The courtyard fills up at around 6.30pm. ‘The bus leaves at 8pm sharp’ turns into 9pm and ‘we don’t know where it is’. Two men who work at the company set up a table with peanut butter and jam sandwiches we wash down with watery orange juice and lukewarm Ricoffy and Joko. When the bus shows up at 10pm we’re hustled out of the yard like we’re the ones who are late.
The trip starts with a prayer. The pastor marches up and down the aisle in his shiny grey suit, casting out demons and binding evil spirits from coming into our lives. ‘We beg you father God to remove evil spirits that cause road accidents in the name of Jesus. We pray for wisdom for the driver, oh God. We bind the spirit of tiredness and cover the road with the blood of Jesus as we ask you to be with all the drivers on the road tonight.’ His prayers become personal. ‘Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, our mighty Saviour, we pray that you help the barren to fall pregnant, and that you grant patience and understanding to the married. Father, don’t forget single people oh God. I pray that you send them divinely chosen life partners. And last but not least, Almighty God, we pray for peace and prosperity in the continent and around the world. In the mighty name of your beloved son, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.’ He forgets to bind the spirit of drama.
The bus breaks down twice before we arrive at Kazungula border, where we crawl through customs when it turns out that one of the passengers in our bus is travelling with a dozen boxes of flat screen TVs. Our waiting game continues while we wait for the ferry to take us across the Zambezi River, where we have to use a different bus to Lusaka. It has peeling white paint and windows that won’t close. The driver hits the road gently, as if he’s petrified that the bus will breakdown, and it does. The first and second breakdowns are from flat tyres that take more than an hour each to repair. The driver blames the last break down on the engine. We drive into the Intercity bus terminal just after midnight.
I rent a plastic mat and find a spot to sleep on the terminal. I’m excited to be one very long trip away from Kampala; even the cockroaches that run around us seem like a necessary detail to this snapshot, you know, something along the lines of ‘determined to confront a homophobe, the Vagabond sleeps among roaches when she discovers that there’s no place to pitch her tent’. This is what I tell myself, otherwise I’m merely losing all standards of hygiene and not even questioning it. The platform goes back to normal at dawn. I return my mat and pay to use the showers.
Buses to East Africa have bodies painted in multiple bright colours. Their windscreens have declarations like Inshallah, Allahu Akbar, Mashallah, Allah Kareem – Arabic for if God wills, God is great, God has willed and God is generous – and mirrors decked with faux fur. Other than short stops in villages and small towns, the only long breaks we get are in large towns like Mbeya in southwestern Tanzania. My diet for this trip is oxygen, and drops of water when I can no longer stand a mouth that feels like sandpaper. It’s bad enough that I’ll only shower when we get to Kampala; there’s absolutely no need for me to put myself through a bush toilet break for number two. The Ugandan man I’m sitting with, Johnson, is slightly wounded that I refuse to share his biscuits, grilled mealie, cool drinks and full meals when we stop for food. I have a handful of cashew nuts to appease him.
A cool breeze blows over Dar es Salaam, where I discover that the direct bus to Kampala is actually a drop off in some alley in Dar that has ticketing offices that double as storerooms. One of the men who works here offers me a plastic chair among the group of colleagues he’s sitting with. A boy walks over with a flask to sell strong, black coffee flavoured with a hint of ginger. I pass on the offer to join them as they work their way through piles of bitter green leaves called qat, that they chew with gum until the leaves form a large ball in their mouths. They spit it on the ground and start again.
We sing along and dance to Mafikizolo’s ‘Ndihamba Nawe’, Brenda Fassie’s ‘Weekend Special’ and Lucky Dube’s ‘Back to My Roots’. We sit through Yvonne Chaka Chaka’s ‘Umqombothi’ when the fellows ask me to teach them how to pronounce the name of their favourite song. We get back on our feet to jam to ‘No One Like You’ by P Square, ‘Fall in Love’ by D’Banj and ‘Yori Yori’ by Bracket. My body is in Dar, but my mind is back in Osu in Accra and Stonetown.
