“That’s so cool!!!” exclaimed my
Ugandan friend Daniel Engole., BA, DJ, Copywriter, radio host, and one-time side-kick
to an alleged Baganda Prince, when I told him that l had gone to Kampala last
year to snoop around. But when I mentioned what I had gone to snoop around for -
a quick oil dollar - he laughed out loud (lol).
 |
| a beautiful monument and garden in Kampala city. Photo by Lloyd Igane |
He lol’d
even louder (LOL), when I told him exactly what I found instead: a city with campaign
posters (mostly of NRM yellow – it was elections time) pasted on every available
surface and garbage in most corners. Daniel and I were, as the more perceptive
of you have deduced, chatting online, and, following Uganda’s and then Kenya’s
announcement that we were East Africa’s overnight oil sheikdoms, oil was on our
minds.
“Pathetic,” he typed, of the garbage. Or it
could have been about something else; you never know with these chats. You
triumphantly hit “send” on a rather lengthy sentence you have painstakingly typed
for two minutes, eyes glued on the keyboard, only to look up and find your
nimble-fingered chat-mate has already answered all the questions you had so laboured
to ask and moved on to other things so different and more important that you feel
rather silly.
Pathetic,
however, also turns out to be the situation you could be in trying to find some
food in that most noble of East African cities after midnight.
“Try
the lower side,” offered an armed guard at a Bata shop on William Street (where
I thought was the lower side).
Now
I have been to Kampala many times, all before the 50th Independence
Anniversary, I must add, and I have many lovely memories. I have eaten katogo for breakfast at many a
restaurant, been spoilt with delicious, wholesome authentic Ugandan cuisine at Steak Out and hungrily gulped down juicy
burgers and great coffee at various establishments of high repute; smoked a fake
Sportsman under a deserted monument that, when later re-painted, turned out to
be the Independence Monument, and gawped at M7’s amazing motorcade to the utter
amazement of nonchalant Ugandans; made friends with a Crested Crane in the
parking lot of a lakeside hotel in Entebbe, been a pilgrim at the GaddafiMosque, and among other things, pondered the cobblestones in front of the
Parliament of Uganda building. I have also bribed my way (with impunity) through
a double U turn and for inadvertently crossing the Nile at more than double the
speed limit...
But
nothing, friends and neighbours, had prepared me for that one night when I hit
Kampala after midnight on one of my many uneventful trips through three
countries in two days. Following the helpful watchman’s directions, I had pressed
on, past a street corner where I had once bought a Ugandan maiden from Tororo two
measures of live green insects (a delicacy, she had insisted), towards but not
quite up to, the big central bus station. This, I realised, must be the side of
town that my PR friend, John, had once described as “Any Time is Action Time street” and made me swear never to put a
foot there or even say he told me.
Now
I had put more than a foot there.
Unlike
the relative stillness of the rest of the city, this had turned out to be a
bubbling metropolis with a life all of its own. I was all of a sudden jostled
from all angles by busy, highly active night people. Granted, some were lurking
in dark corners and were not jostling anyone - probably because that’s how
their business works - but even the lurking seemed active and darkly purposeful.
Now I had heard talk in hushed tones of a Rock
and a Garden on Nile Avenue,
where the sun never sets etc and, for as little as USh 50k (Ksh. 150, Rwf. 17,000),
or even nil, if he buys enough swallow and negotiates from the heart, a hard-up
man can put down his load.
I
cannot swear by anyone’s milk that I was on said Nile Avenue, but I am not
likely to forget the sights, smells and sounds: a most distinctly unsavoury smell
wafted from a nearby garbage dump, fused easily with the general body odour/cheap
perfume as the sensual background of what seemed to be scores of night clubs cum
bars – all thumping and throbbing with an ear-splitting cacophony of high
decibel sounds comparable only to the likes of Sabina Joy or the old Modern
Green of Nairobi, Kigali’s Club Planet at the KBC and a certain Club in
Nyamirambo to which Davie the Cow first took me on condition that I’d never say
it by name in polite society.
Thus
my hunt for a late night snack had progressively turned into an involuntary
cruise of a shabbier version of Nairobi’s K Street, not just on a very busy
night but with several Sabina Joys, MGs and Club Skys (oops!) thrown in. Business
looked (and sounded) really good. Unfortunately for me, the only business
seemed to be alcohol, illicit sax, who-knows-what-else, and then more.
“Are
you looking for a man?” asked a snake eyed man clad in tight blue jeans. He also
looked anaemic and had very bad teeth.
“No
sir,” I managed to say through gritted teeth, “just a cup of tea, is all.”
“And
after that am all yours?” he persisted, batting his badly done eye-lashes at the
night and bleakly flashing his tobacco-stained teeth – a trick that seemed to
have backfired many times but which he was doggedly determined to perfect with
practice. I wondered if he had a concealed knife but didn’t let it bother me.
“After
that,” I almost shouted, but didn’t, “you go suck a bee.”
When
tottering on the brink of insanity in a strange neighbourhood, showing your
emotions can only make things worse.
But
I digress, which is good, really. More presently, Danny boy was still LOL-ing
about the yellow posters.
Me:
Is it true that the posters were all gratis?”
Dan:
Don’t know.
Me:
But someone from a billboard company told me they had to donate some prime
sites...
Dan: Hahahahha. Dictator... do it or
...
Me:
Try strategist.
Dan:
Poltergeist LOL. To M7, it’s still a war... always a war.
Me: Naa.
Dan: 
Deals?
Deals?
Me: Correct. But I worry for Uganda.
Dan: We’ve got oil, dude!
Me: Especially that…
Dan:
???
Me:
Once the oil starts flowing, I fear the queues may suddenly appear at petrol stations like they
do in Lagos.
Dan: That’s the order of African legacies
lately...
(Author’s Note: I’ll never put Daniel E in a story
of mine again. He is too unpatriotic and passively negative.)
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