The Champion's League Heineken Bash

The Dutch. There is little we hear or know about them and as far as I am aware, their contribution to the advancement of mankind has been to cut down trees to make clogs for us to wear and getting some stupid young boy to stick his fist into a hole in the dam to save the city from flooding.


If you wiped the Dutch from the face of the earth, it wouldn’t be news. So they set about trying to reinvent themselves by turning a beer that was brewed in 1833 into a brand that is instantly recognizable all over the world.

Last Sunday Juliana Kagwa, who I am led to believe ‘wears the knickers’ for Heineken in Uganda, decided to throw us a bash as we watched the Champion’s League Final between two German teams whose names I can’t remember and quite frankly, really can’t be bothered to Google or ask anybody on the sports desk.

As far as parties go, this was not a party. It was more than that. It was a celebration of sports, beer and how to effectively market a brand by using a dozen or so young female beauties whom, I am sure must have had their busts and butts laser measured to make sure that they conform to the size and finesse that a Heineken drinker would appreciate.

Indeed, when I walked into Sheraton hotel, I was amazed at the amount of drool and driblets of malusu there was at the entrance. I was going to put it down to the cleaners not having done a good job until, I saw them. Brown Heineken Girl and who had a butt that looked like the back end of a Toyota Celica was in my face trying to put an arm band onto my wrist.

I barely had enough time to wipe away my malusu which had stained my t-shirt when, Tall Legged Heineken Girl approached. She was everything and all she lacked was a sign on her butt to read: “G-string caught between my butt cheeks; hence I have to walk slowly.”

Heineken Girls were a not a distraction but a nuisance because they were good looking and they had legs as long as the Empire State Building that sent we men into ga-ga land.

When the match started, NTV ‘Men’ presenter Peter Igaga, the man who betrays us real men on his weekly talk show by revealing our secrets and I, were the real winners. We were, because everybody else including the Kagawa brothers – Tendo and Gonza and some zungu – er, what’s his name… ah, Milutin 'Micho' Sredojević (whom I really didn’t think had a clue about football) were glued to the match. Peter and I on the other hand, were focused on the Heineken Girls, the beer buckets and the chipolatas that Godfrey Gyagenda and Sam Kalule, Sheraton’s banqueting managers made sure passed our table every five minutes.

When the football match finally came to a close, the match Peter and I had with the beer was impressive enough – three cartons each.

But there was something to ponder as we drove home. First, it was arguably the best corporate bash thrown this year. Second, as it was a stone throw away from CPS, ‘responsible drinking’ kicked in so we used a driver. And lastly, this is a direct appeal to Juliana. “Babe, you got a nice beer but at 8k a bottle, it be a squeeze. You know the embeera – a dime be tight these days!”

Faked Accents

This accent thing has gone too far. I know I do have an accent because some people have difficulty in comprehending what I am trying to say.


Upon my return from England many years ago, Mark Muyobo, who is a tight, introduced me to the delights of Ntinda and especially Yakobo’s. I like my pork and made it a point of going there whenever the opportunity arose.

Often I would go with Mark – if not other Tights. On one occasion when Mark and Tights were not available, I took myself there and did the needful. In those days, I used to drink Bell beer and when it was time to go, and had asked Waitress for the bill, she said: “No problem”. However, upon her return, she didn’t have a bill but a bottle of Bell. I was puzzled and for one reason or another I took it as being ‘Yakobo’s giving back to the customer’. Two beers down the road and this time, I stood up and gathered my stuff and that is when she presented the bill.

There was nothing like ‘Yakobo’s giving back to the customer’ for I had been billed for the extra two beers I had taken. I later found out that whenever I said the word ‘bill’, they heard beer. Since then, I ask for a receipt to avoid any confusion.

Ugandan’s want to have accents but, they don’t like their regional accent. They want to talk like a Briton or an American and to an extent a New Zealander or Australian.

Early this year, I went rafting with Adrift. The New Zealanders, who run Adrift, have been very good in that they have taught the local boys how to raft, how to be instructors and taken them to Canada and beyond for rafting competitions.

In return, Local Boys have not only been loyal to them but have adopted New Zealand accents. When Local Boy was giving us instructions on what were we supposed to do, I didn’t click a word he was saying. In fact, one of the real New Zealander’s whispered over to me that he can barely understand a word he (Local Boy) says whenever he opens his mouth. “He makes such a bad attempt at a New Zealand accent, but I let it pass” he said.

Then there is Moses. Moses comes from a small town called Rushere which, is about an hour’s drive from Rwakitura. To the best of my knowledge, Moses has been ‘abroad’ three times – the first when he left Rushere to come to Kampala, the second when he went to Entebbe airport and the third, when he went to England for a ten day conference.

Upon his return from England, surprise, surprise, he had an accent and it was a bad accent at that. Have you ever heard a Munyankole speaking with an English accent? Absolutely awful! Even if they lived in England for twenty plus years, they would still not get it right. But Moses persists and each time he persists, he goes from bad to worse.

On the other hand, Greg Petzer is South African and has been living in Uganda for the past seven years along with his family. He and Lee Ann have three wonderful kids whom I met days after they landed in Uganda. In the course of their time here, I have seen their accents change from an Afrikaans one to our Ugandan/English. It can be quite freaky when you hear them speak but can’t see them and you assume they are Ugandan kids. And when they pop round the corner, LOL, white South Africans!

