervantes

In memory of William Muwanga victim of suicide bomb

2010-07-13T01:44:00.000-07:00

A Letter to a friend in Tanzania

BY GEORGE KAGAME

OMAR, as a Tanzanian and resident of Dar Salaam you understand very well the pain of terrorism.
Were it not in your city and Nairobi that US embassies were bombed in 1998, killing 214 and wounding 4100?

The bombings happening simultaneously in the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar Salaam had effectively brought terrorism on the frontiers where East Africa meets with the new world order.

“Hi; Osama Bin Laden here!”
In fact they did more than that. They brought you Osama Bin Laden and his colleague Ayman Al Zawahiri in 1998. The two were talking about the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, the possible break up of Sudan and the invasion of Somalia. Dustbin Laden was upset about all those things and so he decided to bomb the US embassies in protest.

WHERE suicide bombings and bombings in general were expected to blow up London, Moscow, Madrid, New York, Kabul, Baghdad and add yours cities; they were really not an African concern.

When we were growing up the closest terrorism came to us was the Algerian Ninjas in the mid 90s. The ninjas were reputed to disappear "just like that," other than those crazy ninjas we never had bombings. And terrorism was a thing like fashion. Happening in New York, Paris and London!

And somehow it was a problem for those crazy Arabs with their beards, oh yes we also watched 24.

And yet East Africa beat New York, Moscow, Madrid, London, Kabul and Baghdad in the bombing championships.

Terrorism gets personal
I would expect that you might have known some individuals that died in the Dar Salaam US Embassy bombings or even the horrendous one in Nairobi. They were regular people, who never cared for politics even.

For you it is not just a talk of numbers and figures whenever terrorism is mentioned in the news. You have a personal experience with terrorism and like death, the things becomes entirely different when it starts happening in your neighbourhood.

Awkward conversations
Yes, twice it happened in Nairobi and Dar Salaam but for me that was far away in the city. Then I moved to the city too.

And that is when talking about terrorism became like a conversation about racism. Mysterious and awkward.
The people that took much interest in it were crazy.

Starting with the active participants-the suicide bombers -to others that make a living off it talking, and even fine people, they were all crazy. I never wanted to have a conversation with such people.
Because there would be a lot of misunderstandings, so much sensitivities and awkwardness!

It gets closer to home
Alright; this is when your sympathy.
Keziron was a good kid. He was a close friend to my best friend at the time Edongu Ronald.

Ronald or Edro as he called himself was one of the brightest boys in the school; he was competing with Frank Mugisha another genius in economics by our standards. That outstanding class of 2001 in Katikamu Secondary School also included Muwanga William aka Keziron.

Keziron was interesting in that he never spoke English. He protested the speaking of English as the lingua franca of the school and spoke exclusively Luganda as a sign of loyalty to his King Ronald Muwenda Mutebi of Buganda.

It was always a paradox, if he did not speak English, how did he manage to write and think well in it?

Keziron for all his protest against English was a fanatic of European football and his favourite club was Manchester United.
That was one of the first and major things for which he was famous. He loved his king and Manchester United period.

The World Cup Final and 70 virgins in heaven
Keziron was at Kyadondo Rugby Grounds on Sunday 11 July 2010 to watch the World Cup Final between Spain and Netherlands and was killed in the bomb blasts at halftime. Even the suicide bombers had to watch some football first before they blew up! As if the 70 virgins in heaven are not enough for him/her? Damn it!

The bombs killed Keziron along with 73 people.

One of the things the news highlighted as the story evolved was that Al Shabab; a Somali religious and militant group of bearded men were happy with the efficiency and motive of the bombs and later admitted to carrying out the bombs.

Omar, the suicide bombers are nowadays killing people you know. No longer a story you read about in the newspaper. It is a reality in your life.
And suddenly George Bush was a not crazy afterall.

Terrorism is the one thing whose conversation about I would rather pass. I just don’t understand what it is that is the crap with terrorism. And I don’t want to. What is it that is so hard to figure out really to stop this thing? How come we are talking advancement in technology and solving other problems.

Even for poverty we have the MDGs. That sounds like a hardware application for an awesome video game but it is an important solution to poverty. Just think about it. What is the difference between PS3, Ibox360 and MDG?

That’s evidence enough that we are working on poverty. That conversation we can have. It is also very easy to talk about charity, development aid, and millennium goals, NGO, HIV/Aids and more donor aid please!!!!

But with terrorism people start talking of Israel, Jews, Arabs, Islam, oil, and; you can add your issue too! It becomes a conversation of extremes and passions.

And then I ask myself; “What’s up with the Somalis really?” It is not just the Al Shabab that is fucked up with them Somalis. They have not had much going on their way really.

It is said that they, along with the Ethiopians were the only Africans that were ever colonized. And look what they got?

From Siad Barre they got Mohammed Farrah Aideed. You remember him? The one who brought you the famous BLACK HAWK DOWN series? The movie about 18 US soldiers who died when their chopper was brought down in Mogadishu in 1993, they had their bodies pulled throughout Mogadishu to the global shame of the US and Bill Clinton.

Do you remember them choppers that also did the job in the Afghan and Iraq war where uncle Saddam Hussein was deposed? Yes we saw his statue fall, didn’t we?
But did you watch the Black Hawk Down?

But yet I miss uncle George Bush. He was on the other side of the coin in the conversation about terrorism. HE tried to tackle it practically other than be mouthing on it with declarations and what do they have there in Iran? Sanctions?

Bush for all his weaknesses, I cannot blame him for setting the globe rolling in terrorism. The thing was there way before he became president and hell; he went for it.

Omar; the big picture of Somalia was designed by President Bush and Ethiopia when they chased away the bearded zombies in 2008. Ethiopia at the time overrun Somalia, Installing a government appropriately named as Transitional Somalia Government or something awkward as TSG, LIKE an application for a video game itself.

The TSG like all applications was short-lived and was chased away by the Al Shabab, It as not clear what happened to them Islamic Court Union, the predecessors of TSG.

And when Mr. Mouth ON Him Barrack Obama replaced Uncle George look what happened? Oh how I remember seeing Uncle Bush in Kigali in 2008!!!!!!
I miss him!

donuwagiwabo@gmail.com

: MTN and how World Cup Citizens have mouths on them!

2010-07-07T23:33:00.000-07:00

From the Hammock

4 July 10

Majukumu aka responsibility: Everything about him is irritating, he is smart and that’s okay but he also comes across as if he is ever driving the point home and proving a point to himself that indeed as advertised, he is smart.

I don’t like Majukumu sometimes but it is inevitable to recognize him. His turf stretches from Johannesburg, through East and West Africa. Others call him MTN, but I disagree, I think MTN is his poster face. MTN puts in the work and makes Majukumu’s money.

In fact MTN’s motto can be his logo; “everywhere you go,” and like many latecomers in the Citi, Majukumu has a mouth on him. Just think about it for a second, how many people used MTN to communicate this Sunday morning, and then consider the mouth doing the communication. How busy? How important?

After mouthing his way to bringing the World Cup to Africa he is now demouthing it away, dismissing it as big business, the usual suspects; Coca Cola, McDonalds (poor McDonalds,) the Jabulani, beer and even bigger countries.

And talking about Africa’s World Cup how come there is never been a European Cup or even American one?
Is it not because those countries are so diverse that one country cannot represent them? Is it not true that most of the Africans who played in the African teams Cameron, Nigeria, South Africa, Algeria, and Ivory Coast also have EU citizenships?

Many of the African players in the six African teams also played in the most prestigious leagues in Europe just like the players from Brazil, Argentina and Spain.

Of the Algeria’s 23 players at the 2010 World Cup, 17 had French citizenship and 6 had represented France at junior level. The Algerian Coach: was the only African coach in the world cup and even he exited in the preliminary rounds of the tournament.

African time my foot; it is a very good thing the world cup but it is not African time. And yet all the African teams failed miserably?

See the Nigerian president Jonathan Goodluck has more to his leadership than an appropriate name as he has suspended Nigeria’s football from international tournaments until the Nigerians find out; ”what’s up?” with their talent and mediocrity.

Majukumu is yet another lazy African elite.

Mtali: (he can speak for himself)

What’s up with these cities of the World Cup? Drakensburg, Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, Pretoria, Durban, Rustenburg, Dutchburg, Franconstenburg, Englishburg(and those shrewd and crazy Bafokeng had to appear here also.) Do you remember them Bafokeng? They are the people that had a kingdom in South Africa throughout the time of colonialism and apartheid.
Somehow…

The kingdom was within the country of South Africa where apartheid and its predecessors had ensured black people and their kingdoms were irrelevant.

The Bafokeng had some smartness; they bought land from government and continued their kingdom under semi autonomous rule. At least the even crazier Boers believed in good old capitalism.

Therefore when the South African government banned gambling, the Bafokeng and some white South African types built Sun City. The Bafokeng were considered a separate nation in South Africa.

Today Sun City is known for a different spin. But the Bafokeng were still able to build this World Cup stadium from which England were chased out of the tournament by Germany? Totally a cool tribe that one.

And talking about tribes. Is it not odd that the only African ethnic group that has the same name as the mother continent is that of Afrikaans?

Of all Africans, these are white. Indeed the rainbow country.

The truest and closest to a rainbow nation I know of is Brazil and boy; are they having a wonderful time in African time? They make Argentina look indeed talented and lucky rather than efficient.

And what’s up with Africa, FOOTBALL and the World Cup? We are failing so bad that we’re accustomed to being the cute under dogs in everything.

It is not just football where we have a lot of promise and potential that we never fulfil. If you thought that making it into the big league, as a sportsman is almost impossible ask local musicians how they have developed their talents and you will be shocked.

Think about the relationship between football and politics. Politics is heated because it is the only avenue that one must take if ever they will achieve any meaningful accomplishments in life. The universally accepted ones at least, a family, a job and a home. Politicians rule in Africa.

We all bend to their whims, cruelty and violence.
Semi illiterate power brokers on the other hand manage sport; they operate with a mystery and they are mostly a hybrid between businessmen, witch doctors, politicians and peasants.

The day we demystify politics in Africa and demand of our leaders the same results as we demand of sportsmen then it will be our time.
African time.

Mtali: noise, noise, noise. That’s what you are all making all the time. Noise. Talking without speaking, hearing without listening. We’re fed up of people like you.

Ends

From the Hammock : Football not among “things of note” in EAC

2010-07-02T01:34:00.000-07:00

BY GEORGE Kagame

But in consolation even reclusive North Korea finally opened up; albeit only briefly.

Misery is being subjected to the hooh hah of football and The World Cup when you don’t care what the hell it is about.
mean, what really? You wonder where the sentiment comes from. I once had friends who would swear their lifetime allegiance to Argentina and Arsenal.

Conte was a fanatic of Manchester United and Italy, but secretly he hoped Argentina was a better team. Conte’s real name was Tusiime Anthony and he was a staunch catholic too, he had never been to England or Argentina but hoped to someday make the trip; somehow!

East African sport is bizarre; when people from far off places hear that football is popular here they never realize that our interest in it is only limited to watching it on TV. And even that is watching the football played in Europe and not here Africa.

But Football is important because for many it is the only chance to see and watch television in their lives. When the World Cup happens, the anticipation it carries equals that of Christmas. In Kigali we have businesses starting out with a television set, a bunch of benches and a shack nearby a market. These in most cases provide the only real leisure time activity of many in the country.

A football match between Arsenal and Manchester United is much more anticipated than even the budget and Independence Day ceremonies combined. On FM radio stations Competitions are held, draws, raffles and picks, prizes, awards, airtime and “so much more.” Most Rwandans do not care who the minister of the environment or public service is but they know the entire line up of Arsenal and Barcelona.

There are very stark contrasts and fortunes between the football being watched and that being played around here.
I have met The lumpen, a self styled expert on English football. In the pub they call him Arsenal.

For those of you who are wondering what Arsenal, it is an English football club managed by a Frenchman who is an economist and I got those facts spewing from the lumpen in less than three minutes of acquaintance.

Maybe we love to watch the football quite a lot on television so much that we have no time to play the sport or go to the stadiums to support those who play it or we have despaired from the administrators of the sport that we don’t care what they do anymore.

When Tanzania hosted Brazil in a friendly in Dar Salaam before the Brazilians flew to South Africa for the 2010 World Cup, and lost the match by 5:1, the Tanzanian players were congratulated for the loss by all sundry in the country. They were expected to lose by a larger margin. And I won’t tell you about CECAFA as you will forget it by the end of this paragraph anyway.

There is no platform of success that East Africa is renown for in competitive football, the biggest export from the region so far is a certain Kenyan aptly known as Mariga;

“many sheep,” who plays for Inter Milan. Perhaps the West Africans have been much adventurous in football, but they also remain whipping boys when prestige stares them in the face.

Football really is an extension of our politics where the most powerful people in the game are also the same in any other sector of the economy. And if politicians in Africa are corrupt; as advertised; yet they are the rule makers, just imagine how far more corrupt the football administrators are. Many like the politicians above them in the pecking order of “people of note” have no or limited expertise, experience and skill.

And like other sectors of many economies in east Africa, it is a waste, pure carelessness. A mess.

But for its mess, football is an outlet. In the days of dictators and liberators in east Africa and indeed on the entire continent, The World Cup was the only event where east Africans got a chance to see a TV. Personally, as an eight year old in the early 90s, I watched Italia in the middle of Lake Victoria on an island known as Kibbanga.

On this island there was no telephone, no radio, health centre or even a road but somehow we were able to watch the World Cup. It was our only contact with the other world.

Also football enables fair competition and debate to take place, the kind that is unheard of in politics, business and legislature.

The good thing about being a journalist in Africa is that when there’s a mess in sport the coverage is freed of other restraints in the mainstream media about politics and its cousins. The mess is much more scrutinized than politics because it attracts less serious people.

“People OF note,” are too cool to be bothered by politics and crucially the donors are not interested in your sports, you may run, walk, sleep or kick about, as you want.

Donors are talking about serious things like human rights, world peace, saving endangered animals, climate change and capacity building. Football or sport IS way down the pecking order of “things of note.”

A sports reporter will therefore uncover details of a fraud scheme in football and they are quite aplenty and expose it without sanctions and limits from big brother.

As such, there are resignations in sports and some form of procedure is followed. In politics there’s limited scope of unearthing a fraud and corruption. News comes at its time.
In these circumstances of relative freedom to compete on the pitch, east African football administrators outdo each other in competing for attention, sympathy, success, prestige and good old bragging rights amongst human beings.

For its sheer fun, try watching a match between APR FC and Rayon Sport in Kigali; YOU will enjoy it immensely. If you happen not to be a football fan, at least the traffic dilemma in the city and Kwa’Rubangura that day will be less congested and so you will get home earlier.

But if east African football is misery, beyond misery is being a North Korean football fan or even worse national team player. In that country they have never watched a live World Cup match or any other live programme on their lone television station. So last week’s decision to show North Korea against Portugal was a blessing.

But it was a classical Case of Typical wrong timing.
North Koreans used to seeing only positive news about their country were shocked when their first opportunity to watch live television ended in disaster with Portugal humiliating the dear brother leader’s team seven nothing.

Television and the World Cup were immediately halted and positive news restored.

badass day off.

2010-06-21T22:26:00.000-07:00

Yes.
I have a day job, the kind of job that you have too. That you wake every morning and sometimes night and then attend to.
Like you i also attend the altar of earning the bread. And like you I worship every day. Well like you I have day offs from the altar. That is badass.

One should not have days off. All days must be days on.
Like they write on radio studios; "On Air." Just imagine having "off air" on your doorstep, or somewhere to brand you at any given time of the day.

Today I have a "Day Off" REALLY, that sounds like a copy edit for a trendy advert post, and then the opposite: "Day on."

Why should one then have a day off, a sort of an "off air day" placed in front the studio room of a radio station.. Imagine being off air. Thats also badass.
Really? I don't need a day off. All my days need to be day on. Not day off, not for me. It is forever 'Day On."
Because I am cool like that.

So I have a day off, really? DAY off on monday? But somedays off are very beautiful like the one for today. Imagine a day off that starts with a live World Cup MATCH on my bed. First thing in the morning. At 5 am. North America does things to you. Thats also badass.

watching a Live World Cup game at 5 am on a Monday morning taking place in Johannesburg is nice and right. But somting is wrong somewhere. It is geography I know, wait where is the map?

Yes, I see it is 10.00 PM here in Calgary, the sun is out and shining brightly. Seriously? the sun is out and shining brightly at 10.00 pm? In fact children are playing football in local school pitch. three boys, they are playing kick about, they exchange stints in goal posts.
The forth one runs, he makes very fast start and stop short sprints

10.00 pm? the sun is out?

There is a God. He is somewhere there. He is watching over everything at his time. Time to him is a trick. Seriously? sun is shining at 10.00 pm?

The of the kids doing said sprints is a good kid. He is 16 and plays football for Chinook United FC. He is training for a tournament in Seattle US. His origins are as far back as Ottomans, you know those badass people from sometime century. They were apparently great people according to wikipedia.

Now they pass off their days as China Turk. Otherwise how really will you remember some province that is controlled by China but somehow they are Turkish. Turkmen, Shinza men or whatever.

I think they are some country or province somewhere who are fighting for liberation and struggling for this spin or that. Are we not doing that our selves. Everyone of you that will ever get to read here are that place with a weird name. Having days off and days on.

When one gets their days on and off right in Rwanda they earn the title of "Msirie.: which it is much more fluent in its English translation; the serious one.

So If you don't get your days and hours right you don't get to qualify being be "the serious one" by Rwandan standards leave alone Calgary.

that is also badass.

Day offs must be abolished and the sun must shine until 10.00 pm everyday. That way God can look at us all he wants. Not checking upon on us his time as he does now. Johannesburg+5 am+World Cup+Vuvuzela+LA Lakers+sun+10.00 pm=
badass.

We must have day ON all the time.

Downtown, the train, the university, the library, the bus, the football pitch, The World Cup, the Ottoman. I saw a Vuvuzela live on TV today, it was being blown by fans of LA Lakers who were cheering their team in the victory parade of their 2010 NBA Championship in los angeles where they defeated the Boston Celtics.
Talk about patents!!!!!

A Vuvuzela inspired space programme for Africa

2010-06-20T00:22:00.000-07:00

From the Hammock : Africa and our Vuvuzela inspired space programme

BY GEORGE KAGAME

With the World Cup in South Africa spinned as Africa’s time to showcase whatever we have here; the talking season is in frenzy.

Pundits, serious people, important people, people of note and even our fellow Citizens are talking. Albeit in drink filled mouthfuls and typical Third Street foul mouths; you can call it ranting.

Captured below are some of the things that concern our three favourite Citizens transcribed from a discourse taking place in that favourite of watering holes; The Ship&Anchor in downtown Citi.

Naturally this is a good time to be in Africa or to be African, it is the World Cup for Christ’s sake on our doorstep. A global feast of joy and happiness.
Don’t you reckon?

Africa is now welcome to the cheer party of the world. But like the script goes; if you come late to the party you try to make up for lost time. (Ask UN representatives of their opinions regarding Muamar Gadafi’s UN summit speech in New York recently.)

South Africans are late comers even to an African party but in a very short time they have successfully upset the established cheer party by their Vuvuzelas and this has many Citizens talking in space.

Bwana Mdogo: “It was a laughable idea a year ago when it was announced that the DR Congo government was planning on launching a space programme. And no; we are not talking about the space as in political space, media space, personal space, democracy space and space in whatever fashion it comes in but the space of mars, the sun, rockets and scientists.

DR Congo and a space programme really? You must be joking.

