Welcome To Lagos: A Compelling Reality of Struggle, Perseverance in the Megacity May 10, 2010

Update: Vocal Slendar will be going to London to play Live in London Indigo 31st of May with Basket Mouth,JJC etc.

We may never know what exactly is the West obsession with Nigeria and Nigerians lately. Even way before the Abdul Mutallab incident, there was a healthy obsession with Nigerians in Holly Wood. They were front and center in District Nine, the epicenter of CBS and Dateline NBC scam documentaries and even the biggest grossing film this year, AVATAR did not fail to mention Nigeria. While Nigeria has been making news due to the recent death of their president and the circumstances that surrounded the events leading up to his death, the BBC found time to squeeze Nigeria to the forefront of media headlines again. It has not been an easy year for our Nigeria indeed, and the latest 3 part documentary by the BBC has split the Nigerian community abroad and at home with some crying foul once more and others siding with the BBC. Seeing that documentary was western produced, I was not expecting  a balanced representation of Lagos, but wondering to what extent the facts will be distorted.

When for better gets to for worse

Chinwe Chukwu

I have often wondered why some married men cheat on their wives. Personally, I see it as an unforgivable offence. I mean, why would someone who has vowed to be faithful to their partner and who claims to love them cheat on them?

It also worries me that some men do this and then when they hear of a woman doing it, they are the first to cast a stone. Few weeks ago, a married man asked me out. I asked him before hand what he wanted from me, and I was really surprised when he said he was in love with me.

I asked him again his marital status, and he answered married and with kids too. So I asked him why he would want to cheat on his wife. Did it mean he didn't love her?

‘My husband’s mistress set me ablaze’ May 5, 2010

Asiimwe talks to his wife, Ms Kyogabirwe at her hospital bed at Mbarara Referral Hospital. The woman suffered what is suspected to be a crime of passion, following a bitter row with her husband’s lover. PHOTO BY ALFRED TUMUSHABE. 

By Alfred Tumushabe  

A woman in Mbarara is nursing wounds after suffering an attack with fire. The victim points fingers at her husband’s lover whom she accuses of sending her threatening messages in the past, writes Alfred Tumushabe.

Frank Asiimwe, a boda boda cyclist at Mbarara Central Market stage, along Buremba Road is a troubled man. He suspects his lover Jesca Natukunda to be behind the plot to burn his official wife, Idith Kyogabirwe, now nursing wounds at Mbarara Referral Hospital.

Ms Kyogabirwe was on May 18, torched with petrol. The attack left the upper part of her body with burns. She lay gasping on the bed in the emergency ward and struggled to speak or sit by herself. “There is another woman I am in love with who I think has done this. She has been threatening to harm her,” Asiimwe said of his lover as he attended to the patient.

Beauty or personality?

 

By JACKSON BIKO

Accept it, the Chinese are smart. Not only because they build everything we use, but because they seem to have a saying for everything, even if it’s hysterical. Here is one that will get your goat; “Beauty is the wisdom of women while wisdom is the beauty of men.”

In short, a beautiful woman doesn’t have to be intelligent or smart because beauty substitutes wisdom. Beauty redeems every female foible. When you finally stop breathing too hard and think about it for a second, you will see the grain of truth therein.

Where I come from, women with big eyes were way up there on the beauty scale. They made men’s knees buckle and they were praised in songs.

Mrs HIV: Contradictory Policies in the Fight Against HIV in Africa May 3, 2010

Kampala — Unlike many films that have been done on HIV, Miss HIV takes you behind the curtains on what is really happening in the battle against a virus that is now the leading killer of people under 60 worldwide.
The docu-drama Miss HIV unearths the international conflict of HIV/Aids policies while following the journey of two simple HIV- positive women who enter the contest.
The documentary highlights the international controversies over the prioritisation of abstinence, faithfulness and use of condoms in fighting the HIV pandemic.
Elizabeth Ramolale, one of the women, sees that African nations are dying and she wants to break the stigma that keeps it hidden. 

Dating your friend’s ex April 28, 2010

 

By JACKSON BIKO

Remember John Terry, the English footballer who recently had an affair with Wayne Bridge’s ex-girlfriend (who by the way was his good friend)? Remember how Bridge got his knickers in a twist when he became privy of that, uhm, indiscretion? Remember the ruckus?

The question that this love triangle begets is not even whether footballers really can’t keep their shorts on, but why it’s such a big fuss why a man can’t date his friend’s ex-girlfriend…especially if she looks half as sticking as the woman in question; the devastatingly lovely Vanessa Perroncel?

This saga goes to the heart of the male code, a set of rules passed down generations of men. The rules are many and the good thing is that years might pass, but they are never subjected to a referendum to find out if they still stand.

How society has set men on a wild search for manhood

Sitawa Namwalie is among female writers of the collection To Be a Man. Here, she presents a poem at the Cut off My Tongue show. Photo/FILE 

By TOM ODHIAMBO

It has become fashionable these days for all manner of interest groups, stakeholders or those concerned to raise hullabaloo over all kinds of issues.

A most intriguing topic these days is the debate over the subject of the state of manhood. Or the status of men. Or, when put in alarmist tones, the “increasing marginalisation of men” in today’s society. That sounds like a worthwhile academic topic, doesn’t it?

Yet it is not only academics, with their proclivity for abstract theorisation of and over even mundane things as “being or not being a man”, who are mesmerised by this subject. Remember Maendeleo ya Wanaume? What was it all about? Was it to counter or complement Maendeleo ya Wanawake?