You may be forgiven, then, not necessarily by God, but even by God’s creature that was at the tail’s end of Standard Seven exam results, to suspect that, some wires in my brain have loosened up. Being a kind, God-fearing creature, you would propose that, the wires be fixed fast, by a first class Magomeni mapipa ( as opposed to Magomeni mandoo) mechanic.
Here’s the answer the stupid question I posed at the beginning: I wouldn’t register as a competitor in a sharp memory competition for the sons and daughters of a country that owns an unnecessarily tall mountain that it can’t sell because noone would afford the price.
It’s because the hopelessness of my memory is seriousness enough to qualify me for top winner of a national poor memory competition. To give you a rough idea, I often shorten my three names for fear of forgetting them.
Believe me because lying is a sin I fear far more than committing adultery, for fear of getting a one-way ticket to hell on the dreaded day of reckoning. As far – not near – as my first name is concerned, I am at home with Willie but away from there with Wilson – long live colonialism.
Curiously, both own five letters, but the former sounds to me shorter than the latter! My friends - real and fake – know me as Kai, the circumcised version of Kaigarula. The worse victim of the circumcision was my middle name, Rutaitabigunju - which, in the language of banana-terrorising republicans of Kagera Region – means someone who doesn’t kill wild animals.
The shortened, easier pronounceable version is Ruta. Ruta, as I am almost 100 per cent sure you are aware, is the circumcised version of several surnames of male Kagera republicans.
This shouldn’t tempt you, though, to suspect that they are distant political allies of the soon-to-become TB ( not Tuberculosis, but Top Boss) of the US, Mr Donald Trump. In spite of my memory not being sharp enough to win me an Olympic medal, I have just remembered, faintly, a gentleman who, like me, had the misfortune of being born and bred in a village which was located near a swamp. It’s by sheer miracle that, it didn’t eventually become one a few years after its creation by Sir God.
I now have the presumed honour to share some bits about the gent, before they dissolve the way sugar does in a cup of coffee. Did I say gent ?
No, that’s a small, forgivable lie. He was once a village mate, a Kageran associate and a Tanzanian citizen, but has in the interim been a long-time resident of hell or heaven, depending on whether the Creator judged him inexcusably sinful, or sufficiently righteous when he called it a day in 1972. The man, Rutasheka - so called because he never even smiled, let alone laugh, and didn’t even on his wedding day – switched off his radio whenever visitors went to his house.
He feared that, the more the listeners, the faster the batteries would wear out, and the more money he would unnecessarily spend on buying replacements. Someone once manufactured a rumour to the effect that Ruta often looked skyward and cursed the moon for not casting sufficient light on the paths along which he snaked his way home close to midnight - after assassinating the local lubisi wine.
If the moon had behaved, he reportedly said, the money he wasted on buying batteries for his torch would have been spent more beneficiary by trying to win the heart of village beauties! Ruta started moving around with a panga that shined as brightly as 12 o’clock sunshine, loudly declaring that he would reduce the rumour monger to countless pieces of flesh after chopping off his head, upon their paths crossing ! He said he knew who the culprit was: short, fat, and eagle-eyed.
Since over 100 male creatures of God in the village matched that description, whoever spotted the pangacarrying fellow creature of God sped off like an athlete preparing for the next Olympic Games.
An emergency meeting was convened at which Ruta was emphatically told that he had the democratic right to engage in childish tendencies like economizing on radio batteries, but had no constitutional right to threaten to disengage anyone’s head from the rest of the body.
Ruta apologized profusely and promised, as profusely, that he would become a reformed man from the following day. He was cheered loudly by people who, the following day, buried the controversial man, who had tossed himself into a disused pond on the fringes of the village. As to whether he is in heaven or hell – that’s God’s secret !
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