by Hassan Higenyi
On one of his habitual evening walks in Bugolobi, Kampala, thirty-one-year-old Moyo looked behind and saw a ‘babe’ about a hundred meters back, coming along the same side of a lonesome road. Like a bonobo, his heart suddenly beat faster with a rush of sexual urge.
He had mixed feelings about whether or not to act on the urge, though. He was conflicted perhaps because of the taunts from some of his buddies who ‘dissed’ him for being ‘slow’ or ‘lacking game’. And he had resigned to swallowing this ‘diss’ like a bitter pill. Yet this was a chance to prove them wrong. Perhaps the ‘diss’ now spurred him on like a dare, so he slowed down, glanced back and caught sight of her curvaceous figure. His beady, brown eyes shone instantly, eager for ‘optical nutrition’. Besides, he would not want to fall victim to optical illusion, mistaking booty for beauty. She could be so good from far, yes, but far from good.
He turned his head slightly and stole another cursory glance. This time his eyes went to her face, which looked like Fanta Orange. With his self-confessed fondness for light-skinned ‘babes’ she seemed, in his Urban Dictionary lingo, ‘sexilicious’. Better to try and fail, he decided, than failing to try. And with hormonal blood now surging in his veins, his manhood swelled and the bulge was visible at the fly.
He turned his head slightly and stole another cursory glance. This time his eyes went to her face, which looked like Fanta Orange. With his self-confessed fondness for light-skinned ‘babes’ she seemed, in his Urban Dictionary lingo, ‘sexilicious’. Better to try and fail, he decided, than failing to try. And with hormonal blood now surging in his veins, his manhood swelled and the bulge was visible at the fly.
But it’s as if she was only Fanta-orange-ish in face. The legs were black like Coca cola. “Shit,” he cussed.
Much as he preferred light-skinned ‘babes’ to ‘black beauties’, yet he himself was dark-skinned, he despised bleached ones – like the convicted local celebrity called Bad Black, whose interesting story he had read about in The Kampala Sun.
The gap between them soon shrunk, and so did his bulge, as if to prove the correlation of distance and desire. Even the earlier gleam of excitement in his eyes was fast-engulfed in the frown on his face.
She drew closer and, disappointed as he was now, her softly approaching footsteps grew louder and irritated him. No sooner had he smelt her perfume than he burst out: “Bleached bitch!” Stealthily, he caught sight of the look on her face, a familiar frown of instant rage, and he knew she had heard him but was either pretending or…
“Sonofabitch,” she jeered.
He heard her too, loud and clear, and impulsively said:
“Excuse me missy?”
Having walked slightly past him now, she halted and turned. In that dusky evening sky on a Thursday, at the roadside of a less dusty city suburb in the so-called Pearl of Africa, they stood face to face. She being a little taller seemed to make her confident and he a nervous wreck, momentarily tongue-tied even. Before he could loosen his tongue to voice his thoughts, she broke the silence and an exchange ensued.
“Me?”
“Yes please, if you don’t mind.”
“Then you should say lady, not missy?”
“Oh. My bad.”
“Well, then, say it.”
“I was just wondering why uh …”
“Well, then, say it.”
“I was just wondering why uh …”
He paused and, having quickly scanned her from top to bottom, his eyes lingered on her hands with which she firmly held a chocolate-suede purse in her right and, in her left, a small book with a familiar picture of a stray dog on the cover.
“Why what, mister?”
“Umm… never mind.”
“OK then, au revoir!”
She then turned to walk on while he, having discovered upon closer inspection that she was not bleached, stood there gaping and frozen as though overcome by divine revelation. She was wearing black stockings in her short bluish-green dress, which accentuated her voluptuousness and made his urge urgent. Now, seemingly mesmerized by her stunning beauty, he wondered how to woo her. And just then he got a closer look at the familiar-looking small book. There and then he recognized it and remembered her.
“Eureka!”
“Did you say something?”
