It’s an odd, weathered, roughed-up place; once one of Uganda’s most prosperous towns, it suffered greatly in the post-Amin years. Around the leafy suburbs, white-washed bungalows sit in different states of disrepair: broken windows, missing doors, roof tiles battered by the elements. Ragged women stand in the doorways, surrounded by squealing kids. They sit in the shade on the porch, chanting “Mzungu! Mzungu!”, or dangling barefoot and grinning from the trees. It’s as if a whole city of mid-level bureaucrats – their modest salaries paying for modest homes with modest lawns – were chased out by some apocalyptic uprising, and now the squatter families have moved in, dragging their mattresses onto the porch and watching the water stains slowly spreading across the walls.
In its own small way, though, Jinja enjoyed a revival. The birth of the rafting industry on the Nile’s Class IV and V rapids has brought with it a surge in tourist traffic. Campsites cluster around a scenic perch at Bujugali Falls – some, like Nile River Explorers, achieving a certain notoriety for the libidinous escapades of buff young kayakers and their blond, chain-smoking hangers-on. Downtown, beside the pork joints and DVD shops and stationery stores, you can pick up carved masks and statuettes, woven baskets and beaded necklaces, hand-made goat-skin drums. You can also take a sidewalk table at the Source Café, an attractive little tourist trap with bougainvillea tumbling from the trellises. I spend quite a few mornings here, enjoying a strong Ugandan brew and reading in the shade, while groups of local volunteers – pale Americans with elaborate walking sandals and braided hair – practice their Luganda and roll their eyes at the tourists who walk down the street, banging their goat-skin drums.
(Incidentally, there’s also a hokey tourist attraction at the river’s so-called source – a carnival set-up of yellow and orange pavilions, sponsored by the local Nile brewery. Here you can sip a cold beer at the approximate place where John Hanning Speke discovered, in 1862, the river’s elusive source. The discovery itself is, of course, a matter of great dispute. And the failure of so many of the epoch’s great explorers to find it for themselves lends a certain extravagant irony to the ornery theme park that would have, no doubt, made Livingstone reconsider the ill-fated quest that would end in his death. But metaphysical asides aside, it’s a pleasant enough place. I spend an afternoon hitting the sauce while a storm blows in, rain falling in fat drops and dimpling the gray smooth waters.)
I’ve come to Jinja with absolutely nothing on my agenda, and that suits me just fine. While just about everyone who comes to Jinja does so to raft the Nile, I’ve taken a glance at the promotional videos – best described as “white-water carnage” – as well as a glance at my empty wallet and decided that, at $125 for the day, I’m happy to give the rapids a pass. I stroll through the market with Shufy and Omer – two Israelis I met at the hostel – while they haggle over fruits and vegetables. I terrorize small children with my camera. It’s a swell couple of days, all in all.
One morning I take a long, looping walk along the river road. I meet a group of boda drivers resting in the shade of a great flowering tree. A tall, handsome man approaches and takes my hand. His name is Hamzeh. He’s wearing a crisp, button-down shirt with black cufflinks and designer jeans and brown loafers – a poster-child for a happy Uganda, if ever there was one. Soon we’re joking and talking easily when, to my surprise, he asks for money.
“We are poor people,” he says, his palms turned up to the sky.
I reach over and tug his pant leg up till his shiny loafers are exposed. “Look at these shoes!” I say. “This man wants to tell me he’s poor. Look at my shoes.” I gesture toward my mud-spattered hiking boots. The others laugh wildly. “You want me to give you money? Why doesn’t someone want to give me money? I’ve been in Uganda for six weeks, and not once has someone said, ‘Hey, mzungu, here: have some money. Have 1,000 shillings, mzungu. Buy yourself a drink.’” This leaves everyone in hysterics.
Hamzeh laughs, too. He gets a phone call and walks off a few steps to take it. When he returns I grab him by the wrist and show the others. “Wooo-eee!” I say. “Is this a fancy phone or what? This poor man wants me to give him money, with his fancy phone.”
