Mr Ernest Bazanye

One day, a pair of beans drop out of a boy’s belly and change him. What they change him into depends. You could say a man, but what kind of man they change him into depends. You could say a good man, but what kind of good man depends, too. It depends on what you mean by good. A brave leader? A loyal soldier? A proud king? A wealthy boss? The word good is as slippery as the word man. Let’s start again.

A boy gets his balls and changes, he begins to want sex.  Up until then, life has been uncomplicated. You don’t have too many questions about stuff. If you wonder about anything you just believe what you were told. Africa is good, Uganda is the best, education is the key, success is the reward for hard work, the rat brings money for your teeth, you should respect your elders, you should drive a car. In your childhood you won’t be perplexed  by any of the cunning lies that comprise these truths. No what-abouts, no but-then-ifs, no “Even Uncle Peter who used to beat Aunty Brenda?” No “A car on these roads?” No “A leader like the president?” Life is easy, life is simple. Right and wrong, good and bad are clear and distinct. 

Sins have tempted you before and you have already learned that if you succumb, you deserve your punishment, because you had a choice and you made the decision, even if it was not easy, to lie to mummy, or to steal the sugar, or to pinch your brother, or to make noise in class. When the kiboko came, you hated it, but you took it. It was the consequence of what you did. You would play football in the mud until past sundown, go back home covered in dirt and take our asswhooping like a man.

Parents are not children, they don’t remember that joy, that full and total and complete joy that rises within you and becomes so large that it fills every corner of you until there’s no room left for fear or regret or reason. Chasing bouncing balls over mud? That is transcendent. The thrill, the absolute joy. Fear of canes will not stop you.

You will return to the field the next day. You will gather under the trees just above the field with your friends. You all got your canes the night before and you’re all wincing at the memory of the pain, but the memory of the pain is fading. The field, though, is still laid out before you, waiting. The pain will fade, but the field is still there, the broad, oval patch of dirt circled by yellow grass, the two piles of rocks on each end that are makeshift goal posts. There are grasshoppers leaping in and out of the yellow turf. There is breeze that stirs the dust.

The field is not still, it’s moving. The field is not still. There is sunlight. There it is. That oval of trampled dirt, it’s where something comes to life. You boys will not play in the dirt today, not the day after you were caned, but you will play in the dirt again. Some day soon.

Then one day you are in class and Mrs Acheng the math teacher crosses her legs.  

I can’t speak for the rest of them other niggas, but this is one group I understand, the boys from my youth in a boys’ boarding school. This is what happened when the balls dropped. One day, Mrs Achieng crossed her legs and we saw her knees and something stirred. 

When we discovered lust it was an entirely different type of bad thing, because it wasn’t something we did, so it wasn’t something we could decide not to do. But we had been told it was bad, and we felt guilt, more than the guilt from sugar pinched out of a bowl, more than the guilt from footballs chased through dirt. It felt like taking something from somebody, like getting something you weren’t given. Mrs Achieng didn’t give it to you, but you took it and kept it. It’s a theft you didn’t want to commit, but once it was committed, you did not reverse it. You kept the bounty. But then, this guilt felt unjust and a bunch of us got angry. We resented that Mrs Achieng was turning us into what we had been raised to think of as creeps or perverts and so we grew up into that constituency of misogynists who call women hoes. These women are people who incite evil in the form of this sinful arousal. It’s them. It’s their fault. They are the ones. Them. They are bad. And so they must be punished for it.  

When we began to talk about sex among ourselves, we spoke in our own language, our slang, and the words we chose for sex were verbs of aggression, like bang, smash, chew, hit that. As if we were valiant John Wicks, giving just desserts, putting an end to the villainy of these hoes. It was heroic. Fuck them hoes was John Wick. Body count was John Wick. The application of a level of skill to the game, turns of cunning and trickery, that was all John Wick gun gymnastics and stunts. Even the callous disdain for the women we would go on to sleep with was part of the whole inverted heroism of the thing. This happened with a lot of the guys I knew. 

