"INDEFINATE" SUSPENSION of "Bart Harmminga" from Jinja Club

Jinja, Uganda,
Date Of Original Posting: August 2008
by
Bart Harrings

Wednesday August 13, 2008
It started as a normal late afternoon golf game. Standing at tee #1 some elder club members were trading jokes and waiting for flights to form themselves. Suddenly, the Chairman said: "Sing [real name withheld] told me you have a web page about the club?". The tone was one of unsettlement.
"Yes", I said, "I report to my friends on my site"
"But you should have told us".
"It's not a secret, and it is not posing as a club site, it is just one of my greetings to friends, I make no money with that page, if people like me to delete it, I will".
"Sing says it is even racist".
"That is ridiculous. I am not a racist".
"I told Sing to print it and let me read it".
"That is a good idea. Tell me if you want it off."
It is my turn to tee off with another player, so we part.
I have lots of three-puts.
On return in the club house the chairman on the veranda, not reading. But the 8 page web text with pictures is posted on the club house wall. Sing? Anyway, someone thinks he should try to light a fire. Would the chairman like that?
I hope not, so I return to the veranda and tell him, with a welcoming gesture inward: "its is already hanging. On the wall".
But the chairman does not take action.
I see Sing, go to him and say: "I heard people may have felt offended by that web page, if anyone did, I delete it".
"That is a matter for the chairman", Sing says with a gentle smile.
Since when is the chairman doing my web site? I thought. I went home.
At home I decided there was no reason to wait for any further reactions and I deleted the page from the internet.
[now, after two years, following the last incidents, I have uploaded again the original page "Jinja Club Life", without alterations, after all it has become an historical document, it is now on this blog, right below this posting]
Thursday 080814
The next day I went to the club with an apology to offended members. Now, the text of the web page had disappeared from the wall. I put my paper on the empty place, a nineteen-sixties view from Jinja Club (as was on display on my web page)
I apologize to anyone who felt offended by any of the things I reported about in my web page on Jinja Club. I unconditionally love the club not only as it really is but even the way esteemed members wish people to think about it. I have deleted the page from the internet.
The club manager told me he had orders from the chairman to tell me not to play pending my suspension.
"Do you have it written?"
"No but you should not play".
"I am not suspended until I am suspended. I will play. Do not worry, I'll tell them you did your job and I refused to comply".
I was not really in the mood for golf, launched 24 symbolic practice shots and signed the club book for driving range use.
Then it was time to wait for the incoming flights with senior members. The chairman entered. I went to show him the club book: "I just want to show you down here, you see? I played".
What does that mean?
"I played", I said over my shoulders, walking back to the veranda. It looked like the chairman was really wondering what it meant. Could the manager, who tried to stop my golf, have been lying about his "chairman's orders"? If the chairman would take interest in talking to me I could find out. But no approach.
I stayed long on the veranda, giving anybody the opportunity to talk to me. Only the golf captain did, inside, when I passed him one time: "I thought you had already been suspended, but you will soon get your letter". So indeed it had not, as the club manager had maintained, been the chairman, but the golf captain, possibly lying to the club manager that the orders came from the chairman, after all, a club manager would have no reason to hide the golf captain behind the chairman.
"They should ban you from the club altogether", one of the golf captain's friends said.
"You call us chimps". I do not remember whether this was the golf captain or one of his entourage.
Not letting this club conversation go on very long, I returned to the veranda, where some friendly club members told me that in their estimation I would be suspended, but I should take it calmly, I would just adhere to the rules of my suspension and then everything would be business as usual. Ironically they claim to be psychologically preparing me for suspension: "stay cool", "use your shock absorbers".
After taking some more beers the golf captain group tore my apologies from the wall.
The next day I decided to stay away from the club. Around sunset the manager called me to say he had a letter for me. I collected it the following morning. It reported the decision.


