By Alex Roberts
Sunday
It was lit, now I felt like I was dying.
I’d thrown in the towel at dawn. This was too much for me. My voice was cracking at a constant, I could barely speak my words coming out in garbled sounds of forlorn low-pitched screeches. I barely sounded human, let alone here to cover the event in a professional capacity.
The cab I’d procured at 10 AM (though I don’t recall how) stopped sharply, waking me up in front of my Kampala abode. How’d he known where to drive? What time was it? Fuck, what day? Who was I?
My then girlfriend came bounding down the stairs, dressed in a mustard yellow jumpsuit, all smiles at my return. Her face dropped when she saw me.
‘Aww bambi! BAMBI! What happened? What the FUCK? Bambi! Were you into a whole battle? What went wrong? Oh Bambi can you walk? Bambi! Your FEET! JESUS Ch-RIST’
In the mirror, it was clear her points were valid ones. My face was swollen, three days of stubble creeping in. It looked as though I hadn’t showered. My nose was running with severity, clear down to my chin. My heels had breached the bandages and liquids were streaking down my heels, pus covered, darkly scabbed and clearly rapidly becoming further infected from the mysterious puddles I kept trekking through on my own vibes and inherent weirdness.
In the days that followed, I sat, in darkness, contemplating my mistakes, eating ‘Spicy’ KFC chicken with the lights off, drinking bourbon neat out of a plastic cup and listening to Moby’s ‘When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die’ at full volume on repeat.
The comedown was by far the worst I’d ever experienced following a proper multi-day party. Exhaustion set in, as did an unexplainable sadness, but why?
I think the core reasons as it were, largely because I was beyond my limits. Creatively and emotionally this Nyege Nyege had done me far worse and dirtier than I could have fathomed. It’s a shock to the system to have such a buildup be shattered from the moment one arrives. When you come so close to the sun, it hurts all the worse when you’re burnt by it; wasted potential is much worse than the absence of it ever being present.
Some of the organizational failures reflected my own dereliction of proper coverage, I became a symptom of the scene that was set. From time to time, when a table is laid out in a certain direction, the
chefs can’t be shocked at the means by which it gets devoured. For those who attended, we all know things had gone too far, or not far enough at nearly every possible turn and in all possible ways.
Our energy was too heavy and suppressed to be condensed into this, it was less of a party and more of a needed group scream therapy session, but one that was exploited by many in attendance (and some who had snuck in through the gaps in the fences). The positivity we had felt was turned inside out and directed back at us, and for many with quite awful consequences. Everyone had gone through such traumatic shit either before, during or after Nyege (because of it or not), that stories are still coming seeping out more than a year after Kampala’s lockdown was originally lifted.
Where we sought catharsis, none was there to be found. Things had changed, and in this case, it wasn’t for the better.
In the end, it was just another forsaken ratchet bender, the likes of which I’d seen a dozen of during my time in Kampala, though dialed up to eleven and dashed apart into chaos over the course of four nights. Was it fun? Dear God, yes, at least for me, some of the most reckless abandon I’d ever been around; but the ugly truths that not everyone enjoyed themselves must be acknowledged.
Objectively, I’d enjoyed myself but even so, I was sick for weeks, could barely walk, had seen the aftermath of multiple assaults, had lost my phone in a theft, 800,000 Ugandan Shillings in (probably) another) as well part of my confidence as a writer- yet my experience wasn’t nearly to the level of many…
Social media leaks began to spring up, anecdotes, firsthand, secondhand, third. Substantiated and less so, of robberies, hundreds of pick-pocket incidents, and a litany of sexual assaults, especially just off the paths that led through the pine forest to the main gates of the festival. It is impossible to allege a concrete number, but one thing was crystallized, that part of the issue was the logistical failings of the Nyege Nyege festival itself.
The fences were patchy and hastily made from flexible bamboo in many places, the grounds incredibly dimly lit (if having any lighting at all), the security spotty at best and clearly not ‘properly looked after’, though this had most certainly been attended to with unnamed millions in past iterations of the party.
With the location chosen on the high bluff over that category of rapids, and the crowd that teemed around the grounds, it is beyond miraculous that no bodies were found washed up days later, bloated and several kilometers downstream from the site of the Itanda Falls.
Reputations in Kampala don’t always fall to those truly responsible for them; such is the case with the creative sector, and, indeed, the music industry. So, who was truly impacted here? Was it the organizers of Nyege? They took a hit, sure, but are back with a vengeance for the 2023 edition.
I’d contend it was worse for the artists there to perform (drastically underpaid as they were) who were literally center stage at a full-scale, internationally famous shit show of chaos. They went to get back on the horse a bit and were promptly thrown from it into a social media driven cesspool. The art wasn’t center stage, the chaos was. Frankly, the artists deserved much better fucking treatment, but such has long been the case- few events have served as an actual blow-by-blow case study of the trend. It was their limelight, but it was tarnished outside of their control.
That is a damned shame, as the musical talent that took the several stages across the 2022 Nyege Nyege Festival was never in doubt. They were, if anything, the only high-mark redemption for that ill-fated event.
We all float on, and some in these circles seem to manage to float above us others. In the days before the festival, in a crowded bar at a more crowded table a former associate of the organizers told me in hushed tones that I should be careful with them, this is a small town, and the power and influence might be too much for them to take criticism lightly, it was less ‘love and light’ than it appeared to be.
In East Africa, everything can be defined as somewhat of a cartel, and Nyege Nyege 2022 helped to shine a light that indeed, there is a cartel for vibes. Sure, there were stories of a massive fraud perpetrated at the hands essentially a singular outside party (in charge of the infamous tents and is rumored to have fled deep into the farthest hills of upcountry Uganda with several briefcases filled with sweaty cash) lawsuits, refunds, backlash, apologies, vast public anger; however, nothing seemed to stick with any sort of true permanence. The party continues, as it always has for those within these haunts.
And it will again, and surely there will be more stories that come out of the 2023 edition of the festival. The vibes have continued, there have been pre parties galore, and the same energy building up. The grounds have changed, back into Jinja town, the level of organizational improvement is yet to be seen.
Such adjustments don’t address the most pressing issue that came out of last year: that women were raped inside of the Nyege Nyege 2022 festival grounds, and that there is a responsibility that should be laid at the feet of the same contingent that have been existing on vibes and a dream out here in Uganda (as well as the region at large) for the last decade or more, having meandered down from Europe, elsewhere in East Africa, wherever they came from; to dance their own little Shangri-La shuffle while ignoring that the music had stopped for so many others trying to be satellites to their orbit.
The stories of those who were assaulted got lost in the same smokescreens, and that is a further shame onto what should have been a high point of partying for all those who went down to Jinja for that weekend.
Will I attend 2023? Indeed, but the veneer is gone, so is the innocence. Instead a weariness has creeped in; the pre-COVID possibilities might really be dead at this point, drowned in a sea of toxic positivity, kitenge pattern covered stages and substantially higher pay slips for the ‘special’ foreign DJs.
It’ll be lit, but hopefully this coming Nyege Nyege won’t signal another farewell to vibes.
