Mr Ernest Bazanye

It started with a tweet. These things always start with a dumb tweet. It said something like, and I paraphrase, “No matter what time I get home, even if it’s 2am, my wife has to serve me supper.”

The tweet was posted by a man. He/him.

The reason his wife has to do this, even at 2am, is not what you’re imagining. No, he did not rescue her from jackals, saving her life at the last minute and inciting a pathologic devotion that led her to wait on him hand, foot and all, because she cannot stop herself from constantly slathering him with gratitude.

It’s not because he’s a guy who wrote the lyrics of Angel by Sarah McLachlan, a song of such beauty that I will allow you to stop in the middle of one of my articles and click open a YouTube tab so you can check it out.

Click over to YouTube and have a listen. You’ve listened? You’ve heard?

That song is beautiful, yes? If you discover it at random, just anyhowly when one Bazanye links to it, you will think, “lovely song” and move on. But if you encounter it at just the right time in your life, you will not be the same again. You will be transformed by the beauty of it, the intensity of the sadness and the way it finds a way to work a miracle, mixing comfort, solace, and even peace with that sadness, and making you understand in a deep, deep, level of your soul that hope is a real thing. After that your life will never be the same.

And you will feel obligated to devote every moment until you die to thanking the man, if it was a man, who gave you that song. You will never let him lift a finger, not even to feed himself. If it means staying up until two am, you will stay up until two am and serve him the perfect supper he deserves, garnished with gratitude, flavoured with thanks.

But that is not the case here.

And she doesn’t serve him supper at 2a.m. because he has implanted Creature Commando chips in the necks of her college besties and if she doesn’t feed him on demand, he will flip the switch and all their heads will explode off.

No.

The reason she serves him supper when he staggers in at 2a.m. is because he is a man.

The fact that I can post this picture, but not the i in the word shit…rassclart.

Picture it: The Big Man ( I should point out here that I don’t remember who wrote the tweet, so what follows is what I imagine him and guys who agreed with it look like.) beard, potbelly, Toyota Vanguard parked outside a bar full of other big bellies and beards, drinking and shouting Facebook conspiracy theories into the bar air between them, bellowing about how the earth is flat and the other side is where all the dinosaurs live and that is why, when you dig downwards, you find their bones.

Or maybe they are roaring erudite theses on post-democracy geopolitics supported by the results of the latest studies and fortified by citations and quotations from thinkers of noted reputation. It makes no difference what they shout. No one is listening. Ugandans don’t listen to each other in bars. They just go there to talk at each other. They go there to talk at each other, to shout, just to expel noise. That’s why it doesn’t bother anyone that the music is too loud for them to hear what the others are saying.

I once went to a bar once with two friends I wanted to exchange thoughts with. We ended up forming a WhatsApp group.

But these men and men like him, they love these excursions.Shout! Noise! Beards! Pork ribs! There is a primal but powerful joy in these moments: Men’s moments of man shit. There is a way the mix of beard, noise, and other men fills you with a sense you don’t get anywhere else. It feels good. Manness is a vessel that is deeper than it looks from the outside, and our day-to-day urban lives don’t provide enough material to fill it. But it yearns for occupation. It yearns with a latent, passive but potent hunger that aches all day. It is at night, at night, with beard, noise, booze, bellowing, and the company of other men, that it is filled. It brims, it overflows. Man, you can get drunk on it. It feels so good. I know, not just because I’ve seen it so many times, but I remember feeling it when I, too, was a man.

Anyway, @men go to the bar, enjoy themselves, and then, at 1.40am get into their own cars and drunk-drive home.

Each hoots at the gate when he gets there. The Askari pushes a button on the remote control and the black iron sheet rolls open. The Vanguard trundles in. It is 1.57 now.

@man exits the vehicle, crosses the compound, and gets to the door. He knocks.

It wasn’t necessary to knock. She knows he is back. We all heard the hoot. Besides, it’s his home, he has a key.

But he knocks. She opens.