JINJA CLUB

Office of the Chairman

Tel: 0772 799 99610772 411 715 P.O. Box 638

E-Mail : mjkabeho@madhvani.org JINJA

Date: 14.08.2008

Attn: Mr. Bart Harmminga

SUB: INDEFINATE SUSPENSION

This is in reference to the web publication you unilaterally made on Jinja Club without
the consent of the Club Management of which some information was false. incorrect,
defamatory and damaging to the Club image.

Il has been decided that you serve an indefinite suspension with immediate effect until
the committee consults and reviews the implication of your publication.

Please hand over any Club property in your possession to the manager and by copy of
this letter. the management is directed not to extend any services to you including games and the Club house.

Yours fàithtullv.

Mwinde Jim Kabeho
CHAIRMAN

Cc: Chairman Uganda Golf Union
Members of Executive
Manager Jinja Club

So, now is was written. An "indefinate" suspension of a person called "Bart Harrminga". Had they targeted me and missed due to rural semi-literacy? I could deny this and claim I was not suspended. But that would be too childish. But since no hearing seemed to have been scheduled at all, not even to verify my name, I decided to answer thus:

From: Bart Harrings
To: Chairman Jinja Club
Through: Manager
Jinja, August 27, 2008

Thank you for you letter of 14-08-2008 concerning my suspension. Being a foreigner, I think I should just assume your decision is appropriate to the circumstances. I wish, however, to express my happiness that qualifications like "racist", which haunted the club in high profile are refrained from. I infer from your letter, since it says that a decision has been taken, that hearing an accused person is not part of Jinja Clubs suspension procedure. Let me therefore write you what I would have said had I been heard.
Nine years ago, easy software appeared allowing you to make text, insert pictures, and email them to friends. I started to use it for holiday greetings. But at the time, email boxes still were small compared to the size of such files. Hence I started to upload my greetings to a server, and just sent a link to my friends, allowing them to access them on a moment of their own choice while not burdening their email boxes. Since I had no plan to communicate secrets, I did not bother to password protect these greetings. While internet became a big thing and search engines got introduced, in communicating my greetings I was still using the system as a means to blog files to a server that friends could access. And up to today, these blogs are normally read only by 20-odd people I know personally, almost all in Europe. Nevertheless, I realized there was no password protection so the pages were accessible for every internet user.
However it came about, a reader outside my small group of regularly alerted friends accessed my page about Jinja Club. He or she thought the page was controversial and informed others in the club, who started to ask me questions. Though nobody asked or advised me to, I immediately removed the page from the server holding my files. I thought people thus far involved would understand I had no intention to damage Jinja Club. Why would I? What would be my profit of such a thing? And if at this point a conversation between the few club members involved, including me, had followed, the issue would have ended inconspicuously.
But the highly unfortunate course of events was different: the same evening I deleted the file, a hard copy of the page was posted on the club house wall. Others had printed hard copies before I could delete the page. After the page’s removal from the wall the attention of members not yet informed went frantically for these copies. The crown of all this conspicuous firework was my suspension (if by "Bart Harrminga" you mean me, Bart Harrings), that had probably become inevitable after these events.
I am sorry for having uploaded to an internet server a non-password protected greeting to my friends that turned out to be controversial. I turned out to have made something that could be used to inflame the club, as the wall posting did. Even though I did not see this while making the page, I do carry responsibility. After removal of the page, I posted my apologies on the club house wall, but senior members removed it. I refuse all requests for copies and comments on the events. I nowhere raise the issue. I will continue to do so. Copies circulating at the moment do not come from me. We may still have a chance that this thing will come to a halt before literally every bystander has satisfied his curiosity. Every one of the highly unfortunate moves towards the present situation is understandable from some angle. Moreover, I realize with regret that had my page not been available, all this could not have happened.
Yours Sincerely,
Bart Harrings

