CANDID TALK: Why the devil lives in Uswaz despite our religiosity

What you need to know:

  • It is believed by my friends and foes alike that I should long have been confined to that ‘horror’ house where they treat hollering people gone gaga because, as Winchinslauss Rwegoshora (BA, MA Dip UDSM) avers, I have in the past made a goof of God’s ‘servants’ (did I say God or Satan?) and gotten away with it.

Welcome to this mad column written by a bloke fitting the profile of a Mirembe Madhouse patient. Also, prepare yourself for a comatose for I am dying to bore you stiff, my dear reader, and I have no apologies. It is believed by my friends and foes alike that I should long have been confined to that ‘horror’ house where they treat hollering people gone gaga because, as Winchinslauss Rwegoshora (BA, MA Dip UDSM) avers, I have in the past made a goof of God’s ‘servants’ (did I say God or Satan?) and gotten away with it.

Winch swears by all the gods of Lake Victoria, Mt Kilimanjaro that the good Lord upstairs will someday unleash his wrath in form of fire and brimstone upon me if I continue to be a stiff-necked moron insisting on rubbishing religious doctrines that have been garnered over centuries by clever folks.

See? We live in religious times and are supposed to put on a holier-than-thou disposition. We are instructed to seek the elusive holiness. Our piousness should be one that is capable of turning away angels with shame – we should exceed the angels in their commitment, love, kindness etc. According to Fr Ruteshobya, the Uswaz padre, we are supposed to walk, breath, talk, love in the same way that the Nazarene did some 2,000 years ago when he proved that on did not need water ski boards for he comfortably walked on water.

The Nazarene proved something else more appealing to the likes of I, the Uswahilinite; that there was no need for money-guzzling drinking holes such as Mzee Shirima’s beer drinking hole he could convert water into beer. I sometimes wish that we, in cockroach and rat-infested Uswaz had been living in that golden era, for I would not have to be enriching Mzee Shirima the bar owner.

Recently, a man I have always seen at Mzee Shirima’s beer drinking hole stormed into the newsroom seeking the help of any fearless and tough scribe who could smoke out the padre. His sole mission was to expose the evil that the cassock-dressing, ever smiling Fr. Ruteshobya of the Uswaz Parish had unleashed upon him. His beady bloodshot eyes darted from one corner of the room to another, as if expecting the ‘good’ old padre to pop up from somewhere. From his looks, he was indeed a man already in deep pain – a beat man ready to throw himself from the top of PPF towers.

As he talked to the scribe a few meters away from where I was sited, I gathered that his local “Baba Paroko” had been having some steamy unholy and illicit intimacies with the poor man’s wife – the wife he had ‘bought’ with fifty breathing cows for. What a blasphemy? How could the man accuse God’s (…errr devil’s) own representative of such sin? My nosy scribe’s brain ran fast. I knew here to find him. On that day, I arrived at Mzee Shirima’s at 5.00 on the dot. I expected to find the fellow drowning himself to death in beer - drunk like a skunk. He poured out his heart to me, a stranger - talking of how the padre sired his second and third born children.