Aisles of blood: On weddings & brutal endings

At the start of last month, Uganda’s women were at it again—waving placards, marching out of formation, singing against the dictates of tune, vociferating, then finally—hurling obscenities at the posse of constables ringed about the National Police Headquarters in Naguru. 

Their cause?—the blood-dimmed tide of rampant kidnaps and unsolved murders that’s gripped the country’s capital these past few months.

In the end—both the day’s oppressive sun and government paid them little mind.

But the march didn’t fail to leave its (or at least, a) mark—and least of all because Dr. Stella Nyanzi was the procession’s de facto leader. With the volatile, and in equal parts infamously famous feminist activist in the recipe, a lasting ‘impression’ was no doubt in the offing.

To that effect, tactics were changed, so that instead of merely shouting themselves hoarse against a wall of intransigent, uniformed masculinity—the protesters drew from their holsters plus-sized dildos.

The eye-catching artifacts were subsequently held against the protesters’ gyrating crotches, wagged angrily at the visibly uncomfortable cops, and lest their ‘revolution’ go untelevised—some activists took the chance for photo ‘‘ops’’ with their ammunition—which images then swirled virally through the ever obliging social media currents.

Uganda’s men—personified by their government and its (some say) impotent President—had been effectively emasculated.

For his part, John Martins Okoth-Ochola—the newly installed Police Inspector General—had received his baptism of fire, sealed complete with a kiss from Dr. Nyanzi who blew it to him through the television cameras of a primetime news talk-show at which she was hosted later that night.

Hardly a fortnight after these events, Ibrahim Abiriga, MP—was mowed down by assassin gunfire in a Kampala suburb as he retired home after a hard day of, well—not doing much to speak of, actually.

In response to the mounting national outcry, Museveni ordered his security chiefs to arrest his former IGP and a host of the fellow’s cronies; such that the latest reports from Makindye Military Police barracks reek of anxiety-sauce laced with whispers of betrayal and entreaties to ‘see-ko the big man’.

My sympathies are with Ochola—who no longer needs the services of a Prophet (be it Mbonye or otherwise) to foresee his fate in the next few months.

And speaking of Mbonye, that fellow whose Zoe fellowship at Lugogo Cricket grounds is soon to be a remnant of memory; news has it that the ‘anointed’ man has had to ran to court seeking legal redress against the IGG’s eviction notice.

Isn’t it strange that a ‘Prophet’—at that, one who regularly receives phone calls from Jesus (something thousands of University-educated Ugandans believe)—should turn to earthly institutions for justice?

Evidently—Ochola’s own political instincts will serve him better than any prophetic pretensions in planning his delayed (but doubtless imminent) exit.

My recommendation would be for the IGP to expose whoever is behind these kidnaps and killings—perhaps someone(s) among those that sign his paycheck—and leave with his dignity intact, though I wouldn’t make a bet on him keeping his head on its shoulders.

As for the rest of us, I daresay we’ll hear again from our hunters before too long a while has passed. 

Yet if we have the slightest interest in self-preservation, it’s long due we grew sharper teeth than those who would make meals of us—in lieu of the paperknives passing for canines in the mouths of our supposed protectors.

***

In a 1987 book, the late Anglo-American journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote of the persistence of Anglo-American Ironies¹, and how Blood, Class & Nostalgia were Britain’s most enduring (but certainly far from greatest) legacy to her upstart former colony across the Atlantic, or ‘pond’, as the region’s colloquialism would term it.

But perhaps nothing typifies these ironies better than the much-vaunted, now past, and in this age of goldfish attention-spans and leonine appetites for latest fads (sartorial and otherwise)—swiftly forgotten nuptials of the ‘African’, ‘former slave’ and ‘ex-subject of the British empire’—Meghan Markle, and a Prince of the (blue) blood.

Hitchens’ argument is institutional—arguing that modern American institutions, for all their claims to progressivism—are no more than a mirror-image of the demonized mother country, and reflected in their workings and ideologies is a deep-seated nostalgia to uphold and perpetuate the legacy of Empire.

Churchill himself, conceding the fading light of the island country over which he was Prime Minister—declared that the flambeau of the ‘White Man’s burden’ had been passed on to America—for better or worse.

Well, in Meghan Markle—poetic justice has finally come full circle—and America has finally taken the last untouched stronghold of British monarchical purity, if not by storm, then by nouveau charm and beauty.

Britain’s blue blood has at long last been stained by Meghan’s deep, rich and dark red—and who knows; perhaps the stain may show up in the skin of a head under the Imperial State Crown someday.

Yet lest we should forget, blue is an unnatural color (for blood) to begin with, and as the saying holds—not every Tom, Dick and Harry can have it.

***

Returning to Kampala, whose streets increasingly find themselves painted red with bloods that are neither royal nor aspirational.

A friend and I were, for sheer lack of solutions, joking about the kidnappers, gunslingers (and if you watch Agataaliko Nfufu like I, serial grave robbers) having a field day in and around our traumatized town—when he brought (or more accurately, thrust) some scandalous theories into my know.

Apparently, according to available demographics, the kidnaps have had a curious ‘ethnic dimension’ to them. He pointed out how one of the first victims, a female student at YMCA who was gruesomely violated before her body was dumped in Mutundwe, was from a certain ‘part’ of the country.

I argued that it was mere coincidence.

My friend mentioned a few more names, including the shady businessman’s daughter whose case added fuel to what was until then a small candle in the national conscious.

I said it didn’t make sense. He said that it was being done to create an illusion among people from that ‘part’ of the country that they were unsafe. 

I asked him how common criminals could be that sophisticated. He said it wasn’t common criminals to blame.

I asked who was to blame. 

He responded that I knew who, and withdrew into that tried and tested mode of guaranteeing safety to the Ugandan person—feigned cluelessness. 

Yet try as I might to pry him out of it, my pleas of sincere ignorance fell o deaf (or for that matter, deafened) ears, and further inquiries into the matter were vehemently boomeranged.

So you see, this is how conspiracy theories are born. 

Especially in this small banana-growing village of ours, which despite all contrary evidence, stubbornly insists on being called a country.

·         1, Hitchens, Christopher. Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship. Nation Books, 2004.

© Surumani Manzi

A version of this essay was first published at: https://lanternmeet.wordpress.com/2018/06/27/aisles-of-blood-royal-weddings-and-brutal-endings/