By Ernest Bazanye
I loved Kampala once. Kampala at six pm? I loved that.
Back then I would take languid, aimless walks through Banda in the evening when the sky was softening and the trees and roofs around me were edging towards silhouettes. Venus, Mercury, and the new moon laid a straight line dipping west at the sun that had just set, the crown of the night and her jewels. At six, the world and everything around me was loosening, lightening its load, exhaling. These walks were not to go anywhere. I was not walking to any place; they were walks through, not to, just walking through Kampala, just being in it when it turned into peace.
There was distant music, there were calls of birds in trees I couldn’t see. There was the smell of fried street food, and there was the sky. Venus, Mercury and the new moon.
That’s how I fell in love with Kampala. I was 18. It was a very adolescent love in the sense that kids fall in love unguardedly. Recklessly. It is not that kids believe they cannot be hurt, it is that they don’t know that they will.
They don’t know what happens to love, that it dies. It leaves you, it dies, and there you are, broken pieces of yourself with empty hands.
I loved Kampala not just for how beautiful she was, but also because of how she made me feel. It was not just how she made me feel about her, it was how she made me feel about myself. Eating freshly fried kabs from the pan at the stenseni, recording Steve Jean off the radio, owls shooting, I felt that these things were mine in a way I didn’t feel about the things on TV, or in school or in any of the other spheres and circles of life we inhabit daily.
There was a space with certain intimate, lonely things that came alive at six thirty that only I could feel and enjoy. I felt wed to them as if I was a part of them and they were mine. Kampala at six was a warm smile and a warm, soft bosom that welcomed me, welcomed me home.
Home is a tricky concept for people like me who grew up all over the place. I am a child of three cities: I was a toddler in Nairobi, a teen in Kisumu, and I spent that nebulous crossover age at the end of my teens in Mombasa. Each of these towns was a different person.
Kampala, though, that became home.
Now I hate it here.
I live here. I have lived here half my life. I moved back for University and never left. And over these years, the hatred started, settled, grew, and now this is how I feel about her.
I hate it here. Not always, not all the time, but in those moments when I am not too distracted, that is what I find standing between me and my city. A chain link fence of loathing. I hate how noisy it always is, and how hard it is to find a minute of silence. I hate the intractable traffic, the people in Woolworth’s clothes mocking people in Owino, teachers making teenagers pregnant, the casual littering that carelessly defiles our beauty, the entitled bigotry, and drivers texting while speeding. I’m convinced that that is how I will die. I’m going to be knocked down by a driver on his or her phone. I hate that I can’t drink without getting bloated. I hate how hard it is to be fulfilled, content and at peace.
I hate how selfish and cruel, cruel in such a casual way, people are here. It’s not a unique Kampala cruelty, I know; it is the mark of humans in every city; people have mean streaks and brutally sharp edges, and you feel them when you live packed so close in with them. But it happens to me here so I hate it here. I hate that all the things I hate are in Kampala.
Now, this is the tricky part. I love, but I don’t believe in love. There’s too much fear and doubt and suspicion in me to really believe in love.
I love but not for long. I always expect my love to die.
I fell in love in Kampala once.
I met a wonderful girl and proposed.
She is the reason I moved out of the Kampala with the winding dirt paths and the smell of rain and into the middle-class burbs, my entry into the Ugandan dream, Kampala’s Barbieland.
When we moved in together I began to create the life. We furnished the house. We got carpets, wall hangings, a properly equipped kitchen, and a DStv dish. I traded in the Corolla for a Spacio, and she drove a Rav 4. We would visit other couples for dinner. I would come home from work to announce that I got the promotion. She got me out of my accustomed dishevelment and into button-down shirts, and I contemplated having kids.
I discovered and developed a taste for quesadillas and bolognaise, canapes and crepes; I drifted from the rice-liver-g-nuts side of Kisementi to the bright lanterns of the mall, and six o’clock would find me in a trendy lounge —this is what Kampala Barbieland called what usurped the Kafunda. It was a cafe that sold beer at night and had someone sing neo-soul in front of our shiraz while a bass guitar twanged, and none of us thought of how clangy the acoustics were. Somehow, being in this cocoon of conspicuous consumption inured us to any of the cracks in the facade. I was happy. I was content. I didn’t notice that I was bit by bit, edge by edge, further and further from the Kampala I had loved.
Then, my fiancée and I split up. It was not complicated, it was a simple and direct expiry of love.
I have a wise friend who says the love died because her love for me could feel that my love for her was always shaded with that fear, the shadow against the light, the feeling that this will end, that No one loves forever, that love dies. And when it did I found myself in my selva oscura. I don’t know how to go back to 2001, so I am stuck in my middle class middle aged middle passage.
I move into a different Najjeera apartment every year, and they are all barely furnished, just a bookshelf, a fridge, and a sofa, and the false illusion of vastness is trapped. It’s supposed to be the living room, but there is nothing in it; just the beginning of what will grow to be an accumulation of junk and trash. Paper bags. Empty bottles. Discarded things.
I don’t live here. I just sleep here.
But there’s always a balcony. And it faces west. After sundown, I sit on that balcony and exhale. From the balcony, I see the sun at six, just giving everything that alchemical glow… the walls of buildings, treetops, enyange in formation.
I find myself musing often that if I still loved this city, I would be so happy here.
It’s not her fault, not Kampala’s. It’s not her. It’s me. I’m weak, impatient, and fearful, and I lack the fortitude to muster my own redemption from my own gut, which is where it is; the only place I will find what I need to save myself is within myself, not in another country, not in a woman’s arms, not in the past. I have to, and perhaps I can. But I don’t. And that is why I still hate Kampala.
I am writing this at six thirty. I’m in an office building in Ntinda. The moon is going to rise off the steeple of Saint Luke’s church soon. It’s going to be a full moon. What they call a Harvest Moon. Large. Then I will get on a boda to Tina’s place in Najjera. That’s where the people I love are: mum, my sister Tina, and her kids. I’m going to have a Rolex with avocado for dinner and chat with an old friend on WhatsApp, who I hope I will get to see tomorrow. She tosses her head back while she laughs, and has an uncanny knack for finding the exact words to make the things that confuse me make sense. I think that’s what people call wisdom.
Then, I will listen to a Kafeero playlist, which I discovered on Spotify in June, when I first realised how smoothly he blends with dusk and beer. It’s like tasting music and hearing peace when Paulo Kafeero plays in the background as you sip a stout on your balcony, reading a long story on your phone.
Everything I love is in Kampala.
Responses