I am not entirely sure I should point fingers because I am not entirely sure it wouldn’t have been me too if it were not for, well, for Church.

I was a church kid, so I felt even more guilty of sexual urges, but I was not in one of those churches which blame women for men’s and boys’ impure thoughts. In my church we blamed ourselves for not being strong or prayerful or faithful enough. Our impurity was ours and so we hated ourselves, not them. 

There but for the Grace of God went I. 

The Exceptions came when we landed. 

Some of us did not just get lust. We got crushes as well. And that made a difference.

I don’t know the biology of crushes. I don’t think that, just because they also start with seeing a beautiful woman, that means they are just a more potent or complicated form of lust. Crushes have always been very, very much the opposite of lust. It wasn’t like Mrs. Acheng’s knees, which worked within the same area where you find greed and envy and anger and pride. Crushes were warm and cozy and smooth. They arose and lived in a different place, a nicer place.

It started with beauty but what her beauty incited in you was not a desire to have her, it was more like a desire to be desired by her. Not the carnal and base realization that she can give you pleasure, but the more, perhaps, ethereal sense that making her happy could make you happy.

At first we didn’t even understand it well enough to understand what it wasn’t, let alone what it was, and we had to go through a lot of bewildering  crushes before we began to discern this much about it. Was it even love? Every love we had known before this had been a love that had been earned from us. Our parents protected and fed us. Our siblings shared our lives and if we loved our lives, we had to love them too, because they were part of us. Our friends were good to us. Our TV heroes entertained us. But this? This crush? She was a beautiful stranger who had done nothing but be visible to us one day. What love was this?

She just exploded. No, she didn’t explode. You were just suddenly struck… no, that is not the word either. You don’t get struck, you don’t get love struck, you don’t get struck by the arrow,  you don’t get smitten, it does not smite, it was not like that.

It was sudden, yes, and unexpected and unbidden, yes, but it was also gentle, like something blossoming. Mild and Soft. And it would change you on a level beyond understanding. No thinking, no attempting, no trying, just the arrival of a pure, unimpeachable, indubitable, almost sacred knowing. Her, that’s it. No, nothing to add. Her, that’s it. Her. 

When I first saw Patience, I had just been uprooted from the town I had known as my happy home for years and was now in a school I hated. I was just trying to drag my weak way through harsh days. Then I saw her one day and now I wanted to go to school because of her. What did I want from her? I don’t know what I wanted from her. Did I want to be her friend? Did I want her to be my friend? I don’t know. Not then. Even though I thought about her often, these thoughts never came to a reasoned conclusion. No what, why, or how. It was just a blissful contemplation of who: her. I wanted to go to school because that is where she was. 

I was older when I saw Maureen. I made Maureen laugh. When the group was walking from church, Maureen and I would fall out of step with the others and it would just be the two of us, and I would tell her anything, anything at all, just to keep her smiling. It was church, which meant not much was permitted– we were too young to date, but well, she was there and she gave me these moments, walking and talking in a small, other universe, when the rest of the world faded to some oblivion beyond frayed edges. 

But I left town before we were old enough to date.

Some years later I was a grown man. Well, young, but adult. I did not know then how phenomenally lucky I was in love, how massively huge the odds I had beaten were. I have no horror stories, I have no drama stories, I just have fond memories of amazing human beings and unending regret for how often I fucked it up because I have been selfish, I have been cold, I have been very frightened of letting people love me back and I have wasted more than just my career in this city. 

I met Solome. Solome was a fan of my newspaper column (I had one) and her Facebook picture was hot. We got to chatting, then we agreed to meet. 

We met in one of those fashionable cafes that was then a new trend for an emerging youth bougie class.

I wasn’t ready for what happened when we met. It hadn’t happened in years. I had almost forgotten it, if not dismissed these sudden infatuation things as adolescent past. But the first time I saw her…

I remember the light was low, and she was reading a book. A lamp silhouetted her. I remember her shoulder and her neck.

