The Legend of Taco Bell

So, thoughts on Uganda…
Kampala is a city built in a rugged valley near an inlet from Lake Victoria. The city boundary sign even proclaims it to be “The City of Seven Hills”, much akin to Rome I suppose. It is a developing city, but from what I hear it lost some of its charm with the advent on expansion. It was formerly quite green, maybe like a miniature Seattle, but now it is quite dirty, like a miniature Detroit. Some of the streets aren’t paved, and poor drainage systems channel water through them, creating enduring ruts and mud. This is prevalent throughout Kampala, so that the throngs of people track the muck even to paved avenues, and the result isn’t attractive.
Speaking of the multitudes of people, I should discuss traffic. I counted a total of two traffic lights in the entirety of the city. At every other intersection, there is a jumble of cars, small buses, large buses, bicycles, pedestrians, and motorcycles. There are no crosswalks, and by the end of my week there I picked up the local habit of walking into the middle of traffic and dodging and weaving my way across the street. I floated like a butterfly… There’s no other way to cross, unless you took a taxi or something, but then the taxi has to fight all the vehicular congestion, which is a nightmare. When I took the bus into Kampala, from the boundary sign to the bus depot was a distance of maybe 2 kilometers (that’s just a little over a mile, Davis). It took some frightening, adept moves by our driver to pass that distance in roughly forty-five minutes. I have decided I will never, ever even attempt to drive in that city. I’m pretty sure that the average distance between cars (front or side, they are insane) is about the width of a delicious Big Cheeseburger from Jack-in-the-Box. That’s less than a few inches, if you have yet to taste the rapture. They are called “Big” because they are big on taste. So yeah, traffic’s bad.
Even walking on the elusive sidewalks, human traffic was a pain. You know in some cities how everyone walks with their head down and with a purposeful stride, thus causing a few minor collisions? Yeah, its like that, except that when I was walking, a person would look right at me and then walk into me. I don’t understand. Maybe I was violating some national law by walking in straight lines and trying not to bump people. This was the most prevalent in the clothing market, which had one small alley with barely enough room for two people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder. If you stop to look at a football half-shirt, or denim short-shorts, or you know, whatever you wanted to buy, people slam into you from behind incessantly. I guess it was half the fun though.
It seems like I’m painting Kampala some pretty dismal colors now, but I actually enjoyed the city very much. It was exciting and full of life, as evidenced by the frantic street crossings. When someone would bump into me, they would invariably apologize and smile, or even stop to talk. There’s hardly any animosity, even when a man is laying on his car horn he is laughing and chatting with other drivers nearby. And it was nice being able to speak English again, although American and Ugandan English are a bit different. “Do you want let’s go boss?” was one of the catchphrases of the motorcycle taxi drivers, who perch at every corner and then try swooping on the white folks who pass by, offering rides for twice the going rate. I took a regular taxi (Peace Corps put the kibosh on volunteers ever riding motorcycles; something about a high fatality rate, I dunno) one time, asking to go to Kabaka’s Palace. I asked the driver if he knew of it, and he assured me he did. I even repeated the name at least four times, slowly, because on the previous ride I took the driver misunderstood me. That time, we had sorted it out quickly and only wasted five or ten minutes. This time, he drove me in quite the wrong direction, and after half an hour, we reached a place called Backpacker’s Hostel. Hmmm… Back-pack-ers….Ka-ba-ka’s. Nope, I have no idea how he managed that one. When I finally reached the palace, he tried charging me about triple what we had agreed on, saying he used so much gas. What a chump. I gave them three snaps and walked away.
