Yesterday, Gretchen had occasion to squeeze Dr. Bashafala Kumanina Kinuka Mkundu, Primary Under Assistant Secretary for Economic, Cultural and Scientific Affairs of the Ugandan Embassy to the United States of America, into my consultation schedule. “Mr. Collins,” she complained to me via IM Chat from her computer in the reception area, “this Dr. Mknundu is totally obnoxious. He’s hitting on me, and his pickup lines are bordering on the psychotic.”
“Such as what?” I IM’d back.
“He says, in his country,” she replied, “he would pay twenty cows, forty sheep, sixty goats and a hundred chickens for me. Not only that, but he’s leaning forward right into my face, his breath smells like rotting garbage, and he’s got a bulge in his pants that looks like he’s packing a zucchini down there.”
“That’s just typical Ugandan friendliness,” I assured her. “Ugandan men are the old-fashioned macho types, through and through, and when I say old-fashioned, I mean 12,000 BC. What’s on his breath is simply the traditional smell of ripe bush meat cooked rare. It’s a status symbol to eat bush meat in Uganda these days and he probably just had lunch at the embassy with some Ugandan bigwigs. Those things he’s saying are actually compliments – simply Ugandan bon mots he would use to flatter any pretty young woman in his home country, and furthermore, he would expect her to be impressed by the aroma of rare roasted ripe bush meat on his breath.”
“Pardon me for preferring peppermint, sir,” she shot back, “but isn’t this [expletive] supposed to be a [expletive] diplomat? Meaning, among other things, that it’s his job to understand and follow the local customs of his host country, that being the US, and know that men don’t behave or talk like that here?”
“If by ‘here’, you mean Washington DC,” I conceded, “then yes. However, what can I do? I’m with those Norwegians you booked for 1:00 PM who wanted to talk about the impacts of an embargo on Russian oil due to a lack of resolution to the crisis in Ukraine.”
“OMG,” she wrote, “he’s touching me! I don’t care what it is, just do something!”
So, excusing myself momentarily from the company of three slightly bewildered Norwegians, I rushed through the two heavy oak doors which separate my office from the reception area, to find Dr. Mkundu fondling Gretchen’s flaxen blonde hair while whispering what I can only presume to have been Ugandan sweet nothings in her ear. Gretchen’s usually milk white Pennsylvania Dutch complexion was, at this point, about the color of a ripe beefsteak tomato, and I daresay I know women well enough to say that, if I didn’t take prompt action in the next five seconds, she was going to scream.
And as that would have been considerably disconcerting to the denizens of the neighboring offices, many of whom also work on Saturdays when circumstances require, not to mention the four scientists from the CDC who had arrived, inexplicably, some seventy-six minutes early for their consultation regarding the policy implications of recently discovered transmissibility potential for Ebola virus during the three week asymptomatic period following incurably fatal infections, I took immediate action.
“Gretchen!” I shouted, gesturing at the heavy oak doors leading into my office, “those gentlemen were expecting their Starbucks coffee twenty-five minutes ago! Why are you still here? No, don’t tell me,” I continued as she leaped out of her seat and made for the door to the hallway, “just do it!”
“Sorry, sorry, Mr. Collins,” Gretchen wailed as she scurried out, “I forgot!”
“It’s so difficult to find decent clerical help these days, Dr. Mkundu,” I lamented as he resumed his seat, unfazed while nevertheless getting the hairy eyeball from a definitely shocked trio of virologist, epidemiologist and biochemist – all themselves PhDs.
It was a very quiet reception room indeed thereafter as I completed my appointment with the Norwegians and subsequently invited Dr. Mkundu into my office.
“That woman never came back with the coffee,” he noted as he made himself comfortable on the couch. “You should fire her.”
“The lines at a Starbucks in Washington,” I noted, “can be extremely long. But be that as it may, how can I help the nation of Uganda this afternoon, Dr. Mkundu?”
“Well,” he began, clearing his throat ostentatiously, and evidently a bit put off by my reluctance to discuss Gretchen any further, “as I am sure you are aware, His Excellency, President Yoweri Museveni, will be arriving here in Washington on Monday to attend the US – African Leaders Summit conference.”
“Yes,” I confirmed, “he will be meeting with top United States officials and, just as importantly, with top US business leaders. Our President Obama is setting a precedent which will, hopefully, continue to result in periodic summit meetings with African leaders in the future.”
“It is most foresighted of your first US President of African descent,” he observed, “to convene this summit. And our President Museveni is especially glad that this first African President of the United States had a father who was from Kenya, and came here of his own volition.”
“And why is that?” I inquired.
“Because,” he explained, “President Museveni believes that Africans who were stupid enough to be captured and brought here as slaves are congenital idiots.”
