It’s 7:00 am on a Monday morning. You are rushing for a meeting with a go-getter executive religiously hooked to that inane early bird catches the worm philosophy. Half the city agrees with your dour view of the hour: most shops are closed, the morning traffic is just starting to build, even the sky is empty of birds.
Your lift drops you off at Ntinda, that famous suburb now a mix of homes and offices masquerading behind residential walls. Lift flips on the indicator, readying to rejoin the road, when out of nowhere a 90s model Pajero flies into his rear, stopping just one centimeter short of smashing the boot.
The offending four-wheeler bounces from the effort of sudden braking. Loud dance-hall music is blaring through tinted windows disfigured with stickers of hemp leaf and etchings of Rastafarian wisdom: Legalise it.
Disbelievingly, you scan the growing traffic for a clue. Where the devil could it have possibly come from, flying at this speed! You see the gap. A blue-striped taxi had stopped to let off passengers, right in the middle of the road. Angry drivers behind him are honking horns, impatient to get to work before the traffic thickens. The taxi-driver is unbothered. Indifferent as an overfed cat. You shake your head. This is Kampala.
Exeunt offending Pajero: a gang of burly youth and barely dressed girls, looking like afterthought extras yanked out of a cheap hip-hop video. The jolly bunch yells the usual deafening cries universally interpreted to mean let’s party. None has taken notice that their car, just seconds ago, nearly crashed someone’s bumper, or that it is 7.00 am in the morning. For them, as for many of their agemates around the city—it’s party time!
They stagger up the stairs of a popular and noticeably congested bar as you stare with affected shock. This is Kampala. The party never ends. You shake your head and go about your way, amused and baffled.
You hail down a bodaboda. Your destination is just 500 meters away but who in this city walks anymore? Bodas are a cheap and fun way to get around; there’s the sage life advice your rider will hit you the instant you get comfortable, without you asking, then the adrenaline-raising whizzing between cars set on knocking anything in their way, the wind assaulting your nose with every foul scent it can dreg up from the city’s bounteous picks of airborne hazards, and, of course, the bragging rights — every hitchless ride is a literal middle finger to Death and his cousins.
These two-wheeled taxis are your favourite part of life in this dusty town. They are legend. There’s even an entire tourist movement around them, up there with the savoury, dust-topped rolex, and fresh-food markets. You beam with pride. What does Nairobi have? Matatu? Githeri? Lame. What about Dar? Tuktuks? Chips-Mayayi? Spare my lungs. Bodas…Rolex… That’s the real street. Kampala is the best.
Kampala has its own special brand of madness. Every city does, really. Cities are after all, by design built to drive you insane; why else would millions of people from places as distant and distinct as Pluto is from Mars cram themselves into one crowded space if not to drive each other mad?
You kind of like Kampala’s brand of madness. It’s special. There are the taxi conductors who pack their cars so full they have to ride at the back, with a 2-inch bumper for a foothold, gripping onto a 1-millimeter line of metal strip running across the van’s top. There are the buildings which mushroom overnight and grow in whatever direction they desire, no hint of urban planning. There are the shopkeepers and waitresses who serve you like you stole their lunch and have the audacity to face them without apology, the drivers who behave like no one else but them uses the road, the pretty girls who appear out of nowhere (you know where don’t you?) in nightspots and vanish in the daylight, the verbal wars between Christian and Muslim street preachers dueling for converts at nearly every marketplace.
Kampala puts the ‘kat’ in katogo. It’s a real mix of everything Uganda has to give. Did you know that more than 87 languages are spoken on the streets of this city? Yeah. Neither did I.