Why Clutter Is Good For You

 For a long time, I have been mortified at my extreme ability to generate clutter. Now I am just amazed.

Leave me alone for a few minutes in a neatly arranged room with a laptop on top of a coffee table and chances are there will soon be no space on the coffee table for a cup of coffee. My space has always been a jumble of items jostling for space, not even pretending to be orderly about it.

And whenever someone else neatens it up, I tend to get lost in the neatness and keep forgetting where to find what! It’s not something am proud of, mark you. Heck, it’s not even something I should be writing about but such is the beauty of writing about writing. I can write about anything as long as it can be remotely connected to writing; any writing.  

My laptop’s desktop, like my actual one is usually so full of icons (that have given up hope of getting filed away somewhere) it sometimes has no space for more. Needless to say, the paperless office is still a mythical creature that creeps up on me every once in a while when I sit at meetings with important people like Nat or Ndirangu, whose squeaky clean glass-topped desks with only miniscule computers (i-pads?) and not a fingerprint in sight tend to freak me out.

Clutter is a phenomenon I (and my long-suffering house-keepers, ex-wives and other partners) have grappled with for years, until the day I faced up to the simple truth: that to be unapologetically creative is both a gift and a curse; and that the ability to thrive under the chaos of clutter is just one of the many forms of the curse!

Now I did not come to that conclusion entirely on my own steam, but rather, I have checked out other people’s experiences and read a few blogs on the subject as well – the latter being mostly about how to cope with clutter and interruptions by people who, I can only argue/assume, are unable to handle the heat and should stay out of the kitchen.

Sample this:

“I wasted time by reading emails whenever they came into my inbox. I noticed that once I had started reading the name of the sender, I read the first line of the text. Once I mastered that, I continued reading the entire message, and once I got to that point, I felt compelled to respond because there was no point in leaving an already half-finished task. Then sometimes I needed extra information to answer the message, so had to add other tasks… [I] often wasn’t making any progress with what I was originally working on – and in the end felt quite breathless and exhausted. I thought I couldn’t be the only person struggling with this.” 

~ Ulrich Weger, quoted by Lucy Tobin

The real clutter junkies don’t complain and offer no apologies. They just go with the flow and crush everyone who gets in the way. Andrew White, one of the best admen it’s ever been my pleasure to share a food-chain with – albeit from far way below – once fired his secretary for organising his desk while he was out for a meeting. “I couldn’t find a bloody thing on my desk,” he had complained later, still fuming at the frustration of it all.

 “They think they are helping you,” he added with an amused giggle on hearing how I wished I could have thrown out my niece for organising my home office and colour-coding everything. “Help, indeed, ha!” we both agreed like two gay men saying “nothing” in unison when asked by straight people what they were up to sneaking out together like that.

Seriously though, there is nothing quite like the thrill of reaching for a friend’s phone number (that you wrote on the corner of your long-unused desk organiser several fortnights ago) by first lifting a few volumes and magazines from said corner.

Yeah right, I hear the neat and the organised brigade say.

They are forgiven. How are they to even remotely suspect that these seemingly annoying interruptions offer the creative mind limitless opportunities to stumble into mind-bogglingly inspired new ideas. So, while most writers grapple with ways to avoid the phenomenon of “writer interrupted”, I secretly welcome interruptions even as I blithely complain outwardly. And many are those who wonder about my seriousness when I tell them they’ve caught me at a bad time, yet offer to drink tea with them and chat about their hobbies. And although it is argued that research can always prove anything you want it to, I tend agree with research findings claiming that creative type employees who are denied Facebook and loud music are less productive than those who are not.  

The puritans of neatness argue that a clear desk means a clear mind – I don’t doubt them. But a clear mind is certainly the last thing anyone needs when forced to consider several moodily lit pictures of toothpaste tubes and come up with a line that makes the carefully defined target audience (everyone!) believe that this new toothpaste is the best thing since Colgate… With dozens of half-baked ideas flying in and out at the speed of thought, each looking for something sensible to connect with, the barrenness of a neat, well-organised desk does not quite fit or help, does it? Neither does dead silence; or softly piped classical music. 

Jazz, however, with its constantly shifting perspectives, is quite a different proposition altogether. So is Rock; and clutter – my favourite sin. 

