The village I am living and working in is only 10 miles from our apartment in Kampala, but the phenomenal amount of traffic in the city can make the drive vary from 25 minutes with no traffic to 1hr 45m last Thursday night. We have made friends with a special-hire driver named John who is very punctual, helpful and an overall nice guy. Our long journey together the other night provided ample time for me to not only observe the outskirts of a large African city, but also have an amazing conversation with a hard working local.
At first we stuck to the back roads through several villages and trading centers to avoid the main road as long as possible. I have been through places like this at night many times in many different countries, but this night seemed different. Why…I don’t know; maybe because I had never been this very road, or maybe I was just in a reflective mood. As we slowly drove the remarkably rain-rutted dirt roads I was taken by how life (and by life I mean everyday activities that people engage in) in rural Africa proceeds much like the developed world only it is conducted in much less light. As one drives these roads, one tends to forget that the light that that is allowing for such observations is coming from the headlights of the car and the cars coming the other way. It was only when I would turn around to look back that I remembered just how dark it really was, and that the hustle and bustle of town life exists in the dim lights of a mix of candles, sparse low-watt light bulbs, Christmas lights, charcoal cooking fires, or a kerosene lamp here and there. Friends chat, business takes place, kids run around playing, and dinners are prepared in the same dim light. Most impressively, people walk along the roads in the pitch black yet always know exactly where to step.
It made me think of the now famous picture, ‘The Earth at Night,’ that seems to be in every social studies textbook these days, or in poster form on classroom walls. It is a map of the world depicting the most populous places by how much light is shining. For example, the entire east coasts of both the US and China appear as big globs of light, as does the entire island of Japan, but what always amazed me was that the giant continent of Africa was virtually devoid of light. Of course, in my western, developed world frame of mind I always assumed there was not much going on in the dark areas. Now I know that the dark areas are actually teeming with people who are living life to the best of their abilities whether there is ample light or not.
When we finally reached the “paved” roads of Kampala proper the streets were clogged with cars, trucks, busses, boda boda’s (motorcycle taxi), bicyclists and pedestrians alike. There are very few stoplights in the city and what appears at first glance to be an unruly free-for-all, upon second glance, turns out to be more of a semi-organized chaos. The orderly US idea of taking turns when there is no stoplight, or when they don’t work is non-existent here, as the intersections stop dead every few cars until someone decides to move just enough to let another car or truck inch through. And I’m not kidding when I talk about inches of clearance, because no matter how little space one thinks there is, a boda boda or two always manage to squeeze beside or between the vehicle at the last second. Without fail, every one of these frenetically chaotic intersections is home to one poor, lonely traffic officer standing in the middle of the mess, whistle in mouth, sucking fumes, looking like a deer surrounded by lions. What I realized is that much like the villagers persevering in the dim light of the dark nights, the city dwellers too were persevering the choking, potholed streets of Kampala knowing they would eventually get to where they were going. I guess what struck me on this night was the interminable resilience of the Ugandan people to survive no matter what challenges they may face, and there are many.
Aside from my deep thoughts on electricity and traffic, what ended up making this drive such a profound experience is the conversation I had with John, the driver. Over the last ten years I have read numerous books attesting to the misery of vulnerable people around the world caught up in tragic episodes, such as war, genocide, or just general oppression. I have even visited sites where some of these atrocities took place, reading first-hand accounts of survivors, but it has never felt so tragic and real as when John told me of his experiences of growing up during the “bush war” of the 1980’s when the current President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, fought a five-year civil war for control of the country. The conversation began benignly, as I simply asked him where he was from because I know that most people are from villages away from the big cities. When he told me he was from Luwero, I guessed by his age that he had been quite young in the early 80’s. Brief history lesson: When the murderous regime of the infamous Idi Amin was overthrown in 1979, the former President, Milton Obote, re-took power in a very dodgy election. Museveni, not keen on letting a former terrible President be President again, took his loyal soldiers from the Amin war into “the bush” to fight to overthrow Obote. This five-year bush war primarily took place in an area called the Luwero triangle just north of Kampala. John’s hometown, the city of Luwero itself, was right in the center of the triangle and therefore in the middle of the civil war.
I was right that John was somewhere between 12 and 14 (he is not sure of his actual age) when the bush war started. He began his story by saying, “Oh, let me tell you please that life was so hard for us during that time,” a phrase that he would repeat many times over the next hour. He explained that Museveni’s strategy of making the bush war a peasant uprising meant that there was no distinction between peasants and soldiers. In fact, he said that Museveni’s army enlisted people of all ages into the army so he had to stay out of sight to avoid conscription, which was virtually impossible, so even he was eventually trained to fight for a short while. The problem, though, was that the peasants, John’s family included, were already desperately poor, and this new war would be the worst of all. John’s family often had no food or water for days, and medicine was even scarcer. Museveni’s army controlled the Luwero triangle, but Obote’s soldiers would often make incursions into the area killing soldiers and civilians alike because they could not tell the difference. John said, “We had to watch our family and friends die because if they were hungry, we had no food, if they were sick, we had no medicine; we could only watch them die.” In fact, John lost both of his parents and 8 of his 13 siblings during the war. When I asked how they died, he said, “Oh, they died from so much, from hunger, from disease, from bullets. It was a terrible, terrible time for everyone.”
In Luwero John could only move around at night so as to avoid conscription into Museveni’s army. Four years into the war in 1985, he decided to get out of Luwero by walking the 60 miles to Kampala. He made it to a district just outside of the city where he found an Uncle to live with for a while. In late ’85 he arrived in Kampala where he could now only move around during the day. Obote’s army still held the city in late ’85 and apparently the soldiers would go out at night stealing from anyone they came across and breaking into homes to loot what they could find; it was a desperate army by that point. John explained that as soon as the sun went down he and his roommate would go inside their place, shut the lights off and try not to make a sound in order to avoid Obote’s pillaging soldiers.
Needless to say, I was astounded by the story John was telling me, because hearing it straight from the mouth of a survivor puts it in much more tragic perspective than simply reading about it. And John is an impressive survivor, as he ended up marrying and having three kids, all of which he is putting through school as a special-hire driver. I finally asked John if he felt after 25 years and so much suffering in the early years, that Museveni had done the right thing in fighting the bush war. He shook his head and said, “Yes I do,” which tells you just how bad Obote was.
As I sat there simultaneously feeling abject sorrow for this man next to me and continued appreciation for his resilience and the resilience of the Ugandan people, he launched into one final cruel twist of fate. John makes a decent living as a special-hire driver, but he could make much more money driving for a large company or for the government. However, as a child he was only able to complete primary school before the war forced him to just survive. In Uganda students take a test at the end of secondary school to acquire a certificate called “O-levels.” Ironically, neither big companies nor the government will hire people who have not obtained their O-levels, so the very government that so terribly disrupted his life will now not give him a better job, disingenuously apologizing, claiming it is simply their policy. Sometimes life can be remarkably unfair.
I usually complain about traffic, as do most of us who have the good fortune of allowing it to be something we can care about, but on this night, the traffic instead produced an unforgettable experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment