The days wasted away, as though the severing of our online lives meant a literal cutting away of something needed for our survival. We ate, slept, watched mindless TV and talked for hours on end. You know you’re truly losing it when you start turning philosophical, spending long hours silently staring at the sky. For its part, it remains unmoved, witnessing the latest tragicomedy as it plays out on this country’s landscape. The sky and the starry hosts have seen it all before, silent witnesses to the daily drama of a Ugandan. Perhaps that should be our solace, that amid all this confusion, there are some who’ve seen this play out a thousand times and know the one truth we human beings repeatedly forget: at some point, it all comes to an end.
But for now, we must contend with our problems as though we’re the first. The election period felt like someone grabbed the lot of us and took us back in time. With the pull of a few levers, we were transported to a remote world that knew no ‘unmute your mic, please’, no cute late-night emoji-saturated texts, no funny cat TikTok videos. Nothing. For the first time, I think I truly understand Americans’ obsession with freedom, liberty, and the right to the pursuit of happiness. The idea that one person, a single individual, can so heavily impact your life from so many miles away is a phenomenon my mind is still trying to understand.
On one of these impossibly long days, my precocious 12-year-old cousin walked into my room and, in the same panicked voice reserved for a nuclear-disaster-level event, she said, ‘It’s off! It’s off! Oh my God, it’s off! It’s like we’re living in the 1940s.’ It was hilarious, but then afterwards, weirdly revelatory. It does feel like we’re living in the 1940s. Everything in this country has felt a little like a retrogression to some ancient, chaotic past. Maybe not the 1940s, but more like medieval times, with kings and crooks and a revolutionary feel in the air. Even when everyone around sensed that perhaps the naked emperor was not equipped to run the kingdom, a future without him seemed unimaginable.
For a country with a political history as bloody as ours, it’s a wonder that there are still those amongst us who truly believed this time would be different. There are those who risked their lives to protect their faith in a system that has shown it cannot be reset. We dared to buy into the dream of a Uganda that actually works. It certainly couldn’t be worse than this. We were mistaken. We’re a people captured. Not by an enemy state, but by something far worse. There’s a scent of inevitability in the air, and it smells putrid. We’re obviously on the back foot as a nation. It’s not just that the elections were an obvious sham. That, we’ve grown accustomed to. No, this time felt different. It was the thinly veiled attempt at formulating a believable lie.
There is something about watching an electoral commission agent read results and then run to his car like he’s just set off a nuclear countdown that weighs down the soul. Something in the collective consciousness of the nation shifted. The announcements left a dark feeling all around the house. Everyone simply wanted to be left to wrestle with their thoughts. Luckily, as if wishing to throw citizens a small cheer-up token, the small gods of our day had mercy and restored joy with the flick of that powerful switch.
The sudden burst of joyful screams around the house was all I needed to know that I should probably power up my laptop. The familiar sound of pings reminded us that there is life outside this. But still, like a depressive episode that leaves you for a moment and returns when the lights go out, we crawled into bed wondering what lay ahead for us in this country. Soon, we return to our various responsibilities and make peace with what we’ve lost over the election week. For some, a friend, a brother, a father, a husband. For others, hope. We know what the next five years hold for us. Business as usual. And like the scorned lover who’s tired of it all but has no place to go, we’ll cuddle up to our tormentor and make sure the night breeze doesn’t leave him feeling cold.