The project is still in incubation but not many people take it serious. This is due to the fact that despite many countries in Africa being more developed and more stable than DRC, we have not yet embraced the space thing.

The industry of satellites, rockets, and general space has simply not yet blossomed around here. Predictably, it is said that South Africa has nuclear technology, but not even they have space.

As such there’s a very limited presence of Africa(ns) in space, the only known African who ever made it there was Michael Shuttleworth, a young and wealthy white South African investor. And even he had to pay 20 million dollars to go there as a tourist.

While other people have been talking space, computers and satellites we are still stuck with the pre cold war technology of those poor miserable Russians and their notorious arms dealers.

So when DR Congo announced their space programme we remarked; “seriously Congo?” we knew that a solution to our space conundrum would have to come from South Africa. And indeed our answers were answered recently in Africa’s creative hub; Johannesburg.

Our first encounter with space was not ideal. It comes across as irritating; like someone you cannot stand in a staring contest. See? We have been left behind in the space race for so long yet we also need a presence there and if noble means won’t take us there we have no choice but to creep upon space with our noise.

Episode one started on 11 June 2010 with a plastic horn. The now famous Vuvuzela, blown by South African crowds thronging football stadiums to watch The World Cup, apparently the sound produced by these horns has reached the science space.

Never mind that many visitors have complained about its noise; upon which FIFA President Sepp Blatter has responded; “Seriously, this is Africa!”

Maama nani: Perhaps they brought the World Cup to a wrong place, somewhere really bad, a place with a lot of crime and violence, rape, muggings, and HIV/Aids.
And since it will take a little bit longer to see those other things, the poor Vuvuzela has been catapulted into a serious talking point of Africa’s World Cup. It might as well be the everlasting image and memory of the 2010 World Cup.

I have an idea for a Vuvuzela moment; I suggest we build a statue in memory of this horn and how it made us heard in space. Caption it with a statement like; “we made contact with space minus the drama and the cold war.”

We are good at this kind of thing, we build statues everywhere in Africa, and in fact recently we just got a cathedral of statues, the mother of them statues across the world.

This one was even a prophesy of Kenya’s Ngugi Wa Thiongo in his book; “The Wizard of the Crow.” The cathedral of African statues built by Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade in Dakar cost more than 28 million dollars.

But in fairness to Wade, the statue is that of a guy with abs, a marvellous woman by his side and they are even carrying a cute child. The African Renaissance project as it is known could have been worse, just imagine it being the face of Wade himself while at the same time he earns a fortune from it from tourists.

Indeed Africa, space and sports are good topics for future generations to interest themselves.

Mtu Mzima: Take away your craze!

Take away your Africa and its World Cup spin. I will watch football even if the World Cup was held in Tonga, Fiji or Samoa.

Please don’t tell me about apartheid, crime, violence, HIV/Aids, spin this spin that. I have known about these issues for a very long time; very eloquently told through the lives of Lucky Dube and Brenda Fasie. And don’t even tell me about your Vuvuzela. This is sport.

South Africa is not different from Germany or Bhutan. I don’t care who hosts the thing. It is not the place I feel attached to. It is the play, the competition and the story of those countries that are competing. Save me the drama not connected to the sport.

The 2010 Marathon

2010-06-08T13:25:00.000-07:00

I have no particular reason why I entered the thing in the first place. Oh I remember, I read that the winner would be rewarded with 1000 dollars. I calculated that At an investment of 90 dollars as the sign on fee I’d make a profit of 900 dollars. Yes, I’m that dumb.

This was Feb 2010 and I had just paid membership fees at the downtown Eau Claire YMCA gym at a subsidized fee for people with low incomes. All they required was a bank statement and a pay stub to show that one worked and that they earned below the average pay check in the province that is 21 dollars per hour.

So after paying for three months the question arose as to what would motivate me to come everyday to the gym, normally payment was enough motivation as the fee I had paid even after subsidizing is still disturbing in itself.
So I listed for the marathon such that I’d use the membership to the gym productively. The 1000 dollars prize therefore became secondary incentive for I knew to win the thing I needed to be without a job and concentrate exclusively on training.

I started training in Feb, running on average 25 km four times a week and by the start of May the body had got sick. The knees were hurting and I walked about with a rattle and a wobble. I irritated even myself a lot.
From Feb through to April I run in along the riverbanks of the Bow river in downtown Calgary starting at Eau Claire and running all the way to Canada Olympic park in the northwest and back to Eau Claire. This would take an average of three hours and 30 k. In the gym I stretched out, looked/ stared at the belles doing their work outs and chatted with Jesus Fikr a friend I met there who originally came from Eriteria.

He worked in the gym and occasionally gave me hints on developing strength in the hips and legs such that I could build endurance in the run. Fikr is also an ardent soccer fan and he supports Chelsea. We talked a lot about sport and women. Most times I looked forward going to the gym just to chat with Fikr.

But the marathon was too overwhelming. The thought of running 42.2km in two hours and a half-which was my initial target made my stomach cringe.

I used to be an athlete in Kako Secondary School from 1997 to 1998 and even qualified for the All Africa post-primary Championships in Abuja Nigeria 1997. I had also competed and won in the Buganda King’s birthday athletics meet held in MAsaka in 1997 in the 10000 metres slot as well as running in the Uganda national athletics championships held in Jinja in 1997.

Come marathon race day with the right knee in pain but generally feeling fit I went to bed at 1 am after drinking two beers, a late night walk and general procrastination involving mostly reading soccernet.com stories.

These are absolutely wrong things to do while preparing for the longest run of your life. First according to the greatest runner of all time Haile Gabre Selassie one needs to train for a maximum of three hours, run on average 30 k and then eat healthy foods. On race one need to get to bed early, say if you are running on Sunday, Saturday must be set aside for rest and if possible massage. And the meal prior to the race must be eaten two hours before the race starts.

I was up at 4am took a shower and Mike my housemate drove me to the starting line at Bridgeland and Memorial just next to the city train stop. For my breakfast I drank a bottle of powerade cake, banana and two sausages. It was bad as I had to endure four toilet stops during the race and it reduced my time almost 15 minutes.

At the start line I met Doug Driedger a fellow with whom I go Bethel Baptist Church. Driedger is 52 and a graphics designer in some big company in the city, we had not spoken with him before that meeting other than the usual after service chit chats. But He is a seasoned runner. He has already done three marathons on top of the mother of them all, the Boston marathon. I think he was diagnosed with some disease a few years back and as a result he decided to dedicate his body and free time in raising awareness to the disease.

Doug was to be indeed helpful.

He set the starting pace early in the race and gave me some insights on strategy, all I knew was that I was going to need to run 2hours non stop at a pace of four minutes per kilometer and after I’d need some divine intervention to complete the remaining time and distance to reach the finish line.

We started out with Doug and when he stopped for water a sped past and never run with him again. He over took me towards the end of the race when I had outrun my body, my wits and perseverance. I was at the time relying on divine power. Doug beat me by 6 minutes.

I had on my Nokia phone working as an mp3 player. The music paying on it was what I had used during training. A 2005 collection of reggae as well as a 1990s hip hop mixtape. Those two would lift me up for two hours and twenty minutes. After that I had some songs of Damien Marley, Israel Vibration, Rex Mundi, Tupac, Sizzla, Eagles, Cocoa T, Richie Spice, Wyclef Jean and Bob Marley.

I started powerfully and kept to the four minute pace up to the one and a half hours mark by which time I had run almost 26 kilometres.
But that is even going to far.

The HIV/Aids wagon in Africa follows economic growth

2010-06-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

1996 Uganda was a boom. It was boom boom time everywhere, or so it seemed.
The economy was doing very well; international coffee prices were still favourable to Ugandans who grew some of the best coffee in the world at the time.

fish exports from Lake Victoria were also beginning to grow. Most importantly, the Indians, and their expulsion from Uganda earlier , remember them? The ones that brought you the Last King of Scotland!

By the mid 1990s they were returning back after being invited by the Ugandan reigning president Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. The president also ordered for the Indians property and land that had been confiscated by Idd Amin Dada to be returned to the rightful owners. The returning Indians, and their cousins from Pakistan. It did not matter, they were the Indians.

The Indians had come to Uganda upon the invitation of the British to construct the famous Uganda Railway.

When the Indians initially known as the Coolies had finished building the railroad and the British Empire long gone after the collapse of colonialism, the Indians refused to go back to their country. They stayed forever.
The British left the economy of Uganda in Indians hands and the politics to the Ugandans, the relationship between the Indians and the Ugandans after the departure of the British was well captured in the movie; The Last King of Scotland

Museveni came as the ultimate good character against in the said movie. He stabilized Uganda.
By 1996 Uganda was indeed a pearl.
The Ugandan shilling was exchanging fairly well against the US dollar. As a result many Ugandans were able to go Dubai to trade, many even went to Japan and started motor vehicle import businesses across East Africa. Dubai was the first adventure for many hustling Africans to achieve success.

When Museveni invited back the Indians the economy went BOOM. Ugandan seriously challenged Kenya’s position as the economic powerhouse of the region, most of the Indians that fuelled this new birth of Uganda had settled in Kenya earlier when Amin expelled them.
They fired up Uganda.

Along With the economic success of Uganda came other less fortunate things. First among them was HIV/Aids. Long before the disease made serious headlines elsewhere in the world; Uganda was suffering the worst of the disease. Major commercial lines and corridors were at the centre of an epidemic, which nobody at the time was even able to comprehend.

In the simple analysis of many Ugandans it was a curse from the witchcrafts, wizards and magicians.
The witchdoctors, traditional healers smelled a rat. They increased their services. Sometimes advertising their services in their neighbourhoods. Listing the number of curses, diseases, demons and punishments the magicians were capable of commanding.

It became normal to see roadside adverts for traditional healers, yet in contrast, witchcrafts were a of particular interest amongst Ugandans. Many suspected people of witchcraft were burnt in public in some places.
Buyikwe and Bukunja in Mukono district were highly respected in matters witchcraft.
Aids was simply a matter of witchcraft.

One of the first public victims of HIV/Aids in Uganda was a superstar musician known as Philly Bongole Lutaya. Lutaya had done a first for his generation on the continent. He had successfully created himself a career in the music industry of Sweden. Of all places, seriously?

He also became the first person to serious start a discussion about the stigma of the disease. The prevalence rates of HIV/Aids in the country was as high as 17 percent of the population.
Jinja on the shores of Lake Victoria, Rakai district on the trade corridor linking Rwanda, DR Congo and Burundi, Kampala the capital and also on the shores of lake Victoria as well as Busia on the boarder with Kenya were all battling with a disease which left disaster and desert in those communities. They were also the trade hubs in the region.

Museveni was the first leader whose face became synonymous with the fight against HIV/Aids in the world and success or strategy stories the face told. The coinage of a new breed of African leaders was fully inscribed on his image. Ugandan became the go to place for all the world do gooders. Museveni then cemented his place as a statesman.

Rwakitura and the triangle that it created from Lyantonde to Masaka was the Mecca for all the visitors and people of note in the country as well as many who had an interest in fighting HIV/Aids. Yet the place was also among the most severely attacked b the disease. The soldiers guarding the presidential home as well as the intelligence network they held were the chief medium through which the entire trade hub was spread with the deadly disease.
There was also a contradiction of a president fighting a strange disease everywhere and his soldiers spreading the same disease amongst the local people.

In 1997 my Mother Jane Mbabazi was working for President Museveni and his wife Janet at the headquarters of the above-mentioned hub of HIV/Aids and trade. Museveni’s home in Rwakitura unlike others spread across the country was a mini commercial and social centre in itself. It covered the triangle of Lyantonde, Rushere and Mbarara. Rwakitura with the soldiers guarding the presidential compound, the large household staff and other supporting agencies was a hub. My mother headed this hub which had its own school known as Karo Karungi a Runyankore name appropriately loosely translated as ‘a good village’.

This school never had an examination centre because it was populated by privileged kids in the neighbourhood of Museveni's country home, they were not academically disciplined and they were racists. I attended the school for only three weeks.

On holiday from boarding school I visited with my mother and since The nearest and biggest commercial centre to Rwakitura was Lyantonde I made frequent trips there, for family errands as well as ‘a night out on the town.’
Lyantonde was a town besieged with HIV/Aids but since nobody or just a few people at the time knew the disease in the way we know it today everyone called it an invention of witchcraft.

For those of us in our early teenage years we were told that most people in Lyantonde were agents of witchcrafts, magicians and wizards. We were told not to even dare eat the food in the town. We carried everything we needed around us. We were even warned not to go in washrooms in Lyantonde. Any contact with a person from Lyantonde meant contact with the magicians, witches and wizards. We were even warned not to look in their eyes. We were told tales that some men and boys who went with a woman from Lyantonde after a night in the clubs would wake up wrapped around by a snake or the would turn out to have a goats hooves in the morning.

Unfortunately this became the misery of People Living with HIV/Aids in the country, the stigma around patients was so huge. A person that contacted the disease was immediately fired from their jobs, with no income the women resorted to prostitution and the number of victims multiplied.

I996 was just two years after the South Africans had gotten rid of Apartheid, the embargoes and sanctions that had bedeviled the country during the white supremacy rule were loosened and South Africa became the giant of Africa. Their economy was expanding; they started the first mobile telecommunication industry on the continent and spread the industry across Africa. They started with Uganda first in 1998. I had the pleasure to work in the construction company that built the MTN switchboard in Bugolobi at the time. I was aged 16.

South Africans had been under the yoke for so long the end of apartheid granted them freedoms never before dreamed of, they took this freedom with both hands. And that was about the time that HIV/Aids attacked them with vigour. By the end of 2000 prevalence rates in the country were 12 percent.

Unlike in Uganda were the disease concentrated its wings in this landlocked country and mainly never affected neighbours like Rwanda, DR Congo, Tanzania and Kenya; in South Africa the epidemic spread across to Botswana and currently the two leading economies of Africa are threatened with the HIV/Aids.

2010 Crossing the Calgary Marathon finish line with Doug Driedger

2010-06-03T23:35:00.000-07:00

The threesome dance for milk and the movies,

2010-05-29T01:25:00.000-07:00

The story of Citimen

Msela thought about the famed cow walk among his people. Armed with a stick normally hanging around their necks, his people had walked about with their cows from one area to another as though God owed them a loan. And God had not paid that loan back for a while now. So they walked about with the arrogance that suggested that God was shy of meeting them in broad day light.

God comes to our place only in the evenings, they talked amongst themselves.

From region to region They chased water, grass and tried to escape the biting sun in the process. There was no license both existing or required , no regulation. There was simply nothing other than the Citimen and their cows. Some people called them Nomads, they called themselves Citimen.

They even formed a virtual triangle, involving the Citimen, cows, water and grass. The Luwero triangle series brought you a memorable man. He was named Forest Whitater. Whittaker won the Oscar academy award for a leading actor in Last King of Scotland. Remember that one? About the events that had befallen the Citimen.

Note:

The thing was acted in my town, right in front of my street, both in real life, in a book and then in a movie.
Right on the street where my uncle owned a bread shop. Across the same street was even the most famous Sax Pub. Sax pub was actually a trick which its owner a certain Citiman known as david Karinda had invented to sell sex. At Sax pub, a woman for a night would cost you a minimum of 10000 shillings, roughly six Canadian dollars.

Sax pub sold sex, but the owners played with the letters. The E was substituted by the A. That way Sax pub escaped being banned under the ambiguous public sex and obscenity law. The law was promoted by a recently born again Christian minister in the new government known as Nsaba Buturo. Before his rebirth, Buturo had been a torturous man in the Last King of Scotland Series. Oiling the machinery of Milton Obote in the 1980s."

Back to the cow walk,

Armed with his stick and the cows ahead of him, the Citiman schemed his way through the Luwero triangle. The beauty of plateaus and valleys in Kiboga and the tropical midnight summer nights Of Mubende.
A nomad, a peasant, he worshiped a cow. A Bihogo! With his cow and baseball bat shaped walking stick, he roamed the triangle. The stick was most times used in starting or settling violence.

During his walks with the cow, the Citiman was in the path of the threesome of the Last king of Scotland. In real life, book and movie. As if that was not enough, Citimen went further and brought you Hotel Rwanda. Have you heard of that one
The triangle dance pointing ever at water, grass and the sun left an indelible trail in the wake of the Citmen.
They figured out the weather seasons,

Without the radio and Internet network. Citimen simply had none.

in their daily tribulations Citimen communicated by howling on the top of their voices to connect day cattle herders with their colleagues searching for water in the valleys during scorching sunny days. If the cows were thirsty there would be no milk early or later in the day.
A world without milk was unimaginable.
Water was necessary but milk was crucial.

It was known as Kuhira.

Citimen did not quite figure out how other tribesmen in the triangle survived without milk. Milk was the oil. The oil of the body and the land. The citimen’s daily search for the water to make the milk was as fascinating as it was interesting.

For example in one instance, once every day, somebody in the family in charge of searching for water would howl from hills away to folks in search of water. They responded to the echo of each others voice. A non word battle of noise and the winds. They were known as Imiyaga.

If one tried to explain this incident to a person who grew up around an ipod, Internet, phone and facebook they would certainly make faces and turn eyes.

Beyond shouting at each other citimen walked.
In their footpaths in the valleys and shadows of Luwero Triangle they were met by even more weird people, as if having the unfortunate fate of living under the era and legacy of Last King of Scotland and Hotel Rwanda, was not enough.

When Life Happens to George Kagame. 2002-2006

2010-05-13T23:29:00.000-07:00

At university I was a student of journalism, but other than listening to Capital Gang on saturday mornings, I was always behind news and in fact I never considered myself talented in anything. At a time when my age mates knew their careers I was drifting about.

I cared more for my job at HotLoaf bakery as a sales assistant, climbing so high as a manager and other times so low as a tea boy. When I turned up for classes in the mornings I also occupied myself with wooing Anne. Journalism, what? Life was hard.

On top of the HotLoaf hustle I also vended Club Silk Royale complimentary tickets for their Campus Night every Tuesday of the week.
Beer on such days was usually free. Facilitating a bonanza of students and free beer was not a good idea.

Many a day we joined for lunch at a place known as 'Blues' just opposite the famous Flying Rhino in the core of Kansanga. This pub was popular with Tanzanians. Next to Rhino was the even more famous AL's Bar sharing space with Half London.
One time I was having lunch at blues with Roy, Brian, Enoc and Biko in what was known as the problem table. On some days we had the pleasure to host Benice and Nahid on this table.

We called it a problem table. We had problems with our rooms and how poor they looked. We had girl/boy troubles, body image trouble, money troubles and some of us showered from bathrooms that were nicknamed 'passport size'. The length of the bathroom walls covered you up to the belly button.

The rest of the body facewards was in the open, you could have a conversation with somebody on the street while you showered.
It was as if one was posing for a passport size photograph.

At the university newspaper there was such shortage of writers that the editors created a mysterious character named Zorro. Zorro was cool. He simply solved all major problems in the university community, from dating tips to blind dates.
Zorro was the kind of guy you meet in Catcher in the Rye.

He gave advise about dating, and not just any dating. Zorro advised and encouraged all straight male students to date the reigning beauty queen of the university, a Kenyan belle known as Carol Wanza. Carol was also a cool name, Assenga had a girlfriend known as Carol. The Tanzanian Carol was just like a movie plot, even she never quite figured out what was 'next scene'. She had a very beautiful curvy stout body, just like a little gem stone. A sort of World Cup.

Zorro like many other cool people were unanimous in their agreement that Kenyans were a rowdy bunch and they came in all shapes and sizes. There were the Somali Kenyans like Li, the coastal people like Saidah Omar Kaseko's one time girlfriend , Nairobi urbanites like Francis and Brian. They also had the regular Wanjirus and Ougos.

