A father’s apology

A week ago, I had a long telephone discussion with my father, Theoneste Nyamutera, who said that he had forgiven me all the sins I had committed against the family when I was growing up. The relationship between my family and I has been unstable from the day I told my father I was determined to pursue a career in journalism. My father sat and cried. He was seething with anger. To him, for his son to disregard marketing courses and become a journalist was the ultimate betrayal. “People will hate, curse and jail you. You only want to bring misery to us,” my father warned before pronouncing to the rest of family members that I had become a rebel. The climax came after elementary school when my father told all his children that it was high time we began thinking about reading strong courses at university. He believed that people like lawyers were the ultimate of the “learned” and that law or engineering courses would lead to powerful professions. His thinking was not different from his contemporaries who thought that lawyers were all knowing and resourceful to their families. My father told me that journalists do lousy jobs yet lawyers live as all children are entitled: rich and dressed in decent suits. He said journalists were always dirty and their feet were full of blisters. He didn’t know that lawyers or engineers from our universities are no different from the man on the street or a journalist. Lawyers and engineers can also not succeed in life, but this kind of argument was an insult to my father. I have always had a special admiration and respect for journalists. Given chance, journalists can excel. I told my family that becoming an advanced person had little to do with profession, at least profession as defined by my parents. So we parted ways. In a couple of weeks, a family member ran into trouble because the names on his academic papers were different. As the son of a refugee, he had tried to change his names so as to benefit from a scholarship given to the country’s nationals. But like the English adage that what goes around comes around, the change in names came back to haunt him. My family had tried to explain the genesis of the mix-up but in vain, until I stepped in. Being a journalist is both good and bad. You create many foes and friends too. When I explained to the boss of probe team how the difference in names came about, he understood it and cleared the relative. None of any family member had managed to talk to higher authorities to explain the predicament. My father is now a happy man. He has been going a round telling everybody that I am one of his loved sons! Contact: Ssuuna2000@yahoo.co.uk