Humour: “Where have I been?”

This is the one and only Villager, putting my “rusty pen” (not the proverbial pen though) to paper. How times have changed, when we were kids joining primary school, we were not allowed to use pencils and pens lest we “dirten” the paper. For that reason, we were made to write on erasable “tablets” (not the “ibinini” or vidonge kama kwinini), the tablets were a sort of mini blackboards on which one wrote or tried to write! Sometimes the English language is so difficult and at times it lacks the right words in which one can express oneself; for that reason, I keep on borrowing words here and there. As they say, “communication is not complete until the message is understood by the intended recipient”, that is why I will always patch up the “Anglo Saxony” language with all sorts of lingo phrases until it makes sense to my readers. I have been here and there, far and wide, doing this and that (does that make sense?). As you well know, this paper has limited space, if I began unleashing my story; I could as well take up all the space (from front to the back page) and there would still be more to tell. In the days of Mfashumwana (while I was still in that small village of mine), we used to have what was known as “story time”. We used to gather around a fire, say in the chicken or is it the kitchen. Here, children and adults would tell stories. That is gone by, no kitchen fires anymore, you cannot gather around an electric or gas cooker to tell stories. Those days, food was prepared by mama, that food was cooked with lots of love. Not any more, food is now days cooked by “abayedi” (aides or is it maids). When we were growing up, house maids were unthinkable, that was a privilege for the town dwellers only. The best one heard of a maid was a “muyaya”(no malice intended). These were normally girls taken from the village to say Kampala or Mbarara, to tend to babies of city dwellers. How on earth would a loving mother need the services of a maid? Does the maid know the pain of carrying the baby for nine months, leave alone the labour pains? No thank you. That is why our mamas used to strap us on their back all day long. My mama trying to violate this status quo led to me and the whole village getting the name that I proudly carry! Technology has really changed the world and the people therein, no soon had I disembarked the “airbus” (bus travelling through the air) than all the papers began announcing that “The Villager is Back”. I really do not understand who tipped off the journalist of this great nation that I, the Villager was onboard one of Rwanda Air’s flights scheduled to land in the wee hours of the day! I was received by none other than my brother and former “pagemate”, “The Diaspoman”. I still do not know whether it was out of love or he just wanted to confirm that I had not become “past tense”, as some people had taken it upon themselves to report. Within hours of my arrival and subsequent news headlines on the same, I have received so many e-mails that; my “Tablet” is finding it hard to cope. In the olden days, all these would have been channelled through the post office, they would have cost the senders some money for the stamps, and even then, they could have taken a week or so to reach me. Do not get confused about my talk about tablets, these are not the type that is found in KIPHARMA or Pharmacy Counsel; these are instead a type of miniature computers; in fact, I do not have to type on the keyboard if I chose not to, I can use a “pen”. At this rate of change, I might as well end up changing from being a villager to someone more modern. How many of the so called urbanites own a Tablet computer, leave alone, know what it is? I can see time and space are not my friends. For more information, please keep watching this space. Mfashumwana@fastmail.fm