He does not stagger in. He is an experienced drunk; his legs know what to do. He strides to the dining table and sits down and waits.

He waits while she warms up the food. He waits. It will take a while. She cooked the meal hours earlier.

She has to warm it, then serve it, with some juice, too, because he has to hydrate; hangovers hit harder when you are at the age men are when they own Vanguards and have wives.

He sits at the table.

She brings a plate and lays it before him.

The matooke steams. The beef is soft enough to split with one fork tooth. He eats.

Now he can finally end the day. He can finally go to bed.

And so can she.

“Why?” is the question we left unsatisfactorily answered earlier. Why should she stay up until 2a.m. to feed a man?

I used to sit at dining tables myself once, hungry, and impatient, waiting for a woman to feed me meat and matoke and dodo and juice. I couldn’t go to bed otherwise. She had to feed me first.

It was her duty and her job and it was my entitlement. I was 9 years old then.

By the time I was 16, however, mum had risen in her career and her income was higher so we had a microwave. I still needed her to feed me, but in a different regard. In the sense that she paid for the food. But if I came home at 2a.m., my return would be different from @man’s.

I would have to sneak in quietly. I would climb over a wall, creep along a fence and then duck through a window into a bedroom she was sure she had left me asleep in 5 hours earlier.

I was hungry, though. I needed to eat. So I would change from my ripped jeans and hi-top sneakers (Yeah, Genzies. We did it first. You’re jacking our swag ) and into pyjamas.

We were middle class now. We wore pyjamas.

And then I would creep, pyjama-clad, into the kitchen to make my own dinner myself. If she heard me and came to the kitchen to see me microwaving frankfurters at 2a.m., I would need my attire to bolster my explanation, which was that I woke up for a late night snack.

Then I turned into an adult. At 22, I was earning my own money and I had a job. I moved out of her place and got my own house. Then, when I went out on the night with other young men, with noise and beer and ogling at everyone else’s boobs, and only got back home at 2a.m., if I was hungry I boiled up some noodles or I rustled up some spags and minced meat or I fried an egg.

I fed myself. It felt liberating. Part of the liberation was not having to sneak around to get food. I fed myself. I didn’t need anyone to do it for me. It felt liberating. Part of the liberation was being able to choose what I would do with my own night. It was my beard. The day I moved out of my parents’ house and said, “No, I’m good,” when they offered me some pocket money, it felt liberating.

I was my own man now. I was not a boy. I was a man. I fed myself. I feed myself. I am a man. I didn’t need to sit at a table waiting like I did when I was 9 years old. That shit was for boys. That was for children. I was a man now. Men feed themselves.

But enough about me. Back to @man.

To refresh your memory, we are talking about a tweet that says nti “eveniyif u da Man evenyif you come home at 2 a.m., da wife he have to serve him supper!!!11”

The question why was a answered as such: Because he’s a man.

I just thought of a better use of the new name that greasy fish gave twitter when he bought it. If twitter still had competent leadership intent on improving the product, they would have looked at that name and immediately start to code a system that allows users to mark answers. This tweet would then have a red X and a note: see me.

wrong.
As in wrong answer.

Bullshit. Men don’t need wives to feed them when they walk in at 2a.m. We know where the rolex guys are. And even if we don’t have microwave ovens and Glovo money, at the very least we have arms. ItzPrize is edutainment, guys.

Soon after we started drinking, we married women (or attempted to. More on that if I ever decide to trust you enough with my life story.) who had jobs and needed to wake up early so we couldn’t be keeping them up until 2a.m. just to push a microwave button. And besides, the kids have school. You’re making noise for them. If you are so into maintaining traditional family roles, why is Daddy making noise for the kids instead of the other way round?

What is a man?

A man, the tweet tweeted, is a person who has to be fed by his wife at two am because he cannot feed himself without diminishing himself somehow, regressing to something less than this vaunted glory called manhood. If he doesn’t have her feed him, what will that make him? Less of a man. A mere human with hands and the means to put his own dinner on his own plate.