It’s bad for Gletkin when Kakwenza is still yapping

The first time Kakwenza Rukirabashaija was inducted into the dungeon hall of fame, he told me he would never poke the leopard’s waste downloader.
Last week, I sought him out again. After two days of not seeing his response to my message, I thought the long man with a long name had grown too long in status for the likes of me. Then I remembered he had so many useless numbers saved as contacts in my almost dysfunctional iTel-something.
“Waiting for your empty noise on Sunday,” he said the moment he came through, completing it with laughter emoji.
If you (yes you reading this) went through a whiff of what this guy has gone through, you would quit social media and never say anything about any spotted feline until January 26 stopped being a public holiday in Uganda.
But this long chap was freely cracking jokes. He even licensed me to write whatever I wanted of his situation. Who declines such a licence?
Kakwenza reminds me of that scene in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon when Ivanov warns Gletkin to keep his itchy fingers off torturing their comrade-turned-detainee.
“Rubashov is made of a certain metal that becomes strong the more you hammer it,” Ivanov says.
“Human beings capable of resisting any amount of torture do not exist. That, I have never seen one,” Gletkin responds.
“You’re a living refutation of your own theory,” Ivanov says, reminding the younger officer that when he had been captured, he had not betrayed the revolution despite torture.
Darkness at Noon is the best literary work every published. So prophetic is this book that only revolutions that died young like that of Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara never tasted the betrayal of Number One.
Now imagine 36 years. The Old Guard, aka the Rubashovs and Ivanovs, are long gone leaving behind many young Turks excited by meat cleavage, pliers and other torture tools handed to their care inside dungeons.
They are the Gletkins. But you have to pity the Gletkin who turned Kakwenza into a badly done graffiti. After all their efforts of doodling pain on the long writer’s body, the result is Kakwenza being Kakwenza.
The other day, I reached out to one of the Gen-so-and-so-is-our-next-man fellas and asked what the month-long torture was for if the long writer was still curmudgeon-ing them so daringly on social media.
“You guys just wanted to learn body art and used the poor fella as a specimen,” I said.
The Gen-is-our-next-man guy first sneered and then out of the blue, claimed that they were helping build the long writer’s profile.
“Last time it was only people like you who were commiserating with him,” the fella said.
“But now the Besigyes and Bobi Wines are jostling with foreign envoys for a date with Kakwenza, all thanks to what you call a badly done graffiti.”
I wanted to protest but what stopped me was the thought that Kakwenza would simply laugh at such and call it a petru-something. The long man loves long words that I think he learns in the dungeons when they are working him up. If the first bit was bad, the next one got me flabbergasted.
“Now, thanks to that doodle-cum-graffiti,” the Gen-is-our-next-man chap said, “Kakwenza can apply for a visa to Americas or Europe claiming his life is in danger here and he’ll get it. The bazungu will even construct for him a Bank of Uganda-like residence and…”
I signed out of Facebook at this point.
I’ve been thinking about Gletkin. If they were supposed to drive young dissents who are taking to social media to drive the spotted animal nuts under their beds, Kakwenza has showed that it isn’t working. We can save taxpayers by putting all Gletkins out of job.

Note: This is a parody column