The Ugandans joked that Only a nosy and strong headed woman like Carol would handle their kind. Carol was a beauty in journalism school. She was smitten by Biko and she had Beautiful eyes with some wit. She dated a Kenyan heartthrob that was so organized he was studying Clinical Psychology. How is that for cool!

Assenga had all the vibe. At his hostel one found good music, deliciously home made meals and beer. I smoked my first joint while at University inside Assenga's room. Assenga was blessed with a fortune of excellent hostels, at Kings&Queens he lived with the classy Brian and crew. A group of seemingly privileged guys from Nairobi that included Andrew, Solo, Francis, Marion, Amina and many more.

Nobody however was as smooth as Marion. The Kenyan soft spoken girl was so beautiful one would enjoy her company in all circumstances. With her beauty and elegance she would have even the most powerful men in Kampala answer her whims, but Marion unlike other beautiful girls at the time was humble. She hanged out with the broke guys just as much as she did with the privileged boys.

you could get drunk with marion and be as whipped as anything, yet you could never develop silly ideas with her, she always said in a matter of fact response to all the men that got drunk with her-which was very frequent-"You are a good Friend, you can make a very poor boyfriend and an even uglier one night stand."

Marion was simply in your face. You had to like her. She kept you hoping against common sense that you had a chance with her, and yet NEVER gave any hints.
She was so beautiful that one had to be stubborn to ignore her face..and she never took advantage of her beauty as many popular girls of the time. And I write this not because I ever tried to date her but because I observed her just as much as every other guy I knew was watching her. A few made bold moves were never really successful.

Clearly I needed some editing above, Yeah, I will do better next time. Thank you..

ROy WAS so full of surprise that he won a biblical knowledge competition on Power Fm, boasting that he had made his first million in record time. The competition tested participants in their grasp of the bible. Roy would was the authority on promotions and discounts in the city. if one had a crush date the guy to ask for venue ideas was roy.

And yet none of us would ever beat Jackson Biko. other than participating in the religious competition on power fm Somehow, Biko got to meet and know a certain radio presenter on one of the most campus FM stations in Kampala. Their friendship ensured that many a day, friendship with Biko was an insurance policy in fighting poverty. Biko created an industry that involved the use of mobile phones, and got many of us to answer quiz questions where we won cash prizes.

The trick was learning to sound as a different person every other day of the week. and yet this is strange because Biko was not so smart anyway. at least to the level of knowing the answers to all the questions on radio between 9 am to 12pm.

He did not know much about the world really. Politics simply bored him, sport was overrated. I do not remember Biko ever having or talked about sport. He knew his talent was writing about man's less serious things. WE CALLED it Fleecing the audience.

When Life Happens to Jackson Biko

2010-05-06T00:18:00.000-07:00

When life happens….

April 23, 2010 by bikozulu

The irony of life is in growing up because people grow up then they grow apart. With age comes dissociation. Age lays an unrelenting buffer of solitude. Jobs come in between people. Cities come in between people. Distant come in between people. People come in between people.

In short life happens. And it’s sad.

Revolving door, that’s what life is. People come in your life and they go. Some make an impression others make a ruckus. Some are forgettable while others you struggle to forget. Primary school was great. Friendship was about who was good at football, who had the most change to buy snacks over recess, who was fearless when it came to the girls. You needed to be fearless because girls in primary didn’t wear mascara and cross their legs. They weren’t ladies. You couldn’t drop a gauntlet at their feet because they would call your bluff and kick your ass. And some were big. No, make that fat. Fat girls were not very kind, at least not in my school.

Their uniform didn’t fit and they sweated under their armpits. And they stuck together. My word, did I fear them or what! One time one of them really heavy girls in my class rubbed a buyu seed on the floor, then when it was very hot, she pressed it on my neck. Boy, did that hurt…her thumb that is, damned thing was the size of an orange!

But back then I never thought I would miss them. Now I do. Christie, Faith and Belinda, I remember them and I always wonder what happened to them. Did they get married? Do they beat their husbands? Are they still mad about buyus? Do they remember the fat clumsy boy in class 5 who couldn’t look them in the eye? Do they still sweat under the arm? Christie, Faith and Belinda, if you are out there do something, show me a sign, send me a buyu.

Then there was this nutter called Odipo. Complete looney. Lost his marbles all together. He was perhaps the only person who the Fat Gilmore sisters wouldn’t bully. He was a man before we fully comprehended what that was. He had hair on his hands, do you know how cool that was to be 12yrs old and have hair on ya bloody hands? He also used to gloat that he had pubic hair, of course nobody believed him. And none was brave (or mad) enough to check.

Odipo was a truant, a truant with a swag. He walked around with a toothpick hanging from his lips, like a bleeding mayor or something. He started watching porn before we even knew that female breasts were cool. He would occasionally smoke when going home somehow he always came first in our class – first from the bottom that is. But it never bothered him, because he came from a wealthy family. When you come from a wealthy family that doesn’t care if you smoke or watch porn in primary school, life is a breeze. I think. And here is the thing; being seen with Odipo was like being seen with Tony Soprano. Teachers hated him because they couldn’t dare expel him. He was an outlaw and we worshiped him.

Odipo had a bag. A bagful of dirty tricks. Here is something he loved to do to the girls…except the fat Gilmore girls of course, those ones could sit on your chest and eat crisps. He would swagger up to a girl over break time, his hands in that position that implied that they were too soiled to be dipped in his pocket. “Please, could you get me my hankie from my pocket?” he would ask the girl who would innocently dip her hands in his pockets to fetch the hankie.

The loud horror that would soon be written on her face was only matched by the uproar from the cackling boys who would be watching because what sneaky outlaw Odipo had done is to cut off the lining of his pocket such that when she dipped her hand in his pockets she would touch not a hankie, but nuts. And I don’t mean peanuts. He liked to pick on the new girls in school. Look, it was funny then, and whenever I think of it now, I can’t help but smile. After primary school, Odipo, like everyone else was swallowed by space and distance and cities and people. Odipo was swallowed by the time machine. Wherever he is, I hope he got a better trick.

Then there are the boys in high school. High school was torturous in that it was a trying stage. Boys were turning into men. Voices deepened. Hairs sprout in the dark places and on faces, which was a dark place as well when you think about it because the face of any pubescent is a chest of confusion and angst. In high school boys dropped all that baby fat and grew taller and thinner. Quasimodo made sense. Virginities were taken away from us, mostly by older girls who couldn’t pick on boys their own age. High school is where boys found themselves – and for some- lost themselves.

High school was where boys realized that girls actually were something special – even if they sweated in the armpit. Baby Face and Boyz To men informed our socialization into the vast precarious arena of love and romance. Patra and Diana King offered that beat that we walked to, and we lusted over them as we lusted over Toni Braxton. Hell, we still lust over Toni, that woman is ageless!

And of course there is the soundtrack that all newly found manhood teetered on; Snoop Dog. You had to know all the songs to the album Doggy Style, we knew it by heart and we lived by that code. Snoop was a religion. Friendships were forged. Boys became men, and those who didn’t man up sooner and kissed a girl – at least even one girl – were assimilated. You had to know how kissing a girl felt like otherwise you had no business wearing those colorful checked and oversized Kriss Kross shirts. It was the barcode of manhood. The boys. Roy. Amunga. Tuesday. Gordie. Dave. Pato. They all got swallowed with space, distant, time, cities and people.

Then there was Uni. The best friends you make probably you made in campus. Here men were already men. There were no boys. We knew what we wanted, at least for the most part. You drunk. You read. You hustled. You tried to stay afloat and you never dropped the ball. Edgar. My first roommate. I remember our first meeting at 3am. Yes in the AM. When I checked in, he wasn’t in, but his books were. A boatful of books.

Books about politics. Memoirs of great men. Autobiographies. Literature on Chinua Achebe and on Shakespeare. An impressive smorgasbord of literature. And these books were all over his bed; a sea of books and scribbled notes and pens, and dirty socks and a half eaten bag of peanuts. “My God,” I thought, “I’ll be damned if I’m sharing a room with a law student!”

Anyway I’m beat, 10hrs on the bus. So I black out. At 3am, I feel someone shaking me awake. It’s Mr. Books. He has shaggy uncombed hair, he looks like, I dunno who has shaggy hair, Maxwell? He smiles into my face. He smells like a beer truck. He is saying something, which I hope is English. He introduces himself as Eddie. Nice to meet you Eddy, what time is it Eddy? It’s 3am. No kidding. He sits on the floor, next to a beer bottle which he takes occasional swigs rom. I ask him if he is studying law and he says he is a journalist. Note, he doesn’t say he is studying journalism, he says he IS a journalist. Must have been the beer. Turns out Eddy loves to read (no way) and write. I instantly knew we were going to get along- if he didn’t wake me up at 3am again.

I tell Eddy that I’m beat, and that we would talk in the morning, and he polishes off his beer, climbs up to his bed and promptly starts to snore….with one leg hanging over my face. Here is how special Eddy was. I stayed with him for two semesters, and every weekend and sometimes weekday, he would go drinking and he would come back at 2am or 3am and he would wake me up and he would regal me with some talk about literature and writing and stuff. This habit ticked me off at the beginning, this 3am discourse and I would tell him to not freaking wake me up when he was from his drinking sprees and he would apologize profusely.

Two days later, he would be shaking me awake at 3am to talk about Othello, or why he didn’t like Mutahi Ngunyi latest piece. And he always slept with his clothes and socks when he was from drinking. Soon I stopped getting mad. Soon I learnt to prop myself up and listen to him because he was a true story teller. Sometimes he would tell me tales from the club, how he almost brought a chick back to the crib (thank God that hardly ever happened, his success rate was something like 2.78% …on a good month. “Eddy mate, chicks in the club don’t give a shit about Ngungi Wa Thiongo’s literature, so stop making every conversation about him” I would plead with him)

But he was a sharp fellow, sharp as a whip, he read every African writer you know. His recall for quotes was stupefying. He wrote well, quite often from his bed. He could be up early the morning after a long night on the tiles and he would write the whole morning. His political analysis, although hilarious, often bordered on the anal. The only thing he loved as much as his books was his beer. He was a creative, sloppy, spaced out but with an unfailing sense of humor. He left campus midway went to Europe, came back after a while and found the Lord Jesus Christ. I was shocked, Eddy and Jesus?! What would they be possibly talking about? Now he does community work somewhere in Ukambani, something worthy- I don’t know, maybe he sinks boreholes for widows. And the clincher is that he is a father too, no kidding.

More people come into your life in campus, and most of them very special. Most of them you share a passion with for something. Kagame, a skinny Rwandese with a mouth on him. Roy, contained and sober creative. Maseme, excellent newshound. Together we wrote for a campus publication which was really a rag driven by scandal and gossip… something we enjoyed tremendously. We had a small office with one PC, and we took turns to bang our stories there with one eye on deadlines- which by the way we pushed around on a whim. At midnight on the eve of “going to press” I would often fought bitterly with the strong headed Kagame. He was always trying to pass a strong worded piece on something that had potential to shut us down. He loved to stitch people up, heck we all did, secretly, only he didn’t make bones about it.

And so at midnight we would often be in the office, banging copy, chewing some fat. Anyway, the worst nights were the eve of “going to press” we would work until early morning, and we would fight bitterly with Kagame over content, while our graphics guy, Roy, would sit and watch blood spill. But Kagame, although un-manageable, was a great writer and a sport, er, sometimes. Once in a while he drops in here to make a comment as Making Appearances, and he knocks me about, something that seems to float his boat even though he is many continents away.

Assenga, Mary, Edu, Brian, Kate, Ann, Gasirigwa, Solo, Ochamringa, Kent, Enock, Marion, Wangui…the list could fill this page up. Names. People. They touch your life in a special way, then they leave. You get off your graduation gowns and hug and pick numbers and earnestly tell each other, “Let’s get in touch” and people leave…then life happens. They get on boats and they cross continents and borders and they get swallowed by the rat race. Years pass. Many years pass and your lives become akin to ships passing each other in darkness. You hear someone got married, or got a baby, or found Jesus, or landed a major job or started their own business, or broke up with their fiancé, or lost weight, or added weight… Your relationships start getting conducted through the grapevine. You seem them sometimes on Facebook, but they seem like strangers. Once in a while they will pop on chat and say hi, and you will catch up for a minute, then they will go under again. You both will.

I once logged onto Facebook and this guy I grew up with had just updated his profile, saying he had lost his son. Yes, a short but heart wrenching cry of help on Facebook- because people only write stuff like that when they need help. When they need comfort or words that can tide them over. And a man extending his vulnerability to all and sundry like that is a man in pain. How can that not shake you? How can that not change the formula of your life, even temporarily? I hadn’t talked to him in ages, and I was damned guilty damn it.

You feel unworthy to tell him sorry, because that sounds so manufactured, more like an insult to his pain. But you do, you become a part of the many comments professing their condolence. And you know you are phony and fickle because life took over, because you let your lives get swallowed by reality. But you think of all these people, how can you possibly not? And the worst bit is that you do nothing about those thoughts. Sigh. It’s deeply saddening, when life happens.

Memeoirs of a Msope Part tw0

2010-04-24T23:27:00.000-07:00

GEORGE K

The prevailing circumstances in his life had made it necessary that Msope was surrounded and therefore obsessed by 'many' things foreign. So today as he descended upon downtown Citi to watch the EUFA Champions' league semi final between Inter Milan and Barcelona it was an important errand. Way early in the afternoon of a Tuesday.

Surely, if you knew the true picture of Msope you'd be baffled that a soccer match played far away in Europe is of such importance. He does not really care about those two names and the soccer. But somehow a sports event in Europe had taken such prominence Msope, a central African. Msope has never boarded a plane, a boat, a ship and a train. In fact he is so hopeless in overseas' travel that he does not have a passport. Why is he so obsessed with European soccer then? one might ask. The answer is simply as baffling as the question.

So today as the Msope considered attending one of the events to commemorate genocide in his area, a soccer match was crucial in his life to cause a crisis. See? no pub is allowed to open and sherekia in this period lasting through April to July, set aside to mourn fellow Bossman that have been sacrificed for the growth of the republic. But he knew he was not the only one whose fascination with European soccer had taken him from being a fervent love for Rayon Sport in Kigali to ARSENAL in UK. He said in his defense that even fans of music were listening to American Currie Underwood on Contact FM.
Shit, Msope said to himself.

Msope could not tell the point in time when he got hooked to this European lifestyle. A life of internet, connection and televisoin. When did 'things' foreign have such significance to Msope? How come the world is so closer to Msope today? Suddenly Msope was feeling, 'around.'

Yet soccer is not the only foreign obsession that the Msope had been attracted to in recent days. As part of his professional requirements. he also spoke a 'new' foreign language. It was necessary in shops, bars and workplaces. Since Msope started flirting with the new foreign language he also steered a global conversation about himself. At his work place there were people from all corners of the world, places he had never heard about. People who were fun and weird; interesting people.

As Msope heard in the bar later, there were current amusements within the Bossman Security, drama! Bossmen we love our drama. The folks and The SECurity were acting out Snowball and Napoleon. IN his Ipod Msope was listening to "who is fooling who?"

It was good drama season. The year had began with the entry of a Msopekazi. She was the ultimate drama queen Bossman had missed since many many years ago.
The name of the Msopkazi was not so awesome. It was popular way before the Victorian era. No. This is 2010 halfway through the big important number; 2020!

"That woman is as foreign as they come. Only sometimes she sounds more authentic when she says venti venti rather than my twenty twenty,' Msope whispered to himself. But that woman; "ni kama wale watu wingine wagenyi!" he thought aloud.
Breaking his animated conversation with the barman at the counter.

The two were taking bets on the pronunciation of Eyjafjallajökull. Apparently eyya jaa fujja la jo kal, had an impact on the performance of the Spanish team. "Don't you see Barcelone has endured a 16 hour bus drive instead of flying by plane. Eyya jah...... volcano ensured there were no flights in Europe." Msope was now educating himself on global warming, climate change and air travel in one week. You see? Msope had even risen his interest above local issues.

At best the events in his backyard intrigued him. It was like theatre, a George Orwell book. Since when did politics in Bossman get this active? He would ask. He laughed off the piece in the newspaper laid out on the counter which said that Victorian era woman was Now sending her greetings in a post card inscribed with the words; "See you later."

But other than the drama value local events had for him, Msope had nothing at stake really. Politics and patronage were indeed far away from him and his realm. His version of politics was defined and limited to Msope's fights with fellow Sopechas. These Fights were normally about the bill, the deal, the match. And about that son of a bitch Julius Malema?
It was always a difficulty finding middle ground. Sopechas and others did not speak through a unanimous and eloquent figurehead.Even the other sopes spoke different languages. this Did not bother Msope. Many other Sopechas had much more money than him and more education.
These were far more important fights than-who the hell holds some important fancy title and rank-fights. "And now I hear they are incarcerated eh eh." How come I never heard much about them in their good times roll?

The recent plays in Bossman theatre featured cool perspectives about The Security. The Security was a big dude. He was tall, big, muscled and scary. He wore dark glasses and as long as you never bothered him, he was cool to hang out with. But if you as much as raised his disinterest in you.
Eeh true Aki ya Mungu; (true of God).

He took care of business that even Mario Puzo would not figure him out. Recently somebody had annoyed him. The Security or otherwise known as Mutekano in Bossman speak was now kicking ass; you anticipate a meeting with John Rambo at some point. Hell, that kind of action is nolonger cool.

But these were the 'normal' descriptions of Bossman. On other days Citi was popular with the local and international, although Ordinarily there were so many suspicions in Bossman, Msope had learnt to get along with the action. Nowadays however, he had upgraded his concern about these suspicions to panic. Paranoid was just around the corner.

Surviving in Bossman required one to have both grit and sleaze in equal measure. "She must be a collaborator!" another Msope interrupted while the discussion about the Victorian woman got heated. These Sopechas are crazy!

NO, another responded. She is a Dubai and others say he is a Musajja but I think she is as Msope as I am.

donuwagiwabo@gmail.com

Memoirs of a Sungu Sungu victim

2010-04-19T21:11:00.000-07:00

BY GEORGE K

EAC Common Market Protocol

Goretti Majjimarefu was bitten by the Sungu Sungu bugs a few years back and she carries a scar to-date on her limbs as testimony of the venom of this rare sting.

The Sungu Sungu is a type of militia that operates along the western frontiers of Tanzania with Burundi and Rwanda.

The Sungu Sungu are savage, they not only loot, they also cause physical and psychological harm. They are the expression of xenophobic feelings that a large Tanzanian populace has towards Rwandans and Burundians who have resided in Tanzania since many years back.

The misery of these settlers was invoked when their status in Tanzania was reviewed in the mid 2000s round, about time when the Sungu Sungu syndrome started.

Rwanda had asked authorities in Tanzania to help repatriate these people to Rwanda with promises of resettlement and reintegration in Rwandan society.

These Rwandans, some of whom never knew of another ‘home’ other than their TZ confines were very reluctant to heed the calls to ‘return’. Tanzania decided to forcefully expel the settlers by use of the Sungu Sungu bugs; a sort of God using the plagues, against the Egyptians in Genesis episode.

This initiative was eagerly implemented by overzealous unemployed youths in many areas where people of Rwandan origin were settled, the uncouth youths were referred to as Sungu Sungu.

The expulsion of the former not only gave the latter a chance of work, it was also an opportunity to loot and even-barring official reports- rape their victims of eviction.

Beauty carries with it her own opportunities and in some regards risks and because many Rwandan women are reputedly hot, they also attract considerable threats of rape whenever conflict rears its head in the East and Central African region-but don’t let facts get in the way of a good conversation. We can get to this argument another day too-

On the fateful day that Majjimarefu was embossed with the scar on her limbs, the Sungu Sungu found her taking care of the calves of the family mid morning when the cows had been taken to the fields by one of her brothers.

