Sometimes The Home Grown Man Is Best

When the late Princess Diana married Prince Charles in the 80s, it was not a wedding. It was THE wedding! Shown on TV, globally, it drew an audience well into the millions and for years to come, Diana was the talk of the world. Academically she was daft (a mere two O-levels), but she was a stunner who could flutter her eyes in a provocative and sexual manner, enough to bring most men to their knees.

Then the cracks appeared and by the time she and Charles parted company, the daggers and machetes were out. In those days, Face Book and Twitter didn’t exist so they leaked information on each other to the media. The highlight was when Diana bared all on a BBC documentary about her ‘harrowing’ marriage to Charles.

I remember watching the documentary in a normally screaming pub in South London except that this time, it was so quiet, you could hear a pin drop. By the time she was done and the verdict was read, Charles was vilified as the most hated man in the UK.

Closer to home, I woke up on a Tuesday to a screaming headline in New Vision: “I was abused” and underneath it, a picture of our own, Princess Komuntale and hubby, Christopher Thomas.

Komuntale and Thomas had called it quits, though in a rambling press statement, Komuntale didn’t reveal the specifics as to why the marriage had run its course.

But on Face Book, their dirty private muck was being thrown about for us to read. In one post, Thomas says: “Her family is broke, they have no money. Everyone knows this. It’s no secret and I want my ring back.” But the killer and perhaps inexcusable allegation was that she had sores all over her body as well as having herpes. And the muck is still being flung.

In our parents’ generation, marriages were not always rosy. They too, had their fair share of problems - be it money, infidelity and a whole host of other problems. But somehow they battled it out. Yes, the muck was thrown. They argued, they fought and they screamed, but certainly not for public consumption and certainly not in front of the children. When the dust settled and the broken pieces were picked up, one thing that was not bound to happen was divorce. It was not an option.

Komuntale didn’t have a father figure in her life so I guess she never got to understand how the male psyche works. Her dad, the former king, died when she was still a tot and growing up, she was tossed to the sidelines because the spotlight was always on her brother King Oyo, who the world had an interest in seeing he was the world’s youngest ruling monarch.

There is a good chance that if her other ‘father’, the late Col. Muhammer Gadaffi, were still alive today, Thomas would not be slinging the muck on FB. He would have been like a chicken thief on the run, hiding out in the slums of Harlem or seeking refuge in derelict and rat infested buildings of the bankrupt city of Detroit while fighting for stale bread with the roaches and the rats. He would have been doing all that because Gadaffi would have put a fatwa on his head for ruining his ‘daughters’ life.

Now that Komuntale is single, perhaps she has learnt a lesson that Ugandan women of today do not want to grasp. Foreigners – be it American’s or otherwise, may not be the best. That Ugandan man over in the next village with the cassava plantation and malwa joint could be just the right man to give eternal bliss.