“Surely,” I countered, “there are many descendants of American slaves whose achievements could readily refute that assertion – Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Claude Brown, Duke Ellington, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Neil deGrasse Tyson…”
“President Museveni would ask,” he interrupted, “if they are so smart, what are they doing with white people’s names?”
“They have American names,” I asserted. “And I might point out that President Obama’s mother was white, and that his wife, Michelle, definitely has African American heritage.”
“It is hardly a secret,” he sniffed, “that true Africans have very little regard for the so-called African Americans. As President Museveni has indicated, to the extent that they have any intelligence, it is because they have gotten it through breeding with their white masters.” “He admires them, then?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” Dr. Mkundu affirmed. “President Museveni admires white people, of course. Look at how much they have achieved. Hitler, for example – one might say, President Museveni idolizes him. He understood the value of national identity for his people, as does President Museveni. That is a very important concept for Uganda.”
“Um… yes,” I responded. “Understood. So, if we could now… ah… direct our focus on the challenges pertaining to the summit which…”
“The [expletive]!” Dr. Mkundu interjected. “That’s the problem! Those Sodomites, who insist on committing unnatural acts!”
“So,” I sought to verify, “it’s not the rampant corruption in the Ugandan government that bothers your esteemed President Museveni?”
“Absolutely not,” he coolly vouched. “As you say here on Wall Street, ‘business is business.’ That’s the long and the short of it as far as President Museveni is concerned.”
“And Uganda’s current forty percent annual inflation rate,” I prodded, “that’s not an issue for him, either?”
“No,” he chuckled, “on that front, we are well ahead of Argentina, for example, and I don’t see the United States snubbing them at diplomatic cocktail parties around town.”
“And the seventy-four percent illiteracy rate?” I needled. “No problem there?”
“None at all,” he told me. “Reading is over-rated. If the common people do it too much, in fact, it can be counterproductive – even dangerous.”
“And it’s not the ubiquitous complaints around the world that the Ugandan political system is a complete fraud,” I ventured, “as demonstrated by President Museveni receiving more votes in the 2011 election than the number of people who showed up at the polls?”’
“As your Democrats,” he quipped, “in your city of Chicago say, ‘we just keep counting the ballots until the numbers come out right.’ And, as I recall, your President Obama is from Chicago, is he not? I am sure he would understand President Museveni, all too well, in fact.”
“And it’s not,” I sought to confirm, “Uganda’s repeated invasions of the Congo, and the consequent expropriation of billions of dollars in gold, diamonds, gems, coltan and other natural resources that concern you?”
“Uganda is a vibrant and growing nation,” he rationalized, “just as was the United States, but a few decades after gaining its own independence. How can a country that massacred the Native Americans of the Dakotas, in violation of its own treaties with them, and with extraordinary loss of life and property; how can a country that invaded Mexico for the express purpose of taking its territories of Texas and California away from it; how can a country that expropriated the entire Hawaiian archipelago from its rightful royal family, possibly criticize Uganda for what amounts to nothing more than the same kind of self-defense measures your wonderful ally Israel practices constantly in the Levant?”
“And you’re not concerned,” I persisted, “that President Museveni supports a Ugandan Constitution which allows polygamy or that he has no problems with Ugandan common laws which permit brothers to inherit the wives of their deceased siblings; the fact that there are essentially no laws prohibiting domestic violence against women in Uganda; and that his government steadfastly refuses to enforce the Genital Mutilation Prohibition Act, none of that is a problem?”
“Women?” Dr. Mkundu smiled. “Your problem here in America is, you have forgotten how to keep them from taking over everything and turning you all into little boys whom they scold and order about. Women should run your house, not your economy, not your legislature, not your banks or your factories or your executive mansion. Kitchen, cooking and children – that is what the African knows women are for. Your problem is, you have lost sight of that.”
“So it’s just the gays?” I inquired, aghast. “All you’re worried about is how President Museveni’s stance against homosexuals is going to play at the summit meeting?”
“You must understand, Mr. Collins,” he cautioned, “that until the British built their railway from the East African coast to Lake Victoria, in order to control the source of the Nile, bringing with them their Hindu laborers from India, the very idea of homosexuality had never occurred to anyone in Uganda, neither man nor woman. Our culture simply did not posses the repressive and depraved characteristics necessary to engender it.”
“Your culture, however,” I noted, “apparently did, in fact, possess whatever characteristics were necessary to engender the practice of cannibalism.”
