There are buses, too – a frightful convoy barreling down the road, their windows dusty, their tires smoking and spraying gravel into the air. Harried faces peek back at us, a brief, terrified communion as we hurtle toward our separate fates. This road is enough to make you find God, or at least send out a desperate search party for Him. We pass one bus idling by the side of the road, smoke billowing from the rear, and another laying on its side, surrounded by broken glass. Further on we see a bus hidden in a clump of tall grass. I imagine the fearful moment as it broke from the road, hell-bent on disaster, the seconds ticking toward eternity before it came to a terrible stop against the base of a tree. Later we watch another struggling to negotiate a battered stretch of road, veering onto the shoulder and pitching far to the side before righting itself, headlights flickering, prepared for whatever perils lie ahead.
I’d planned to leave Kampala on the early-morning Post bus – described to me as “the least dangerous” of Uganda’s perilous bus options – but was dissuaded by Borja, a tall, lanky Spaniard who was himself heading north for some volunteer work. He’d been hanging around the bar at Backpackers these past few days, chain-smoking, fidgeting nervously, watching Uganda-league soccer on the tiny bar TV. A photographer from Jerez, he’s on his way to Gulu to run a photography workshop for local children. Through an odd coincidence, his contact in the north is an American named Tiffany – a CouchSurfer I’d written to just a few days ago, looking for a place to stay. He offers me a lift, and I tag along the next day for the long ride north, packed into the back of a Land Rover alongside a few screeching kids, a box of Christmas cards, and a Russell Hobbs espresso machine.
The truck is owned by Invisible Children, a Gulu-based NGO that works with youths affected by the two-decade-long civil war in the north. For the past two years it’s rebuilt schools and lives in the war-ravaged region, giving hope to kids who spent much of the past two decades living in fear and, often, on the run. It was the Lord’s Resistance Army – the north’s notorious rebel group – that pioneered the practice of kidnapping children and recruiting them as soldiers. Local families, anxious about the safety of their children after dark, would send them on “night commutes,” with hundreds of kids carrying sleeping mats to any crowded public place where guards could keep a watchful eye over them. Pictures show their frail bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder on the floor, curled into tiny apostrophes in the basements of police stations and churches and schools.
It’s been a decade since the kidnappings reached their peak, but even now, with peace talks between rebel leaders, the Ugandan government and neighboring countries inching forward, the stalemate in place appears to be a wary one. One of the LRA’s main conditions for peace is an agreement that Joseph Kony and other rebel leaders won’t be prosecuted for war crimes by an international tribunal in the Hague – a demand that’s justifiably met with fierce resistance around the bargaining table. Many Ugandans in the north look toward the future with uncertainty. Jolly, Invisible Children’s country director, describes the group’s reluctance to build new schools where old ones were razed just a few years ago, guarded against the prospects of failed peace talks. And in the refugee camps that orbit the city, packed with displaced persons who fled their homes during the war, few people have been willing to return to the lives they left – unsure of what they’ll find, and anxious that the year-long truce won’t last.
It’s a slow, painstaking process trying to bring hope back to this shattered region. Aid workers pour into Gulu, settling into gated, guarded compounds on the city’s outskirts, plowing through the streets in their logo-ed SUVs. Many are flush with funding from international donors; for others, like the African-run HEALS, it’s a constant uphill climb. The group, founded by local Acholis and spearheaded by Invisible’s Jolly, epitomizes all the hopes and struggles of grassroots groups in Africa. Working with area children, HEALS aims to rebuild their young lives through Health, Education, Arts, Literacy & Sports. It’s largely the sort of “play therapy” I’d rolled my eyes at when I first heard about it in Nairobi. But I’ve at least come to realize that there’s something worthwhile in teaching these war-stricken kids how to play.