My wake up on the issue was too slow. When on that Wednesday (top of page) I was first asked about the page, I did not even think it would get frowned upon after it would have been properly read, even though I realized the pages did report on some neglect of maintenance of respect for property, not the most serious I know, but the most amusing. I thought they were considered normal: everybody knows, the club house veranda conversation habitually concerns them, and never so by suggesting that serious action should be taken. I do not consider my tone in the web page to be defaming or even one of accusation, but rather of benevolent resignation. I read my web page again. Yes, I am still really pleased with it! The quality of my web pages is not always superb, but this page is surely way above my average. Sing knew - and little did I foresee - that by posting it on the club house wall, he could injure members' pride, yes, high pride, more than sufficiently to have their author suspended, and his apologies even torn off the wall!
Nobody in the club seemed to have given any thought to how to contain the presumed "damage" . The desire to retaliate was far stronger. Thus, Sing published the page on the club house wall, in order to turn members against the author and the club officials kept it available for any interested reader, under the bar table. After the conspicuous firework of suspending the author this naturally is made use of, to say the least, eagerly. Thus club officials effectively spread the very pages they regard as regrettable.

Summary: Jinja Club suspended a member for a "publication", but

1. The club merely accidentally found, or was given by someone who merely accidentally found, a private, though unprotected blog on an internet server.
2. A member of the club's committee published the blog's text on the club house wall without consent (a copyright infringement).
3. The club's committee unilaterally judged "some information" in the text as "false, incorrect, defamatory and damaging to the club image". That opinion is not generally shared. Surely I never thought of it like that.
4. Such a difference of opinion may be annoying but R&A formally a club can not suspend someone for just writing something. Even if it had concerned a genuine publication, or even "false etc.", golf etiquette would have required more respect for freedom of expression.
5. Then the club abandoned the suspension procedure half way by simply never fixing the term.
6. To my knowledge Jinja club never had a member "Bart Harrminga". If I am correct in that, formally no one has been suspended at all in this incident, though of course they targeted myself.
7. As it stands, Jinja Club's registration as a golf club and its membership of the Uganda Golf Union is a violation of R&A standards, both because its course is not up to the standard for being called a golf course and for the total unawareness of R&A management standards in the committee, as transpires from this incident.

Jinja, Uganda, August 2008,
Bart Harrings

Jinja Club Life

"We start the financial year 2007

at the beginning of March, 2006"

Manager Jinja Club

Jinja Club, Uganda, bordering Lake Victoria at the Source of the Nile, established in the mid 1920's. Golf, tennis, swimming, squash.


Photo: Jinja club Southward from the road side. Foreground: tennis courts 4 and 5, on the background the Club House overlooking Napoleon Bay leading (to the right) to the source of the Nile.

The run down premises and facilities are unaltered since Ugandan independence. No doubt the club started whites only. We keep trying to find out the date of opening to everybody, a day marked, we like to think, by the mounting of the signpost below, that now features prominently at our entrance:

Photo: the welcoming signpost I pose with reads: "Jinja Club is committed to provide quality sports, recreational and social facilities to its members without any discrimination..."
on the background our utility vehicle

If it was not long after the opening to everybody that an artist was inspired to put the painting shown below on the back of the club's announcement- and competition score board, the general opening would, we think, likely have been only after independence. We all to like to think of the grey spot just above the club head at the depicted tee as a hippo.
CLUB NIHGT... MODEL STEBLE FORD ...

"The Jinja Golf Course in Uganda, close to Ripon Falls and Lake Victoria Nyanza, is a favorite hang-out for the local hippo population. They trek from green to green during the night, happily mowing the grass while leaving sets of parallel tracks that look like ruts impressed by broad-tired cart wheels. Golfers raved and cursed until Jinja club officials made a new ground-rule: If your ball lands in a hippo's footprint, you may remove the ball and drop it on adjacent turf without being penalized" From: Excerpt from "Animal Kitabu" by Jean-Pierre Hallet (Random House, 1967)

