Begging

Take a walk down Kampala Road shortly after dusk and you are likely to have to face repeatedly an aggravating sight. Tiny toddlers of two or three will be plonked in the middle of the pavement, arms fully extended, hands cupped together, still as a statue. What astonishes me most is how such a tiny baby has the stamina to maintain such a posture – what authority is so dreadful that they fear moving so much?

I have never once lowered a coin into the hands of one of these children, nor their older siblings who will run alongside you until you pay them to go away (or so their theory runs). You might consider me callous, but the reason is that every time someone hands over money to one of these kids, either out of annoyance or pity, they increase the problem. Why? Because no market can exist without customers.

Who is in the wrong here? Is it the mothers who instead of allowing their toddlers to toddle, will mould them into that familiar posture and hide behind a telephone box, returning periodically to collect the proceeds? Is it the fathers who got these ladies pregnant in the first place and are now nowhere to be seen? Is it the government, that is failing to protect the children under its care? Or is it the citizens of Kampala, for taking the easy option of dropping a coin, rather than looking at the problem from a long-term perspective? Kampala may not have a crime problem right now but it is certainly working hard on bringing up the thieves of the future.

Some children have found imaginative ways to avoid begging. My favourite is those who walk the streets with weighing scales. Never mind the fact that every time I weigh myself on these I get a different result – I still do it every time. It may not be any more likely to get the child off the street, but at least by soliciting money in return for a service, they retain a precious morsel of dignity.

Close Encounters of the Contraventional Kind

Regular readers may recall a certain lady called Sarah, who has featured once or twice within these paragraphs. I am going to use her here – with her permission – to demonstrate how social mores are altered one generation at a time. My point involves a comparison between her and her father, but interestingly, has nothing to do with the fact that life treated the old man to two wives – not consecutively, as is the vogue amongst the men of my home country, but concurrently.

With his pique bubbling precariously near to the brim, the father of twelve sent the following text message to two of Sarah’s sisters:

My Children, Amalli, Naome Asinde, you are sending me to the grave early by putting on trousers, against God’s teaching and command. Search for scriptures, otherwise you are to choose between me and your bad way of dressing. Stand warned!

If anyone can help these wayward young ladies and direct them towards the relevant section of the good book, please do get in touch. To me, it seems that like so many, they stopped reading at commandment ten, and have therefore neglected to heed the eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt not put on trousers, thou shalt not put on jeans, nor slacks nor flares, nor shorts nor chinos, nor anything that has separate divisions for each leg.”

Sarah herself made a lucky escape this time, although she was once banished instantly from the home of an uncle for the same transgression. Quite right too.

Friendometer

A while ago Ben and I made a deal to shamelessly promote each other’s blogs. However, what I got, in the lexicon of media slang, was a ‘shout-out’ and not a ‘plug’, so I considered the deal off on the grounds of breach of contract. However, since Ben made a recent cheese delivery to me in here in Uganda, I’m prepared to reopen negotiations. The benefit to you is that if you want to, you can read a less irreverent account of the country by clicking here: http://findingmyways.blogspot.com.


Ben’s main reason for coming here, which he repeatedly stated, was to enjoy Kampala’s nightlife. I decided to bring the nightlife to him in the comfort of my own home, and thanks to Andrew’s fine DJing and my efforts to redline the friendometer, I managed to pull off a pretty good party.


Miss the deliberate mistake

I happened to be absent-mindedly flicking through a nearby bible as I waited for my dinner the other night, where the early verses of the Book of Exodus describe an encounter between an important Jewish patriarch and an inflammable shrub. Having alluded to the story herein, I am disappointed that no-one spotted the error – it was Moses who was getting a hotline to the Big Man, not Abraham, long since dead by this point in biblical history. I am as ashamed by my own error as I am by the passive complicity of my readership, a significant proportion of whom share my Semitic background. Tsk, tsk!


Competition time

My deliberate mistakes finally proved too much for my trustily pedantic brother David, the original inspiration for this competition. He complained about my creative vocabulary. Now, I have spent the past year carefully positioning twenty-four thousand of the best words in the best order (count them). He should accept that within that splendid total, there will have been at least a couple of words that are new entries in his cerebral dictionary, even if they are home made. However, both he and Bill Gates’ spellchecker have enjoyed disdaining these unique lexemes (‘consultantism’, ‘telecommers’, and today’s ‘contraventional’, to name but a few), so in defiance I would encourage more linguistically progressive readers help to bring them into general use, in a process that I shall christen ‘vocabularic enrichimification’ (in homage to my favourite US president).

And finally… the obligatory valedictory swansong

One year on, I have mastered the change game, navigated the perilous waters of a Ugandan government department, proven that wingless flight is possible with the help of a dark road and a fast-moving motorcycle, confronted Death himself on my own front lawn, watched a chimp give his lady some lovin’, raced kids up a peak jutting over 4km into the sky, discussed circumcision ceremonies with a soldier, averted an ambush by a crowd of drunk boda-boda riders, and battled and beaten a raft of minor ailments. There is also the small matter of helping to turn one swamp and one sugar plantation into two thriving schools, whilst helping to get two others back on their feet, but who cares about all that? My proudest achievement is that I can now hear a Ugandan’s surname and tell you which part of the country they’re from with a surprising level of accuracy. But I am now coming home and even though Nigel will again be in Uganda, ‘Nigel in Uganda’ is closing shop.

I hope you have all enjoyed fondling your synapses with the rapidly oscillating electrons of my inspired HTML, whilst nourishing your optical organs with the megapixels of my magnificent daguerreotypes. I am sure what you have enjoyed more than anything is the verbose and pompous way in which I have expressed the simplest of ideas.

Can’t you see through it?

A recent Transparency International report that classed Uganda as the joint third most corrupt country in the world was greeted with a vast tide of indifference from the citizens of said nation, probably because it was so unsurprising. There was some small consolation to be taken from the external verification of such widespread graft, but when presented with such a golden opportunity for government criticism, it was frustrating that people weren’t outraged, when by all accounts they should have been. Even if we already know Uganda is corrupt, winning the bronze medal in the world championships is a pretty damning indicator of the scale of the problem. But the president and all his cronies conveniently ignored it, the opposition were sleeping, and the papers sacrificed a few column inches before going onto the next gay pastor revelation.

