AFRICA THE GREAT HALL!

By Robert Bake Tumuhaise

The reporting day came. This time the journey to Kampala seemed shorter. By evening Nyamishana was inside the university. Uncle Gerald had accompanied her to Africa Hall, where she had been allocated residence. The custodian allowed her to choose a roommate and so she ended up sleeping in the same room as Ruth, her villagemate and friend.

Ruth was a couple of years older than Nyamishana, but because she had dropped out of school for some years, they ended up joining university in the same year.

Makerere had eight Halls of residence – Nkrumah, Nsibirwa (Northcote), Livingstone, Mitchell and Lumumba were for boys; while Complex (CCE), Africa and Mary Stuart (Box) were for girls. Of all these, Africa was thought to be the most prestigious. It was a hall for the rich and those who claimed to be rich. Ruth was happy that they had been granted residence in Africa.

Ruth had lived in Kampala since she left Nyamishana in primary school and so she had to orient Nyamishana in matters of city life and how to live like a campuser, as university students were referred to those days.

“It’s taboo for a girl from this great hall to be seen in the dining hall,” Ruth revealed as soon as they had settled in their room. She went on to explain: “You see Nyamishana, Africa is a hall for rich girls and so you either have to be rich or pretend to be.” Poor girls who found themselves in Africa had to either condemn themselves to reckless living to lay their hands on big cash or to resign to a life of ridicule from fellow girls.

“But Ruth, you know my background. I can neither pretend nor get money through evil means.”

“Don’t be childish. Being seen eating that rotten food in the dining hall is a sign of abject poverty and I am not going to allow that. I know you are a good Catholic, but don’t argue baselessly like a married woman who claims to be a virgin.”

The conversation went on and on and on, ending their first day together in disagreement. Ruth believed it was fashionable to sleep with a few rich men to get money to splash around, while Nyamishana believed that was an abomination. They had to pause that discussion and talk about other things.

Some of the other things they talked about was that Kay, the Rib-Cracker, their childhood friend, was in Kampala. Ruth promised that she would take Nyamishana to see him. This somehow distracted the two ladies from the heated argument that was threatening to boil their hearts.

Other than disagreements over lifestyle, the two had a lot in common. They hailed from the same village and both equally valued education. However, Ruth didn’t like Nyamishana’s course, MDD, and so in her absence she would ridicule and gossip about her. Nevertheless, they enjoyed life in Kampala and visited many places together.

Bakiga say: “Don’t tie your good goat near a bad one.” As time went on, Ruth’s life-style started to influence Nyamishana, who had previously believed that city life was terrible. She began to discover that there were also many good things in Kampala. People could do all sorts of businesses. Anyone could travel anywhere, anytime, without road-blocks or any other unnecessary interruptions. Life was being lived.

There were many ‘happening’ places where people could eat, drink and dance till morning without any fear. Such was the Guild Canteen at Makerere University.

Campusers believed that going through the university without having fun was like throwing away your old clothes and walking naked to the market to look for new ones. Ruth and Nyamishana were not about to be the only ones to be left out of this fun. So they started to visit the Guild Canteen to join other students in the eating and dancing.

Much as Nyamishana loved fun, she wanted it decent. But at the Guild Canteen and other places she went to for leisure, she kept meeting people who behaved like they were just bodies without a person inside. They seemed to be shame-proof as if their hearts were made of concrete. She always distanced herself from such people and instead continued searching for true friends in Kampala, especially those that hailed from her home area.

For the first few months, most of the faces she was meeting were new. Generally there were not many people from her village living in the city. The few that were there were too busy to be seen. They worked as house-helps, night watchmen, soldiers or shamba-boys.

Days and weeks passed. Then one day, while walking towards Africa Hall, she saw the face of a man that seemed familiar though she couldn’t remember where she had seen him. He stopped his Mercedes Benz, lowered the screen and beckoned her to enter the car. That very second her mother’s warnings re-emerged in her mind and kept disturbing her until she declined the invitation. She only greeted him and introduced herself as Nyamishana.