Then she looked up as I approached. She smiled and her eyes squinched. She shut the book and said hi. She used her little finger to mark her place in the book until I noticed and we got a napkin to use as a bookmark. I remember this part vividly. I don’t remember anything at all about what happened next on that date. It was a daze.

I don’t want to do that thing where we rhapsodize over eyes and other features of beauty, but I need you to understand what knowing Solome was. 

She could spend so many hours in a book that she would forget to eat. She couldn’t dance or sing for shit, but that didn’t stop her dancing and singing. She liked Bon Jovi and kept borrowing my iPod and so I got another one because I preferred her having one of mine to her getting her own. She would put her hand over my cup of coffee just before I could scoop a third spoon of sugar into it. She would rub her earlobe when she was thinking. I remember all this stuff because after the crush I fell in love with her. 

Now, everything I’ve written on this site I have second-guessed. I know I’m wrong about some things here. I don’t know which ones they are. I’m pretty sure, though, that this is one of them… I have never understood love or why I crave it yet fear it, why I run away even though I know a home is safer than this wilderness outside. Solome and I would sit on opposite ends of the sofa under a blanket reading and her feet would lie over mine.

>>>

Let’s get back to the teenage mandem.

So you get a crush on Patience. You help carry her books. You say you don’t really want your chicken leg from school lunch just so that she can have it if she wants to. You join the choir. It’s called simping. That is the 90s definition. There may be a newer one, but I will not do any research on red pill. If I Google it, you know what will happen: The Google goblin will register that Bazanye showed interest in this topic, then it will send this information to the Facebook company goblins. They have no diini and they are in cahoots with Long Skum, as we call him when we, a) don’t want goblins to know that we were talking about him in case his apologists start appearing on our tiktok fyp unbidden and b) because he is scum, and if my faith in you is misplaced and you let me down and your word of mouth doesn’t get enough people to read these things and I have to return to social media to get an audience and I find myself back on Twitter and Facebook, all I will be met with when I log back in is cascades of crimson pills, just floods bleeding off my screens. 

I will not Google, I will ask the AI for a convincing hallucination. Let’s see.

Okay. I’ve seen. 

Where were we? Yes, the boy likes the girl and shows her he likes her. She doesn’t, however, like him back. 

He’s devastated, yes, because this rejection hits hard. Heartbreak has vast  tonnage. It hurts like fuck.

If he goes back to one of his boys, we’re probably safe. They may talk candidly, sensitively, and grow. If he goes back to the pack, we’re screwed, because they will turn him and one day, when he’s 35 and you say something questioning whether it is appropriate to play “These hoes ain’t loyal” at an office party, he will blurt it out before he has a chance to reconsider. “But it’s facts! Wamma it’s facts!”

Simping is when a man goes to lengths seeking affection (or at least sex) from a woman. The extent that counts as simping depends on the person deriding you as a simp: there are men who buy whole cars in exchange for a campusers’ fake orgasm and then sneer at the guy who gave Sandy a lift to Mbuya when it was raining.

Perhaps it depends on whether you get the sex you are angling for or not. If you do, you are a player, if you don’t, you’re a simp. And these are the two options for the boys who grew up believing in a single, standard way men should relate to women: the way they learned to act manly, and that is by behaving as if everything is about power, and power is manifest in adopting a position of strength over the weak, and executing that strength by taking from them that which the weak will not surrender without some exertion of influence from you. 

I know I haven’t said it explicitly, but I do know and acknowledge the same vibe you are getting from reading that. I think so, too.

But then there is the kid who simps because he knows he should work to earn a reciprocation of his desire for her. He could do this by being nice to her and thus make her like him. This is not an execution of power, but it is kind of cynically transacted.

Then again…

I know a lot of guys are dicks, but for real, I do not want to sound like that. The bloodos from boarding school were one group, the guys in church were another, but it’s been fifty years and I have met a lot of guys. Some of them are just normal people and normal people do nice things to people they like. So if he likes her, he will do nice things for her and if she likes him back he will be happy and she will be happy because someone nice likes her.

Nice people are nice to people, especially to people they like. 

