……I hate that everyone is yawning about Nyege Nyege. This over blabbering is what jinxed last year’s edition. Last year, the festival was over sponsored and advertised. No wonder, everyone showed up.
Even the DJ who plays Kidandali was there with his vixens. It ended up being a normal Ugandan type of festival complete with fake weed, fake hair, fake body parts and accents. So us weirdos were overwhelmed and bored with all the normalcy.
At the end of it all, there was nothing to write home about apart from that one strange rock band with tall Caucasian men. They kept making eerie incantations during their performance. At some point we just stood there wide-eyed wondering what in the world was going on. No wonder it didn’t even rain the whole weekend.
Anyway, let’s rewind to Nyege Nyege, 2017, my first and best so far.
I am still convinced that at the festival that year, there must have been random sprinkling of weed in the air, just to make sure everyone was high. Because how else would you explain a group of very important people (my friends and I) who when we had just arrived at the venue were looking down our noses at people that had spent the previous night at the festival and after about six hours, we had turned into those people?
When we walked in, I remember wondering why in the world we were even there. After all we were people of high virtue; we had no business being in such a place, let alone with such a crowd.
We got in with our bougie noses in the air, despising everyone, especially those who were stuffed in little tents ‘mbu’ sleeping. This bougie behaviour went on for about an hour until we found it, the cocktail table! That dear reader, is when everything changed.
After a couple (okay, about 17) cocktails called Muyenga Sunrise, we were the most social people in the area. We danced in the rain to music I have never heard of, only that it sounded like ritual music (the kind they play when someone’s tongue is about to be cut out as sacrifice to the tribal chief) we, climbed the wall fence to dance, walked and played in the mud, ate 20 Rolexes each, spoke patois, puffed on strange things that tasted like strawberry tobacco and then drove from Jinja to Kampala at 1am on a very foggy road with almost zero visibility.
Did I mention that there must have been weed in the air? To this day, I don’t know why I got home with no shoes, red feet and missing eyebrows. It was such a good Nyege Nyege year.
This year, I am praying for four things; Rain, that slay chics and their sponsors, the kidandali DJ and his vixens all get stranded somewhere in Mabira forest all weekend, that Fresh Kid or any other children with recorded bitontome don’t appear on the list of performers but most importantly, free tickets for my bougie friends and I.