“I will introduce myself when I return,” the man promised, with a smile.

“If I may ask; what exactly will you be returning for?” she begged to know.

“You will get to know soon enough,” he replied before speeding his Benz off.

By this time the little money that her mother had given her for upkeep was finished and she was surviving at Ruth’s mercy. As she stared at the Benz that was being swallowed by the distance, she cursed poverty and wished she had been born in a richer family. Maybe Ruth’s argument about the end justifying the means on issues of money contained some water. Her mind was too troubled to make any rational judgment.

Meanwhile most other freshers (first-year students as they were called) were living a wild and reckless life. In secondary school, they had been in ‘prison’ and finishing secondary school seemed like the prison bars had suddenly been broken. With no one to question them, they now felt they could live their lives anyhow.

Later, when Nyamishana started meeting her childhood friend, Kay, one of the passionate conversations they always had was on ladies’ dress code. Kay would make a lot of fun out of it. For instance, he would joke: “While wisdom has it that human beings should dress like they want to be addressed, many campus girls I see these days dress like they want to be undressed.”

Nyamishana had never forgotten Kay’s story of a campus girl who was passing through Owino market dressed (rather undressed) in contradicting attire. Below a T-shirt with the picture of Jesus was a micro-mini skirt. So one man ridiculed her: “Haaaaaaaaa, look at this girl who has given the part from her waist to the head to Jesus, and that from her waist to the feet to us!”

Ruth’s lifestyle worried Nyamishana. She was that typical city girl, the kind you would meet in tight jeans, with her earphones on, listening to loud music and swinging her arms as if she borrowed them from a witchdoctor. She was the kind that would throw a piece of cloth around herself that was nearly the size of a napkin, calling it a skirt.

“Her dressing could tempt the devil himself,” Kay would joke.
One day, Ruth’s dress code landed the two girls into trouble as they entered the old taxi park to board to Wandegeya. At the sight of her dressing, one taxi driver asked: “Is that a net you are dressed in, pretty lady?” a question to which another man quickly answered: “No she’s not just dressed in a net; she’s a net herself!”

As Nyamishana was still looking for a place to hide her face in shame, a third man also pasted himself into the discussion: “Maybe she’s on her way to the beach; she wants to use the net to capture fish. But even then, she might capture the young ones and the Minister of Environment will make noise.” Embarrassed, Nyamishana left Ruth behind and rushed back to campus alone.

In the evening there was a hot argument in their room. Ruth was demanding for an apology from Nyamishana for abandoning her to the crowd of men. “Pardon my villageness, but truthfully speaking those men were right. Somewhere there has to be a boundary,” Nyamishana put across her point. Ruth changed the topic.

Nyamishana had come to Makerere hoping to enjoy life like other students, but also aware of the traps that city life sets before every growing youth. At some points she would find herself in a corner where she was divided between her principles and campus life. But the values planted into her young heart by her mother could not allow her to compromise. They kept echoing in her mind as if an invisible being was whispering them into her ear.

Much as she coveted new fashions that had swept over campus, she maintained her traditional dress code of long skirts and dresses, with no unnecessary openings to show the body parts that should be left private. Billy Graham’s television programs that slammed immorality also helped her to stay on the right side of the moral fence.

Nyamishana defied the common practice of wearing make-up, a decision that Ruth kept laughing at and making fun of. However, Kay always came to Nyamishana’s defence.

Whenever Kay visited Nyamishana at campus, he would give her positive advice: “Never do something you feel is not right for you, even if everyone else is doing it.”
He often used his own example: “I started by drinking little and called it a joke, but now I am bound by alcoholism. Always avoid such traps, Nyamishana. It’s sad that I can no longer control the temptation to drink alcohol, but I am less worried because this temptation is not as terrifying as getting tempted to steal or to sleep with a sugar mummy.”

