By Alex Roberts
Notes from an ugly Chinese built apartment block in Nairobi:
Editor’s clarification: the following was set ablaze and soaked in tears, then thrown in a flaming bundled heap at the doorstep of the esteemed possibly defunct offices of the EA Scene in the days ahead of Nyege Nyege 2023. We may have been the ones who threw said piece at our own offices then sped away on the back of a very confused man’s boda boda while screeching about journalistic ethics, but such cannot be substantiated.
The consequences of the festival went too deep seeded to be written in any quick succession- a series of benders, tears and emotional chaos befell all those involved with Nyege Nyege 2022. The only thing that snapped me out of the ennui were several fatalistic nights up and down the Kenyan coast. The several days after the festival had been a dark week- one of time jumps, black outs, antibiotics, and fever dreams possibly brought on by remedial herbs that had to be rubbed into my bleeding heels.
Upon edit, the story of Nyege Nyege ended in such desolation it would have been just as likely had the following story been the ramblings of a terminal mad man- screamed forth from a padded room within Mengo Hospital’s Mental Ward in Kampala.
As I idly sit in avoidance of consequences, months after the festival ended, sequestered at dusk in many ways I am still in recovery. Nothing that my third double Buffalo Trace bourbon neat and a bit of a pre-roll can’t at least assist to alleviate, but things had gotten impossibly heavy, with terminal immediacy.
One last blow out for the Gods; Chaos in the Pines and possible incidents of brutal assaults, Sacrilege on Sacred Grounds; a full lifecycle for the East African Creative Scene played out sacrificial and a multitude of destitute ailments; the only truth to be found through Waragi Premium shots and the creeping Ebola rumor.
What had even happened?
I couldn’t be sure if it was truly a festival or a sacrificial ceremony to long lost vibes, laid bare on a bluff above a wide flowing waterfall several miles up the Nile from those swirling green waters of Lake Victoria.
The very air of Kampala seemed a glow with it for weeks before- passing in the streets, down panya routes (rat routes, slang for back routes), in newly opened bars long overdue, while buying questionable chicken thighs slow-roasted crisp over coals on crowded avenues that smelled of magenta jacaranda flowers, fermenting scotch bonnet peppers, spilled liquor and petrol. It was on everyone’s lips- Nyege Nyege was back.
For those of you dear readers playing for the home team of the East African party circuit for the last odd decade, Nyege Nyege is well known as the pinnacle. A four-day circuit of decadent exuberance, pushing away ratchet boundaries, the best damn collection of the region’s music to be found.
It may be the farthest out hell scape weekend of party vibes this side of a Dubai Sheik’s private yacht club (but with no signs reading ‘No Cameras Allowed’, other than the army-manned main bridge heading into Jinja town proper).
It had been half decade since I’d been to the last one, a rain-soaked transcendence back in 2017; one that possibly helped to propel me to my current living situation in an awkwardly cheap serviced apartment just down the road from a police post and around the corner from a main vein into Central Kampala.
This is a weird back drop to sit down and do my first ‘serious’ piece of the night job in quite some time; even as I type this, my floor neighbor on one side is throwing a fuck into someone like his wife is coming home, and on the other a 67 year pot-bellied Italian constantly swilling homemade limoncello, is in some sort of vicious domestic dispute with several braided slay queens, the oldest of which looks to have hit her 19th birthday on the Fourth of July.
In this Kampala however, such behavior is tacitly tolerated and publicly disapproved of (while privately, one merely shrugs her shoulders and mutters ‘Aww bambi, they are adults after all, maybe she’ll eat his money’).
Indeed; the ‘well behaved’ sober mentality of a true ‘grown up functional member of a society’ rarely seem to apply to the expats within this hill-marked town; they all stumble fuck their way in and out of dire situations, constantly drunk on micro-brewed beers and imported liqueurs while they publicly bitch about the ‘problems with Ugandans’; even as they have found themselves with a mere secondary school diploma rapidly rising up the ranks to a middling NGO bureaucracy on a 75,000 ‘Pound fucking sterling salary’.
These foreigner types partied, but not always in a serious way. Not of true consequence and throwing themselves out of the wire- not in the way that Kampala actually got lit in places like Kabalagala, farther down into Ggaba road and North beyond the bypass into Ntinda and Kisaasi. They tried but hadn’t quite grasped it.