The Experiments

At school, I was never into science. I liked experimenting but not experimenting on issues that had to do with science.


Godfrey Kitagenda, was a school friend whom I have not seen since 1982. I don’t know if he is alive and where one can find him and whilst I have tried looking for him on facebook, it has yielded no results. So Godfrey, if you happen to be reading this article, do give me a call.

Godfrey too, liked to experiment and suffice to say he was no Isaac Newton John or Albert Einstein. When it came to exam time, while the rest of the school had buckled down to burn the midnight oil and doing as much cramming as possible, Godfrey was in bed and fast asleep. In fact, Godfrey was the only person in school who got enough sleep during the two weeks of exams.

His theory was simple enough. He would put his books under his pillow and through some form of ‘scientific energy’, the material would be transferred from the books and to his brain.

I don’t know how he managed to convince me but I did give it a shot. Suffice to say, when the results came out, we had both failed. I abandoned him and while he persisted, he never passed.

This is embarrassing. During one holiday, Godfrey came up with a classic – of let’s perm our pubic hair. Seeing that it was fashionable for men to perm their head hair in the 80s, so why not our pubic hair? So we did. We didn’t go to a saloon – how would we explain ourselves to the hairdresser?

Instead we bought a home kit – if I recall, it was called Curly Kit and one half term, we did the needful.

We spread the formula all over our pubes and waited. What we didn’t know, is that when it starts to burn, you are supposed to wash it out immediately but that did not occur to us for we thought we knew better.

We got burnt. No, tell a lie, we were more than burnt. We had third degree burns. We had pink patches that turned septic and at one point started to ooze a discharge that had the most horrible smell. And there was nobody we could go to – not even the school nurse.

We endured a month of agony until the pink patches dried up and we were able to have a communal shower rather than having to wait up until midnight when the rest of the dorm had gone to bed.

Campus was an eye opener and my neighbour, Rachael Moss, looked like the quintessential ‘English girl-next door’ but who hid a dark secret. She was into drugs - not the heavy stuff like crack, heroin or cocaine but marijuana and Moroccan black.

On one of my birthdays, she gave me a cake which she said she had baked. It was a nice cake and unknown to me, she had baked some drugs into it. I got high. I had hallucinations. My brain went into a total meltdown that I couldn’t remember how to do the simplest like tie my shoe laces or how to get into bed. It freaked me out.

I do know people who are into cocaine and I have seen how it has messed them up. While Hollywood may glamorize the drug industry, it’s not worth it. If you don’t end up being a crack head, you will end up like Iryn Namubiru who now languishes in a Japanese jail.

The Gym

I have a phobia for gyms. I smirk at them and the people who use them. I see no reason why anybody would want to spend hours on a tread mill or lifting weights. “What for” I ask?

Kabira Country Club arguably has one of the best equipped gyms in the country as do Serena and Sheraton hotels. And I hear in the mornings and as early as five am, they are packed to the rafters with people who I presume are slobs, overweight and did not bother looking after their bodies when they were younger like I did. 

I am lean. I don’t have a shred of fat on me and I recently took part in the London marathon albeit, by watching it on television and with a beer in one hand. And to be honest, while I do know some fat people, I pretend to like them because it is not socially acceptable to dislike people who are fat. But seeing that I am entitled to an opinion, I will say it again – fat people and I don’t gel. Ok!

There is somebody I recently met who goes by the names of Billy Christian. Billy is a likeable person. He also has a body that looks like a pile of concrete and reinforced steel meshed together so I figured he must go to the gym. And he does because he is a full time fitness trainer at the Royal Suites. When I met Billy, I made the mistake of telling him that: “One day, I want to have a body like yours.”

It was an off-the-cuff comment and I should have known better because the last time I made that kind of statement, Peter Mukulu, a trainer at Munyonyo put me through the paces that even Rambo or Chuck Norris would have had difficulty with.

While the gym at Royal Suites is not as decked out as Serena, Sheraton, Speke or Kabira, it nevertheless holds its own. For the past five days, Billy has put through a rigid system and I can already feel the benefits because I can now open a bottle of Coke without the opener hurting my hand. I can also carry a bag of shopping a couple of yards to the car and not feel any pain. 

When I speak, I find myself ashamedly speaking of things that confuse me like squat thrusts, press-up’s, dead-lifts, pull-ups, double unders, snatch, kip and chipper. I feel ashamed because in reality, when Billy put me through the paces, I was a lost cause, a waste of space!

It is a tall order to look at people who are fat and running on the tread mill in a bid to lose weight. I feel like shouting at them: “Hey don’t bother. Keep on eating the donuts, the French fries, the fried chicken and the pizza’s because you will never lose the weight. You are destined to be fat for the rest of your life. And don’t worry about the high blood pressure or cholesterol either for no matter what you do, you are destined to end up six foot under in a wooden box.”

Like I have already said, going to the gym is not for me but for the slobs and the fat people who need it most. I will continue doing the marathons and any fitness exercise my body needs by watching it on television and with a beer at hand. It’s much easier and the best thing about it, at the end you feel ‘fit’ if not slightly blazed, and you didn’t even have to break sweat!