sketches of kampala, part 3

The conclusion.

religion
christian, but not too serious about it. there's the usual evangelical tripe on tv, but you get proselytized less than in kenya. there's also a few hindu shrines, an enormous, bizarre bahai temple (which I'm visiting on saturday), and a big, beautiful mosque atop prime real estate on the city's tallest hill. it was donated by Qadaffi: rumor has it he was sleeping with one of the Buganda royal nieces, and this was his way of showing affection.

crime
nothing as bad as nairobi, thank god. petty pilferage is about as bad as it's gonna get. my own crime story here is minor: I won a couple million shillings from the chinese guys at the casino one night after three of them went all in on the same busted inside straight. I was leaving the next day for rwanda and hid the money in a balled-up tube sock, but one of the handlers at the airport must have stolen it from my bag. or maybe it was my maid. or maybe i just washed it (I've done this before.)

art
tribal dance! my friend taught me one. she's kenyan, but it happened here in kampala. you wiggle your legs and sidle ten feet in each direction... then come back. I ended up doing a sort of Michael Flatley "lord of the dance" type thing, which I'm pretty sure is an expression of my genetic heritage and not the prevailing cultural norms.

economy
god, I am so so so sick of talking and thinking about this. uganda, economically, is fucked, and as the rest of the world creeps ever closer to the OECD ideal of a busted mortgage, an upscale "luxury" vehicle, and a single overfed, overeducated offspring, things here remain at a standstill despite the truckloads of aid money from every conceivable charitable source.

the standard ngo rejoinder is something like "well look at korea and india in 1960, they were just as poor as africa is now." yeah true, but they also had written histories dating back centuries, and well-developed class systems, and thousands of years of cultural and legal infrastructure. in africa all you start with is some cool music and an inherent tendency to give everything to the chief. it would take centuries of cultural re-education to transform this society into the contract-abiding, corruption-free, high-production, goods and services-oriented microstate that the western societies dream of, and pace milton friedman and my own (now-debunked) intellectual upbringing, I'm not even sure that's desirable.

chicks
this was supposed to be a draw, as all my kenyan friends couldn't stop talking about the beauty of the ugandan women. I can see it, sort of, though it's not exactly my thing: petite, languid, moon-faced and shy, there's something about the disposition of ugandan girls that suggests a carefree sexual availability. not that they're sluts, or even aggressive. you're not gonna get your junk fondled by a stranger, like I did once in a nightclub in mozambique. but you're not gonna bang your head against the wall of pentecostal morality either. coquettish is the word I'm looking for, or maybe just liberated.

there's something else that I've long been remiss in discussing, and that is notable not just in uganda but every african country i've visited: hair. rather, fake hair, and the ubiquity thereof. I'd estimate about 1 out of every 10 urban girls is rocking her natural locks. the rest go for complicated, outlandish weaves, or more commonly, just a straight-up wig. these come in every type imaginable: boyish bobs, bettie-page style bangs, weird, spiky, annie lennox shit, or that blond beyonce "relaxed" look. I lack the vocabulary to fully describe the phenomenon, as I'm a straight male, and thus spend about .0002% of my time thinking about women's hair. but I recall once, in an alcoholic haze somewhere in africa, seeing a cute, gap-toothed black girl of about 20 with complicated diagonal bangs that wouldn't have been out of place on the sidewalk in williamsburg.

"where'd you get that haircut?" I slurred, and she lifted the whole apparatus straight off her head, revealing an inch of black naps with the tips frosted blond.