Charming tale of a modern Snow White

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/magazine/Charming+tale+of+a+modern+Snow+White/-/434746/1114076/-/item/1/-/4nhdujz/-/index.html

BOOK REVIEW: Snow White and the Seven Aliens

 ; 64 pages; Available at Books First @ Nakumatt City Centre, Kigali; Reviewed by Lloyd Igane;

Probably because of all the little love notes, little pictures and mementos she leaves me every time she can, I have always made it my book-shopping policy to browse the kiddy titles as well in search of suitable reading material for my seven (going on 30) year old daughter, Tami.

It could as well be my natural parental instinct stepping in to save my lovely minded daughter from the pitfalls of limiting her reading to Jack and the Beanstalk, Thumbelina and Snow White & the Seven Dwarves. It could even be my hope that by devouring such fantastic titles – from simple African tales by the likes of Frank Odoi and Tuff Mulokwa, to Ladybirds with fantastic fairy tales about enchanted forests and other not as much fairy (or kiddie) tales by the old master Roald Dahl (Boy, Witches, The Enormous Crocodile, Pig, The Rat-catcher, etc) - I may get enough inspiration to publish a credible children’s story - one day.

It could be a whole lot of reasons including space and time travel … but nothing quite prepared me for Snow White and the Seven Aliens, one of the best children’s books I’ve read so far.

Written (rather well) by Laurence Anholt – with dizzyingly hilarious illustrations by Arthur Robins – and published under the Seriously Silly Stories series by Ochard Books of 338 Euston Road, London, the book tells the story of a hapless (of course!) Snow White, whose dream is to be a pop star like her hero Hank Hunk of Boysong, whose every single is a bestseller and whose posters she plasters all over the walls of her miserable dwelling quarters. Although she has a beautiful voice, is a great dancer, and can write her own lyrics, one thing stands in Snow White’s way: her Wicked Step-mother. A once-upon-a-time famous pop star as Mean Queen, lead singer of The Wonderful Wicked Witches, her voice is now croaky and she is no longer a star, hence her extreme jealousy of her step-daughter.

“You will never be famous like me, she screams at a cowering Snow White. “You look too… ordinary. You don’t even have a band. And besides, your nose is too small!”

A seriously henpecked father doesn’t help much…

But the wretched girl’s luck turns when she – after a series of unfortunate events and a few coincidences – ends up as a cleaner at the Swinging Spaceship Night Club (no less) where she hooks up with a musical band of seven aliens (Scotty, Spotty, Dotty, Potty, Snotty, Grotty and Botty), whose singing repertoire is rather limited – to “hi ho, hi ho” to be precise.

Not to spoil the story for any seven-year-olds-going-on-30 that may be reading this, suffice it to say that the setting, the protagonist and the main characters of this story are more identifiable with in today’s terms than those of the original story (Snow White and the Seven Dwarves).

The story is also truer to life and is less insulting to the said reader’s mind than the old one: For instance, instead of the “magic mirror” telling the witch stepmother that “Snow White is the fairest of them all”, it is the henpecked husband that the witch forces to sit behind the mirror and speak with a shaky voice which he doesn’t have to fake at all. To say that he too is scared of his wife would be an understatement unworthy of Laurence Anholt’s and Arthur Robins’s efforts in conjuring up such a strong character (weakness-wise!).

Sample this:

“Mirror, mirror on the wall

Who has the cutest

nose of all?” roars the wicked witch,

Terrified husband from behind the mirror:

“Mean Queen, you look

a treat.

With a nose as perfect

as a boiled sweet.”

That would bring her a lot of joy and she would cause a fracas and disturb the neighbours. But as Snow White continued to grow into a beautiful young maiden with a cute little nose, she got more and more disturbed by serious bouts of jealousy. At such times, she would stick her vuvuzela-like nose at the mirror and seek solace in its assurance:

            “Mirror, mirror, tell me true

Is my nose as long as a didgeridoo?

    That girl’s nose is microscopic.

What are your feelings

   on this topic?”

Dutifully, the “mirror” would respond:

            “If you push me, I must admit

Snow White’s nose is a perfect fit

But your nose, oh Queen, is

   really small.

In fact it’s hardly there at all.

