Driving drunk dead

I ran into some chap I know at an Indian shop in Parklands where I was buying a screen protector. My screen looked like it had stopped a rubber bullet.

After niceties I asked him how another mutual friend he is close with was doing and he said, “Well, he was buried last week.” I thought I heard him wrong. I said, “What do you mean he was buried last week?” He said, “He died. Two weeks ago.” I said, “No way. I saw him two weeks ago!” He asked where. I said in the bar, at the parking lot. So we forgot the stupid screen protector I was buying and we narrowed down the day! I was like, “My goodness, he died that same night I saw him do you know what time he died?” He said sometime in the night.

I was leaving my local bar shortly after 11:30pm; he was waiting for someone to move his car to allow him to leave. I remember that he was leaning on the hood of the other person’s car, a Land Rover Defender, his phone pressed against his ear. As I passed I waved but he held one finger up for me to wait a sec as he wound up on the call, so I hung around. He finished and we hugged. I could tell that he had had a great deal to drink because his tongue was heavy, he slurred and his face was shiny, and he had those foolish droopy eyes we all sport after a few and one side of his shirt was untucked and I he kept calling me, “Zulu man.” I hung around and we chatted as we waited for the gentleman to come move his car.

He was funny. I was funny. Everybody is relatively funny when they have had one to drink. We both laughed at each other’s jokes. Mine were obviously funnier because my tongue wasn’t as heavy, so they came faster. Just idle banter. I distinctly remember this night because the person who came to move their car turned out to be a lady. I might not have remembered this night in its detail because had the person who came to move their car was a man. I remember it because we had a moment of shared unspoken chauvinism; we were both taken aback that the owner was female.

'BEASTLY CAR'

I remember him telling her something like, “You are driving a beastly car, you know that, lovely girl?” And the lady, a slim chocolate girl wearing blue faded jeans torn at the thigh area seemed used to men like us, so she said something and climbed into the car. “Probably her boyfriend’s car,” he said as we watched her bring the car to life. “Yes, nobody drives a Defender in those jeans and that red lipstick,” I said. We said goodbye, I might have told him to drive safe. I walked to my car as he drove off and the Defender lady reversed into the empty parking slot.

I was told he rammed into a tree and crushed his lungs and heart. Maybe they exploded. Maybe he screamed at that final moment. Maybe he thought of his children, or mother. My pal told me the front of his car was completely wrecked. The tree survived. It’s still in the same spot, that tree, waiting for the next drunk driver with kids to leave behind.

I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know this guy well, never once drunk with him or had lunch with him, but to think that I saw him the night he died just messed up my head. I thought of him for the next day two days. All the time. I would be interviewing someone and my mind would drift to him. I’d stop writing a sentence midway and think of him and that last night I ran into him. He must have been hours from death that time if he passed by another bar for one drink, or literally under an hour away from death if he headed home straight. Death is always with us. Lurking. Waiting.

My next feeling was of guilt. I knew he was drunk and I knew he was in no position to drive safely but I didn’t say anything. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed his date with death, maybe it would have, but all I had to do is say, “Boss, maybe you shouldn’t drive like that,” whether he takes my advice or not. But I didn’t. Maybe I should have. It might have made a difference. His children might have grown up with their father. His wife might not have had to start off a single mother, struggling with the son at teenage. At some point, to console myself, I said this thing was already written, he was going to die anywhere. I was a nobody to stop fate. Who was I? But still.

There is a lesson here, at least for me. Don’t let anyone get behind the wheel when drunk. I think it’s a collective responsibility. Stop them. Stop them for themselves, stop them for their mothers and siblings and for their children and for their wives. Stop them for people they owe money and people they make happy. Stop them for other road users who are sober. Sometimes other road users with children in their car. Stop them for themselves. The worst they can say is no and if they do then you will have done your part.

Historic premiere screening of Black Panther in Kisumu,Kenya

Lupita Nyong`o

I could not make it home to Kisumu for the historic premiere screening of Black Panther. But I have been getting my relatives’ and friends’ responses to the event and the film. Even from across the Atlantic, the effusive appreciation, from both African Americans (like Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey) and American Africans (like my family), is overwhelming.

Indeed, Black Panther is such a phenomenal success and an irresistible talking point that many of us may end up actually never finding the time to watch it. I mean, there is probably many times more footage about this unique movie than the whole feature itself.

