Jacob Katumusiime
Uganda’s social media is daily fed with antics of a White man from New Zealand, calling himself Muzungu Boda. He is most popular for the drifting stunts he performs with different sorts of cars. Some of the stunts are alarmingly done with children bundled in the cars.
Children are the most endangered around Muzungu Boda. In several videos, he parades children whom he harasses in subtle ways that seem to pass off as fun. In one video, he spits on the face a child and in another, he presents black children whose faces are smeared with dust, claiming to have also become White.
Muzungu Boda’s fashioning of himself as a philanthropist who loves Uganda so much has covered his craziness. He is often seen soliciting school fees for Ugandan children, supplying food stuffs to communities and promoting Uganda’s agricultural products, all of which are done with a sprinkle of racism and the aura of white saviour mentality.
In a very stereotypical manner, Muzungu Boda often caricatures the daily lives of the Ugandan locals. He casually presents the Ugandan communities as starving and in need of saving. Muzungu Boda further goes around recording our parents in their everyday labours, and he without shame also continually makes perverted advances at our mothers.
The impunity with which Muzungu Boda breaks not only the traffic rules but also the ethical codes of conduct screams of a man who has zero respect for the customs of the land. It should be worrying that he has children under his custodianship under the guise of Muzungu Boda Football Club.
He often records the young black boys begging his followers to contribute money for their school fees and in one of the videos, he even instructs them to ‘be sadder.’ Uganda needs to calculate the human cost of letting Muzungu Boda and his ilk go on rampage.
In the era of content creation, Uganda and the rest of Africa have yet again become sites of exploration for the Western world which has never quenched its colonial thirst. The lives of the local Africans captured on camera are the minerals that the European world seeks to extract for both amusement and money. Indeed, Muzungu Boda also presents the Ugandan society as a discovery to which he invites his countrymen to explore. There is a thin line between the tourism promotions that Muzungu Boda carries out and neo-colonialism. Business empires are even using him to market their products regardless of ethical considerations.
Muzungu Boda’s idea of doing something good for the community is a total menace. He will be spotted downtown making a mockery of the small businesses that Ugandans operate, in the name of trying out the trades of the locals. His attempts at learning Luganda are for the fun of it, the result of which is a desecration of a people’s language. Even where Muzungu Boda claims to raise awareness over the bad roads in Uganda, his solutions remain ridiculous.
The Ugandan society needs to develop a critical consciousness against forces that vulgarise the world they live in. The tendency to laugh at things that should irritate us sustains the structures that fashion our misery. We often pretend to be unaffected by the wrongs happening in our society, until our own family members are involved. How can we have a large mass of people claiming to be intellectuals and at the same time lack insight into the absurdity of our lived reality?
