It is the first day of another graduation season at Makerere University. Lines of smartly dressed parents/ guardians and their graduating children are proudly streaming into the university through all the gates. Men in kanzus, men in suits and ties, men casually dressed ties, and of course the ladies are wearing all sorts of apparel. Graduation ceremonies remind me about my own first ceremony at this same old hill. Graduation is a rite of passage that marks the successful completion of one phase of life and the entry into formal employment, maturity, adulthood, paying income tax, contributing towards the bills at home, and eventual independence.
But heh as I think about graduation, my eye catches onto something odd, strange, weird... There is something off-beat about a man smartly dressed in a tie, whistling to a young hawker with trays of boiled eggs on his head. I watch this man-in-a-tie asking for the price of one boiled egg. And then he pulls out his old leather wallet. He digs into it for a crumpled note of 1,000/=, pays the boy and then proceeds to carefully choose one hard-boiled egg out of the tray. I think he chooses the biggest egg in the tray. This man-in-a-tie then cracks the hard-boiled egg against the other eggs remaining in the tray, removes the shells and takes a big bite of the egg-white. He reaches for the salt-shaker, sprinkles some salt onto his egg, and takes another bite. Getting his balance from the egg-hawker, the man-in-a-tie walks off as he continues to chew his boiled egg.
There is something enigmatic about a man in a tie buying a hard-boiled egg from a street-hawker on graduation day at the oldest university in Kampala. Surely graduation may still fail to deliver youths out of dependency on parents and guardians who dress smartly to celebrate the completion of university. What does graduation symbolise in Uganda today?
Stella Nyanzi
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