Super Higway

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

W. B. Yeats

 

Take whatever you want from Yeats. Different groups have done just that for decades. Don’t we just love double entendres!

But then again, knowing the story of people like Tim Berners-Lee and the growth of his spawn, the Internet, one can’t help but look with a worried backward glance as the creature slouches towards ‘Bethlehem.’

We are now on the cusp of the information age. Things are good. It’s amazing that just 15 years ago, there was no real internet. Fifteen years.

Right now, he who can store as much information as possible rules. When the President of my country calls on journalists from a neighbouring country to make his case for negative comments attributed to him, he knows there will be blood. So he makes sure he is well-prepared with his information. he hits them with all this information and one journalist goes back singing his praises.

People still employ workers on the basis of what the applicants say they know. Yes, papers can still get you a job. You go to school for two decades and come out with an impressive dossier. Hit your prospective bosses on the head with the tome and you are home free.

What’s going to happen tomorrow though? What happens when your papers don’t really matter anymore?

The creature seems to have been sighted already. It’s in the rebels of today who stare down their dads and refuse to go back to school because they have found the answer. If their dad won’t understand that, sayonara papi.

The dirty jeaned, sandal-wearing, shaggy-haired nerds of today are the business. They have the papers but they don’t really need them. The rules of today’s world are becoming obsolete fast.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow it’s going to be about how well we use the knowledge we say we have. Tomorrow, the 5 PhDs you hold won’t be worth the papers they are on if you can’t turn this sand into water.

The wisdom age is only a click away.

Tintin and the land of Black Gold

My country discovered that it had oil deposits underfoot. That was a good thing seeing as we are classified as one of ‘those that are broke’ and having a reprieve; any reprieve should be a god thing for us.

The elation was tinged at times with fear; suspicion that the ruling elite of the country would find a way to steal the wealth. There are those who believe that my country’s leaders being what they are and having the background that they have (poverty at all levels of their earlier years and having come to prominence because most of them were crazy enough to stare down the blood-crazed killers who ruled the land before them and won), they’d try to steal anything that could be stolen. If something was unstealable, it was believed, they’d bide their time and wait for a time such a thing would be available for theft.

Naturally, we all expected the oil to be stolen. No one was surprised to see the government cozying up to the Bunyoro kingdom, the traditional rulers of the land where the oil is found. No one is surprised that suddenly, a large number of contracts are going to a tiny clique. The wider public might not even know because of all the silence that the government says has something to do with the secrecy that is required in share agreements; we don’t know how and when the oil dollars will start making our lives better.

All that is understandable. This is Uganda where we let our leaders get away with anything so, as usual, we are not surprised. But we always knew that no matter how much the top guys stole, they could not exhaust the oil reserves. They’d steal some for their puny little families maybe to the third generation but such a resource is not limited to the whims of a few greedy thieves. We knew that we had arrived.

Unfortunately, the picture might not be as rosy as that. Reading the supremacist publications like The Economist, which is so condescending, (how come those guys don’t attribute as much as the rest of us are forced to?) one will get the sense that we are finding oil and any other resource this side (Africa) because there is something afoot.

The Germans have been showing us their electric cars for decades on TV but we always thought it is just smart kids doing some harmless stuff. But now with all the noises about going green, everyone will be looking at oil producers with disdain, I think.

Then all your oil will be worthless.

(Yeah, nothing to do with Tintin. Or maybe there is. I am on a marathon; got 30 issues, from the very first).

The fabulous puppet show

Nine years ago, I got into an argument with my roomie Rodney Ruvuza about fate and destiny. We’d just come out of a lesson on Oedipus.

In our back-and-forth, an observer would have gathered that I was passionately in the corner of those who believe that one can change their fate. I did not want to believe that there are some beings up there pulling the strings and whatever we did we could not run away from them. Until, maybe, they lost interest and went to sleep. Rodney, always the one to let life take its course was surprisingly passionate about the counter view; Oedipus’ ass was made the moment that oracle was made. He would kill his father and marry his mother.

He couldn’t run away. Last night I had an epiphany. Walking home in the gathering darkness, I almost broke my leg in some man-hole thingy. There they were again, the little bearded men playing nine pins, making fun and watching me stumble like I knew where I was going.

I am careful when I walk, of that I am sure. It wasn’t very dark and the roads are paved in Entebbe, thank you. In my area code, anyway. So what was I doing falling into a hole? If that’s not the evil hand of fate, what was it?

Maybe I should buy Rodney a beer one of these days.

Bred andi Bata

Been bingeing on Mowze and Weasel lately (thanks for the HD, antipop) and I am thinking to myself, Ugandan music has really arrived. It’s a nice break from the serious heavy stuff of hate filled lyrics and the constant gloom of knowing that the music of Chameleone and his like, completely devoid of comedy is always going to slide.

I know it’s probably too early to jubilate since the two still sing about nothing but there’s no equal for Mowze singing “Naye Sitani, y’olikaddiwa ddi?” (Devil when in hell will you grow old and die?). The descriptions in Bread and Butter (I prefer Bred andi Bata).

And of course I am trying hard to look busy. Jesus is coming back.