IMPRESSIONS:Martin Luther King Jr’s Nobel prize and my Swedish usher

The year was 1964 when Martin Luther King Jr, one of the most influential people of the twentieth century, was being awarded the most coveted award. The Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to humanity. By this time, I was a fresh graduate in journalism from the Columbia school of journalism and I had just returned to my foster country since I was living in exile for political reasons. I immediately took up the role of the editor in the leading tabloid in that country. King Jr was the hottest item during this time around the world and when the information came in that he had won the Nobel Prize, most of the media organizations with credibility were invited to cover the ceremony and I represented my own. I arrived in Oslo the capital of Norway where the ceremony was to be four days before it started in order to acclimatize. The organizing committee had already hired ushers to guide the protocol and the guests and the airport, I met a lady with a placard written “sharpshooter” and I was convinced she was waiting for me. “Hullo, I am Sharpshooter a journalist from East Africa,” I introduced myself. “Good, I am Burger Drowski. I will be guide and translator where necessary during your stay.” I was so mesmerized by her warm reception and kind words. We immediately jumped into a cab to my hotel room, both of us in the back seat. “How is the dark and primitive continent?” she went on the offensive about mother continent. Not to show my disappointment, I pretended weakly, “Oh, Africa is good” but inside me the only appropriate revenge was bringing this ignoramus to Africa as my lover. The plan’s execution started right there. In the hotel room, I had documentaries about Africa and showed her Mountain Kilimanjaro, Lake Victoria, the famous source of the Nile, the Congo forest. With this, my work was made easy since she immediately fell in love with the “dark continent”. That evening she invited me to dinner with her in the quietest suburbs of Oslo. She confessed wanting to come to Africa. Ignoring her admiration of Africa, I looked straight into her brown eyes and said “Burger, you are such a beautiful girl and you deserve going to a beautiful land.” As shy as she was, she briefly looked in my roving eyes that were by now inspecting her entire body and she only said “Shooter, I am only your guide here.” I went ahead to ignore her and complimented her on how good she had been to me on the first day. I requested for more encounters of this nature during my short visit and she agreed. The following three days to the ceremony, I found myself spending more time in her solace. In my entire dating and courting career, I have never missed my target and on my third day I made my intensions clear to her. Of course it always goes “I love you so much and would want to go with you to Africa”. That evening she introduced me as her potential lover to her elder sister with whom she stayed. That very evening we found ourselves playing under cover games between my sheets. Unfortunately, she didn’t have her travel documents ready so she didn’t come to Africa and I never saw her again save for the only letter she wrote me five years later which I will share with you in this column next week. Ends