No one plans to grow old. Not truly. We plan for when we will be old, but not how to get there. The virus; for pathogen, it is—lies dormant for days, months, sometimes years—then springs upon us on an otherwise eventless, ordinary dawn. A milk tooth emerges painfully from the red of gum and the confident crawl turns into a clumsy toddler. Looking in the bathroom mirror, you observe a crease of skin, unremembered from yesterday. Your barber notices a strand of silver where a full head of jet stood only the week before. He keeps it to himself, discretion being the perfected art of his trade. They know things about us—these artisans who pedicure our feet, wax our backs, varnish our toenails, or “escort” us to orgasmic nirvana. They know things.
I turned thirty earlier this year—an age which, judged from our hardened social attitudes—heralds as much as it extinguishes. Shifty banana-republic juntas ran out of steam at twenty-eight. God stops counting at twenty-nine. Women begin living at thirty. Men are supposed to do the reverse—prepare to die. And while that may sound rather deflating, the chief merit of being your own philosophy’s subject is that you observe it unravel up close and, naturally, reserve the right to amend things as you go along.
Of late, I catch myself thinking of random, barely coherent occurrences—like why we would instinctively stick an injured fingertip in our mouths, sucking the blood from the wound like vampire starvelings. As I said, barely coherent. Undeniably, this is what the onset of middle-age triggers—a swoon down the rabbit hole of whys and wherefores, cold sweats at midnight, and insomnia that won’t be cured by exhaustion or overwork. The frenetic tempo of life, a full charge of one’s self-mobilised brigade, can have us galloping, eyes glazed with heedless confidence, full steam toward the abyss. The thrill of speed, the wind whistling outside our ears, the roadside world racing us in the opposite direction, and the adrenaline pump in our bloodstream—prove irresistible. And perhaps, such speed belies a coping strategy—the breakneck pace merely a subterfuge aimed at blunting out the mundane, an artifice contrived to dull an inevitable pain. For inevitable, this pain is. Precisely because living is that, and even more, an exercise in navigating the serrated landscapes of an ever-elusive pleasure.
Speaking of pleasure—because I own no internal combustion engine-powered wheeled conveyance, I tend to whizz around Uganda’s towns on bodabodas more frequently than is good for my health. It’s now cliché to say that riding a boda in Kampala is an extreme sport. One takes their life into their hands once they mount up—like signing your life over to Beelzebub, or at least his Ugandan version. Not quite two days ago, I took a late evening ride from central Kampala to the city’s distant outskirts—where people of my station are expected to live. The apartheid of colonial physical planning laws seems to still be alive and thriving, even in this bejewelled twenty-first century of liberal progress, universal rights, colour blindness, and unfettered postmodernism. And as matters often go, the conversation with my rider drifted onto roving, pundit’s turf—from the politics of the day to the intimate lives of city socialites to the impending cure for Ebola.
Anyhow, as we swerved right from the Serena Hotel stretch towards Shimoni Road, missing an oncoming car by precious heartbeats, a chorus of feminine voices called out from the shadows. Because of the hour and circumstantial noise, I couldn’t fully hear the catcalls (yes, they amount to that). But having been a pedestrian in the area enough times, the gist of the chorus wasn’t too difficult to decipher. This is the heart of Kampala’s redlight district—if district it may be called. The business premises are nothing more than a few dark alcoves along potholed, supposedly high-end streets whose few installed streetlights never seem to work after dusk.
In Uganda’s urban centres, every time a near-miss occurs on the road, the survivor is advised to “go and eat his chicken”—a phrase that sounds irreplicably melodramatic in its original Luganda. The essence is for the person to seize their second chance at life with both hands. Really, a moment of carpe diem. The young ladies felt it only fitting that I should start my new life by leaping off the motorcycle and talking to them more nicely.
***
Uganda turned 60 this year, which makes me exactly half the country’s age. But, as you might have guessed—I shudder at the thought that I may be reading too much into these numerical coincidences. What have I become, an astrologer?—reading palms and hinging life’s decisions on the horoscope. I tremble to think what has become of me; I—who, until my twenty-ninth, have been an unapologetic materialist. Superstition never was my strongest point. But the unknown does funny things, even to the “best” of us.
When Alex Mukulu; better known to younger social-media audiences for a disdainful judicial scowl delivered at a local talent show almost a year back—published his Thirty years of Bananas in 1992—he was only thirty-seven, yet a formidable national playwright nonetheless. The play was essentially a tragicomic rendition of the politico-military bungling of Uganda’s socio-economic fortunes at the hands of what Mukulu felt was, up until then, a predatory, illegitimate and often downright clueless post-independence elite. For the most part, he was right.
Mukulu’s work, which has since been readapted and recast by successive generations of socially conscious thespians, saw day’s light the same year I did—implying that today, I am exactly as old as the play. However, like all good art, the book will grow finer with time’s passing; and ultimately outlive not just I, its foster sibling—but its father, Senhor Mukulu. That thirty years after “Thirty years of Bananas” was first staged, little to nought has changed about Uganda’s political or economic situation is scandalous, if not sinful.
Someone said age, or was it ageing?—makes philosophers of everyone.
Every man my age, though few would dream of admitting it—battles with the nightly succubus of “arrivism”. But so strong is the dread of exposure that even the prosecutors of the medieval inquisition—Papal sanction notwithstanding—would find trouble extracting confessions from us. According to the doctrine of arrivism, our worth is gauged by the size of our paunch, measured against the obedient genies we can summon up at a moment’s notice for the pleasure of our women and offspring—capable of granting the latter’s every caprice.
