The Bored Classes – an Opening
We did a little cleaning up.
Since our last posting we have been in conversation with a few well-meaning friends.
Mostly well meaning.
The result, as you can see is a refreshing of the design for this site. It comes mostly as a nudge for me to start writing again and write more often. The series on Kampala’s drug appetite has people talking still. The series grew out of interviews and a few confessions. There was also a very generous and courageous individual who painted in vivid picture of how complex and personal an issue it is.
This is especially true when it emerged that drug use is often not about recreation but a response to creating a meaningful even new existence between coffee shops, bars, online courses, fiestas, debates on global and local pressures for the poor but educated as well as the well-to-do but unsatisfied.
There is a lot of unsatisfaction too.
It can be reasoned, I think, that the market for distractions is not limited to what can be drank by the bottle or sniffed, smoked, or experienced at the many Monday-Monday enjoyments that have made Kampala and the country one of the brightest spots in East Africa to “have a good time”.
As a young restless country, one of the youngest on the planet, it can be excused that all that youthful energy must find an outlet. But when sports entertainment crosses from what one does in the evening to culture one must pause. In the city and across the country young people are a crossbreed of hard working, hard hoping ethnics moving seamlessly between the garden, the market, the airtime store, and the sports betting store.
In turn sports teams and a sports lifestyle (branding one’s family, car, and office in team colors) has become part of the multiverse that is as real to its citizens as the other one of trying to get ahead in a country where the lack of opportunities has guaranteed that life indeed resembles the lottery at the sports betting store.
It is a multiverse of citizens that are essentially bored regardless of their fortunes. In this way entertainment is not an industry but the national couch on which all lie and confess their fears and celebrate their joys. This can only be, the boredom I mean, why even scandal no matter how shocking, is appropriated as entertainment.
The socialite with the viral video and her condemnation by the clergyman in a collar are all squeezed on a smartphone screen as just another show before we move on to wait; the runner who made it on the international stage in national colors or the tone deaf politician with the gleaming palace that makes a mockery of the idea of “a city on the hill” because it is no more than a stone building surrounded by brick and tears.
So, we may write here a bit about the bored classes and what they are doing to keep it together. Most importantly how a country so young and with so much promise, one that should be exhausted each evening from building that Wakanda future is instead scrolling down the TL and with cynicism more than wonder approaching the coming years.
I thank Apollo Kalibbala, who is responsible for this website and the new look. Support his hustle. His contact is down below.
email: apollokalibbala@gmail.com
contact: +256 788295320 | +256 705295320
I hear u. From where we stand there’s so much polarisation. The only hope that is in the horizon is for the ECO system to make the best balance out of all the forces at hand. When lions over feed on their prey,disaster is always inevitable on their population; ecology plays it’s part and makes the best balance!