Fire, Water, and Lice

I’ve been navigating the undercurrents of our parched city these past few months – persuaded that Kampala’s authentic sap courses somewhere beneath the opaqueness of the elitist, hand-to-mouth façades that belie our lives.

What I am slowly discovering may well be a stream of burgeoning existence, tucked neatly out of sight.

And in that passage of days – several exhilarating, numbing, and at times wholly objectionable experiences have stumbled across my path, or I theirs – yet none leaves a deeper recess on the impressionable self than the workaday ‘trinity’ essayed below:

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One –

The Parable of fire in a bottle:

If, like I, you commute often between destinations – the stuffy bedroom at home, the bland office, the depression of school – on rented pneumatic tires, you’ve doubtless noticed these little red bottles ubiquitously bracketed to the body panels of our taxis:

 Suffocate the flames!

Every public van in Kampala has one, thanks of course to the remarkable foresight of the Japanese auto-manufacturers who kindly ship those motorized conveyances down south for the express purpose of equipping Africa for the exigencies of modern existence. 

Now, while these putative ‘extinguishers’ are oft possessed of the right labeling and color-scheme (red for danger) – I have not in my long, committed and steamy romance with Kampala’s taxis ever seen, read about, or been told of a situation where these safety devices have been put to use.

Not once.

So, in the absence of any known deployment within living memory, it wouldn’t be entirely irrational for the thinking man to begin incubating doubts over the contents and functionality of said extinguishers.

Do they really contain any anti-combustion agents? 

Or are they sheer ornamentation, mere decorative entities fixed to that Toyota automobile-junk dumped on the continent to reinforce the old stereotype of the gullible, trusting Negro that the world so loves to hate.

Seeing as we can’t secure a ready interview with Mr. Akio Toyoda – I guess we’ll never know.

Also, attempting a practical, confirmatory experiment on the extinguishers would be potentially fatal, and thus unadvisable.

This is precisely because one risks incurring the scalding wrath of an incensed taxi conductor and his driver who – compounding an acute economic frustration with their class’s subconscious resentment for the privileged upper classes – wouldn’t be too reluctant to lynch any nosy proletarian for vandalizing and laming their prized workhorse.

In the meanwhile, that mythical red bottle will remain clamped to the inside of Kampala’s taxis – and while the speeding, combative drivers and their vociferous conductors go about their blissful business in total ignorance of the fire hazards that are their workstations – we, their witless victims, shall opt for the silence and apathy that is God’s greatest gift to the Ugandan masses.

However, one can’t help but wonder:

Is this – an innocuous fire extinguisher in a public minivan – really just that – or is one of the countless telltale signals of what really is wrong with this country?

With our continent? 

Our world?

One is left wondering. 


 ***

Two –

The Tale of one lunchbox:

 

Hungry, anyone? Well, let’s share a box lunch!

This little plastic chest, no larger than a kindergarten-going child’s lunchbox, or more accurately the equivalent of the casing toddlers use to keep their pencil-set and crayons intact – is what the same minivans discussed before, licensed to carry 14 passengers, possess by way of an emergency health intervention.

As for who does the licensing, what criteria they follow to do their job, or who meets the cost of their air-conditioned office and rich, aromatic morning coffees – a deep-seated & rabid rancor forbids me from commenting further on such person, or persons.

What I can, and will comment on – is the superfluity of these inadequately-sized, apparently permanently-locked and certainly annoying first-aid contraptions present in the public transport facilities serving the great majority of Kampalans.

It doesn’t require any lot of brilliance to deduce that taxi conductors have no first-aid administration capacity whatsoever – surely, to do that, they’d have first to rid themselves of the populous lice colonies nested perpetually on their heads, and the endless stream of bedbugs that troop from under their soiled shirt-collars like an independence day parade.

The tokenism that this phenomenon represents – is, if one gazes keenly enough, to be found present in many other shortchanged endeavors and abortive initiatives of our young republic.

When the country breaks its leg, we trouser it up in colorful pants to hide the compound fracture – all the while playing music noisily in the background to drown out its deathly screams.

Is this not why – in the infrequent times when we have the misfortune to host international events – we hastily sweep our otherwise perpetually littered streets, plant instant flower gardens & overnight-maturing trees, patch up the perennial road craters that embellish our city boulevards, while in the same breath; we hustle the human debris of itinerant merchants and roadside salesmen off our beautiful thoroughfares?

There is, very regrettably, a chronic formality to life in this – our little republic.

There is a for-the-sake-of-occasion nonchalance with which our elected representatives go about executing the tired business of state, and by consequence, with which we all trundle along, making futile sense of the appalling mess.

Not too far a day thrown back, a colleague prone to jocosity commented; on a strand of one social-medium – that Africa was bewitched.

He was responding to the absurd case of the country’s obnoxious and self-serving son-in-law to the President, a one Rwabwogo Odrek – who was in China on a squandering-spree of our people’s meager monies.

Of course – like any modern, well-schooled and enlightened Negro, I scoffed at my colleague’s primitive and childish bronze-age convictions. 