Perhaps the breakfast show presenter on my favourite radio station can shed some light on why this is. His basic point, in analogy, was that two participants are required to perform a famous Argentine dance. Just as every goat must have his goatee, every corrupter must have his corruptee. When Joe Mpublic is stopped by a police officer for speeding, he may choose to admit his guilt and go through the normal procedures, which will cost him 100,000 shillings, or he may choose to fund a beer at the officer’s bar of choice, which will cost him fifty times less. But what he needs to realise is that in opting for the latter, he instantly forfeits his right to complain about the corruption in his country.



Friendometer

My workmate Martin’s fellow accountancy students had a beach party to celebrate the end of their exams a couple of weekends back, and I was given the great honour of an invitation. Needless to say I accepted – the opportunity to see how accountants go about the business of a beach party was just too good to resist. And yes – when I got there, lo and behold, they were sat in the shade playing scrabble. I haven’t even made that up.

I was supposed to be posing as an accountant, which owing to almost a year of being inflicted with Martin’s vast lexicon of accountancy jargon wasn’t actually that hard. “The amortisation of the prudency has led to the suspended liability of the compound assets of the consolidation of the income and expenditure cycle” left the real accountants lost in admiration.

The venue, at least, was spiced up by the decaying carcasses of two Idi Amin era passenger jets, which provided a great opportunity for regression to boyhood as Martin and I challenged each other to scale the dizzy heights of the fuselage, before terrifying the ladies by jumping on the wing and making the entire plane shake.

The event served as an atypical but worthy introduction to Uganda for my good friend Laura and her very kind boyfriend Ben, who had flown in on a moderately more modern jet that very afternoon. I wasn’t sure whether I was more pleased to see them or the cheese they brought for me. Hang on, what am I saying? Of course it was the cheese.



Close Encounters of the Intestinal Kind. Warning: story unsuitable for those with delicate stomachs.

I awoke at dawn the next morning with a much displeased alimentary canal, which was keen to expel its contents via all available emergency exits. As if having copious streams of effluent emerging from both orifices wasn’t unpleasant enough, the undigested remains of the previous night’s meal were perfectly unwilling to disappear down the sink, where they’d ended up owing to the toilet bowl being occupied by other things at the time of evacuation. On any other day I would have slunked off back to bed and tackled the problem once in better health, but on this particular occasion I had two esteemed guests staying in the adjacent room, and wasn’t sure that a pool of stale vomit would make a very pleasant accompaniment to their morning shower. So despite my illness, I had to get under the sink with my plumber’s wrench, wrestle off the U-bend, and fish out several satisfyingly gooey fingerfuls of someone else’s hair, which had made a highly effective net to trap the larger globules of my belly’s unwanted meal. It’s a good job I’m not squeamish. Sorry if you are.

In other medical notes, my passing reference to tuberculosis in my last entry sent my mother into a whirligig of panic, so for the sake of my father, who had to bear the brunt of this, I promised to visit one of Kampala’s quacks. I chose one of the highest repute I could find, but of course he came with the highest price tag too. As I had predicted, he told me it was just a cough (duh), and sent me away with some medicine that is ‘made from the lungs of dead birds in Thailand’ – or that was what he insisted I relate to my mother.

Competition time

It seems that the fable of the chameleon and the shoebill stork has polarised the readership, with those who ‘get it’ on one side, and those who are trying too hard to ‘get it’ on the other. So it is with all cutting-edge, avant-garde artistic movements. If you’re in the latter group and wish to move into the former, all you need to do is resign yourself to the elusive conclusion that the whole thing was nothing more than an elaborate way to ask you which photo you preferred.

The return of the scoreboard

My Dad gets a point for being the only reader to care about democracy, my cousin Eleanor gets one for getting her friend to spell-check my entire blog, and Laura and Ben (who are now one person) get two – one for the cheddar and one for the gouda. If this seems unjust, then be assured that you can also earn points handsomely by ensuring I receive further consignments of cheese by whichever means seem practicable.

Nigel’s Dad 3
Volunteer Jo 3
Ben R 2
Nigel’s Mum 2
Uncle Simon and the Family Hipps 2
Laura and Ben 1
Julia 1
Nigel’s Gran 1
Brother David 1
Phil 1
Mr Ibbs 1
Suzanna 1
Charlotte 1
Cousin Eleanor 1

Even I can do better than that

The following is an unedited excerpt from the Red Pepper, which as you’ll no doubt guess from the name is Uganda’s finest daily newspaper:

STREET DISABLED TO BE ARRESTED – POLICE

All disabled people on the streets of Kampala will be arrested and prosecuted, police has decreed. The police liaison officer at Old Kampala Police Station, Enock [sic] Tumwesigye, said the order to arrest them comes after a police study found out the disabled people are involved in crimes like murder, aggravated robbery, and theft, among others.

Some people will have found that very funny whereas others may well be outraged. For the latter group, let me reassure you that the ‘newspaper’ from which the quotation is lifted is not really a purveyor of journalism of any kind, but simply uses real people and places to write works of brief but complete fiction. The front page headline that very same day was “PASTOR PAID SHS200M FOR SODOMY VIDEO”, which claims that a certain Pastor Kayanja of Rubaga Miracle Centre (yes, it’s really called that) has been paid $100,000 by American homosexuals for filming the aforementioned act being performed in his church. According to the paper’s “sources”, “most of the Pentecostal churches in Uganda are funded by gay groups in Europe and America.” So if you ever wondered what libel laws are for…

Even with such defamatory claims plastered all over the front page of Uganda’s answer to the red-tops, it’s hard to feel too sorry for Pastor Kayanja – my work colleague recently got a poor and dishevelled young girl knocking at her home, collecting donations to buy the man a private jet so he can spread the gospel worldwide. There’s nothing quite like using religion to exploit the weak for personal gain!

Friendometer

Last weekend found me at a huge and no doubt hugely loss-making outdoor concert arranged by Orange mobile phones, who are currently spending all their European profits desperately trying to win Ugandan customers from their four established competitors. I wasn’t helping their financial situation since I’d bagged myself a free ticket, sim card and ten grand’s airtime (shillings, remember, not pounds). As any Ugandan will readily tell you, it’s not about having the know-how but the know-who, the “who” in this case being a certain Roger Kaweesa who climbs masts for the eponymously citric French telecommers, and can explain the difference between microwaves that magically cook food and microwaves that magically transform into a voice in your ear. Anyone involved in such wizardry deserves a shout-out in my blog even before they help me with free stuff, in the name of human social interaction. Keep us talking, Roger!



Not long after arriving at the event in Kampala’s impressive cricket oval (no, they hadn’t fenced off the green), me and my fellow PEAS Muzungus were approached by a group of Canadian doctors who introduced themselves with the words “we couldn’t help noticing, but you’re white.” This prompted a situation where a sarcastic response requires such little wit it’s simply not worth it. I suppose they can be forgiven on the basis of finding a common ground so quickly. Having spent a week or so with a nasty cough (see below), I canvassed for a bit of free medical consultation, but the instant diagnosis of Tuberculosis didn’t really help the rapport.

Shaggy was the evening’s headline act and wasn’t as old as he should have been considering he used to tell me about how they call him Mr Bombastic, Stella Fantastic all the way back when I was in primary school. This was thanks to Pat Sharp and his cronies sending this important communiqué through the speakers of my radio. Mercifully Pat has long since desisted from inflicting his mullet upon us; Shaggy, on the other hand, has evidently failed to grasp the benefits of fading into obscurity, first among them being the wellbeing of the general public. Mr Lover Man was disappointingly underfed for someone with such a troglodytic voice, but I quickly forgave him both his incongruously slim figure and his unlikely youth, since by the time he came onstage I was already far too drunk to appreciate his famous homage to Carolina, not to mention the other Caribbean delights that were croaked and grumbled our way.

Close Encounters of the Medical Kind

The persistence of my cough has led to everyone I know advocating for the latest homemade miracle cure, which though tempting (gin, honey etc.) seem to me to be bound only to worsen the problem. It is just unfortunate that Ugandans find the sound of the human body’s reflexive attempts to remove trapped phlegm absolutely hilarious, disconcertingly referring to the involuntarily loosening efforts as ‘rockets’. When I suffered an attack just as the beginning credits started rolling in a darkened cinema, people didn’t even bother to attempt to conceal their titters. I was tempted to launch some ‘rockets’ in their direction, but quickly reflected that as the visitor, it was my job to adapt to local culture and therefore suffering their laughter was the only noble thing to do.

Despite regularly descending into cascades of these suffocating exertions, gasping for air between each episode like an asphyxiated fish, I have so far comprehensively refused to seek medical counsel (drunk Canadians aside), much to the vexation of most of the people I know. My feeling is that like all life’s challenges, illness can be beaten by sheer determination, and as soon as you give in and take medicine then you have somehow failed. However, the likelihood of the infliction simply being a stubborn legacy of a mild cold gets more remote by the day, and I am beginning to regularly review my vocabulary of respiratory diseases to see if I actually know anything about them: tuberculosis, bronchitis, pneumonia, swine flu…

Erratum

It’s only taken me nine months to realise that the title of my regular feature ‘Close Encounters of the African Kind’ is not very right-on, since it unfashionably lumps an entire continent into one whilst simultaneously assuming that said continent is prone to near-misses of all varieties. I apologise to those who may rightly be offended by such prejudice. To those who object because they know such sentiments are not in vogue, I will dutifully doff my postcolonial flatcap to your elevated status as savvy global citizen, before starting work on my new feature, ‘Absurd Political Correctness of the Western Developed Nations’ Kind.’

Gallery of shame

If you ever wondered how teenage girls pass their school lunchtime, the following defacing of my fine photography by my endearingly insulting cousin Eleanor might shed some light:



Competition time

Despite publication of Chapter 2 of the Fable of the Chameleon and the Shoebill Stork, voter turnout is still pitfully low at just 2 people. My father has a possible explanation:

I see you have encountered the problem faced by many democracies today, how to engage with the electorate and persuade them to use their vote. Your approach of persuasion is in deed eloquent. However, I’m not convinced that SHOUTING is the best approach to electoral reform and public engagement. One Barack Obama seems to have managed that using modern technology and reputedly sends out an email every week, to 1 billion addresses! However, I doubt the contest between the Shoebill and the Chameleon warrants such heavy promotion. Given the choice between one candidate who can’t control themselves and the other who likes the sound of their own voice, I can see the argument for disengagement and abstention. One wonders what each of them might be claiming on their expenses, oratory and deportment lessons perhaps, or maybe a high tech designer Chameleon house… Now if we had a candidate who willing serves the people, was personable and showed a tolerant attitude to all, then we might have someone we could vote for. Hence I vote for the Rhino.

Unfortunately, in this great political allegory – I like to think of it as an Animal Farm for the 21st century – the rhino is playing the role of electoral commission, so though we can rest assured of his integrity and dutiful service, he is not eligible to be voted.

A cacophony of silence

Last weekend, me and my fellow do-goody-gooding muzungu housemates went to the largest island in an archipelago known as “Ssesse”, although really it would have been better named “Zzzzzz” considering how sleepy it was. There was a grand total of nothing going on, except for the odd bit of not much now and again, and if we were really lucky, a rare show of sod all. Still, I shouldn’t be harsh – these are useful qualities for a place when the principle objective of the visit is to convalesce from the acute trauma of living in Kampala.

Friendometer

Determined to prove to myself that the island must be harbouring activity somewhere, I decided on Saturday afternoon to pitch out across a nearby hill Dr. Livingstone style, and see if I could actually find evidence that something was going on somewhere. After wandering for a fruitless hour and still finding nothing worthy of diarising save a rusty old British water pump (how proud we should be of those fine engineering minds!), I was suddenly perfunctorily summoned by a voice from a dense and thorny thicket to my left: “you, man! You! Stop there!” I didn’t stop, but instead gave a casual glance over my left shoulder that belied my fear that I may have finally found somewhere in Uganda where hairy pink visitors are unwelcome. However, the shouting bush didn’t desist, and seemed to be getting angrier. Suddenly recalling Abraham’s seminal encounter with talking greenery, I decided it was more prudent to stop and humble myself before this phenomenon, lest it be trying to communicate something of divine portent. I summoned my most English tone of voice and sheepishly solicited for a clue as to the reason for my arrest: “Oh! Dreadfully sorry! Have I intruded upon your privacy? Gosh, how mortifying!” At this stage I still hadn’t ruled out the possibility that I was witnessing the Second Coming, so I was somewhat surprised when a dishevelled teenage boy emerged forth from the thicket. I was almost disappointed to discover that he wasn’t angry at all, just anxious not to let the hairy pink being proceed without first ascertaining what it might be doing on his island. Of course, I had been asking myself the same question ever since stepping off the boat, so I wasn’t able to satiate his curiosity.

