My village, Gitegi, would want to feel good, like the rest of the country, when a big public holiday comes knocking. However, a number of factors conspire to ensure that we remain miserable and barely derive any joy from national commemorations.
What would we be celebrating? Harold runs Gitegi like a personal kiosk. National leaders void our village, and administrators skirt around it like it does not exist.
Even the pretentious district officers and chiefs, who scribble down horrible speeches and deliver them to a handful of disinterested people in the name of representing the president during national holidays, avoid this village.
It goes without saying, therefore, that Gitegi will not be swallowed in the razzmatazz that will be seen in the rest of the country when a national holiday comes around.
The shopping centre will be bustling with the usual mundane activity, with small crowds of men, who smoke for hours on end, discussing pretty unimportant topics, such as Arsenal’s laughable season, and women updating each other on the latest gossip.
To take advantage of what should, ideally, be a big day, Harold has organized a mega-crusade.
To this manipulative maniac, Gitegi was unshackled from very evil spirits and very bad men when he initially took over leadership, and he feels that is the self-rule that we should be celebrating. Plus, easy money.
See, you have to be an aggressive wheeler-dealer if you wish to survive while doing nothing important in Gitegi. You have to lack shame and go all out to swindle people without worrying the gods will drop pepper into your mouth at night.
Harold has, therefore, spent the week guilt-tripping us all into spending our Madaraka Day in his church, and generously giving to Caesar what does not belong to him.
The fear of religious institutions, and the fear of Harold’s empty threats have this village in a chokehold.
This is how Gitegi will look like today and tomorrow: Just beside Sue’s pub, the crusade will be kicking off this evening. The goal is to convert as many drunkards as possible. But knowing Harold, who preaches wine and drinks it, the proximity is for exactly that reason, and also because he knows, as a serial drunkard, how generous inebriated people can be.
This Madaraka is likely to make us in Gitegi mad haraka sana.
