Hillary Okello opened his show with the Unbwogable song.
Hillary Okello’s Uganda Must Laugh show at the National Theatre at the weekend, curated his content around the sad facts about Uganda.
Art is rightfully supposed to mirror society; it is through the power of imagination and creativity that people manage to reflect on what is going on around them.
Yet, in a country like Uganda, even when art has the power to move mountains to enlighten and educate, it is a rare feat to find an artist leaning into that artistic power, be it to talk about an injustice, call out a society or merely point it out.
But for one comedian, Hillary Okello, whose show, Uganda Must Laugh at the National Theatre, curated his content around the sad facts about Uganda, most of these are of course structural problems brought about by those with power and others by Ugandans as a people.
Okello started his set with the famous Gidi Gidi Maji Maji song, Unbwogable. The song, when released in 2002 was a regional crossover hit that as the country went into polls, the duo was approached by then candidate Uhuru Kenyatta’s campaign team seeking to use the song as his campaign theme at a tune of Ksh10m (approximately Shs150m then).
The duo turned down the money. But regardless, the song had already been wrapped in politics; Unbwogable is a song that announces its defiance nature from the way it starts to the first chorus.
Okello’s show was relatively safe at the beginning with Hillary talking about growing up poor and having to fly business class for the very first time and feeling out of place as he listened to conversations of more accomplished people in the room about over-dressing for the flight.
“Every time I would fly economy, I would see people who fly business and say to myself, you think you are better than us, until I was in business; I realised they are better than us,” he said.
But these were just a few jokes about him and life growing up. What happened after were jokes about him and Uganda, the roads we use, how we use them with the authorities and all the chaos involved.
“I bought a car this year and I have realised that officers can simply stop you without a specific fault,” he said, sharing a story where he had everything the officer was looking for until they asked for a triangle.
Talking about the roadside corruption using the different names officers use while soliciting for bribes were funny jokes, which also called us to reflect.
But he got even murkier when he started talking about the presidential traffic; most of the times, when President Museveni is moving, cars and humans are stopped from moving until he has gone. The presidential-induced pause of traffic flow can go on for 30 minutes to an hour.
“Whenever you find people in this traffic, you do not even need to ask if there is anything wrong, for some reason every Ugandan knows exactly what is happening.
He went on to wonder why there is a need for every government official to seek right of way, joking that some ministers should stay in traffic with the people because they have no emergency.
“The minister for urban planning should sit in traffic with us, he did not plan this city well, let him use this time to plan,” he says.
But it was the bit about journalists covering the opposition that got the audience on their feet, arguing that while covering events of the opposition, journalists show up in gear like they are going to war, with press labeling in front and at the back.
“When you are covering NUP, it is always abrupt, the studio will cut to the journalist and then you will have a shaky picture of a journalist running before jumping into frame; they do not even introduce themselves because they have to explain to an officer that they are journalists…”
Hillary Okello is a clinical medical clinician who chose comedy over his profession. His cut-cross jokes and sets which beat the common Ugandan tropes such as sex and tribal jokes, have made him a darling among many lovers of comedy in English.
This was his second show.