She says the Sungu Sungu first ordered her to go home and pack everything that the family owned, and leave the country “to your motherland” as one of the foul mouthed ‘scoundrels,” ordered. But this is my motherland

Majjamarefu stated, “no” retorted one of the Sungu Sungus and the argument was ended at that moment.

The Sungu went about informing everyone in the area with similar profiles as poor Majjimarefu to leave Tanzania. Ironically, this was about the time that the East African Community was undergoing rejuvenation and the hoopla about unity and brotherhood was nearing frenzy.

A few years later, Rwanda was to be welcomed to the EAC high table thereby prompting talk that the expulsion of Rwandans from Tanzania was (a) engineered by Rwanda as one of the conditions of joining the EAC, (b) maybe the ones that were sent back were actually suspected criminals that escaped from Rwanda and Burundi after participating in various episodes of ethnic cleansing in the two countries.

Maybe it was the politics of the CCM and that Jakaya Kikwete who talked so well about unity and integration in meetings but once back in Tanzania dismissed and de-campaigned the whole EAC as some ploy to fleece TZ wealth. Who knows?

But these are not ideas that I was keen on sharing with Majjimarefu as we met in the Kimironko market square, and found ourselves discussing her scar.

But she was in such a jovial mood that even the scar seemed not to bother her. Speaking about the economy and the ever increasing prices of foodstuffs in the grocery shops, Majji said that soon all these prices will come down and that even she will start buying bread and butter.

“You see the EAC Common Market protocol is COMING SOON. This means well for me and my Koperatife salary. For since I was forced to come to this country every product sells at exorbitant prices.

Some grocery shop owners blame the high prices on many and high taxes the government has put in place. Others say transport costs to Rwanda from the manufacturers of products are very high.

So a cup of cooking oil which I used to purchase at the equivalent of only Frw 200 in Kahama I find it costs Frw 1250 here.”

It is a good day indeed. Majji is analyzing economics and regional integration; she even has a coherent point!
For a long while many people in Kigali and Burundi have done their shopping in Kampala.

It is said that ‘things’ are cheaper there and business people there are not arrogant as they are in Kigali. Many Kigali lovers have enjoyed their relationships and lives in our hills but when it comes to shopping for weddings, they head up north and spend our contributions to the wedding meetings ‘fattening’ the Ugandan cow.

Now the EAC Common Protocol that is due to be signed on July 1, will end most of this capital flight to Musajjaland.
The protocol will ensure that in the long run a product in Kigali, Nairobi, Kampala, Dar and Bujumbura will cost a similar price and therefore, enterprises will compete on quality of service and uniqueness of product.

Most importantly Majji’s family will also retain the property that the Sungu Sungu forcefully took away, when the family minus its cattle and other property were chased away from Tanzania.

She will even be able to invest her koperatife salary in their former neighbourhood without restrictions as capital movement like people are freed. Majji can also find work in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda as her academic qualifications that she acquired in Rwanda, will now be compliant and acceptable to the members off the EAC.

That said, the protocol is yet to answer pertinent questions that one cannot put to the simple mind of Majji and these include; Kenya hustling countries in the hinterland by imposing a limit on the weight the freighters have to carry while transporting goods through the country to Rwanda.

For example, Rwandan business people having to take 6 trips to collect a load that would otherwise be packed on one trailer and transported in one single carriage.
There are currently too many weigh bridges and roadblocks between Mombassa and Kigali.

Hitherto, the trips have ensured Kenya benefits from fees which the freighters have to pay at various stages in the country therefore fattening their cow too!!

And most importantly, Majji says that maybe the Tanzanian will see the wisdom of a strong EAC as isolation during the Ujaama, did not necessarily help them.

To be continued

Memoirs of a UTAKE fan

2010-04-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

GEORGE K

My local radio station has a themed program, the presenter is even synonymous with the brand although sometimes, one is led to believe that he has just smoked some dried green leaves, and is therefore imitating Jamaican patios, but he is not. He is just animated by UTAKE.

East Africa is undergoing a reinvention. It started with one person and now the regional music industry is abuzz with it. Even Baganda, are now composing music lyrics in Swahili, a language they have long considered to be a medium for thieves.

UTAKE is the new ‘cool’ of East Africa and for all the right reasons as it enhances regional integration, private sector growth as well as encouraging locally bred role models.

The genre, brings together music compositions from the three older members of the East African Community (Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania-music promoters and stakeholders are yet to take up my suggested acronym of RnB’UTAKE thus incorporating Rwanda and Burundi in the fray seeing that we are now regular features.

But now that Alpha Rwirangira won that Tusker Project Fame thing, music producers will possibly bring us on board officially.)

Before UTAKE, East Africa’s music industry was for long, single genre duplicity of African folklore that musician after musician exploited to stardom.

With a possible exception of DR Congo-and only because a few of us understood Lingala-musical creativity was inspired by men crying foul of our famous gold digger women, and many simple things which defined the African rural scope of life.

The explanation, could be due to the fact that the largest part of the audience for the artistes and their work, was mainly the rural folk, the ones involved in local farming and produce, tea and coffee cooperatives, as well as conservative generations who detested many modern or foreign trends.

This, according to entertainment experts was because only this demographic group could afford radio sets, especially the kind that came in Mekosonik and Soundsoro.

The battery cells these simple radios used and the cassette tapes on which the music was dubbed and sold, were quite expensive for the youth while the fact that FM radio stations were not yet here, ensured there was a limited scope for the youth to be involved in the music and entertainment industry.

In fact it was considered ‘bad behavior’ for younger people to love music, to dance and to be updated with entertainment trends.

For East Africa in particular, the most memorable artistes and bands were mainly Congolese stars like Franco’s TPOK jazz, Sam Mangwana, Arlus Mabele and his Loketo Band as well as the queen of Mtuashi Tshala Muana.

The entry of FM radio stations changed all this, and in the mid 90s the face of East Africa’s music scene changed drastically and dramatically beyond recognition.

East African musicians were faced with a challenge as most of the music that was played on the new 24 hour radio stations, was mostly American.

This music, it is argued helped promote and implant permissiveness in Africa. Many of the youth in the region at the time, relied on American value systems as the musical lyrics promoted them.

It was not helped with the fact that this period, also saw the widespread transmission of HIV/Aids in urban centres, and greatly so among the youthful generation of the time.

To curb this problem there was need to develop authentic African creativity in the entertainment industry, and reduce the airtime that western influences were getting on local airwaves.

Among the first acts that led this creativity was Jose Chameleon, a Ugandan artist who made his career breakthrough after moving to Kenya and recording his timeless mega hit; “Maama Mia” in 1999.

With this move, the spirit and dynamism of UTAKE was formed and in a few years time from then, East African leaders were to meet and recreate the EAC which had been on a death bed since 1967.

Chameleon was himself inspired by Jamaica’s dancehall icon Shabba Ranks as one person that is closely related to him narrates; “.... I remember there was one particular incident in our teenage years, when we had a talent show and one guy was performing a Shabba Ranks song and Jose asked us to let him sing because he said he was better than the other guy.

But the organiser of the show refused, Jose sneaked onto the stage during the interval and gave the audience a freestyle, and with the screams from the crowd he never turned back, this was in the mid 1990s at Mengo Secondary School, that is where Chameleon started his musical journey and he has never turned back.”

Starting out in his teenage years earlier in the smaller pubs of Kampala, Chameleon was faced with the huge challenge of breaking the afore mentioned cultural bind which ensured that it was mostly folklore stars, or bands that succeeded in the industry.

And many of these were far older than he was, yet they were still very popular. He did not have any real contemporaries.

As a result, Chameleon moved to Nairobi to pursue a dream of becoming a top notch African musician.

This move inadvertently started the transformation of East Africa’s music industry with Joseph Mayanja alias Chameleon at its pivot. His eccentricity notwithstanding, he personified the gradual transition of East Africa’s entertainment industry that today; it is not considered exaggerating to mention him in the same breath as Zaire’s great Franco and Sam Mangwana in leading the way for other musicians.

Chameleon not only got the youth interested in local music, he also ensured that this music appealed to the ‘normal’ African folks.

The new and much younger produce sellers in the market, the public taxi drivers and touts, the charcoal traders, receptionists and secretaries, the luggage carriers in commercial streets as well as you reading this article.

While it is open for argument whether he is the greatest artiste East Africa has had, it is highly likely that many East Africans have one of his classics as a favourite tune. One East African music expert calls him the Michael Jackson of the region’s entertainment industry.

So, how did Chameleon manage to change the music scene?

And who can answer this question better than his elder brother Henry Kasozi who to a large extent guided Chameleon through his delicate formative teenage years.

Kasozi says that he did not groom Chameleon in the superstar he is today, but says that he did all the normal things that an elder brother needs to do to help his junior achieve their dreams.

“Before he left for Kenya in search of his dream, I gave him my lovely rucksack (a small and trendy carry on luggage bag) and I always believed in his dream.

The greatest gift I ever gave him though was opening the gates for him every night when he sneaked home from his late night dee jaying. This is because the parents were very strict on staying out late at night and never approved of any excuse.”

As if to pay homage to the Africa’s icons of yester years, Kasozi says; “If I could take you back to the times when we where growing up, we listened to foreign music like Lingala from Zaire and South African music, but Jose came up with his own style that knocked all foreign music out of Uganda leading to the rise of many Ugandan artists.”

Unlike many of his predecessors whose creative web was based on the socio-politico issues of post independent Africa-as is evidenced in most of the songs between the 50s and 80s on the continent-Chameleon, was faced with a new generation that was slowly and easily being soaked by American cultural invasion in the aftermath of the cold war.

He, like so many at the time, started out singing in English, rapping in styles and rhythms that were very much copycats of Jamaican ragga styles.

His audience was the teenagers and urban yuppies- the aficionados of the new American cultural invasion. Chameleon instead began mocking the African chauvinistic customs in songs like Mama Rhoda, Effuga Bbi
Chameleon’s changing musical inspiration is similar to the ability of the animal after which he is named and therefore begs the question as to how he chose that name; Kasozi says; “He did not choose this name but it was coined by our mother who used to be surprised of how Joseph changed moods and that he would fit into different surroundings.”

On his recent reinvention as Dr. Jose Chameleon; Kasozi says; “ His music heals hearts due to the fact that he sings life experiences and people relate to his music in good and bad times, so he treats them with his music, that is why he decided to have the new title of Doctor on his name.”

Memoirs of a Mzungu in Africa 1

2010-03-28T22:48:00.000-07:00

BY GEORGE KAGAME

Close your eyes; take a dose of sanity and ask yourself a question; What would we do here in Africa without the good old Mzungu?
Open your eyes and read further.

The Mzungu has been here for as long as our humble communities evolved from small-and sometimes big chiefdoms into the megalomaniac states we have today.

Mzungu, for good and bad has been part of it all. And yet we have never accepted him/her as a normal feature of our African society. Instead whenever a white person walks around in a city suburb, many children will run around following them, for as long as two miles in some cases. They are like a mobile circus. In most cases the children will be begging for sweets, pens, money and many other things.

In one incident I witnessed two kids pinch the skin of an American friend at the Kimuhurura junction just to test and they run away afterwards without saying a word! When children grow up with these experiences, it ensures that racial stereotypes in our society persist and it is not helped by the fact that many opinion leaders always take refugee in inferiority complexes and give in to misconceptions and hatred based on racism, they go ahead to heap blame for all the mess in Africa on Mzungu in lazy intelligentsia debates. Most do this in a whiteman's language!

It is predictable that every time things go wrong in Africa as they are wont, the Mzungu has been the punching bag. If it has been famine he takes the blame, low prices for agricultural produce, tribalism, war, family disintegration and others. Hell the whiteman is responsible for all the mess in Africa, and we black people are the angels, you get the feeling.
We do good things. You see we are a humble kind, prone to being pushed about forcefully to do things that we have no idea about or even don't like.

Today The Hammock offers to start a discussion about the experiences of a white person in Africa and in particular in Rwanda. What is the Kinya-Rwanda noun for a white person?
Mzungu is what quickly and normally comes to mind. Mzungu comes from a Swahili word known as Zunguka which means "moving around in circles with no sense of direction and or or purpose."
By definition our word for a white person is not only offensive, it is also factually wrong.

In fact Swahili is so crude to white people that Ulaya is the noun for the continent where white people are said to come from, Ulaya itself seems to conjure images of Malaya, another Swahili word for prostitute. And it must not be confused with Wilaya, the Swahili word for province or continent.

One could argue that black people who were born and bred in Europe, North America and other parts of the world are also referred to as NIGGER by white people, valid as it may appear, it is not entirely true as there "are other more respectful ways to refer to black people if you need to describe their appearance. So when someone chooses the word "nigger" that's deliberately degrading," says one Mzungu. However, there's no respectable substitute for Mzungu in Swahili and possibly in Kinya-Rwanda too.

In our first attempt to record the memoirs of a Mzungu we will consult with an Integrated Mzungu, (I.W.). This is a white person, again for lack of a better word, who decides to live in a very remote part of an African country where they do not have tarmac roads, sushi and Mexican restaurants.
Their chosen place of residence normally has no street pavements and lights or even theme nights in entertainment districts of our cities which themselves are copycats of the I.W. cradle.

The I.W. in this case is really a youthful and beautiful young woman in her early 20s who, not bothered by all the cliches about Africa; chooses to live in a small cramped abode way out of the glitz that many expatriates in Africa live in. And yet even with this 'normal' lifestyle I.W still feels the generalizations thrown at her because she is a white person.

She says it is frustrating to be classified with such trademarks such as the ones that Africans associate with Mzungu generally, these include; them being rich, ignorant, they do not understand what is happening here and are taking pictures of little children because they are going to sell them or their stories.

I.W. adds that this could be the reason that the first time one is surrounded by people of a different colour, all the cliches apply, they feel everyone is staring at them, talking about them and in Rwanda, sometimes pointing a finger in their direction. You stand out. It could be the reason you rarely see a single white person alone, and if they are alone you will probably see kids running after them, If they happen to be women, even old men often times stalking them.

"Everyone likes to believe they are unique," I.W. says and adds that it is the reason that; "Many bazungu get away with hardly ever being the only one- they live and/or work and/or travel always with others. Anyone who comes to Africa knows that racial stereotypes exist, Bazungu are known to be rich, they have a sort of physical helplessness which means they can't walk for long distances or climb mountains, they are sexually promiscuous, and their lives are generally easy."

I.W. continues that her concerns and subtle discrimination while in Africa cannot be in any way compared with the experiences of black people that live in other parts of the world but "it gives you a tiny, tiny window on what minorities experience in the West."

The first memoir is meant to offer us insights into the issues that do concern and often times disturb the I.W. in Africa. (WE can write about the one in South Africa and Zimbabwe another day.) For the next memoirs we will attempt to get the Mzungu's idea of Rwanda today in terms of our own cloudy identity.

As quite often we have blamed the Mzungu in our history for polarizing the Hutu and Tutsi, we can testify to this as our own identity today has been raped-in large parts because of internal racism. Today we'd rather not mention who is Tutsi or Hutu. Does our visiting Mzungu have capacity to tell the difference between us? Which magic does the Mzungu use to circle out a Hutu or Tutsi?

Till next week.

Kigali mornings; the belle, commercial posters and my machismo

2010-03-23T10:00:00.000-07:00



By George KAGAME
The drive to work this morning was as predictable as only Kigali can be. I stood at my bus stand for a couple of minutes and after a while several buses with loud and annoying touts parked almost by the tip of my well polished shoe. When I entered one of the buses, it turned out the inside of the vehicle-with its jabbering radio presenter-was competing with the outside-where the touts held fort-in who can shout the loudest. I cannot remember the channel of the radio station which was tuned on a monstrous volume, the programme, as I learnt later was aptly named ‘Sun Up’. The radio presenter repeatedly played many different versions of his jingles with a frequency that suggested that even he feared the thought that he might forget what he was presenting. It was easy to think that this was because he had few commercials to play as the only advertisements were those of an amorphous telecommunication firm as well as a beverages company. Typically I was left with no option but to go into ‘space.’ Space in this case varying from reading a book, using headphones to block out the sound as I create my counter noise by use of a walkman disc or simply gazing out of the window in the hope that something worth attention takes my eyes and thoughts. Meanwhile, the desire, ambition and incentive to buy my own private vehicle was increased tenfold as is normally the case with Kigali mornings. This morning however my regular ‘space ship’ which doubles as my mobile cellular was low on battery, as yesterday load shedding ensured that I never charged it. So I was left with no option but to endure the punishment of the bus and its early morning irritating noise. Thinking about fellow commuters I imagined the volume was meant to update them on the happenings in the presenter’s life and his mambo jumbo about an event taking place at BB night club today or some other place of Kigali fun nights. Fellow commuters seemed not to be bothered by the noise; probably the normal thinking amongst bus operators is that radios are hardly affordable these days so their vehicles serve a double purpose as a public address system. (And you wonder why then, we have so many radio stations.) Through the windows of the bus I was taken up by one of my favourite pastimes. Looking at roadside commercial billboards and what they were telling me to do or about the events and issues of our society, (the billboards that is.) And true there were several about HIV/Aids, tuberculosis, water purifiers, corruption and investment. One was informing the public about a new service of some development bank, another about a cellular company which suggested that if I bought their airtime frequently, the romantic relationship with my woman will considerably improve. Another promoted some products that I never understood. And just before disembarking from the bus I saw this one poster which hooked me for a while that I reported to work late. It was a television that was hoisted as a poster and played commercials non stop. The adverts were sliding up and downward, sideways on top of disappearing and then reappearing suddenly. Eh, this city of mine, now it is like New York? I stood there in a posture that only a person who has just arrived from deep in the country to the city can understand. The commercials were written and spoken in foreign words with words falling over themselves like rocks falling off a cliff in an earthquake, spoken in tongues that seemed to be flipping in the nose, in accents so strange that North Americans would be jealous. In all the commercials I saw both on the City television, on the roadsides and even heard over the radio, there was one overriding fact. They were all wrapped around a soothing voice of a presumably beautiful belle, (in case of the radio,) and on the body of a visibly attractive one on those in the posters and television. The woman seemed to invite me to leave everything I was going through in my current life to take her and the product she was promoting, if I had a caption for many of these adverts it would go: “Come to me you wondering fellow, you will enjoy your time with me. Leave your life, your wife, your everything, I am the best thing in this world.” Contrary to the poster that stands right outside the entrance to my ‘home’ in the inner city, the roadside adverts on the way to my work station were only appealing to my machismo while the poster in my neighbourhood simply had this caricature of a fish and a presumably cow leg and the words Amafi and or boucherie. With Alimentation at the bottom.

Pub Talk; the cheeky city official and his driving misfortune

2010-03-14T21:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.newtimes.co.rw/index.php?issue=14199&article=6446

BY George Kagame

Not much worth your noble attention happened during the course of last week in our here backyard. Therefore if you were looking for sense when you purchased today's copy of this newspaper, please don't read any further From The Hammock. My advise is you turn to the next page.

But if you are still reading then I write for people like you, please continue and since nothing of note happened to motivate me to undertake a VERY SERIOUS analysis of the subject I am left with no option but to invite you to partake in the idle chit chats that I proverbially indulge in at the Pub Talk normally happening in the abode of Ship&Anchor, the most beloved watering hole of yours truly.