If you get tempted into viewing the trailers, the fashion parades at the screening venues, the comments of the enthralled viewers and the flurry of talk shows, you will be video-weary long before you get to the real thing.

I will, therefore, refrain from regaling you with more details about Blank Panther. But the main reason why the film caught my attention is that it dovetails strikingly with several recent developments in Africa and the Black diaspora, which I have mentioned in these pages.

It all stems from this “black” thing, especially with reference to the colour of our skin. Obviously, Black Panther hints at the ethnic identity of the citizens of Wakanda, a fictive never-colonised, technologically advanced African country somewhere “on the western shores of Lake Victoria”.

Did I say I would remain mum on the film? But I suppose you can see one of the reasons why it is “wowing” the Black diaspora and the rest of us who have been subjected to colour politics or “colourism”, as it is increasingly labelled in current discourse.

I believe that the attitude of most of us black people (or “people of colour” as the others call us) is that skin colour does not matter. It is just that, skin deep, and should not be used as a criterion for judging or measuring humanity. Do you remember the late Lucky Dube’s iconic reggae croon, Different Colours, One People?

Unfortunately, many of the others — those who think that it matters that they are not black — will not leave it at that. Every time there is an encounter between different shades of humanity, the colour flag is raised, and most often to the disadvantage of the dark-skinned people. That is how, for example, many of our ancestors came to be subjected to systemic slavery in the so-called New World, with all its attendant complications.

Yet, despite all the colour obsessions of the racists, the Nazis, the supremacists, the KKK and their ilk, it is inevitable that wherever normal human beings meet, they do and will mix across all those insignificant lines. Racial purity and colour purity are absurd assumptions, neither tenable nor enforceable in any human community.

The Immorality Act, for example, in apartheid South Africa, tried to ban sexual relations across race lines. It failed miserably. The “Act” was widely satirised and exposed in literary and dramatic works, including a play, Not Now, Sweet Desdemona, by Murray Carlin, my South African lecturer at Makerere. In the play, Carlin poses the question of what would happen to a South African (White) Prime Minister if he were to turn black while in bed with his wife.

Anyway, the obsessions with colour still persist among some people. One of the most anticipated events of this year, for example, is the royal wedding, sometime in May, of Prince Henry, the grandson of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, and the American actress, Meghan Markle. Meghan and Henry’s romance evokes many emotions in those who follow these things.

America and Britain have always been “uneasily” together since 1776. Maybe this is one of the reasons Winston Churchill, whose mother was American, once observed that “the British and the Americans are one people divided by a common language”. (Incidentally, Donald Trump’s mother, too, was a Brit, a Scotswoman). So, a topflight Anglo-American romance is always noticeable.

But we who were around in the 20th century also remember that Henry’s great-great uncle, King Edward VIII, was forced to abdicate from the British throne in 1936 because he decided to marry an American divorcee, Mrs Wallis Simpson. Meghan Markle, too, is a divorcee, but people are more relaxed about these things today. After all, Henry’s father, Prince Charles, is himself married to a previously married lady, Camilla Parker Bowles.

Incidentally, do you remember Henry’s mother, Princess Diana? She died in an accident when she was fleeing from the obtrusive paparazzi, who were haunting her and her African (Egyptian) friend, Dodi al-Fayed. So much for your racial separation obsessions.

Still, the one detail that some people seem to be fixated on in the royal romance is the fact that Meghan Markle’s mother is African American, with “black” blood in her veins. The obvious question here would be: so what? In any case, there are millions of people, especially in the Americas, of mixed ethnic descent, regardless of whether they know or admit it.

Anyway, the obsession has ramifications. Henry Bolton, the leader of the United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP), one of those rightist, separatist setups that spearheaded “Brexit”, has just been forced to resign. One of the reasons for his fall is that his girlfriend, Jo Marney, is said to have spread racist messages against Meghan Markle and her princely fiancé.

Then, in a curious twist of scientific dramatic irony, it turns out that the earliest known native Englishman was probably black, with blue eyes! The latest DNA tests on the so-called Cheddar Man, the oldest human fossil to be found in Britain, strongly support  the hypothesis that this being was dark-skinned.

Back to Black Panther, I suppose that one of the most refreshing things about it is the spectacle of strong black people going about their human struggles without undue preoccupation with the colour of their skins.

I wonder, though, if my Waganda entrepreneur friends are ready to cash in on the tourist potential of Wakanda.