Funny as it may sound, Nyamishana’s simple lifestyle is what had attracted the Benz man. He knew he had found a treasure that was not like other spoilt city girls. It was even possible that this poor village girl was still a virgin. He wanted to explore the possibility of hooking her up for a wife. So just like he had promised, he showed up again.

This excerpt was picked from my new wowlicious and unputdownable novel 'TEARS OF MY MOTHER: The Success Story of Nyamishana, the First Female President of Uganda'. A copy goes for 20,000/= only.

Today, you can passby WORLD OF INSPIRATION, Luwum Street, MM Plaza T33 (3rd Floor) and get yourself a copy autographed by myself. You can also inbox me your contact or call us on 0700487768/ 0774107287 / 0414691595 if you want your copy delivered to u at no extra cost.

WANDEGEYA CHICKEN

By Robert Bake Tumuhaise

How time moves so fast! Fast-forward, and Nyamishana has metamorphosed into a gorgeous girl. Her niceness turning heads of men in the whole village. Nevertheless, she never allowed the madness of teenage years to get into her head. All that was on her mind was to get to Makerere, a university that was then referred to as ‘The Ivory Tower’.

Life in Wandegeya was one thing agreed upon by both the boys and the girls who had studied from Makerere University. Whenever they met in the village trading centre, they would share many stories about Wandegeya that left Nyamishana officially curious. “All sorts of activities take place in Wandegeya”, Ruth always narrated. Ruth was Nyamishana’s childhood friend who had studied her secondly education from Kampala.

Wandegeya was a busy suburb located right below Makerere. It was a bee-hive of activities that kept people in running up and down. During evening hours, the human traffic jam was so intense that passing there was like penetrating an impenetrable forest. Wandegeya had all sorts of business activities.

There were many bars where customers sat drinking all tribes of drinks, spending money as if they had a grudge with their wallets. Funny that one of these was called “Savers’ Bar”. There were also shops selling various items, mainly clothes, furniture, household items and electronics. Shops sold a lot, and so did street vendors. But one thing that attracted many people to Wandegeya was eating.

Every corner you turned to had a food joint, most of them with very interesting names. Right after the traffic lights stood “For God so Loved the World that He Gave his only Son Restaurant”. This name could make you recall your Sunday school childhood lessons that it would invite you for lunch.

Some of the food businesses were in properly constructed structures, while others were in the roadside markets. There on the roadside people enjoyed buying all sorts of eats, ranging from boiled eggs to roasted maize, bananas, chips, deep-fried fish, sausages, roasted goat meat (nyama choma), yams, roasted ground nuts, and pork, to mention but a few. Only the amount of money you had in your pocket could limit you.

This is what was happening all over the City, except for the ‘rotating chicken’, a popular term that Makerere students used in reference to Wandegeya chicken. It was derived from the manner in which it was prepared. A whole chicken would be fixed on a bar and placed into a roasting machine where it had to rotate around the hot coil till it was ready. The machine had a glass provision for by-passers to look at how delicious it was.

On a crazy side, rumor had it that campus girls formed the largest percentage of sex workers in Wandegeya. A story was told of how one man, who had travelled to Kampala for the first time, got mesmerized at the sight of these skimpily-dressed dazzling beauties that he got tempted to buy one. On entering and switching on the light in the hotel room, he was shocked at the first question.

“Dad, what are you doing with prostitutes?” It was the voice of his daughter.

“Can you explain to me how I could send you to the University to study and you end up peddling your flesh?” He answered one question with another question.

“You know the money you give me cannot sustain me at campus even for two weeks. But for you, it’s a shame. How could you leave mum home and come to sleep around with sluts?”

“Calm down, please; we can sort this out without anyone knowing.”

By that time their voices were so loud that the neighbors thought the sound was taking off the iron sheets. Before they knew, a crowd of spectators had broken into the room and were cheering and making fun out of them. The next morning the story was all over the tabloids.

The ‘rotating chicken’ in Wandegeya was responsible for many HIV cases, unwanted pregnancies and family upheavals as older men, commonly referred to as ‘sugar daddies’ usually seduced young campus girls, using it as bait.

