Dress African to see African and think African

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OPINION

By Simon Kaheru

Oluwatosin Oluwole Ajibade walked over to his table with calm elegance last weekend, greeting everybody quite warmly and keeping me for last. In fact, I thought for a few seconds that he had ignored me as he took his seat after the first round of greetings and light chit chat with the guests, specifically Attorney General Kiryowa Kiwanuka and his wife, Sarah.

When he came over to shake my hand, he declared to his companion and the table at large that he was happy to finally meet me.

Oluwatosin’s more popular name is Mr Eazi — by which he is known globally as a highly acclaimed music artiste.

So, you can understand how his statement created emotional kavuyo all around — especially for my wife, who was now hearing yet another reason to value my presence.

To quell, especially my confusion, Mr Eazi quickly explained: “You see, I was telling him (the companion) that all the women here are so beautiful and smart in their traditional outfits, but somehow all the men are wearing suits. I was wondering — do the men in Uganda not have traditional or African clothing?”

“Then I saw you from a distance, and I was happy to find we are at the same table...”

Quite chuffed, I entered crusade mode over why I avoid wearing European-styled suits and neckties. He agreed, as did most others around the table, and a large number of the guests at the event kept remarking on my outfit. It certainly looked “African”, though no one could quite place the culture from whence it was drawn. I had taken a simple route with my seamstress and asked her to make a Snood to match the embellishment on the shirt, which I had randomly wrapped loosely around my neck.

The key result was that it was African, and I was at an African event of a cultural nature about which everything original, authentic and grounded would be deemed appropriate.

The bride and her mother, being fashion designers of note, made it even more imperative for all the guests to be properly decked out.

But because Africa failed to manage the entry of the white man into our continent two hundred years ago, we continue to reap the debilitating fruits of the confusion sown way back then, when our cultures started getting tilled like loose soil. Just that morning, my father had launched a discussion about the flaws in Western Democracy in view of Africa’s traditional styles of leadership.

He wants us to Be Serious about our politics and change the things that simply won’t work for us because we have failed to adopt and implement them as natural to us, Africans.

Because of his deep grounding in Christianity, I cautioned him about the positioning of arguments about belief systems that the Western world brought to Africa, and he smiled. (I agree with him, though.)

These Western belief systems, I explained, are mixed up in our lives and cultures in a way we sometimes find blurring when we try to express our African-ness.

Mr Eazi was impressed, for instance, that none of my children carries an English name, but uses strictly African names, even though not necessarily Ugandan in origin.

Mshukuru, for instance, is the Kiswahili phrase for ‘Gratitude to God’.

In return, I remarked to him how I always found it comforting that so few Nigerians seemed to use European names - and that those I knew with non-African ones were mainly from the Islamic parts of the country.

He told me, this celebrity, that in his culture (language), when you see “Olu” in a name or title, it usually indicates a connection to divinity or leadership — and that “Olúwa” is often translated directly as “The Lord” or “God.”

Our Pan-African discussion at our round table was wide-ranging and drew from our knowledge of African history from school days and our observations of life in Africa as we had travelled around. Sadly, though, in the back of my mind were the ongoing reports of the damning Operation Dudula in South Africa, where Africans are attacking Africans for being in Africa.

Strangely, in a couple of the video clips, you hear some South Africans speaking a language that is starkly similar to some East African languages like my own.

Annoyingly, too many of us on this continent are so ignorant of our own history that we do not realise how close we are as one people - hence uprisings of the nature that we are seeing in South Africa. Even without looking into the distant history of the Cwezi, Ngoni and Ndebele migrations, we should at least recall how some of us stood together during the Apartheid days, right?

Wrong

One elementary explanation I gave some colleagues down south a few weeks ago, deep into the night with its attendant mental fuel, was that we cannot recognise ourselves across this continent because we show up in foreign garb, using foreign names and speak with each other in foreign languages about things non-African.

Where do we start?

Take off our Western suits and neckties as a simple entry point to creating an atmosphere where we can think ‘African’ because we are seeing ‘African’.

www.skaheru.com @skaheru