We visit HEALS one afternoon, in a small compound down one of the twisting, grass-covered roads on the town’s fringes. Borja’s come to drop off his bags: it’s through HEALS that he’ll be running his photography school, and the group is letting him stay in a spare bedroom – partly out of gratitude, partly to offset the costs of the extortionate import taxes he had to pay to get all that equipment into the country. The office is a threadbare room with a couple of desks and a sink in the corner. Pictures from HEALS events are taped to the wall, the bookshelf crammed with binders for the group’s countless projects. Some kids have begun to assemble in the yard. Later in the afternoon, Emmy – an AIDS orphan who’s been adopted by Jolly and her family – will teach his daily break-dancing class, and the kids are practicing their footwork on a plastic sheet spread across the rocky earth. In a room nearby, a young boy is tapping away on a Casio keyboard. He’s leaning over Beethoven’s 9th in an exercise book, playing the same eight bars over and over, frowning with effort.
Close to thirty kids have arrived by the time Emmy begins his lesson. He’s a serious, self-assured 17-year-old, his t-shirt and khaki shorts loosely draped over a slender frame. He assembles them in crooked rows – barefoot boys with fake Nike headbands and Power Ranger t-shirts; girls in plastic Bata sandals and shapeless blouses and dusty skirts. Emmy paces back and forth like a drill sergeant, barking in Acholi, shooting a reproachful stare when a fit of giggles bursts out from the back. He walks them through a few steps, swinging his arms, pivoting his hips, skating back on the soles of his feet. In clumsy unison, thirty bodies follow suit – an unruly flailing of gangly arms and spindly legs, Emmy watching gravely and nodding his head in 4/4 time.
Finally they run through the whole routine from start to finish. Some of the dancers struggle to control their laughter; others look so pained by each pop and lock, you’d think the fate of Uganda hinged on their performance. Clouds of dust swirl around their heels. Chickens cluck outside the compound’s walls. Emmy claps and nods his approval, and when they’re finished there’s a spontaneous burst of applause. There’s joy and relief on their faces – a sense that whatever just passed between them, it was something good. They laugh and high-five and chase each other around the yard in agitated circles. Afterward they perform some traditional Acholi songs and dances, stomping their feet and shaking their shoulders and wiggling their hips while their voices carry the high notes into the air. It’s a frenzied, inspired, carnal performance. Sweat beads on their foreheads and chins; they revolve around each other, thrusting their heads and rocking their backsides. The guys’ voices rumble in low, rhythmic baritones. Drums beat wildly. Borja circles with his camera, zooming and clicking away, and later that night we’ll look over his pictures, agreeing that it was a very good day.
The bus pulls into a quiet station on the outskirts of Kampala, and I’m hustled into a cab with minimal fuss, desperate for a hot meal, a cold beer, and what I suspect will be a luke-warm shower. The city is buzzing at this early hour: cabs honking and swerving, boda-bodas squeezing through traffic, young singles lining up in front of nightclubs or spilling out of bars. It’s a happy change from Nairobi, where an air of distress starts to settle on the city at the first hint of dusk. I make a comment along those lines to the driver, who grins broadly and nods his head and gives a solid impression that he has no idea what I’m talking about. He pumps my hand warmly when we get to the hostel – a sure sign that I’m about to get fleeced. Sure enough, when I ask for change he pats his pockets sheepishly and says he has none, and the tip I grudgingly give him – Ush2,000, or about a buck fifteen – ensures that we part the very best of friends.
After the funereal calm during the sad decline of Nairobi Backpackers, the Kampala counterpart is refreshingly upbeat. There’s an overland truck parked outside and a bunch of backpackers milling around the pool table and girls in yoga pants and tank-tops having drinks by the bar, their pony-tails bobbing with a sort of youthful vigor. It’s a place I suspect I’ll be getting used to in the weeks ahead. In the morning, clean, fed and fully rested, I get that familiar feeling of suddenly finding yourself plopped in a country for the first time – a feeling of nervous energy and promise that, it dawns on me, I haven’t felt in months.
Driving around Kampala, it’s clear the city is still coming down from the heady highs of Chogm. Roads are freshly paved, hotels have been spruced-up or, in some cases, built from scratch, in anticipation of the onslaught of media and dignitaries pouring into the city. There are billboards on every stretch of pavement, on every street corner: Ugandans of all ages, shapes and sizes, looking cheery and optimistic and braced for the bright future ahead. “Let’s embrace Chogm,” some suggest. Others, almost forebodingly, ask, “Are you ready for Chogm?” Even my hostel has gotten in on the act, with a solemn promise stenciled across its freshly painted wall: “Chogm is your doorway to the world.”