Our lift to Ubungo bus station is the Falcon bus that arrives just before sunrise. The station goes from calm to chaos with masses of people bumping into each; their luggage on their heads or on wheelbarrows pushed by touts. As engines cough to life with white and black smoke, hawkers walk around selling fruit, boiled eggs, cold samosas and chapati. The driver who gives us the lift to Ubungo is shocked to discover that we’re still in the bus because we’re waiting for it to fill up and begin the journey to Kampala. ‘Do something,’ I tell Johnson who has been sitting next to me since the beginning of the trip. We’re in his home region, after all. He says I mustn’t worry and goes back to watching other buses leave the station.
The bus driver says he knows nothing about a trip to Kampala. I follow him around, my voice moving between gentle pleas and loud demands for him to make a plan until he finds us seats in a Kampala Coach. Stepping into the bus, I start thinking that the reason it takes an hour and a tantrum before we get seats is due to the embarrassing state of the ‘luxury’ coach. The leather seats are hard. Some of them are unhinged from the floor and move when the bus driver flies over speed bumps or makes a sudden stop, which is often. When I’m not banging my head against the overhead compartment, I’m picking myself up from the aisle after being tossed off my seat. Apparently, the aim is to arrive in Kampala maimed – if we actually make it there. We break down just outside Dar and wait an hour for the mechanic to come to our rescue. Another breakdown keeps us off the road for two hours. The tedious trip gets worse after dark, when the driver pulls out a plastic bag full of qat.
However, this is Africa. The bad is always outweighed by the good. Tanzania is big and beautiful. We drive past pineapple fields and Mount Kilimanjaro. In Moshi, mountain tops peek out of grey clouds, while villages are set in lush plains that stretch as far as the eye can see. At one of our stops in Moshi, three Maasai men lean against the wall at the Kampala Coach office. Their thin, long bodies are wrapped with shukas held together by leather belts overlaid with beads. The leather pouches at their waists have daggers; one of them has a knobkerrie in one hand and a cellphone in the other.
The only time uniforms cause minor trouble is at Busia border between Kenya and Uganda. Two of them want to search our bags, which I don’t mind. What I do take exception to is hands poking into ziplock bags that contain the lifetime supply of Lil-Lets tampons I now travel with. Even worse, they want to know what they are, and disbelieve me when I tell them what I use them for. They walk me to an office, collecting a female uniform along the way. She’s never seen tampons before either.
‘Why don’t you just use pads?’ she asks, pressing a tampon.
XIV
HANG THEM
November 2010
THERE ARE PLACES I feel before I get to know; when I step on the ground for the first time and I just know that my life is about to change. Uganda is one of them. At the border, I stand at the door for a few minutes taking in the country’s first impression. Touts stand outside the door waving SIM cards and airtime vouchers. Forex traders brandish wads of cash. ‘Shilling sister. Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya – we change everything.’ I get money to pay for my visa from the ATM.
The uniforms here are polite, smiling at everyone, demanding none of our money or poking their heads into our property.
‘Welcome to Uganda,’ a uniform says when his stamp lands on my passport.
Kampala is one hundred and forty-five kilometres from the border. We pass many trucks and bakkies filled to capacity with bundles of dark green bananas called matoke – the country’s beloved, tasteless staple. Road trip food in Uganda is like a mobile feast: chunks of fresh fruit, meat and poultry on skewers and fat chips. I can eat again now that I’m a
lmost at my final destination.
Kampala announces itself with a bang, literally, when the security guard slams the heavy steel gate at the entrance to the Kampala Coach against the wall. We park next to the only bus in the yard. People on their way to Kigali continue to the lounging area that’s a flight of stairs from the ticketing office and the store room. I leave my bags here to walk the city for a while; my previously weary body energised by the bumper-to-bumper traffic and the get-up-and-go energy I pick up from the bus seat. It makes my feet light as I press between stagnant cars, buses and matatus. Only mopeds, called boda boda in East Africa, can move. The foot traffic is just as crammed. Our bodies touch and we almost step on each other. I walk into a one-storey building, where I spot Sudanese and Congolese restaurants.