I think I came here to mock the deviants but then I don’t see them right now. Now I see something else. A different memory.

So nga we are at a function. We weren’t supposed to be there. We were in town on some other plot when someone’s relatives made us drive them to a burial. She was the wife of a local priest, so all devout Anglicans in the village were going. The Deacon, or reverend, or provost, or vicar was an old man in an old suit. The shoulders had too much give and the hems of the sleeves went up to his knuckles. It was an old suit. In a 90s style I remember from our R&B videos.

We could see the lines on his face from our position trying to be inconspicuous in the back, feeling nervous about having brought our middle class urban privilege here, desecrating the place with our Nikes and Lacoste. I think some of us were still a bit high.

But we could see the wrinkles on his face. He had those  grooves that draw backwards from the edge of the eyes. They are the ones called crow’s feet. Those that start at the edge of the eyes and then spread backwards towards the ears and down the cheeks. They are also called laughter lines.

The old priest’s laughter lines  seemed dull and blurry now on cheeks that looked heavy. They sagged. His eyes were sunken behind his glasses. 

He shuffled his feet and adjusted his Bible and read a verse. He thanked family, friends and  well wishers for coming to join him and his family in sending off their mother, their sister… and then he paused. He paused. Then he straightened his spine and looked up at the assembly. His hand on the bible before him, his chin raised, his  he said, “Mwebale nnyo okubeera nange ku lunaku luno, nga nsiibula mukwano gwange ennyo.

Tutambulidde wamu olugendo oluwanvu, mu ssanyu n’okubonaabona. Mu lugendo lwaffe luno tewaali kiseera na kimu lwe yandeka ne mpita mu mbeera bw’omu. Mu buli kimu twabadde ffembi, nga tusanyukira awamu era nga tulwanirira awamu.

Ne mu kiseera kino mmanyi nti tandesse. Ansooseyo mu maaso naye anninze.

Nange ngenda kumusanga eyo gy’anninze, tuddemu tubeere ffenna.”

A crush is a wonderful thing to have. Even if it is going nowhere. Just think how easy it makes joy. She liked your post. She replied when you texted. She took your elbow in her arm. The drudgery and the mundane, the dust and the mud, being broke, falling short, your fear of yourself deep into late nights alone with just your cigarette smoke and the dark can just fade away in the wake of a sudden light and warmth, and you become joyful just like that. Someone just acknowledges you in some trivial way and you get happiness. Just like that. Miraculous.

Then there’s love.

There’s love. 

No, you don’t understand. There is love. That thing the old priest had with his wife. There is that.

The things we hurl ourselves after, the things we so madly chase, the harems, the money, the fortrunner, the power, the envy, the manliness, manly manly manliness, the Fortrunners? 

Nothing is worth more than a thing that is worth everything.

Nothing is worth more than a thing that is worth losing everything for. Nothing is worth more than a thing where, if you lose it, no matter what else you have, you have nothing.

Get love. Find love. Seek love. And you have to give, give, extend yourself to people, be kind and help and give. Give yourself to her to get her to give you her love and if you can be deserving of it, if you can be worthy of it, and if she is deserving of your love and if she is worth your love if you can be the man she loves?

Most of us humans are selfish and mean and can’t be trusted, and when you walk these streets it’s easy to assume everyone is a piece of shit. I don’t know you. You might be one, too.

But if you have a heart that can be worthy of another person’s love, someone else has one, too, and you will be worth one another. It’s worth it, if you have a shot at that love shit, do everything for it. Simp for it. Simp for it.

Mean it, too. Don’t lie and pretend to be kind, be the man she can love, and then be loved.

Fuck your fortrunner.

The model on Pinterest has a different look. It’s the look that says, “I am beautiful, like this clean street I stand posing on, this bright sky I stand posing beneath, this sports car I lean against; I am appealing, I am admirable, I am attractive; I am Paris in spring, I am Manhattan in the sixties, I am barges on the ancient Nile, I am violin strings.” That’s the Pinterest model.

