In 2006, Kamwokya was on fire. The elections were raging, a veritable inferno in the bellies of disaffected voters. At the time, Kamwokya was so yellow you would think it had gone bananas. But if you looked carefully, Kamwokya political persuasion was really like the skin of a mango that changes from green to yellow, orange, or red as it ripens. Thus, it was a battleground area, potentially going to the highest political bidder.
One of those bidders showed up to shape the curl of my smile with the crescent-shaped fruit of their political efforts by asking me to vote yellow. The National Resistance Movement (NRM) had just adopted yellow as its primary, symbolic colour around 2003–2005, as the country transitioned from a movement system to multiparty politics.
I was introduced to a certain Mr. Baguma, a man who believed that cheques must lead to a favourable bank balance when dealing with voters. Accordingly, he cashed me with the only change we voters truly seek: pocket change.
Suddenly, I personified inflation as shopkeepers raised their prices to match my newfound cash flow each time I went shopping. But I was soon distracted by a bar enroute to the supermarket.
Stepping inside it, old friends materialized like foraging hornets buzzing with delight. They were drinking on a budget that strictly forbade more than the drinks they had already guzzled. They needed a savior to carry the cross they found themselves on with they crossed the wrong bartender.
He wanted his money. They sought another drink. So, I struck a compromise: the bartender would get his “dough” and my friends would get more drinks. Clearly, I had gone bananas if I thought that was a compromise. However, we often tell ourselves that every drink counts and so we could count on every to drink do the numbers and hope they added up to a paid bill.
Before I bought a single round, I declared that I was only buying five rounds. Firstly, because more rounds than that would lead to a technical knockout, with the landlady coming down on me hard, no pun intended.
Second, the number five is whimsically significant as the “high five” gesture of celebration, representing the 5 vowels (A,E,I,O,U) that make words work, and the 5 senses we use to navigate life. It is also the only prime number ending in 5, making it a quirky, self-centered mathematical oddity.
By the time I had explained that last paragraph to those drunks, we found ourselves on the forbidden fruit of six rounds! I don’t how we got to six without five, but we were seeing double of everything and thought we had hit 55 beers each and tried to reduce them to six!
Before long, we were dancing on the ceiling like Lionel Richie. Well, we thought it was the ceiling because everything was suddenly upside down. I even saw the bartender calling the devil, which was really “999” upside down.
He thought we were going to leave without paying the bill. Clearly, it had risen to Himalaya heights, with one of my drinking buddies pointing at him and saying: “Him, Malaya.”
It was an insult the bartender could not take lightly. In a Kamwokya minute, the cops showed up with arresting intensity and immediately asked us to cough up some cash like our pockets had a shared respiratory illness.
Essentially, we had to bribe them with our bill in order to escape paying our bill. Bear in mind that we were seven boozers. “No. we did not say we were the president’s boozers,” I replied, when pressed upon our actual number.
It turns out the bartender and his whole extended family seemed to be drinking from the bitter swill of our inability to pony up the cash.
I had spent over and above my own budget and there would be no supplementary arrangement from Baguma. Luckily for us, the cops were also soon high, on my bribe. The situation was bananas; I slipped away while pretending to be on my happy way to the toilet.
Everybody I left behind me saw red when they realized what I had done. That’s how Kamwokya switched from yellow to red.