The fast-moving crowd shuffles me back to the street. The crowd swallows me, and spews me onto a street laid out with rows of tables and customers eating pilau or kikomando, the bean and shredded chapati dish that’s named after the giant lizards.
I go back to Kampala Coach offices to get my bags and hop on a boda boda to the Old Taxi Park for a matatu to Lunguja. The park and the section of the city it’s in heave with masses of people. We’re four weeks away from Christmas and the season’s shopping is in full swing. Pavements have turned into mini markets that sell produce, clothes, books and entertainment systems. The taxi park can’t contain the matatus and people waiting for their turn to board. I have to pull my stomach in to walk between the matatus. A young boy hawks fruit salad in five hundred millilitre containers while we stand in queues that snake out of the park. For the equivalent of R3, I enjoy cubes of firm mango, pineapples, papaya, watermelon and jackfruit. The quality of my life in Uganda remains unmatched.
Backpackers’ Hostel is on Natete Road. It’s ideal for my new rule of stretching my shillings as far as possible by only using matatus and camping. My ankles are still swollen and my back still strained from sitting in a bus from Monday morning to Thursday afternoon. I walk off the exhaustion by going up Natete Road. I turn around less than five minutes later armed with a copy of The Onion and Red Pepper tabloids; seduced by the sex they use to sell.
Almost all content has to do with sex – who is getting it on with someone who isn’t their partner, who needs to get it pronto and who they can possibly get it on with. The most hilarious thing about the stories is how they don’t use the words vagina and penis. Instead, they’re yoyo and khandaha and gologo and anaconda. No one’s sex life is off bounds, dead or alive. The former dictator Idi Amin leads a two-part series in a list of Uganda’s most sex-crazed citizens. The list has one hundred names.
I start my search for someone to help me understand Uganda’s relationship with its LGBTI citizens at the Nando’s restaurant on Jinja Road in the business district. I meet Bob online via his blog, and in person a day later. Bob is not his real name. He used to tell journalists his real one but they’d betray his confidence and use it instead of his moniker. He has stopped speaking to journalists on record and tells me to call Pepe Julian Onziema. ‘He won’t mind talking,’ he says. He also introduces me to French photographer Bénédicte Desrus. She has an interview with David Bahati and invites me to tag along. David is the member of parliament who is championing an anti-gay bill that proposes the death penalty or life imprisonment for LGBTI Ugandans. He says gay people must die because that’s what God says. ‘The Bible says those caught in sin should suffer death. The Quran says hang them and throw them over a cliff – I’m only obeying God’s words.’
He speaks softly and patiently when we challenge him. ‘God chooses people He uses to deliver humanity from calamity. In your country, South Africa, He used Nelson Mandela to deliver your people from apartheid, He used Martin Luther King Jr to speak about the racial evil in America, and just like He used Mother Teresa to help the poor in Calcutta, God is using me to deliver Uganda from the evil of homosexuality.’
Uganda is crazy about God. There are as many posters announcing festive partying as there are those advertising spiritual revivals. Young boys walk the city hawking posters with Jesus’ face and Bible verses, and the city’s skyline features the domes of its many mosques.
So when David says he’s God’s chosen one, he means it. It’s impossible to miss the framed picture on his desk, where he kneels in the middle of church pastors and elders laying their hands on his head. If David gets his way – and he’s working day and night to make it happen – the bill will be a law by 2011. Then the country will be free from people he accuses of sodomy and of being rapists. He claims young people are lured with booze and money to become ‘homosexuals’. He doesn’t have any evidence of his accusations and won’t answer our questions. Instead, he goes on about God and culture.
I’m calm until I decide to screw objectivity. This bigot wants to incite Ugandans into hating and killing each other.
‘Do you know how absurd you sound?’ I yell. ‘You want to dictate who consenting people can love and have sex with? What does it matter to you if I sleep with women?’
