“SCHOOL OFFICIAL held for sodomising 6o pupils,” screamed the front page of the Saturday edition of Uganda’s Daily Monitor newspaper. Of course I had to comment, to poke my nose, because not only is she (and by she, I mean Uganda, not umukobwa) Rwanda’s neighbor to the north, is also my other home. When I read that headline, I scanned around for a nearby shade, bent my knees, and thanked God that I was not a father who would perhaps have had to explain the total input of that headline to an inquisitive nine-year-old daughter. After I was done with that, one of my boys passed me my sword and dagger, a very trusted, efficient combination, and off I moved to more befitting thoughts about the culprit. The story says, by the way, that the monster responsible was the school’s librarian. A librarian! Because the last time we checked, book keepers were supposed to be these meek, almost docile, stressed and hunch-backed, over-worked laborers of the world too stressed and physically sapped to even contemplate undertaking such a literally back-breaking venture. I have been to the Kigali Library Services in Kacyiru a few times when I’m broke and reading a good magazine seems like the only sane option to pursue, but I can gladly report that I have not seen a male employee with man-eating traits. You know, the Tsavo man-eaters was the term applied to a pair of notorious man-eating lions that would later be responsible for the death of scores of Indian construction workers on the Kenya-Uganda railway line between March and December 1898. Like you can see, the point of this particular para is to stress the fact that the act of a school official “sodomising” (what a word!) 60 of his charges does not belong in this day and age. Saturday Monitor (Uganda’s) front page: “School official held for sodomising 6o pupils.” What does the world think? I later posted on one of the popular social networking forums which I won’t name because I don’t give free adverts to social networking sites. The world (well, my small private world of social media “friends”) did not seem in the least thrilled by the status update. And after waiting for near-eternity, the answer to my question streamed in and read: “That Ugandans have stamina”! Yes, just read the status update again. Meanwhile, if you have ever considered me to be a friend and are non-Ugandan, now is the time to start briefing me on the nitty-gritty of your country’s immigration laws, because who wants to associate their name and hard-earned reputation with a country in which such an ogre finds work in, of all places, a library –a school library at that?!
