Mr Ernest Bazanye

Let me tell you about a man. His name is Benjamin Zacharia Kikaye. 

Benjamin. A name phonetically so full of testosterone. He’s so macho. Benjamin. You can’t even begin to pronounce his name without a forceful explosion of breath: Benjamin. You punch the air out of your mouth. You bark when you speak of him. 

They call him Benja. No one ever has to say the rest because he is asserted already by the bboggola bomb blast of the first syllable.

He is very manly, but because a manly man is not manly enough if he is not excessively manly, Benja Kikaye has more names. They also call him Zack. It sounds like ezzike, which is apt because Zack also looks like ezzike. 

He is tall, broad shouldered, barrel-chested and hairy. His beard is sculpted neatly but is lush and thick in a way that allows no doubt that this is the lawn in the front yard, but the jungle behind the facade is wild. Under his shirt and pants, from chest, to scrot, it is primevally dense.

Ezzike. He’s the size and shape of one. Tall. Not just tall. Large. No, not just large. Massive. No, not just massive. He doesn’t merely have mass. He has volume. When he takes up space he displaces other things. No, he doesn’t just take up space. He takes up space the way the British Empire did with Africa during colonization. Just shows up and, next thing you know it is his place, his room.

He has dominance and it is naturally imposed almost without effort. His voice is large. His eyes are large. His hands and arms are large. No, you don’t understand. The guy is so manly. You look at him and you just know that his penis and testicles are to proportion and that all his lovers are regularly satisfied. It’s all the evidence you need that his wife tells her girls at brunch that she knows, of course she knows, but she also just allowed. She shrugs and says, “Men are men.”

No, you don’t understand. He is so manly that when he’s at the rugby club with the other men shouting around beer and grilled meat and he says, “No, you first wait and I tell you,” they actually stop and first wait for him to tell them. 

You know loud men eating beer and drinking beef don’t talk to each other. They don’t have conversations, they have voice competitions. They hurl voices into the space above the platter and their barks and bellows jostle for dominance. It’s a free-for-all audio arena, a bloody battle of bombast. Let’s see who will kill the most mosquitos from the sheer force of vibrating air.

But when Benja Zack Kikaye says, “No, you first wait and I tell you,” there is an actual lull.

Of course, he wouldn’t be so manly if he didn’t have great wealth but get this, his wealth, it’s ill-gotten. That makes it manlier. He robbed, extorted, strong-armed, deceived and in very many other very manly ways took what he desired according to the manly tenet of “I see what I want and I take it. I don’t let no one stop me.”

Not even the person who owned it. 

I have overwritten this. I am overwriting now. We have made the point. Now let me come back with the storo.

So one day he’s driving through Kampala when he lands in a traffic jam. He moves his phone to the other ear and turns the wheel sharply right to start the third lane that is the cultural right of men like him. But just as he does so, a boda is trundling past. The jaj dings the side of his Fortrunner. Benja can hear the thud and the crash and the scratch.

Now the judge guy is not an idiot. He knows Kampala. In Kampala you don’t fuck with Fortrunners. He revs up and dashes off. 

But in Kampala you don’t fuck with Fortrunners. So Benja swerve round sharply. He is now in hot pursuit.

…

He sped as bodas do, recklessly down the road, through speed bumps and potholes, a streak of perfect flight,

The fortrunner pursued.

The sounds of the city whooshed away. He heard only the roar of the fortrunner behind him and the pulse of blood in his ears. 

He hit 80. He sped as bodas do, recklessly.

Bodas are fearless, we say. It’s because they have feared things before and survived them. They have faced danger, but after you face it, and then survive it, you fear it less, you begin to see danger as something that can be overcome by, if not courage, then foolhardiness, or by the fear of what is worse, the fear of not making enough money to not starve, the fear of police, or the fear of a Fortrunner on your tail. He sped over ditches, ruts, galleys, snaking through other cars, other bodas. He flew. Until he crashed.

He was on the ground. No pain. He had landed on something or someone, he didn’t know, he couldn’t tell. He turned to look back.

It was large. Black. Looming. Fortrunner. Large, black, looming, like a storm, like fate, like vengeance, like life, like death. He stared.

And then the car stopped. Benja got out.

He stomped to the prone boda guy. There is something we know in the deep caverns of ourselves, where it’s all feelings, impulses, urges, and no thoughts, down there where no lies can lie, where no lies can live, where everything is true, we know that death is easy. It’s release. It’s relief. To give death is mercy. So Benja did not kill him.

He hurt him. 

His helmet had fallen by his side. Benja grabbed it. He felt its heft, its solidness. Good. Benja lifted it and swung, broke his cheekbone, swung, broke his jaw, swung with that large gorilla arm and the muscle, rage, adrenaline, fury, volume.

Benja swung, broke his eye socket. When he lost consciousness, Benja stopped. He stood over him.

Done. Then he returned to his vehicle and drove back to his life. The beer was waiting.

Men can be so emotional.