We stare at each other while I gather my camera and notebook from the floor. According to the bill, anyone who is even suspected of being gay is guilty, and those who don’t report the suspects are also guilty of aiding and abetting. ‘I said, what’s it to you if I sleep with women? Shouldn’t you arrest me, and aren’t you guilty of not arresting me?’
My antagonism only makes him more determined to explain that he is on a divine mission. ‘God help us deliver Uganda from evil,’ he says. God deliver Uganda from this bigot, I think. We can’t keep writing Africa’s history with blood. People like David, who use their power and influence to incite violence, are the ones who should be locked away.
Bénédicte and I meet again the next day at a café a stone’s throw from Makerere University. It’s packed with people who are out for sundowners. Bottles of Nile Special, Tusker and Bells beers and a local gin called Waragi, also know as ‘the spirit of Uganda’, cannot come to the tables fast enough. I order a Nile Special and wonder if I will be able to stop myself from throwing it at Giles’s face. David frustrates me; Giles angers me and breaks my heart. At twenty-two, he’s a young man on a continent that’s still trying to wipe the blood stains left by its brutal past. The best way to use his influence as the managing editor of a popular newspaper cannot be to call for war on fellow citizens.
Even more annoying is the fact that he’s just a boy who is looking for attention, more than anything else. He has been revelling in it for weeks now, and smiles when he recalls his interviews on global news networks. He peppers the conversation with words like evil, sodomy and vile. He says Rolling Stone is meeting its obligation to God and citizens when he steals pictures of ‘known and suspected homosexuals’ off Facebook pages, publishing them with home addresses in some cases. ‘Homosexuality is a creeping evil and affliction spreading through Uganda like wildfire,’ he complains. ‘My paper is strengthening the war against the rampage that threatens our society because, as you know, homosexuality is a sin, and it is unAfrican.’
At first, it would seem as if I’m turning a molehill into a mountain but a closer look at the facts proves me right – Ugandans are out to get me. They don’t just want me dead. They’re determined to make sure that I return to South Africa a mangled corpse. I first come to this realisation on the day I move across town from Lunguja to Bugulubi. Red Chilli Hideaway is walking distance from the main road but I have a backpack and camping gear, so I get a boda boda. I still haven’t figured out how to sit on one without shifting my weight to one side. The boda rider keeps telling me to sit in the middle, whatever this means. He puts my stuff between the headlights and revs his motorcycle. Instead of moving forward, it leans upwards and topples me to the ground. I’ve been avoiding boda bodas because they’re known as coffins on wheels, but they’re the only way to move around the city without having a traffic-jam-induced psychotic episode.
Other than being East Africa’s party capital, Kampala also has some of the w
orst traffic jams in the world. The boda boda nearly falls again when the rider drops me off at Red Chilli. The establishment has hostels with shared kitchens and chalets, a swimming pool, restaurant and gardens where I rent a spot for my tent. Guests are tanned road hogs with bundles of bracelets on their wrists, and groups of young overland travellers who sound, dress and act the same. They move like a flock and keep to themselves.
I pitch my tent between the dormitory and the swimming pool and stay away from other residents in keeping with my rule to avoid Americans and Europeans. The only resident I hang out with is a young man I will call Peter, who is visiting from Mbarara in Western Uganda. I get a boda to Kabalagala one afternoon to lunch at Ethiopian Hut restaurant. It’s one of several in the area. I visit it in particular because it was bombed by terrorists months before my arrival. The blast put Uganda on the travel advisory list. I visit the restaurant to defy the advisory.
Going to Ethiopian Hut is my way of letting Kampala know that I’m not afraid of its other recent headlines. Besides, Ugandan food is bland. The only local food I eat is a rolex, made with an egg fried with chopped onions and tomatoes and rolled into a chapati. Ethiopian food is fragrant and spicy. My initial anxiety about going to Ethiopian Hut is a waste of energy. I find beefed up security that includes body scanners.
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