If you have ever written a poem or drawn a painting, you’ve probably experienced how sound can instantly teleport you into that mental space creative minds call the zone. When in this space, the world around stops and creative juice flows through you like magic dust falling through a sieve into a cup. If you have ever made up anything inspired — a building design, a business plan, a recipe — you have been to the zone.

Do you sometimes wonder how music does it? How the sound of a song you’ve never heard before — just the sound of it — can dramatically change your mood in a way that has nothing to do with the lyrics? One second your ears are striking a chord with the beat, the next, your mind is inundated with pictures and a sense that you can create anything. Vistas open to…

I can write about books everyday and would still fall short of encompassing all the pleasures I have enjoyed in reading. Not only is the subject of books humongous, books are also our great friends. They are the large health trees under whose glorious and magnanimous shades we shelter from the ruthless rays of prejudice, violence, colonialism, racism and stereotypes. Books are lovely parents into whose kitchens of knowledge and parlours of wisdom we are always invited.

Writing books like reading them is tastier when done frequently and consistently. Reading and writing books are exercises. The more you engage with them, the easier and more enjoyable they get. The less so, the more dreaded they appear. I often jump, shake and dance to their tunes. The tunes, wonders and melodies of a book aren’t things to be told about, they are beauties to behold and experience. I can’t count the…

When I was rather naïve and in my first year of university, I chanced upon historical accounts that offered, in great detail, some insight into the creation of the state that is Uganda. Some fox-like, peripatetic fellow (whom a ganda-native calls Omuzungu—azunga) with more malice than good faith saw a latent opportunity that could earn him esteem and favor from his government. This fellow invited them over as though to his own land. His adventures ensued under the directions of a culpable corporation whose name suggested a harbinger for the iniquity yet to befall the land. After successfully furnishing all preparation for the invasion, the bogus company was declared insolvent and eventually transferred the administration of the territory to the British Government.

Perhaps, in what could have been the final step, a commissioner, whose legitimacy was derived from a piece of legislation enacted in UK, was appointed. The primary…

Dear Beloved,

You, for whom the heart aches: the blood rushes through my veins like Kiyira’s waters whenever I see you.  I long for you in ways a desert lacks knowledge of the rain, yet beneath these lashes my eyes dart, avoiding you.

You are what a sad man needs to smile and everything I would ever need if it weren’t for books.

You see, I heard whispers which left me with a chill and with goosebumps on my skin. I heard that you do not read, that you wouldn’t be interested in a man whose conversation and language is about words. I have heard that you my love have never picked up a novel, nor entertained a thought of reading one.

I am man ensnared, caught between my love of books and my desire for you. What woman wouldn’t like words, words penned down for the mind to revel…

“Read!” say the snobbish literati. Their noses see saw between musty books and the air as they raise their nostrils in disdain whenever they contemplate or chance upon people who do not wish to wile their hours away doing what they do. They lick index fingers and flip pages as they indulge in tall tales or cogitations of people who have made a vocation of day dreaming.

They are not hard to spot, these literati. First sign is usually an indication of poor sight in form of visual aids like thick rimmed spectacles. Their eye capillaries are bursting, a trend that begun from high school where they read after lights out by the aid of a Tiger head powered torch. By their twentieth year, these voracious readers have hit a certain number of books. Their craniums, now heavy,  reel with the knowledge of the human condition, which world literature overwhelmingly…

The first time I stepped into a proper bookstore I was stunned. All things are grand in a child’s mind, you know, and in mine, all the books in the world were there. Later, I’d of course learn that this grand store was grain on a beach; there’s a staggering number of books in the world, a billion lifetimes won’t take you even half way —that’s how many books are out there.

In social media tax paying 2018: online vendors like Amazon can deliver any book to your doorstep, spaces like Kampala Book Market make book hoping hustle-free, and if you are into indie lit, genre fiction, or cross cultural lit there are hundreds of websites dishing PDF knockoffs. Whatever kind of book you’re looking for, you have plenty of options in social media tax paying 2018. In the 1990s, it was a different story.

Back in the 90s everything…

At the start of last month, Uganda’s women were at it: waving placards, marching, singing, and then finally hurling obscenities at the posse of constables ringed about the National Police Headquarters in Naguru. Their cause: the blood-dimmed tide of rampant kidnaps and unsolved murders that’s gripped the country’s capital these past few months.

In the end, both the day’s oppressive sun and government paid them little mind.

But the march didn’t fail to leave itsmark; and least of all because Dr. Stella Nyanzi was the procession’s defacto leader. With the volatile, and in equal parts, infamously famous feminist activist in the recipe, a lasting ‘impression’was no doubt in the offing.

To that effect, tactics were changed, so that instead of merely shouting themselves hoarse against a wall of intransigent, uniformed masculinity, the protesters drew from their holsters plus-sized dildos.

The eye-catching artifacts were subsequently held against the protesters’ gyrating crotches…

My friends and I agreed to write about the royal wedding, and kidnaps of mostly women in Uganda that have proved too complex a puzzle for our government to solve. Never mind that peace is the NRM government’s flagship propaganda tool. According to President Museveni and other apologists of his military dictatorship that sprinkles a few rain drops of democratic trappings in a desert of political diversity, they should rule for life because Uganda discovered peace under his reign. The past is terrible and past leaders are swine because people were being killed day and night without effective government response, they postulate.

A recent visitor to Uganda who has tasted the tasty NRM government propaganda may get the impression they are living in the past. A past condemned, convicted, and demonized, a past in which nothing good ever happened.

For our present pain is real. Rent? We pay in dollars!…