Believe it or not, I have been discussing business with a friend. The friend, whom I call Gahindiro, since I’ve been assured he has some blue blood flowing in his veins, is unlike his kin in more ways than one.
Believe it or not, I have been discussing business with a friend. The friend, whom I call Gahindiro, since I’ve been assured he has some blue blood flowing in his veins, is unlike his kin in more ways than one.
For one, he has a keen sense of business, much unlike his ilk. For another, he has small eyes and Micombero-like wide whiskers, where his blood-brothers have goggle-size eyes and baby-smooth faces.
When Gahindiro first proposed the idea of starting a business, my first reaction was: "With what?” Knowing I had no kind of property to my name and that I’ve never boasted any bright idea in any field, I dismissed his proposal as a pipe dream.
But when he went on to explain a few of his ideas, the name "Mbidde” immediately sprang to my mind.
I may have talked about the man in these lines, such is the spell he still holds over me!
Mbidde (RIP) was a rich man when I entered secondary school in Mbarara, Uganda, in 1969. He made his wealth through brawn rather than brain, and his name defined his work. ‘Embidde’, or ‘imbihire’, is the name of a type of banana plant that has particularly sticky sap that will forever stain your clothes once it drops on them.
Mbidde had acquired that name because, as a young boy, he had chosen to single-handedly supply bananas to Ntare School, a secondary school in Mbarara, southern Uganda.
For carrying bunches of bananas on his head all the time, understandably, his clothes were stained beyond recognition and thus, his name.
From his earnings, Mbidde was able to buy a bicycle and supply even more bananas, which multiplied his profits. These profits he used to increase the acreage of his field and also to supplement his supply by buying from his peasant neighbours.
With more profits now, Mbidde was able to buy a lorry and expand his field into a large farm where he hired a few farm hands to help his wife tend the many types of crops and livestock, while he crisscrossed the whole region in his lorry supplying food requisites to the area’s schools.
From tomatoes to potatoes, meat to milk, eggs to entrails, Mbidde supplied them all, in his trademark stained attire that included a short-sleeved shirt, shorts, knee-long stockings (two pens stuck in them) and safari boots.
When Mbidde felt he had earned himself a bonus, he took a bus to the Ugandan capital of Kampala to buy himself a family car, his moneybag slung over his shoulder but clutched possessively in case he encountered a ‘pickpocket’.
On seeing him, the Indian salesman (Wavamuno was then a small clerk in a Kabale bank) shouted to Mbidde to go away and come back on Friday (day for beggars) if he wanted alms. Mbidde ignored him and proceeded to inspect a long, army-green Mercedes Benz 280 with tinted glasses.
Satisfied, he went to the counter and poured out the contents of his bag, whereupon pandemonium broke out.
The young salesman jumped over the counter to go and close the doors while the black sales assistants and security guards ran in confused circles in an effort to guard the doors and the money at the same time.
It was not until the owner of the garage himself had come to count the money that calm was slowly restored. After all the formalities of signing papers and getting change for his customer, the owner of the garage himself offered to drive Mbidde to Mbarara but the latter politely declined and took the keys of his new Mercedes to drive the 256 km to Mbarara….
So it was with a certain Kashwiga (RPI) of Kajaho in the sprawling refugee camp of Nshungerezi in the early 1960s. Kashwiga was not a particularly strong visionary, but he was shrewd enough to calculate that even if the refugees’ trade did not involve fiscal exchange at the beginning, it was bound to outlive batter trade in the end and transform into a money economy.
And sure enough, by the late 1960s Kashwiga was laughing all the way to his pillow, every evening. To his pillow, because it was inside that precious sisal sack that he kept his daily earnings.
Yet, when Kashwiga had set up a small shop in Kajaho in the early 1960s, no one could have guessed that he would end up buying himself a brand new Peugeot 403 pick-up in seven short years.
But the miracle was not in how he had anticipated that the refugees would slowly graduate to a cash economy. The miracle was in how the little he earned was enough to make him rich, knowing how he did not always get his due payment.
Kashwiga was so absent-minded that when he saw a shilling in your hands, he imagined it was already in his pocket. Many were the times I tendered my shilling and then put it back in my pocket!
So, why not dream? Age or none, I know a Frw when I clutch one!