Jose Chameleone has always intrigued me. Why is it that Ugandans love him so much? Why is it that Chameleone was given lifetime amnesty? Then I realised that Chameleon embodied everything that Ugandans stand for. He embodied our values. He is the symbol of a true Ugandan.
A true Ugandan is a chameleone, a creature of many colours, diverse, able to change with the pace of events, adaptable, agile, and able to mask in, and say the ‘right’ things in the ‘right’ rooms. And the true Ugandan can critique things – the same Ugandan will indulge in those things.
So why did we love Chameleone? He held the mirror to us. For the first time, in one man, we saw what it meant to be Ugandan and live as a Ugandan. Ugandans are great people, but they will also try hard to always undo their greatness. Ugandans are talented, but they will wake up and piss on their own talents. The very idea of our greatness tortures us, we fight it. We crack at it. In every Ugandan, you find this dialectical struggle of opposites. The things we thrash in the morning, we caress in the evening. There are no permanent desires and interests in Uganda, we are all beautiful chameleones……..CONTINUE READING………..
