my favourite part of kampala (standard:other, 2165 words)
Author: DAVID TUMUSIIME	Added: Feb 21 2003	Views/Reads: 4037/2380	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
some say it is a story, others say it is an essay. what do you think it is?

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

boys. They are used to carry supplies the shop proprietors purchase or 
have sold. When the runners begin to work, this area comes to its true 
life. 

The runners carry flour gunnysacks on their dirty-shirted backs. The
sacks weigh on average sixty kilos. The sacks are off loaded from 
lorries. The runner bends and men on the lorry dump the sack on his 
bending back with a thump. Even before the sack is securely on his 
back, the runner has begun to run. 

His eyes are strained to stay open. His forehead is deeply furrowed. His
mouth is chewed tight shut and you can see the lines of teeth through 
the skin on his jaws. He runs. His eyes might as well be closed. He 
seems to move by instinct. The route he is to take is decided in his 
mind. He will not divert from it no matter what. 

He runs. Woe to you who stands in his way. He runs. He will not stop
until he reaches where he is to deposit his load. He runs with a 
stumbling speed, a human truck machine without breaks. He runs. His 
only warning is his harsh cry. “Fasi, fasi!” he howls. 

The day has begun in Nakivubo and the shopping and selling has begun. 
Minor snacks vendors begin to spread from shop shade to shop shade, 
like oil spilling over water, covering the pavements over with brightly 
packaged sweets, big headlined newspapers, reed baskets of roasted 
ground nuts, tangy smell of unlit cigarettes, business diaries to order 
your life, chewing gum. The women sometimes wear scarves sitting on 
stools behind their merchandise, the most beautiful with the saddest 
look or sprightliest conversation attracting the most customers. 

The road is narrow, it is not all tarmarced. The parts where the road is
tarmarced wind and weave like a snake in motion. After the buses have 
gone, bumping and rocking on this road from the bus park , the taxis 
and the smaller “my cars” take over, racing like they are in a rally. 

It is hot even before the morning is over. The sun is high up in the sky
and the clouds are probably blue. But you cannot be sure because hardly 
anyone ever looks up. Eyes are on the ground where you are walking and 
in front of you where you are passing. Inattention and someone bumps 
into you and as you turn to adjust another moving body bumps into you 
and knocks you over.  Nakivuubo is a bus park next to a taxi park, a 
trading centre, a residential area.  Everyone passes here and if you 
stand idly under a shop shade the whole day you will see all of Kampala 
walk by or drive by. 

You will not be the only one watching Kampala walk by or drive by. You
will have company and if you are timid or solitary will not like the 
company. You will fully grown men dressed smartly in shirt and trousers 
and sometimes a coat and tie standing under the shop shades staring 
ahead of them at what you can not see. They will stand there the whole 
day staring ahead of them at what looks like nothing with intense 
concentration. Perhaps they are philosophers. But the mean, hungry look 
in their faces inclines one not to think so. 

Some are more sociable. They play chance games. They lounge on benches
playing cards for money or “omweso” for money or monopoly for money. 
They chatter loudly and laugh and sometimes fight and stare at 
passers-by and strangers nastily.  They catcall sometimes and sometimes 
one of them will appear from out a shop or out some corridor laughing 
running pursued by a cursing woman whose buttocks he has slapped. 

In the lunch hour the men crowd the shop shades standing those who do
not have seats ordering their lunch with oaths and swearing. The women 
rush about from the cooking shades carrying trays of food and bottles 
of juice and water and sweating on their brows.  They are coquettish 
and giggly even as the men run their hands under their dresses as they 
need the money.  Not even the dust from the road can obscure the 
perfume of food that fills the air nor any blaring radio the happy 
conversation of the munching luncheoners. This is the hour of peace. 

The afternoon is for desperacy. There is either work or no work.  This
is the time when thefts happen: the snatching of a woman's dangling 
handbag, the picking of a brown wallet from a man's back pocket where 
it makes a tempting bulge. Quick like a stick-pocked venomous snake, 
the drowsing habitués will jump to life, if the victim is one they 
sympathizes with, and the thief not one of the habitués.  The thief is 
surrounded, tripped, curls on the ground, with flung stones and kicks 
to the head is beaten to death. 

There is a channel in this area of dirty running water with shaky, wood
plank bridges over it.  When the men and the women have nothing to they 
sit on both banks of its sides if the sun is not too much and talk and 
joke with each other. They counsel each other and smoke and flirt. 

It is hard to believe they are adults. That when Daddy or Mummy leaves
home to work, he or she is going to spend part of his or her day like 
this. 

5:00 p.m. school ends. 

Evening comes. If you are lucky, you will see a wondrous sight. You will
see an Indian family out for their evening stroll. All day the man has 
been out working. Many Indians own businesses in this area and work 
very hard. It is time for relaxing in the evening. If it is a young 
family, a very thin, short , nervous-looking man with a bottle-mustache 
will be at the head. He will walk in front of his young family, cuffs 
of his long-sleeved shirt folded now. His taller, thinner wife will 
fall at a distance, head bowed covered in a shiny, colourful shawl 
pushing a pram or talking to her toddler son and daughter on either 
side of her scoldingly as they cheekily play or laugh. If the family is 
older, the husband will walk with a white haired plump old man, his 
father. They will smoke. The plumper wife will have a companion, her 
best friend or her neighbour. The awkward-legged teenage children in 
shorts, if the boys are fortunate permitted trousers, will form the 
back of the strolling party. 

Scurrying activity down to a minimum, those unemployed stand to watch
this sight. Those not in employ to this family or Indians, if whim 
grips them, will call after this family insultingly. The strolling 
party will walk on without a change in pace, as if they do not hear or 
understand. The children's faces, the sons' especially, are scarlet. 

Returning in the nighttime, it is better not to come after nine. All
Kampala sleeps early, the shops close earliest. When the shops are 
closed and locked there is no light because there are no working street 
lights. The vagrants you know and the idlers are crowed on the shop 
shades reluctant to return home. They stand under the shop shades in 
the darkness watching you in silence. You walk quickly in the middle of 
the road your shoes scrunching in the dust and scratching on the tarmac 
looking closely ahead of you and surreptitiously sideways. 

After supper after nine, the food still heavy in the stomach, you do not
want to sleep. There is nothing to watch on TV on the non-paid-for 
channels. You can then go out on your balcony and watch Kampala go to 
sleep. The air is cold and clean and pure as it can be in a city and 
you can hear the slightest sound like the ticking of your watch because 
after nine, coming to ten, there are very few vehicles on the roads and 
hardly anyone about in the streets. 

Standing on your balcony listening you hear the rumbling, gurgling,
flowing water in the channel you have not heard in the daytime. 
Sometimes then totally unexpectedly, some odd Ugandan man comes out 
onto another balcony with his woman and they are lost in each other in 
a way that makes you feel lonely if you do not have someone of your 
own. 

You do not want them to see you. You go back inside. 

Before you draw the curtain, standing by the window looking out seeing
the red and green and white lights shining in the distance of Kampala's 
hills, you are very glad to be here. 


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