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Do not lose all your localness
What you need to know:
The haggling, the sweet endearments, the lugambo...
Because we are local: Many times in popular spaces, people will easily loathe a person that behaves in a manner they deem unfit. There are names for it, uncultured or poor etiquettes. Yet most of the times, the uncultured are trying to live their unfiltered life without the rules education and modernity introduced.
Last week, I was summoned by MC Heno, the self-proclaimed head of the Decadenian Fund. I was summoned to the famous ‘Pork Talk’ over a Lusaniya. And true to the location name, the tiles had differing colours, shapes and styles. Then the conversations kicked off. In attendance was the famous Muntu Wa wansi aka Silver Fox (the man’s beards have turned grey at an early age). Then the crew wondered; ‘what if this could be the next podcast?’ What if someone chose to record the conversations that happen over a Lusaniya?
For one, I believe podcasts (not the over-planned ones) are the next big thing in this country. I have always had an eye for seeing the future. The next big thing is going to be a Boda guy choosing to record the conversations at his stage. The next big thing is a conductor/taxi driver choosing to record the conversations in the taxi park. Downtown is coming to uptown. And the future of podcasting is someone picking up a downtown trend and dusting it in bits. Enough of those great ideas, let’s not divert from the mains of today.
There’s something about Ugandans when they’re not gagged, they flow with ideas, some are ground-breaking, and some are just – embozi z’amalwa. From the Lusaniya convention, I had a chance to reflect on life, especially the dilemma of happiness. You know all my arguments were shot down. I told people that I didn’t see any meaning in the chase. Why do people keep in that chase? What’s there to gain from a few minutes of pleasure at the end of the chase? I was informed that everything in life adds up to zero. But the meaning is in that zero. Surely, there was something making these people smarter.
Having reflected on these existential issues, I decided to relaunch myself as the modern philosopher of our times (except that I won’t take Socrates’ fate). I won’t take the hemlock. I will be the Alien Skin of philosophy. Power shouldn’t be threatened, even power to represent the victims, the oppressed. Alien Skin finds himself as a potential threat to the powers that represent the oppressed. I always knew that it was just a matter of time. The Ghetto would have to answer the question about the emergence of a new ghetto force. Now is the time, hopefully I will have an answer in due time.
Why are we here today? It’s to make a case for localness. We are not making a case for the extremes of localness. That localness can be terrifying at times. But as we modernize, there is a need to revolt against over-modernising. Because over-modernising comes with all these rules that atomise us. Modernity is all about taking away everything novel, everything unique about a person, and then making us all identical.
That’s why all music songs these days run on the same beats. Anything off-scale is bound to sound local. Yet, in our attempt to modernise, we have lost count of our beautiful past. We’ve forgotten the beauty of a Haruna Mubiru. Have you listened to his ‘ticket’ song? And on a serious note, why struggle to be a bourgeoisie in Uganda? It’s not worth the hustle. Why get stressed twice? By Museveni’s potholes and then by the social prisons of modernity.
You know every time you drop your localness, you also drop your freedoms. Because to be local is to allow yourself some allowance to be human. Why struggle at pronouncing ‘plumber’ the right way? Can’t one just pronounce it as ‘pulamba’. Why struggle to eat fish with a fork and knife all in the attempt of being modernised? What happened to the skill of demolishing those chicken bones? What has happened to this generation? I hear they even have the right way of drinking their alcohol. What’s that nonsense? It’s my alcohol, I must drink it my way. Those things of ice cubes should be dropped last. What the heavens?
Our misery started the day we started running away from our localness. Do you know the happiness a Masaka man derives from his fluffy dashboard covers? Do you know the happiness a woman from Ntungamo derives from names such as ‘Charity’, ‘Blessing’? Oh, this generation! You’ve placed yourselves in the social prisons of modernity.
Now some of you don’t want to admit that you shop downtown. Yes, that friend of yours who runs a boutique doesn’t go to Turkey. She just has a supplier downtown. On a serious note, if modernity means abandoning everything that defines us, the things that we think are local, the ‘kyalo’ in us then that’s a modernity that will leave us depressed. My friend Rolland for example can never be any happier without his ‘kiga’ accent. Imagine someone trying to modernise it. I thus take this Friday to launch the theory of happiness based on the model of localness. It states that ‘there is a direct relationship between happiness and the localness levels in a person.’ The more local, the happier the person, and by the way, the less boring the person. Of course, this is not to make a case for Nansana, but to say that the best people in life must have a blend of Naalya and Zaana. Those are the people that run this city!
Twitter: ortegatalks