In the newspapers, though, Chogm’s departed with plenty of controversy in its wake. A storm’s brewing around the millions of Ugandan shillings that mysteriously vanished from Chogm’s coffers, with pundits weighing in on just which ministers managed to get their hands in the till. Other critics have been equally critical of Chogm itself, questioning whether the very political circus of these past few weeks didn’t have the whiff of some post-colonial hangover. What does it mean for a country like Uganda, after all, with its sluggish economy and primitive health care and crippling rural poverty, to join hands with commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia? When Ugandans line up to graciously thank the Queen, just what are they thanking her for? And didn’t Chogm simply underscore the grim reality of the British commonwealth, where less-fortunate members have been left far behind?
It doesn’t take too long to tell we’re a long way from Piccadilly Circus. Along Kampala Road, the city’s main artery, the Barclay’s banks and high-rise office towers – concrete dominoes built during the country’s post-independence boom – belie the commercial clamor and pure African bedlam as you descend the hill toward the taxi parks. Here you find piles of second-hand clothes getting hawked on street corners, and rows of knock-off handbags hanging in shop windows, and barefoot men lying on filthy plots of grass, and women balancing buckets and baskets on their heads. Buses and matatus and boda-bodas all seem hell-bent on converging on the same exact stretch of tarmac at the same exact moment, and it suddenly seems miraculous that the city’s notorious accident rates haven’t soared even higher. It’s also impossible to reconcile these wildly divergent images of the city, as if Kampala is split between two visions of itself – the city as it is and the city as it wants to be – with most of its luckless residents caught somewhere in the middle.
From the back of a boda-boda, the driver gritting his teeth, checkered shirt flapping in the wind, I watch it all unfold. We pass furniture shops with men sanding and sawing headboards on the street, paisley armchairs and animal-print sofas lined up on the sidewalk. We pass shops with slabs of fat-marbled meat hanging from hooks and shops with cheap shoes piled high in the windows. We pass Excel Fashions and Xcess Designers and Lady Jayne Enterprises, Ltd. (“Designers of African Wear”). We pass the City Parents’ Primary School (“Education is Light”) and the Victorious Primary School (“God is Able”) and the Victorious Kindergarten, where Disney murals illustrate such important mottos as “Share with others,” “Make new good friends,” and “Children learn well if they are given frequent nutritious meals.” We pass New Look Maggie’s Bar & Pork Joint and Akaffe Pork Joint and Johnny’s Joint (“A cool joint with a difference”). We pass cows grazing on a school’s soccer pitch with corn growing outside the gate – spurts of vegetation that give the impression this place would be swallowed whole by indomitable Nature with just a few years of neglect. And in every direction the green hills of Kampala roll away, smothered by heat and smog and the blistering equatorial sun.
That night I pop in a local restaurant for dinner – a cheerless, white-washed place whose continental name – “Le Bistroh” – belies some very un-continental cuisine. I look over the menu with its unfamiliar dishes and ask the waitress to bring me something good and typically Ugandan, not suspecting those two requests are asking for two very different things. She brings me a bowl of goat stew – two hefty bones with scraps of meat clinging to them – and a plate of sides: motoke – a thick paste made from cooked plantains – and yams and cassava and sweet potatoes and pumpkin and posho – a dense, flavorless cornmeal mash. There’s some dry, overcooked rice, as well as a few greens draped across the plate. It’s more starch than I’d consume in any given week, let alone in a single sitting. The waitress – a young, angular girl with frizzy hair tufted in the back – sits at a nearby table and bats her eyelids, lazily shifting her gaze from me to the TV screen on the wall playing Nigerian soap operas. She’s wearing a shirt that says “Naughty boy – go to my room!” She doesn’t look a day over fourteen.