Hamzeh becomes solemnly indignant. He protests, saying that it’s the cheapest phone in Uganda. I tell him that’s impossible: I have the cheapest phone in Uganda. I pull out my light-weight Nokia and show it to the others. There’s a murmur of approval: it is, they all agree, a very cheap phone. Hamzeh asks how much I paid for it, and I say Ush40,000 – about twenty-five US bucks. He shakes his head, unimpressed: his phone cost just Ush10,000 – about the price of a frappuccino. He says that his phone is so cheap, if he drops it on the ground, no one will even bother to pick it up. I do a little comic pantomime of me kicking his cheap phone on the ground, and he says no: they wouldn’t bother to kick it, either.
I congratulate him, then turn toward the others.
“This man right here,” I say, “is definitely the poorest man in Uganda.”
Hamzeh joins in the laughter, but then his face grows serious and earnest. “Mzungu,” he says. “I met an American last week. I met him right here,” he says, pointing to the ground, “and he said that in America, when you have the new year, you take all the things from the old year and throw them away. You buy new things for the new year.”
The others nod in agreement. This is, it seems, a story they’ve heard many times before. I protest at the wild improbability of what he’s saying, but none are swayed. Hamzeh continues, building his case.
“He said that you throw away your old radios and buy new radios. You throw away your old televisions and buy new televisions.” More nods. “Mzungu, is this true?”
It’s almost a moment of high drama, but for the sheer lunacy of the accusations being flung. Still, that a dozen men gathered on a dirt road in Jinja could believe such things is, in itself, deeply revealing. I assure him that it’s not true, that most Americans, myself included, have weathered old stereos and TVs and kitchen appliances, and that many Americans are, in fact, poor. This meets with a few whoops of disbelief from the crowd. If I’d decided, at this very moment, to strum Brahms’ Cello Sonatas on my pubes, it would’ve seemed no less fantastic to their astonished ears. When we part, I can imagine the looks of reassurance being shot behind my back, as if to say: we Ugandans might be poor, but it sure beats being crazy.
Later that day I get a sobering call from Kenya. It’s from Peter, my footballer friend who – last I heard – was weathering the country’s post-election storm with his family in Kitale. The violence in western Kenya has been the country’s worst, and it’s not long before I learn that Peter’s family is in bad shape. Like many Kikuyu living in the west – in Kisumu and Kitale, in Eldoret – the Munenes were targeted soon after the rioting began. They’d been lucky to escape unharmed, but Peter tells me their houses were burnt down. They’re living in a local church, hoping to find a way back to Central Province, where they can join the rest of the family.
The timing has been especially bad for Peter: this month he was meant to be in Nairobi, trying out for a place on Mathare FC – one of the country’s top football clubs. Now, with gas prices rapidly climbing because of country-wide shortages, he explains that the cost of a bus ticket from Kitale to Nairobi has doubled: from Ksh500 to Ksh1,000 – about fifteen US bucks. It’s more than he can afford, but he’s desperate to get to Nairobi. So I visit the Western Union the next morning and arrange to send him some money – enough for a ticket to Nairobi and, I hope, food for a couple of weeks. He thanks me, and promises to be in touch when he reaches the capital.
Two weeks later, when I finally hear from him, he sounds exhausted. He was arrested in Nakuru – he doesn’t offer details – and by the time he got to Nairobi, it was too late: Mathare’s squad was full. Now he’s going to go back to Kitale to be with his family, though he doesn’t know what will be waiting for him there. I promise to keep in touch and do what I can for him, but I don’t know what that might be, and I doubt it would be enough, and the words feel like little consolation.
But I’d learned to take the scattered lows of my life with the countless highs; and if that meant Christmas in a city full of strangers, it sure beat most of the alternatives. So I bought a snazzy pair of socks from H&M and hooked up with an 18-year-old Latvian girl, telling myself that for all the last-minute melancholia, 2006 hadn’t ended half-bad.
