Around Africa, we see pictures of obscenity every day, but the images splashed across the Ugandan landscape this week as college students arrived a prom party in exotic vehicles and aircraft must rank among the most bizarre. Until this story, I had no idea there was anything like prom on this continent. Don’t blame me: I’m the kind of person who isn’t enamoured of the idea of a cake at African weddings. Uganda, like most African countries, is a study in economic despair, but you wouldn’t know if all you saw was the display put on by students of the Elite High School. In the video that has taken the social media space by storm, you can actually see a helicopter touching down on the school field. The door opens and out comes a teenager dressed in a blue suit. This character takes some photographs with his prom date who is dressed in a long black one-armed dress, and the couple head into an exotic ride. But this is only a fitting complement to the deluge of exotic cars arriving the same venue even as a track titled “agba baller” (chief baller) by Nigerian singer Flavour wraps up the episode. It’s been reported that the helicopter was hired from Bar Aviation at $1200 while the car, a V8 2022 Model, was hired for six hours at 3 million Ugandan Shillings.
It turns out that Elite High School is quite notorious for these extravagant prom parties staged by young people who know next to nothing about life. The supposed parents of these rich kids have apparently stolen enough from the Ugandan landscape to guarantee this obscene display of wealth. Students arrive at these parties dressed to kill, and ready to act out Flavour’s lyrics– “Agba baller, how much is money? Nothing!”—in extremely real terms.
Minister of State for Higher Education, John Muyingo, expressed dissatisfaction with the trend, saying: “Are these things happening in Uganda? Where are we going? Money is a scarce resource; it shouldn’t be given out and spent like that.” Muyingo wondered why students would put up such a flashy display in a country where millions of households struggled to have three meals a day. But he apparently sounded like a flagrant anachronism to the principal of Elite High School, Lawrence Onyango, who declared that prom parties aren’t limited to the school, and that that there was absolutely nothing to investigate. Onyango’s drivel: “There is nothing that the ministry can investigate. It was just a normal party sponsored by parents for the candidates to enjoy. If they do, they will survey all the schools in the country that have had graduation parties because there are quite a few of them. This has been practised during school holidays for decades. It’s something normal. So, pairing is not a problem, but it’s just for the party. It’s just social media that makes it seem like a big deal.” The cars belong to the parents who had gone to the party with their children, said Onyango, so why the fuss? For some reason, Onyango had no time for the Director of Basic and Secondary Education at the Ministry of Education, Ismail Mulindwa, who promised to conduct an investigation and take action.
The Ugandan rick kids are probably now adept at “promposal”, a pre-prom tradition where a student asks another to go to the prom with them using some fanfare, and prom ask, which typically includes the question, “Will you go to prom with me?”, but with less fanfare. Exactly why we need this comedy in African schools isn’t quite clear to me. But maybe I’m just being facetious. Isn’t nearly every young, educated person marrying these days part of the “Will you marry me?” crew? You see total strangers applauding the kneeling guy and chanting: “Say yes, say yes, say yes!!” Go to the malls and you see this comedy quite often. It’s like that hollow command in church these days: “You may kiss the bride,” a woman that is typically already pregnant. These young fellas make their proposal surrounded by meat pie, ice cream and chicken. But they will live their marital life in eba. The town is red with taxes!
Parents drowning their children in luxury don’t love them; life interprets what they call love as violent hatred. The parents of the Ugandan revelers are setting them up for future misery. Why should a secondary school student, a teenager, have a fiancée? Is this the time to handle relationship drama? Why would any parent who claims sanity allow their child to revel in the kind of luxury witnessed in Elite High School? How are such youths to have value for money? Besides, are Ugandan students staging prom parties just because someone is doing so in Euro-America?
This is from the Korea Times: “For many partygoers the real fun and trouble begin after the supervised party ends. Chaos from after-prom parties has gripped the United States. After the prom, it is not uncommon for students to hold their own parties in hotel rooms or in houses, which their parents vacate for them. Quite a few couples who attend the prom together have sex on this night. Parents often educate their children in safe sex before prom since uncontrolled after-prom parties can give birth to serious problems, such as conceiving an unplanned child at a young age. They also remind children, “Don’t ever do drugs,” since illegal drugs, not to mention alcohol, may be available at these unsupervised parties. Recently, the “young cougar” scare is giving parents another reason to be concerned. A cougar.. is also used as a slang word to describe a middle-aged woman that hunts for younger men to sleep with. The new term, young cougar, refers to an older female student who partners up with a young male student for prom. According to the New York Times, quite a few female students in Baltimore, Md., brought younger boys as partners to their prom, saying “younger boys are more respectful” and “nicer to date.”
Well, so much for prom.
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