The search for nice girls in Kampala
Sep 18, 2012
There is a story I’ve been meaning to tell for a long time, but never quite got round to it. It involves a friend of mine, we shall call him Steve. It all started with a debate on facebook (where else?) about nice girls and bad guys. Dozens of posts were put up trying to explain why otherwise nice
By Kalungi Kabuye
There is a story I’ve been meaning to tell for a long time, but never quite got round to it. It involves a friend of mine, we shall call him Steve. It all started with a debate on facebook (where else?) about nice girls and bad guys. Dozens of posts were put up trying to explain why otherwise nice girls would let themselves be treated atrociously by the proverbial bad guy.
Steve did not agree to this, and insisted that the world was full of nice girls, and all you had to do was to find them. So a bunch of his friends put him to task to try and find, if he could, any nice girls in Kampala. This then, is his story:
Steve’s premise in his search was that nice girls would obviously be the opposite of bad girls. Since bad girls are found all over bad guys, it can be assumed that nice girls will give bad guys as wide a berth as they can.
So when he met Linda he knew he had found the real thing, finally. She looked like an angel, never complained about anything, and he loved the way she talked. And they talked about almost everything- how the world is in such a lousy state, how people are no longer well behaved, and morals gone to hell.
They discussed the bad guy fallacy, and she insisted that what she wanted was a guy who appreciated her. She was no excitement junkie, Linda said, and wanted a nice guy like Steve who would treat her right.
They went to movies, out for dinner, and it seemed all she wanted was his company. Till one evening they were having a drink when her ex walked in. When she saw him she became all flustered, and almost dropped her drink.
Now her ex was one of those proverbial bad guys, who treated women like they were half wits. He walked up to them and demanded for a book he had given her when they were still together. It so happened that she had it in her car so she went to get it.
When she was away he sat down and started a conversation, or rather he told Steve, “what’s wrong with that woman? She can never do anything right, how do you deal with her? Is she daft or what?” He said the last when she was within earshot.
The ex-guy just grabbed the book without as much as a thank you, and left Linda still all shaken up, whispering ”the guy must have put juju on me’. So Steve figured she still had her bad boy fixation, and moved on.
Next Steve chose to check out what kind of girls worked in banks. Bank work is notoriously dull, so were the girls just as boring and dull? Not really, he found out, and they were extremely good dressers. He’d never seen girls as smart as those working in a bank.
But banker girls dealt with some real big guys, with equally big accounts, and no nice guys ever got to that level. So bank girls tend to admire those bad guys, and generally ignored the Steve types, who often earned less than they did, anyway. No nice girls there, then.
On Sundays, Steve goes to one of those Pentecostal churches, the ones with big bands and pretty girls. How were the girls here? Since they were born-again he reckoned they would be those ‘love your neighbour as you love yourself’ types, and with God’s help would see through bad guys.
But, just as in banks and corporate offices, he found there are bad guys also in church. Those who could sing like larks, although they had manners like a backstreet barman and lacked any finesse. But because they could hold that note forever, and preached the world out of that microphone, those Christian girls just adored them. Not Steve’s type, then.
Steve’s first girl was a journalist, but that was before she actually started working. Soon she started going to these press conferences where big men (read bad guys) presided, and met more of them on all those cocktail parties she covered.
How was Steve supposed to appear interesting and appealing at the end of the day when she had just been talking to Gerald Albright, Akon, and posed for pictures with Shaggy? And the last week Chameleone had been telling her about his new album launch. Another dead end.
What about models? Maybe that stereotype of a vain, self-centred girl was all wrong. Steve knew a few fashion photographers, so he started hanging out with them, trying to catch the eye of a model or two.
What he found was that it was not stereotype at all, but the truth. If a girl’s dream was to appear on a giant billboard so all the world would be looking at her, she definitely had no time for the likes of Steve. Besides, the only eye they wanted to catch was of the photographer who would put them there, and maybe the modelling scout to get them the job. Nothing doing there then, too.
At the end of the day, exhausted, stressed, and extremely disappointed, Steve went to a nearby pub for a drink. There were not many people, so he sat at the counter where a not bad looking bar girl was in attendance.
Before he knew it he was telling bar girl all about his search for nice girls in Kampala, and failure to find any. Turned out she knew about bad guys well enough, for she saw them everyday at her pub, and could not count the number of girls she had soothed afterwards.