By Jason Cotsapas
Kampala, like Rome, is known as the City of Seven Hills. As a local tour guide pointed out to me, rapid growth has meant that today it would be more accurately described as the City of Twenty-Three Hills. Twenty-three hills, predictably, provide for no shortage of glorious viewpoints. Rooftop bars, breaks in the roadside tree and bush cover, and balconies in glitzy homes offer grand panoramic perspectives of Uganda’s expanding capital. You take it all in, immense verdure and birds of prey coasting around, buildings providing millions of lights at night. There is a calm like no other.
Take two: Kampala, all motorbikes and dirt thrown up and trees and lush green but no parks and roadside chaos to accompany the actual road chaos and lateness and painful congestion and dizzying speeds vying with each other and soccer shirts and bright billboards. It’s a ridiculous, oftentimes nauseating assault on the senses. Read all you want about it, take in a thousand photos on Google, but remember what Robin Williams tells Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting: “But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like…You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that.” He was describing the Sistine Chapel, not a roundabout at perpetual rush hour, but Kampala, like Rome, like anywhere, needs to be experienced to be felt, known.
Take traffic. Tomes could exist dissecting the preternatural way it somehow functions OK, despite all laws of physics and common sense dictating otherwise. Crossing at an intersection requires that the driver have five pairs of eyes on each side of the head, as motorbikes—they’re called boda-bodas here—frequently ride on the opposite lane as they seek the smallest opportunities to advance. Opportunities are measured in inches. Car drivers look right, then left, repeat the exercise ad nauseum, I sit in the back convincing myself of the utter futility of even trying to move, and yet we cross in short order. The soldier makes it across no man’s land, encounters endless rounds of machine gun fire, and stares at his unscathed body as he reaches the enemy’s trench. What, how?!
Take a corollary to traffic, being a pedestrian. When contemplating crossing a street, your thoughts initially default to “no, this does not sound like a very smart idea today, no thank you”. The sheer verve of boda drivers will have you doing a little unintended shuffle dance between the edge of the sidewalk and the great beyond. Don’t take that step. Even safe spaces aren’t safe. On especially busy days, you’ll see bodas snaking between pedestrians and lampposts and bus stops. Sidewalks are entirely fair game. The rules of the road have not been lodged, and it’s not only people’s games, but motorcycles, often moving against traffic, that you got to dodge.
Take the direct corollary to traffic, traffic jams. You’re going to have to learn to be patient here. Don’t drink too much water. Whatever you do, don’t overload on lattes if you know you’re lactose intolerant. What should be a five-minute drive can easily turn into a five-hour odyssey, replete with existential panic and back-alley latrines.
BUT. As with any experience, habituation leads to a dulling of the excitement, a sincere acceptance of the organized chaos. Within three weeks, Kampala and its unique modus operandi were all I ever knew. Of course five thousand cars and ten million bodas will compete against each other at every moment for the slimmest of gains. A pedestrian, at first paralysed by the inertia of caution, taking half an hour to cross one street, soon briskly weaves her way through traffic as easily as Messi sidesteps defenders.
The Complete Guide to Kampala Traffic, vols. undetermined, can be a passion project for later in my life. I figure it’d be wise devote some of this post to other things as well.
General thoughts
Coming to Uganda, a poor patchwork of images made up my understanding of the place. These were little more than a smattering of KONY 2012, the last King of Scotland, abundant wildlife, and a recent legislative elephant in the room. I knew that, like much of the world, it belonged to the British at one point. Seeing the Canadian government’s warning about travel to the country—“Exercise a high degree of caution in Uganda due to the threat of terrorism and a high crime rate”— did little to enlighten me.
So, what to make of it? Kim Baronet, last year’s McGill RLP representative, helped to inform and assuage me. Her enthusiasm about her experience was palpable, her concern about any volatility blasé.
I now largely share this latter sentiment, but it’s not easy to see why on first glance. It seemed that the world had gone into overdrive over the summer. An alarmingly regular array of shocking news stories reminded me of a series where every episode had the excitement and anguish of a finale. For its part, Uganda flirted with staking its own claim in the saturated buzz.
Dark cumulonimbuses seem to be gathered all over the neighbourhood. The week before I arrived, a coup attempt took place in neighbouring DRC. Kenya’s Gen-Z led protests have been in the news for the larger part of my time here. In their thematic wake, young Ugandans planned a march on parliament to protest corruption. In recent years, terrorism, effectively quashed after devastating attacks in 2010, has seen an uptick. This is all alongside the longer-term instability in South Sudan, to the north, and North and South Kivu, to the west.
