The evening before;
A friend hinted there might be a nationwide internet blackout, but I was too preoccupied with the security situation back home to do anything about it.
I also didn’t have the chance to share this bit of intel until it was too late.
As I type this out, I have a message languishing in Whatsapp purgatory – that annoying place where it’s trying too hard to be delivered, but won’t leave and deleting it will only make it vanish on one side and when/if the Internet is restored, have it promptly show up in my contacts’ DMs proclaiming doom and gloom like a second rate prophet.
My sleep routine was also thrown off by this new turn of events as I had no social media platforms or tech and entertainment sites courting me as I waited for sleep to show up.
Without Whatsapp statuses, movie news and tiktok vids, I resigned myself to renaming my contacts – adding second names, changing nicknames and reordering the way the names were previously saved (‘First name, last name’ became ‘last name, first name’).
The day of;
Woke up earlyish to have a brief discussion about what time we’d go voting. I proposed 9am but, figuring, that would be late, we agreed to 7.30am.
The internet blackout robbed me of the motivation to glance at my phone screen with my usual regularity, so there will be no timestamps going forward. If it helps, all this happens in the morning of January 14th, 2021.
The elections shouldn’t really motivate you to go into your wardrobe looking for the ‘right’ outfit – you’re not meeting people for drinks, hooking up or trying to make an impression.
You’re standing around in a queue with a bunch of strangers waiting for a chance to lumber over to a basin, hunch over, place a tick on a few sheets of paper, get your finger stained and move on.
But…
People have been finicky over colours lately which means if your pants should sag and so much as expose the ‘wrong’ colour of underwear you may attract the wrong kind of attention.
I settled on a black t-shirt because;
I wanted to make a statement about the current state of democracy the world over
Moving about topless only makes sense when you’ve got abs and shit
- It was kinda nippy and this is the WORST time to pick up a cold
- No political party has looked at the spectrum and gravitated towards the dark side
Our polling station is pretty close by, so I threw on a pair of converse sneakers that, like some political leaders, have refused to retire and headed out.
Quick FYI, I was in the company of a babe with Bantu knots and a baby – well, I thought they were Bantu knots, the Internet was off and all google was good for was enlisting a dinosaur for a solo marathon.
The line at the polling station didn’t look very intimidating and suggested we’d be in and out in no time. I took my place on a (useless) raised platform and waited.
Like a third world country in the middle of an election period, there was little in the way of progress and the only hints of movement were the yellow posters in the distance featuring a candidate with a smile that suggested he knew something we didn’t.
Babe with baby and Bantu Knots decided to leave the line for a bit because reasons, which worked to her advantage because people just kept urging her to move ahead of them.
As she moved ahead, it became apparent that this was actually a glacier that identified as a queue… and chose to maintain its inborn pace.
Done, baby and with Bantu Knots came back to bid me farewell, prompting people to ask whether they could borrow the baby and jump ahead.
With all the extra time, I was able to take in my surroundings and profile people.
The police guy that was assigned this polling station liked to twirl his baton quite a bit and I imagine in another life, he would have made for a decent cheerleader.
Further back, a gentleman kept observing that we were moving really slowly and would likely get rained on before we got to the ballot boxes. I imagine he was a meteorologist. . . pretty sure he wasn’t a rocket scientist.
The (still useless) raised platform and I got to know each for a bit before the queue started to move… a little, this progression was soon halted when a gentleman leaped out of his 4 Wheel Drive and jumped the queue, prompting what I assume was a cultural attaché to complain about the “Mujardin” to “baton twirler”.
The “wannabe cheerleader” listened intently, because really, what else was he going to do, before breaking down the different classes of people who were ‘allowed’ to assume that everyone else had nothing better to do and just cut ahead of them.
“You see, that one is an Executive. The people who are allowed to get ahead are the executives, women with babies, women about to deliver babies, really old people and the lame.”
As you may have surmised from my declaration that I walked to the polling station, I could not be placed in the “Executive” or “really old people” categories. Also, the by-line makes it pretty clear that I am neither a woman with a baby nor a woman about to deliver one. And my god-awful puns surprisingly don’t place me in the last category.
There’s no provision for people who do the light work in the baby making process.
A lady remarked that she was, in fact, pregnant and baton-twirler, now pivoted to his other career as a pseudo gynaecologist and declared she wasn’t.
He also said she was just ‘fat’ but retracted the statement as fast as a person that had just realised this internet ban thing wasn’t going to last forever and the two ‘woke’ people among us would tweet so hard, no cheerleading outfit would want his gynaecological baton-twirling ass to join their outfit.
