By Alex Roberts
Friday.
If yesterday had been a benchmark of the chaos to come, this night surely would be the epitome of it. Half of Kampala was descending today, fucking off from work by 2PM, sneaking out back exits to make their way down the Jinja highway by whatever means available.
Everyone had fallen into the same wavelength months ago- to go and spin out endless, get lit or die trying.
For now, there were actual things that I had to sort out, heavy handed hangovers and rising tequila/waragi buzz be damned. I was already in a bad way- for hours the previous day, I’d wandered about in overly tight untested shoes, now two gaping wounds had formed on my heels, striking me with sharp pangs of pain with every step.
I’d changed into flip flops and spent an hour or so in the medical tent, the workers of which already had a thousand-yard stare after a single night. The reasons would become apparent in weeks to come, as on top of the usual festival fuckery, they’d had to deal with some injuries that were coming about from more violent means. They poured dark yellow antibacterial liquid all over my feet, staining them orange; then wrapped me roughly in cloth bandages. By the time I reached the two story mabati press structure, they were already bleeding through and slipping off.
In the chaos of yesterday, there was no way to sort out my press passes; now it was time. In my mind, there was still some sort of ‘official’ aspect to this festival, stages to go behind and artists to sequester and interview.
I was dead wrong, but who knew? All around members of the press scrolled urgently through phones towards gigantic charging ports, stacking devices up five high all around this small room, generator powered, chugging along under a shaky mabati roof. Some were already typing away desperately, trying to relay the situation of the festival in real time to non-believing editors (many of whom were already on their way down to Jinja for the turn up regardless of status reports).
From outside, an Itanda area shaman called the press into a circle, he danced around, ‘blessing’ the festival, but with members of the media drinking beers all around the effect was at best, strange and at worst, was giving neo-colonialism.
Nearby a tall girl was crying uncontrollably. I wandered closer, and she tearfully told an old acquaintance of mine from university in Nairobi that somewhere out there in the pine forest, that she’d been sexually assaulted by several strangers and the cops were nowhere to be found, refusing to listen once she located them.
Soon after, one of the chief organizers of the festival approached a confidant of mine, who was also trying to procure her press affiliation. He swayed back and forth and slurred noticeably, barely on his feet, pupils widely dilated.
I found my business partner in the crowd, and we wandered off together, vaguely towards the stage, new found plastic laminated press passes in tow.
‘I’m covering that stage for the foreigners’ she told me, pointed to an aluminum structure, already pitching with the crowd by 2 PM Friday, partiers streaming from the woods, dropping their shit seemingly at random and joining the masses. I bought another Waragi Coconut and started passing it about to whoever I could run into, which seemed to be about everyone that I knew (and half their cousins). The Nairobi crew I’d come with were seated nearby under a tree, already decking themselves out in glitter and hot-glued faux rhinestone jewels; preparing in earnest for the night’s turn up.
We met some sort of large-scale amalgamation of people, all of us sat up on the ridge and watched as drunks stumbled up and down the paths. Joints and cups were passed around, the sun fell fat and heavy across the river, reddening by the moment; little flecks of light rising to meet the beats starting to emanate heavier and deeper from the stages.
Despite all the fuckery, the vibes were rapidly getting lit and, from the outside, excellent. It is, to be sure, the last memory of solid coherence from the weekend. This little quiet hour was the only respite that was to be had until we all found ourselves, home and shaking, wherever we had originally come from.
The night had set in with strange force- the press passes, small metallic bangles jangling around our necks on an ugly laminated lanyard. The Waragi was in full effect, as some of my friends later told me, ‘you refused to be without a bottle’. I wandered here and there, doling out shots in pathways whenever I ran into someone I knew. There was very little sleep in my nervous system at this point, and I was starting to feel some kind of way; but ignore it, push forward, at this long awaited party the mantra is continuation on principle. This, in the weeks following the festival weekend, would prove to be a horrid error but we all make our choices.
Days earlier, a Zambian marketing director I was sharing a drink and a lowkey fling with passed me over some sort of horrific cough while we dodged some of the Dutch dramatic cohort during a gauche birthday affair in a thoroughly packed Kampala night club. Now I’d been pushing vitamins and surviving on some sort of circular thought exercise of ‘vibes Inshallah’ the entire week. I refused to go down on the eve of the fight.
Now the fight with illness was right on top of me and the party was becoming a full scale brawl. I passed Kampala friends on strange pathways in the glow of the night, their eyes glazed over from whatever they’d seen under lock down and the drugs they’d taken to cope. We wandered downwards, under impossibly steep stairs cut into the hill to a rapidly muddying stage down in a grass bowl by the river, a small dock jutting out just next to the stage, ferrying ever more revelers across from whatever hotels represented little glittering lights across the great river. The mud was seeping in, impossible to tell in some spots if it would overtake the very ground, we stood on at the very first hint of rain leaking from the pregnant clouds above us.
