By Alex Roberts
Thursday
Arrangements had been made days earlier, and we shuffled into the cab, clinking suitcases and little vials full of multicolored glitter in tow. For our part, we’d started early; desperately working our way through an entire 750ML of Waragi Coco in the car ride from Kampala, stopping only to get more cups, further bottles of booze and multiple packs of Dunhill Switch cigarettes with crude pictures on the sides. No mention was made of the rising cases of Ebola in villages a hundred odd kilometers west of Kampala- sometimes ignorance really is bliss. Knock on wood and just keep it moving.
Thoroughly lit and having dropped all my possessions of value at a squat motel across the road from the army barracks, we made our way towards the gate, some 30 kilometers up a beaten dirt path towards our own inevitable excess.
All the Jinja hustlers had been aware of this coming party for what seemed to be years and had gathered en masse for the three or so kilometers leading to the main gate- hawking Rolex, warm beer, Chinese made imported condoms, ugly bowler hats and flimsy toxic plastic knockoff wraparound sunglasses.
Ugandan flags wrapped every makeshift stand, hundreds of them, and strange blares of vuvuzelas and whistles cut the air. The road was already such a parking lot of chaotic stillness as revelers burst forth from cars that hit the jam and scrambled towards the gate. We too were forced to abandon the remaining Waragi and make for the entrance on foot. After some ugliness in the crowd over ticketing procedures, I abandoned my Nairobi companions to talk my way in through the wooden fenced main gate with a series of awkward foreigner grins and claims of being a member of the ‘friendly press’.
After labyrinthian negotiations for press credentials (which I didn’t receive), I was in through the main gates, though I think some of the press tables’ weariness came from the fact that I could hardly be considered as a member of the smile and nod’ media guild (and most certainly look the part). I wasn’t their shill, and as such was nearly sniffed out.
I’d had a creeping feeling for months now, starting when my request for the location of the festival grounds (on an official press request email thread) had been met with a response of ‘the grounds are on your right, next to town, as you look towards Egypt.’
As I walked in through a vast pine forest (the one that would be subject of many a story of robbery and illicit unwanted groping in the darkness) and towards the campgrounds, the suspicions that had been rocketing around my mind for weeks were confirmed with an awkward immediacy, a blatan dereliction of ‘clearing the bar of expectations’ that was startling.
The road to the campgrounds was already a horrid swamp- pitfalls of mud already half a meter deep in some places, the stands of wooden outhouses standing unfinished- ghosts to a grand hustle, holes with no doors. Men with cheap cigarettes flamed down to the filters hammered furiously at the hasty wooden A-frames, placing ‘roofs’, clambering for payouts from hapless drunks who just stumbled in and were now looking to be in various states of panic.
They’d finished nothing- the ‘glamping’ that had been advertised was a cacophony of timber and protruding nails, spiders the circumference of cricket balls already guarding territory within seemingly all the structures.
It was an act of organizational failure overlooking the Itanda Falls, which are considered sacred by the residents of the hilled areas surrounding them.
Sometimes, an entire cohort begins to buy into their own toxic echo-rooming, they get high on their own supply, as it were. What appeared with clarity, was this: that the circular reassurance of the Nyege Nyege festival organizers spiraled inward in the three years between the events. Instead of planning the king hell comeback party of the decade, they’d spent it circle jerking each other’s vibes and positivity at their own sequestered events in fancy houses, on fancier drugs, with fancier views of Lake Victoria while the ‘fanciest’ people told them just how special they were (then passed along the plate with the fanciest lines).
All around me incredibly awkward scenes were playing out- weary travelers yelling at builders chewing miraa. A pint size slay queen I knew through former circumstances in Kampala sashayed up to me and offered up a sly ‘I know just how to bribe them, and I can give you the ideas’. Her eyes were already thickly caked in drug use, she was swaying on her feet, God only knows how she made it through a series of treks through the thickening mud, through caving fences, out into the giant swath of the exterior pine forest.