As a bonus, he also let her cut ahead of the rest of us regular folk who had nothing better to do.
Looking around, I was a little surprised that there were no slay queens among us. We were smack in the middle of the ghetto, but surely, they have places they retreat to when they are not sitting by bar counters throwing back shots of BRRRCARRDD and RIME. Try as I might, I couldn’t see Scantily-Clad-‘Shanti.
As the glacier identifying as a queue continued its journey, the meteorologist took it upon himself to keep us updated… well, the polling agents, if I’m being honest, the rest of us were collateral damage. The news channel would later bestow the title Ugandan Election Weather Analyst on him…if they covered our polling station.
The media houses of note were out watching the noteworthy candidates vote themselves. I don’t remember seeing a story on Katumba voting and while I want to put that down to the possibility that he wasn’t old enough to approach a ballot box, it’s more likely he was mobbed by groupies, hot off his chart-topping, club banger, “I have no manifesto”.
It occurred to me that there was a possibility there really were some slay queens among us and they were just not in character – the internet was off, after all, and make up tutorials are hard to follow by SMS. I couldn’t dwell on this for too long as a young lady was making her way towards the queue with the sinister determination of a person out to storm the capital city.
Turns out I was wrong, she went all the way to the back, waited for a bit and figured she was better off picking up a drink. And because it was not “Siminoff Ayisi”, it’s safe to assume this was not “Scanti ‘Shanti”. The back of her jumper had the words “Masta Peace” which was as sad as it was ironic, but to dwell on this is to take the piss and I have not mastered that.
Speaking of, the polling station wreaked of what could best be described as fermented urine.
I finally got within reach of the sanitation station, signifying the end was at hand AND SOPs were an afterthought {in case you’re wondering, it was water and magic detergent. How do we survive COVID-19 in the ghetto? It’s magic!) … then a lady came out of nowhere and placed herself in the space between myself and the guy in front of me – this is what you get for trying to social distance.
She ‘apologised’ for this, claiming this really was her spot – something you’d think I’d remember after spending a chunk of my adulthood here – but before I could say anything, the guy standing behind me said we’d let this slide because she was beautiful.
Her modesty (possibly her one redeeming quality) wouldn’t take this and she said beauty comes from within and not without – “A person’s character, not their booty” . . . which no doubt led to the guys who were inconvenienced by this intrusion to conclude that she was unattractive af.
She attempted to make up for it by showing me a couple of memes… which started off well enough – “see this animal, it’s doing things animals don’t do, it’s funny, lol”, “see this baby, he is saying things babies can’t, loler” , “Cast your eyes upon this Bobi Wine meme, it’s funny because it’s true, loleth”, but by the 310th I’d decided I owed a lot of my friends an apology – if I’ve ever subjected you to this kind of behaviour, please FORGIVE ME.
I had no idea how painful having to pretend you’ve not seen these things is. . .especially if you’re not wearing a mask.
While we’re on the topic of wearing things, Scanti ‘Shanti finally showed up as I made my way to the, erm, polling table – I think that’s what it was, anyway, but going by the sheer number of officials present – useful and otherwise, it could have been the local chapter of a third world country’s cabinet.
Scanti looked a little worse for wear, no doubt a horrible side effect of Snapchat withdrawal.
I walked over to the table, flashed my ID and was instructed to make my way to election officials that would likely have chosen watching milk boil over charting a path for our nation’s democratic process.
There’s only so much ‘swag’ you can display when you’re hunched choosing your preferred candidate, so outside of whipping out my sanitiser, not much happened… until I got to the end…
You can’t help but feel a sense of empathy for the last official at the polling station – his/her first batch of colleagues are charged with going through the register and making sure you can vote (that’s power), the next lot have the ballot papers which determine the fates of the candidates (that’s more power… and a lie in some banana republics) and then finally, there’s him/her…
All they do is sit there with a little bottle of ink waiting for you to come and dip your finger in there – they can’t even bully you into dipping a specific finger in an attempt to wield a hint of power – NO! THE PINKY… THE PINKY, I SAY!!!- they just sit there, powerless and take whatever you throw at them – like a lot of voters, actually.
This may explain why my thumb ended up looking like a Game of Thrones extra… or lead character, actually.
As I exited the polling station, I was filled with dread that I would run into MemeLord who would no doubt be eager to share the other chapters of her Meme Encyclopaedia and I would be too powerless to banish her to whatever realm from whence she came.
Luck was on my side – she’d left… or was enthralling some other stranger with pictures of dogs with speech bubbles… or maybe she hooked up with the dude who let her jump the queue… Whatever it was, it beat rushing home to rearrange my phonebook for kicks.
