No life is lived in vain

When one asks you about someone you have known at some point in life, there is always that scene that pops out in your mind from some place in the shelves of your mental archives.

If someone asked me about Jimmy Pounds (JJ), what pops up is a well-fed, plump world at his feet; light skinned lad complete with a rim of specifically fitting eyeglasses. JJ as we called him sometime in the mid 2000’s was not easy to miss in a crowd. He was the person you found at Praise rallies and similar praise sessions on a Sunday service with a huge Bass guitar. He pinched at the stringed monster with such raw precision that for the most part you doubted he actually did any justice to it. One would be tempted to think the sounds were prerecorded so much so that JJ seemed to cast in the stage-managed scene.

There were those parts of the progression where Graham Keys, Irad Khitta Prince or Junior would mute the Key board and it would be JJ left to pulsate the environs with those husky guitar licks to much aplomb especially from the ladies. Trust JJ to leave to the moment. He oft times crowned up his solo with a summer sault or a Congolese 360 gyre much accessorized by his given endowment for that particular dance routine.

JJ went on to be an interpreter, radio DJ and gospel musician.

Jackie Mbabazi was that lady who was more vicariously known through her son Elvis; a young light skinned Rwandese looking boy and arguably the youngest member of our VIM choir at the time. Jackie was at church for the most part, did her biddings as an usher, helps minister, and a little would be said about her being a primary schoolteacher as well.

We shared those missions where we struggled to put pieces of legal tender together, went through prayer and fasting sessions together, struggled to find Justin’s choir uniform together.

Sometime last year, it was told that Elvis passed on in some mysterious juvenile delinquent mishap. At the beginning of the week, social media was awash with later to be confirmed rumours of JJ’s demise. Right before that particular dust settled, someone else posted that Jackie had followed on West.

These people served God with such passion and dedication at some point in their lives and I can say as much that I was there to glean from the unique shades they weaved into the fabric of God’s green earth. I eavesdropped on their loud out dreams at times…I heard them testify at times for the glimmer of rays pointing to the exhilaration in their hearts.

Gone to soon, I agree, and I am left with the task of finding out what it is that their lives have left for us to work with. So much is left unknown but one thing is for sure. No life is lived in vain.

R.I.P fellow labourers in the Great Commission, your legacy lives on.

#R.I.P
$TOH

twitter @matsikogodwin

No matter what yo not good at, your dreams are as valid as ever!

I remember somewhere in Primary 1 at Uganda Railways Primary School Nsambya (not sure the school exists anymore) my teacher of English was praising my progress in the subject when her Maths counterpart a one Ms Musisi (I hope it is not the KCCA boss) rubbished her on grounds that my Mathematics was wanting.

Sometime in Senior 3 at Ntare School a teacher in the Chemistry lab saw my unsuccessful attempts to draw a beaker or whatever name it went by, (those glass containers in Chemwa where colours were mixed then through tubes bla bla) and assured me how I would never be a scientist (and in that school such was a huge insult).

Music and Literature were always second nature to me but never measured up as brainy quests. It was better for one to ace the science subjects and do okay in the humanities than the reverse.

As the seers would have it, I never really aced Maths or Chemistry; I had trouble remembering all the valences of all elements under the sun, making sure equations balanced with letters of the alphabet, numerals above and below them. Those short numbers in Math’s paper Section A, were just too impossible. I just managed to survive the system I would admit.

I would perhaps had been most confident on stage, in the music room, any type of aesthetic theatre or recital; a magazine editorial or novel tour but not mixing colours and hoping the blue turns pink but not too much pink and that X and Y persist to the last part of the dy dx trajectory.

Do I sound like R. Kelly? Not really, Can I ace a Beethoven symphony? Naaaaaaay, Do I think I could succeed Shakespeare? Dude, who does that? …and the scales tip some more, and yet some more.

Somewhere deep in Rukungiri, a not really schooled woman (mother of a childhood friend) always told her kids that I would be a lawyer (although I actually found this out much later and she died before I could ask why she presumed thus. R.I.P)

I kinda detested the learned profession for no justifiable reason and so had never really striven for it by any scintilla of ambition. I was sure I would do something big with my life somehow but I could not quite put a finger to what. (Have I yet anyway? I cannot say).

There are that many things in life that are always blurred and perhaps even for too long. I have probably forgotten 90% percent of what I studied in the Chemistry lab and my appreciation of numbers has not necessarily improved but none of that marinates my waking moments that much.

#As Lupita would say, no matter where you are from…blab bla bla…. and as I might add, no matter what you are not good at, your dreams are as valid as they have ever been.

Onward marching, dreamy soldiers…
$TOH

twitter @matsikogodwin

Andrew Mwenda's Open letter to Oscar Pistorius

Dear Mr. Pistorius,

Reference is made to your personality, ongoing trial in the Courts of law as well as the uncompromising verdict of our hereto; Court of Public Opinion.

 We ken on the fact that you are Oscar Pistorius at such a time but as it stands you are definitely a celebrity for all but the wrong reasons. Now it is not anymore about the sympathetic fan base of a special needs person (SNP or PWD) trailing in a world sprint; or perhaps because of your inspiration as an African talent that transcends physical kaput. You were not just a limbless (or metallic limbed) person with talent, you actually found a girl to love you despite, a catwalk monster at that! Women go to men for antithetic reasons, so she possibly fell for your fast legs (or lack of them), the camera flashes, the bankroll, your golden heart or one of the myriad trivias that niche the buds of feminine erotica. On a behindhand, Reeva Steenkamp threw her everything to you (literally) and for the time that the amour lasted; we would like to believe that she made you a happy man. (What more would a man, limbed or otherwise want?)

