One man's meat; did another man eat it?

Secretly we(silent majority) love the villain but publicly we praise the hero. This particular morning, I sat in a 14-seater taxi from Kyanja with the intention of accessing the central point of Kampala Capital City in the shortest time possible. As is the routine, 06:00am - 08:00am are rush hours for almost everyone around the city especially for taxi drivers. I witnessed the taxi guy dodging corners and using all the insane edges to escape the traffic jam and even when I closed my eyes not to see what this "mad" guy was up-to, my heart was beaming with excitement both at the thrill that came with the rush and also at the fact that he worked against my time constraints.

Did I feel guilty about my inner man? Insignificantly yes! A tingly thing in me felt like this guy was my hero in this particular moment and I bet you must be thinking, "how can human beings be this selfish?" But you already knew that, right? It is debatable whether human beings are innately selfish or not, but that's for another day.

The nature of a villain is unapologetic, unkempt, with no limits nor boundaries, always up for a challenge and one that he will put up a good fight for. Fortunately or unfortunately such struggles always end not in his/her favor but rather in favor of the hero, bringing to life the words, "Good always wins". In fact, because we depict the villains to be shrewd, gigantic and masculine, it is rare to even imagine a woman as villain later on a hero. In movies, the closest she has been is from Ugly Betty on one side and a witch, bitchy high-school fellow or evil stepmother in snow-white on the other. Well, thanks to WONDERWOMAN and the likes, for extending our imaginary lenses to this fierce woman.

Villains are always portrayed as fun characters while the heroes are just boring figures only intended to ride on our empathy. One might say that these are just movies, but the influence they have on us is just immeasurable and can be depicted in how we interpret our daily struggles, institutional movements and political regimes. Epithets no longer motivate heroism nor deter villain-ism.

The other day I visited the Uganda Museum which featured the Unseen Archives of Idi Amin Dada and I left challenge seeing a hero in the eyes of a villain. Slowly by slowly our society and culture are drifting into treating villains as heroes and we are back to the drawing board where one man's meat is another man's poison. I guess at the end of the day what matters is who tells the story and I pray that GOOD will always win.

Remember that "Until lions learn to write, every story of the jungle will glorify the hunter" African Proverb.