the invisible people (standard:Editorials, 2095 words)
Author: DAVID TUMUSIIME	Added: Apr 22 2004	Views/Reads: 3866/2352	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
personal reactions to beggars on kampala's streets. are beggars all over the world the same?

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

face of beggary? Not entirely. He is the epitome of destitution but for 
his eyes; slightly yellowy and long lashed which even though his face 
may be raised and his voice pitifully begging for a little from you 
kind stranger his eyes just won't beg. In fact they seem to command and 
are hard, a mean man's eyes they seem to me. Wiry he is, but that body 
without physical deformities doubled at the waist into a supplicating 
form bristles with barely suppressed brute energy. Suddenly I'm a child 
again, quaking and afraid of men who look strange. 

Like Sam but for different reasons I find myself not friendly inclined
to someone who is actually helpless: a beggar. He is a reminder. Akiiki 
Wilson Kaija told me of his own spectre that is a reminder. His is not 
a bunch of people. It is one person, a woman whose mental faculties he 
is not sure. She is to be found on Colville Street, opposite Christ the 
King church. I went to see her. 

She is a dark brown woman, slender necked, prominent hunger cheekbones,
with soft black kinky close-cropped hair. She is almost six foot, long 
and loose boned but not with any sense of fragility but rather 
toughness like that of peasant women from Kabale from who is probably 
descended. To see her walking is quite a sight. She wraps her clothing 
around her such that when she is walking, the sweaters, the polythene 
bags, bits of gomesi all form a sort of bridal train that trails after 
her that ridiculous as it sounds make her look magisterial. 

Kaija has been aware of her since 1999. “I first started seeing her when
I used to walk on this street going to Shimoni. I saw her so many times 
that I even started to learn some of her behaviour. I think she is a 
Catholic. She wears a rosary which she makes sure is always prominently 
displayed in front of her chest, over her rags. She sleeps around the 
church. She comes very early in the morning and sweeps the pavements 
around Christ the King every morning and when they are dirty. She can 
never allow them to become dirty. Even those buveras she sleeps in, she 
never scatters them. She packs them whenever she shifts from one part 
of the pavement to the other. I used to fear her but she seems 
harmless. If I pass this road nowadays and I don't see her, I wonder 
whether she is okay or what has happened to her.” 

During the Congo war, it so happened that the number of street kids in
Kampala drastically reduced. And for once though the street kids may 
not have been aware, many people were concerned about their 
whereabouts. Instantly forgotten at least for the time was how the 
first influx of kids on the streets had been a cause of worry. Stories 
filtering here from Nairobi had prepared Kampala for the worst. 

In Nairobi, so the stories went, these beggars who were mostly
adolescent young boys and a few girls accosted pedestrians and 
“my-cars” and under threat of smearing them with human waste elicited 
‘alms.' The influx of so many kids on the streets to many was clear 
indication we had the Nairobi problem on our hands too. 

These street kids were and are not adolescents with threatening
attitudes. They are toddlers and children five to ten years in ragged 
t-shirts too big they slip down constantly to reveal their skeletal 
shoulders. Of all beggars in Kampala, they are perhaps the hardest to 
ignore or resist. “My-cars” trapped in traffic jams know this best. 

These street kids already know basic economics and hardly any of them
runs to beg from taxi passengers. Trapped in a traffic jam on stretch 
of Kampala road, Namirembe road or Wandegeya roundabout, it is 
especially difficult to tune out the strained pleading voices that 
cough for effect or those big helpless eyes that remind one of the 
obligation of helping any living thing young because it cannot take 
care of itself. 

In spite of the situation, it is sometimes funny to watch how the
persons in the cars react besieged on all sides by the wrenching sight 
and chorus of pitiful voices. More often it is chilling to watch how 
quickly the windows roll up and the denizens stare straight ahead 
waiting for the traffic lights to release them seemingly indifferent to 
the pleas all around them. 

“My-cars” can pretend they do not exist. Pedestrians have a harder time.
Before some of these street kids were forcefully removed from 
Pilkington Avenue and behind Speke Hotel next to the UEDCL offices, 
their pestering had reached such levels that especially female 
pedestrians preferred to dash to the side of the road where they would 
not have to wad through their branchlike upraised begging arms. On 
Kampala road, this dilemma remains. Very few dare to cut through 
Constitutional Square Park after eight in the evening for fear of 
encountering these kids. Somehow kids that looked helpless and reminded 
one of a younger brother or sister in the night seem menacing suddenly. 


To be fair, I have my own spectre among this homeless band, these
invisible people. He is a boy of whose very appearance calls out all 
the myth-making, romantic-past painting part of my nature. He is about 
sixteen years old. He has an unusual appearance. It seems one of his 
parents was Arabic or Asian because he has the pale appearance the only 
Africans who have it are Swahili. His hair is a natural glossy black 
and soft, straight like an Asian's. As if he is not strange enough in 
appearance, his special begging appeal is one no one else can copy. He 
is an artist. He draws portraits of current newsmakers on exceedingly 
white paper in pencil. 

I can tell what street he is on by the ever-present circle of curious
pedestrians who gather around him wherever he is. He is popular and the 
curious gathered around love to amuse themselves by demanding he 
demonstrates again and again how he draws the portrait of President 
Museveni, chuckling hilariously when he accentuates the famous mountain 
peak on the president's bald head, nodding “yes, that is how he does 
them” when he curves the prominent eyeballs. And that, as they say, is 
his pitch for your money. 

His oddity naturally is the kind that calls attention to him; some
sympathetic, he has been profiled several times in the newspapers, some 
not because for all the amazed crowd always around him, I have never 
seen one purchase a drawing. I have also been told that there have been 
repeated attempts to get him into a juvenile rehabilitation centre, 
unsuccessful as his continual appearance on the streets shows. 

Once I brought up the topic that it was possible a Picasso was neglected
on our streets. I was corrected. I was told that the kid is 
unmanageable, that there are many people who are willing to help but he 
has no sense to use these advantages. That all he seems to care about 
is being on the street and drawing his portraits. 

I sometimes wonder what the monotonous repetition of the same portraits
is doing to his artistic soul. The last time I was aware of his 
presence on the streets I did not see him physically. I had had to go 
back to town late in the evening and I was on foot hurrying. It made no 
sense to sit in a taxi in the traffic jam of Kampala road. I would be 
late for my appointment. And it was on Kampala road, on the pavement 
stretch of Bank of Uganda opposite Radio One, that I saw him last, or 
his work. He was not there. His drawings, the portraits of Museveni and 
Obote and Bush, were scattered all along the pavement and hurrying 
evening passers-by were trampling them underfoot. 


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