The years must count for something, we are reminded, and often not gently. A small stash stowed away for the rainy day; a fertile wife to provide heirs and spares; a son to guarantee immortality; a daughter to fetch back her mother’s dowry. New-age feminism—in an unveiled attempt to recruit us to its cause—blames the syndrome on internalised patriarchy. The theory’s popular version holds that we, who ought to be the beneficiaries of that oppressive system—find ourselves grasping the shorter end of the patriarchal stick. What better way out of the quandary, feminists then argue—than to turn our cloaks, join them, and overthrow our shared repressor? But when have hegemons ever had room for all their intended levies? —a question possibly best put to America’s Appalachian whites. I flirted with radical feminism for a brief season but soon realised that should the movement ever come into its full power, the only privilege with which men will be left will be the right to urinate by the roadside unashamedly.
Thirty years ought to be a long time. Time enough for a man, let alone a country, to get its act together.
In March 2021, I lost someone, who, for lack of language, I shall call my second mother. She succumbed not to COVID-19 but to the uglier consequences that the pandemic occasioned. The madness of politicians, the collapse of health systems, and the wanton violence of armed forces—claimed more lives than that infamously crowned pathogen. The pandemic caught us, in the real sense of the term—in flagrante delicto. And for countries in the global south, like our own, whose priority has never been to prepare for the worst or the unforeseen—COVID-19 was a kind of Armageddon. This woman who mothered me succumbed to stage four oncological complications—a condition that might have never been fatal without the lockdown and breakdown of global supply chains triggered by the virus. She, like hundreds unlucky enough to be born to a people with no government to speak of—was the victim of a very preventable end.
Who repairs broken gold?
Two years have passed since a friend from my boyhood, Andrew, was arrested, charged, and committed to Luzira maximum security prison. It didn’t exactly come as a shock—because unemployed young men in our communities must ultimately fall foul of the law. But close-knit communes like ours would understandably seek to protect even the worst of their own. And Andrew, plus the scores of listless young men with whom he roamed the neighbourhood—first and foremost, belonged to the community. They were ours. Ours is the same mindset that leads tribal delegations to petition the Ugandan President for pardons to co-ethnics caught in the IGG’s antigraft web. As long as a thief is ‘our thief’, we say—let him go. But in Andrew’s case, this protectionism had fallen flat on its face. Someone had talked—an insider. Eventually, through bits and ends of gossip, I was able to gather that a neighbour’s mother had caught him making off with some not inexpensive household electronics. She went to the police—village boy or no; here was a burglar. The magistrate at Nakawa Grade II court concurred. Well, because ours is a poor convict-visiting culture, Andrew and I quickly lost touch. We forgot about each other—or more accurately, I forgot about him—seeing as I had a life to lead and all.
But some weeks ago, on a long-distance call to another mutual friend—I’d like to argue that Kabale is acceptably distant from Kampala—she let it be known, almost in passing as we concluded the call, that Andrew had returned. I believe the phrase she used was that he had “been returned”. So, when I visited mother a few days ago, I dropped in to see Andrew. After waiting briefly in the dimly lit living room, a threadbare curtain hanging across the bedroom door was swatted aside before a scarcely recognisable figure dragged its feet to the hard-bottomed chair across mine. When he tried to smile—I noticed that Andrew had stained teeth, chipped in several odd places. I looked away politely. After some moments, I thought we might shake hands, then noticed that his were curled toward the palms, in an almost permanent proto-human way. He never spoke of which tools were used to break him or mentioned any of the horrors. He just sat there, looked past me, and smiled—shyly because of the teeth. I fidgeted for things to say, manly things about business, work, and growing drunk from too much power. I was ashamed of myself—perhaps to assuage me, Andrew accepted the few inadequate shillings I proffered.
Who repairs broken gold?
What does it mean to be a man, truly? What is the purest ingredient of manhood? Brawn, wit, coin? The question has plagued my formative and juvenile nights. In a futile attempt to answer it, my childhood was characterised by impatient aspiration—and later, I braved adulthood marked by paralysing insufficiency. Perhaps maleness implies us strutting about as swollen as male turkeys in the throes of a seasonal mating dance. It brings to mind the primitive displays of raw machismo prevalent in the natural world. And yet mine, the one I’ve chosen, is the race of James Baldwin. It is the dash of an at-once-too-small, at-once-too-large person across the yard of a tragically short life. How could such a man be all he was—and still belong to us so perfectly?
The authors of the ubiquitous, unsigned posters often surreptitiously plastered around Kampala promising “manpower enlargement”—would serve us better by figuring out ways to expand our self-worth. For our grandest woes are psychic, not phallic. It is instructive, I think, that our conjugal duties have fallen so far down the drain of cheap commercialism. A generation begins to fail in its bedrooms.
Some years before the immortal Afro-American leader, Dr King, was assassinated, he was interviewed as part of a Magazine series titled “How my mind has changed over the last decade”, whose stated goal was to establish the philosophical and intellectual trajectory of the man. Well, my mind hasn’t changed much in the last decade. Or at least, I’d be hard-pressed to adduce that it has demonstrably done so for the better. Instead, the clock’s chimes between my twentieth and thirtieth birthdays feature in my memory like one terribly kaleidoscopic blur.
Change?—I wouldn’t claim to understand it, for I am not a master of it.
It has overwhelmed me.
And each time I can steal a moment away from the brigade’s charge to be alone—I find myself nodding concord to the adage, ‘The more things change, the more they remain the same’.
This is not the moment for petty insecurities or wounded masculinities. It is not the time to fight small battles or win little wars.
Neither is it the time to wish.
But if we are to wish, however—then let us wish to be better men.
If we must aspire to greatness, or riches, or some form of power over other men. Let it not be so we can visit revenge on them for stifling us in our days of weakness, but that may show them the nobler side of things.
Let us be the goldsmiths of broken things.