Male models in Pinterest hearken to things we have already learned to admire, things we think of as graceful and elegant and holding that grace and that elegance beyond question. Like the cobbled streets of Paris by in spring. That’s the statement said and ended. No question of sewers or poor people. Sixties Manhattan is joy and jazz, not war. Cleopatra’s barges are tranquility under soft sun, not slaves. These Pinterest pictures are worlds contained completely in their frames. Nothing exists off screen.

Male models on Pinterest all look like that, no matter what different outfits they are wearing.

These days it’s sunglasses and polo shirts,  (solid colour, no stripe, tucked in) and chinos rolled up a bit at the bottom. I never notice the shoes but there is usually a beard up top that is youthful if not young. The models look like they have “creative” jobs and long-term relationship. No ex-spouses, just joy and love. They tend to be white , but ambiguously white. If you decide that they are white, they look like the white guys who play pick up ball games at night with black guys in the hood, where they are welcome even though they don’t live there. They live in a loft in the fashionable part of the city. That is a Pinterest model.

But I am looking at a Ugandan chap in Kisementi.

He has the same thing on, chinos and a polo, but the same outfit doesn’t look as good on him. He is too bulgy. 

The clothes do look expensive, however, and that is better. It’s actually the whole point.

His outfit looks like the money it cost and so he now looks like he can afford the things Europeans and Americans covet from Pinterest and, in Uganda, this means he has succeeded or is succeeding where so many of us are floundering. And that means he is better. That is the whole point.

He has the shape of a mid-thirties Kampala guy. The paunch of beers proudly drunk presents itself before him. He walks with that legs-wide-apart gait that tacitly alerts you to the presence of testicles and penis. The clothes on him fit ill. Too tight where his waist and belly bulge out, and at his crotch, where the chinos scrunch up in a lewd V. 

But he doesn’t care, or doesn’t know, or doesn’t know because he never cared to find out, and that makes the proclamation of the apparel even louder. He has way too much money to care what you think, especially if you already think he has more money than you. He has your envy and that is more valuable and more enjoyable than your admiration of his figure. It’s more valuable than the glamour of the pretty-boy Pinterest model. Beauty moves in the service of the beholder. It is here to please us and it craves our approval. Envy on the other hand? Envy works for the subject. The man in the tight shirt is a better man.

This is a elegy for something that died before I even knew I needed it. I lost something somewhere along the way to Acacia Mall and I didn’t realise until I got here that I had lost it.

I’m at the mall in a button down shirt that I didn’t buy there. 

I got there by safeboda, did some work at Endiro and am now loitering through the mall letting the cortisol dissipate.

Watching them. Them. The Acacia people.

Watching like an insect watching hawks. I am not one of them. 

I have no ambition. I just don’t. There is nothing here. I am apathy.

My life? I do nothing now, just exhale. That is what you are reading right now. Me exhaling. 

Wait. Maybe something else. I see a suspicion of myself, shifting in the hollowness, at its edges.  Perhaps this lack of ambition might be a problem. Maybe not wanting more money is costing me the things I actually do want. If I craved more wealth, more fame, more Caffessarie carbonara, more Sketchers, more iPhone earbuds from Elite, more Ovaltine from Carrefour, more Stanley Cups, more Cotton Candy, more money stuff, maybe I would make a greater effort to get them and perhaps succeed. Maybe when I had the life of Wakiki chinos and Woolworths polos I would also have peace. Satisfaction. Contentment.  

And I am not not too dull to appreciate that having more money than you need is better in many ways than having enough. I have never been poor: I have been broke. I have never been rich: I have been loaded.

In June the heater wasn’t working in the house I lived in so I moved to another place with another heater.

So one day, long ago, years ago, I moved to get married. I proposed. “Do you take this man?” And she took me to Kampala Barbieland. The Ugandan dream, the burbs. Najjera. 

Before that I had been living, as I do now, in a glorified crawlspace, badly furnished, perennially messy, a cuboard for a life, a garage for a nigga, four walls to store my laptop and notebook while I slept.