When the vibes get into sleaze, promptly grab the liquor and run. I followed such sentiments, turned promptly out of the construction site/glamping location and walked back to the amalgamation of chaos that was playing out at the campsite organizers table; where I promptly ran into two old friends, Joe and Lina, from the underground Nairobi literary subset.
Watching the unending back and forth from the organizers of the camp, who had clearly also been misled, were in over their heads, and whose voices were beginning to crack with tension- the decision was promptly made to abandon all our earthly possessions and find more booze. We procured a tepidly warm bottle and sat around a squat plastic table for the better part of an hour, cranking our way through overpriced ‘Real! Mkoko! Chicken!’ Rolexes made with stale chapatis and chasing it with large quaffs of this gin-adjacent substance.
We split back up, with me on a mission of bribery to get my tent built, but there was nothing in it- and the scene in ‘luxury camp’ subset was rapidly getting weirder as the sun started to reduce in orbit over the hill on the adjacent bank of the Nile.
‘I swear to God I’m going to eat (sleep with) one of these colonizer bitches this weekend, I just gotta find one with an ass worth my time’ said one skinny Ugandan man in a bright yellow tank top, he never looked up at his friend as he muttered, taking large drags off a joint the circumference of a rock hammer.
I grabbed everything I had and went back to the normal tents, through a gap in the wire section of the fence overhanging a bluff, to find Joe and Lina- their normal tent now seemed the better option to stash everything, plus I had a plastic sombrero topped bottle of tequila to quell their worries with. I’d snuck it past the cops at the gate with relative ease, though he made a great show of checking my bags.
That’s how the security seemed to be at the festival; keeping up appearances for the kids while quietly sneaking shots and intending to keep up a steady, innocuous buzz. The security apparatus of this country had a quite tough go of it during lockdowns, some of them had only managed to build two brand new houses with newly ‘found’ monies.
I was being grabbed on the shoulders.
It was Joe, who is as gay as the day is long, with a look of tedious, weary desperation in his eyes. ‘This is my friend I was telling you about!’
He pointed me in the direction of a model-esque girl, all legs and tiny jean shorts, tank top a glitter in bedazzled scarlet and the caramel skin of her shoulders poking out from below a long straight black wig.
‘He’s most certainly single!’ Joe said a bit too loudly. I wasn’t at the time, but why ruin someone’s first day at the festival?
I greeted her, and she hugged me too tightly, pulling back she said loudly enough for half the camp to hear, ‘I’m here at Nyege to cheat on my husband, he’s abroad don’t you know.’
That’s all well and good, but it was time to delve deeper into the party itself, not the moment to help facilitate an early onset mid-life crisis.
The festival itself was set up in a sort of a gigantic triangular arrowhead shape, with the bottom boomerang shape along the ridgeline being where almost all the stages, shops, pop up restaurants and campsites were stationed with a view over the crashing Itanda Falls, which fell with grand aplomb down a series of rocks. Just below the knobbed hill of the main stage, there was a sort of inlet in the river that was more calm, a couple of stages were down next to it on the banks, and several revelers were already sticking their feet in while smoking joints, little puffs of decadence rising up from down below us as twilight set in.
Beyond the main band of the festival lay a deep swath of pine forest before the main gate, which was altogether too big, some three hundred meters in diameter, perhaps more. Within it, the darkness was already seeming to creep. It was just too vast of an unmarked, unlit territory for a full-tilt festival setting and as I sat near the police campsite to have a cocktail and watched them knock back beers and yell over the sound of the generator, this assumption was proven out.
The rest of the night was a warmup blur, ducking a trio of sisters trying to steal more tequila, dancing in the deep mud and never really going without a bottle. My friends later told me of this first evening, ‘I think you had a full Nyege festival over the course of Thursday night’.
At dawn, I dove headfirst into Joe and Lina’s tent; bending spectacle frames and generally causing a scene as I did. Sleep may or may not have crept in, it’s tough to be sure, but regardless, after a few hours it was time to screw it back on again and continue. This was now time to get fully serious.
