A Night In The Company Of Thieves. Part 1.
As always, i planned on leaving his place before midnight. We talked as we always do, ate as we discussed Museveni and politics until the food battle was well won. We had always joked lightly about the food we ate, calling ourselves soldiers in the battlefield, and our enemy was the food we had to finish. It was a war we had fought so many times and were yet to win.
This time felt different, however. We won the war, for the first time since we started hanging together. We failed to follow any of the myriad movies we put, which was totally unlike us, and the NBS frontline debate had failed to spark any political conversation. Only raw jokes about Odonga Otto’s choice of clothes which reminded me of a certain twitter influencer with shared taste. He had a lot on his mind and so did I, so we continued lightly joking about the food until it was done, whilst spending most of our time typing away on our smartphones until my headache intensified and the urge to fart just wouldn’t go away. So i felt the need to leave for my place. It was 11pm.
There was something eerie about this particular night but neither of us could place a finger on what exactly didn’t feel right. Was it the full moon hovering over the curfew-emptied roads outside? Was it the headache i had felt all day, or was it the voices we kept on hearing outside…
Tired, sleepy and frustrated by my inability to focus long enough to muse on my plans for the next day, i stood up and decided to leave. And that’s when it happened.
I live a stone’s throw from my cousin’s place, and to avoid LDU’s patrolling for curfew breakers and night-time thugs, i would usually sprint all the way home, hoping to knock over whatever and whoever stood between me and my destination. He’d always leave the gate open such that in case i ran into any trouble i couldn’t knock over, I’d easily sprint back up and go straight in. I didn’t have the energy to do so this time round, so i planned on walking. I was still deciding between walking and running when i heard the voices. Hushed voices from right outside his fence that first caught my attention, and then his. Curious, we tiptoed to the fence to find out what was going on, but they had already moved out of range. Slowly, he opened the gate and we moved out. Curiosity killed the cat but we were rats trying to investigate said murder. From afar, they looked like LDUs. Walking in line formation, stopping infront of every shop to check if it were locked properly, and then moving on. We watched, more out of curiosity than suspicion, until they reached a shop with a security light. As one of them reached for the security light, another turned to look behind and we saw it. And it shook us to the bone. A firm realization that things were not as they seemed, and that we were in grave danger. Shiny, polished and freshly sharpened, it almost glittered as the light from the security lamp they were disabling reflected off it. A panga the size of my arm, and that’s saying a lot. Hanging off a string on the side of his jeans, it looked like a misplaced tail, scraping the ground as he moved along. They all had them. They all holstered them the same way.
He quickly motioned to his people and they turned to look at us. In those few seconds, i knew they were weighing our threat level and deciding whether or not we were worth their time. He even tilted his head as if to say
Are they worth it? Or not? Will they be hard to take down, or not…
All the time gently stroking the handle of his panga with his thumb. This forced me to weigh our odds and realise that my big frame, albeit being accentuated by the muscles and square jaw, and my cousin’s relatively large cum chubby frame would not suffice as much of a threat to panga wielding thugs whose number seemed to have doubled somehow. The guy operating the security lamp successfuly disabled it and we were all thrown into a darkness more absolute than my good friend Ocailap. And that’s saying a lot.
Suddenly, all we could see of them were their silhouettes against the lights in the distance, and it took us a minute to realise that what looked like their silhouettes moving up and down then left and right was actually the thieves running at us, pangas drawn. They were so silent that we only heard their footsteps when they were a couple of metres away. My heart pounded so hard i could feel it in my ears. I crouched, already on the defensive and ready to attack, and from the corner of my eye i saw my cousin ready himself too. Our eyes met, and in that moment, it was silently decided. We would stand our ground. A simple act that had blood rushing through my head. If he was willing to fight alingside me then no army could defeat us. An old african adage goes “ It is wiser to have a brother than a friend as a hunting partner” and now i saw why. All the anger, all the fear and all the hate i could muster flowed through my veins. I could hear my breathing become heavier and heavier and as they drew closer, one word flashed through my mind — RAGE.