“Yes, your ladyship! Sorry we got off on the wrong foot. Moyo is my name”
“OK. Good to know. I’m Grace, but in a hurry”
From her accent, not emphatic enough of a Ugandan, he could tell she was the sophisticated, feminist type that seem to seek to emasculate men with their radical sisterhood: the type that watch Oprah, Desperate Housewives, and Single Ladies, but not Telemundo or Nollywood, Bollywood, Ugawood, Ghallywood, and other “woods” that are not Holly; the type that rely on BBC, CNN or Aljazeera news, not Agataliiko Nfuufu or Bukedde; the type that are somewhat amused by Steven Fry, and yet angered by Dawkins and a certain old, fat boy’s “insensitive” views; the type that do not read Mills and Boon novels, but cannot have enough of Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Adichie. He could go on and on with this dichotomization, for he was familiar with both kinds from his unpopular experience.
To woo such a woman he now figured one would have to first tickle her feminist sentiment with subtle flattery. And if there’s something every sophisticated feminist knows and loves, it is Maya Angelou’s Phenomenal Woman.
To woo such a woman he now figured one would have to first tickle her feminist sentiment with subtle flattery. And if there’s something every sophisticated feminist knows and loves, it is Maya Angelou’s Phenomenal Woman.
“Anyone ever told you how phenomenal a woman you’re? I mean, you’re stunningly
beautiful like Kim Kardashian, and you strike me as one with the sensibility of Jane Austen, the
intellect of Zadie Smith, if not Virginia Woolf.”
She did not reply, but he noticed a change in the look on her face, from a frown to a smile of sorts – which encouraged him.
“I take it you’re silent because you’re listening to what I’m saying. There’s a reason as to
why those two words, ‘silent’ and ‘listen’, have the same letters, you know. Pardon my mistake
of calling you missy, but mistakes ought to refine rather than define us.”
There was still from her, though they were now walking closer to each other. Then, abruptly, she halted and turned.
“OK. What do you want from me, mister?”
“A lot. But for starters, I think that’s my book.”
“No. I got this from my friend’s mini bookshop.”
“It’s Disgrace by Coetzee, right?”
“Obviously! Do you want a prize for reading a title?”
“I guess your friend is called Magezi in Middle East?”
“Uh… Yeah. How did you know?”
“Well, let’s just say it’s a small world.”
“Still, you’ll have to get it from Magezi himself even if it’s yours. I’m retuning it to him.”
“You won’t find him there now, but I know where he is.”
“Wait. Are you a stalker?”
“Oh no, and please don’t freak-out.”
“Then how do you explain all this?”
“It’s happenstance, a chance encounter, or coincidence if you may. Call and ask Magezi if you don’t believe me.”
He knew this was a half-truth. The encounter was not entirely by chance on his part. But then he also knew that all truths are half-truths, technically, for there are two sides or more to every truth. And, he reckoned, all encounters arguably happen by chance and it’s by chance that they turn out to be good or bad.
“Good idea. I’ll do just that now.” She unzipped her fancy purse, pulled out a sleek pink phone and touch-dialed.
#
While on his usual smoking break at Dotcom bar and restaurant, about to light his first cigarette, Magezi’s Chinese I-phone rang. It was Grace calling.
“Hullo G. What’s up?”
“Hey, I’m on my way to your lockup, returning Disgrace and hoping to get another good read. Are you there?”
“Not at the moment, but will be by the time you get there.”
“Also, do you know someone called Moyo with an Afro?”
“Yes he’s like my alter ego. What about him?
“Well, he just waylaid me saying this is his book.”
“Son of a bitch!”
“Indeed! Oh, and he says he knows where you are as we speak.”
“Of course he does. And yes the book is his.”
“So?”
“OK. How about he brings you here and we go get you another good read together?”
“Cool. See you soon, then.”
He lit his cigarette after the call and, while savoring every puff, thought of how Moyo had waylaid him too one evening at Makerere, about six years back; and they became friends from then.
He was coming out of a lecture on oral literature, or “Orature”, as Prof. Austin Bukenya termed it, in the second semester of his second year then, when someone standing in the corridor familiarly greeted him and asked for a moment of his time. He obliged, and the stranger introduced himself as Moyo, with whom they resided in the same hostel called Dream-World.
Moyo was in his final year of B.A., majoring in Literature, but the former had a retake for missing coursework in oral literature. So since Magezi was doing the same course, Moyo asked if he could keep him posted in case of a coursework or any new development on the course. Magezi obliged. And in turn Moyo also helped Magezi with some of his other literature coursework at times. They went out of touch, however, when Moyo finished his course.
Two years later, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, while waiting for a Premier League match between Man United and Arsenal, with a cigarette in one hand and a copy of Albert Camus’ The Outsider in the other, a familiar baritone voice roared Magezi’s name. Startled, he looked around, and there was his long lost friend, the diehard Arsenal fan – Moyo Augustine!
They spent the rest of that day ‘catching up.’ Moyo was now an editor with one of the local daily newspapers, and lived with his brother in Bugolobi flats, Block VI, near Dotcom. In turn Magezi had given up job-hunting, opened up a video library in one of the lockups in Middle East market in Bugolobi, and rented a single room in neighboring Mutungo.
They kept in touch since then. Dotcom became their hangout. And Moyo became Magezi’s loyal customer for movies. One evening Moyo came with Disgrace, which he was reading then, and said:
“Books like this, good recent literary fiction, are hard to find in this country. Why don’t you put a small bookshelf in this lockup and deal in both movies and such books?”
Magezi took the advice.
Long before meeting Moyo, however, Magezi knew Grace. In his early childhood, his mother decided enough was enough with her polygamous husband, his father, in the village, and moved to the city while pregnant with Magezi’s sister, the youngest of her three children. She told Magezi of how this was the most trying time of her life, for she had no job credentials apart from her relatively good spoken English.
Then, in the course of her hardship and toil, someone told her of a Mzungu looking for a house help. The Mzungu was Di, also known as Mama Grace, an Afrikaner married to Apollo, a Ugandan expatriate banker of mixed race. Magezi’s mother got the job, and accommodation in the servants’ quarters.
After saving a little off her salary, she collected the rest of her children – Magezi and his elder sister – from the village. That’s how and when Magezi came to know Grace Nandi, his mother’s bosses’ firstborn daughter. Magezi was thirteen years young then, and she was eight. They lived in the same homestead in Bugolobi bungalows for long; she and her parents in the big “main house”, and Magezi with his mother and sisters in a small room in the servants’ quarters; she in expensive, international schools, and he in cheap, local schools.
With time they grew older. And, having finished university three years ago but still unemployed, Magezi decided he was old enough to have a place of his own. His mother understood. She got a loan from Grace’s parents and gave it to him as entandikwa, which he used to start a video library and rent his one room ‘humble abode.’
When Magezi read The Help and watched its film adaptation, he felt as if the whole story was generally based on his mother’s life. It moved him to tears and made up his mind to become a writer one day and tell such real stories that would hopefully help shape humanity better.
Grace, born with a silver spoon in her mouth, also finished her Art and Design course in UK, and set camp in Cape Town, South Africa. She lived in her parents’ house there and visited Kampala once in a while.
On her last once-in-a-while homecoming, she checked on Magezi at the lockup, and he was pleasantly surprised. They exchanged compliments and she asked if he could get her a good read and a must watch. He recommended The Famished Road and Life of Pi, but she read the books’ reviews and saw the movie’s preview and said they were too much make-believe for her liking. Then Magezi realized that, like him, she too probably was not into magic realism, and he told her that she might like Disgrace.
“It’s the epitome of realistic literary fiction and the phrase well-written,” he said.
She took it. As for the must-watch, he told her to choose between Leaves of Grass, starring Edward Norton, and The Magic of Belle Isle, starring Morgan Freeman. She took both, apparently to check out his taste.
And just as Grace was exiting the lockup, Moyo entered through the same door.
“Who’s that yellow bird I just saw leaving?” he asked Magezi.
“She’s a family friend, but now my customer too. I just gave her your copy of Disgrace.”
“What, she’s into literary fiction too? A yellow bird that enjoys literature! I love her already.”
“No, she is not a literary snob like you. She just wanted a good read and Disgrace sprung to mind. And what’s with you and yellow babes?”
“Let’s face it. Our appreciation of beauty is mostly visual and, seeing as most guys will turn their heads at the sight of a yellow or brown skin babe more than a black beauty, there’s no denying that the fairer the more attractive. And evolutionary psychologists will have you know that physical attractiveness is directly proportional, more often than not, to intelligence. ”
“You know, instead of reasoning like Soyinka that you admire, you sound schizophrenic like Dambudzo Marechera. But well, subjective and superficial as your sense of beauty clearly is, you’re entitled to your sense of beauty. I hope you include albinos among the fairer. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, after all. Forget about this one though. She is out of your league.”
“Why is that?”
“Let’s just say that she is grace and you’re grass. And you know how the latter tends to repel the former.”
“No. I know opposites attract. I just want her phone number or Facebook user name.”
“I can’t give you either. She’s like family, though she stays in a bungalow and I stay in a ghetto without a proper residential address.”
Little did Magezi know that Moyo had habitual evening walks in the bungalows before hanging out at Dotcom, and that one day he would meet Grace. As he sat at Dotcom, watching the puffs of white smoke he had just exhaled disappear into the dusk, Moyo startled him with the same old baritone voice.
And just as Grace was exiting the lockup, Moyo entered through the same door.
“Who’s that yellow bird I just saw leaving?” he asked Magezi.
“She’s a family friend, but now my customer too. I just gave her your copy of Disgrace.”
“What, she’s into literary fiction too? A yellow bird that enjoys literature! I love her already.”
“No, she is not a literary snob like you. She just wanted a good read and Disgrace sprung to mind. And what’s with you and yellow babes?”
“Let’s face it. Our appreciation of beauty is mostly visual and, seeing as most guys will turn their heads at the sight of a yellow or brown skin babe more than a black beauty, there’s no denying that the fairer the more attractive. And evolutionary psychologists will have you know that physical attractiveness is directly proportional, more often than not, to intelligence. ”
“You know, instead of reasoning like Soyinka that you admire, you sound schizophrenic like Dambudzo Marechera. But well, subjective and superficial as your sense of beauty clearly is, you’re entitled to your sense of beauty. I hope you include albinos among the fairer. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, after all. Forget about this one though. She is out of your league.”
“Why is that?”
“Let’s just say that she is grace and you’re grass. And you know how the latter tends to repel the former.”
“No. I know opposites attract. I just want her phone number or Facebook user name.”
“I can’t give you either. She’s like family, though she stays in a bungalow and I stay in a ghetto without a proper residential address.”
Little did Magezi know that Moyo had habitual evening walks in the bungalows before hanging out at Dotcom, and that one day he would meet Grace. As he sat at Dotcom, watching the puffs of white smoke he had just exhaled disappear into the dusk, Moyo startled him with the same old baritone voice.
“Man, are you high or what?” Moyo boomed and pulled a chair for Grace.
“Thank you, gentleman,” she said.
“Eh,” Magezi said. “I thought girls love bad boys.”
“For us, to everything there’s a season. But speaking of bad things, I didn’t know you smoke. Can I have one?” she said.
“Wait. You call it bad but in the same breath ask for one? How do you reconcile your knowledge with your actions?” Magezi wondered.
“It’s my informed choice to live life to its fullest including and not limited to its little pleasures like smoking,” she said.
“I bet Moyo here agrees with your definition of living as enjoying,” Magezi said.
“Yes, but informed choice is a self-deceiving feel-good argument. Let’s face it. For most smokers, it begins with peer pressure and becomes an addiction or urge rather than a choice,” Moyo philosophized.
“Yes, but informed choice is a self-deceiving feel-good argument. Let’s face it. For most smokers, it begins with peer pressure and becomes an addiction or urge rather than a choice,” Moyo philosophized.
“Arguments about smoking often remind me of Grisham’s Runaway Jury and how film adaptations can suck, even for genre fiction,” Magezi chipped in, redirecting the conversation as he passed Grace a pack of menthol cigarettes and lighter. “Even though the theme of the book was well captured in the movie, the former was about tobacco, not guns.”
“Some adaptations are better than the books though,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “The Twilight trilogy, for example. I failed to read the book but enjoyed the movies.”
“Same here with The Pelican Brief, A Time to Kill, The Davinci Code, The Last King of Scotland and Eat-Pray-Love. In fact for me most movie adaptations of genre fiction and memoirs, except Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, are better than the books, while the reverse is true for literary fiction. Then there’s the misleading wanna-be writers’ guilty pleasures, movies about writing or writers, like The Pill and the series Californication and Castle.” Moyo said, going on at length perhaps to impress Grace.
“So which book are you gonna gimme this time?” she said.
“Let’s go you pick one yourself. But if you loved Disgrace, then you might like The Sea by John Banville. It’s realistic, lyrical and a Booker prize winner as well,” Magezi suggested.
“Why not Godimer’s July’s People or Nabokov’s Lolita?” Moyo said.
“Ah! I’ll take Magezi’s picks,” she said. “I now trust his taste. Besides, I’ve read Lolita and Disgrace is somewhat reminiscent of it. Both are so well written and poetic, though Disgrace is a bit deeper and less psycho. The two make perfect examples of well told, sad stories.”
“That is true literary fiction for you. It’s deep, and the magic is more in the telling than the tale,” he quipped.
“A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is another fine, poetic novel, meanwhile. But where
Coetzee would say ‘he sighed’, Mistry says ‘he took a deep breath’. And I would rather say it’s a well woven story than well written. If you want a must-watch again, I have The Constant Gardener, Les Miserables, The Great Gatsby, and Game of Thrones,” Magezi added.
“Oh, I’ve watched them. And remember I haven’t returned the movies I took, so I guess I’ll just take The Sea and A Fine Balance. I hope their owners won’t also waylay me!” she said, and they all laughed.
“Well, you left me no choice,” Moyo said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she mused.
“It means how about Magezi goes for the books while I get us drinks and apologize for my rude behavior?” Moyo winked at Magezi, as if to make his amorous intentions obvious.
Magezi said it was a good idea and excused himself to go bring the books. On returning, after closing the lockup, and bringing the two novels, about two hours later, he found Moyo on the karaoke machine, saying: “This song goes out to someone special that I just met today.”
And then he mimed Don Williams’ Seniorita. Both Moyo and Grace had not seen Magezi standing in the darkness at the entrance. He watched their romantic drama unfold. Moyo sang shyly while Grace giggled and blushed non-stop in her seat.
After his performance, Moyo rejoined Grace at the table and Magezi witnessed another scene. As he joined them, he saw their heads interlocked. He could not believe it until he reached the table and it was beyond doubt that they were indeed kissing!
“Ahem, get a room already!” he said, startling them. The scene reminded him of the Nigerian comedian Basket Mouth’s joke about how telling Nollywood movie titles were, such as “Could This Be Love”, depending on the appearance of the actors or actresses. Grace looked embarrassed, while Moyo was all smiles as if re-enacting a scene from The Prince of Zamunda.
“This is the best evening of my life!” Moyo said, with a wide grin, ear to ear.
“He just won a bet,” Grace explained. “I dared him to sing and I give him a kiss.”
Magezi gave her the novels and they all carried on with the evening until late when, past midnight on a night graced with a bright moon light, Grace got drunk and started speaking incoherently as if possessed by Afrikaner spirits. Moyo offered to escort her home, and Magezi boarded a boda boda to his humble abode.
Magezi gave her the novels and they all carried on with the evening until late when, past midnight on a night graced with a bright moon light, Grace got drunk and started speaking incoherently as if possessed by Afrikaner spirits. Moyo offered to escort her home, and Magezi boarded a boda boda to his humble abode.
The next day Magezi got a call from Moyo telling him Grace had slept at his place, because she apparently did not want her parents to see her so drunk. In the evening the two hang out as usual, without Grace, and Moyo told Magezi the whole story. Moyo called his chance encounter with Grace and their ‘hook-up’, “love at second sight.” He toasted to alcohol for serving as philter at Dotcom, and to weed, which he believed worked as an aphrodisiac at his place in the morning.
“Whoever wondered why drink and drive when you can smoke weed and fly had a point!” Moyo beamed, with happiness writ large on his face.
“So doesn’t she have a boyfriend?” Magezi wondered.
“I don’t know yet, but I hope so. And if that’s the case, it proves that my theory about sophisticated chicks is true. Nowadays most of them are feminists with dreads, short hair or bald heads, and, if they’re not lesbians, bisexual and other letters they keep adding on to LGBT, their liberalism or nonconformity tends to intimidate conservative men who are the majority and prefer submissive women. But all in all they’re just like other humans with feelings, only raising their voices to right a wrong, and if you press the right buttons you turn them on.”
Before long Grace and Moyo became lovebirds, freely indulging in all manner of public display of affection for each other. She soon returned to Cape Town, but invited him and offered to chip in on his M.A., and to help in publishing his Ugandan English, Uglish, poetry collection. He could not pass up this offer. He abruptly quit his pencil-pusher job of editing and left Kampala to try his luck with love and literature.
Escorting his ‘alter ego’ to the airport, about a year ago now, Magezi could not help wonder who of the two, Moyo or Grace, had the upper hand in their relationship, or if they were equal partners, and how long their love would last. For Magezi his friends’ relationship could as well, in a way, be proof that gone are Jane Austen’s days of such things as “a fact universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in need of a wife.” With or without feminism, now things concerning relationships had changed or were changing, seemingly for the better of humanity. Husbands and wives or boyfriends and girlfriends were now, more or less, ‘partners.’ Perhaps, then, even a single woman, like Grace, in possession of a good fortune could be in need of a partner.
Escorting his ‘alter ego’ to the airport, about a year ago now, Magezi could not help wonder who of the two, Moyo or Grace, had the upper hand in their relationship, or if they were equal partners, and how long their love would last. For Magezi his friends’ relationship could as well, in a way, be proof that gone are Jane Austen’s days of such things as “a fact universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in need of a wife.” With or without feminism, now things concerning relationships had changed or were changing, seemingly for the better of humanity. Husbands and wives or boyfriends and girlfriends were now, more or less, ‘partners.’ Perhaps, then, even a single woman, like Grace, in possession of a good fortune could be in need of a partner.
<>
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Hassan Higenyi, aka Sense, is an ambitious writer whose writings, mostly informed opinion and book reviews, have appeared in almost all of Uganda’s newspapers, namely The Daily Monitor, The Independent, and The New Vision. He is a University drop-out, but in 2006, while still a student of BA(Arts), as a Literature major, he won the national YEAH (Young Empowered And Healthy), an initiative of the Uganda Aids Commission, journalism writing competition dubbed “Something for Something Love” (on the theme of Cross generational sex). In 2010, he teamed up with like-minded individuals to form Freethought Kampala, a social group, “to promote reason in a highly superstitious society that is Uganda.” He is currently exploring Africa as he works on his “Voice of Reason”, a four-parts novella, “Reminiscence” being the first part.
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