Don’t Read This. Read This.

This is my frigging eye.

Yes, that’s how beautiful I am.

Now on to more pressing matters.

Like?

Like looking me in the eye. Yes you, Valder IKnowThat’sNotYourRealName Larka. Look me in my beautiful bug-eyed glory and tell me the truth.

The truth about whether you really were an adventurous Swedish teen introduced to Museveni’s war in Uganda in the 1980s. That as a misguided youth you truly served as the personal bodyguard of a head honcho in the Kenyan police. That you left the comfort of your father’s home and a place at a prestigious university to fight alongside the disparate gang of guerillas in eastern, (or was it) central, (or was it) northeastern Uganda.

Look me in the eye and tell me you weren’t lying when you describe crossing into Uganda from Kenya on a canoe down a long, winding river. And the massacre of the family of an undercover UN-worker-cum-guerilla-sympathizer. And your baby conceived somewhere in close proximity to a jacaranda tree. And the brutal slaughter of the Ugandan goddess who stole your heart.

And the wise bushman from southern Africa who spoke to you in proverbs and taught you more about yourself than anyone else. And the white South African mercenaries who fought on Museveni’s side, and the Ethiopian gunman, and …

Look me in the eye because there’s no way other way I can believe you.

You, Mr. Larka, provide me with neither the names, places, dates nor times that you allegedly fought with Museveni’s National Resistance Army in Uganda. A lone white man, fighting a black war; conspicuous, you would think. So why does no one know your name?

Suck it Banyakyalo

Inspired (in part) by Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist.

Definitions:

Suck it: Yeah, yeah … and by the way, yo’ mama …

Banyakyalo: Anyone imprisoned by the deception that milking a cow is magical.

If you are a city-born African reading this, you’ve probably heard it before.

“Shame! You’ve never known the beauty of tilling a field and growing your own food? Shame!”

Or

“Ah, how I long for the days when we shot birds with catapults and over an open fire roasted its succulent flesh.”

Or

“How wide the fields were! How wonderful the nights slept under the stars. How aromatic the smell of fresh cow dung. How beautifully terrifying it was to search your way through the dark to the pit latrine out back. How magical the hours spent telling stories by the fire. How glorious …”

Yeah?

I’ve never done those things. So suck it banyakyalo.

I’m glad I was born and bred in the city with its pollution, culture-that-is-no-culture, burglaries, noise, dust, slums, mansions, high walls, no walls, pesticide-filled apples from South Africa, pizza deliveries, 24-hour supermarkets, imported milk from Thailand, garbage, road rage, telephones, books, air-headed celebrities, tapped water, banal TV programs …

And so are you.