Rendezvous

The first time I entered a kafunda, in 2001, I didn’t even know what the word meant. I knew, of course, that I had gone into a small bar. I was sixteen and a Form 4 student at Hassan Turabi Education Centre, better known and stylized as Bweyogerere SS, a very strict Muslim boarding school where corporal punishment was rampant. The son of separated parents, I spent my school holidays with my polygamous Muslim father in Butaleja when not with my born-again Christian mother in Bugolobi.

Bugolobi then was, as it still is, one of the brighter suburbs of Kampala, a source of pride for those who lived there and envy for those who didn’t. The market-abutting slum area known as Middle East, notorious for loud music and frequent fights in dingy drinking joints, was attractive to many, drawing patrons young and old from everywhere, including the nearby flats and bungalows with a cosmopolitan air to fascinate a teenage villager getting used to city life. We lived in one of the bungalows, ordinary folks among wealthy people whose children attended international schools and inside whose compounds fierce dogs barked while I walked past the gates, fantasizing about possessing a beautiful house someday.

While I was a practicing Muslim when staying with my father in Butaleja, in Bugolobi I was a practicing Christian. Some Sundays my mother would persuade me and my sisters to go with her to Rural Evangelical Christian Church, a haven among the flats for the born-again faithful. At home the radio was permanently tuned to Impact FM, a Christian station that featured divisive preachers who demonized other faiths, especially Islam. This irritated me to the extent that sometimes I covered my ears with my bare hands, eager for some relief and wishing I could take a walk. At school I felt even worse, bothered by the Islamic fundamentalism championed by stick-wielding teachers and sheikhs who urged discrimination against nonbelievers.

It was while trying to escape the toxic mix of religious extremism that I became a Bugolobi boy, although I had yet to make any serious friends there by 2001. Well, there was one, a classmate named Yusuf Ngarukiye, a light-skinned, tall and slender Rwandan with a deep voice who had transferred to Bweyogerere SS from Makerere College School because, it was said, his guardian wanted to pump Islam in him. All the pretty girls in our class seemed to have a crush on him, at the expense of the rest of us. But something about Yusuf’s ways and style seemed familiar, that unmistakable yearning for freedom, and so we were destined to become friends. When he didn’t go to Kigali during the holidays he happened to live with his cousin brother and a roommate in a furnished apartment in the flats, not far from where we lived.

*

One afternoon in 2001 Yusuf asked me to go with him somewhere nearby. We walked a very short distance and entered a pub with a bamboo fence. Inside were several girls and boys about our age, casually seated on plastic chairs around stools or small tables in open and partitioned gazebos, chatting, drinking and merrymaking. Others were at the counter, watching TV, enjoying music, and playing pool. They greeted Yusuf as if they knew him well, shaking his hand with smiles and intimate gestures but looking at me curiously, perhaps wondering where I had come from. He quickly introduced me, after which we pulled seats and joined the group in conversation about music, movies, football, school, family, and so on. The banter felt oddly therapeutic as we jokingly blew steam by sharing personal stuff, stories that we would not have shared anywhere else. Immediately I felt at home in their loquacious presence.

I had often walked past this bar on my way to Yusuf’s and seen several boys and girls going in and out. What the bar was called I didn’t know at the time, and feared to go inside alone. I learned, when we were there that afternoon with Yusuf, that the place was called Rendezvous, apt for a meeting place and pleasantly evocative of new beginnings.

As we talked, inside Rendezvous, a waitress came to ask if we would like to be served. Yusuf took me aside and asked if I had some money. I pulled five thousand shillings, all I had, out of my pocket and handed the cash over even as he advised, as a parent warns a child, that I was not to give money to anyone. He particularly warned me about a man called Albo or Albeng, a school dropout who was known in all bars in Bugolobi as a charismatic drunkard with the potential to charm his way into the confidence of anyone.

Yusuf called the waitress and, without asking me, ordered two Club beers and Rex cigarettes, which we shared with the others. I might have politely declined, but, eager not to embarrass my friend, I drank and smoked for the very first time. Smoking happened naturally for me, having once lit Kali cigarettes for my grandmother. But beer tasted bitter and I must have made a face, because Yusuf winked at me knowingly. I struggled to empty the bottle, and yet the more I sipped the more my tongue accepted the bitterness. The alcohol seemed to miraculously lubricate and loosen my tongue, making me speak things I would not usually say, while others laughed at me behind clouds of smoke.

That evening, after rinsing my mouth with water and chewing gum to eradicate the whiff of alcohol and cigarettes on my breath — lest my mother kills me upon finding out — I returned home past my usual time, late but happy. To Rendezvous I returned many times after that initiation by Yusuf, basking in the company of new friends with whom I took turns, when I had some cash saved from grocery errands, buying drinks and cigarettes.

Sometimes Rendezvous seemed boring and we had to relocate to other kafundas nearby or outside of Bugolobi. Near Rendezvous was Gabiro, where older boys and girls usually went. Gabiro was, and possibly still is, where senior residents of Bugolobi hang out, obviously not the place for boys who didn’t want to be spotted galivanting in bars. At Gabiro you could run into Gaetano Kaggwa, he of Big Brother Africa fame, or General Kahinda Otafiire, large of size and even larger of heart but somehow in the unfortunate habit, it was said, of hoarding bottle tops of the beer he imbibed, apparently to thwart the bartender who might try to cheat him.