Despite my first taste of misfortune, I’m still feeling adventurous the next night. I decide to try some of the assorted meats being cooked over roadside grills near the hostel. It’s a treacherous walk downhill in the dark, boda-bodas careening onto the road’s rocky shoulder and strange shadows flitting in and out of the headlights. Traffic is backed up along the road to Kampala, but the unpredictability of Ugandan drivers makes them especially perilous. Matatus swerve; taxis make sudden hairpin turns; trucks stop and lurch forward without warning; everyone scurries for cover. Half-way down the hill I feel someone approaching from behind – a young guy in neat slacks and a button-down shirt, smiling the sort of inviting, shit-eating grin I’ve grown accustomed to in Africa.
He extends a hand and greets me warmly. His name is Peter. He asks where I’m going, and I warily mention I’m heading down to Mengo for a bite to eat. Even as we exchange pleasantries, my guard is up. Part of me is ashamed to admit my suspicions – even to myself – though a bigger part points to the long line of con men I’ve managed to sniff out mid-hustle. But Peter seems sincere; he talks about visits to London and Cairo, about the siblings living overseas. He holds up a plastic bag full of sausages and French fries; he’d just gone to visit his mother – jerking a thumb over his shoulder – and she gave him some food to take home. He invites me to weigh the bag in my palm and appreciate its warmth. It’s very plump and very warm. He’s on his way to check his email, but asks if I’d like to have a drink afterward. I agree and we shake hands and part.
At the foot of the hill, the shops and grills are tightly clustered around a dirt lot. I buy some chunks of fatty goat meat grilled on a stick by a thin, wary old guy. Boys circle with cartons of boiled eggs stacked on their heads. I give one of them Ush200 to buy me some chapati from a shop nearby. He brings it back and smiles shyly and I pinch him once on the cheek. A guy in a wooden duka is selling CDs across from me, the wall behind him plastered with colorful pictures of gospel singers and reggae stars and the odd American rapper. He’s playing a song with a loud, bouncy, African beat, and a few girls are gathered around his stall, flipping through the rows of CDs.
A few minutes later Peter returns and walks with me up the hill. He takes me to The Pool, a sprawling outdoor bar set around a massive lap pool and surrounded by high concrete walls. The water is dark and glassy and dimly shimmers beneath a couple of fluorescent bulbs. A few young couples sit on chairs close to the edge, kicking their heels toward the water. The place is packed. Guys in ribbed tank-tops and basketball jerseys and cocked baseball caps bob and sway in front of towering speakers. They dance with girls in tight t-shirts and clinging skirts. People throw their hands up and wag their fingers. The smell of body odor is intense. Peter explains that the crowd on this Sunday night is made up of students and vacationers and the unemployed – a mix which seems to account for most of Kampala. Inside a bunch of guys are sitting in plastic lawn chairs, watching Liverpool play on a tiny TV screen. We sit down and watch the game and don’t say a word. Once or twice we try to start a conversation that goes nowhere. I ask how many siblings he has, and he says he has three brothers and two sisters. He asks if I have any brothers and I say two. He asks if I have any sisters. I tell him I don’t have any sisters. Then we sit back and watch the game until he asks if I like football, and I tell him, yes, I do: I like football very much.
He gets up and says he’s going for a light, and he’s gone for close to ten minutes. At this point I’m convinced something’s up. There’s a big, bald, husky guy leaning against the wall – an ill-fitting polo shirt hugging his biceps – and he seems to be watching me closely. By the time Peter returns, smiling and puffing away, I’m looking for an excuse to call it a night. He sits and smiles and leans forward, as if he’s about to say something, then leans back and says nothing at all. We watch FC Porto play on a separate TV screen, and he asks if I like FC Porto. I can’t quite pin down just when I lost all powers of conversation, but five months in Africa have left me feeling incredibly dull. Before long, I’m less worried by the threatening guy with the biceps than by a crushing, weighty ennui. I lean forward and squeeze my temples between my fingertips, shaking my head bitterly. I’ve had a terrible headache all day, I explain, and I probably just have to go home and sleep it off.
Peter rises and puts a hand on my shoulder and walks me to the door. I do feel terrible, in my own way, about how I’m behaving – though not so terrible that I’m tempted to change my mind and have a drink. Outside I dodge a few matatus and bodas darting through the darkness, and there’s a healthy crowd of backpackers gathered around the bar at the hostel when I get back, though I’m not in the mood for them, either.