This goes on for a bit – as such nasty things always do, propping up an unhappy marriage and making at least one child’s life particularly miserable. One night, however, the terrified husband decides he can’t lie any more when the witch demands to know:

“Mirror, mirror, above the sink,

Tell me what you REALLY think.

It’s time you started coming clean-

CHOOSE SNOW WHITE –

OR ME, YOUR QUEEN

With a thin trembling voice, the terrified husband grits his teeth in pent up anger, and hits his tormentor on the other side of the mirror with the full force of the truth:

Alright, I’ve really had enough

I’m fed up with the lies and stuff

     You are past it, old and sad,

    Crinkly, wrinkly - really bad.

Your nose is sort of long and hairy,

     Beside you, Snow White

       is a Christmas fairy!

And that, friends and neighbours, is the inciting action that sets off a series of events that build up to a blast of a happy ending – with little time for falling action, if any.

A real whirlwind of an adventure-romance-happily-ever-after read!

            Another reason I may have been so pleased with the Seriously Silly story of Snow White and the Seven Aliens is the blatant way in which it takes an old classic and modernises it for the 21^st Century and beyond. Something I’ve always wished someone did.

What next, you wonder?

Look out for Ali Baba and the Forty Politicians and Pinocchio and the Televangelist, to be published one day soon – before Tami and her little friends graduate to stories with fewer pictures, more words and no exclamation marks!

(Blogger's note: Buy this book for your child. You and BooksFirst can thank me later)

©Lloyd Igane 2011-01-26

kreative @earthling.net

DOING BUSINESS IN RWANDA: LOW-HANGING FRUIT AMONGST THORNS?

Judging from the increasing throngs of loud-mouthed Kikuyu and Somali-speaking businessmen jamming the airports and the bus termini with their excess baggage and incessant complaints, there is no doubt that Rwanda is fast becoming the East African businessman’s new Mecca, and has no shortage of eager pilgrims.

And as Meccas go, the “land of a thousand opportunities” has not only generously thrown its gates open to all friends and neighbours of goodwill, but done it in award-winning style: The country has been named the globe’s top business reformer by the World Bank Group’s Doing Business Report 2010; the World Economic Forum’s 2010 Competitiveness Award and the Commonwealth Business Council’s African Business Award 2010 - just to mention a few have recently honoured the little hilly country in the heart of Africa.

So what, one wonders, has made Rwanda so attractive to investors and professional types?

To begin with, Private investment is such a top priority for President Kagame, he has established a whole industry around it in the name of the Rwanda Development Board. Headed by John Gara, a lawyer, the RDB has the mandate to bend over backward to accelerate national growth through private sector development. The government has also pushed through major reforms, one of which is to ensure no sectors are barred to foreign investors and no restrictions are placed by the government on the percentage of equity said investors may hold.

Other major indicators of the country’s favourable economic climate are myriad. They include strong macroeconomic growth which encompasses an 8.8% year-on-year GDP growth rate, an 11.2%, controlled inflation, increasing government tax revenues, and stable exchange rates. The stability of government with a "CEO President of Rwanda Inc", zero tolerance for corruption,, and extremely low crime levels.

But these are just indicators of the country’s favourable climate. So what exactly, has made Rwanda Inc so attractive to investors and professional types. Why is it that everyone you ask tells you what a breeze it is to do business in Rwanda?

The government will tell you that the ease with which you can register a business is a major factor. Thanks to economic and legal reforms, what used to take several procedures over several weeks has now been reduced to two procedures taking no more than 24 hours. They will also go on and on about other reforms that have made it easier to register intellectual property, attractive incentives, and simple taxation, and how easy it is to do business with the rest of East Africa from Rwanda. Rwanda is also in the process of establishing an industrial park, a Technology Park, and a Free Trade Zone, and has started developing a robust capital markets authority beginning with the stock exchange.

While still on the topic of starting a business, they’ll tell you that online business registration is now operational. This means by simply visiting the relevant RDB website, you can incorporate a company remotely from abroad without going to RDB.