At school we shared stories of our ‘extra-curricular activities’ in kafundas, and eagerly looked forward to the next holiday, when we would connect again with friends attending other schools. On the last day or weekend of the school term, students from all over the country flooded Kampala like mating dogs, gathering at downtown places such as DV8, clubs like Silk and beaches like Nabinonya. Afterwards, the grand revelry over, we would disperse and hang out in neighborhood kafundas, with our homeboys and girls. Despite attending different schools for our high-school education, Yusuf and I remained good friends, regularly meeting at Rendezvous during the holidays.

Regrettably, however, our insatiable fondness for kafundas gradually took a wrong turn, for we became party animals, forever craving ‘plot’ or ‘proggie’ of events happening in places like SteakOut, Legends, Kyadondo Rugby Grounds, or anywhere else. Schoolboys destructively wedded to nightlife, we would start the night in one kafunda and end it in another.

Somehow Yusuf and I passed our A-level exams and were admitted at Makerere University, he at the business school in Nakawa and I at the main campus as a literature and linguistics student. Still, we found a way to carry on partying. A kafunda near my hostel, coincidentally once called Rendezvous, became my favorite hangout place, and there Yusuf visited me from time to time. It was there that we both wound up literally drinking our tuition and, ultimately, departing Makerere University without degrees.

I have wondered over the years what we were thinking, or if we were thinking at all. It’s not helpful, but some questions persist. Were we, by frequenting bars, compensating for the lack of freedom at home as well as at school? Were kafundas to blame for our addiction to alcohol and cigarettes? Or were we just unlucky in our failure to sense danger and pull back from the precipice as others of us did?

What I do know is that, unlike some others, Yusuf and I came from the same background: two rebellious schoolboys troubled by experiences of repression. We would overcome our obstacles in future, or perhaps not at all, but while we were still boys the need to enjoy a bit of freedom was uppermost. It was not to be suppressed. And so, even after dropping out of Makerere, we kept hanging out in kafundas. Later Yusuf permanently relocated to Kigali and I pursued my writing dream. Not surprisingly, kafundas are the setting for most of my writing.

Rendezvous, the kafunda in Bugolobi, changed management several times and finally shut down around 2013, by which time we had since outgrown it amid the gentrification of Bugolobi. Now we were hanging out at The Bridge, opposite the market, or Kagame’s Shop, one of the market lockups. It was around this time that I read an article in The New Vision that rued what the author, Kalungi Kabuye, proclaimed to be the ‘death of kafundas.’ The article had been apparently provoked by the destruction of a kafunda in Wandegeya that had been a favorite of Kabuye’s, leading him to conclude, incorrectly, that the end of that particular joint “marked the beginning of the end” of kafundas. And yet Kabuye’s article had situated the political and socio-economic resonance of kafundas as “more than shops” but really “a fulcrum of Ugandan society.” Surely the fulcrum of anything still alive can’t be said to be dead. What’s negotiable is the name and perhaps the size of the place, as indeed the word kafunda, a Luganda adjective describing a small place, space or gap, eventually became a noun meaning the small place itself. And what’s small in the eyes of one may be big in those of another. Thus City Bar, as spacious as it was, could pass as Milton Obote’s kafunda, just as the comfortable Golf Course Club may once have been a kafunda for Tumusiime Mutebile. I know that in Luganda the plural would be bufunda, not kafundas. Yes, some well-liked kafundas have died, but the kafunda is not dead.

*

Near the end of 2013 I met a man named Herbert Wafula and some friends from the defunct Bugolobi pub Rendezvous at a roadside kafunda in Mutungo, where I lived at the time. Owing in part to our mutual passion for reading and writing, besides drinking, smoking and bantering, Habo, as he’s fondly known to his friends, and I quickly got along and became good friends. A rugby legend in Uganda, he’s older and physically bigger than me, so that I am compelled to regard him as an older brother. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, when we had both left Mutungo and moved to Kitintale, he introduced me to a kafunda called Grouve, this one in Luzira. It’s as a Grouver that I realized that a kafunda is not just the physical place; it’s also the spirit of what animates its members, for there is an unmistakable sense of brotherhood and sisterhood among Grouvers, as members proudly call themselves.

We celebrate members’ birthdays as if they were our own. If a member is in distress — say over the sickness or loss of a loved one — we fundraise on their behalf. Then there’s something called Morning Crew, which mostly happens on weekends when members go to the bar very early in the morning with a commitment not unlike that of Christians rushing to church on Sunday. Since even churches were banned during COVID-19 lockdowns, Morning Crew helped Grouvers to manage their stress. The same spirit sparked the launch of a members’ SACCO, of which I am the secretary.

While a kafunda such as Bugolobi’s Rendezvous probably died because its regular customers stopped coming, the COVID-19 scourge, which killed so many people and businesses, instead injected new life into small joints like Grouve. They became oases of hope amid death: people sitting by tables and ordering beer or herbal concoctions while others despaired or died in their homes. To be at a kafunda such as Grouve, despite the government ban on bars and occasional raids by the police, was to assert proof of life. Of course, like any other community, Grouve has its mix of good and bad characters, and undesirable events like fights and false accusations happen from time to time.

Perhaps some will say that we cannot have enough of kafundas because we are alcoholics. Be that as it may, it still says nothing about what makes some bars immortal. They can be the lifeblood of entire communities and, as Ernest Hemingway said, “if you want to know about a culture spend a night in its bars.” In a way, for me, Grouve is Rendezvous by another name: Rendezvous Redux. While I failed to protect my time as a young man all those years ago in Bugolobi, the spirit of Grouvers shows me and others at large that there is way more to a kafunda than reckless merrymaking.