KASESE, THE SOUL OF UGANDA'S HEART

At the fall of 365:
kansmus@gmail.com

Some of you think us started to understand after reading confessions of an economic hitman. My start was different. Instead I listened to the confessions of a traditional old man.

In our rural home since 1998 when I was just 24 #months old preciously put as two years, there lived an octogenarian man, a one named Eliphaz by an Anglican missionary stophel in the year of the rain that fell the village’s remaining spiritual groove: the oak tree. He lived with us till he was a nonagenarian in 2009. We didn’t know his exact age but his tales of having been born in the season of the scotching sun and a drought that killed the only surviving camel in the Ankole Shaza of Sheema, we stretched down the historical and time series lane and established in approximation that he was 90 years old in 2009. Having been someone who knew he had lived for long and to have seen a one John Speke, Eliphaz thought good mathematical sequence would count 200 years for his age. “I am cheated. I cannot only be ten times older than you.” He said to the ten-year-old me then.

Often times, visitors to our home that had met him in his former years were amazed that he still lived. He was still a man of wit, humour, strong eye sight, less “nagging” compared to people of his age. Put in modern language, he was a “go getter.”

Eliphaz was not a relative but my dad’s friend. They met in the late 1970s in the communal grazing lands of a hill named by many as kaagati when my dad was in his early teens and Eliphaz was pre-supposedly in his early 60s. They were half a century of years apart but they were great friends.

For the 11 years Eliphaz spent with us, every holiday was a great experience I had with him. Indeed, him and I had become one.

Every evening after a day’s work, Eliphaz took a shower, sat on one level of the staircase and pressed his legs on the lower level for his legs to dry: he didn’t believe in towels. As my idol, I started to mimic everything he did. I took a shower. I would want to call this “shower” its local translation but memory isn’t serving me right because I am typing this at lunch hour and I must finish. After the shower I joined him to sit at one level of the staircase and press by legs on the lower for my legs to dry. I too didn’t believe in towels. Sometimes, he didn’t use the verandah but sat on his wooden stool. Sooner than later I found my sitting stool from a local carpenter Obadiah.

Sitting there, from the time I was 4 to 12 years of age, I listened to his stories of the harvest, the significance of the blood pacts, the fireplace fairytales, the taboos and totems of clans, clans in the early 1900s that vanished due to rare pandemics, giant men that died in the hunting grounds, women that sung colloquys in the millet fields and the coda as they tied the last sheath, morals and values and their process of transmission, apprenticeship in the black smith’s hut, the place of men and women in the African Traditional Society. The Latin say “et cetera”.

My daily reminder to him was that when I grew up, I would be a great soldier. I am not yet one but I won’t disappoint him in the promise.

Years passed and Eliphaz was ill. He said to me from the paralysed part of his lips but in a sound rhyming in tremor, “In my last years I have been a teacher and you have been my greatest student. You can’t afford to disappoint the time you sat at the verandah. I have summarized my entire years in the last eleven that I have spent with you.” It was from this statement that I realised that Eliphaz’s daily lessons were intentional and on purpose. I still reflect about them.

Eliphaz lived 365 days for 90 times (though he complains it was 200 times), but he met his greatest student in his last 365. Morale: To Eliphaz, his last years were knotted to form the string on which he and anyone else would swing the pendulum that would qualify his several 365s in the fall of the final ones.

The earth has its revolution around the sun for 365 days. Every start of the year we celebrate nothing but the successful rotation of the earth around the sun and forget that has never been our achievement but the earth’s. Nonetheless, we continue to thank God for the rising and setting sun when we ourselves are not rising which leaves us with no reason to set. We continue to celebrate the success of the sun through light and the moon through moon light and the stars through their twinkling in darkness.

We all have our own 365s different from the earth’s. At our first 365, we start to crawl. At our second 365, we start to walk and grow milk teeth. At our 8^th 365, we start to lose our milk teeth for permanent ones. At our 20^th 365, we start to receive more rejection emails than acceptance or congratulatory emails and at our 50^th 365, we start to send those rejection emails to those at their 20^th. Sometimes it is a matter of time but no day or a group of days should be lived because we think those days are not part of the time that matters.

 Our achievement can only be measured depending on how we qualify our time in the 365 days and not how we quantify it in the numeracy of hours, days, weeks and months. One that does a 4 years’ assignment in 2 years has lived for 4 years in the two years they have existed and one that does a two year’s assignment in four years has lived for 2 years in the four years they have existed. If seven days in a year passed without us doing anything, we have lived 358 days in the 365 days. In other words, we didn’t live the 7 days at all: we simply existed (we were around). Eliphaz lived ninety years in his last 11 years when he gave lessons to one he believes will live for more than the remaining eighty-one years.

Should we celebrate birthdays? Yes. But the summation to full years should take account of the days we have lived not those we have existed.

Go live. Stop existing. The quality of our deeds qualify our time but the quantity of time may not guarantee time’s quality.

Continue to rest in peace #Eliphaz.