“That,” he protested, “is a false analogy. Cannibalism is about… choices regarding… cuisine. Homosexuality, on the other hand, is about one gentlemen putting his [expletive] into the [expletive] of another gentleman or likewise having another gentleman [expletive] his [expletive], or two ladies performing analogous acts with that equipment which Nature has endowed them. President Museveni firmly believes that the fact the Ugandans had to learn these behaviors from the British and their Indian servants conclusively proves that engaging in them is a moral choice. And just as the British and the Americans insist that cannibalism is a moral choice, so he insists that being gay is one also. And in Uganda, he made sure the penalty for making the wrong moral choice about where one juxtaposes one’s [expletive], [expletive], or [expletive] with the [expletive], [expletive] or [expletive] of another person of the same sex is a heinous crime punishable by death.”
“But your Supreme Court,” I observed, “declared that law unconstitutional.”
“And what,” he chuckled, “did your own President Andrew Jackson say, when your Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall, declared confiscation of Native American lands unconstitutional in the case Worcester versus Georgia? Did he not say, ‘John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it?’ And did not your President Andrew Jackson then evict the entire Cherokee Nation from their ancestral lands and place them on a forced death march to Oklahoma?”
“Not exactly the brightest moment in US history,” I admitted. “To this day, there are Cherokee who won’t accept a twenty dollar bill because it has Jackson’s picture on it. I guess if I were a Palestinian and somebody tried to pay me with currency emblazoned with a picture of Ariel Sharon, I wouldn’t take it, either. So what about this gay thing – you worried about protests, boycotts, fanatics wearing suicide vests – what?”
“President Museveni,” he sighed, “is confused. Here we were in Uganda, never having thought of homosexuality, and along came the English and the Hindus, to whom it was almost second nature. Then we obtained our independence from the British Empire, and after many years of uncertainty, false tyrants and instability, we obtained the wise and just leadership President Museveni. Then the American Family came.”
“The American Family?” I asked. “Bishop Abraham Vereide, Pastor Rick Warren, Senator James Inhofe, Goodwill Industries – that lot?”
“Exactly,” he confirmed. “The Fellowship are Evangelicals. They taught the Ugandans that Christ wants every homosexual to die. And for many years, that has seemed to be what the United States of America wanted Ugandans to believe. But over the last four or five years, President Museveni has noticed that being gay is becoming very… ah… shall we say… fashionable in the United States. So he sent me here with but one question: which is it?”
“Which is what?” I wondered, nonplussed.
“Which is it,” he implored, “President Museveni wants to know, if Uganda is to get billions in foreign aid bucks, if it is to have Most Favored Nation status in trade, if it is to be allowed to buy the latest weapons technologies like drones and GPS guided ordnance, if it is to have credit at the World Bank and strike profitable deals with the International Monetary Fund – all those things, and more, that President Museveni comes to the summit meeting in order to get – are we supposed to go along with the American Christian missionaries or the American gays? Because I will confess, Mr. Collins, President Museveni, even after asking his best economic analysts, his top political advisers, his most esteemed soothsayers, his most powerful witch doctors – none of them could say whether it is in his best interests to follow the Fellowship or to follow Obama. So – which is it?”
“Go with Obama and the gays,” I advised.
A pregnant pause ensued as Dr. Mkundu stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Very well,” he eventually offered with an uncertain shrug. “Given a choice between God’s Holy Commandments and the Rainbow Flag, Uganda is to choose the path which will lead to me having to watch muscular young men walking down the streets of Kampala holding hands, and hot young babes making out with each other at Club Silk. Just so I can convince President Museveni you didn’t simply flip a coin to arrive at this recommendation, may I ask for an explanation of your reasoning?”
“Certainly,” I vouched. “But before I start, I need to correct your statement concerning the Ten Commandments. In none of the four renditions of them appearing in various versions of Scripture is any mention made of a prohibition of the gay lifestyle. Now, the reason it is in President Museveni’s best interest to chuck the Evangelicals and their Goodwill Industries shtick and get on the bandwagon with Obama and the gays is pure statistics. Recent studies show that in America, going to church is down twenty two percent over the last ten years, while [expletive] [expletive] [expletive], [expletive] [expletive] and [expletive] have gone up thirty eight percent. This indicates that, if present trends continue, by 2019, eighty-three percent of Americans will be able to recognize the gay subtexts in The Wizard of Oz, while seventy-seven percent will have realized that the Bible is not literally true. Therefore, I suggest you remind President Museveni that even the lion must tolerate flies.”
“So it is said, and so I shall tell President Museveni,” Dr. Mkundu agreed, suddenly brightening as an idea occurred to him. “That girl, after you fire her for not delivering the coffee on time, can she come to work for me?”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Mkundu,” I informed him, “but no. Alas, for all its remarkable similarities, the District of Columbia is not Uganda.”