We had a lot of hippo's until Idi Amin's soldiers shot them in the mid 1970's, some say for food, some say because they got trained to cross the Nile swimming and feared the beasts. Nowadays only every now and then a male from Buvuma island (10 km), chased from a group, tries his luck swimming our side and returns after being seriously annoyed by people who do not like him to graze their crops at the shore side at night. While in 1963 the South side of Napoleon bay was rain forest where from the Club's veranda you could see the elephants drinking at sunset, now all shore sides of Napoleon bay got largely stripped of trees and crowded with small fishermen-farmers. No hippo in his senses would try to come and raise his family here. Despite their prints having thoroughly disappeared since 40 years, the club cherishes the hippo's memory by maintaining a local golf rule on the score card until today. Though not among hippos, Jinja Club enjoys more animal popularity than ever: among others, goats, cows, snakes, literally millions of big fruit bats, fruit bat hunters with catapults, fish eagles, marabous (often moving balls), scores of resting Jinjajenese, bikes, motorcycle-taxis on their way to the source, the odd car and our young self appointed club cat ("Tiger" of course) roam the fairways.
Jinja club is an association with members, a board with a treasurer, an annual meeting, and staff: a financial manager, bar service, swimming pool staff, golf course maintenance staff. And it has a host of largely idle caddies, waiting for the lucky day they catch a mzungu guest player unaware that their bottom price is 80 eurocents. For the happy occasion of such visits some privately own a set of clubs for rent. Even the bartenders tried to enter the market by offering clubs for rent, but due to their incompetence got cheated when buying them (from caddies?) and are now stuck with some bags of over 30 year old dinosaurs, each number of a different brand, length and lie. At the arrival of a mzungu the peaceful rest turns into hectic running, crowding around the arrived and shouting what is on offer and at what phenomenal price. Despite the crowded impression the club thus makes, do not just set yourself on the veranda to wait for service. You are sentenced to a frantic hunt for the barman. He may be having a chat and watching the girls in the swimming pool, or has a shower, to which he claims to have the full right: "I was sweating!".

Security: Scores of Caddies swarm and sit on the members' veranda waiting for a customer, many wait for more than a week.
The club house satellite TV is also an obvious attraction to whoever poses as caddy, the sound of which mingles with the loud disco in the swimming pool. Understandably the club's dressing room locker is not the place to store your diamond necklace. A few years ago, one caddy was sent off for breaking in lockers but got back because he was just about to become the golf champion of Uganda. There is a lot of the typical African restrained stealing: only your balls are gone but your clubs are still there. I personally found, after a stay abroad, in my locker my tennis rackets, covered with gravel dust, all with broken strings. My own padlock was still on and working but it opened a bit stiff. After another, longer stay abroad, my locker was clearly in use by another member.

This happened last year. I am a full member (USh 100 000/= or €45 yearly), I owed the club the membership fees of last year and the present one. Moreover, I saw I was registered for a bar debt of $10. I told the new manager that the bar debt was due to the previous bar manager, fired for fraud - in my estimation the average Jinja Club manager is fired for fraud after two years - , who held, for structurally solving the eternal "I don't have the change" problem, a small deposit of me with an exercise book to keep track of my beers. Having been fired, he had gone off with my money and exercise book, leaving my recent purchases in the clubs accounts as unpaid. I had reported this to the club more than a year ago.
I shrewdly proposed to deal with all problems (debts and lost property) in one go. That changed the matter. My golf clubs were unexpectedly found immediately. The 9 and pitching wedge were missing, but somebody knew the man who was "repairing" the pitching wedge. I told them I would pay my membership as soon as I would have received both my missing clubs, my missing balls, tees and glove. The last three items had "plobabry" (African English) been sold, but I could live with that. Within two days, even the last two clubs surfaced. The - usually drunk - grounds man bringing them was so moved by his own benevolence that he wanted a reward. I gave him a dollar.

