Satire: How Rwanda’s Knowless made me stop flirting

I was sending this message to a friend in Mbarara when a colleague replied to it instead. These things happen, some that can leave you in a bag of onions.

Like this day in Kigali. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. In the newsroom was a chic who looked too beautiful to be real. When she walked out, I saw a couple of guys pretend to go to the washrooms. I did the same.

There was a sleek Benz out there and this amazingly cute thing tossed her everything inside and the car sped off, leaving imaginations behind.

“You don’t know Knowless?” Collins, a workaholic at the time, replied to my perplexed query.

“Man, that’s her? She looks better than in the photos,” I said.

Knowless Butera is a diva. She sings better than Sheebah and Spice Diana combined but she doesn’t show her flesh around. If you are not paying for her music, you are paying for her beauty. Either way, she wins the bucks.

Back to my desk, I dived straight onto Google, determined to punish the poor technology by compelling it to give me as many pictures of the fine creature I had just seen as possible.

Google obliged.

I immediately got to WhatsApp and engaged Daniel, a desk-mate. I told him he had missed seeing the most beautiful chic in Rwanda.

“Wapi, Rwandan chicks are only cute in photos on social media, I’ve moved all over Kigali but never seen any like the photos they show,” Dan said.

So I decided to drop a photo of Knowless to him. It went with the caption: “I could drink her bathwater”.

It took unusually long for Dan to respond. I thought maybe the beauty in the photo had knocked him out. After some time, I decided to open our chat.

There was no photo there. But I was as sure as an epitaph that I had sent a photo. There was no italicised message that I had deleted one either.

I closed the chat and checked my record for who else I had engaged. There it was. My wife.

I opened it and Knowless’ beautiful face had suddenly become as traumatising as anything imaginable. The caption was there and the two blue ticks could never have been bluer. They were shining like neon light at a red-light district pub.

For some reason she did not reply. That silence numbed me all evening. Work done at 10pm, I could not see myself going home. I went to KBC and played pool till very late. And then I walked home at 3am. But the bullet I was postponing was waiting.

Madam was awake watching – or rather pretending to – series. After seeing me walk in, she walked to bed without saying a word. I had rehearsed a dozen apologies and how to say them but nothing came through the moment I walked in and she walked in to bed.

Sleep then connived with the entire situation by refusing to come. “I could drink her bathwater” kept playing in my head and haunting me more than Capital Chicken whatever is doing to our gullible ‘investors’.

Wifey did not speak a word about the incident and I thought it was okay, that she had understood my explanation that I was just playing around with a workmate when I delivered the message to the wrong recipient.

That was until we had an issue and she told me to go and drink bathwaters of my other women.