By Kato Ibrahim
The get-go
When UNEB released my Advanced Level results many years ago and my family lauded my excellence, I did not. Instead, I held my thick head between my palms and let sadness crawl from my eyes and roll down my chubby cheeks like an angry flood. The days that followed my admission to medical school, nothing made sense. Food tasted like faecal matter. I spent hours standing before the mirror, seeing a boy I didn’t know; like I had cracked into two and the other half of me was facing the wrong way. Medicine was not my calling, or so I thought.
My father is an elusive man. Like a wan ghost, he vanishes only to reappear when something has gone terribly wrong. You know those Muslim men whom everyone calls ‘Seeka’ as if they have no names of their own? That’s my father.
So when he appeared home one night asking, Lwaki oyo mwaana yekabya ebitaliimu magezi? I knew better than to tell him I was dreaming of being a fashion designer and not of enlisting in any medical school. The wild thought died a stillbirth; my lips never bore the intestinal fortitude to dispense it.
Medical school
The life in medical school drained me. Deprived me of being me. I was sent to ward rounds and percussed by overqualified consultants. I watched in despair as lives stealthily left people’s bodies and their loved ones begged me to please do something. Wards smelled of death and urine and sweat. My brain just couldn’t hold me together. Whenever I sat in lecture rooms to study human anatomy and stuff, my awareness peeled away from me in slow motion and I stared right ahead, unable to sit still.
Outside school, I wore a different hat. I was a founder of a dance crew which we had christened The Dopes. Yes, we upset the status quo: night clubs beckoned us to please perform whenever they had gigs and hosted big artistes. Everyone knew about us. They wanted to be seen around us. But they weren’t paying what I felt we deserved.
So I girded up my loins. Picked up what was left of me and moved into hawking electronics: headsets; phones that were old as dinosaurs; laptops that were old enough to marry. In the beginning, I sold these things on campus premises. To my classmates. To the occupants of my hall of residence. I spread my wings in spite of my sawed-off capital and quite soon enough, the streets in town knew my name.
When the electronics’ blueprint had its roots firm and deep enough, I morphed into something I had never hoped I’d become: a mechanic. Did I tell you I was selling things that had recorded first-hand stories from the time Cain killed Abel? Well, my customers always returned in throngs, reporting deaths. And what would I do? Split these dead electronics open as do cardiologists when they perform open heart surgeries. Touch a few nameless spots here and there and bring the thing back to life. Again, they knew my name. Kat’s World Technologies & Repairs.
Returning to the city
When my parents convened for a nocturnal clandestine affair, they made not only I but also my twin brother Mosh. While I hawked and sold my electronics, he was the one tasked with purchasing them in bulk. And boy, was he reliable. Graduating from medical school and returning to the city in 2019 meant we had to get back into contact and do everything together. We became Yin and Yang. Flesh and blood. Fire and smoke. Whatever it is that we did, we did together. Our elder brother Ali was a paradigmatic one. By then, he ran an itty-bitty shop in Owino Market where he sold a few genres of shoes. He would later punch above his weight, move all the way to a prestigious Nabukeera Plaza to write his name in the stars, but that’s a story for another day.
I ‘fell into things’. Landed a redoubtable job as a doctor. Not because I wanted it, but because a few phone calls were exchanged between my stern father and his old friends and, duh! A prestigious hospital in Kampala became my new home. I interacted with patients but felt like a stranger in that space. Cannulas harassed me; none of them seemed to find the right path into a patient’s vein. Nasogastric tubes bullied me. Some bumptious patients occasionally eyed me up, decided I was just not clever enough to solve their problems – and rightly so. Man, nothing can be as humiliating.
One day in June 2021, I caught Covid-19. In a letter addressed to me by the Human Resource Manager, I was apprised to take leave for a period of four weeks. Time flew fast and by the time I returned from that imminent break, I had been replaced permanently. I stood in the Human Resource Manager’s office and my mind went blank.
The birth of OwinoVersace
The Human Resource Manager did not bother looking up from his Apple laptop when talking to me about my (lost) job. He wore a poker face: no smile; no expression of anger; nothing. I clenched my heart into a fist of stone. By the time I wove on my stilted feet and decamped from his office, I had decided I’d look for a tree with thick branches and end this worthless life.
Have you ever listened to Vinka’s song, Mapoozi? That shit changed my mind about finding a rope and a tree with thick branches. In the song, she repeatedly mentions Owino Versace.
Now, I have lived the entirety of my life buying all my designer clothes from Owino Market. Some of them are falsely labelled as Versace products but that is not for me to worry about. Vinka’s song simply awakened my dream of being a fashion designer. It pumped into my head the idea that I could bushwhack our good old Owino Market, buy the most presentable of clothes, sell them for small profits and go a long way – as have clothing brands such as Gucci, Versace, Dior, Jordan. Our name would be OwinoVersace – a kind of brand all the way from the bowels of Owino Market.
What began as a dream materialised and became tangible in a matter of months. OwinoVersace attained a permanent base; a home; an official command centre along Salaama Road, right next to Kiruddu National Referral Hospital.
Before I drew a breath, I was assaulting big offices and companies with my pedestrian idea. I had designed big music stars and mushrooming ones like Vya Alexis and they had extolled me the way radical Christians extol Jesus Christ. I had been to Taggy TV and designed their show hosts. I had been to a now defunct online Youth TV and designed their presenters. I had been to BTM TV and had my idea thrown out through the window like an empty bottle from a bus in transit. I had assaulted Jim Nash in his office and held him against the wall till he bought my idea and introduced me to the movers and the shakers of Nyce TV.
Last Saturday, we made or debut on Nyce TV in the Nyce Vybz show and it will be airing every Saturday between midday and 2.00 pm. According to our contract, whatever the hosts will wear to this show until further notice belongs to us. I could have smoked the heads of red ants, but sooner than later, we might design Oprah Winfrey or Ryan Secrest.
Have I come thus far alone? Certainly not. Thank you all who believed in me. Even those that didn’t, thank you for not pulling me down. Thank you my brothers, Mosh and Ali. Thank you our models; Pizzy Gunns and the rest. Thank you AlabaStar Media. Thank you Jim Nash and Godfrey Kiraga of Taggy TV for the support.
Kato Ibrahim is a Medical Doctor, and C.E.O at OwinoVersace.
This story was narrated verbatim to Daniel Kakuru (MugOfPorridge), a columnist at Kaaro Karungi