Elements of the same diplomat-adjacent subsets made up the Nyege contingent, the ones who had started the festival down in Jinja the better part of a decade ago and had now boxed themselves into a corner to hold the singular ‘must attend’ post COVID fest. Now Nyege Nyege was known to be where all the partying corners of Uganda (and East Africa) collided at once.
Why?
Kampala is a city seemingly born of a party- even in dens of the deeply ratchet cohorts in towns like Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, this is well-known, a truth that is lived up to at least four nights a week in six dozen blaring bars dotted along the green hills.
Even among the malignant drunks in this hardest partying of towns, Nyege Nyege was known to be another level. Those who couldn’t hang, (or could hang all too well) had been making their excuses to get the fuck out from Kampala town and towards the Nyege festival grounds for several weeks now. They knew what was coming and it would absolutely be a heavy one.
Artists from all over were coming in, and the marketing for the festival had been, to put it mildly, intensive for the previous four or so months, building us attendees of the festival into a steady intensity of anticipation. Not only a festival massive in scale and spectacle, but possibly triumphant, one of the industries slammed hardest in Uganda (and East Africa at large, for that matter) were the entertainment and music sectors, sidelined into irrelevancy, no longer able to play to crowds and no one having the spare cash to indulge on buying their latest releases.
This 2022 edition? Maybe it could help in recovery, if not entirely financially, then reputationally and cathartically, that sense that ‘we’re back’ was coming along for the ride in the form of dozens of musicians, even hundreds, many of whom hoped to springboard the 96 hours of Nyege Nyege into
re-entering their creative careers, to get back to normal a bit- though the hustle of a musician in this region could hardly be considered normal.
Eight days before the festival was set to commence, an American from the day job sent me this message: ‘Man…is this real?’
I knew what was coming; attached was a terrible and factually inept article from the ‘crack international team’ over at CNN: ‘Nyege Nyege Musical Festival Canceled By Ugandan Parliament Over Promotion of Sexual Immorality’. Indeed- but in Uganda, there’s always a bigger dick in the room, and whichever way said dick allegedly swings, is the way the wind allegedly blows.
My friends from Nairobi, fresh off an acid trip deep in the Aberdares mountains to counterbalance their latest month long bender, were quick to raise questions, but those of us in the know already knew the truth and a mere 16 hours later it was confirmed. Of course the festival must go on.
Just as was always apparent: all those wads of 50,000 Ugandan Shilling notes, foreign dollars, crumpled pockets of Euros and Pounds fucking Sterling were needed in desperate order after the Kafkaesque nightmare of a pandemic; two years of lockdowns across Uganda, and bars most certainly remaining closed for the entirety of COVID…
And of course, the bars and clubs were most certainly closed the whole time- none of us made repeated late night near death runs across Kampala, dodging road blocks with a wink and grin (and a cheeky red 20,000 UGX note); weren’t nearly fired upon with state owned AK-47s and certainly never brutally struck an officer of The Law with a rugby stiff-arm from the back of a speeding motorcycle after a night of strangeness and dancing in the Kisimenti club district’s main strip (which was also closed the whole time and not packed with hundreds of us indecent heathens at every possible chance).
Indeed, all of us moral upstanding ones went to church and prayed for the sanctity and perseverance of the regime (and you should too, dear reader).
As such, the very same frumpy parliamentarians who tried to cancel Nyege Nyege were ushered like tired-eyed schoolchildren into a side room of some bland government office block and politely told to fuck-right-off (for the sake of the billions of shillings that were due to pour into towns from the lakeside airport town of Entebbe, right through Kampala and over to the root of the Nile at Jinja town).
Such horrors of the recently ended COVID lockdown set the stage: with such deep seeded repression of vices, the entirety of the East African ratchet party subset was attempting to simultaneously descend upon Jinja town like a bomb of destitution and explode like dying stars just as the gates were due to open on Thursday and carry on through to Monday morning. Hotel rooms were booked up entirely for months, drug dealers were scrambling. Ready or not, the party was back.
Now with Ebola creeping back into the picture from random hamlets West of Kampala, part of the rumor mill was the ugly (if not overblown and distant) possibility that State House in Entebbe would see another opportunity for a sweeping set of restrictions. Some of us more conspiratorial types started to see Nyege Nyege as a closing window to live life, consequences be fucked. In Kampala tacit cynicism is the general political position of anyone you meet in a bar, so why not go out dancing on your shield?
Go big or don’t bother showing up.