It was not only girls who were taken advantage of, but also young boys who were hungry for money. Rich women who either had no husbands or had husbands that were too busy for them had resorted to ensnaring campus boys by paying their tuition fees, driving them in posh cars, buying them items like fridges, television sets and floor carpets, plus of course taking them out to Wandegeya for the ‘rotating chicken’.

This excerpt was picked from my new novel 'TEARS OF MY MOTHER: The Success Story of Nyamishana, the First Female President of Uganda', the newest inspirational book on the scene.

You can passby WORLD OF INSPIRATION, Luwum Street, MM Plaza T33 (3rd Floor) and get yourself a copy autographed by myself. You can also inbox me your contact or call us on 0704666851/ 0774107287 / 0414691595 if you want your copy to be delivered to u at no extra cost. A copy goes for 20,000/= only.

WHAT EVERY SUCCESSFUL MAN DOES EVERYDAY

By Bake Robert Tumuhaise

 

As we begin to seriously concentrate on working towards achieving the goals we set for ourselves this year, I felt I should share about a positive habit that has transformed my work, business and life generally, and which has brought results for many other people that I have shared it with. It’s called Action Planning.

 

I used to have big problems with managing my time and other resources because of not having a daily action plan. I would, for instance, leave home wanting to do ten things, only to realize it is evening and I’ve accomplished only two or three. To make it worse, sometimes I’d find that I started with the least important, such as visiting someone, and left out the most important things such as submitting a proposal before a deadline.

 

I would leave home and head to town with money in my pocked only to return home in the evening with nothing more than the transport fare. And like many other Africans, I would cover up my poor financial management habits by that claiming money passes through my fingers. But the truth remains: I was just a poor manager of resources.

 

In an attempt to solve my problem, I started drawing a plan for everyday, specifying what I wanted to do, what time I’d spend on each activity, the resources I would need and what I intended to achieve out of each activity. When I started to see positive results I disciplined myself more to stick to my daily action plans.

 

Later, I discovered that this is actually an action plan and that every successful man or woman does it whether knowingly or unknowingly. So I decided to start training other people how to develop their own daily action plans and the results continued to amaze me.

 

Since that time I have continued to make my daily action plan for myself and together with my staff, we always make one for my company. It helps us know who does what, when, what he/she needs, the expected results and so on. With an action plan it’s easy to tell where the problem is once you don’t see results.

 

If last year, you had issues with managing your time, money and other resources, I encourage you to try out action planning. An action plan will help you prioritize your activities of the day and not waste a lot of time on less important things. It will help you value your time more and for sure you will be able to maximize the hours in a day without unnecessary confusion and stress.

 

Just for your information, at WORLD OF INSPIRATION we offer this training at 50,000/= only ( and freely to our subscribed members). I also remind you of our coming unmissable inspirational event, AUTHORS' FORUM - Uganda's number one inspirational event. It will happen on Wednesday 6th Feb, 5-8pm at the National Theatre. It will focus on 'INCREASING OUR FINANCIAL INTELLIGENCE'.

 

The main speaker is Coach Phil, an internationally-acclaimed success coach. We shall also have a Celeb Interview with Dr. Monica Etima and we shall launch her book, 'PARENTING THIS GENERATION'. Entrance is only 20,000/= but you need to secure your ticket NOW by calling us on 0744107287 / 0704666851 / 0414691595 and your ticket(s) will be delivered right where you are at no additional cost.

 

You can also have my latest inspirational novel that's rocking East Africa entitled 'TEARS OF MY MOTHER; The Success Story of Nyamishana, the First Female President of Uganda'. It's at 20k only.

 

Otherwise, this 2013, do what every successful man/woman does everyday and that's action-planing.

 

Stay blessed and inspired.

 

 

Bake is the Managing Director of WORLD OF INSPIRATION and the Founder of the AUTHORS' FORUM in Uganda.