Faced with the lack of any event last week sensible enough so as to motivate yours truly to write about, I have the honour and pleasure to call upon the reporter in me. And like all reporters the world over, every night I go to bed I pray to God that some misfortune happens in his world. This prayer can range from massive destruction as a result of earthquakes, and in this regard 2010 has been so wonderful to reporters and newsmen, so thank you God for answering our prayers.

From earthquakes in Haiti and Chile that caused hitherto unknown misery there to the landslides in Eastern Uganda. Such things or others of enormous importance need to happen occasionally and preferably on a weekly basis such that you can count on an epic column every sunday as you sip your favourite blend of coffee/tea or while gallop down your favourite alcoholic beverage at your chosen place of fellowship with old chums.

In fact natural disasters help to keep us in work to a large extent, be they floods, volcanic eruptions and droughts. They are a blessing as long they don't claim our own lives, we like to call ourselves; Cowboy NEVER DIE. Of course as human beings we have empathy but this is immediately overridden by the need to get a story, so it is strictly a short time commodity this empathy thing.

When we are not praying to God to send some mega destruction, we are hoping that fellow man does something so odd so that with our pens, cameras and empty heads we rush to ask such men; "Whats up man?" But this past week none of that happened in our here backyard. Save for a Kigali City official that is accused for driving over a leader of one of the country's political parties and running away, only to return moments later and play innocent bystander.

But this official is so 'small' a man to get the attention and publicity of The Hammock because, as explained above, he of the swinging bed needs something epic to rant about in the guise of a column and that he is now 'columning' on the misfortune of the Liberal Party founding member who died after being being run over by the said City official, is a sign how news has been so scarce in here our backyard.

Last week was a blessing for columnists far lazier than The Hammock. It was reported that an army General had allegedly escaped from his troops, and as if in shock, most notable columnists were tipping over themselves in faked shrieks screaming out against the intentions and discipline of alleged traitor. Now really, what do you expect an army general to do after a war? And in this particular case after a series of wars? Become a priest or take my lame job? That of praying that the world faces frequent apocalypses so that I can keep reporting at my station? Oh, there were grenades blowing up here and there. I also prayed for the victims of these dangerous 'stones.'

So in a week that no military General escaped, me and my brotherhood of columnists, to whom we are in complete discretion and anonymity of each other, were left with no option but to wonder at the shenanigans of the City official and his comical misery after killing a citizen of notable repute in our here backyard.

What attracts our attention however is not the death of the Liberal Party official, (Bless his Soul dear God,) but the single most foolhardy act the City official did in a futile attempt at damage limit control. It was reported that after driving over his unfortunate victim the city official never stopped, instead he zoomed past and packed his Grande Suzuki, (what else?) at a fuel station ahead, only to return moments later and act as one of the witnesses.

Kigali being Kigali, in an instant after the official hit the man who had moments earlier left his home that is situated on the eastern throngs of our beloved city people gathered quickly, I don’t know where they normally come from, but there is already a crowd. They crawl from the woodwork. They surrounded this hapless man. The city gives birth to them in throngs. As a senior city official he must have known better, which begs the question, how did he get his senior management post in the first place?

But anyway he stood among the crowds and was also innocently asking like everybody else; " What happened? Who knocked him? What was the number plate of the vehicle he was driving?"

Really City official which movies do you watch? You are advised to discard Ki'Nigeria if you survive a very long sentencing in 1930.

The line of actions that this official should have done is left to you the reader, but since this is Kigali that we are still talking about, conspiracy is already doing the rounds. It is now on record that the dead man testified earlier in a Gacaca court case were the brother of the official was accused and sentenced for his role in the 1994 Genocide.

Intellectual property rights; are we ready for this war in Kigali?

2010-03-08T10:42:00.000-08:00

BY GEORGE KAGAME

Before we saw a computer in Africa, (I am very aware that many communities in Africa have not yet seen or known about the magic of computers. And On a personal level, as a graduate of a major African journalism school in the mid 2000s, and working as a business reporter for a first street national daily, the wonder that is google.com was revealed to me by my good friend Mansur Kakimba a year after my first journalism job.

I was so excited and delighted about the discovery that I wrote an op-ed and appropriately titled it: "God bless google for our careers." AS usual I was a late comer on the ICT wagon.)

Back to the hammock.

The computer heralded in Africa easier access to recreational activities by ordinary folks as was never seen before, even though late in these things as normally is the case with most trends in Africa, the computer was both a blessing and a curse in equal measure.

For Africans that have never seen and or still don't know how to use a computer, either as a result of high costs, lack of connection to electricity, knowledge, relevance and awareness the thing was received and dismissed as a symbol of the elite and all the trademarks that the elite in Africa carry around. But the emergence of Ki'Nigeria, (I will not explain what this is as I assume that ya'll know what it is, had such a phenomenal appeal that most people sighed pleasantly for the blessing of computers and the entrepreneurship of pirating it brought.)

The computer made it possible for many Africans to become entrepreneurs and aficionados on matters of sport, love, and leisure as it brought movies, music and secretarial services to even the most rural of AFrican communities. I was one of such investors in my hometown of Kansanga a suburb of one East Africa's greatest cities.

Situated close to Ggabba landing site me and my best friend Fred Mugisha aka Junior decided once after a hard labour working day at HotLoaf bakery to open a music and movie rental business on Ggaba landing site on the shores of Lake Victoria. In 2006 we opened up Low Life Records, the business operated in a roadside single room which also served as a men's hair saloon. WE only needed a computer affixed with a DVD and CD burner, a video cassette player that also served as an amplifier as well as two loud speakers that we placed at the entrance of the saloon.

Having grown up in the neighbourhood, I was in charge of acquiring music files from my friends, purchasing the computer and marketing the business for new clients. This was an easy task as ours was the first CD burning and movie rental store on one of the busiest landing and fishing villages on the mighty Lake Victoria. Junior on the other hand was the know how of the machines and the technical work involved in our pirating venture. Soon the business was booming. As a testimony to the increasing fortunes we changed the name from Low Life Records to Two Eyes Productions. Among our new services was video coverage for emerging musical talents as well as weddings in the vicinity.

Our business was one of the signs which signified the end of the deity that the DJ. Most people in the area stopped going to discos, the mantra and pedestal of the DJ was demystified. His trade was made irrelevant by businesses such as ours. People made selections of their favourite songs and brought their playlists to us and we would burn this into a cassette tape recorder or CD and charge a reasonable fee for our music an service. It was good days. The computer was then just beginning to break into the African mindset. What Two Eyes Productions was doing was illegal but since it was bringing food on the table and no one had made any noises we continued our music and movie business.

To explain to you the enigma of computers I will tell you a story from my good friend Charles Onyango Obbo. Onyango says that in the days when the computer was just starting its voyage in East Africa he was one of a select few that had an email address as well as a computer connected to the internet. Because of such rarities he was a major connection between his various friends and their relatives that were living in Europe and North America.

He says that in the days before internet cafes became common he practiced a virtual internet dictatorship where his colleagues would use his computer to write their relatives in developed countries. In the process Onyango says he was privy to the most personal and bizarre of secrets and hoo haa of his 'subjects' who (through him and his email address were communicating to their long lost relatives and lovers in the west.)

On the other hand, Two Eyes and many other music dubbing businesses were not the only culprits in breaking intellectual property rights and laws. The musicians whose music we were illegally dubbing were also copying and defrauding other peoples' music and instrumental creations and voicing over their banal lyrics to sell their own brands. It was an industry of unoriginality dubbing, piracy and illegal copying.

As with most things showbiz, Dar Salaam was the very first, not only did they expand EAC music and dance through this business, (since most musicians sang in Swahili, they would reproduce works of other people and simply change lyrics from other languages into Swahili. The audience would not tell whether what they heard in Swahili was the original or in case later a version of the same thing turned up in a different language was the pirated one. And since since this was the time of Bongo flava, the local was always the authentic.

The Wa'Bongo also led in the CD dubbing business which would be worked out in 'secretarial services' centres , through this, they further led the EAC version of manufactured pop groups and led the move to East Africa's reincarnation of South Africa's Kwaito dance as well as the authentic African style hip hop known as Bongo flava.

The moral of this story is that I was shocked last week when I read that Kigali Police authorities had arrested several young men for pirating music records. I was sympathetic that the poor fellows, upon questioning said they did not hitherto know that they had been breaking the law.

Their arrest spells good for the fortunes of local musicians and artists but it should also be a moral to the artists that we as the audience will now expect them to produce more authentic work. Because when I listen to KGB's "Arasharamye' I can easily notice that it is a copy of R. Kelly's "Burning Up," and therefore I should not be arrested for pirating such a product. And it is not only KGB, the current international music industry with the exception of Kenya's Mejja is full of banal and crass works.

Africa’s rendez-vous with music, commerce and the DJ

2010-03-01T09:42:00.000-08:00

By George KAGAME

We Africans are renowned for our love of music, drama and dance. In fact racist people all over the world, coined the term Kumbaya, an otherwise spiritual song by black Americans, to identify with Africans.

The term was given the image of short people with small bodies, big circled stomachs, huge heads and leaves tied around their bodies.
They spent their entire time on the universe, drumming and dancing under the tree shades during the day, and under the brilliant moonlight in the nights.

In fairness to the said racists, Gutarama was such a favourite pastime in my home town before the DJs and FM radios created customized entertainment. Everything about this Kumbaya image screamed kwashiorkor in your head. If you gave it a caption, it would read cynicism and sympathy, with words like, “Oh those miserable people, they are so poor but happy.”

The idea that we love music is true, but the images that have been coined to the idea and thereby branding Africa and its people are wrong. Speaking as someone that has been blessed to visit and work in DR Congo and South Africa; I can write with some authority that indeed the love of music and dance runs in our genes.
And is it not true that the people in those two countries have seen some really bad times? For all their talents and fortunes, west and North Africans have never really been known for music and dance, at least in mainstream Africa.

Just as music and dance are so popular on the continent, the people that play it are revered. From the Fela Kuti dynasty in Nigeria, Salif Keita in Mali, Youssuo N’Dour in Senegal and your pick in DR Congo, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. These music stars enjoy iconic status.
But since most of them ply their trade in Europe and overseas, not many Africans ever get to see them perform. And many of these fans are average Africans who sell produce in the local markets.
They cannot also afford to purchase the work of their musical heroes. Therefore most of us were left to middlemen, to taste the sounds our favourite music tunes.

These middlemen in my early teenage years were the DJs, and they worked in conjunction with the market cassette tape seller, who appeared on special market days near the village square along with other nomadic merchants. They appeared at intervals of a week or a month.
The cassette tape salesman, set up his stall near the entrance of the market, but since most village markets were randomly set up in an open redundant expanse, they never had any structure.

The cassette tape seller set up his shop at the most vantage point. He would attract clients by placing his small watts speaker in a large empty box that would act as an amplifier. The sound it produced was really annoying, but his intention was not to give potential clients quality tasting.

The louder his makeshift boom box shouted, the happier he was. He only wanted to attract people to his stall and not to please them. Noise is a good and important thing for us Africans, but this is a topic for another day.
The cassette salesman was responsible for the gradual death of Gutarama in my neighbourhood and all its side advantages.

The cassette salesman, has been an eternal feature of African markets from the time the Arabs helped us change from a barter to monetary system of trade, and set forth the village market day commerce, that later gave rise to Africa’s first commercial centres like Timbukutu, Tabora and most urban centres on East Africa’s coastline.

These were the first years of Africa’s liaison with mercantile trade, and this salesman, basically sold music composed and performed by the local church choir and local folklore.
In later years, music performance evolved and there were many composers of other music genres and places yonder which came up. The salesman even became more important. And it was befitting that he was a VIP amongst all traders in the village market.

To start with, we never had radio coverage in most parts of Africa till the late 1990s and as such, whenever there was a military coup de tat, ubiquitous throughout Africa, the most important instrument of power that the soldiers took first, and that which most symbolized the change of power was the radio station.
There’s no point in explaining what radio station it was, as most African countries had only one radio station serving the whole country.

In my hometown, which interestingly is only 35 miles from a capital city, there is a legend that once, there was a change of government three times in a row, and the locals never knew about it till one day, somebody came to the village speaking a strange language with a gun.
In this village they have since sworn to hate the language this man spoke. This language was Swahili.

The cassette tape salesman claimed to understand Swahili, and he also claimed that he never had anyone in the village with whom to speak. He in fact, sold music performed in Swahili by Congolese artists or so he told the community.

We were later to learn that in fact the Congolese sang in Lingala not Swahili as the salesman had told us. But who were we to doubt the cassette salesman? He who had brought us music!
Some of us that could not afford to buy his Judi Boucher, Don Williams, Yvonne Chaka Chaka and Chiko Chimora tapes, would go to the market on the said special day not to purchase anything but to dance at his stall, inadvertently helping him to attract even more clients.
But above the cassette salesman, was an even more important person, more prominent than even the local church priest.

He was the DJ. In later years and as Africa developed and connected, the DJ was responsible for compiling songs of different artistes onto one cassette, which would be sold through the market cassette tape salesman as the middleman.

The DJ was so important that the best musicians of the day composed songs in his honour. Chaka Chaka’s “Thank you Mr. DJ” comes to mind, you can add your favourites.
The DJ, however, lost his place on our musical pedestal with the onset of HIV/Aids, as the man (there were very few female DJs earlier) schmoozed his way into many bras and pants of any agile women.

In the process the DJ, the truck driver and later the motor cycle man, were responsible for the penetration of the disease and many other STDs in many families, schools and communities.
This was all before the computer revolutionized Africa’s musical rendezvous and its people. And now the rules of piracy are catching up with the computer too. Ditto Rwanda’s piracy laws.

Till next weekend!

Wael Badawy: 2010 Calgary Immigrant of Distinction Professional Award

2010-02-28T09:45:00.000-08:00

Distinguished Professional Award

Wael Badawy

Next time you enter a building or premises in Calgary with video cameras hoisted and recording happenings at the place; think of the vision of Calgary resident Wael Badawy. Following his passion for video analytics and related research, Badawy embarked on a long journey from his alma mater at the University of Alexandria in Egypt, moving to Canada in 1997 when he was accepted into Concordia University in Montreal for a M.Sc in Computer Engineering and then transferred to the University of Louisiana.

Upon the completion of his PhD in Computer Engineering in the field of video compression and architecture he joined the University of Calgary in 2000 from whence he has been to-date. At the U of C, Dr. Badawy is credited with helping to found the Lab for Integrate Video Systems. Later the lab led to the creation of IntelliView Technologies Inc which has spearheaded video surveillance technology in Canada and abroad.

The company's work can be seen at the Market Mall, Calgary Stampede Grounds, the Calgary Health Region and the U of C. Badawy has developed some of the most important software technology that the firm employs in its services and spearheaded the commercialization of Canadian video technology through IntelliView Technologies Inc.

Some these include; systems for safety and security, integrated IP camera with built in DVR, video systems using multi-sensor and sensor fusion to profile cargo in containers that is used by the US HLS department at DOT weigh stations. Badawy is also the brains behind security systems that protect remote sites from intruders and trespassers, this technology is used by many oil and gas companies in Alberta and Canada. The firm has also created partnerships with multinational companies including Microsoft, IBM, Panasonic and Sony.

IntelliView has offices in Calgary and Ottawa and its flagship technology is is giving video surveillance tools to companies to enhance their site security and operations, owns 11 patents in vidoe analytic development and applications.

It is also developing a software that will be used in health centres and hospitals in monitoring the movements of patients on beds, this will prevent patient falls and reduce the risk of injury to senior citizens which is currently taking a big chunk on health care costs.

Badawy say; "I believe , technology should improve the everyday lives of Canadians. If I can reduce stress and give people a sense of security then, I feel I have made a difference."

Peter Hacket, a Fellow of the National Institute of Nanotechnology and professor in the School of Business at the University of Alberta says Badawy is an excellent academic and entrepreneur, he notes; "I have known Dr. Badawy in my role as President and CEO of Alberta Ingenuity Fund as a Professor at the University of Calgary and CEO of Intelliview Technologies Inc. His students and company have won a number of Alberta Ingenuity's competitive grants and awards. He has also contributed greatly to the Alberta research and innovation community at large through his participation in a variety of consultations and initiatives."

As a testimony to the spirit of Canada, IntelliView employs more than 20 professional from a wide array of backgrounds with a shared passion for video software and securities. Badawy is married to Ghada and they have three young boys. In his free time he volunteers in various academic and management positions at the U of C,

He has edited many professional journals in his academic field including Journal of Computer Science, Journal on Circuit and Systems, Sensor Letters, Canadian Journal on Computer and Electrical Engineering, as well as various academic publications in leading academic libraries.

Mrs Idrees A. Khan: Calgary 2010 Immigrants of Distinction Awards Community Services Nominee

2010-02-27T09:48:00.000-08:00

2010 Immigrants of Distinction Awards

Community Services Nominee

Mrs Idrees A. Khan

Idrees A. Khan is very conscious of her identity and that of Canada, it tells from upon observation of her work with the Calgary muslim community. A muslim from a conservative background in her native Karachi in Pakistan, Mrs Khan arrived in Canada in 1972, with her degree in Economics from the University of Karachi and embarked on a career in the oil industry in Edmonton.

Having lost her father at an early age, Mrs Khan was raised by her mother who instilled in her a sense of love for community and serving individuals with less luck in society. Khan was given a good education but she was very aware that even with her education success in her career would be deterred by cultural boundaries tied to women in Pakistan and so she moved to Canada to be able to explore her full potential. Upon arriving in Canada in 1972 she got a job with Esso-Imperial oil in Edmonton. Later she married Zia Khan an accountant and the family moved to Calgary and continued her work in the oil industry by getting a job with Sunoco.

But such is the power of her passion for community service that Mrs Khan changed careers and started to get involved with in the local and growing community of muslims. She was particularly concerned that many of the social issues affecting this Calgary community were not being discussed in the mainstream forums. Calgarians of the muslim religion needed help with education, guidance in getting acclimatized to Canadian culture, learning English as a new language, family and parenting issues as well as access to important basic services like food and clothing for many in difficult economic situations. She went back to Mount Royal College to increase her knowledge of Calgary social challenges and studied various programmes in social work and administration.

The education she acquired from Mount Royal College helped Khan to found the Muslim Families Network Society in 2003. This initiative brought about a forum through which issues of refugees, immigrants, poverty and family hardships were discussed and solutions sought from a cross section of stake-holders in Alberta. She also started the Muslim Halal Food Bank in 2004 to help with the outsourcing and provision of food to poor Muslims living in Calgary, this food bank offers supplementary basic services to individuals and families on social welfare assistance or unemployment insurance, refugees and new immigrants.

Mrs Khan offers counseling and support services at the North of McKnight Community Centre by bridging the knowledge and language gap for new immigrants and refugees by providing useful information about the various initiatives available for them as offered by the federal and provincial governments and where to find such services.

Further more, Mrs Khan also started the Big Sister/Brother program where muslim children can fully embrace their identity, learn the importance of caring, sharing, tolerance, patience and team work. She also has organized many conferences in Calgary where issues that are important to her and the community are discussed by various stakeholders.

These include; raising teenagers, spousal abuse, children and seniors' neglect and or abuse. In all her work, Mrs Khan gives the youth and parents an opportunity to share their knowledge and skills such that the young can develop into muslim leaders that have a balanced understanding of Islam and how it fits into the western indigenous culture. She continues to volunteer by hosting people in search of emergency at Inn From The Cold Society, Muslim Association of Calgary and at the North of McKnight Centre.

Bea Twumasi: 2010 Calgary Immigrants of Distinction Awards Business Award

2010-02-25T09:48:00.000-08:00

Calgary 2010 Immigrants of Distinction Awards

Business Award

Bea Twumasi

Walking into her shop situated on 222, 17 Ave SE Calgary one is reminded of everything about customer care and 'feeling at home.' On top of an array of cosmetic products on display, smiles and laughter are among the most salient features of Bea Twumasi's business.