They will also tell you about e-Regulations. A web-based information portal aimed at putting all doing-business procedures online, E-Regulations is currently under implementation by the RDB in association with the United Nations’ UNCTAD; It is an online step-by-step guide to all for doing business procedures; it brings total transparency to investment procedures and is also a truly one-stop concept, is the only one of its kind in East Africa.  Hence, for every doing-business procedure, e-Regulations offers detailed step-by-step guidelines (every mandatory interaction with a civil servant is considered a step) and for each step, a step sheet that shows what one should get from the civil servant at the end of the step; complete contact details of the civil servant in charge and of the person one can complain to in case of a problem; forms and other documents one needs to submit; and finally, time, cost, and legal justifications for the step. So far, potential investors can enjoy online access to all the steps necessary for Business registration, Business Licensing and Permits, Land and property; Business licenses and permits; Immigration; Intellectual property; and Taxation.

There are many other reforms aimed at making doing business in Rwanda a breeze, many of which one never knows until they check the RDB website. These include reforms relating to the ease of acquiring Construction permits, registration of property, getting credit, winding up, and many others. But most of all, they’ll tell you that, despite remarkable progress, Rwanda remains largely virgin territory with limitless unexploited opportunities in Agro-Processing, ICT, Infrastructure, Tourism, Energy, Mining Services, Real Estate, and Construction.

However, even as the loud-mouthed Kenyan businessmen and other investors flock to RDB to register their businesses for as little as 25,000 Rwf (slightly more than 40 USD), they quickly find out that these “low-hanging fruit” have thorns around them.  

“They said that Rwanda is open for business and they have made it easier, “complains a frustrated Kenyan businessman at Magerwa, the customs warehouses in Gikondo, “but they surely make it very difficult for one to make money!”  Like all Kenyans, he is frustrated by the slow pace of things in Rwanda compared to the fast-paced Nairobi. He is also frustrated that what he imagined would be only a five percent import duty for imports from Kenya (under the EAC) has turned out to be a lot more and has almost depleted his margins.

He is not alone. At the single-terminal Kigali International Airport, a bunch of Kenyan ladies scream at an airline staffer who has told them they can’t take the flight they want for they have reported long after the gates were closed and have to wait for the next morning’s flight. “Why,” screams one of the ladies, “do we have to pay for your incompetence?” To his credit, the airline staffer keeps his cool and slowly goes about his business of serving the airline’s customers. No muscle on his face indicates that these foreigners have just insulted him for just doing his job and unfairly lumped him with all the lazy local employees of service companies whose work ethic does not even remotely include the concept of customer service.  A case in point is the experience of a regional supermarket chain when they first opened in Kigali city more than a year ago and had to fire the whole lot of local customer service people they had hired and replace them with a more carefully picked, easier to train lot. For it is not unusual to have a bank cashier staring blankly at your passport clearly not registering what’s written on it; his/her mind clearly elsewhere, while you, the customer, stands there waiting for him/her to come back to the present and give you your hard-earned money. To a visitor from fast-paced Nairobi or Kampala or, heaven-forbid, New York, New York, most service people of local extraction always seem like they deliberately drag their feet with the sole purpose of rankling the customer.  In fact, Davie the former resident wag at the old CarWash once coined the phrase “the only person in a hurry in Rwanda is Paul Kagame.” This, in a way, was true because, despite the slowness of waiter service in most places, all government projects such as schools, roads, and such are done in record time.

Not all is lost though. Pockets of exemplary service are emerging and shining brightly. Having taken the best part of half a working day to open an ordinary local-currency savings account less than two years ago -  a dollar account would have taken longer – a writer we know was recently amazed to open one in a different bank, complete with SMS banking, in less than twenty minutes one day after work. (Yes, banks in Kigali are open till 8 pm on working days and are flexible about weekends too. And still the queues at most bank branches mostly overspill the chairs and queue outside. Again, yes, every banking hall in Kigali has many chairs for customers to wait in, which means you walk into a bank with a novel and prepare to read a few chapters. And while Rwandans don’t seem to mind enjoying this hospitality, the aforementioned foreign investor/ professional can’t help but wish this easy-to-do-business-in place could move a little faster.

The good news is that the “impatient” foreign investor/professional bravely soldiers on; a fearless agent of change – the service standards at the few foreign supermarkets in Kigali are, for instance, beacons of hope for all others to look up to.