The return of my property of course made me ready to pay two years of membership fees.
The new manager: no, you have to pay for three membership years.
It is February, 2006. I show him my last fee receipt of December 2003 for the membership year 2004. That fee had been reduced with the 18 000 USh, the non-consumed part of my exercise-book-change-shillings the previous manager fled with.:
Yes, the new manager says. That was for the financial year 2004.
No, I say, it says "year", not financial year. But I do not mind to take it as financial year, because I know that starts in March, hence it would give me three free months.
But we start the financial year 2007 at the beginning of March, 2006.
I do not say anything but look at him for a while, to see whether any light gets on. Then, he asks me to see his book. In a brand new book it is solemnly written I should pay 300 000.
Sorry, there just has been a million fraud in this club [a million is €450], I am not even going to read its books. My receipt is my proof. Take it and discuss it with your treasurer.
I put my 200 000, two years membership fee, back in my pocket and leave.
After five months of silence on the matter, I get an invoice for "membership 1-4-2006 to 1-4-2007", which in my calculation saves me one year's fee. This time I decided not to object.
Through the years the quality of the golf course varies from excellent to a state where you are not even likely to find your ball in the middle of the fairway. Yet you feel having a free ride with your €45 annual membership and € 0.80 green fee (Wednesdays € 1.20, Weekends and public holidays € 1.60). Moreover, recently the course got a boost by high military attention. Fuel surfaced, workmen could be paid, even water pipes got dug to the greens. All taps got stolen on the day of their mounting, but they kept being replaced until even proper night security was installed.
A fine tractor appeared on the premises, which was first thought to have come from the army camp but later was said to have been donated by St. Andrews. An internet surf session taught me that the donation was by R&A, the golf's world rules and development body (yes, at St. Andrews), and our three new green mowers had come together with it.

The Annual meetings of the club are worth a visit. They start three hours late. Not long after, the alarming unpaid claims of the club on its members are discussed, most of them bar debts. Fortunately the major share in the debts is due to members long suspended and abroad, which has the additional advantage that they cannot defend themselves. The members attending the meeting fortunately are all relatively clean, they claim at high tone about themselves and each other, but curiously enough, a cash-only policy is supported by a small minority only. The counterarguments adduced by the other members are intricate, sometimes brilliant and take about 80% of the meeting: every item on the agenda, whether it is squash, tennis or whatever, seems to naturally lead back to the subject: the features of a legitimate bar debt - guests suddenly appearing / only members of other clubs or any guests? etc. -, its exact maximum amount and duration.

Golf competitions are highly emotional events since the value of prices (varying from a video recorder to 10 kg of maize flower) is, as a percentage of the wealth and income of competitors, so high that the stakes are almost professional. Do not be surprised by some unexpected coughing when you tee off, balls gone astray are found miraculously and winners are contested for wearing clothing inconsistent with the regulations. If all that does not help some try to sneak out with prizes they did not win.
The courtyard of the clubhouse is a most intriguing place. If you can't find it just follow the Tiger the Club cat. Here children are running around and women sit behind food, boiling on floor charcoal fire as you could see it in every African country village. Who is who is not easy to grasp. Some staff live there with their families, but since it is normal in Uganda to have many wives the place is be impossible to survey. Three year olds come out assuming a helicopter-like appearance by swinging full size golf clubs over their heads, hitting fairly hard the occasional ball you like me no doubt get tempted to drop at the right place.

Photo: Jinja Club Centre Court

The Club goes up and down, but nowadays we are up because of the R&A donations and a strong presence in our board of high military: our president, a top military officer, while signing for some expenditure: "we do not leave shopping to others, you go yourself! I saw this guy staggering drunk carrying our fuel!...I heard someone ran off with yesterday's money of the swimming pool?...etc.
Jinja Club, inalienable part of the international golf heritage. The luring danger is of course a corrupt set up in which the ground gets lost to some project developer, but the popularity of the fairways among the many Jinja citizens who need a rest from doing nothing all day makes local officials reluctant to follow their temptations. Meanwhile we got proud to see a new mast of mobile provider MTN displaying its name as "Jinja Club" on our cell phones.

Breaking News: "Bart Harmminga" serves "indefinate suspension" for writing this page: Posted on this blog (above) .