Beas Braiding and Extensions has been called "Calgary's answer to bad hair", it might as well be but the salon does much more than just hair. In fact it is among the most enduring features of Calgary for hair care and has been an icon of the city life for 17 years. The proprietor of the business; Twumasi, has been braiding and weaving since she was a child in her native Ghana of West Africa having learnt the trade from her mother, she started doing it as a businesses when she moved to Calgary in 1974 and her basement suit acted as a saloon.

Such is the significance of Bea Braiding and Extensions that it has been featured in the business section of the Calgary Herald, the Calgary Sun, and Global TV's Breakfast show. The salon is a major participant in the Calgary high schools Beauty Culture Program mentoring students interested in a career in beauty and costmetics. From this program students get a chance to intern at the saloon and some are even luckier as they are retained for employment. Twumasi has also provided hair extensions and accessories to Calgary's movie and music industry players. Currently there are 5 permanent employees of Beas Braiding and Extensions, the salon also exhibits art pieces made by new immigrants to Calgary.

Twumasi grew up as an only child with a single mother in Kumasi a major commercial centre in @@@@Ghana. Her mother Agnes Okyem ensured Twumasi learnt about entrepreneurship earlier in life, she was taught hair braiding at home but the daughter turned out to be a teacher instead but hair care remained her first love was hair care. In 1974, Twumasi immigrated to Canada and has since been living in Calgary with her husband Emmanuel Twumasi an oil engineer, they have three children.

Immediately after arriving in Canada Twumasi enrolled in the University of Calgary and graduated with a bachelor of Education. Having learnt the ethics of work earlier on from her mother she worked for the Calgary Catholic School Board and cleaned offices in the evenings to take good care of her young family then, she later worked as a Rehabilitation supervisor for people with mental and physical difficulties at the Legion Group Home. In her free time Twumasi started a hair care business in the basement of her family home.

While she worked as a manager at Legion Group her basement salon continued existing and later hired more staff, her client base expanded from a predominantly ethnic composition "and crossed cultural lines" according to Gloria Mensah who has known Twumasi for 25 years . Demand for her services grew so big that her home salon needed an independent premise of its own. In 1993 Beas Braiding and Weaving opened its doors on 17 Eve SE, it was among the first ethnic hair saloons in Calgary back then and Twumasi resigned her managerial job to concentrate on her love of hair care. She hired 6 staff members and according Mensah, many of these maiden staff members have since gone on to open their own hair saloons.

As a living witness to the great Canadian success story Twumasi wants to share the inspiration of her transition and her success from being a child of a broken family, young and challenged immigrant to Calgary in the 1970s to entrepreneur. Twumasi a Calgary role model, she is part of efforts that enhance the spirit of Alberta as a home for all. From new comers to Canada, young people that are in need of guidance in life and celebrating the true joy of living in Canadda.

She is currently working with the McBride group which seeks to help job seekers learn skills and trades that they can use to find meaningful employment. She participates in various events like the Carifest, the Calgary Women's Show and Afrikadey. These events are some of the features that make Calgary city a community of fun, work, love, peace and creativity for Calgarians of all walks of life.

Natalia Estefania Echeverria-Dubon 2010: Calgary Nominee for the Community Services Award

2010-02-22T09:42:00.000-08:00

Nominee for the Community Services Award

Natalia Estefania Echeverria-Dubon was born in 1974 in Guatemala and grew up along with her four of her siblings in a region troubled by inequality, poverty and war. However Estefania's mother dedicated her life to educating her children and grooming them into compassionate and visionary citizens of the world.

Estefania as a result was endowed with a love of people and the world at an early age. Faced with the troubles of Guetamala and the limit these troubles were bestowing on her life she emigrated to Canada at the age of 18 in 1992 settling in Calgary. Estefania says that her philosophy is influenced by the spirit of Canada which she is says is an open country and welcomes people from different places of the universe and turns these people from being strangers to one community.

"All human beings need someone or something to corroborate their existence. A mother. A friend, A nation. A law. A God. It is my belief that we all need entities that would constantly reassure us that we have a purpose in life and that we belong somewhere. That we are not outcasts, but rather we are welcomed, that we fit in , and that we are in the right place."

She came to Canada in 1992 fours years before the civil war in Guetamala ended. Upon her arrival in Calgary she enrolled in Father Lacombe High School and entered an essay writing competition about "What Does It Mean to Be Canadian?' and was selected as a winner. The next year she emerged second place from a short story writing contest organized by the Latin America Association in Calgary. Since then, Estefania has used her first language (Spanish) to benefit other individuals involved in missionary work as well as students interested in learning Spanish for leisure as well as career purposes.

Currently she teaches Spanish in the non credit continuing education department at the Mount Royal University and her students have but praise for her. "She is by far the best language teacher I have known in my many years of teaching," says Catrina Loman a retired teacher with the Calgary Board of Education. "She is a shining example to other immigrants," Constance Hunt a former Law Professor at the University of Calgary says while another one says; "she stands head and shoulder above all the language teachers I have been exposed to."

In her free time Estefania volunteers her time by teaching Spanish and Latin American culture to different groups and missionaries traveling to the region. She also volunteers at Bow Valley Christian Church, Spanish Christian Fellowship and FairChild Radio 94.7.

Memoirs of the first Msope

2010-02-21T21:48:00.000-08:00

BY GEORGE KAGAME

The weather is good today, the sun is fully out and the skies are clear and like all mid mornings on such days the good old the First Msope just finished having what he calls a balanced breakfast. It is the second breakfast of the day. Earlier In the morning before he left home the good old Mfasha, his genial wife, had prepared a nice wonderful send off comprised of a warm cup of milk tea, a banana, mandazi and bread.

the First Msope loves carbohydrates. They make his cheeks chubby but that is a sign that Mfasha is doing her job well. These are good days in Citi for the First Msope, he has some concerns and issues with fitting in the new Citi but he lets the complaining and bitching about these issues to be done by others on his behalf.

For now he is enjoying the good days and he knows fully well in his heart that he has never seen better but paradoxically he believes that someone else is enjoying the benefits of the good days more than him. As such he is jealous and when he returns home in the evening after work he will complain about the current system in Citi to Mfasha and his close buddies at the watering hole, the famous Ship&Anchor in Msingi wa Mji the business capital of Citi.

the First Msope is reveling in the new found fortunes of Citi, he never thought that things would be this good for him after Citi had earlier slid into calamity and then recovered to the gem it was now becoming today. So as he licks his lips and pulls up his trousers concealing a fast protruding belly while readying to sign numerous documents about Misio and fishi, as business trips and their expenses receipts are called in Citi he is joyous.

Today is Friday which means the working day ends at 12pm upon which he will sign out and head straight to the watering hole in the official Suzuki Grande while the afternoon shift, otherwise dedicated to Siporo, will be spent chastising the new trends of Citi in private.The Grande is the new big man signature in terms of automobiles running the streets in Citi they replaced Rengi Roveri and Renault. The latter wowed the crowds in years yonder. Life in the new Citi is a paradox!

The Suzukis now crowd the road leading to Marutarama a suburb in Msingi wa Mji that hitherto had been a shrub but now was turned into a Malibu estates look alike.

But it is unfair not introduce the First Msope properly as it would rob you the understanding which is crucial in discerning why he is enjoying today so much. You see the First Msope was born in the Citi country side and never dreamed of big things as were happening in Msingi wa Mj currently. When he was a younger man, the authorities in Citi were uncouth, they mismanaged the country and got the Citimen as confused as an intoxicated homeless man. Citimen as a result hated each other so much that they unsuccessfully tried an apocalypse once. During this time the First Msope was starting out his teenage years. Problem is that some of the people in the authorities at that time were well known to the First Msope and in fact some of them might have been related to him by extension. Even at that time, all evidence pointed to him being a big man in the system one day.

In school the First Msope studied in a foreign language but this was to prove a disadvantage as the teachers were not very generous with their language so he only learnt the language partially. To compound the mess, that language was out of sync today and that is the reason that he was uncomfortable with some of the changes in Citi currently. He detested the new language and what it represented but the new language had also introduced him to the English premiership.

The First Msope circled on Arsenal for the club managed by a Frenchman gave the First Msope a sense of identity as the lonely Frenchman in the English premiership. But in hindsight, Msope's newly found zealousness for soccer blessed the fortunes of the Citi national team in its hey days. The Citimen had even qualified for the continental bonanza, a fete that was hitherto unknown. The leading club in the land had also dominated regional tournaments and attracted the best players from all counties surrounding Citi though this did not stop the First Msope from going to Ship&Anchor to watch Arisenali instead of Siporo on friday afternoons.

As soon as the previous authorities in Citi were abolished the First Msope found out that the language he studied in school and managed to learn only partially was no-longer trendy. And so in order for him to flourish well today he had to learn another foreign language. This was particularly a difficult task at his age and big man status.

But this new foreign language was essential in the economical and political dynamics of Citi, many language centres opened up all over Msingi wa Mji and other urban or commercial centres such that many, like the First Msope, would learn the new language and take advantage of newer opportunities in Citi. The language centres opened up in mosques, churches and markets.

He relied on his dexterity in farming on steep hills in the country to hustle in the new Citi. It did not help that all the new development programmes in Citi were compiled in a new vision and everything was written in the new foreign language. In order for the First Msope to climb the new big man ladders he found it necessary to learn this new language.

The language was further necessary because the new authorities had ensured that many new people arrived in Citi and they were not just visiting. They had come to stay and in order for the First Msope to get along with them he had to learn not just a new foreign language but new cultures. He was worried that the road rules were soon to be changed and that even his cherished friday Siporo would soon vanish.

Memoirs of a Musajja

2010-02-12T00:18:00.000-08:00

BY GEORGE KAGAME

He was born and bred in Musajjaland but basajja never considered him a bonafide 'son of the soil' and like Wyclef Jean sang in 'peace God' when he died his life was not even worth paperwork. He grew up learning that he was different. He was not bothered in his existence but there was no doubt amongst his hosts that he was also not welcome. He was the Musajja.

As a result of his confusing and often compelling economic history, he was left with no option but to wander the entire expanse of Musajjaland trying to find one place that would make him comfortable, the search for a home. The less neighbours known to him the better for his existance. It was perhaps due to this that he chose to be a nomad. But even that economic activity, like the endless summer nights, has a cycle. And so the cycle stopped. The Musajja was tired of the rat race, he decided to try his luck in Citi.

In fact prior to this event, he was not even aware that he was a Musajja, this identity was tagged to him the moment he crossed the line and entered Citi.

Years yonder after entering Citi he never knew that when the Citimen talked of Musajja they were referring to him. Many lives in exile had successfully robbed him of his identity to a point that even when all those around him reminded him he was different, the musajja never bothered. To start with, he did not have one particular language with which to identify. And he was right. He had acquired this 'deaf' skill from his sojourns in Musajjaland. His hosts had called him many names, that even he, forgot who he really was. Perhaps it was because of a mixture of his vigilance and misery. How can a refugee be so vigilant in fighting for the overall freedom of his hosts? Either the hosts were arrogant, dumb or unreasonably proud or maybe the refugee did not have an option and so was left to be used as a condom to fight other people's wars. After-all he was considered to be so hapless that the only means the refugee had used to get to Musajjaland was hopping on top of fishes and swimming across borders.

The means he used to cross borders ending in Musajjaland withstanding, the Musajja had acquired the characteristics of a chameleon. He became a successful cattle herder, a community organizer and a freedom fighter that many of the dictators reigning in Musajjaland would not have been disposed of without his compliance, his cattle, his homelessness, his love for action, his despair, his cattle and above all his elegant women.

So it was with a sense of both relief and hurt that he had acquired an identity upon entering Citiland, even if Musajja seemed inappropriate it was all the same welcome. However, in Citi more than Musajjaland, they had been incarnated with a spirit that told them who was whom. Any slight difference amongst individuals could be detected within a distance of 70 miles away as a result of this training. The Musajja tag was therefore coined according to his accent, his recipe, his talking manners as well as his adaptability. What however remained a dominant feature was that he was also considered a foreignor in Citi.This was hurtful.

What was relieving however was the fact that the musajja was more comfortable with the physical features that defined him as a person and that on occasions he could compete for work on equal terms with everybody else in the job market. But even in this Citi life there was balances of foreignors and locals that had surfaced once the musajja crossed the borders. So as the musajja competed for one particular job for which he qualified the employers were faced with a small problem of balancing the two. The musajja, for his limited French, for his distaste of pause, (that proverbial afternoon siesta prevalent in Citi, was considered a 'bad air' in the working environment.) So he lost out on all the jobs of NGOs and public parastatals. The musajja as a result found willing employers in the private sector and the government of Citi, which itself was almost operated on the principles of a profit motivated private corporation.

The ideas that the musajja was a foreignor was further strengthened and enhanced by the opinions of the visitors of Citi, since the musajja was not very eloquent in Citi he got along very well with many of such visitors to Citi but the visitors had their own agendas and quite often they interpreted the musajja as not being proud of other Citimen and wanting to align himself to foreignors. The visitors therefore suggested that indeed the musajja was not one of the bonafide Citimen and so he belonged to lands ashore.

Faced with this paradox the musajja had to rely on his refugee skills. The skills of believing in good, in the unlimited depth of the human spirit to love, in the drive to forge and develop a community and in the hope that one day Citi will be a home for all. Foreign and locally born.

donuwagiwabo@gmail.com

UN and donor employees: third world misery is their career blessing

2010-01-31T20:17:00.000-08:00


BY GEORGE KAGAME
I am seated in the waiting lobby of an NGO office located on the 12th floor of a glass skyscraper in downtown Citi. There are eight individual chairs in the lobby but we are only two people waiting for different officials of the NGO whose main activity is to assist Citi families with counselling and awareness services. The other guy has been in the office longer than I have but he seems patient as if what brought him to the office is an important errand and he has to sit it out till his supposed appointment shows up. Despite the fact that there are only two of us waiting and in the past 15 minutes none has been called, the receptionist who is hidden behind a desk that resembles a church pulpit seems quite occupied. She repeatedly picks up the phone and says the same words to different callers. In the 15 minutes that I have been waiting she has picked up more than 15 phone calls and to each she repeated the same words. “She is out of office/ she is in a meeting/do you have an appointment with her?/is she expecting you?” Most of the people working in this NGO are women. Maybe they are the most compassionate lot in the gender class. But it cannot be true, I have been here for 20 minutes now while the lady I am due to meet is being traced or so I am told. The walls in the waiting lobby are affixed with trendy notice boards on which hang pick up brochures and pamphlets, a large flag of Citi stands in the middle, a family from the country walks into the office. The family comprises an aged couple and their chubby teenage boy. They cannot speak Citi so they need a translator. A man in his 20s accompanies them and helps with translation. He has ear piercings and earrings and it is obvious that aged couple do not approve of his presence in their entourage. He is a necessary evil since his services are needed and so they have no choice but to deal with him. They are particularly afraid that their teenage boy seems to like hanging with the translator. But whatever the country family wanted help for seems not forthcoming in this office. They are advised to go back home and make another appointment with the responsible officer of the NGO; as such they are given a phone number on which to make the said second appointment From the look of the old lady, she knows that when they make the call, there won’t be a person to pick up the phone on the other end. But the wisdom of old age tells her to accept what seems to be sincere apologies from the receptionist. The old lady puts up a brilliant performance of hiding her bitterness and obvious frustration at the receptionist and the NGO. The lobby was a good vantage point from which to observe the goings on in the NGO and the hoo haa of what their brochures advertised as activities and services. There was a fair amount of young beautiful woman in tight pants walking about with a pseudo display of urgency. The receptionist speaking on phone or attending to her colleagues was desperately trying to appear humble, courteous, kind, and at the same-time putting up an impressive performance of appearing to be busy too. After 20 minutes of waiting in the offices, I heard the receptionist say, “I am sorry,” more than 16 times when I stopped counting. The NGO is like an embassy of a bigger NGO whose headquarters are located in a huge city overseas and it is one of the major players of the do-good industry. I was here to do my part in the industry which was simply write another story to appear in their journal, brochure or pamphlet about what they do. As a result, I do not have a place in the hierarchy of the organization. I am a contractor and therefore an outsider. The lobby experience reminded me of a time I worked at the UN base in Citi years yonder. At the UN I was also an outsider and as such I observed the goings on with a detached interest. The UN base was located in a relatively flat part of Citi but it was ironical that most of the employees in the UN offices exclusively drove sports utility vehicles. They might as well have as the UN subsidized the costs of maintenance and fuel. This area was also particularly stable and peaceful relative to the surroundings but this did not stop UN employees to have panic buttons installed in all the rooms of their exclusively built houses. From a distance, everybody at the base appeared busy but they really did nothing to show for their being busy. The violence the base was meant to stop was instead feeding off the excess of the UN. Violence and crime had/have a symbiotic relationship with the UN and the do-gooders. If/when a location where the donor and UN employees had a report of an incident of crime or violence, the employees gleefully wrote a report to their overseas offices that carried alarm and threat in high dozes. This ensured that the salaries and benefits of the employees would be revised in accordance with the crime and violence of the areas where they were working. This was called the hardship allowance. The hardship allowance ensured that the UN became the most hypocritical organization in the world. Having been started to help reduce violence, war, crime, ensure peace and stability prevailed and those other good things of saving the world, the UN employees thrived in war zones and conflict prone areas. This beats the logic behind the do gooders, one was constantly exposed to the double standards of the UN. It happened in Nairobi recently when UN employees publicly protested The UN’s International Civil Service Commission when they reclassified the UN office in Nairobi from level C to B in what is known as ‘safe’ places to work and the subsequent allowances that the staffers receive for living in such areas. The Nairobi UN staff protested the reclassifying as it reduced their hardship allowance. Interestingly, Nairobi has been a high risk area to work since January 2001 when Mzee Arap Moi was still in charge. Today I prayed for my people in the DR Congo for MONUC is not likely to leave soon while their hardship allowance keeps rising!!

musajja memoirs

2010-01-31T20:11:00.000-08:00

Kafulu, I'm scheming in my head a story, "memoirs of a Musajja," It is basically that, memoirs of a Musajja.
Now really, what is a musajja?
Well, a musajja is the archetypical Rwandan immigrant that was born and bred in Uganda. In Uganda Luganda is the biggest language in a country made up of 52 tribes.

Luganda however is the chemistry that keeps the country intact, students, soldiers, chapati makers and the elite speak the thing. The native speakers of Luganda, the Baganda are among the most humiliatingly humble kind, they kneel, they sir to almost every man, some women are in the privileged position of having the title of sir too, when their kind is passing around, his subject prostrate in the way you can only see in movies. Their beads touching the ground as a symbol that only beads sweep the kings pathways. Just imagine how many beads it can take to sweep a dusty rural road and you have an idea of humble.

When Baganda eat it is a feast. Every meal in Buganda is a ceremony. First is served in a circle format on green banana leaves while the staple food, steamed banana mashed in green leaves and peanut sauce. The middle of a circle elaborately spread in the house forms a pinnacle of the meal. From which everyone in the house stretchers under the watchful eye of the family mother, to pick a serving.
All in the household sit squarely on the floor. Only the father of the house sits on a chair and desk which serves as his perennial solo dining table.