Working Hours

PEAS, the only charity in the world to double as one of your five-a-day, has undergone a transition. When it started, it was little more than a shared ambition that existed in the heads of a lanky Cambridge graduate and an upwardly mobile young Ugandan. By the time I entered the pod (see what I did there?), it had grown to become a flowery bouquet of amateur but thankfully fairly intelligent do-gooders, a mould into which I slotted neatly. Nine months on, you might almost mistake it for a professional organisation: some of my colleagues actually know what they’re doing, we have agendas for our meetings, and we have a flourishing system of office politics.

Since I am supposed to be the ‘Project Consultant’, I was proud of a recent moment of great consultative insight, which was that growing organisations need these other-worldly things that bigger and more important institutions (of the kind we aspire to be) call ‘Systems and Procedures’. I excitedly shared this epiphany with my colleagues, hoping that my consultative contribution would be adopted, delegated to a minion, and I could continue having more brilliant flashes of consultantism for other people to execute. I wasn’t expecting them to say “Lovely! I’ve been really craving a new procedure and I would love a system for lunch. When can we sit down and enjoy them?”

So I am now spending endless tiresome office hours in the company of Microsoft Word. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fine piece of software – but if you must be in front of a computer screen, there are more fun things to do, and there’s even more excitement to be had if you dare to step out of the company of Turing’s invention altogether. In fact, I feel like I have clumsily discharged a firearm into the base of one of my lower limbs. I have gone to the extent of drawing up a rota of fonts, switching to a different one every 100 words or so to give myself some variety. I may patent the idea.

Interestingly, when I was a naïve and hopeful youngster (those halcyon days!), I said that the main reason I wanted to be a teacher was because I didn’t fancy spending my life slouched before a flickering computer screen. This may have been youthful anti-establishment vitriol (about as much as a good boy like me could muster), but it suddenly seems as if I might have been right. However, since teaching left my life quicker than it came, I have concluded that I don’t want to be anything, which is quite convenient since there are no jobs anyway.

Close Encounters of the African Kind

Another twilight safari to one of Kampala’s fine Nocturnal Imbibing Centres began like any other – it was proved for the thousandth time that not even the city’s impressive assortment of the world’s most beautiful ladies, even when they are dancing with the deadly seduction brought about by oscillating the world’s most curvaceous behinds through a series of impossible rhythms, can divert the attention of men away from the football. Of course, being the chaste and sober lad that I am, I was utterly indifferent to both these diversions, so I was delighted by the sight that greeted my eyes when I gave a casual glance over the first-floor balcony to the road below. A ‘Gentleman of the Street’ was enjoying the bar’s raucous musical offerings from between two parked cars. And this guy wasn’t just distractedly shuffling his feet – he was absolutely killing it. If he’d been wearing shoes I’d have had a genuine concern that he was going to tear a hole in the tarmac.

As you can imagine, there was something heart-warmingly delightful about seeing a homeless man having a right good time, but sadly this is another story with a bad ending. I left the bar (alone, of course) relatively early by Kampala standards, but read in the paper the very next day that someone had been killed later the very same night at the very same bar, by falling off the very balcony from which I had been spectating upon the partying tramp. Too much drink, supposedly – but nothing ever has such a simple explanation in Kampala.

The fable of the Chameleon and the Shoebill Stork, Chapter II

A few weeks after their disastrous encounter, the two adversaries unexpectedly stumbled upon each other in the bar once again. At the mere sight of the shoebill’s long and elegant pins, the chameleon felt himself changing from his neutral green to a hot red, and the more he tried to resist it the faster it seemed to happen. He watched as the shoebill stork left his bar stool (donated by the family of a deceased tortoise) and strolled to the bar. With each step, a foot would lift softly, advance a generous helping of inches, and linger seductively before being delicately placed in readiness for the recommencement of the cycle. And then there was that beak! So grand, so grossly, ostentatiously wonderful. By the time the shoebill stork reached the bar, the chameleon was fully red and turning blue. He was sure he saw the corner of the stork’s beak twitch with mirth.

The barman, with a tact and diplomacy typical of species who carry horns on their noses, greeted both in turn, and commented how delighted he was that the two creatures had appeared together, since the results of the vote were in. He lamented, however, how low voter turnout was, which instantly prompted the shoebill stork onto his soapbox. The bird, relishing the opportunity to enjoy listening to the penetrating tones of his own voice, started lecturing on how animals had no respect for democracy any more, but emphasised that he wouldn’t expect turnout greater than fifty percent, since women’s suffrage, though tolerable, was unimportant. The chameleon, a liberal chap, became highly agitated by such regressive ideas, and even though no personal affront had yet been made, he was now changing colour so fast he almost looked white. Desperately humiliated once again, and unable to retard the frantic display of technicolour brilliance, he began a slow and painful walk of shame towards the door. The rhino, pouring a cool beer for a meercat who had been watching the unfolding spectacle with increasing interest, felt sorry for the poor chameleon, but reflected that at least there was now time for a FEW MORE PEOPLE TO VOTE!

Nigel in Rwanda

What happens when you get four English people and an Italian and throw them all into Uganda? Answer: a safe and well-tended garden of fun that explodes occasionally with the glorious clamour of fireworks. I’ve got so blithely carried away down the river of delight at having such a glut of visitors that I’ve not got anywhere near writing anything funny in a blog, so here are some of the choicest prime cuts from the (now slaughtered) Cow of Exciting Times.

Shortly after the staggered arrivals of Suzanna, Danilo and Raj (Charlotte was to join us later), we bussed it to Uganda’s most southwesterly corner, a long trip made worse by our having to tolerate Tina Turner repeatedly asking us what love had to do, had to do with it. Once there, we were rowed in a hollowed-out eucalyptus trunk to one of the myriad islands on a tranquil lake surrounded by terraced hillsides, where we spent most of the time eating and playing stupid and infuriating card games that I repeatedly lost.



After that we bopped across the border into nearby Rwanda and saw why they nicknamed it ‘le pays de milles collines’ as our minibus weaved in and out of a thousand very beautiful hills on its way to Kigali, the capital.