When we moved in together I began to create the life. We furnished the house. We got carpets, wall hangings, a properly equipped kitchen, a dstv dish. I traded in the kikumi 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 kids.

Now I stand here leaning over the railing of the first floor and watch them, no longer one of them.

I pulled off fifteen years as a mall person. I had my own three D specs, a favourite pizza topping, pumas, Miniso impulse purchases, Galaxy Edge, cappuccinos, gelatos, Lacoste, Underarmor. And I played the part well. So good was my disguise I even had my own self convinced. Man.

Did I not belong there and if I didn’t, do I belong here, outside, looking in, where I feel more at ease? Where I feel that I am who I am, successfully me, not failed them?

But the concept of belonging is as firm and solid as the other shadows on that wall. It is how shadows work. Something is not there. You see its absence. But because that is what you see, you assume that something is there. A presence.

But we treat the shadow as if it is the thing.

So we have the man we started with, polo and chinos. He drives to the mall in an SUV, shepherds the boys to Adidas because they need football boots for school and he holds his wife’s sunglasses while she goes through her bag to find the card. The boys want ice cream, and he won’t mind some either, but ultimately it’s her decision. She figures, why not? Liam is still on probation after he forgot to load the dishwasher but there are times a parent just can’t say no. 

It will please me to see them among their bags at the café with their cones. I enjoy seeing families happy.

But I am not that man. If that is what man is, I am not that man.

I am not one of those men. Walking through the mall feels, to me, like solitude. It is what I do when I feel the need for a break from the real world in my laptop.

A life in which you help people in need is a good one, yes. A life of a hero saving people in need is a good one, yes. But a life in which you need and have received help, a life in which you have been there, shit got real and someone saved you, that is a deeper, a more deeply rich life. It gives you things you don’t get from power and success and strength.

It gives you, for starters, what some people call humility, but what is is actually a judicious appreciation of what you are in this world. It gives you a solid understanding that what you are is different from what you want to be, what you imagine you are, what they say you are, and what they say you are supposed to be. You understand you are a flake of dust on the tip of an spiderweb. Some say humility is the assumption that you are not great. That is part of it, but to have a complete understanding, you don’t just need to know that you are not great. You also need the realization that no one is. We are all, all of us, everyone, every single one of us, weak.

Until you understand that, you are living as if you’re watching TV. There will always be a distance between you and everyone else you think you know or love. You will live as if you’re watching them on TV. You will see their performances, performances they make for you and performances they make for themselves. Until the day you fall and see for yourself the fear everyone else has been hiding from you, if not just from themselves, you will have friends, you will have loved ones, but you won’t love as fully as a person who has fallen.

And then, if when you fall, you are saved, if someone got you and saved you, and you saw what it means for another person to be there for you, then you will know that you have the power, the far greater and more precious power, to do the same for another person, and that is when you will know that what it means to be human is greater that what it means to be a man.

Of course, many of us, by the time we are of beer-bellowing, beef-lusania age, we have had that revelatory instance. We already know. And I like to think that I can discern the difference when I hear those belly laughs from the rowdy Rotaractors shouting at Rugby Club. They all sound like douchebags who drive drunk on Sunday evenings, but somewhere among the packs and gaggles of men laughing too loudly and calling each other, “Gwe you man!” there has to be a trio of lifelong ride-or-dies who have waded through pits together. And when they shout their beer, it is a celebration of a strong bond of brotherhood.

I wonder often, when I look at them, I wonder about this bond that is not just human friendship or love, it is something uniquely masculine. There’s a way men meet that takes a certain shape and weight that I have only ever seen emerge from male spaces. There is that thing men have that is unspoken but louder than the beer that makes people they know outside their bond jut their lower lip out and say, “Hmmm. You know very well that if you tell Ssuuna, you have basically told all of Jemo and Ox as well.” You know the bond. That thing that makes it clear to whoever is listening that whoever dares try to you fuck with him, fucks with all of us.

And even when I wish they would use indoor voices sometimes, I won’t deny being jealous of that.