While Ugandans are celebrating Queen of Katwe, a trully Ugandan movie causing Oscar buzz in Hollywood, veteran journalist Timothy Kalyegira, currently running the Kampala Express, a Facebook based publication trashed the movie, saying he was so embarrased that he followed a white woman who walked out after 20 minutes. Below is a post extracted from his Facebook page.
Yesterday I attended the Uganda premiere of “Queen of Katwe” at Acacia Mall.
I had received an invitation by email but on arriving at Acacia to register, my name was not on the list. No surprise to me.
After all, this is Katwe-Uganda.
The email had indicated that the screening would start at “7:30 p.m. sharp”. Knowing Uganda as I do, I was curious to see how the organisers would pull off this, even for an international event.
Of course as usual I was proved right in as far as understanding what kind of country Uganda is.
7:30 p.m. Most guests were still arriving. A South African woman with an Afrikaans accent, coordinating the arrivals, was almost losing her mind in frustration that it was 7:30 p.m. but nothing had begun.
I smiled and continued taking photos. Of all people, an Afrikaans from South Africa should know Africa.
Raila Odinga, Kenya’s veteran politician and former Prime Minister, arrived at about 7:35 p.m., five minutes late. Photographers swarmed around him.
I asked the girls at the registration table what I should do since I had received that email from South Africa but my name was not on the print-out list.
They didn’t know what to do, so in Katwe style improvised and attached a red tape to my left wrist.
I asked through which entrance I should get into the threatre. One of the ushers pointed me to the main entrance where the red-coloured tape was supposed to go through.
The girls at the entrance told me I should go to another entrance since hers was the entrance for the yellow tape. I asked her which was which and with that usual indifferent, unmotivated Ugandan attitude, she stared at me.
So I walked over and asked the South African lady exactly where I should walk through and she pointed me to the second entrance.
Finally, the guests got into the theatre about 25 minutes late, with this lady about to go crazy with frustration.
After the introduction of the producers, officials and actors, all done in that Ugandan way, the movie began.
The acting by the Ugandans was the typical one — simplistic expression, overdone, overstated dialogue, the Bukedde-2 TV or Ebonies’ “That’s Life Mwattu” level of acting, Ugandan “English”, and so on.
What saves ‘Queen of Katwe” from being just another Ugandan TV drama is the good cinematography — the camera angles, use of light and shadows, close-up shots.
The main entrance had been closed, so I kept wondering how I should flee this embarrassment.
On I watched. Same low-brow air of general lousiness we or at least I have come to expect from Ugandan and Nigerian movies.
Finally, a European got up from her seat and started to walk out. I followed her hoping she might be heading for an exit and she did.
And so after 20 minutes of one of the most embarrassing experiences of the year for me, I got out of the screening room and sighed with relief.
Uganda traumatises me.
The atmosphere of low-brow, the lack of mental and emotional depth, the lacklustre culture, the slowness, the childish sense of humour, the half-literate mindset, the mediocrity, the “maalo” that is our African cultures — these things traumatise me about Uganda and the other African countries I’ve visited: Eritrea, Rwanda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya.
This so-called emerging African middle class that is so defined only by the phones, shoes, hand bags and cars it buys and not by the books it reads or authors, not by the mental things it creates, is not going to take us anywhere.
“Queen of Katwe” should not come the attention of Europe’s far-right, anti-immigration parties.
If it does, I’m afraid it will add to the growing feeling among Europeans that their culture is under threat from we, the mediocre types called Ugandans and others from the Tropics.
Meanwhile, veteran actor Philip Luswata who starred in the Queen of Katwe movie has fired back at Kalyegira, calling him an idiot for his negative comments. Click here to read the story.