Bukenya: My run-ins with booze and the dehydration theory

Those who were at the Second Literary and Cultural Studies Conference at Makerere, of which I told you last week, must have been seriously concerned about my gaunt, not to say ghostly, look. Many actually told me so, even as they enveloped me in their love.

None was more explicit about this than my sister and age-mate, Waveney Olembo, from Kenyatta University. She had reason to be, since she and our brother Professor Jotham Olembo, have had a few close shaves with those monsters we were talking about the other day. She advised me to have a thorough check-up at the earliest possible opportunity, and I will.

The immediate diagnosis of my condition at Makerere, however, was that I was acutely dehydrated. It was made by my baby sister (kitindamimba wa mama), Sarah, who is not a professional medical practitioner, but a wonderful care-giver.

Her prescription was quite simple. I should drink a lot of water. After all, dehydration means “out of water”, and my body was parched up, wrinkling, crinkling and drying out “like the desert”, a phrase which made the hotel staff laugh when I used it as I asked them to put a lot of drinking water in my room.

Fortunately, Sarah was preaching to the converted. As I often describe myself, I am a waterholic. This is a habit I particularly strengthened during my tennis playing and coaching days.

As every tennis player knows, there is no way you can survive a tough tennis match, that can run for anything from four to six hours, probably ending in an attritional tiebreak, without immersing yourself in water.

On the courts, we do not only drink the water. We also pour bucketfuls of it over our heads and bodies during those changes of ends which become more and more welcome as the match proceeds from love-all to the crashing game-set-and-match. By the way, do not fail to watch the American Open Tennis Championships through these coming weeks.

Anyway, I took my little sister’s advice and, literally, drank more than twenty half-litre bottles of mineral water between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, when I delivered my keynote address at the conference.

That stream of aqueous goodness did not quite bring me up to vintage “mwalimu” energy levels, but at least it enabled me to share the little I had with my literary brethren and sisteren.

I kept gobbling Adam’s ale throughout the day, and by the time the band at the closing dinner dance struck up the opening dance tune, I was the first to leap on to the dance floor, singing along, “Dancez, dancez”, just like the swinging ageless Mwalimu that my students and colleagues are used to. The water was doing the miracle.

I must confess, however, I’d to leave my “Sorellina (little sister) Professora”, the irrepressible dancing nun, Dominica Dipio, the film-maker, on the floor with her age-mates and retire early to bed. I was feeling quite buoyant and refreshed, but I did not want to tempt providence.

AT MY PHYSIO'S CLINIC

Come Monday, I was at my physio’s clinic, and it is to him I was expounding my dehydration and booze theory or, rather, hypothesis. A theory, you see, is a tried and tested position, empirically proved through research and experimentation, while a hypothesis is just a “hunch”, an impressionistic gut feeling that is yet to be subjected to those processes. That is how they talk up there in the Ivory Towers.

Incidentally, the lore at Makerere is that the phrase “ivory tower” is derived from that image of the iconic grey structure sitting atop the Main Hall where we held our plenaries, and where the old clock still strikes the hours with reassuring regularity.

But there is no truth in that. The phrase, implying lofty, arrogant and self-serving scholarship, is a translation of the Latin “turris eburnea (tower of ivory)”, one of the items in the litany (praise list) of the Virgin Mary.

Craving your indulgence for the digression, let me return to my hypothesis. It is based on the concrete and palpable observation that African men, and especially Kenyan and Ugandan men, drink far too much alcohol for their good or for the good of society.

That needs no elaboration, and we have recently had several dramatic demonstrations of (or is it against) it, including serious insinuations of our male gender being incompetent in various areas of performance, including fairly intimate ones.

I believe one of the main reasons why our men take too much booze is that they do not drink enough water.

Many of them, indeed, never drink any at all. “Water is for frogs,” they say. So, they get thoroughly dehydrated, or simply thirsty. When they get thirsty, they reach for the nearest bottle, calabash or mug of chang’aa, busera/ajon, tonto or mnazi to slake their thirst.

But alas, as we know, ethanol, the alcohol in these beverages, is not only addictive, corrosive and all those other dreadful things. It is also a diuretic, that is, a fluid-drainer from the body.

Do you remember John Ruganda’s waragi-guzzling character, Wamala (incidentally not Wamalwa, “man of beer”, as we often mistakenly, though appropriately, call him), in The Burdens? He says if you gave him a quid, you would soon find it spouting at the urinal of the Republic Bar! That is the diuretic effect of alcohol, and it becomes a vicious circle.

For me, this is not a hypothesis. It is a thesis or theory, because I know it from my real life experiences. I was an imbiber of some repute of those other-than-water liquids in my middle years, and I will tell you about my run-ins with them someday, if you ask me.

Meanwhile, maybe Mututho and his anti-substance abuse friends should not be telling people not to drink. Rather, they should encourage them to drink more –of the right kind of liquids. We should give a try.

Later, if time allows, we should compare notes, over a drink maybe? (Shush! It will be only a drink of water).

Cheers!