The musajja, in his incarnation in Rwanda was a returnee who had lived his entire life as a immigrant without paperwork. You have to Wyclef Jean in his song "Peace God"
Sweetest Girl??
Anyhow the Rwandan musajja was as intriguing as confusing, but that was the brand of a product manufactured in musajjaland. When musajja arrived din Rwanda it was with shock that he realized that hugging are actually African practices, that women don't kneel or wear skirts forever.
That in Rwanda there are actually no cows.
It was a myth what our forefathers told us.
Where did the cows go?
When were they ever in Rwanda actually?
in which parts of the country?
Unless Masisi was part of Rwanda in years yonder.
That I'd agree because there's no place like Masisi if the topic is cows. Masisi and cows and the few native Rwandans have the perfect threesome made in heaven, under the watchful gaze of God.

No actually I was thinking of something else when I started writing this stuff, I was thinking of della Madonina, that is not something complex, i might as well have made it up. It is actually just a socdr match between AC Milan and Inter Milan,

No words for words for della Madonina. Crap, I don't watch soccer anymore. There's nothing like that in North America.

As it goes in Angola, Egypt are up for seven today.
Woe to Ghana,

And guess what Ahmed Hassan is alleged to have said after they earned the finals berth,
"those black people.....Africans don't know how to play soccer....."
Then a reported asked him,"from which continent are you?"
Kasasiro those Arabs.

Calgary is wonderful, is just minus 12 today, snow falling.
But that is a good day by average.
No pub in North America "yalaga" ACN, can you imagine? All this stuff we watched as kids, even, "this is sportscentre," clips.

And these people don't show anything from our side?
As it were, I am now coming up with seven teams that are likely to feature in the 2010 Nationals College Basketball Championships play offs of you know where. it will be around April.

While on March 7th I think is the HUGE SUPERBOWL, it is a cathedral of American sports.Nothing is bigger,
the tradition is that you have a host among your friends, then each one carries beer, chilli sauce, beer, and even the women carry themselves....
Yeah, it is a long rant,
Not heard from you in days,
just "Telling on myself."

Haiti

2010-01-22T00:15:00.000-08:00

Unedited Ramblings
Last Sunday New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an opinion article that has caused a quiet outrage. Commenting on the horrific earthquake in Haiti that killed over 50,000 people, Brooks suggested it’s mostly the Haitians, not nature, that should be blamed.

Brooks controversially suggested that Haitian culture (thus black culture, if you wish to stretch it) is given to underachieving. Also that it’s averse to planning, so Haitians build sloppy houses that crumbled like a pack of cards when the quake struck.
Maybe he has a point, because we have to acknowledge that if the earthquake had hit quake-prone cities Tokyo or San Francisco, 50,000 wouldn’t have been killed. Maybe 150. Reason? They build houses to withstand quakes, and are better prepared for emergencies.

Like many Third World cities, Port-au-Prince has the same problem you would find in Nairobi, Kampala, Lagos, or Cairo: Thousands of people living buildings that are unfit for human habitation because a corrupt official took a bribe, closed his eyes, and issued an occupancy certificate.
Brooks is not the first, nor will he be the last, Caucasian commentator to argue that Third World cultures, and black ones in particular, are inefficient.

Controversial (and even detestable) as his point might be, we have got to that point where the Brooks of this world can no longer be countered with argument alone. That is even before one considers what Pat Robertson said in reference to Haiti's misery, saying that the Haitians have a pact with the devil in regard to their fight to end slavery from the French in the 18th C.
We need a shining example of a black country that is a shining example of economic success, efficiency, and innovation, in the world. It stands to reason that is we are as good as everyone else (which we are are), it is time for us to show it - we should do as well as everyone else.

What do white people that have no interest in Africa for example know about Botswana? Mauritius? Gabon? Gambia? And some other 'black' (black even sounds evil to many) countries??

Remember the the comments about black people in the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide?? How we are so savage as to butcher ourselves on a whim??

Well, today most people of sane minds are marveling at the shining star that is Rwanda. Interesting that natural is not racist, or is it??

I am reminded of Hurricane Katrina, the Tsunami in Asia, the floods in Philippines, the earthquake in Tokyo as you mentioned

fLOODS killed many in China recently, (in that country, they prudently don't allow western media to sway opinion that way the media is doing to Haitians, who in the wake of the earthquake are now portrayed as a violent lot, bent on looting. Now the priority there is SECURITY rather than emergence relief.

And of yes, it is christmas time foe the good old aid workers.

No. It is not the shining example of a black country that we need, (it will never happen if the standards are set elsewhere)
We instead need many black people to bring us on the information highway, we need strONG black media, to tell our own stories. and to resist the idea of understanding ourselves based on other people's conceptions and impressions of us.

AN Important meeting I dream of having one day

2010-01-12T23:10:00.000-08:00

Having a meeting with a plate of chicken. “Hello, Chicken. Glad you could make it to this function. Let me introduce everybody. On your left are chips and next to chips is coke. They are going to be accompanying you on your mission. You will have plenty of time to get to know them better. We have scheduled a mingling session for later. Heh heh. Now that we are all here, let’s get right into it. The venue for this afternoon’s festivities is my mouth. And Speaking of getting right into it…”

Cowism and Umoja: Choosing between two hard ideologies for the EAC

2010-01-11T12:19:00.001-08:00

BY GEORGE KAGAME

Forty years ago or some, Tanzania established itself as a country of umoja, meaning unity. Umoja was also a popular brand of rubber slip on sandals, we called them Sapatu and in Rwanda they were known as Kama'mbiri.

Sapatu was a measure of pride in East Africa in the 80s, in some communities the thing was worn strictly indoors, as it was considered distasteful to walk about in "things of the bathroom outside the house." In this community the wearer afforded normals shoes so as to render the sapatu an exclusively indoor attire, like an under pant. It was considered shameful to wear sapatu in public in some areas.

While in other communities, the sandals were 'sunday' shoes, the other days of the week were spent thumping the earth bare foot, most times in scorching heat. Thank God it was not winter. A picture of a kid wearing a pair of Umoja, and a smiling face smeared with vaseline jelly is a monument in my home town of Busunju todate.

Tanzania strictly and officially practiced Umoja both as a popular footwear as well as a political ideology but somewhere in the late 1990s something went wrong, socialism aka Umoja alias Ujaama was abolished.But while Umoja was successful in Tanzania, (they never had tribal wars, spoke a local national language that is soon becoming the official language of Africa and had a stable government on top of a coastal city, those bastards!!), Tanzania really was not much different from other Umoja adherents in its footwear reincarnation.

As a result of the success of Umoja in later years I shared a room at university with a Tanzanian journalist currently reporting for The Daily News. As would happen in our universities, each country had a group that brought together students from one country into a single association, this association participated in drama and theatre performances representing their countries at cultural galas. Rwanda was a leading contender in most of these cultural galas.

After one performance by a Rwandan dance troupe, the UN as the Tanzanian journalist who traced his lineage to Rwanda called himself, said his country had only learnt about socialism in textbooks while Rwanda had in it their DNA and dances, he found it particularly hilarious that the dances resembled the movement of cows.

Then we would speak of people doing 'good things in the world', when we talked of vegetarians he said Rwandans care for the environment, thats why they dance like cows! "We have also learnt this by textbook," he would say. The cow was important in Rwanda that the business of eating meat was despised by the 'highly cultured' of the day.

A cow would be left to age gracefully and if seen to be incapable of living anymore it would be bartered for beans and sweet potatoes by neighbouring crop farmers. As a monument to the cow, the Kinyarwanda dance was crafted to actually resemble the movement and make up of the cow in the community. The UN said Rwanda practiced Cowism. Before Send A Heifer and Land O' Lakes thought about it, "they also learnt it from the textbooks," he said.

It is ironic that the cow, the way we know it in East Africa, has defined the story of Rwanda. The country is small but perhaps because on large parts of all its comprising hills, a cattle ranch could coexist amidst crop farming ranches. Crop and animal have been central in the scope of the story. Sometimes and in foresight, the interest of the two could override each other, but largely the two got along quite well. Someone later broadened the scope of "got along quite well" or simply changed its meaning and then things got of of order.

The business of the cow and its importance was in its recent replenishment officially a program at the current Ministry of Agriculture. It goes under the auspices of Girinka. Among its tenets is that each household with a given income capacity was given a cow as income support for families, but with immediate and urgent emphasis to those in abject poverty. At the time of the cow story getting to the newspapers, the cow givers had 'dished' the cows to people who were relatively well to do and could afford their own cows after-all.

The recent cow story comes just before the report on the land squabbles in the Eastern Province shows up in your face.

If you are not familiar with the land, note that, in the Eastern province it took President Paul Kagame’s personal intervention in resolving matters connected to unequal distribution of land.

In large parts of the province, senior security officials had acquired large portions of land making many peasants landless and reducing them to squatters. Currently there are, according to the ministry of lands, 7.5 million plots of land in the country serving a population expected to be above 10 million now.

Cowism has its dangers, as seen with Girinka just as are many its benevolence targets; "a chosen group of one.." And if you think Land and cow was a mess, read about the scholarship loans and how they are managed. One highly placed journalist at the Focus wrote: " Numerous allegations are that whoever gets loans from SFAR do so only a) after lengthy periods of pleading and begging, b) if you are his personal friend and c) if you are one of his girlfriends."

Superstition and witchcraft

2010-01-05T01:26:00.000-08:00

Is superstition king in Africa? You bet. Even I am scared enough not to give details, but I will tell the story. There is a rich East African farmer, and four years he went to his farm which at the edge of a forest. He thought he saw armed men deep inside the forest, and thinking they were protecting illegal loggers he crawled to the edge of the forest and peeped over to see.

What he saw shocked him to the bone. There were many armed men around. A little inside in a clearing, was a witch doctor (whom the farmer knew) in feather cap and leopard skins standing over a bare-chested figure. The witch doctor was sprinkling “magical potions” over the kneeling man. The kneeling fellow was the most powerful in the land!!! And there he was being sprayed probably with chicken blood mixed with crocodile teeth and mountain gorilla testicles powder!

This should not come as a surprise. According to a report by the Pew Research Centre released last week, roughly one in four Christians in sub-Sahara Africa believes sacrifices to spirits or ancestors can protect them from bad things happening.
The report, published April 15, said: “Sizable percentages of both Christians and Muslims - a quarter or more in many countries - say they believe in the protective power of juju (charms or amulets).

In Tanzania and South Africa – where 60 per cent and 87 per cent of respondents respectively claimed to be Christian – more than half the people surveyed (60 per cent and 56 per cent respectively) said they believed that sacrifices to ancestors or spirits could protect them from harm. (See “Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa”, at http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=515).

In Uganda, a minister who is a very Born-Again Christian who wants gays and lesbians to be hanged, adulterers to be stoned, and critics of the government (he believes President Yoweri Museveni is God’s messenger) to be tortured, did a U-turn when it came to witchcraft. Child sacrifice is rampant in Uganda, and when it seemed to be getting out of control, there were calls for tough laws against witchcraft. The minister, however, came out and said a tough law that imposes the death penalty for extreme juju was too harsh. So to him, sacrificing children was a less than cheating on your husband or wife, consensual gay and lesbian sex.

If you a child living with albinism, you can be killed and eaten in full sight of the police and they will not intervene. There was that horrible story in Tanzania two weeks ago when a man raided the house of the single mother who lived next door to him. She had an albino child. He frightened the hell out of her, leaned down, chopped off the arm of the child, and walked out calmly with it!

How crooked feet can make for an epic end of year story

2010-01-01T14:43:00.000-08:00

BY GEORGE KAGAME

I was thinking of an epic write up to end 2009 and start 2010 with some sort of unique foresight but before I could think of anything to write I checked this paper’s hypothesis of the past as well as outlook for the new year. I started terribly in the exercise by reading first, Betumire Pan’s “Let’s Explode the Myth of ‘Baringa’!”

While giving a concise explanation of Baringa, a Kinyarwanda verb for a certain type of shadow dance, the writer almost captures the meaning of a related word (Mbariga) in my first language.

Mbariga in this case means a person’s feet face sideways instead of facing in the direction straight of the body. When such a person walks the strides resemble a flat ground broom, the feet are like wings! In fact there was legend in my neighbourhood that people with Mbariga never walked, they were always flying. They were also said to face difficulty in walking and keeping in straight lines. As such when an individual lost direction or knocked something to the floor while walking about, a person with Mbariga would be blamed or they would be reprimanded with the statement; “Stop walking as if you have Mbariga.”

Baringa and Mbariga aside, Betumire does a wonderful job by starting his ‘explosion’ with the idea that most people in the media predictably, are currently giving their treatise of the past decade, and as such there is no need for all of us to take more ink and pages of the paper talking about last or new year. His cynicism ensured that my own take on the end of the year was thrown to the dustbin of the computer.

The computer itself is what I had come to consider as the centre of my “end of year analysis” as it is the single most important idea and object that defined the decade. Yes, the good old computer brought me the third street Nigerian movies, the internet, mobile phone, DVD, reality television and most importantly UTAKE.

Had it not been for Betumire's note I was going to fill this space with more mambo jumbo of facebook, google, Obama, Tiger Woods, Lewis Hamilton and all newsy crap, but no, Mbariga is important and it also needs some coverage. This is because the ailment is not given serious thought by officials in planning sectors. But problem is that Mbariga is not so controversial and while one is writing about such topics as Mbariga, it is generally advised that they listen to such songs as:”These are the times” by Billy Joel. Because frankly, what is so inspiring to write about Mbariga?

Mbariga is a minor natural physical disorder at the lower end of the human body and happens when the feet face a parallel direction to that of the body which they carry. It can be corrected with gradual practice such that the feet face straight ahead of the body, just like a poor alinement of the teeth can be made good by the devices placed in the mouth whose name I don’t know. But because the feet are hidden away in closed shoes or in dirt, their problems are not taken with the aura of other ailments on other part parts of the body. And as if speaking for the less fortunate parts of the body,Tanzanian hip hop artist Professor J raps in his song Nazeeka; " "Ukitaki ku'juwa muhimu wa matako jaribu kukaa'ria kichwa." Loosely translated If you want to know the importance of a bum try sitting on your head.

I 'suffered' from the Mbariga disorder myself exactly 10 years ago and can witness recovery from the thing. The cure of Mbariga, if there’s anything like that is walking. Walk, walk, walk and just like the way the actor of Forrest Gump runs in the movie, walk with out end until the feet start to face straight like other normal feet.

So with this ailment I spent many days and sometimes nights walking. I would walk to events, to class, to town, to the market and sometimes to community ceremonies. Other times I invited myself to all the ceremonies that happened to be in the chosen line of walking on any given day and time.

One time, like so many in my neighbourhood I was in a national stadium where some important people had organized a prayer crusade to usher in a new millennium. The world was reportedly ending at some second of that night and the Son of God was returning. And even if the important people never publicly mentioned it, the prayer crusade was organized such that if Jesus was coming back to mother earth that night, he would find ‘us.’ (US being me, the crowd of the neighbourhood plus the important people in prayer.) Does the guy have to come in the night by the way?

There had been concerns about a millennium bug that was eating into all kinds of machinery and computer chips and at some second some of these collapsed, but we the humans made it through.

So as Billy Joel sings in his melody:“This is the time to remember/'Cause it will not last forever,/These are the days to hold on to /'Cause we wont although we'll want to./This is the time/The time is gonna change./ You've given me the best of you/ And now I need the rest of you.”

The colour of grief

2009-12-29T20:53:00.000-08:00

During the month of April in Rwanda it is common to see a purple cloth wrapped on people's left arms, in their necks, and pockets. purple is the colour of death in Rwanda, IN some cases as is often during the month of April, a white cloth cris crossed by purple on many caskets containing the remains of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

But it is not just colours, I once stayed with a people who took the howling of dogs/wolves meant some disaster, in most cases death. "Emisege," they were called, although as we were later to learn the term also meant another term. I was left thinking about disaster recently.

The other day I wore a pair of black jeans and a black shirt. When I was masquerading around the is just walking about in the corridors aimlessly,
Then in my housemate opened the door to her room and saw me passingby. She was surprised and utterly shocked. "Oh my God," she reacted in horror. I was confused in the moment as to what had shocked her and quickly realized it was my attire and the prominence of black.

I was thinking today as I listened to Prof J's song "Nazeeka" where he says "if you want to know the importance of the bum try sitting on your head."

"Ukitaki ku'juwa muhima wa matako jaribu kukaa'ria kichwa."

I don't know why this song, a Tanzanian urban hip hop thing that is completely unrelated reminds that while people are still struggling to find the colour of love, we were quick to know the colour of death.

Pub talk: The Citi, the Commonwealth, and the good times

2009-12-25T13:57:00.000-08:00

BY GEORGE KAGAME

Majukumu: Just the other week the famous Performance Contracts were undergoing their annual assessment in the parliament under the watchful eyes of the leaders, snoops, elders and well wishers. All these stake-holders were keenly following mayors and district officials present their performances for 2009 and setting the next step in the march to Vision Venti Venti.

Performance Contracts were following shortly after or is it before, the Itorero ceremonies. Among other things, the national Itorero or Itorero ryi'Gihugu is a national dance troupe, sort of a Champions' League of dance and drama, but with a more modern catch than just your theatre! By the way, do you go to the theatre? Do you have a theatre in your town? Do you know any local playwrights or 'plays'?, I don't mean just the Uranana. What is your idea of leisure beyond Primus and the cow dances?

So I was talking about the performance contracts event held recently in the Citi, percentages were read out, visions were set, questions were asked, answers were given and I can imagine it was a good time in many hometowns for Citimen . God times facebook reminds me!

Mambo'yetu: You see the pride in my hometown pub talk was in watching one of us, speaking on national television with The Leader, who was seen to be following with serious interest and even asking questions. Who are we to have a local boy speaking on television with such an audience. So the neighbourhood was in high spirits going into the christmas period. Welcome to the 2009 PLAN of our home towns.

We have heard unfortunately that one of us, a KalinaIngufu is on the run. Uhm, one wonders, this boy? we saw him a few days ago, he is/was the pride of the pub.

Is he not the one whose name means "a small man with power," now he even just went epic, this power thing I tell you!! He was about to be promoted and transferred to the party city of Africa, but as an appetizer, he was sent to a 15 day vacation to think about his next career step which was a perched office in the Lap Green conglomerate In the party city.

Well, while the 'little man with power' was preoccupied with evenings at FatBoys, Bubbles O'Leary and Just Kicking, Nakulabye, Bbunga and Kabbalaga, he decides to step down on the Cape, see whats up there. Then, don't say it. Whisper instead, INterpol is looking for him. Shyhhhh!!!!!!!

This boy, I think he was a bright spot in the vision at some point? Who is Eric Kariningufu?

Bwana'Mkubwa: Yes, earlier in their cycle of growth, the Citimen were dismissed by many not least their neighbours, they were called baFella, war mongers, a bunch of thugs meant to destroy or create an empire. Yes, they were said to be creating an empire; a "hegemony" as one mogul called it.

Eh, those people, remind them that now the Citimen are engaged in Keeping Peace in other places. Have you not heard? recently we have lost our sons killed by ambush attacks in Darfur. Have you met Darfur in the news?

It is a strange place up north and our fellow Citimen are very popular there. They walk around with guns and big bags on there backs. They are not back packers>

And remember just yesterday the Citimen were seen as a bunch of "dominators." Those neighbours, we laugh at them, they only tried to understand us in one scope, that of two kinds of people who lived close to each other but never shared peace or love.

Yes, the empire was a big idea at sometime and at one point was called a " dynasty." Woe to those people.

Our two sided street on the only road passing through Citi was lined with such avenues such as war, hatred, genocide and genocide ideology. But thanks to the new vision brought in by the new brand of Citimen to whom as a foresight, Kariningufu, like other alleged bad apples belongs.

