Book Week: Final Thoughts and Oh My!

1949. The crack of dawn witnessed my nativity into the lovely arms of my mother, Francisca Nabulo.  This began the remarkable sequence of Balibaseka Bukenya …

 

… There I was, puked out with vigor, and my umbilical cord gently separated from my mother with the help of a piece of dry reed of elephant grass.  In the midst of blood dripping down her arms my mother carefully carried the slippery thing, trembling, with her lovely tiny fingers and wrapped a folded gomesi around it.  She stealthily checked for my sex, and I must have heard her praising God that this time it wasn’t a girl …

 

No, that isn’t my own writing.  God in his wisdom knew better than to give me any real talents.  He knew that just by being born, I’d become an insufferable snob.

 

The excerpt above is from the autobiography of Ugandan Vice President Gilbert Balibaseka Bukenya.  I bought the book, Through Intricate Corridors of Power, today at the Book Week Festival.  An unnamed person from Fountain Publishers warned me about it, saying, “It’s an interesting story, but I can’t vouch for the writing.  If you ignore the exaggeration and the portentousness of the author, you may like it.”

 

Okay, he didn’t say portentousness.  He said something along the lines of VP … vanity … editing it was almost impossible mbu.

 

I’m done with the first six chapters and do not have the will to continue through to chapter seven.  The title of chapter seven is “My Struggle to Prove Excellence Begins”, which I have chosen to rename “I Give Up the Will to Live.”

 

Anyhoo … Uganda Book Week Festival stuff and thingies.  Here’s a couple of bleah pictures.

Ignominy

The sickly sweet smell is everywhere.  It’s on my clothes, it’s in my hair, it’s on my hands, it’s in my breath!

 

It doesn’t matter how many times I bathe or scrub my clothes or slather pungent lotions on my body.  I still smell over-ripe, syrupy and nauseating.

 

As a pupil at Naguru Katale Primary School my friends and I were terrors.  We were children of city councilors, who held more privileged positions in society that the sons and daughters of policemen and shopkeepers who lived on the fringes our large housing estate.

 

Our lunch boxes were full of juice, jam sandwiches, rice and choice pieces of meat.  They could only afford a few pieces of day-old boiled cassava and tepid water carried in old engine oil bottles.  We were given money to buy sweets, biscuits and kabalagala from the school canteen.  They were lucky if their parents had money for new books.