Rwanda was utterly decimated by a genocide that took place on the streets and in the villages a mere fifteen years ago, just as I was reaching the conclusion of my primary education. Considering that, it was incredible to see how clean and organised Kigali was, where they give you a ticket on the minibus taxis and the boda bodas have uniforms and a spare helmet for the passenger.



Kigali made Uganda’s urban offerings look utterly amateur in comparison. As Germany and Japan can testify, destruction breeds rebuilding, and rebuilding breeds economic growth.

That’s not to say the genocide has been forgotten, although a visitor passing through as we were might not feel the true depth of the scar. I was given a harrowing reminder of how present the tragedy was at the genocide museum – not because I read the stories, or saw the photos, but because a Rwandan visitor suddenly began to howl with anguish, when some part of the exhibition brought unbearable memories coursing to the surface. Museums present a shined and shaped version of the past, but this was horribly real.

Walking around Kigali, I reflected that it wasn’t the scale of the tragedy that was incomprehensible so much as the barbarity of it – ordinary people running through the streets macheteing friends and neighbours to death. And then to get from there to a safe, friendly and organised civil society in the space of a decade and a half… it makes you have to leave sentences hanging and get a reproachful green squiggly line from Bill Gates’ flawless grammar checker.

Friendometer

Back in Kampala, Charlotte joined the crew, and the Easter weekend became an opportunity for Kampala to flaunt its only redeeming feature – a thriving nightlife. The most noteworthy outcome of the back-to-back partying was when my two young, single, female visitors hooked up with my two young, single, male colleagues, a beautiful double union which caught me totally off guard.



Close Encounters of the African Kind

Much against everyone’s advice, we took ourselves to some music festival at Kampala’s old concrete stadium, which is nestled snugly at the centre of Kampala’s least salubrious area. We had repeatedly been told that the event wasn’t intended for the likes of us, with the barman even going so far as to comment that it was for ‘third class people’ – citizens so far down the pecking order that he clearly felt the need to invent a new and unprecedented category for them. We were having a great time nonetheless, but when a drunken mob stormed the beer tent and made off with half the beer, things started to hot up. Some security guy who knows what to look out for detected that we were about to be subjected to a similar ambush, and with admirable tenacity escorted the only muzungus in a crowd of thousands safely out of harm’s way. We continued to enjoy the music from the back until Andrew, my new and estimable co-muzungu at PEAS, spotted that we had been subtly surrounded by about ten guys and needed to move quickly if we valued our personal effects and physiological integrity.


The only thing that could outdo an encounter as close as those two was if a man wearing ladies’ trousers and fluffy boots came dancing up to me and offered me his services for a whisker over two dollars, which strangely enough was exactly what happened next. It’s about the first time in Uganda I was offered a fair price first time round, but that's supply and demand for you.



Office Hours

Back at the office, as I lamented the departure of the last of my good friends, I was perusing the newspaper personal ads to see about making some more and I came across this:

Single lady wants a financially stable, impotent man for company.

Perhaps she has not yet realised that you can’t get something for nothing…

Competition Time

One evening, the chameleon and the shoebill stork met down the pub. Clocking the geriatric gait of the chameleon as he approached the bar, and realising how much more elegantly he walked, the shoebill stork started bragging loudly to the barman about his perceived superiority. As he talked, his grandiose beak oscillated imposingly, prompting the barman (who was a rhino) to chip in that although he would never be so barbarous, the big bird could if he wanted swallow the chameleon whole. The conceited shoebill chuckled appreciatively at this interjection, and proceeded to conclude his lengthy address by casually observing how few people knew about him but how much they’d love him if they did. All this big talk upset the humble chameleon, who in his vexation started changing colour manically. It was an amusing spectacle, but underneath, the shoebill stork was deeply affected by this rare and idiosyncratic skill. Up to that point he had been unaware that his quiet reptilian companion possessed such an incredible talent. Despite the big bird's efforts to hide it, the barman correctly interpreted the shoebill’s sudden silence as profound envy. He decided to settle the question in a fair an democratic manner, by putting it to vote.

And that’s where you come in – the competition between the shoebill and the chameleon. Who is more special? Cast your votes now!

Do you think you’re funny?

For my girlfriend’s birthday, we went to see a TV programme being filmed. It was like a sort-of Pop Idol for Ugandan wannabe stand-up comedians, eight of whom had 2 minutes each to try and make us laugh, most of them failing embarrassingly. The worst one must have endured the longest two minutes of his life – after bounding onto the stage like a demented goat, his attempts to tickle the thousands of ribs before him became increasingly frantic, and the anticipation in the auditorium thickened into a bitter soup of agony. How unfortunate that he was called Mercilus.

The judges followed the now formulaic good-cop bad-cop routine, with one following the Simon Cowell school of judging, pitilessly crushing valiant candidates with deft put-downs (e.g. “John? [pause for effect]. You’re not funny.” Ooh, harsh!)

Close Encounters of the African Kind

My girlfriend’s ex is a peculiar lad who I’ve spoken to on the phone once or twice and even had the honour of meeting – he dropped in unexpectedly to the office a couple of weeks back. I was hoping he’d at least try and threaten me or something, but it seems he was just curious to see if I was as beautiful as him. Sure, his sculpted musculature gave him a natural flair for intimidation, but nothing can win in the face of my devastating wit.

It was rather absurd, then, that we took our seats in the comedy show only to discover he was sat a short distance away on the same row. In such a situation, a sardonic smile and wave is a dangerously compelling course of action for a bold usurper to contemplate. Tempted though I was, I decided that I was above such an undignified display of smugness. But to pretend I hadn’t noticed him at all would have been a sure sign of weakness in this world of alpha-male competition. I considered standing up to stretch ostentatiously, as if limbering up, to show that my streamlined physique could give me a speed advantage if not a strength one. A casual glance in his direction at the end of the movement, to make sure he’d noticed my quivering calf muscles bulging beneath my straining trouser seams, would do the job nicely.

In the end I opted to meet his gaze and give a subtle and manly raise-of-the-eyebrows. I was rewarded with an even less perceptible nod in return. Job done, I settled down to watch the show, albeit taking care not to appear to be having *too* much fun with this lunatic’s ex-girlfriend lest I feed his thirsty wrath and get embroiled in some primeval showdown on the steps of the theatre at the end of the show.

