Single in the City-68, 23,14

By Me in my column in 'The Citizen Newspaper' on Saturday's in Tanzania.I thought to start officially sharing it on MKEKA. 

Issue 68

The ecology of ‘me’…

Sidestepping the regime is like finding a straight stretch of dry land, in a potholed tarmac road on the field of Tanzanian city squeals. Soon after twisting your ankle, re arranging your hip, you realize your natural rhythms are outlawed. As all around the edicts say fulfill the status quo, keep digging the grave that will bury us all.


The luxury of breathing clean air, enjoying merits of electricity like a warm shower, eating organic food whilst listening to your lover hum ‘you’re just too good to be true, can’t take my eyes off of you’. Require us to splash water on our faces and woman up to our histories. To the barren wells of East African human worth, the dignity cord that will have us accept the ramifications of being tied by DNA to the oldest family bloodlines on earth.

Integrates with yours

You’d think after living on this earth for over 190,000 years, certain things like feeding ourselves daily, having our homes & workplaces in a cohesive manner. That ensures we don’t asphyxiate from pollution, don’t foster poor drainage resulting in floods, don’t see ourselves as ‘other’ but as brothers. Instead (this does apply to singletons the world over) we’re a calling a UN summit to deal with the worst humanitarian aid crisis, since World War II.

There’s a tomb of forgotten secrets beneath our skin, shouting in our veins saying we of moving blood homo-sapiens need to ‘get over ourselves’. Stop parading our feathers like a male peacock in heat, by thinking our exteriors are so special so as to delineate the world into ‘1st World, 2nd World, et cetera.


Instead be brave enough to diagnose and start treating our malaise quickly. As we are currently experiencing adverse climate change, ramifications of which can and have started to wipe out entire populations? We’re currently living in cities that are fast depleting their flora leaving fumes of carbon monoxide and incessant noise seeping in our lives constantly, as though it’s normal or healthy.

So I’m Single but not alone

“Have you eaten today,” Regan puts a plate with a hot ball of ‘ugali’, steaming pumpkin leaves and ‘changu’ fish in ‘makange’ lemon marinade on the side. I lean over and place a kiss on his lips, after a delectable voyage in the stars of passion. He pulls away and looks at me closely, eyes gleaming with tenderness. Of course I’m famished and after he places his own plate on the table uttering a prayer of thanks we dig in, happily listening to the chorus of birds and swaying leaves outside. Whilst lulling our aching minds with trivial but heartwarming conversation on ‘how was your day?’

I can find reprise in one memory, heal the world with the thing I’m doing right. The swirls of shimmering curly afro hair will extend their versatility onto everyday motions of our emancipation. When we admit we’ve made mistakes, as there’s this false belief that once you’ve made a mistake. You’re automatically a failure and so it goes the world will not accept the mistake of African Slavery & Colonialism by instituting clear reparation steps. The mistake of having a UN with Super Powers, as really the whole point of having nations worldwide unite, is to ascertain the equality of all not to have a few claiming privilege over others.

So I’ll take your fear squash it to the tides, reinstitute your will to say, me too. Me too as an East African Ole girl, have a ‘herstory’, have the ability to live like a Queen. Claim the rivers and hills of my ancestors, shed systems of ‘right living’ from the oppressor. Climb home to the place of pumpkin leaves & ‘makange’ fish, as we clasp our palms in sweet agony.

Whilst twisting in the sheets of candid breaths, experienced when we take the steps to mitigate our disasters, by stripping the veil that says the way things are going is the way to bliss. Instead of the graves we’ve been digging for too long a time now. For though we’re all born single and shall meet our death recount by our single some. We’ve forgotten that we’re children of the stars, not the mortal shackles of history.

Issue 14

Survival of the wittiest

When pulled by an addiction to the doorknob of death, a death of soul, compassion is woe. You’re breathing for the compulsion, slowly negating your real desires and ultimately substituting joy with a flicker of suspended bliss. As for a time you can numb your senses, shut your eyes, eliminate your logic.    

If you’re living in the city odds are that you know or have brushed shoulders with an addict. Not just a drug addict, not just a smoker, not just a perpetual swearing sista, not just an alcoholic, not just a food addict but indeed the ‘you’ addict. For surely to survive in the city you have to be an addict of yourself.

Coming from the single desk, a state of mind that really envelopes us all in many of our African cities. For here you have to ask yourself more critically than in our village community dwellings of centuries past. ‘What am I good for…?’

Are you good for anything?

You soon come to find that being compassionate isn’t cool; for modus operandi is survival of the fittest. Yet really considering the hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, we as humans have been on this planet. Is it viable anymore to function with this protocol alone?