To this end, there have been several GoR and pseudo-government efforts to improve service standards. RDB has been running outdoor and print ads aimed at dignifying a culture of service. The board has also supported the production of the widely advertised and most professionally done Service Mag, spearheaded several customer service training events, and – through its Human Resource development arm – set up several initiatives to improve the quality of the growing local workforce.

It is clear to the casual observer that the limitless business opportunities (low hanging fruit) available in Rwanda right now are a function of the ongoing long-term reconstruction efforts aimed at getting Rwanda firmly back on its economic feet after the ravages of genocide. But the question of what happens when Rwandans are finally able to manage on their own is never far from any forward-planning businessperson – and that explains the palpable apprehension of the loud-mouthed Kenyan businessmen and professionals even as they jam airports and bus termini with their wares and portfolios.

©Lloyd Igane, December 2010

kreative@earthling.net

peter marangi lookalike fails to impress

The first time I saw what I thought to be Peter Marangi in Kigali, yes, that Peter Marangi, I felt like walking up to him and hugging him like a long lost brother, nay, a long lost, rather successful and famous rib-cracking cousin that you want to brag to friends about. I couldn’t though and not just because it was from a 5^th floor window looking down, but mainly because, on second glance, “he” was a rough cardboard cut-out on a sign that said “Ask the experts” at the entrance to the premises of a paints dealership across the road.

            Several months later, the Peter Marangi of Kigali still remains a cardboard cut-out to me with a message that – putting myself in the Rwandan consumer’s rather large shoes - doesn’t even begin to connect with me, let alone give me that fuzzy warm feeling that gleeful Kenyan audiences whenever experience whenever Peter Marangi appears on television, on radio, or on the scaffolding of a new construction coming up, saying something like “Great! More work for Marangi”. I found myself concluding that although he is a celebrity in Nairobi, the character or any look-alike is totally lost on Kigali’s multinational audience, where the actual “painting experts” are mostly female. 

Oh I have seen the image several more times ever since, but all it does is look out of place. At the entrance to a certain Kenyan supermarket, it stands on a pull-up banner, its trade-mark lop-sided smile in place, but no matter how hard the agency seems to have tried to choose a line that should, on it’s own, relate to anyone who sees it, only a Kenyan who has been exposed to the original campaign can understand (let alone connect to the product), whatever joke “Mr Marangi” is cracking or trying to.

Quite reasonably therefore, I have walked around for months believing that with all the Kenyan building contractors, architects and interior decorators being some of the paint buying decision makers in the grand project to change our little hilly city’s skyline, maybe, just maybe, the hilarious painting expert has an audience after all; that having him here is no goof at all. But that was until one bright mid morning last week.

“Ona Marangi!,” exclaimed Victor from the back seat as we drove past the huge cardboard cut-out outside the paint company offices on the hill. His sister Mary looked up from the front seat. Mary is an events manager and interior decorator from Nairobi, the sister-in-law of an author friend who had thrust it upon me to baby sit the siblings on their exploratory virgin tour of Kigali.

“Mnk,” she snorted, a disgusted look momentarily marring her good looks as she scowled at the apparition that now, on close scrutiny, doesn’t even remotely resemble Peter Marangi. The clothes and the devil-may-care smile, yes; but the facial features have been altered with white paint to look less like a man from the slopes, more like a man of the hills.

“Peter Marangi wa huku hata si msupuu. ” (This one of here is not even handsome!). She snorted again.

She turned to examine the picture more closely as we stopped at the zebra crossing to let pedestrians slowly pass in front of the vehicles as if daring them to run them over. “He is not original; not the genuine article!” she added derisively, wagging an accusing finger at the cut-out.

Why, you wonder do I suddenly concern myself with the illiterate but humorous painting expert from Nairobi? There are a whole lot of reasons, really, not least of them, this fledging East African Cooperation. I see a cautionary tale here – not for Marangi’s creators, AY& R (the company Vernon Ayton created, no less!), – but to all corporate cross border operators; a plea for critical analysis and reason in the way advertising concepts translate across borders. The long running Kiwi shoe polish television ad has, for instance, been running for a while on local tv with dubbed-in Kinyarwanda voices and one cannot really tell that it was created in Kiswahili for a Kenyan audience!  

