Prime
Finding love in Kampala is a full time job
What you need to know:
I do not want the quasi-love of Kampala, the one that is for doing it just for the sake. People, I want full love. I want it all.
I figure I am too slow these days. That I cannot read the signs. But how is one expected to read the signs with all the dust in Kampala? With all the potholes? With all the scandals? How do you know if that smile or wink is meant for good and not the calm before ruin? How should one trust the words of a Kampala girl when it comes to love?
Or perhaps I got heartbroken so well, I cannot see love within the ruins of the marketplace. Or I have many illusions about the one that I just cannot seem to find the one that measures up. Is it some kind of perfectionism syndrome, wanting to get to the utopias of love? Is it that love is something that just grows, that if they darken the big circles, then you are good to go? Is this about ‘settling’ as in ‘settling’ for less than you wanted? I argue that I want it all.
I am a romantic in this life, in the previous life and in the next.
I seek the kind of love that stops time. And not just stop time but forget about time. Forget whether we are dying or being born. The love that makes me forget my lineage, my ears, my heart, my soul, and I must seek it in her to find it. If I cannot have it all, then I do not want it. I do not want the quasi-love of Kampala, the one that is for doing it just for the sake.
People, I want full love. I want it all. I want to love, to feel that heart pump, to confess all my thoughts, yes, I want to simp for the one. Simp until Mwami Kuteesa holds an emergency meeting. But where to find that kind of love! In Lukwago’s Kampala? In Museveni’s Uganda? Perhaps we do not love like this anymore, because it is now business.
Mbu Ugandans have no class
Unlike most people, I am a believer in class. I am a believer in class interests. But in this Uganda, we are all intermingled. We share the same ideas, same interests. The boda guy is no different from the guy in a suit. Mbu in Uganda we are so connected to the same simple dreams, we admire the same things. In Uganda, there are no distinctions.
The rich of Uganda want the same things as the poor. That is why Kyanja is just another upscaled slum. Filled with apartments but devoid of a modicum of things that pertain to a great human experience. In Uganda, more money does not really mean a better life, or a fuller human experience. You visit the rich of Uganda, and they are all obsessed about the same big screens. You will hardly find a library or a horse stable. Or some refined sense of fashion.
Because how in the hell are you doing a big Rolex for a watch? Or some over-marketed yet low quality Tequilla? For the middle class, it does not even get better. Wait, do those chaps even exist? No, in Uganda, we are all poor in spirit and imagination. Our money neither redeems us nor expand our perception. That is why, the only way the rich seek happiness in Uganda is to keep performing for the poor.
Old money never performs, it would hide, it would prefer to keep to its own world. Listen to a Claude Debussy, go enjoy something from a BB King. Wonder what Loro Piana has up next? Discuss the leather seat that has passed on. See, nothing lasts in Uganda. It is all a mirage. Give me some poor dude or chick with class, with elegance, with refinement. We lack that in Uganda. We love good ideas but not convicted by those ideas.
Or let me say, we love to be seen to have good ideas. The poor surprisingly, have better taste than Ugandans. Just go to an average ghettoish place, and you will find better imaginations. But something happens in Uganda, once they get money, imagination runs out of the room. Tell me for sure, why we do not have a Nanyuki equivalent in Uganda. Why for all the money we claim to have, not created an upscale town in the countryside. That is why we are sad, our ‘money’, the one people claim to have does not redeem us.
The arts died, and society died
Your Pulezidenti lied. The country needs the arts. And the collapse of Ugandan society has been in tandem with the collapse of the arts. That is why we have children, but they have no childhood. We have houses, but not homes.
There is nothing to decorate our existence. Go to a Ugandan wedding, and it is nothing but a performance for all the exes, all the haters. But the thing you will not find are the sticky parts, the material that builds memories. We are floating with sciences, forgetting that the arts shape the imagination of these sciences. The country is dead because its poets are dead. We paint on canvasses no more.
We have the canvas, but the imagination is dead. We think the solution is to keep accumulating, that may be in the process we shall find that thing. No people. We woill not. We have buried ourselves. Postscript: Have you ever listened to a classical music piece? Experiment with Beethoven’s Symphony 6 or Pachelbel’s Canon in D. We must re-awaken imagination. Shall we?
X: @OrtegaTalks