I sometimes when looking at images of developed countries see clearly that’s where I belong, as there at least materially more dignity is afforded to majority. Here the ability to self-actualize is ascertained with services like ‘single’ friendly homes, which are available and attainable by most citizens. To mean descent small housing either as flats or lofts where you’re not sharing a bathroom and can listen to yourself think from the age of 19. 

However I’m one of those roots deep ‘typa o people’ so no, I don’t see a blue eyed ‘Mr Long’ whisking me off to a happily Europe after.

Na I’m all about the money…

“We Abdallah usingetupa hiyo kadi ya vocha barabarani, tena mbele ya ofisi yako…” I said this to Abdallah recently; he runs a salon that I frequent in the city. Abdallah is quite smart, having built his salon from the ground up, now employing a minimum of three people and has even managed to buy a car for himself. However his answer to this retort was less intelligent than his entrepreneurial temperament.

“Wewe tupo Africa, hayo mambo ya kizungu…” Now when you’re addicted to your view point which as I mentioned you must in order to blend in our cities. This doesn’t mean that doing so is the intelligent route.

Thing is any country that is boasting of peaceful and joyful co-existence among the majority of its citizens (Netherlands, UK, USA, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, New Zealand) has bent its modus operandi from ‘survival of the fittest’ to ‘survival of the wittiest’.  

Whereas ‘survival of the fittest’ fosters a selfish outlook where might is right, ‘survival of the wittiest’ allows for intelligence to win. This in turn fosters a people who are allowed to look at the bigger picture and realize that though we’re all born single and shall meet our death recount by our single some. In between we live in this one world and the only reason that the breaths matter, is because we’re not here alone hence being compassionate is very cool! 

Issue No 23

Raising our emotional IQ 

Gorgeous African ladies I've bumped into
from left respectively
Tanzanian, Iringan & Gambian 

The ‘gunia’ table tops to my left are covered with tomatoes and mangoes an assortment of watermelons and carrots with green peppers line the right side of the ‘genge’. I’ve come by to get some fruit. It’s around 7pm in this dimly lit stall & the owner is speaking to his male buddy as I pick a mango.

“Pshhh how can I marry that woman, I can’t stand her …she’s been left by three husbands before obviously there’s something wrong with her.” I finished buying my fruits before I could hear the rest of that story. Still it was enough for me to wonder if that gentleman was aware of the burden he was placing on his lady interest.

The ‘Boys don’t cry’ ethic

An artwork aplty depicting girls on a
night out by the very talented
Atsu Numadzi. Can you believe
that's not paint but a mosaic
of newspaper & magazine cuts!

I was reading this article on O magazine, titled ‘How to raise the men we want to marry’. It goes on to highlight the importance of raising the emotional IQ for boys from a tender age. So as to divorce them from becoming closed off brutes as adults.

Like the lad I heard gengeni, I mean the way he declared his words with total conviction, that all the blame lied with the woman, not a dash of it on him. The man was not confiding to his friend in defeated anguish, rather a clear disgust and total conviction that his woman was inferior to him in her behavior.

Now I don’t know the details of what ensures this gentleman can’t ‘stand his lady’ however it’s ridiculous. To assume that because she’s been in failed relationships before, that it was all her fault they went south. Furthermore even if it was, he should then accept there’s something wrong with him too for engaging or attracting her in the first place. I closely suspect he got her pregnant, no wonder the genge owner was suggesting he marry her.

If it was a man who had three failed relationships under his belt, he wouldn’t be considered damaged. I wonder could it be the woman left those three men previous; can this gentleman wrap his mind that a woman has the power to leave not ‘be left’.
   

The ‘Women can take anything’ dogma

As it goes Valerie Monroe in her article on O magazine attributes this brute behavior to the ‘boys don’t cry’ code. “We know what we get when a boy is raised with the code…a mask of masculinity, false bravado, the need to be aggressive and to win….But those boys who get affection, love, respect and compassion grow up whole not unconsciously seeking what they needed from their parents.”

Me at my front yard lazily
drinking the sun

The truth is the majority of our girls are as well brought up by another ethic prevalent in our Tanzanian society. The ‘women can take anything’ dogma, ensuring young girls stop playing with their fathers post 7 years, daddy no longer tosses them to the sky. For Momma urges ‘Msichana lazima ujiheshimu…’ add this to the chores of the house which lean on your mom trickled down to you not your brother.

The result as my therapist friend Anande shares “You have girls being women at a young age and when they do grow up to be women. They consider men as alien figures to please at all cost so they finally get their toss in the sky. Or they’ve accepted that their mothers had the short end of the stick and now look to men as the enemy and hence never reveal their true selves always propelling them to pay up for their fathers sins…”

Now remember we’re all born single and shall meet our death recount by our single some so let’s strip ourselves and heal our inner child.


© All photos are copyright of Caroline Anande Uliwa