By Nick Twinamatsiko, Uganda: I mentioned, in the last installment, that, because every family had to bring to church the chairs they were to use on Sundays, the church furniture was almost as varied as the worshippers and sitting positions were permanent. The chair one sat on in church was a fairly reliable index to their financial standing. There were […]
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By Nick Twinamatsiko, Uganda: The white-washed, oblong structure snugly nestled at the common foot of the village hills was the church. It had narrow, stained-glass windows, timber doors and a pitched roof of rusty iron sheets. On the upper side of it ran the village feeder road, and on the lower side was a large compound which was used as […]
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By Nick Twinamatsiko, Uganda: It has been said for quite a while now that the rise of online media, specifically blogs and social media, threatens to condemn traditional print media to increasing irrelevance and eventual extinction. It’s staggeringly evident from all recent statistics that the reading time, in terms of man-hours and woman-hours, spent on social media is rapidly rising […]
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By Nick Twinamatsiko, Uganda: Two South African ambassadors have lately been in the headlines over academic fraud. Last week, it was reported that the ambassador to Japan, Mohau Pheko, doesn't have a doctorate from La Salle University as she claims on her CV. La Salle university was, until 1996, a diploma mill – a fraudulent higher education organization selling degrees […]
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By Nick Twinamatsiko, Uganda: President Museveni says Ugandans, and Africans generally, fail to tap opportunities that would transform their lives and the economy because they are in deep slumber. According to the Daily Monitor of Feb 26, 2015, the President, while commissioning the $15m Tirupati Business Park, said the African continent continues to lag behind the rest of the world […]
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By Nick Twinamatsiko, Uganda: Sunday was considered the Sabbath, and strictly observed as such. There were no Seventh Day Adventists in the village or neighboring villages to try to dissuade us from this belief. But even if they had been there, and had tried, they would have found it impossible to convince anyone. Unlike the English nomenclature for the days […]
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By Nick Twinamatsiko, Uganda: Bakasherura must have been a child of around ten at the commencement of the 20th century. In the 1980s, his hair was utterly white, a fact that couldn't escape the notice of those of us eagerly making our first impressions of life. “When people grow very old, their hair becomes all white – like Bakashurera's?” we […]
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By Nick Twinamatsiko, Uganda: We owe a great deal to constancy. Exploration would have been impossible or futile if the geographical features had changed location with time – if John Speke, on returning to Mwanza, had found that the vast lake he had seen months before and christened Victoria had relocated, perhaps to West Africa. It would be meaningless to […]
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By Nick Twinamatsiko, Uganda: I was born amidst war – the war that brought Saba Sabas to my village, and rid my country of a president whose name had become an international byword for brutality. Before the war, the phrase Saba Saba had never been uttered in my village – the sound of the Soviet BM Katyusha Rocket Launcher, which […]
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By Nick Twinamatsiko, Uganda: The moment of birth must be as painful for the baby as it is for the mother. Everybody talks about labor pains – and I suppose they are as severe as they are said to be – but the experience of being thrust out of the cozy womb, snugly inhabited for 9 months, through an excruciatingly […]
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