Friendometer

Someone pointed out to me the other day that in order to make friends you have to leave the house, an observation that I had to admit seemed to have been eluding me. Waking up on a Saturday morning to glorious sunshine tempered with a cool breeze, eating homegrown paw paw on the verandah, and watching tweeting birds and fluttering butterflies frolic across verdant lawns edged with relentlessly blossoming bougainvillea, never gave me much incentive to step out on the weekend, especially when someone else is doing the cooking. And being white in Uganda, it’s not so crazy to expect someone to knock on the door and beg for you to accept them into your elite group of friends. Is it? Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that this lifestyle, though good for getting through lots of books, is not likely to bring much social gratification. Get a life, Nigel!



Working Hours I’ve made my first bold step on the ladder to becoming a famous, respected author – a national treasure, even – by being quoted. Volunteer Jo – gone but not forgotten – has decided to feature my grumbles about the Uganda NGO board in her Cambridge University (nothing but the best) dissertation. Apparently she has to first seek permission, which of course I granted as long as she paid the £500 fee.

Competition Time

Volunteer Jo also noticed the obviously deliberate error in the last entry – that Uganda used to be a British colony so of course it knew ounces. Whether or not mercury powder was sold by such archaic measures is, I suppose, a moot point. Either way, she’s earned herself two points in one go, catapulting herself with acrobatic ease to the top of the leaderboard.

Volunteer Jo 3
Ben 2
Nigel’s Dad 2
Nigel’s Mum 2
Uncle Simon and the Family Hipps 2
Julia 1
Nigel’s Gran 1
Brother David 1
Phil 1
Mr Ibbs 1
Suzanna 1
Charlotte 1

Tip of the week

As follow-up to the ‘ten steps to tyranny’ programme outlined in the previous edition of this publication, your ever-willing author hopes to bring periodical updates that will assist those aspiring dictators hoping to speed their ascent to despotism.

I’m starting the series with a suggestion that has a sure-fire guarantee of efficacy. It goes as follows: if any constituencies have had the impudence to elect, by fair and democratic means (heaven forbid!), an opposition MP, then you should be sure to tell them, on your next visit there, that they’ll get a smaller portion of the national cake as punishment. The principle is, “if people won’t vote for me because they like me, then they’ll vote for me because otherwise I’ll make sure they starve”. Don’t worry about seeming like a five year old (“you didn’t choose me so I’m not sharing my Wine Gums with you”), because the desired effect will come about hastily.

And by the way, as you tick off these ethically bereft actions, don’t worry about what your donor government friends over in Europe and America might think. Their love is unconditional, provided you’re not a communist or Muslim. In fact, if you’re lucky, they might even let you host the Queen of England and all the Commonwealth Heads of Government, even when they know that you’ve just bribed MPs a paltry 300 quid each to get the constitution changed so you can get re-elected for a third term after 21 years in power. How’s that for an endorsement of corruption?!

Friendometer

My neighbour’s watchman collared me on my way out of the house the other morning with an arresting proposition: would I like to buy any mercury powder, he asked. “Mercury what?” I countered. Powder, he said. He had about 15 grams.

Now even though metrification was easy in a country that never knew ounces, small quantities of powdery substances sold on street corners by strange men tend to draw one’s mind in a certain direction. I have no idea whether mercury powder is the sort of thing you snort through 50,000 shilling notes, or whether it has more reputable uses, but I promised to ask around for potential clients. He thanked me, and said if he did well with the powder he would move on to mercury liquid. Well, good luck to you, mate.

Competition Time – It’s back!

I’m relieved someone is still ‘on the Ball’ (pun fully intended, even though I hate people who attempt to craft cripplingly unfunny puns from the family name). And I’m even more relieved that it’s Suzanna, who’s been pestering me for a point since goodness knows when. But I am incorruptible, and my points can only be earned by legitimate means, as my faithful cousin Eleanor is also seems to be discovering, given her complaint in the comments section.

Well done Suzanna – my arithmetical messiness was due to a desire for prosaic tidiness, but was indeed a deliberate mistake, so the point is heartily awarded.

Charlotte wants a point for spotting a typo, but I made it clear long ago that we’re not about nitpicking here. However, she has found some feature of this website whereby I can have ‘followers’, like some sort of cult leader, so gets a point for such a show of loyalty. But don’t expect me to dole out more for those who follow suit – I’m rewarding the pioneering spirit.

Ben 2
Nigel’s Dad 2
Nigel’s Mum 2
Uncle Simon and the Family Hipps 2
Julia 1
Nigel’s Gran 1
Brother David 1
Volunteer Jo 1
Phil 1
Mr Ibbs 1
Suzanna 1
Charlotte 1

How to be an African leader in ten easy steps

Today I'm proud to bring you step-by-step instructions on how to make yourself an effective national leader in this continent, particularly for those with an eye on despotism. Obviously I don't have personal experience in the field, but a few months of casual observation is all that is needed to make anyone an expert in the topic.

1. Firstly and most importantly, steal the equivalent of your country’s GDP from government funds and keep the lot in a personal bank account in Switzerland. There’s millions and millions of dollars stashed there – more money than one individual could ever spend in a lifetime of squandering – enough, even, to catapult the infrastructure of your country forward 20 years in one fell swoop – but that doesn’t matter. It’s important to have it there to make you feel like you’ve earned a personal fortune, even though you filched every penny.

2. Own as much of the press as you possibly can, and any other media channels you can get an influence in. Make sure that any media that you don’t own is intimidated and threatened unrelentingly so that no-one can say anything really bad about you, or worse, the truth.

3. Regularly reshuffle your cabinet. If any members have fallen out of public favour due to corruption allegations, make a big show of sacking them but then make them ‘senior presidential advisors’ to keep them on the gravy train so they don’t stab you in the back. It doesn’t matter if you have a hundred senior presidential advisors, as a president can’t have too much advice. Reward useless sycophants with big cabinet jobs to keep them useless and sycophantic, so you can retain your autocracy.

4. Use any means necessary to mobilise political support, including creating endless new districts so you can make lots of new jobs for your friends in the new administrations. It really doesn’t matter if some of the new districts are based around towns that are little more than a group of shacks, or even just a road junction – the more people you can get on the gravy train, the better, as long as they don’t actually have any real power.

5. Give political rivals enough leash to create the impression of a multiparty democracy, but no so much that they could actually have some power. Let the big guys do and say what they want, but make sure their followers disappear mysteriously.

