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| Serena Williams cups her breasts (Photo may be subject to copyright) |
BY WABUYI DENIS
The current Covid-19 scourge will definitely leave a mark on our lives and may also change us forever. This change we shall carry on to the future generations without telling them why it was necessary.
One of these days I have started imagining my children's children having to wear a mask covering their mouth and nose without knowing the real reason why. And innocently, they will also carry it on to future generations. These generations may also take it without asking.
If you're doubting this, tell me the reason why African girls cover their breasts? Does anyone have a genuine founded reason as to why it is "indecent" for an African girl to move topless at a beach the same way a man does? No. It was just carried from somewhere and adopted as a way of life.
It reminds me of Gilbert Bukenya (fromer Vice President of Uganda) when asked why he supported NRM for that long and thus being part of a regime that impoverished his people. He retorted that he was also innocently carrying ekifulukwa whose content he did not know; he accepted without asking.
Apart from a few uptown girls, majority people born before the new Millennium should bear me witness that while growing up in our villages, we would go to the garden with our mothers. As the sun rose and it got hot, the women would pull off their blouses, tie them around the waist and leave their breasts out.
The same woman would come back home, walking all the way from Shituulo to Namunyu without attracting any stares because along the way, we would find even men hanging their shirts on the backs as the sun got hotter.
I also don't know when breasts became private parts but the first time I saw it was in the movies. Then one time we escaped from school went to Kingfisher resort in Bukaya. There, I saw women covering their breasts and not covering their butts. It was my bewilderment that drew the attention of the attendants to arrest and flog us for trespassing. By then, flogging a kid was a community responsibility and somehow, those matters simply ended like that without involving the parents and the schools.
But at the resort, I could not imagine someone taking trouble to cover their breasts and not minding about their butts. Maybe because the butts of the other generation had depressions inflicted by injections and "riding bicycle'' that we never saw our predecessors (in Africa) display them with pomp.
Thus, from our setting a man or woman could carry on with their activities topless and it is not regarded indecent but if you move with your bottoms out, that would earn you a day at Kanyanya’s shrine to conjure the ancestors! But of course if you have been watching movies or your parents have, it is the opposite; cover the breast, let the buttocks swag!
And as times surely change and people prefer to shed off more clothes, I picture future generations being asked to cover the faces so that they don't see each other's private parts. In their wisdom or rather lack of it, they won’t realise that it all started with covering the mouths and nose to protect ourselves from Covid-19. I do not wish to live in those times but I equally don't find reason for wearing clothes if all our faces are covered! If the face mask falls off and you get to see all the undressed people around you, you will endure it; the same way we endure when wind carries a woman’s dress and she takes a minute to pull it back or rather the way we villagers are trained; when you happen to see an elder naked, close your eyes.
I will end this by thanking President Museven for the lockdown. It has pushed some of us into a creativity (you may read idle) mode. Some people from Mayuge are working on the cure. But some of me here, in Busiu are also helping the world with ideas which will shape society after the Kadaga’s cure has been launched and the whole world cured of COVID-19!
WABUYI DENIS
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