HUMOUR : “Looking in the Wrong Direction”

There is this human element that I may call “hope” (not the name of some men’s wives though), can I call it the drive to aspire for better things in the future! Everyone of us yearns for better goodies in life but when you begin dreaming of having what you cannot get, then you have your priorities all wrong! There is this guy called or is it nicknamed “Bagorebeza”, literary or loosely translated as “beautiful women”. Because of the denotation of the name and him being a man, most of his friends and foes preferred calling him Bagobe; now as the name suggests, Bagobe’s eye or is it appetite for nice looking flowers was second to none, he could even smell a beautiful flower in the dark. Can we say, he had some sort of telepathy in as far as the “flowers of life” were concerned? True, we all love our flowers, otherwise, who would allow to be chained for life? Isn’t that the highest form of subornation to the MoCK? It is not easy living on the leash read chain. The MoCK (members of the chain keepers) are so good at keeping us leashed up, pulling tight on the chain as and when they wish, not caring to know how that chain hurts! This world is strange, the Baganda say, “kyenkola banange, sagala bakinkole” (what I do unto others, I do not want it done unto me), let me leave it at that. Now, this guy, Bagobe, being a young entrepreneur, every woman was dying to have his hand in Holy Matrimony (the order of being chained), he decided to go south to Buja (read Bujumbura) to look for a potential chain keeper. Being from Ug, he decided not to marry any of the so called “Basope”, instead, he opted for the daughters of “Rwagasore”. So many people say that Buja has very beautiful “Flowers”; that is their own opinion, as for me, look nowhere, the best “flowers” are right here. The truth is always the truth, even if I risk having my chain tightened because of this statement, so let it be! Luckily enough, my Chain Keeper is not a keen newspaper reader; this trash of a story is likely to go without her noticing it. She only loves watching TV more so, the “Binaijeriya” (Nigerian movies) and to me, I hate those movies, they tend to depict Africans as savages and backward! Ok, back to our Buja flower. Bagobe spotted I supposed the best Buja flower, it was a just about to blossom rose, with sharply pointed thorns at the front end, pocking out as if ready to pierce whoever dared get his chest close enough! After all the hullabaloo of gusaba, gukwa, etc, we were treated to a grand ubukwe (wedding) at the Kigali’s Meridian a.k.a Novotel Hotel currently Laico. A few years down the road, the flower blossomed and gave rise to other flowers; many onlookers were getting tempted to “touch” the flower. Word has it that, one even decided to uproot the flower and take it to a distant land so that he could nurture it from there! As I always say, you can take a villager out of the village but taking the village out of him is not possible. Maybe it was the village in Bagobe that was causing his flower to drift away; maybe it was the beauty of the flower that was causing it to attract so many bees, maybe something else! Bagobe was so devastated that he kept following the flower where it turned, nearly everybody could see that the poor chap’s heart was nearly breaking. If he had come to Mfashumwana (village), I could have found him a good flower even if it was not all that world class but beautiful enough to make his heart leap but not so beautiful to attract too many bees lest he gets stung! It is always good to look in the right direction; Looking in the Wrong Direction can be so devastating. Mfashumwana@fastmail.fm