 Yet as we would have it, you are a man of all but the rarest of talents. You are a movie plot complete in itself. We might have overlooked not only your military prowess, your impaired vision and topical sense of judgment but you’re your Napoleonic mind devious enough to outwit Kaparov. We did not get you red handed pulling at the trigger not that you deny that much anyway. Did we get you fight and berate Reeva’s teary eyes? No we did not. Perhaps you were not just negligent, perhaps more.

 Slack of that, we have your picture. While you could buy a lawyer or Magistrate to grant you bail (whatever it took), you cannot bolt to any other country because you, Mr. Pistorius are no Malaysian aircraft. We will smoke you out pretty cursively. Despite your hefty pay check and web of sympathizers, most of them men of course; the long arm of the law will pick you out like the dwarfs in Gulliver’s Travels.

Did we mention that you suck at acting? Yes you do, why else do you think we pay Denzel Washington and Willsmith to make a fool of themselves, on the silver screen. It is because, Mr. Pretorius, they are damn good at it. You might have relished watching Charlize Theron more but clearly you didn’t or perhaps her talent just could not rub onto a home boy? It is possible that you knew that it was your girlfriend at the time, that you did not actually mistake her for an intruder and that you had your prosthetic legs on; reason for the arched trajectory of the bullets. Throw up all you want, mumble all the semantics you can muster but after you are through with the theatrics we will see right through your chauvinistic casuistry and will proceed with our verdict. It is circumstantial what we are working with. 

Truth be told, the best and only eye witness that would be on the stand has; thanks to you been morphed into the realm of the world beyond. She was a pretty girl with a Daddy who loved and adored her. Still you did not spare our little princess. You put a spiked knife right into her chest and twisted to the right, to the left and then twisted some more. You carefully packed up every trace of intent and sent it with our darling model on that forever gone voyage but circumstantial evidence even if it is all we have left will not let us down. She is gone but her voice screams from the beyond and we can barely make out the whole story but all we here is, “guilty, guilty….!!!”. 

 

We on this side will see to it that you are found thus and sent beyond 4664. 

Yours faithfully 

ANDREW MWENDA

ADVOCATE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION

PS/ We were aware that you might not receive our plea unless it was sent to you in the guise of a famous TV pundit a little less popular than yourself. 

$TOH

Uganda can sell you an HIV status, Why again do you need Obama?

One affair you will realise is that for sometime now, if you did a desultory Google News search about Uganda, there is bound to be a story or two about the West's reaction to the Anti Gay Act 2014 (let alone the naivete verity that most of them still call it a Bill!) One about a Ugandan clergy who has vowed to fight for LGBT, another about a aid cuts, and yet another about mob justice infernoes of gay couples and whatnot. It is as though there is a specific United Nations department or a full nation at that, devoted to Ugandan gay issues. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has in my opinion always had the most convincing arguments on the matter; my Human Rights Law background not withstanding. He lays it plainly thus;

 

         "...For years, we (Africans) have watched how you (the West) behave with shock but have kept quite, how you organise your families, how you relate....we have never come to you to say stop behaving like that....but with this new Social Imperialism you come to us and tell us..'behave like us' and we are saying No.!! ..Obama says this and that...but we have nothing to fear, ...if you do not want to do business with us because we have refused to behave the way you behave, we shall do business  with others who respect how we behave.....the mouth is for eating and talking...not for....."

 

I could go on in that unadulterated Partriachal accent for ages but you get the point I suppose. Stakes are that you will seldom chance more clement people like Ugandans but the BBC will have you believe otherwise. So now they decide to do a survey on what it takes to get an HIV negative status and they conclude it is just off the shelf at just $20. Not only did they actually go the length of committing the crimes assuming it is criminal to do so which it is, they evidently managed to show it as one that should potboiler against Ugandans in the Courts of public opinion. So research is actually an excuse to criminal acts I suppose. Nevertheless, on the merits of their unilateral research I suppose it actually helps to bring in South Africans to abhor our HIV wanton fity- fifty deal. South Africa- HIV really?? Interview Ruhakana Rugunda too. You gave him a nod in the UN so now he is the more subtle devil's advocate against his own country. Assuming all he has to say is what his

office has failed to do and not that his comments were recalibrated and master mixed for the plot.

 

So we sell HIV status certificates because apparently we are so evil that we don't only kill gays but also HIV positive people, that is extremely accurate as my fellow Ugandans would agree. Might I remind you though that despite the death penalty in our laws, it is been over a decade since anyone was actully guillotined, but arguable no jobs for the HIV positive huh!! Might I remind you still that what happened in Vietnam, Nagasaki, Iraq, Guantanamo, Yugoslavia and Rwanda gives us opinions about what the West actually cares about?

 

You own the movies, the settelites and the cables. we own the trees, the potbellies; the diseases, mosquitoes and gollillas too. We still live in trees and do not have drinking water and that makes us even more lacking in grey matter. You would be surprised how dispensable (I think Beyonce said that sometime) you are Mr. Obama, despite what heritage you have chosen to identify with. We are not as articulate at using your dialect through our nose but we chatter in our mother tongues more fluently than you will ever decipher and we do talk about you by the way although it all sounds like cling and clatter. We could pay homage to your pinches a bit, but your New Age has not (except for Phat Boy), deluded us from the belief of someone actually greater than your dollars and for the record we are doing just fine however hard that is for you to believe. Be warned, if you insist, we might send to the white house some human eating humans from Rakai, and O boy, do they mean business!!