‘The police is not around…’
Notes of the illicit club banger Tumbiiza Sound by Eezzy echoed out from somewhere in the distance.
I ran back into the would-be adulterer on a hillside, one of her sisters was with her, the left side of her face swollen horribly. She was moaning incoherent, muttering about having been accosted by several men within the trees, who grabbed at her ‘Gucci’ bum bag and, upon her resistance, struck her thrice in the face in rapid succession. Her sister looked to me as though I could help solve it, but there was no moral bandwidth within me to do so.
Spinning away from them, I ran back into my business partner and one of our company’s attorneys. The attorney was delightfully lit, and was talking about finding strange vibes, her rotation of dick and the current state of her destitute love life.
We left my partner at the gate, trying to sort out the entrance for a German friend of hers that just showed up and was currently ensconced in the masses still trying to get in. We stumbled down the hill, down to the riverside stage in time for a set of decadent old school hip hop mixed in with ratchet Kampala club bangers. Other friends from Nairobi were suddenly around me. One, a tall, braided Luhya girl who gets paid top dollar to help diplomats tour factories in fabulous places like Costa Rica, was getting actively bullied to do bumps of cocaine from the wrist of a Canadian man in a sparkly bejeweled bowler hat encrusted with a gigantic weed leaf on the front, there in the middle of the crowd.
Ugly scenes were happening actively within corners, but we were far too gone to care. The music on this Friday night was far too good for any such mild interruptions. I ran into a close friend, a PR director of a major insurance brand, and her home girls, down on a whirlwind girl’s trip (which turned out to be only this singular night). Our motley contingent traversed the horrors of the hill’s direct steepness onwards and upwards, passing lewd acts with every meter. Both heels were bleeding well now, the bandages had long since pulled down and had clearly reached a fresh level of infection. I needed antibiotics.
This was a festival of zones, the only continuity being the ever-present slog of swirling mud. Behind another lighted tunnel came the VIP section, where sons of cabinet ministers shot their shots at their cohort’s side pieces. Bottles were being popped, but our table lacked liquor, so in my drastic heights I wandered back out of the tunnel to a nearby liquor table (the likes of which seemed to be the only constant to be found at the grounds), searching for tequila and waragi. A small man turned, never quite looking me in the eye, and grinded on my thigh while shouting “Nyege Nyege”.
I sideswiped him, still on a mission for bottles and vibes, and just like that my phone had vanished into the night, with it any semblance of maintaining the illusion that I could cover this story. Or maybe it was just an excuse, and I, like so many others, were seeking out the enablement for the worst of our excesses.
Back in the VIP, my anger had arisen and upon telling my friend, she looked me dead in the eye and hissed “let’s find that little fucker and throw him face first over the FUCKING waterfall.”
Love the energy, hate the possibilities behind it. No, this was not the kind of party to commit a vicious hate crime and try to explain to a Ugandan court ‘you see, your honor, it wasn’t my intent, he looked so much like the thief, who was also Somali, we were sure he deserved to be tossed screaming into the abyss.’
The night went downhill from there, and months later, my friend would recount random sections of it, but all is well beyond my memory, i.e. ‘Those Australians we pissed downhill onto, they weren’t angry once they realized we had a bottle of the right brand of tequila.’
‘Angie, Angie, baddie baddie’
I can’t be sure, but as I walked alone through the ruins of the scam camp that Saturday morning at dawn, I believe that’s the soundtrack to the tableau I witnessed. I’d lost everyone but couldn’t place when.
As I stepped over a blacked-out man on the ground and a British girl scurried away carrying a stolen mattress on her head, I walked past one of the ‘glamping tents’ built as a hurried A-frame of deceit on the bluff above the river. Down below dozens washed off the sins of the previous night in waters of the Nile, a middle-aged Swedish couple, very clearly out of their depth, walked past me, and as they did…
‘WHAM!’ The door of one of the wooden A-frames slammed off, revealing a Turkish man lining up a large beaker full of cocaine in a line out of a prone girl’s ass hole, his eyes bulging and wide. He never stopped while he made eye contact with us, just gobbled his powder, and then turned away.
‘We need to fucking leave!’ Screeched the Swedish woman. Her husband nodded solemnly, never speaking. This is not the party for those without any real determination. The level of turn up in Jinja will spit out the weak and half-assed. They will leave confused and exquisitely hungover, back onto flights out of Entebbe and in silent, tense car rides back to Kampala; the kind that could very possibly have a destination of an ugly divorce upon arrival home.
To party at Nyege Nyege you need intense emotional compartmentalization techniques; just get as crazed as possible then stare into the middle distance while chain-smoking months later, questioning your own inner perversity.
