A man makes Rolex during the Rolex festival on Sunday. PHOTOS BY GODFREY LUGAAJU
The third season of the Kampala Rolex Festival will go down in history as the first ever event to be held at the museum to register huge numbers. By 11:00am, people from all walks of life, comprised mostly of holidaymakers and university students that had just reported to university a week ago were at the venue.
There were no major activities going on at the start apart from the scorching sun receiving revelers who were not about to stop pouring in. At around 3pm, the grounds were already filled up; there was a stampede at the entrance as the numbers were overwhelming. It got out of hand since the crowds at the entrance had outnumbered the security personnel.
The high number forced the organisers to open another entrance of the Museum grounds to let other people access the venue. By this time, performances had kicked off from upcoming artistes like Joe Black and Topic Kasente from Team No Sleep.
It was after that that dancers took over the stage performing, one dance group after the other. Eddy Wizzy and his group took to the stage and pulled dance moves thatexcited the crowd, Wembley also did the same until the dancing performances were climaxed by the Party People, a renowned dance group.
Even at this point, crowds were still pouring into the venue in big groups. The big number of people and little security was a chance for the renowned Kifeesi group to take over. They took to taking as much as they could grab for a 20 good minutes, stealing from whoever had not tucked their phones away carefully. However more police were deployed from Kira Road Police to come and help the Counter Terrorism Police.
This did not stop the crowd from enjoying themselves and feasting on different kinds of rolexes from the normal to the chicken, to the beef and malewa (a bugishu delicay) rolex. Due to high demand for the rolex, one went for between Shs10,000 to Shs15,000. The drinks included all kinds of beers and spirits but the sodas were restricted to Century bottling company Products since Coca Cola was a title sponsor of the show.
Vinka performs at the Rolex Festival at the Uganda museum
Those who didn’t enjoy the rolex or were scared away by the prices settled for the chicken and the beef that was also at the venue. The young ones went for the bouncy castle that kept them busy until singers Fik Fameica and Vinka took to the stage.
Vinka was the first one on stage at around 7:30pm and performed all her songs before leaving the stage for Fik Fameica who at first was not going to perform since the Police had decided to end the show a few minutes to 8pm for security reasons.
Eventually though, Fik Fameica finally performed about four songs and left the stage for DJ Roger and Slick Stuart who mixed the music that slowly ushered the crowds to their homes.
The MCs