Whenever I decided to hoof it rather than face the traffic and chump drivers, I was assaulted with a barrage of “mzungu! mzungu!” that reached a level I hadn’t seen in Bukoba. Everywhere there were street peddlers, selling anything you could want (I found a book by Albert Camus at one) and when they see the great white man, they really put on the pressure. I took the wrong ATM card, so I only had available the small amount of cash I’d withdrawn before coming. Luckily it worked out, I left Uganda with 100 shillings in my pocket (about ten cents). But try as I might, I simply could not convince these hawkers that I was simply a poor volunteer ex-college student. The attention I got, and that I imagine every foreigner gets, was constant, and bordered on being overwhelming. A nice, simple, quiet night out is purely impossible. The shouts almost border on aggressive sometimes. But I found the antidote. No, not beer. Earlier I wrote that I picked up some of the local language here in Bukoba, and it worked wonders around town. Well, I copied that strategy and learned the greetings of Luganda, which is the native language and what everyone speaks before they are force-fed bad English. When I got hollered at, I hollered back (young’n) in Luganda. That made the crowded streets erupt with surprise and happiness, and all of a sudden they stopped trying to sell me overpriced necklaces. Try it out the next time you go somewhere that speaks a foreign language (except French Canada, screw that), and you’ll be surprised at how much the locals appreciate your attempts to use their language. Really.
Speaking of the force-feeding of English, that isn’t restricted only to the language. Uganda was one of the prize beauties during the European rush to colonize Africa, as it holds the legendary source of the Nile. Reason being, who ever controlled this source then had sway over every community which relied on the Nile to survive (*ahem, Egypt*). So basically, the Ugandans got it all ways, as both Germans and English vied for dominance. I hope its apparent that the English ended up prevailing, and then choke-slamming the Ugandans with their cultures and ideas, not to mention language. After a hundred-odd years of this, many of the aspects of their day-to-day life are very disparate from what you’d expect (at least from what I had expected). Naturally, they had to adopt many English customs, such as religion, style of dress, transport, habitation, government. But at the same time, it feels like a flicker of pride as to who they once were has remained, like they don’t want to forget their roots. Just ten years ago, in a huge ceremony, they re-crowned the old Kabaka (king) in his palace. He wasn’t given any political powers, but he has absolute moral precedence. I guess I would say that the entire culture seemed schizophrenic, like these two personalities, colonial English and traditional Ugandan, like they are clashing for national supremacy. The business men and college students gladly assume the role of the updated Englishman, and in fact you would be hard-pressed to realize they don’t hearken from a Western nation. Then, the taxi drivers, hawkers, and especially, villagers seem to live in a more communal, traditional sort of way. In between these extremes are the majority, and it felt to me like they were the rope in a game of tug-o-war between the businessmen and the villagers. I understand both ideas, the business men want their country to advance, to join the Westerners and perhaps to live with less poverty and hunger. The villagers want to keep Uganda’s spiritual and cultural side alive, to remember who they were and are, and to not become assimilated into the league of Western nations, just to lose their identity. Aren’t both desires valid? But I really feel like they are too disparate to exist together. Walking from the market district to the downtown hotel area was like traveling through time (trust me, I know), and I wondered how long these places would continue to survive, being so different yet only a kilometer apart. I imagine this same sort of thing is happening or has happened in many of the European colonies, and I’ve seen signs of it in Tanzania. A good analogy would be like when a fast food burger place begins to offer tacos. At first, you are excited. A fresh new type of food has arrived, and it is delicious. Perhaps the tacos are even so popular that they begin outselling the burgers. I mean, come on, everyone has burgers, but only this place has fresh new delicious tacos. So due to the popularity the burger place adds a second kind of taco, or a bigger one, or the ingredients of a taco wrapped in a tortilla (this is called a burr-i-to). You didn’t know that there were this many kinds of tacos, but you begin to learn the subtle differences between them. Soon, everyone that eats at this burger place knows that corn tortillas are superior to flour tortillas, or that black beans put refried beans to shame. People no longer crave the burger, it lost its luster. Of course, there are a few older people who remember when only burgers were offered, before all this taco nonsense. So the place keeps one or two types of burgers on its menu, to satiate these elders. But after a few more years, even these burgers lose their sway, and evolve into taquitos, quesadillas, and enchiladas. Without realizing it, this burger place has been changed into something completely different than its original state. And that, my friends, is the legend of Taco Bell...