6. Distract any potential pockets of internal resistance to your regime by allowing them to fight amongst themselves for interminable years. Never mind the misery that will ensue amongst ordinary people – it stops these dissenters giving you any real challenge. This is where tribal differences come in handy. You should exploit these as much as possible to create the most enduring internal conflict you can. Make sure there is a ready supply of weapons to the dissenters or the conflict will dry up too soon.

7. When campaigning for upcoming elections, import cheap sugar from Central America and give half a kilogram each to illiterate mothers in rural areas. Exploit the fact that they value half a kilogram of free sugar once every five years over ongoing and lasting improvements in the education of their children, the health of their family, or the road leading to their village. In fact, try not to improve education too much in case they suddenly realise that a government is supposed to do more than twice-a-decade sugar distribution.

8. When it comes to elections, rig them to make sure you win by threatening or bribing people in the electoral commission. If you can get your own people in the electoral commission, all the better. Make sure anywhere that has international observers, things run like clockwork, but everywhere else make sure the real votes are burnt. As soon as you are declared the winner, your rival will instantly proclaim the elections as rigged, and even though they were, it is important for you to denounce him as a traitor to democracy and an enemy of the country.

9. Remember that the world is full of leaders for life. Generally their countries are in a total mess, but don’t be put off by this. History will show that the leaders of Zimbabwe, Libya, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and all the others, are the kings of their day. As the years go on, gradually remove all obstacles to your continuing in office until the day you die, and then surround yourself with the world’s best unscrupulous doctors to make sure that that day is delayed for as long as possible.

10. Relax! You may have had to do some terrible things to get to where you are today, and you may be causing untold harm to your people, but you’re president for life, and what can provide a better indemnity than that? There’s still the thorny issue of what’ll happen at the pearly gates, but that’s all the more reason to get them to keep you alive until the last possible moment.

Friendometer

I seem to be receiving more than my fair share of complaints about this blog, which I would gladly react to if it weren’t for the inconsistency of them. For example, I have Mr Ibbs grumbling about “monosyllabic Nigelisms”. I don’t know what these are, but they seem to imply a criticism which is the exact opposite of Suzanna’s, who is always carping about my perceived verbosity, as if I write with a thesaurus open by my side. What nonsense! Rubbish! Baloney! Poppycock! Twaddle! Claptrap! Drivel!

And then you get Ben complaining about my blog being “full of frustratingly ambiguous teasers” while my own mother wastes no time in voicing her opinion that my last offering contained “too much detail”. What is an amateur (and mildly self-aggrandising) travel journalist to do? You people just can’t be pleased!

However, I must admit I'm thoroughly enjoying slipping references to a girlfriend at plausible junctures in my blog, as for all you lot know she could be a figment of my imagination, or even a ruse to provoke responses from heretofore silent acquaintances. It certainly gets them crawling out of the woodwork, as many an unsolicited email has testified. It still doesn’t seem to have stimulated any activity in the comments section, though.

Office Hours

Just stop for a moment and imagine living with your boss for a month. If you are flirting with your boss in an effort to gain promotion by illegitimate means then you may be thinking the set-up would suit your purposes rather well. I, however, am not attempting to follow such a cynical and depraved course of action to reach the top, mainly because my boss is neither attractive nor female, but also because the top is occupied by him already and there’s no room for me. Living with him therefore means that I get my head pecked not only from 9 to 5, but also from 5 to 10, lengthening my office hours by a factor of 50% (and giving me a very sore head).

A Gentle Brush Against Fame's Elbow

On Thursday, I had the honour and privilege of meeting the great Tracey Emin: esteemed artist, general London socialite, and patron of one particular school library in Uganda. I was rather excited about the prospect as I’d cited her work many a time during my A-level art studies. I wondered what it would be like to meet such an icon of art history – Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Van Gogh’s Waterlilies, Emin’s Unmade Bed. She’d always been top of my list of historical figures to have dinner with.

Sadly, this being a web publication open for the whole world to see, I feel that it’s prudent to exercise a degree of self-preservational censorship. This sadly prevents me going on with the story, and I’m sure you can work out why.

The sorry truth is that all my juciest stories from Uganda are the ones that you never get to read about because the associated risk is simply too great. Once time has dampened the sensitivity I promise to publish ‘Nigel in Uganda Uncut – The Bits They Didn’t Want You To Read’.

Office Hours

There is a particular brand of coffee available in Uganda – Tanzanian, as it happens – that is so tasty I’m convinced it’s not really instant, even though no filters, cafetieres, funny Italian pots or Expensive Electronic Equipment are needed to make it. It’s quite hard to track down, so when I found a tin of it in a supermarket the other day I became unduly excited. Having achieved an almost total abstention from caffeinated beverages for the past two years, this stuff has regressed me to a stage where I frequently indulge in two mugs of the stuff at breakfast every morning. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of this extravagance the other morning when I was due to make a long, long journey on public transport to our most remote and rural school.

Nature came knocking only minutes into the journey. I held on tenaciously but as the caffeine got down to its diuretic work, the discomfort only intensified. It was when the minibus turned off the highway onto the unsurfaced country road that things became unbearable. Every bump was a test of my resolve. In the end, much to the vexation of my fellow passengers, I had to ask the driver to stop. I’d have done so sooner if it wasn’t for the fact that I was seated right at the back of the bus, so getting out involved moving several mothers, children, chickens, suitcases, sacks of flour, etc. out of the way. (I’d already considered climbing out the window but it proved unfeasible).

I ran to a nearby bush but when it came to the moment of release, the stress induced by the barely concealed disapproval of my co-passengers reduced what should have been a whitewater deluge to a lame dribble. I managed to squeeze enough out to reduce the intolerable agony to a dull ache, but within ten minutes the intolerable agony was back. Just where was all this liquid coming from?!

It felt like I’d never reach my destination but when I eventually did, I enjoyed the catharsis of a lifetime.

Close Encounters of he African Kind

Anyone who has stayed at my humble abode here in Uganda knows only too well the vexing state of the ‘shower’. This is a great misnomer: the word suggests a capacity for merciless saturation, whereas this particular ablutional device provides more of an apologetic dampening. It would be better described as a ‘trickle’. Upon my parents’ visit only a month ago, me and ‘DIY Dad’ discussed how to remedy this sorry situation, which tended to double the length of my morning hose down and rob me of time in bed.

