I’m 900 today, but do I miss the good old days?

Mr Charles Onyango Obbo, a columnist in The East African newspaper has written 900 articles in the paper and recounts the journey made so far.

This is the 900th edition of The East African (Daily Monitor sister paper). It is also my 900th column. I have written 900 columns, although only 899 got published on time. There was one I filed from a freshly reunified Germany in 1996.

Those days the big technology was the fax machine. The column came through to Nation Centre alright, but fell under the table. It was published somewhere else in the paper’s next issue, so at least it saw the light of day eventually.

Reflecting on this period, there is probably no better place to start measuring how the world and East Africa have changed than to look at the technology.
We have two daughters, one whom just went to college — and neither of them knows what a fax machine is!

When my first column appeared in November 1994, East Africa didn’t have a single mobile phone service. It also had only one independent FM station, if my reading is accurate: Sanyu FM in Uganda had been launched in June of that year.
Today you can’t turn a corner in East Africa without stepping on an FM station or presenter.

There were two big stories in East Africa then. The genocide in Rwanda had just “ended” a few months back, and the world was still too horrified to come to terms with the fact that nearly one million people had been butchered there.

Guerrilla war
A few months earlier, Tanzania had had its first post-independence multiparty election.
By that point, Uganda had last had an election at all 14 years earlier in 1980. It was a fiasco, and an angry Yoweri Museveni took off to the bush shortly afterwards to start a guerrilla war in protest.

It was not until 1996 that the country had its first election under Museveni.
Uganda has had only one president since then, and if the noises coming from Museveni’s palace are anything to go by, he intends to hang around there for many more years to come.

The man in charge in Tanzania then was Ali Hassan Mwinyi. Since then, Tanzania has offered up Ben Mkapa, and now Jakaya Kikwete. The president of Rwanda then was Pasteur Bizimungu. Paul Kagame was vice-president. Bizimungu eventually put his foot in his mouth and went to jail. Kagame went to State House.

Burundi’s is the most active presidential scene of the 900-issues period. In April of 1994, the country’s president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, with Rwanda’s president Juvenal Habyarimana, died in the plane shot down over Kigali, triggering the industrial-scale killing of the genocide.

Since then, it has had Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, perhaps the man to have the longest name of any East African president ever; Pierre Buyoya (nicknamed Gustave after the famous man-eating crocodile of Lake Tanganyika for his legendary cruelty); Domitien Ndayizeye, and now Pierre Nkurunziza.

The East African Community had not been established. We had a Tripartite Commission for Co-operation that had been set up in November 1993. The EAC was formally revived in 1999.

If you had told me in 1994 that Burundi and Rwanda would be members of a fully established Community 15 years later, I would have eaten my hat. Yet here we are.
…..
Where the blind see
As Aziz Bouallouchen walks into the foyer of a plush cinema in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh, he is given not a pair of 3D glasses that one can expect to find in many cinemas around the world but a pair of headphones.

Mr Bouallouchen, in his 20s, is no ordinary cinema-goer and this is no ordinary cinema.
Every seat is equipped with special devices to enhance the enjoyment of blind and partially-sighted film-lovers.

The film being shown is Lalla Hoby, a popular Moroccan comedy about a man who crosses the Straits of Gibraltar in order to look for his wife who has left him for another man and gone to live in Belgium. Released in 1996, it is the only North African film to have been adapted to carry audio description.

Leading the way
Wearing headphones plugged into small receivers in the seats’ arms, Mr Bouallouchen listens to a voice explaining the action sequences, body language, the scenery - the “in-between” moments without which a film’s meaning is lost.
“It’s a brilliant idea,” Mr Bouallouchen says. “I haven’t been able to ‘see’ a film since I suffered a disease that robbed me of my eyes.”