When Ye met Yoweri
Kanye West went looking for Wakanda but found himself in Uganda instead
In a world where power is measured in Instagram likes, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian-West are royalty. They are celebrity supernovas blazing a trail through the social media firmament, demanding our attention and sucking us into their capricious orbit. Love them or hate them, you can’t avoid them.
Donald Trump, the United States president who owes his position in part to his expert manipulation of social media, lives in this world. Even he was outshone when Kanye descended on the White House last week. Say what you will about the Make America Great Again cap, there’s no doubt that Kanye wore it better.
Yoweri Museveni, the 76-year-old Ugandan president who has been in power since 1986, lives in a very different world. His power derives not from Twitter — although he does tweet, sometimes, with a fondness for homespun farming advice — but from the tanks that he commands; from the elections he has won, or rigged in his favour; from his control over the finances of an entire nation. These are real things, with real consequences, for real people.
On Tuesday, when Ye (as West is now known) and Kim rocked up at State House in Kampala, these worlds collided, with excruciatingly awkward results. Museveni began by asking Kim what exactly she does for a living, before awkwardly accepting Kanye’s gift of a pair of Yeezy sneakers. Thoughtfully, Kanye brought his own pen to sign them. “Very good,” says Museveni, bemused. “They are for football, or for what?”
Kanye tries to explain that he is in Uganda to make a music video, but he immediately loses Museveni — and everyone else — with an inexplicable reference to Jurassic Park.
“What is a Jurassic Park?” Museveni asks, sounding genuinely interested. He thinks of himself as a conservationist, remember; maybe he thinks there is something he can learn.
“You know, where they design dinosaurs, it’s a, uh…” replies Kanye, hands flailing. He is unused to interruption.
Then Kanye gets serious. “I know there’s tourism, but I would like to know what other industries that you would like to build, and have a discussion about. What would make the entire country be the most, like, to build Wakanda, that would be the most thriving, you know, so that we could show …”
And suddenly, it all makes sense. Kanye West has not come to visit Yoweri Museveni, the ageing, autocratic, sometimes brutal presidentfor-life of the very real Republic of Uganda. Despite their best efforts, their worlds are so different that they are mutually exclusive, and they have nothing to talk about.
Instead, Kanye has come to pay his respects to an African republic that he is all too familiar with: Wakanda, the fictional, futuristic home of Marvel superhero Black Panther, a place that now exists only in a popular consciousness propagated by the very same digital platforms that have propelled Kanye’s own celebrity.
Finally, Kanye takes out his pen and signs his sneakers. It is unclear what this signature is worth to Museveni, who typically appends his own signature to legislation and treaties, but he accepts the gift graciously enough.
Ye and Kim may not realise it, but they gave Museveni another gift that day — by sprinkling the president with just a little bit of their celebrity stardust. That stardust will be used to support Museveni’s violent homophobia, and his crackdown on opposition leaders, and the corruption endemic to his regime. It will be used as ammunition in Museveni’s war with another rapper, Bobi Wine, who did not have the luxury of confusing Uganda and Wakanda as he was being tortured by Museveni’s soldiers.
“It would have been great if he had used his voice for the good of people in Africa,” said Wine, of West. “I’m a musician, but I am not allowed to stage a show in my own country because I disagree with the president. It is very disappointing.”
West must be disappointed too. He was hoping to meet King T’Challa, and got grumpy old Museveni instead. Even for one of the world’s most famous people, the gap between the real world and fantasy can be hard to navigate. Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni this week officially launched the New Source of the Nile Bridge, a 525m cable-stayed bridge across the Victoria Nile in Uganda. Also known as the
New Jinja Bridge, it replaces the Nalubaale Bridge, which was built in 1954. The BBC reported that the $112-million bridge — the second of its kind in East Africa — was funded by a loan from the Japanese International Co-operation Agency.
Shopping Somali style
E-commerce is on the rise in Somalia as more and more businesses start to sell their wares online in an attempt to attract more people to the internet. The country has one of the lowest internet usage rates and the slowest connectivity speeds in the world, with just 1.88% of Somalis online. The first company to start offering its goods online in 2016 was Soomar, which sells a range of products from electronics to food, but competition is now rising.
From refugee to mayor
Belgium’s first black mayor is a migrant from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the father of two professional footballers. After winning 28.23% of the vote, Pierre Kompany became mayor of the Ganshoren municipality, a town northwest of Brussels with a population of 25 000. The 71-year-old former mechanical engineer arrived in the country in 1975 as a refugee. The DRC was under Belgian colonial rule between 1908 and 1960.