The kids lost in the Chocolate toffee and biscuit streets of life

LETTER TO:

The kids lost in the chocolate toffee and biscuits streets of life

Sam Mwaka-karama

Once upon a time - there was a round box of Mackintosh toffee and chocolate sweets popular during the Christmas seasons – yes! In the childhood colonial Nsambya and Katwe Police; the colonial officers packaged them as Christmas gifts for the Policemen and families.
The 1950s design on the box had [Barbie doll and Policeman] sort of chivalry soldiers in red tunic and white pants. Carrying long rifles, with fixed long bayonets and a rectangular back-pack. Riding the horse drawn carts.
Set against a snow white background with tall trees torn bare the previous fall – whose sweet fruits were the content of the Mackintosh box; mama’s white lie… you a child stared at the pictures fixedly as you savored the bulging cheek contented sweetness. For a while it is a daily event. A story is forming in your tender mind. An interest is developing in you. A desire to know a foreign world is planted and germinates. To grow and someday blossom.
One day you suddenly salute a colonial officer; he salutes back – you are hooked! You had booked a flight seat. The bizarre Mackintosh box doesn’t leave you now or ever, when the sweets are wiped, it becomes a container for sugar! Every morning at breakfast you look and then look; staring at every detail of the scenes around the box – you are actually reading the picture like a book.
The generation of the 1970s and 1980s; your own children, are still far away in the balls… one day you will meet the women; one at a time, you earnestly look into their eyes and, there is stirring in the balls - a decade apart – the diapered bugler stands at the exit down by the long pipe and blows the bugle. Whole lot of diapered kids suddenly wake-up as the pump-job begins… some lanky tall boy beat the rest to it and dives into the York jelly! He makes the hazardous nine months in the red slippery fairy tale chamber.
About ten years later – you meet some young hard nut; she is un-broiled raw and wild with her own imaginations; this time some four piece rock group wreck the goddamn havoc; the diapered wildest girls on two simultaneous occasions beat the rest to it. They too, make the nine months in the red slippery fairy tale chambers.
But unknown to them – they are hooked! The bizarre Mackintosh sweet streets has a hold on them you don’t know!!!