Uganda: A Little Challenge to the Single Story

Since this Kony 2012 video has gone viral and thus Uganda has gotten so much exposure and been featured so often in the international news, I have been thinking a bit about one of my absolute favourite TED talks, Chimamanda Adichie's The Danger of a Single Story. If you have not seen it, it is worth taking the 20 minutes. Adichie is a writer who grew up in Nigeria. She talks in the video about how her mother would always tell her stories about the houseboy who worked in her house, about his family's poverty. When Adichie finally visited his home, she discovered other aspects to his life that surprised her - since all she'd ever heard about was poverty, she didn't have a wider view of him. When she went to America to go to university, she discovered the same thing in reverse - that since Americans had always heard of Nigeria in terms of poverty, starvation, or war, that they didn't have a positive or complete picture of life in Nigeria. Americans were always surprised to hear that Adichie's parents were scholars, rather than say, subsistance farmers. Her point is that when we always hear one single story about a place, or a people, even if that aspect is true, it is not complete information, and it is what leads to the creation of stereotypes and ultimately prejudice.

I bring this up now in the context of Uganda making the news, because frankly, Uganda doesn't make the news a lot. When it does it is always something horrible, like poverty or AIDS or the regime of Idi Amin, or now the Lord's Resistance Army. It is not that these are not true and important issues. But they are not all that Uganda is, just as genocide in 1994 is not all that Rwanda is.

I certainly don't claim to be an expert on what these countries are, but unlike, well, most Canadians, I have been to Uganda. Let me say upfront that I was only there for a few days, it was five years ago, and I really just drove through some countryside and spent a few days exploring the capital, Kampala. So I can only offer that highly impressionistic perspective. If you really want to know about Uganda, I suggest talking to some Ugandans.

But just for the heck of it, I will offer my limited perspective. It's simplistic and it's blurry, and it's certainly not as important as all the major issues in Uganda. But it is, at least, a second story.

I went to Uganda in 2007. I was interning at the time at Radio Rwanda as part of Carleton University's Rwanda Initiative, a project that is sadly now on possibly indefinite hiatus. I got permission to miss Friday and Monday at work, as I really wanted to visit Kampala. Kampala is home to one of the Baha'i Houses of Worship. Kampala is about a 10-hour bus ride from Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, where I was living.

Rwanda is called the "Land of the Thousand Hills" and is probably one of the hilliest places I've ever seen. It is the ONLY landlocked place I have seen with so many hills. So the first thing you notice on the bus ride out of Rwanda and into Uganda is the flattening out of the land. Before I went, part of my single story about Africa was that it is mostly grasslands and plains - that is true in some places but not Rwanda. Uganda looks a bit more like the stereotypical "Africa" I had in my head - big stretches of grasslands. In our 10 hour bus ride, we stopped twice, that I recall. Once at the border to deal with customs, and once at a bathroom out in the middle of nowhere. The bathroom stop had lots of food vendors selling long skewers of roasted meat. (Probably beef and goat, and not just the "pleasant" parts, either.) I did not eat roasted meat on a stick in Uganda, partly because I was afraid of that meat having been out baking in the sun all day, but a couple of my friends did and they didn't get sick.

The contrast between Kigali and Kampala is amazing. Kigali, population just under a million, could be described as sort of a large village. Its downtown core has government buildings and even a small mall, but most of the city is pretty underdeveloped by North American standards.
Kampala is much bigger - population 1,700,000 - and to my eyes had greater extremes of wealth and poverty. Both cities have big slums but Kampala also has North American style buildings - with stuff I never saw in Kigali, like plate glass windows. Sometimes the "fanciest" buildings surprise you. I remember being sort of bowled over in Kampala because I saw a Shell station. We also ate at a Domino's Pizza in Kampala, although to be perfectly honest I'm not sure if it was part of the actual Domino's Pizza chain or named after it.

Compared with Kigali, and particularly compared with Canada, Kampala is really dirty. My drive out to the Baha'i House of Worship took me through long stretches of road piled high with garbage, often with cows or other animals perched on top of the pile. It's also bustlingly busy, and has probably the most beautiful outdoor markets I've ever seen. Sometimes people put out tables but mostly they stretch out an old blanket on the sidewalk to spread their wares out. Some of the things I saw people selling in the outdoor markets: beautiful scarves, shoes (new and used), clothes, DVDs (mostly bootleg), food (mainly roasted meat and chapatis), motley garage sale style assortments of stuff, books, knicknacks, and vodka in tiny plastic bags, just a little bigger than a ketchup packet. I bought and ate quite a few chapatis from street vendors - it is a common and delicious street food that I can only guess stems from the large Indian population in Uganda - but most of the street vendors I saw selling them were African.

At night, the street vendors stay there and light candles. I can only imagine that they work gruelling long days starting around 5 or 6 am, in the dark, selling by candlelight, until late at night, selling by candlelight once again. Despite my awareness of this, my compassion for it, I still must say that walking through Kampala at night, with the streets all lit up by candlelight, was a beautiful sight.

My last night in Kampala I slept about two hours - I got in late and had to get up early. We walked from our hostel to the bus station at about 5:30 in the morning, and it was an unforgettable walk. It was dark out and the streets were already lined with vendors, mostly selling food, by candlelight. As we walked through the dark streets, already sort of eerie with that feeling of being up at a time that's normally reserved for sleeping, the call to prayer began to ring out from a nearby mosque. The call to prayer lasted about five minutes of our walk. We walked silently, listening to the call, and it was on of the most beautifully meditative, chilling and lovely mornings I have ever spent. Have you ever felt simultaneously completely alone in the world and also completely surrounded by other people? That's sort of what it felt like to me. It is a treasured memory of mine from my trip to Uganda.

I have a lot more stories about my visit to Kampala - the time I fell in a hole, the most hilarious thing I've ever ordered in a restaurant, and of course, my beautiful visit to the Baha'i Temple. Perhaps if this has piqued your interest in Uganda I will come back and tell them. If you would like to see a few pictures from my trip, I am attaching the link to my Uganda Facebook album:. Enjoy.

The Hunger Games

I've been noticing something in the marketing for the upcoming "Hunger Games" movie that can only be termed ironic.

For those of you who haven't read it, The Hunger Games is an extremely popular YA book series, and is well worth a read. It's a total page-turner with a kick-ass, wonderful heroine. 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen lives in Panem, a future country formed from the ashes of North America. Panem is ruled by the Capitol, a wealthy and gluttonous region that lives off the hard work and poverty of the twelve "districts." To punish the districts for a failed revolution 75 years before, the Capitol holds the "Hunger Games," an annual televised event in which a boy and a girl from each district are chosen and thrown into a giant arena to battle to death. Katniss' younger sister Prim is chosen, and rather than let her face death in the arena, Katniss volunteers to take her place.

Much of the book focuses on how because Katniss lost her father in a mining accident, her family is poor even compared with the poverty around them, and so Katniss illegally hunts in the woods outside District 12 to feed her family. It is this skill as a hunter which she brings to the arena.

When she goes to the Capitol as a Tribute in the Hunger Games, she is appalled by what she sees. Because of the extreme affluence everywhere, the people are basically lolling about trying to entertain themselves. They gorge themselves on rich foods, use cosmetic surgery as a form of amusement, and basically spend all their time getting mani-pedis or getting their skin dyed and tattooed. Whereas in the districts the people grit their teeth and watch the Hunger Games because not to do so incites corporal punishment, the Capitol folk watch for fun, taking bets on who will live the longest or get the most kills.

Suzanne Collins, the author of the book, said she was inspired to write it by seeing footage of the Iraq War juxtaposed with reality television.

Anyway, to get back to my original point, I'm just amazed by all the advertising for the upcoming movie. I'm seeing a lot of headlines like "Why is Cinna wearing this necklace?" and "Get Katniss' look from the opening ceremonies!" Okay, so I know maybe I'm overreacting because the difference between us watching the FILM of the Hunger Games, and the Capitol citizens watching the actual Hunger Games, as that in the real world no one is actually going to be dying. But there's a grand theme happening in this book about the importance of love, family, courage, selflessness, etc. - and the extreme triviality of looking pretty and the cult of celebrity. It seems ironic to me that this film is being marketed as though to the citizens of the Capitol.

One of the things that I really hated about the Harry Potter films is that I felt that in an effort to get the special effects and the spectacle right, they lost the themes. Harry Potter is primarily about death and loss, and not allowing the fear of death to consume one's soul. There are also important themes about the horrors of ethnic cleansing, and the importance of good character. I thought these themes got lost under the spectacle of "It's a dragon! On a rollercoaster! In 3D!!!" (Not that the dragons weren't cool!)

I'm really excited for the Hunger Games film but I really, really hope they will not make the same mistake. If ever there was a story where the themes are indispensable, it is this one. Without the themes, it's just a glorification of violence. I know it is hard to make a movie that is designed to make money and sell it to an audience that is much closer in nature to the "Capitol" than it is to the "districts", while staying true to a story about the hurtful and excessive nature of materialism. However I hope they will try. I am convinced that the popularity of this book, particularly among the young audience it is aimed at, demonstrates that despite the wealth and excess of North America, people really are searching for deeper meaning and purpose in life and that is why they respond so positively to these messages. Let's hope those messages don't get lost.