
Mr Daniel K. Kalinaki
For many years, I considered the long holiday at the end of my primary school the greatest waste of my time.
After enduring almost four long years in the thinly disguised penitentiary of primary boarding school, I had been looking forward to reuniting with my friends in Kampala, watching television, playing football and whatever else prepubescents did in those days.
Instead, my old man declared that I would be spending the long holiday at the farm in the village. This was the equivalent of being released from prison and being sent to a labour camp in Siberia. There was water to be fetched from a borehole almost five kilometres away. The outward journey, almost entirely downhill, was a pleasure but the return journey, on a chest-power bicycle laden with four, sometimes six, jerrycans of water,
was anything but.
Then there was the slashing of the cattle paddocks, a task that had to be completed even when the hands blistered and bled. To that one had to add the sweeping, the mopping, the errand-running, and all manner of tasks as are to be found hither and thither.
Incredibly, the toughest part of it all was in the small afternoon and evening hours when, with all the tasks of the day having been accomplished, I found myself with plenty of time to kill. The other siblings were all safely away at school and I did not have any friends in the village. Relatives I had plenty, but those my age were already fending for their young families or trying to create them and did not have time for childish
games of the sort that I fancied.
Once I introduced a football to the local school playing field and assembled two teams. We had hardly played 10 minutes when a player poked the ball with a hoof roughened and sharpened by a dozen or so years of pacing this godforsaken earth barefoot, and caused it to burst.
Having given up on setting up Nakabira Football Club, I resigned myself to the bookshelf in the living room. I started with the
very pleasurable Reader’s Digest, then turned to other bits of literature here and there. Before long I had read everything there was to read except the entire collection of the Laws of Uganda,1967 hardback edition, which the Old Dictator had assembled. I held out for a few days, but boredom ultimately got the better of me, and thus I came to read the entire collection.
I was reminded of these times during a recent family gathering when I observed all the gathered clan offspring burrowed in digital devices of one form or the other. Even those too young to change their diapers knew how to switch, swipe and swerve on digital screens.
If any adult Ugandans today are short for their age due to malnutrition, tomorrow’s short adults will be so because of how much time they spend heads bent forward looking down at digital screens.
Physical therapy might correct these physiological wrongs, but I worry that young children and many adults have forgotten or even never learnt the joy of being bored. The heavy farm chores and errands taught me the value of hard work that I still draw upon these days -- although I am convinced that a riding lawn mower would have covered more ground in the paddock and been kinder to my hands.
But I am incredibly thankful for the gift of boredom and for having learnt, from a young age, to cuddle it, smell it, and find meaning in nothingness. Granted, boredom meant that over the school years there were many hot and humid afternoon hours spent in time travel exploring the vast savannah in my mind while teachers droned on about this or that.
Yet, to this day, I find that the ability to stay still without the unceasing drip,drip,drip, dopamine hit to the brain is a long-lost art and a super power.Whether Isaac Newton and his apple or Archimedes and his overflowing tub, some of the best ideas come in the boring solitude of quiet contemplation.
In a world full of flashing lights and with brains addicted to constant stimulation, how can we rediscover and find joy in being bored?
Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and poor man’s freedom fighter.
[email protected]; @Kalinaki