We are wary of anything ‘exotic’ now. This way of praising what is foreign seems dangerously provincial, patronizing and possibly racist. Foreign news has actively distanced itself from travel writing and all the accompanying paraphernalia of exoticism. Cautious neither to overpraise nor to denigrate other cultures, it has settled as a compromise on a permanently neutral tone, never expressing any wonder at the ways or practices of the far-flung corners of the world it reports from. It never seems amazed to find itself where it is; it simply accepts without astonishment or explicit comment that it is filing a story from a spot where brides offer their grooms a goat on their marriage day, where there may be luwombo with sim-sim paste for supper and where it can be 30 degrees centigrade in the shade at midday, none of which is apparently interesting when the news could be focusing on the prime minister’s likely role in an incident of financial maladministration.
Nevertheless, upon landing in Uganda, one can’t help but be struck by what still deserves to be recognized as exotic: by the colourful adverts for Bidco’s Golden Fry Superior Vegetable Oil hand-painted on the sides of houses, by the names of one’s new acquaintances (Patience, Ignatius and Kenneth), by the smells of roasting meat and campfire smoke, by the marabous, the weaver birds and the turacos that wheel in the light-blue morning sky and perch on the tops of the telecom masts, by the fig trees that grow in the middle of traffic islands, and everywhere by the constant repetition, at moments of delay (of which there are many), of the old Ugandan proverb ‘Mpola mpola, otuuka waala’ (a version of ‘Make haste slowly’).
The news is keen never to sound remotely like him. John Hanning Speke (1827–64).
(picture credit 7.1)
4.
IN TRAVEL LITERATURE, we enter foreign nations with the help of narrators with whom we can identify and who respond to other countries with some of the assumptions and fears we ourselves might harbour. They, too, might miss home and get frightened of fevers and bugs. They, too, might admit to weakness, excitement and despair. They, too, might flinch a little from their normal journalistic impassivity upon seeing, along the main road leading into Kampala, a large and unconvincing sign bearing the promise that ‘Together we can kill Marburg Disease’ (a highly contagious haemorrhagic fever virus which proves fatal to over 80 per cent of its victims within two days and is endemic throughout large sections of Uganda).
Nowadays, though, any kind of personal narrator would be deemed an intrusion on the objectivity of reporting. Foreign news hence avoids speaking to us with any kind of voice or personality. Yet if any harm could conceivably come to a viewer from seeing another country through the distorting lens of a correspondent who expressed candid reactions to it, it is as nothing next to what can be the stifling boredom produced by ostensibly neutral and accurate reporters who, by their implicit denial of even having a response to anything foreign, fatally undermine our desire to add to our knowledge of the world.
5.
IN THE RUSH to acquaint us with the so-called ‘main events’, the news forgets that our sense of engagement with a country depends on our being shown those smaller visual or sensory elements which alone can excite our deeper interest in a people and a place. If we are going to feel any real concern about Ugandan news we will first need to know something about the mango trees in Kampala, whose sweet smells drift across the crowded boulevards after the almost hourly tropical showers. It helps to look around a typical Kampala office, to see how the country’s schools work, to learn about relationship rituals and to browse the local newspaper, New Vision, and take in reports of the latest crimes:
Former Medical Union president Dr. Apollo Nyangasi has been sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of killing his wife Christine following wrangles over property. Delivering her judgment on Wednesday, High Court Judge, Jane Kiggundu said Nyangasi’s actions were uncivilized. Nyangasi committed the offence on July 24, 2010, at their marital home in Kireka Kira division in Wakiso district. The couple had been married for 17 years and has two children. The state attorney had asked the court to pass the death sentence against Nyangasi on grounds that he killed his wife in a brutal manner.
The very tone of this account points up some of the distance we have travelled. The judge deemed it merely ‘uncivilized’ for a man to kill his wife, and the state attorney argued for capital punishment not as a fitting penalty for murder per se but because, instead of dispatching her using some kinder method, Apollo had killed Christine ‘in a brutal manner’. The ‘wrangles’ over property sound confoundingly sedate as well (‘We were having wrangles so I hammered her to death …’). Without quite meaning to, the article conveys an unusual world in which violence is always close to the surface as a behavioural option, as a response to frustration and inconvenience, and where mayhem is such a constant and overwhelming threat that the local news media, unlike their sensationalizing counterparts in more law-abiding countries, can address it only in the most squeamish euphemisms.
6.
I ACCOMPANY THE BBC’s correspondent to a press conference with the embattled prime minister, who for several weeks now has faced accusations from foreign governments, as well as from many of his own people, of being a thief. From such occasions, the news machine demands one thing above alclass="underline" a quote of around fifty words, subsequently to be complemented by another fifty words from an opposition spokesman.
But even this journalistic set piece provides the bystander with an opportunity to learn about Uganda in non-standard ways – for example, by studying the very large photograph, remarkably still on prominent display, of the prime minister embracing Colonel Muammar Gaddafi at the African Union gathering in Kampala in 2010 (the last such event the colonel attended); or by noting, around the conference table, the gigantic black leather swivelling chairs, 1970s in style, a porn-film director’s idea of a seat fit for an important CEO, on which the prime minister and his aides are enthroned.
Stuart Franklin, The Prime Minister of Uganda, 2012.
(picture credit 7.2)
Stuart Franklin, Lobby of the Serena Hotel, Kampala, 2004.
(picture credit 7.3)
There is something to be learned about Uganda, too, from our host’s unswerving refusal to give any kind of answer conforming to the norms of contemporary journalism. On being asked if the allegations against him have prompted him to think of resigning, he offers a slow, wounded smile and a theatrically circumlocutory reply which seems oddly to combine the English diction of a Southern Baptist preacher with the sombre tone of an executioner (indeed, he ran the security services for many years). ‘My friends,’ he begins, ‘dear friends, all of you here are my friends; we in Uganda reach out to the world with a hand of friendship. So to all of you gathered here today, enough of distrust and sadness, enough of blame. The certainty is that no bad thing will befall us again in the future that we are building for Ugandans, all Ugandans, the very poor as well as those who have come by prosperity, today and tomorrow and every day that the Lord grants us.’ Certainly not the sort of statement that can be tidily shoehorned into the next bulletin.