To the manufacturers of Duracoat, the paint with over 400 different colours, whose representatives in Rwanda, Akagera Paints, have been using Peter Marangi’s likeness at more and more depots, what can I possibly say? In a town where their main rival has taken over every available wall and used it to invite the public - in large colourful letters in French and English – to “Colour your world,” a relatively unknown Kenyan-comedian-look-alike builds few or no bridges at all – and may most decidedly harm a carefully crafted brand building exercise.

Unless he is properly repackaged and introduced formerly to the public, a Peter Marangi look-alike in Kigali represents what Roger Steadman would call a “wasted advertising shilling, ” An utter waste of space.

©Lloyd Igane, Kigali 11,11.10

kreative@earthling.net   

"THE WORLD IS FULL OF ‘EM"

My taxi guy Lenny is a nice young Rwandan.

Beside his tendency to play loud music and to talk too much and much too loudly over it, and to occasionally take too much liberty with the exactness of time (he once called me to inform me he was at my place to take me to the airport long after I had called the bluff on his “I’m almost there” mantra, taken another cab and had just made check-in by a whisker!), he is, in fact, a really nice guy. And I mean this in exactly the same way it would elicit the leering rejoinder “The world is full of them” from Vernon Ayton, if he, instead of you, were reading this.

Always eager to please (Lenny, not Vernon), he will, if you complain, lower the volume on the car stereo and apologise profusely for it. He will even ask you what kind of music you like and put it on at a friendly decibel level whenever you enter his always neat, sweet-smelling vehicle. His eagerness to please is, as a matter of fact, a character flaw of sorts. Why, just the other evening, in a classic case of how low the service standards have to be raised from in the city of Kigali, he lost my fare again - and not because he is a bad guy.

After I’ve been waiting outside the Nakumatt where he usually parks for almost a quarter an hour on a rather cold Kigali evening that threatens to burst into spontaneous showers, he saunters up to me with another man in tow and tells me what’s on his mind.

“This is mkubwa wangu (my big brother),” he explains with a wild wave in the direction of the goateed middle-weight guy who smiles eagerly at me and makes as if to board with me but stops when he sees the sura ya kazi look on my face. ‘Can he,” Lenny continues, “come with us as I take you home? Ako pia na mke wake hapa (he’s with his wife),” my cabbie adds with a respectful leer.

“But Lenny … ,” I grumble, pointing at the cigarette I have immediately lit as I settle comfortably in the front seat of the taxi voiture, “how do you expect me to enjoy my ride if you take your passengers?”

“It’s okay, they are smokers too,” he explains, missing the point entirely.

Now one of the good points for Lenny's cab is that I can always smoke in it without the guilt that comes with smoking in someone else’s car. He himself smokes some brand of Rwandan cigar that smells suspiciously like burnt grass and immediately after sprays the car with a sweet smelling perfume which he hides under his seat. But what he is proposing is different. Unless we are splitting the fare, I don’t see myself sharing the ride with these guys whether they smoke or not.

“Okay, let’s make a deal,” I say to Lenny reasonably, “you just take them first, then pick me up right here… No, it’s okay,” I insist when he offers -  rather late in the game I must add – to take me first then come back for his big brother and rastafarian girlfriend/wife. “I will go into Nakumatt and buy something I forgot,” I lie with a straight face.

As Lenny and his non-paying passengers pile into their nice-guy-mobile and take off in a direction, I take off in another and get into another cab belonging to another nice guy who quickly takes me home without much ado. An hour later, while relaxed in my dwelling, my feet up and a specially selected comedy DVD blaring away for my entertainment after a long day’s work, the phone rings and it’s Lenny.

“Hello my boss,” he yells above decibels in his car when I pick up. “I’m now outside Nakumatt.”

“Really?” I ask, thinking of a gentle way to let him know I had lied about waiting till he got back to the city centre …

Surely the world, Vernon was right, is full of nice guys.

©Lloyd Igane, Kigali, 30/10/10

kreative@ earthling.net 

Why I haven’t bought a Kagame t-shirt yet

As we celebrate Paul Kagame’s birthday today, I realise with a pang of guilt that although I own and proudly wear a shiny bronze pin adorned with the likeness of the president on a background of RPF colours, I have not yet bought a Kagame t-shirt.

