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.