Kiburara’s New Year’s Day, fireworks and time’s eternity

In Kiburara, even the devil would not dare challenge me to a wrestling match. So, we travelled at night with no fear of the night and the dangers associated with darkness. But I was so wickedly fatigued.

We had spent Christmas Day in Kampala (by order of the board) and now we had to spend New Year’s Day in Kiburara to proximate ourselves with the resting place of our ancestors.

As part of my ‘this-and-that’ kind of assignments, I can really be many things (anything). In less than a week, I moved from an ‘invited expert’ to a gathering discussing Congolese 2023 elections organised by a European state-patronised foundation to a peasant thinking deeply about the crop failure in Kiburara.

My audience at the gathering were surprised that I projected President Felix Antoine Tshilombo Tshisekedi as a sure winner (even with no rigging). All the speakers had called it for Moise Katumbi. In Kiburara, my people were surprised that I cared about crop failure because of what they thought was my relatively better social security.

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We reached home thirty minutes past midnight on Wednesday December 27, 2023 seeking the cleaner air and breath of Kiburara. As we write this on Thursday afternoon, we are looking forward to New Year’s Day (Monday January 1, 2024). Enough time to enjoy the fresh air of Kiburara.

Kiburara is a good place. At least we have the opportunity to meet real people and listen to stories in their raw form; and of course, the enchanting birds that reminds us of the musicality of communication.

With fresh and cleaner air, Kiburara offers us an opportunity to reflect on humanity’s failure to recognise time as the original constant. You can measure time in years, decades, centenaries, millennia, billions, trillions etc but… Oh yes, but all that is merely an attempt at quantifying the unquantifiable.

So, when I hear the Seventh Day Adventists and Muslims arguing against the veracity of Christmas as the birthday of Jesus, I just look on sheepishly. The calendar is a human creation and the weeks and years in it are just that: creations. We could as well turn December 25 into January 1 and that won’t change the human pursuit of spirituality in Jesus or Buddha or Mohammad’s teachings etc.

Time is the original constant. Whereas humans have managed to grasp the quantities and qualities of matter, they don’t seem to appreciate time as the object on which matter rests. The attempt by humans to quantify and qualify time in cardinal or ordinal instruments is merely that: an attempt. Please note that in the times of Asuman Bisiika, the year used to begin on the first day of January.

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Like many other Ugandans, we in Kiburara also celebrated our New Year’s Day with fireworks. Although I have been advised against witnessing the fireworks, I will be there in full swing. It doesn’t matter whether our fireworks look primitive, I will be at the junction to feel Kiburara in a youthful way.

We have enough car tyres to burn at road junctions. But as is always the case, I have learnt that the boys harvested ebirere (dry banana leaves) and ebisiika (dry banana fibres) and made fibre balls. They will douse the fibre balls with paraffin and torch them balls and catapult them into the air.

Others will hoist the fibre balls on long staffs at the road junctions. And boy, oh boy, I am looking forward to the spectacle. I am looking forward to the popping, crackle and cackle; good fireworks. Please don’t be jealous of Kiburara. Just have a cheerful 2024. ​

Asuman Bisiika is the executive editor of the East African Flagpost. [email protected]