For some reason, late last Sunday afternoon I decided to get to work on the pipes. What led me to such a radical course of action? Perhaps it had been my Dad’s mistaken assumption that I knew about plumbing. Perhaps it was my good friend Miss Billy Crombie, at whose Manchester home I spent many an hour busily wielding hammers and saws while she delivered endless cuppas, and who massaged the handyman segment of my ego to such proportions that I felt like a DIY superhero. Or was it the company of my girlfriend, to whom I was attempting to demonstrate some sort of manly ability to get my hands dirty and fix stuff? Or maybe it was the imminent presence of my boss from the UK, who would also be staying in the house, and who I wanted to dazzle with how much things had improved since his last visit.

Whatever it was that sent me into such a frenzy of activity, things slowly went very, very wrong. My first mistake came quickly – I sealed off the tank outlet with an upside-down mug and then disconnected the pipe, but the mug proved an utterly inadequate seal and for the duration of the ensuing saga I was constantly aware of the disconcerting fact that at any moment, about 500 litres of water could come hurtling inexorably down onto my head. I realised I needed to work quickly, so proceeded by enacting my Dad’s great idea to connect the taps to the mains instead of the tank. Despite snapping all the exisiting pipes in the process, I was successful, but the result was that the toilet cisterns flooded and an unstemmable tide came from the overflow pipe that went up through the roof. So I had to turn off the mains tap altogether. By that time it was dark and late and I was left significantly worse off: no water whatsoever coming from the shower and a considerably grumpier girlfriend.

I wasn’t at this stage about to pay a professional to put the mess right – I’d spent too much time and money buggering it up to do that – and besides, my status as ‘Mr DIY’ was at stake. So the next day, I browsed through the various pipes and connectors in a local hardware shop, chose a few that looked feasible, and reconnected the pipes, sealing them off with bits of plastic bag. I turned the mains tap back on and needless to say they all leaked. So I turned the mains tap back off. By this time there was no water left in the tank, either, as it had all leaked past the mug. I had managed to impose a full-blown drought upon the household.

As if to add insult to injury, when I finally succeeded at getting the whole thing back to how it was when I started, the mains had been shut off altogether by the water company, so we *still* had no water. By this time my boss had arrived. I hope he doesn’t read this as then he’ll realise that his enforced inability to wash on arrival, and for two days hence, was entirely my fault.

Me, Ad and Lindsay (hereinafter Muriel) went East together this week to climb a volcano and look at a pretty waterfall, and I got the opportunity to take lots of photos of the sort that make other people jealous, a much abridged gallery of which you may peruse herein.

Working Hours

You could be forgiven for thinking that I seem to be doing more holidaying than working at the moment. However, this holiday’s crowning feature was a magnificently glittering climb to 4321metres, which was so strenuous that it qualifies for inclusion in the present section.

Also adventuring on the great Mount Elgon were some gap-year teenagers. As with so many of their ilk, they were paying some cynical organisation for a year’s worth of warm fuzzy glow helping poor black children (while stealing jobs from poor black adults who could really do with the money). Feeling older and wiser, we were determined not to be upstaged in our ascent by these “what-did-you-get-in-your-A-levels-I-got-four-As-but-a-B-in-General-Studies” young whippersnappers. Me and Ad had our masculine pride at stake, and even Lindsay was to be heard at one point expressing concern at being beaten up a mountain by someone born in the 1990s. In reality, though, there was no major risk to our collective ego as we did in one day what had taken them two, and on our way to the summit the next day we caught them up even though they’d left an hour earlier (OK – it was on the way back down – but we’d still caught them up).

Despite this, as we were in the process of overtaking them, we passed the path to the second highest peak, and me and Ad, as if to cement our victory, started egging each other on to climb that one too. We did this under the pretence of the Adam-and-Nigel tradition of death-by-exercise, as neither of us would have dared admit that we just wanted to reassure ourselves that we really were superior to the nappy parade. However, they must have seen the game we were playing, as when we started up the path to the second summit, they were hot on our heels. Even so, once we’d all done that one, me, Ad and Lindsay still had to descend to the lower camp that same day while they got to nurse their aching quadriceps at the high camp. So there was no real doubt that we were the winners, although the fact we’re becoming paranoid about being beaten by youngsters when we ourselves are merely in our mid twenties is a great testament to the painful awareness we all have of life’s transience in this modern era.

Friendometer

Next stop was Sipi falls, an altogether more relaxing destination whose big draw was a stream which toppled down the mountain in a sequence of three boundless cascades. They got better as you went up, and my guide for the top one was a soldier on leave whose family happened to own the bit of land over which the cataract tumbled (not that the land was much use, being vertical). After he’d shown me their backyard’s ornamental water feature, which would have made any suburban housewife delirious with envy, he offered to take me to taste some of the ‘local brew’ (and he wasn’t talking about brewing tea, nor any other herbal infusion).

When we stepped into the pub (mud hut) I was taken aback – three old ladies with toothless grins were huddled around a rusty old teapot full of steaming brown gunk, from which they were taking it in turns to take deep draughts through the spout. In fact it was just like I’d walked into the village production of Macbeth. The three witches wanted me to take a photo of them, and asked me to give them five hundred shillings for it, which seemed like an economic transaction in reverse to me. And besides, shouldn’t they have been telling me I’d be king one day and then disappearing into the mist? I think their script was missing a page.

The maize-and-sorghum based cocktail tasted uncannily similar to the smell of the beer you find in half-finished cans after teenage house parties. It felt strangely illicit to be sucking it through the spout of an enamel teapot. I drunk enough to convince myself that Uganda’s bottled offerings were superior, and left my soldier counterpart to get tipsy on the rest. At this point, he offered to take me back to his home and show me photos of his circumcision ceremony – a local rite-of-passage conveyed upon Sabine teenage men (at twenty, he’d obviously been putting it off – can’t think why). If I claimed herein to have jumped at the opportunity, I would be bound to cause raised eyebrows amongst my loyal readership, but I can’t deny a certain morbid curiosity. My guide even proposed I take one of the snaps away as a souvenir, but I couldn’t really picture it on my mantelpiece, so I made an excuse about not wanting to deprive him of his memories. How else would he remember the small part of his being that has since probably been tossed perfunctorily into a pit latrine? After all, I doubt he keeps that in the photo album.

Close Encounters of the African Kind

Our mountain guide’s imaginative attire provided a fantastic showcase of mix-and-match accessorising that would go down a storm on the catwalks of Milan: