I am walking along a street in uptown Kampala, feet stepping to the beat of an Aretha Franklin ballad as my eyes marvel at how rapidly my favourite neighbourhood is changing. Kamwokya. Kampala city’s entertainment hub. The home of Kisementi, Acacia Mall, fancy shops, bars, restaurants, and tens of noteworthy office buildings. It’s hard to imagine this place really was once a residential neighbourhood. Yet the images flash in my mind unbidden, playing as vividly as when I first saw them thirty years ago, like rolls of film shot in sepia.
I see children darting between clothes lines set out to dry on flat rooftops and driveways. They’re playing hide and seek or cops and robbers…or one of those games we’d invent on the spot to create an excuse for a good run or chase. There are few cars in the city at this time, so the streets are mostly empty. My friends and I are waiting our turn to ride one of the two or four bikes shared by all the kids who live on this street. This isn’t our neighbourhood, but the kids here don’t know it. They see us often enough, so we live just around the corner in their minds. We never correct them.
I’m looking for a quiet spot to plant my laptop and jot down some pages of prose for my editors at Ibua Journal when I bump into a scene that stops me in my tracks —a man surrounded by two security guards and a policeman that looks more like an AMISOM trooper in the fiercest streets of Mogadishu. He is in the all-black uniform of that dreaded police unit that once kidnapped bailed suspects at the steps of the High Court: black bullet-proof vest, combat gloves, boots, pants, shirt, black sunglasses tucked under the top button of his shirt, and a rapid-fire rifle at the hip. All that’s missing is their signature balaclava.
The man shrinks when the all-black glowers at him. The security guards stand behind him in such a way that he is caught in a triangle between them and the all-black. If terrified were a man, our man would be it. Although he’s a head taller than his trappers, his shoulders are folded so tight that he appears to be at their height. He is dressed in a sea-blue jacket and sky-blue shirt. No tie, loose collar, top button open, and black pipe pants that are browning with age. Everything about him is diminutive —he looks like the sort of man that spends his days filing papers behind a dusty office desk habitually averting his gaze to avoid offending anyone; an office mouse.
The all-black isn’t large but carries himself as one who could send you to your ancestors with one kick. His muscles are bulging, and every sinew of his flesh looks hungry for a reason to tear heads off necks. With a swift, barely perceptible motion, he punches the man in the chest and barks.
Sit down.
The man obliges. The punch is light. Not the kind to crash a rib but loud enough to send the message that flashes clear on the man’s face. I want to tear you apart into little pieces.
The all-black barks again. You think you can come here and survive here?
The man knows better than to respond. A mere grunt could land him a bone-bending kick in the head or groin.
The smattering of onlookers watching the scene quietly swells but all keep a safe distance. Black uniforms are notorious for beating up and kidnapping whomever they care about. They are the type of unit that carries out missions the Inspector General of Police will deny all knowledge of on the evening news. They aren’t famed for having even tempers. Even regular policemen are afraid of them. No one dares to cross hairs with them.
The all-black suddenly turns in my direction. About three feet away from me, on the opposite end of the road, is a woman in a faded polka dot dress that looks like it saw three owners before becoming acquainted with her body. We’re closest to the action so when he barks ‘remove yourself from there before something happens to you’ at her, I assume he’s looking for a soft target to keep the growing crowd from getting ideas.
Why hasn’t she been arrested if the man is guilty? One onlooker grumbles. Muffled grunts of protest surface here and there. It turns out that the man and the woman had been walking together, but only one of them was apprehended. It isn’t clear if he’s her husband, boyfriend, friend, colleague, or just a guy shooting his shot on the street. The all-black doesn’t give me time to find out. He seems to have sensed the uneasiness growing in the crowd and sweeps through it with a cautionary glare, then whips out a pair of handcuffs and hauls the man up onto his feet with one hand. He cuffs the man and drags him into the enclosure of the building he was ostensibly protecting. The guards follow at his heels, bodies effervescing with the anticipation of letting off some steam or trying out some moves they’d only used in training.
It strikes me as odd that an officer from the counterterrorism task force is guarding a private building. I know the owner of this building. If he has any business with security, he has hidden it well. Perhaps his building recently became one of those safe houses I’m told are everywhere in the city these days. A porter ferrying a table on his head disrupts my musing when he breaks the silence with a remark in Luganda, the lingua franca of the city’s bottom classes; if he has committed a crime, where are the things he has stolen? Why would anyone be arrested for merely looking inside a car?
The crowd explodes. Here and there, you hear the odd curse; all policemen should die and vanish from the earth’s surface.
Aretha’s song starts playing in my head again as if on cue. These are ever-changing times.
The neighbourhood where I grew up, the Buganda Road flats, is about three or four kilometres east of Kamwokya, right at the start of the central business district. The distance to Bukoto Street is a paltry 20-30 minute walk with adult feet, but it was an eternity to our 9-year-old feet.
My friends and I often came to play in Kamwokya during the bike-riding season. The only bike we had in our neighbourhood was broken. This was 1993/4 when goods were still scarce; bikes were a luxury few families could afford. We endured the walk because they had more bikes in that neighbourhood, and the kids were soft. We could get as many turns as we wanted. Our flat’s bike was a rickety old thing held together by divine grace. It creaked and spat its chain every few metres, had no breaks, no seat, and one of our boys had recently rammed it into a wall. Though the kids on the upper side of our hill had a bike for each house, they lived in gates with armed guards.
Kamwokya was not just the nearest neighbourhood with working bikes; it had the added perk of a free ride back home. A taxi stop was just around the corner at the playing field/public park, now home to Café Javas and City Oil. In those days, kids could ride public vans without having to pay. There was a bump behind the driver’s seat we used to call kameeme. Kids rode free on kameeme, and it was not uncommon for adults to carry us on their laps if we were too many to fit comfortably. Kidnapping had not yet become a thing.
I remember finding it odd that policemen and policewomen were never required to pay a fare. Instead, they’d hail a taxi and disembark at their stop without the conductor breathing a word. One day, this happened while riding with my father, so I seized the moment and asked if the government paid their fares.
People do this as a gesture of respect, he replied. Police help keep us all safe.
I’d also see this gesture offered to soldiers and sometimes nurses… so I came to develop a reverence for people in uniform.
One by one, the crowd breaks apart, and each person carries on along their way, some sulking at feeling powerless in the face of injustice. Ugandans are generally chill until they hear the word thief. After that, it doesn’t matter if the fellow is guilty or not. I am reminded of a time when petty theft was high in the city, and things were the other way around. It used to be that police had to protect people accused of theft to save them from the burning tires, match sticks, and jerrycan of petrol that always materialized the instant some yelled thief, omubbi. That everyone left cursing the policeman and praying for the man accused of being a thief was a thing I’d never seen before.
I carry on my search for a workstation and stop at an old co-working space further along the street. The place seems to have fallen on bad times. It looks abandoned. The chairs, tables, and graffiti-filled walls are lined with layers of dust thick enough to make bricks. I only find one soul about, a young, pretty attendant who barely speaks enough English to be bothered with my queries about the fee nowadays, after I tire of calling and searching the building for signs of life. She languidly tells me to buy a soda and turns back to the telenovela playing on a TV set that seems to be the only thing to have survived the dust.
I decide to take my erstwhile customary perch upstairs, blow some dust off the table, and start hacking away at my laptop. It’s quiet and cheap, I tell myself. There are no more public spaces left in this area since the high-end crowd descended on our street.
I have an inexplicable attachment to this street. From the day I started coming here to ride bikes as a kid, I developed an affinity for the place that has kept me coming back to it through every stage of my life.
When I started partying in O’level, I’d return to this street for the first time since childhood, this time to watch football at a spot called Wagadugu. It was one of the first proper sports bars in Kampala, but I had more than one reason for making it my haunt. Many of its patrons were ‘loaded’ campusers and recently employed graduates —the same age as my siblings— so it was easy for me to blend in. More importantly, I quickly learned that if you stayed quiet during the game and only cheered for the winning side after the final whistle was blown, someone would always buy free rounds for fans at his club. For a student with little pocket money to spare, Wagadugu was an unbeatable hack. Fun was guaranteed.
There were other memories of the more sentimental ilk. It was there that I got my first proper snog. I was a lanky teen with a newly broken voice. She was a pretty wide-hipped campuser. She lost a dare in a beer game and held nothing back. Years later, I’d move to Bukoto, the neighbourhood our street was named after, and become a more regular patron. By then, it had changed hands and names to Iguana, but the vibe was still the same. I’d ‘get lucky’ in this incarnation many times as well.
Iguana was a 30-minute walk away from my bachelor pad. I’d stop there every day on my way from work, and a new circle of ‘happy’ friends would form around our common love of the spot. We called it “the sitting room”. It would become our party HQ for the next five years, and a billion memories would be written under its Iguana’s thatched roof. Even now, when its earthy brown hue and soft light have been replaced with grey aluminium and bright lights, the shadows of a million moments pop up in every corner each time I visit. My ‘happy’ friends have since moved on to new haunts and lifestyles, and I moved out of the city, but each time I visit, my feet always find their way to that rooftop overlooking the street.
A friend once told me that the architecture of a space creates energy as alive as a being. The energy influences how people feel and behave in the space and essentially shapes how they relate to it. Now that the street is rapidly losing its visual identity right before my eyes, I see what that friend meant in the way my energy responds to the place. I realize now that the magnetic connection I’ve felt with this street since I was a kid was the unique way the architecture of its building expressed itself. As many old buildings disappear, the street is losing its magic.
I start hammering at the keys on my laptop but can’t concentrate long enough to put down a good paragraph. The image of the man is hovering in my mind’s eye. The lumbered resignation in his eyes as the all-black dragged him away drills a void in my pit. Mild guilt creeps in. There used to be a time when I would not go by a scene like that without reading the riot act, the black uniform be damned. Back then, I believed in high ideas like ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ and ‘power belongs to the people’. But a decade and a half of carrying these ideas in my chest with unnecessary gusto have taught me that power belongs to the mafia in this country. There’s always a cabal running a syndicate everywhere you look.
I’ve lived in this town long enough to know the look of a thief —the kind that peeps into cars to steal stuff or nick side mirrors and brake lights while everyone is distracted and never makes an effort to dress half as neatly as our man; or go through the trouble of setting up a female side kick to rob a street spotted with security guards in daylight. But, who knows, maybe the game changed while I was away.
I have come to discover over the years that if it is true that the architecture of a physical place can shape how you feel and interact with it, so can the architecture of institutions. If you have ever visited an office that is excessively bureaucratic and everyone feels like the people upstairs are watching their every move, I’m sure you’ve noticed that the air in the place can be cold even when it’s melting hot outside. I believe the same principle applies to countries.
A wise person once told me that it often feels like life was better and simpler when you were younger because you were young. A kid’s life is simple. It has none of the complexities and shifting sands adults must navigate daily to maintain a job, a family, and a relationship. I can’t dispute the logic of that wisdom. But while I might have been too young to understand the complexities of adult life in the early 90s, I was old enough to discern the atmosphere of the time, and I can tell you without a doubt that the air in today’s Uganda is a far cry and a fart from the air of the 90s.
Granted, there was a war in the north, the east, and the west, and an armed robbery happening every other night in the central. But there was a firm faith in the state’s goodwill and the idea that it respected the people’s will. Institutions worked, and people respected them. There was a sense that everyone had a stake in the country. Today, the prevailing sentiment is that the country belongs to a small group of people and the rest are squatters. We are living in a military/deep-state state that pretends to hold elections to keep up the performance of being a democracy. Our public is under siege.
Some eyes will look at the gentrification of my once beloved Bukoto Street and see evidence of a country edging towards “middle-income status”. I see the embodiment of a zeitgeist in a hurry to tear down and bury its past without stopping to ask what is worth preserving and what ought to be discarded. The guns and foreign direct investment dollars may be able to dam the tide of public discontent and give a precious few a taste of high life, but if the growing normalization of injustice and civic decay isn’t addressed soon, that 90s’ dream of a country freed from civil conflict may soon join the independence dreams of 1962 on the abortion table.