A year later, Christmas in the tropics isn’t nearly so steeped in emotional contradiction, largely because the mood, the climate, the very look of Kampala owes little to the holiday season. There are some festive tunes piping on the stereo at Backpackers and a few wreaths hanging over the aisles at the Uchumi Supermarket, but there’s none of the transformative holiday magic of New York or Barcelona. In the crowded streets downtown, people are busy with the clamor and thrift of their daily lives: muscling each other in the market over secondhand clothes, buying loaves of sliced bread from the backs of minivans. Is there any way to separate the holiday season from any other day of retail madness in this city? Piles of pirated DVDs; stacks of cheap handbags and plastic shoes; billowing undies; sheets and pillowcases and scarves and linens; wallets; watches; pens; lighters; keychains; pictures; posters; old language primers. Men hurry down the street with boxes of Chapa Nyota blue laundry soap and blenders and spare car parts hugged against their chests. They carry sacks of charcoal and belts and spiffy loafers and Tuf Foam mattresses stacked a dozen high on their heads.
It’s hard to get worked up with Yule tidings in these parts. And besides, this is my third straight Christmas season away from home. I send out some obligatory emails and make some obligatory phone calls; and on Christmas night, I have dinner with Mai and Toon and Kristin, a Canadian volunteer living near Mai in Kabale. But there’s none of that wistful longing for the patter of snow on the windowpane and the piles of presents beneath the tree. If nothing else, I use the holiday as an excuse to splurge on Korean food and blow off work for a few days of drunken bonhomie. What is Christmas, anyway, but a time to spend with the ones you love – or, at least, like just enough? In close to a year and a half away from home I’ve grown quite comfortable in my solitude, but it’s nice to break the spell now and then – to be reminded of the simple joy in the company of friends.
Having decided to hunker down in the city for a few days before heading east, or west, I’m taking advantage of the glut of good dining. The days pass in an orgy of chapati and curries and naans from the city’s ubiquitous Indian restaurants, and bowls of thick hummus from the Lebanese joint in Garden City – Kampala’s obligatory mzungu-crowded shopping mall. I stock up on books from Aristoc and find a few decent cups of coffee around town, and if there’s any conclusion I’ve come to as another year winds down, it’s that I can travel half-way around the world and still manage to find a free WiFi signal with my eyes closed.
On New Year’s Eve I meet Mai and Toon and a couple of cute, bubbly Norwegian girls for dinner. We wrap up the year at Nawab, on the roof of Garden City, digging into our tikkas and biryanis while the lights of Kampala flicker across the city’s rolling hills. We’ve been boozing since early-evening, and by the time we leave the restaurant at half-past eleven, there’s a long trail of empty Niles and Bells behind us. Outside the Hotel Africana, where one of Kampala’s biggest parties is being held, a line snakes down the street. Most of the crowd is decked out in smart shirts and tight dresses and fancy Friday-night shoes, but the air is of such restless desperation that I suspect they’ve been waiting around since the days of Obote. We flash our tickets and skip to the front of the line, and we make it inside just in time to watch the fireworks bursting over the stage. The crowd oohs and aahs with great appreciation; I’ve got my hand on one of the Norwegian’s asses. The new year is off to a very good start indeed.
Afterward we flag down a half-dozen bodas and careen through the streets to Kyoto, a Japanese restaurant-cum-nightclub on a small hill above the golf course. The crowd is handsome and sloshed, flapping around on the dancefloor and rhythmically pointing to the ceiling and groping each other in dark corners. Somewhere along the line I manage to take a slight spill down the stairs. I try to laugh it off before ordering another drink and hobbling back to the dancefloor, and it’s not until half-past four that I realize I’m in a world of pain. By the time we head outside to grab a taxi I’m hopping on one leg, and at Backpackers I grimace and hobble into bed, welcoming a year that’s gotten off to as much of a stupid start as the one that came before it.
