This is what you write when drunk for the first time


What you need to know:

  • Sigara is Swahili for cigarettes while Sagara is the man who smokes like he invented sigara. But he is a good guy, because you can leave him with your Mercy and you wouldn’t have any WhatsApp chats to worry about, forget even the confessions of a negative test result.

These are two things I have never done in my life. The closest I’ve come to sigara is meeting Sagara, the satirist.

Sigara is Swahili for cigarettes while Sagara is the man who smokes like he invented sigara. But he is a good guy, because you can leave him with your Mercy and you wouldn’t have any WhatsApp chats to worry about, forget even the confessions of a negative test result.

It is Wednesday. I bathe my dog and her pups. Usually a bath goes with snacks to make them happy but I call for the snacks and the maid says there is none left. Then there is also no food for the dogs.
I feel so hurt that I grab the gin I procured for aftershave and mix it with Coke. Damn, the thing makes you sweat! But on the flipside, it helps me remember that 
I have a deadline for this space to fill.
So in the midst of the Coke-spirit concentrate, I power the poor computer and go to work. I open Twitter and comment on Mercy’s tweet. Then Joseph Kabuleta tweets something that I think I retweet and comment on. I’m not so sure now.
As for the comments, I’ll look them up on Thursday morning. 

A full ‘siniya’ of ffene is served. Like the one they serve pork with. Madam asks where I bought the bad ffene from. I tell her I hadn’t bought any ffene even as she insists I had.

The next things I hear her saying are in French or Latin or German or even Espanol. But I know nothing about these languages. I begin to envy this guy who has been rending for fixing trysts with his side dish in foreign languages.

I open WhatsApp and there are many messages on the many Congolese rumba groups I’m in. Someone has shared about Falaswa, a song by Franco that dwells on a man who hounds out his wife saying she is barren only for the same woman to concede the very first time she gets to work with another man. Then the whole society turns to laugh at Falaswa.

You see, Lingala is a good language. Nobody uses it here to write captions for their NWSC-size plumbing units when sexting their side dish. Even Asians, if they used Lingala in the 1970s, Idi Amin wouldn’t have expelled them.

You see, that day on August 4, 1972 – if the date is wrong, blame the waragi – Amin accused the “blood suckers and parasites” of keeping their account books in Hindi and Gujarati languages to hide irregularities from government.
I think that is precisely what Mercy and Andy were doing. But ho, clever killed them.

Even then, I still would advise our diplomats to do the same. Imagine they went native using terrible grammar on their WhatsApp group to fight themselves. 
Ambassadors Bob and Ado literally stripped themselves there. One even used the F-word and it was clear that one was building up a massive clique… ah, this ffene is really terrible.

I don’t know why Madam insists I bought this terrible ffene. I normally smell ffene and buy those with the perfect aroma that meets their taste.

In one of the rumba groups, a Guinea chap says Mamady Doumbouya, the Guinea junta leader, has placed top dollar on translation of words written by a Ugandan army general. This raises my curiosity.
“If our commander-in-chief gave instructions, it wouldn’t take UPDF a day to discipline mutinous troops like the one in Guinea-Conakry,” the text reads.

Now those chaps in Conakry speak French and would have understood whatever Mercy and Andy were plotting without the need of Google Translate. But they also don’t know English so a man who has overthrown a full dictator has to be helped.
I want to get angry with whoever wrote that thing maligning Doumbouya but I realise that I’m also typing under the influence.