Africa? Bewitched? – bah!

My thoughts were not unlike George R.R. Martin’s own – ‘sorcery is the sauce with which fools flavor failure to account for their own ineptitude’.

Alas, how wrong I was!

 
***

Three – 

The Parable of the rock and the pipe:

‘‘… then Moses, exasperated, struck the rock with his staff – and forth flowed the stream of life.’’

Take a good, long gander at the unsightly assembly in the picture above.

I nearly left it deliberately uncaptioned, because a single line wouldn’t do justice to the profundity of its implications.

However, in case you’re still trying to get your head around the apparent mystery, or figure out what direction I’m pulling your leg (or other anatomical parts) in, I’ll abbreviate the effort for you –

That, my friends, is a no less than a feat of remarkable genius and problem-solving.

Believe it or not – the clod of concrete resting squat atop the thin, black pipe is an unrivalled case of local Ugandan ingenuity at peak and prime.

This picture was captured right in my neighborhood, not many meters from the demarcation of estate I call, and not for want of a better word – home.

A few days ago, there was a burst in the water mains connecting the properties in the area to the national water-grid.

As with any high-pressured fluid channeled through a narrow bore, the water spurted forth in a jet of foamy showers – much to the delight of the neighborhood kids who ceased the chance to bask in the glorious ‘up-pour’.

In a few hours, a steady, bubbly stream of clear water had begun to snake its way downhill from the widening pool at the point of the pipular discharge.

For the poorer sections of the community, those with only crumbs (or less) of our Ugandan-loaf on their plates, it was a godsend opportunity to stock-up on clean, cost-free water for the days ahead – and relieve their long-worn feet from the pebbly, slippery trek to the distant watering hole or spring-well and its questionable water.

Thus – the aquatic festivities described have carried on for two weeks now.

Apparently, no ‘concerned citizen’ has taken it upon themselves to alert the local authorities, and none has bothered to make that remedial call to the NWSC.

Actually – the other day – I could have sworn I espied our area L .C 1 Chairman skip over the new-formed stream, adjust the distorted lapels of his oversized coat, and proceed his way without as much as a second glance at the damaged pipe.

For me, the vivid dispassion and disinterest with which my community and I are handling the event is too intriguing a social phenomenon to pass unobserved, leave alone uncommented-upon.

Is it that our people don’t care about these things, anymore? [For they certainly did, once.]

Are we too traumatized (economically and otherwise) by the excesses of the political-class to give a hoot what happens to anything with a government ‘label’ on it?

Perhaps we detest the authorities so much that we’d first see the goddam country go up in flames and powder to ashes, before we raised an alarm for the fire engine?

Of course, the fellow who saw it fit to muffle the spraying water by placing a huge rock on top of the perforation may be the culprit here.

Perhaps the absence of a conspicuous white fountain, jetting into the blue sky and providing an irresistible allure for naked children to play under it [the nudity being a strategy against parental beatings in the event of soaked clothes] – is responsible for the lack of community urgency in responding to the problem.

The chap who placed that rock, whether consciously or not – spoilsport though he may be to the village kids – struck a reverberating chord with our national psyche, if there is indeed such a thing: 

For in dealing with the many ills that afflict our society, we tend to presume that because something is hidden from sight, then it cannot harm us – as well draw a veil of muslin between a charging lion and oneself, and forget the whole infernal thing! 

When our expectations don’t coincide with reality, we conceal the latter and window-dress the former.

Is this not why we pen the poor, hungry and diseased under-classes of our society in the concealment of slums and the obscurity of ghettos?

Out of sight, and therefore out of consideration.

Problem solved!

But possibly, this isn’t a uniquely Ugandan malaise.

Likely – it’s the cancerous heirloom every capitalist and intrinsically unequal society must grapple with. 

Likely. 

Now, don’t you start hectoring me about my civic duty, or harping on with regard to how I ought to have informed the water authorities about the leak, so that the country would save that scarce and priceless hydraulic resource for this and generations to come.

I say – who is the country?

And whose is it?

Surely, the men and women who even today flock to that burst-pipe to fill their cans and basins with escaping water are part of the country too!

Why should they not enjoy this rare chance at access to clean and safe water, undeterred and uninterrupted, simply because some snobbish elite like myself seeks to protect the privilege I possess on account of affording the costly services of the NWSC, by reporting the leak?

No – I say free water for all.

Also, I say a malediction upon whoever would demure this.

I am born into a land where 80% of my countrymen cannot have safe, free (or at least affordable) water with which to wash, bathe or simply drink. 

If the government of my country has become a cabal of selfish interests who seek to recruit me into its service with the inducement of safeguarding my own class privilege – then let me live without that privilege.

At least then, I will live with dignity, however deprived that dignity.

As the reckless poet once said – one wild, sweet day of glorious life (however rash & stupid), is worth a world without a name. 

Anyhow, who is that self-obsessed imbecile who first devised the notion of gazetting something as dear to man’s life and well-being as water – and commodifying it for commercial gain?

Whoever he is, a curse upon his house (or hut)!

30^th/May/2017