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Blue Light posted on October 26, 2011 - 7:23pm
On Saturday night, when the rest of our clan leave their homes to hunt down the yellow and red lights of a young city on a weekend night, the four of us, Kaijenga, Awana, Rom and myself turned down another direction. Wa had said that he knew where we should find another light. A pale blue light. And we followed him. There are people like that: when you put people like us next to people like that, we slip from ranks adjacent to them into files behind them.  We spilled out of a taxi on the edge of the fine blacktop and let the van curve back towards the towers of the city, and we dove after him into the narrow, crooked, cracked mudroads into the slums.
It was a weak morning, it was the reason I hate waking up before eight. The sun climbing with weary effort up the black hills of Mengo, nudging into a grey sky streaked with long, thin clouds. It made me think of lines of vomit in a puddle outside a bar after a storm. I hate waking up before eight. I don’t want to see this crap.
Drops of Jupiter by Train and Ernest Bazanye posted on October 6, 2010 - 11:35am
The wind is mean. A mean, dark wind spilling and spiraling over wet ground. It falls against my forearms and neck and temples and brow. I snug my collar closer around me and wince to draw my thoughts away from the fresh memory of my last hit and thoughts of next hit. I’m dreaming in spite of myself … I try to draw my thoughts away but they keep slipping back and I keep looking up to the corner for to see if I shall catch the arrival of the shadow in a trenchcoat with the vials of lies hidden in any of a dozen pockets. It is the sudden sound of rubber on wet concrete that makes me turn away from the cracked yellow of the dim streetlight. Squelch on ancient pave, squelch over crack, silent as it leaps daintily over a puddle and lands with a smaller sound on the other end, squelch and squelch and it finally arrives. That leap was a small effort for a woman who we know knew could fly.
Thunder Road. posted on August 11, 2010 - 6:39pm
By Bruce Springsteen and Ernest Bazanye I nudged the Camry off the road and purred slowly up the clay. I stopped before the gate and turned down the radio and waited. For a while, the chirruping and the whooshing and the faraway cracks and shrieks of a suburban kampalan evening resolved themselves into a distant hum, and the only sound was the bare whisper of Roy Orbinson in the cassette player, singing for the lonely; this is stillness, which sometimes is as good as silence. and it was as he strummed that I heard her screen door slam. Mary stood on the veranda, suddenly, abruptly present, altering the keel of the whole universe.
Pelegrines posted on July 28, 2010 - 5:45pm
There is a young woman at the corner of the street. She shifts her standing posture in a way that shows that she is impatient. Her hair is slicked back and shiny, pulled into a little tail. On her head it seems like every strand has been oiled to perfection. She has four earrings, two in each ear, and a pair of expensive sunglasses pushed up on her head in spite of the night— the watching man can see them glinting in the streetlights and in the occasional lamplight of the cars that roll past to and for. She shifts posture again. He wonders how at the contrast she makes with the ground she stands on; she is so clean, so smooth, so polished clean. The ground is made of dirt. Her skirt is tight around the hips and the man knows that to touch it would electrify him to the bone. He smiles slowly to himself.
That Shop Isn’t There Any More posted on July 4, 2010 - 11:51pm
From The Invisible Man In my neighhourhood, in the mornings as I head for work, I walk past a dark and dingy shop. It is one of the riddles that came with Museveni’s little economic boom that shops will cluster like this. Each one is identical to the next, none giving you any reason to enter it and not another. But this one shop seems to have missed Museveni. It looks just like all these hollow caves used to look back in the days.. This shop is still cavernous and dark. There is nothing inside. To the left and to the right the shops are crowded with sacks of sugar, flour, rice and other grains, powders and substances no yuppie would be able to identify. Milling around the sacks, falling off shelves, are toothpaste, bread, detergent, headache tablets, bad-tasting squash concentrate, insecticide, light bulbs and margarine.
From Run: We made this posted on April 19, 2010 - 5:09pm
I remember when this was a virtual ghost town, empty, dry and deserted. Right after the war. It was fourteen years ago, but it was so bad I can recall like it was yesterday. The shops were empty and their windows were cracked if not smashed and broken. The glass was that translucent grey-blue glass subsides to after a long enough period of neglect. Paint that once advertised the shop’s wares was faded and scratched, so much so that you could no longer tell whether it said “dentist” or “ten percent off”. There was nothing in the windows anyway. Just sagging wood shelves, curving under the weight of their own emptiness.And there were potholes all over the main road. Roads all over the city were more hole than flat surface. Drivers had learnt to swerve and steer round to avoid the jutting islands of tarmac.
I remember Mr. Bukenya’s classroom in primary school being long and dark. The walls and floor were made of bare, dark grey concrete which turned just a bit darker up in front, halfway up the wall, between the two corners, where a rectangle of black paint had been spread. That was the blackboard, covered with Mr. Bukenya’s handwriting. Geography notes. For fifteen minutes, he had been in front of the class scribbling across the board. This was primary school education in Kampala those days.
Chapter IX: Not to create or recreate posted on September 22, 2009 - 9:09am
Some men are destined for greatness, this we all know. Other men, we are equally aware, aspire towards greatness and miss their goal. This is one of too-many definitions of tragedy. But then there are others, those whose place on the ladder of success is just beneath that of those who failed greatness. They are those who failed to be satisfied with being average, those who wanted more. A lot of the time the dissatisfaction sits in them like a cowering stowaway hiding in the shadows with a bad smell, evident but indistinct, and they cannot tell what exactly it is they want about more, just that what they have isn’t enough. In some ways this is worse than tragic.
Why are you looking at me like that. posted on September 18, 2009 - 6:45pm
Whenever he looks at her he is instantly bewildered. He has only a split second within which to take in all that her eyes hold, the deep brown  music, the pleading and the mockery and the threat and the promise that mingle and conflict and then come together to declare unanimously that we are her eyes. He cannot stare at her.