The new crop of Citimen decided that the Citi brand had to change, if Citimen cannot get along properly, the new people said, they would open up Citi, let it be explored by other people, much more different, the Citiz would then learn how to make better of the relations between themselves on the single road running through our beloved Oh Citi. The avenues on our road had to change to cooperation, peace, stability, peace, cleanliness, peace, order and if one knows the Citi well enough, good food.

Citimen have now invited other people on our single street Citi. Our stretch now springs from Kampala, Dar Salaam and Mombassa, it is called the EAC. Oh yes, we are now open for business in Paris and Kinshasa. The Commonwealth is an added advantage of course. Oh yes, I am reminded that Rose Kabuye is currently charming up the streets in Citi, and we are open in Berlin too! We have some criticism too, but that is for days yonder.

Yes, there's a problem with being a new kid on the block, at some point the other members of the East African Community complained that Citimen were rushing them about reforms and targets. Citimen knew too well that the only people they had to impress were the good old Donors.

That is why at the time the EAC was reluctant we approached African Peer Review Mechanism, (APRM) and signed on, at that point the EAC had to play catch up with us. I tell you, we even managed to convince the World Bank. Look at the World Bank 2009 Doing Business Index.

Alright, we'll see you in 2010...

From SA’s dance melodies to Nigeria’s movies, Africa’s scene

2009-12-22T12:11:00.000-08:00

Sunday, 6th September 2009
E-mail article Print article

Wole Soyinka

BY GEORGE KAGAME

Much of Africa’s entertainment industry in the 1990s was very much an offshoot of events and issues in South Africa, and how musicians developed a talent for telling their stories of the brutal apartheid experiences, in groovy songs that were favourite disco and dance tunes at the time.

Yvonne Chaka Chaka with songs as Stimela and Thank you Mr. DJ was the queen of Africa, Brenda Fasie, the pop princess and Lucky Dube, was a sweet melody to lovers in disco halls.

Dube’s music was not even known as reggae at that time, it was slows. The likes of Pat Shange and Chiko Chimora were the party blues, complimented by a variety of Congolese stalwarts like Tshala Muana, Arlus Mabele, the incredible Madilu System and Kanda Bongoman. (Where did he go?)

The songs and videos of continental music told of misery under dictatorships or absolute poverty, yet in the disco halls and party homes the music was a soundtrack for passionate dancing and joy.

Africans of this time danced with a certain zeal, that even one big DR Congolese star General Defao made himself a name primarily on dancing moves that resembled the gorilla walk.

The mid 1990s Congo or Zaire was still under the tutelage of the Kuku Wa’Zabanga al Mubutu Tse Koko. His people having given up hope of getting rid of him-he was considered a god after all-had invested all their energies in sweet Lingala tunes.

Their music with that of the South Africans was the soundtrack of the new Africa.

This was no ordinary time in Africa, Tanzania was breaking free of communism; Uganda was coming out of various episodes of war, South Africa was closing in on apartheid while Rwanda was going to war and later genocide. Robert Mugabe was still undergoing political adolescence.

Algeria was still fighting the famous Ninjas. But the music on the continent then was superb. Every event of name in any urban and rural part of Africa had to have some music from Lucky Dube, Chaka Chaka and Brend Fasie, Pepe Kale, Judi Boucher and UB40 to be worth a memory.

African music at that time indeed told of the continent’s quest from ‘Kumbaya’ and the famed idea that Africans were able to turn misery into celebration and so could only be good at dancing.

Considering that the South Africans at that time knew very little of the ‘other’ Africa, it is difficult to fathom how they created music that enthralled the whole continent. But South Africans love their dancing with passion, they supported their musicians and the musicians in turn told the story of the people.

The biggest music stars of the time in the country were equally as popular as such figures like Nelson Mandela and Chris Hani.

Sometimes their music was about working conditions in mines or farms, saving only for food and Umuqomboti. Yet most of these songs told the stories of the other Africa that they never knew.

The ‘other’ Africans loved this music; many ‘cool’ guys of the time had to have a Chaka Chaka or Dube cassette tape
And when Chaka released her I Cry song, about the struggle of a woman, married to an unreasonable jealous African ‘big man’ that had for long treated her to domestic violence, the government considered Africans not intelligent enough to know about gender equality, so the song was banned from television and promotion.

Like other artists her music was strictly for black people, it was not supposed to be promoted or marketed to other races.

The song was banned from SABC, the government not being happy after interpreting itself as the unreasonable jealous man in the song!

And then South Africa got rid of apartheid in 1994. The music changed as well. Where we had the Chaka Chaka’s now, arose; Mafikizolo, Black Smith Mambazo et al.

The rhythm changed to more energetic and powerful dancing, they had already figured out the computer sound. Africa was now in touching distance of the ICT ladder.

With the breakthrough of television in Africa in the late1990s, (during this time, the importation of television sets was banned in Tanzania, only Julius Nyerere imported and watched TV and sometimes he watched CNN and the next day when he addressed crowds he appeared as a philosopher or prophet. He knew his subjects would not figure out where he got his information.)

South Africa again led the television revolution in television, in many African programmes; Mnet presented an African vision and image of the continent that CNN, BBC and the movies never showed.

The corporate and ‘civilized’ Africa! They capped it all by the introduction of Saturday soccer pubs. Programmes such as Egoli, Generation and Isidingo not only told a story of diversity, they also depicted the corporate and ‘normal’ African, discussing business, talking law and even falling in love- without the use of force or witchcraft.

The story of Africa as told by South Africans was a happy and refreshing one indeed. The script changed when Africans started buying DVD players and abandoned regular television.

The Nigerians noted this. Having produced such giants of story telling as Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, the Obas invented the famous “KiNigeria” movies.

Their entry reduced the love and vigour of dance on the continent, African continental stars also perished in their place we are now watching Nigerian gold diggers, African big men, Pentecostal prayers and Cinderella stories to get status.

We need a new era, idea or zeal with which to invoke this continental spirit again.

It remains to be seen who is going to lead us from this stage to the internet era as events in South Africa, DRC and Nigeria have not been forward steps.

Ends

Rambo Ronaldo

2009-12-15T23:13:00.000-08:00

His story is that of any prodigy, it is perhaps telling that his f chierival to the throne of world soccer today is Lionel Messi. Christian Ronaldo is so amazing that he is a threat to Lionel Messi to world domination in soccer today.

Yet even when is so brilliantly talented Messi looks like the 20 years he is, he has an innocent frown, a guy just minding his business in the street, on the other hand Ronaldo is so good enough that he has been renamed Rambo.

Rambo is the American movie star Sylvester Stallone whose action films about the Vietnam war and the heroics of American troops, he had extremely built well muscles, was handsome and strong, yet Rambo also loved life. His movies had women, beautiful women and sex, machine guns, kicks and blows. Rambo represented America and Hollywood to the world.

Rambo was fit and had appeal, guns, women and cars, most young guys at the time secretly imagine themselves as Rambo, he was America at the time in short.

The first movie I watched was a Rambo action film, I walked the whole of 20 miles to watch in 1993, I was thirteen and my 15 year old brother Tony had a word of a visiting cinema from a bigger city called Mityana. We walked from Kyiterede after Kyakatebbe to Kakungubbe near Myanzi.

Okay this is not my story, but I read about the new 'Rambo' as Christiano Ronaldo is currently reffered to by newspapers in Europe. When I saw the Real Madrid star scoring for Real Madrid against Olympique Marseile in the Champions' League i thought about coincidences.

Having grown in the era where David Beckham shifted football from sports pages to fashion, humanitarian and educational pages in newspapers and magazines, Ronaldo horned his skills studying one of the greatest sportsmen in his generation. He improved is talent and appeal, Ronaldo inspired Manchester Untied to one Champions' League victory and another final, he also was the star of the technology inspired games on Playstation.

Ronaldo's fitness was supreme, then he transfered to Real Madrid in 2009, where his goal celebration has coined Rambo..

Alliance of housegirls and the Citi's homage to butlers

2009-12-12T22:00:00.000-08:00

GEORGE KAGAME

Last week's 'alliance of the maid' reminded me of the one time I had a 'house boy' myself. I'll indulge you, it is Sunday after-all.

Two years after my graduation with a degree in journalism I was in the employ of a daily newspaper in the Citi, 2007 to be exact. Having been appointed as a staff writer of a first street daily newspaper in the Citi, I moved 'up' a suburb, a bigger house and even a busier schedule. 'As such' I could not cook my own food nor wash my own clothes leave alone clean after my self. I acquired the services of a 'mU'boyi.'

I met Olivier after a frantic search of two weeks. We agreed I was supposed to pay him the equivalent of 20 USD per month on top of full board living. He would basically clean after and cook for me in exchange. The first night Olivier spent at my house he locked me out and I spent the night on a verandah. When he woke the next day, he said in his defense; "Bosi it has been a longtime since I had a good sleep."

As a student I had been a senior editor of a campus newspaper and during that time I met so many people that have turned out bosses today. I have met bosses myself, in fact I made a career out of meeting bosses every other day. Olivier apologized and convinced me not to fire him, a few weeks later he simply picked 100 dollars from my drawer and disappeared. I was left laughing at myself and the folly of development.

Yet last week when I introduced the encounter with the maid of a prospective old Italian landlady and her cheating ways, I remembered the moments when I have met with the equivalent of mU'boyis in my life. At the time of writing, many households in the Citi have the services of mUboyis, the same can be said of many cosmopolitans neighbouring the Citi.

As a teenager I had met an old lady in her 50s, she had left her own family 150 miles away in another region, she was the first 'housegirl' I met and many came and went in all places I have lived. I also remembered the times when I have discussed with a house girl, as I did with the one who works for the Italian landlord and thought the next revolution would come from her kind, the alliance of housegirls.

Upon acquiring a job many of the people in the Citi had a predictable scale of preferences top of which was to have a house, a car, a butler, a wife/husband and other items. The people involved in the descriptions of butlers at a time ensured they were youthful boys and girls, every successful person (elite or illiterate) in the Citi employed a butler. Sometimes three generations in one family had a butler, parents, children and their grand children.

Today In my home town, entire legends, songs, poems, and plays are dedicated to house girls. As a result the 'butlers' are important enough to be a regular point of reference in the media there. As a young journalist I was just beginning to climb the Citi's hierarchy of needs. Many more before and after me had these butlers who cleaned after them and cooked for them in exchange for meagre salaries. As such whenever there were serious crimes in a family a house-girl was normally an important and prominent witness.

The best movie in The Citi was made by a man who had worked in the services of a butler! History was very cruel to the butlers. After all, were they also not present during colonial times? It was said that the people who served the colonialists at their dining tables are the ones to whom independence of the Citi was bequeathed in the 60s. Housegirls/boys are very important in the Citi, the most successful Citimen/women were said to be working in western countries, in the services of butlers. They were given a vernacular name which translated to 'sweepers' in English.

Now the Citi had been reported to be in a cosy affair with Dubai, woe to both. The Arabs were said to have a budget of 230 million US dollars to invest in the godsend industry of butlers in the Citi. As it turned out the Arabs were selling feathers of white ants. In a dramatic turn of events Dubai pulled out of the investment which had ensured an entire neighbourhood had been hustled out of their homes in the suburb that was meant to host the butlers' cathedral.

The Arabs in Dubai were a good inspiration to the Citimen. Having formed their country 38 years earlier today, Dubai was promoted as a planning country and their speciality was in the services of butlers., they also had very many 'Sweepers.'

Samuel Eto'o Interview 2010

2009-12-08T23:23:00.000-08:00

World Soccer'sDan Brennancaught up with Inter Milan and Cameroon starSamuel Eto'oon the eve of the African Cup of Nations. The prolific striker discussed his exit at Barcelona, his new role with Inter and Cameroon's chances to reclaim African glory.

World Soccer:After having so much success at Barcelona, were you surprised the club let you join Inter Milan?

Eto'o:That's a question that I can't answer myself. The coach [Pep Guardiola] has to do that. I heard and read what he said about there not being a "feeling" with me -- and I keep asking myself what "feeling" means when you've always given everything on the pitch, always delivered and helped win every possible title. But I have to look forward. I'm at a great club and I think this season we will have a very good campaign.

World Soccer:After being used to playing such attacking football at Barça, is it hard adapting to a team where you have onlyDiego MilitoandWesleySneijderhelping you in attack?

Eto'o:I hope this will be corrected as we go along, because otherwise we will not go far.

World Soccer:What do you think ofJosé Mourinho? He wasn't very complimentary about you and your Barça team in his autobiography...

Eto'o:That was at the time when Barcelona faced Chelsea and I had just a general impression. But now I can see him daily in training, I think that he is doing a good job and things are looking good.

World Soccer:You moved to Inter last summer as part payment forZlatanIbrahimovic's transfer to Barça. What do you think about him?

Eto'o:A great player. There is no problem with him and surely he will adapt to the tactical scheme that they have at Barcelona, although we are different in our approach to the game. I hope it works out for him.

World Soccer:Do you still feel positive towards Barça despite the circumstances of your exit?

Eto'o:Of course. I still have the club and the fans in my heart.

World Soccer:Do you miss La Liga?

Eto'o:A little, yes. It was a large chunk of my life. I spent 13 years in Spain and when you spend that amount of time somewhere it has a deep influence on you. But now I'm facing a new challenge. I have to adapt and try to succeed.

World Soccer:Speaking of success, you've enjoyed a bit of that over the years, haven't you?

Eto'o:I've managed a few things, yes, and it's always a pleasure, but to keep winning you have to regard whatever you have already won as history. You must always start from scratch, find the strength to win again.

World Soccer:Is Inter bigger than Barcelona?

Eto'o:They are different. Inter shares the football limelight in Milan while, with respect to Espanyol, Barcelona represents the city, and that's why they say it's "more than a club."

World Soccer:Are you a problem player?

Eto'o:No. People can say that if they want, but I don't accept it. I work hard at my job. Like everyone, I've had controversial moments in the past, but those are already forgotten.

World Soccer:Which specific moment would you consider to have been the most significant for you while in Spain?

Eto'o:Perhaps it was havingLuis Aragonésas my coach. He is like a father to me. I worked with him at Mallorca. I arrived [at Mallorca] on a low, because Real Madrid always sent me out on loan, and whenever the season ended, I'd return to Madrid without a clear idea about my future. So I stayed at Mallorca and Aragonés really shook me up. He talked to me a lot, he advised me and I stayed there for four seasons until I ended up at Barcelona. That's why I was so happy when he won the European Championship with the Spain national side, because I respect him so much as a coach and as a man.

World Soccer:Many say that you have a complex with Real Madrid because, though you played for its second-division reserve team, Castilla, in 1995-96, you never established yourself.

Eto'o:It's not like that. Over time, I became closer to Barcelona than Real Madrid, but I had very good friends amonglosBlancos, people who I have fond memories of. Perhaps it's just that my character is very expressive and when I win, there is an outpouring of emotion.

World Soccer:What was your lowest point in Spain?

Eto'o:Without doubt, it was when I was on loan from Real Madrid at Espanyol in 1999. The coach,Miguel Brindisi, never played me and I felt depressed there and couldn't wait to return to Madrid.

World Soccer:Do you have an idol in football?

Eto'o:Sure,Roger Milla, who was everything for Cameroon. I was lucky enough to have seen him play a great match when I was only 6. At the end of the match, Milla threw his shirt to the fans and I was very lucky to catch it. Ever since then, I was fascinated by football. At the age of 12, I was already playing with people aged 20 without many problems.

World Soccer:How did you first move to Europe?

Eto'o:I was 15 when I made my debut for the national team. Then I found out that the game was being watched byPirri[a Real Madrid legend in the 1960s and early 1970s] and he was the one who took me toFabio Capello, who was the coach at Real Madrid. They loaned me straight to Leganés. I actually arrived in Madrid in February 1997 when I was 16. That early experience helped me to grow and become strong inside.

World Soccer:Do you still regard yourself as "running as a black man but living as a white man?"

Eto'o:That phrase has been discussed a lot, but I think it is not always understood what I meant by it. What I meant is that you have to sacrifice to live well. I like some luxuries, such as cars, but because I pay for them with what I earn, there's no debate. And while I do like to enjoy the good things in life, I also have a charity to help children in Cameroon and I feel good doing this. I feel like I am giving back everything that football gave me. I feel privileged to be able to do what I enjoy doing and that I also get paid to do it. That gives me great pleasure.

World Soccer:Do you think that this World Cup, the first to be played in Africa, may finally be won by an African team?

Eto'o:That's my dream, but we know how difficult it is. Cameroon, fortunately, has enjoyed some success over the years and I am already lucky enough to have an Olympic gold medal, from Sydney 2000, when we beat Spain in the final. Who is to say that we can't do the same again in South Africa?

Read more:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/world_soccer/01/06/samuel.etoo/index.html#ixzz0btwLa4Mr
Get a free NFL Team Jacket and Tee withSI Subscription

Urban living; The tenant, The landlord and the rent

2009-12-06T14:47:00.000-08:00




BY GEORGE kagame
It is said by people who know more about knowledge than me that to travel is to see and to have seen is to have learnt. In my first language it is even more eloquent, it goes; “One that has not eaten elsewhere other than their home thinks his/her mum is the best cook in the world.” As a budding young man I read several books about Italy, I don’t know why but I have always been fascinated by Italy and I have no personal attachment to that country, other than enthusiasm for AC Milan football club and Italy in the World Cup. But early in my adolescent life all the books about Italy that I managed to read seemed to tell a story similar to my own African experiences. These stories would be about employment, city living, family and community relations and so on. I always thought that if ever there was a comparison between Europe and Africa, (or anything like surrogate brothers), Italians were the closest to Africans as chimps are to human beings. Yet I am aware of the geography of the world I live in and I know as well that if an Italian reads this article he/she will think of me as a crazy loser in life. The way Italians marry, conduct business with each other, compete and relate as genders is not very different from our African ways. In old Italy, a family chose the design of their communities by controlling friendships and commerce and even marriage was a calculated step, the way we do it in my culture. Recently I met an Italian landlord. She owns an old town house in my neighborhood and I was interested in renting part of it. She stated her price and we agreed. We had a deal. I paid my rent for two months and like in the old Italian books, when I gave her the money and looked into her eyes, I did not think for a moment that a lady with children as old as I am would later be in a position to play dirty tricks with money. I held her in so much high regard that I did not feel it was necessary to immediately get a receipt for my payment. But alas!!! After moving into the house I found that many of the things she promised were not available, all the amenities mentioned in our verbal and electronic exchange were not there. I decided to inform her that I was leaving her house and considering alternatives elsewhere. As a result, I asked her to return my money. She refused. Switched off her phone and left me with no alternative but to go to her house and demand my money back. At her house, the lady left a small open window at a vantage point from which she could see who was coming into her yard and when she did not like what she saw she would simply just ‘chill’ and no amount of knocking, phone calling or even noise would bring her out. As an African man that has grown up in the urban section of renters I have inbred skills of dealing with landlords in urban centers. So the next day I devised a new mechanism to get my money. I pitched camp in a nearby library and after thirty minute intervals would go to check on my hustling indebtor. It took a whole of 6 weeks to speak with her again and even then I had to connive with the maid to waylay the landlord. Like me, the maid had her own issues with her boss. She had not been paid for services in three months and whenever the topic came up between the two her boss would immediately point out the failings of the maid. This state of affairs ensured that whoever had a bone to pick with the Italian lady would find a willing ally in the home of the Italian. The connection between the Italian and the African is that both have a marginally high propensity to be unfair once they are positioned in places of advantage. There are many maids in my neighborhoods that would identify with the young maid who works for an untrustworthy landlord and the actions of this landlord are very much in sync with what many people renting/living in African urban centres only know about so well. Next week I’ll write you more about the maid and her endeavors to get her three month payment. Till then.