EP Back-Track: "African Time"

How three months in the Ugandan capital

put a beat back in my step and got me back on track.

In late 2018, I found myself in a strange place in my mind. I'd just come home for the third time, dropping out of my International Relations degree at the University of Kingston, London (not Jamaica!) - this time because alcoholism had torn me against the world I lived in and thrown my last hopes of a higher education out of the window. I didn't care. I'm a musician and every experience = inspiration. I didn't study the degree to join the UN, join the government, work for an NGO. I wanted to travel and be a musician, but as everyone I knew was going to university I thought why not learn something detailed about the world I was travelling into.

Turns out student life didn't suit me. The schedules, the homework, the books, essays - all this work learning from the past or from other people who spend their lives in an office; not to mention the box of an apartment room, little but a cage against the cold English air and reserve. What does one do when they feel trapped, alone, isolated, estranged and fed up with it all?: they self-medicate. Sitting in my room in my countryside home, a place Mum chose for it's sanctuary, the whisper of Jameson's whiskey slowly airing from my system, my thoughts flew to Africa.

"I'm making a move in the right direction" I strummed, "Hakuna matata" (Ki-swahili for 'no worries'): Ie. You'll be alright... you'll figure it out... you'll get there in the end, just take it slow. Polé polé (slow down).

The next week, I get a message from Moses Ocaya, my teenage friend from Qatar (*who you can read about in "Back-track: Child of the Nile"). He's a Ugandan man in his forties, humble, kind and wise. Moses has dealt with it all, when I met him he was earning what he could as a security guard in the Middle East, sending most of it home to feed his family, school his children, nurse his ailing mother and build his house. Now he's getting married. Again. To the same woman! 😦Long story short: Moses can finally afford a church wedding. The fees are so high that when a couple want to mark their unity they have a traditional tribal wedding, which can be fun if they're different tribes and different religions (like Moses and his wife).

I'm invited, the journey is long. I meet some US Puritans at passport control, on their way to aid the poor; (on the way back I'll meet more US Puritans with adopted African babies) but I'm not here for culture clashes - I'm in Africa for Africa. My friend picks me up in a borrowed car, a 4x4 he could never afford. He's joined by friends I remember well from my month here in 2014 - Mama Rose and the girls and guys of her guest-house, where I'll be staying.

Already, everything starts to slow down. .  .

Life is so much easier.

The heat of the night is friended by a gentle breeze, not unlike how I feel. The palms swing to the rhythm of a new moment in time, a moment where life is less confusing. We cruise by in the car, stopping to nourish my air-weariness and welcome me to Kampala with a "Rolex" (omelette of red onion, cabbage and tomato rolled up in a chapati, the Indian-imported flatbread), a simple, delicious treat that eases me back to the country I have longed to return.

Oh Africa. .  . I'm back!

I miss Moses all the time; he's been such a good friend to me over the years, and I love and respect his spirit and soul. I understand that life here is not free from anxieties either - in fact poverty breeds all types of stresses, naturally. But being here with him, I feel calm. I realise now, it's the relativity of our situations that renews my perspective: there's him, father of three, a wife to marry, school fees to pay. Security guarding in Dubai and Qatar got him so far, now he says he's helping load shipping containers going to America from a port in Kenya. But the work's not reliable, sometimes he has money, sometimes he doesn't.

And me: Expat kid, modest education at international schools, never lacked (apart from an identity), kind, generous, loving family (slightly broke apart a few years before); a promising musician but little other professional skills, defines travel as the ultimate goal to avoid having a home but can't even get a degree or a teaching certificate to help pay for it all. Plus the last of my money (save for this trip) I've just given away to the Kingston booze shop.

Moses wouldn't understand. It's not his business to know the problems of westerners, or the societal struggles of TCKs and sons of engineers. But I know he cares, I know he'd help if he could, regardless of his own difficulties. The relativity hits me when I realise our differences, how Moses is the one with the most problems but through practise he's owned them, he lives by them - he accepts them and he gets a move on. This is what I need. To be grounded... To escape the pressures of my "modern society" and be more like Moses, following the breeze, doing what I can, surviving, enjoying and being.

My hopes as a diplomat or journalist were never realistic, I will always be a musician; the world won't change whether I have a degree, or a modest, supportive family, I will still have to survive. And surviving is much easier without worrying: ie. anxiety and world-weariness.

One of my favourite lines of this song, music being my therapy, is "there is always something to prove when the world needs correction"... I believe that to be very true, and stand by this philosophy today. Like the body pushing out a virus, our lives passively get rid of their waste - we make decisions for all sorts of reasons (we don't know what to do, we have to make a choice, someone suggested it was the right thing; or simply, it just went that way) and we have to deal with it, and realise how unuseful it is.

And that goes for the world: is every war, political takeover, corporate scandal, oil spill or any other event great a small not a reaction to say 'SOMETHING IS WRONG'? I think it is. It would be easy enough in our own lives to say I'm not gonna do that because it's not good for me, and I'm sure mindfulness can help this, but somehow we are able to make things more complicated than they need to be. I would like a world where this doesn't happen, where all the parts of my life are balanced just like people could be balanced if some of them didn't undermine the potential of others.

I want to develop myself at my own pace, not the pace of the capitalist modern media, or the university programs where everything must be done NOW, NOW, NOW. I want to be like Moses, and the host of other wonderful, warm, gentle, pure-of-heart Buganda and Aloo, Runyoro, Tanzanian Masai and all the other people who made me feel most welcome, at ease with their small-standard but beautiful lives together in self-built houses, or mud-brick huts where solidarity and selflessness benefit everyone.

Who knows where the money's coming from, who knows when we can buy a "data ticket" to download the new Blockbuster. We have good music, good friends and a slow life. This is what Uganda gave me at this unstable moment of my life, a song I know is sung the world over. So why let this world torment us? There is nothing so important than our survival and well-being, mental health and spiritual centrality.

So I'm now a travelling musician, fair and straight. Not too much pressure, no deadlines, it will be done when I do it and if I didn't do it, it doesn't matter.

I'm in Europe at the time of writing, but in my heart and that of my 6-month-old Nigerian self: I'm on African time.