____________

WHAT’S UP!

When I saw the headline on Monday that a dish with a human’s male private parts had been served at a restaurant, I took it for your typical, though rather gross, media April Fools’ Day stunt... and did not read any further. So, imagine my surprise when a day later it was still making headlines. Talk about truth being stranger than fiction.

Had it been just a stunt, it would have ranked up there with some of the best, or should that be, most wicked of all April Fools’ Day stunts. I’ve written my fair share of them for the New Vision newspaper, the most memorable was during a period when there was something called ‘blue pork’. Does anyone remember that?

Ugandans have a well-documented love affair with pork, and in early 2002 emerged a condition which turned pork bluish. Ugandans were not to be deterred, and continued consuming their delicacy, despite warnings from health officials who were not quite sure what caused it.

So, when I was asked to come up with a story for April Fools’ Day, I decided to play around with the country’s favourite delicacy.

‘Blue pork makes men impotent’ was the headline that met people that Monday morning, and there was genuine panic in Kampala.

Social media had not made an appearance yet so it was thousands of SMS that made the rounds, showing that Ugandans rarely read beyond headlines. Even after it was revealed that it was just an April Fools’ Day hoax, it took quite a while before Ugandans were comfortable going back to their favourite pork joints.

There have been many April Fools’ Day pranks recorded in history, but I think the craziest one was in 1975 when the ‘The Jovian-Plutonian effect’ made thousands of people across Britain believe they could fly. A respected astronomer went on the radio and told listeners that “due to a rare planetary alignment of Pluto and Jupiter, the Earth would experience a shift in its gravitational forces that morning, allowing people to float in the air”.

At exactly 9:47am that morning, thousands of people jumped in the air and tried to float. Not only that, several called in to the radio claiming they had actually floated, with one insisting he floated so high his head hit the ceiling of his living room.

They are all supposed to be in jest, innocent fun, really that is why they are called; pranks. You’re supposed to have a laugh afterwards.

There used to be a tradition at King’s College, Budo, where Senior One boys would be woken up at 2:00am on April 1 and told to carry chairs to the Girls’ End because important visitors were coming that morning.

I’m not sure if it still happens, or how it all began, but in my Senior One, we were dully woken up and told to carry chairs.

I refused because it made no sense to me. Why didn’t they tell us the evening before? In any case, one cardinal rule at Budo was to never cross Bursary Road to Girls’ End when it was dark.

We boys who had come up from Budo Junior School knew about this rule, so we were convinced these older kids were trying to put us into trouble.

Quite a few of us refused, giving rise to accusations that kids from Kabinja had lugezigei. Now imagine a Budonian accusing you of having lugezigezi, we had a good laugh at that, and at the kids who had to carry the chairs back again at the break of day, with all the girls laughing at them.

To many, though, that was the only time they got to go to Girls’ End after dark, and they wore it like a badge of honour.

Apparently, no one knows the origins of April Fools’ Day, with some claiming it goes back to Roman times. It is all supposed to be innocent fun, but it is usually the more gullible of us that fall for them.

So, it is amazing in these days of social media that the tradition seems to be dying.

There is a hilarious story of how some journalist trying to establish the origins got pranked instead, although it was unwittingly.

As the story goes, in 1983, a reporter reached out to a university historian to discuss the origins of April Fools’ Day. The historian, thinking it was going to be a prank, spun a tale about how a group of jesters convinced a Roman emperor to make one of them king for a day. But the young reporter went ahead and wrote the story as a fact, and it was duly published. It was egg-on-the-face for the editor when the joke was on him, and he almost fi red the young reporter.

Is it a sign of the times that this Monday no major April Fools’ Day prank happened? Imagine waking up to a headline in a national newspaper: “Speaker to resign over conflict of interest”. That would have shaken up the country pretty much although I’m not sure if the Speaker would have taken it all in good faith; does anyone know if she has a sense of humour?

Anyway, I was thinking to dedicate this column to an April Fools’ Day prank next time it falls on a Friday, but Google tells me that won’t happen, until 2033!

Will I still be writing? Not sure. Will I even be here, boring you guys with this column? Not sure. But, just in case, stay away from blue pork. Ha ha ha

@KalungiKabuye