“I am waiting for the price to come down” is the story I’ve stuck with ever since the rather too orderly august presidential campaigns when I watched awestruck as Rwandans and foreigners alike scrambled over each other to buy PK merchandise. Great high-quality stuff too; not the crap I’m used to seeing fought over at rowdy political rallies in Nairobi.

The 10,000 francs ($16) for the t-shirt is however not the real problem. Truth is, I’ve become pathologically apprehensive of certain people’s tendency to label me a self-appointed apologist for the RPF leader and CEO President. Why, just the other day while watching the news in Kenya, I caught myself hopefully scanning a line-up of regional dignitaries attending a summit in Nairobi and getting rather anxious that my personal favourite East African president was missing the photo op.

 “I read your blog,” says Manwa Magoma, a Kenyan acquaintance of mine who ran a regional ad agency in Kigali for a few months before scurrying back to Kampala. “I can’t say you sound quite like Kariuki Chotara of the Moi era, but you come quite close.”

. But why, pray, would one write about evil where one sees none? I write about poor service standards and the slow last-minute.com approach to things and bad TV, don’t I? And isn’t it a most ungrateful guest indeed who, after going walkabout in a strange neighbourhood, unmolested even at late hours, turns around and rails against the heavy presence of armed guards?

 “Every sweet-smelling rose has its thorns,” they tell me darkly when I insist that nighttime Kigali streets offer a far higher life expectancy than Nairobi streets in the daytime.

“But there are too many armed soldiers everywhere I look,” complains Manwa, refusing to see the logic that too many overtly armed soldiers are better than too many covertly armed thugs.  “You are too scared,” he accuses me, “of rubbing the government the wrong way.”

Yes, I am Manwa. I am so scared that, like King Julien of Madagascar, I have people for that.

I also have relatively big ears for the conventional wisdom of ages past. Consider if you may this story told to me when I was barely seven by a very old and wise grandmother (of a neighbour) who walked with a permanent stoop because “the white man’s black policemen” broke her back by walking all over it with hobnailed boots during the mostly inglorious hunt for the Mau Mau.

A long time ago, during the Famine of Many Monkeys, which was long before the Famine of the Great Corner, a boy and his mother walked a long gruesome journey on growling empty stomachs in search of the home of a one-eyed man called Mbutu, whose wealth and generosity were legendary. Another legendary thing about him was his aversion to any mention of his bad eye or even a hint of it by carelessly suggesting he had one good eye. When they finally got to the old man’s farm, the son could not help but marvel at the abundance of food. The barns overflowed with stored grain, the cows walked funny on account of painfully extended full udders and the farms were choking with ready-to-harvest cereals, fruits, and tubers. There were grains and bananas just being toyed with by noisy monkeys as birds and beasts came and left as they wished yet they couldn’t finish the food. Old, childless and too tired to give a hoot, Mr and Mrs. Mbutu just watched.  

“Wowee!,” exclaimed the boy scampering up a mango tree and biting into a succulent fruit, barely before a bewildered Mrs. Mbutu had finished welcoming them into her homestead.

”Remember,” whispered the mother sidling up to the mango tree to avoid being overheard by their hostess, “we can eat whatever we like; as much as we wish. But we can not______”

‘“____ mention the old man’s one bad eye,” said the son in the same urgent whisper.

As his mother went about chasing away the monkeys and other wildlife and generally helping the old couple with all the milking, harvesting, and storing, the young man jumped from tree to tree, barn to dining table to tree again, eating his way through his welcome, so to speak, not quite unlike the monkeys his mother was throwing little rocks at.

On the third day, the son, now brimming with over-fed confidence, his stomach bulging with food and his cheeks looking smoother and rounder, climbed up an over-laden mango tree for what would be his last time.

“Mum, Mum,” he shouted at the top of his voice for everyone to hear; he rubbed his stomach contentedly, “I am so full I could accidentally mention Mr. Mbutu’s bad eye!”

He was about to break wind contentedly but the old man’s anguished bellow stopped the wind in its tracks as mother and son were banished from the land of plenty, forever.

Now if you don’t mind, I'm off to see if those nice t-shirts are still in stock.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President.

©Lloyd Igane, Kigali 23rd October, 2010. kreative@earthling.net