Here’s the thing, though. Multiple Swords of Damocles might hover above you, but after a while you barely glance up at the blades. Knowledge of the headline warning banners, blared far and wide and infrequently to people who haven’t had the chance to form any detailed idea of a place, hardly illuminates. On a day-to-day level, Kampala is calm, even its crazy traffic is calm in its craziness. It’s remarkable how unremarkable things become, and they were only remarkable in the first place because they were unknown.
Apart from the dubious conclusion that you should—at your own peril (?)—take government notices with a grain of salt, what has this demystification taught me?
Uganda faces serious challenges, some of which I alluded in my last post. Inequality is stark, and there is a particularly nefarious spatial dimension to it in Kampala. Though the city spreads out over what appears an endless expanse, most of the land seems locked up, in gargantuan parcels, in precious few hands. Open spaces of note for the public are scant.
There is one exception to this last point. The Baha’i temple provides a wonderful asterisk to the claim that this is a parkless city. Nestled atop one of the hills, it’s an imposing building surrounded by what seem like acres upon acres of scarcely believable grass. Admission is free, and you’ll feel like you’ve gained back years of your life lost through the stress of the boda ride to get you there. You end up at a reasonable net zero.
I’ve also learned that Kampala is great fun. There are bars upon bars. One of them is called Bubbles o’ Learys, which is kind of amazing. A lot of them fill up every night, and they stay open forever. Uganda’s very own Berlin.
I’ve also also learned that Uganda is absurdly beautiful. Straying outside the city for the first time is like taking in a massive gulp of oxygen. I found myself wondering why it is that people seem to visit neighbouring Kenya and Tanzania for their nature in far greater numbers. ‘Anything you can do I can do better,’ the varied landscapes of this lush country could confidently assert. I can count Sipi Falls, a series of waterfalls located in the foothills of Mount Elgon, among the prettiest places I’ve ever been. There are national parks aplenty, and Uganda is also home to the source of the Nile. Drives can be long, so don’t drink too much water or too many lattes.
I can go on any which direction, from food to sport to traffic to traffic to other touchier realms. The point of this post was not to carry out a systemic dissection, but to reflect on the fruits of experience. To experience is to break through the mist of vague expectation and trepidation and half-baked, often entirely unhelpful, ideas. It is to form a richer, albeit profoundly incomplete, picture. Being in Uganda has given me an opportunity to brush up on both national and wider regional politics and history. It has provided me with the chance to meet a host of interesting colleagues, soccer teammates, tour guides, miscellaneous others, many of whom I am thrilled to now call friends. It has allowed me to eat all the chicken in the world, too much chicken. Plenty of rice, too. It will, perhaps, allow me to tell next year’s potential McGill representative at RLP that it’s absolutely worth standing there and looking up at the ceiling of perpetual rush hour.
Postscript
I don’t retract what I said above, but a couple of days of reflection have highlighted a certain tonal dissonance between how I feel and what I’ve written. I’ve had a rewarding time, but this has also been an overwhelmingly discombobulating experience. It feels like an all-too sanguine cop-out to end on the previous paragraph’s note.
Life is unfair, and I’ve never seen unfairness in more stark relief than I have this summer. On any given day, after I hear from parents whose children have been abducted, single mothers or fathers who cannot afford to feed themselves or their family, victims of rape and torture struggling to cover medical expenses, I’ll find myself at a poolside bar or a nice restaurant. I’ll plan a weekend trip with friends, costs often cascading into the high hundreds of dollars, hours removed from sitting in on a case where someone cannot afford the boda fare to travel to another NGO’s office. Such fares rarely exceed the equivalent of two dollars.
Last week, while I ate brunch with a friend at a hilltop hotel, Kampala’s largest garbage fill gave way under the pressure of the previous days’ rains and killed over twenty people who lived beneath it[1]. I remember the scene from “Parasite”, where, as the camera traverses Seoul, a storm transforms from an opportunity for carefree fun to a cataclysmic destroyer of homes. The political economy of elevation stares at you baldly, brutally.
I brush up, daily, against the extremes of existence in a way that has become disturbingly familiar. I’ve thought a lot about how criminal defence lawyers or surgeons or E.R. nurses go from dealing with misery and agony and fear to getting cocktails with friends at 9. This is a psychological quagmire I’ve struggled to come to terms with.
Ending the post on this note might be as morbid as the previous ending was happy. In the end, however, it’s also apt, as I’ve flip-flopped between excitement and jadedness more times than I can count. The question of whether or not you need to be relatively emotionally uninvolved to thrive in certain fields is reductive, but I’ve found myself asking it quite often. This has been a roller-coaster without safety guards.
[1] Winter, J. (2024) Kiteezi landfill: Landslide at Uganda rubbish dump kills 12, BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly8k506ygzo (Accessed: 27 August 2024).