In the Sunday Monitor here.

Ugandan boxer Ouma “The Dream” Kassim makes headlines in the USA even when Ugandan politics don’t.

Kassim, only 28, has a baby face, with a broad face and flat cheeks, scattered and faded scars, and a hair style that changes every week. Uganda’s “Dream” doesn’t look much older than some of the kids who just started training at Lugogo Track.

And he wasn’t very old – five and a half – when the National Resistance Army recruited him as a child solider. Because he deserted the army, Kassim would have been prosecuted by the government if he returned to Uganda.

So he waited ten years to receive a pardon, and then he came home.

He’s spent the past few days traipsing around Kampala, handing out 20 k notes to his friends, paying for airtime with a wad of cash, meeting and greeting.

Much has been said over his relationship with pop star Juliana Kanyomozi. While Ouma had no official comment, it was Juliana who picked him up last Tuesday to drive around Nakasero. He called her his “baby girl,” (but then again, he calls most women baby girl), and said, “I just want to get lost with her.”

See Tuesday’s Monitor for a brief article on Ouma and the upcoming Sunday paper for a longer feature.



The Russian Ugandan at Kampala’s Cafe Pap

Ali Bashinski Ssemakula sported a nubby orange wool sweater in the warm Kampala sunshine. He didn’t look Russian, but the sweater did.

“Nyabo,” he asked the waitress. “That yellow cloth on your waist, does it stay clean all day while the table stays dirty?” Her towel hung dry at her hip.

I sat with Ali, a stranger to me, at our dirty Café Pap table because it had the only open spot at a smoking table at the crowded cafe. Pap, which sits just below Kampala’s Parliament and just above the main thoroughfare, is Uganda’s version of Starbucks, only with even more mediocre food and an even more stratified social milieu. Mbu, this is Uganda, where the average family lives on less than a dollar a day, and a cappuccino at Café Pap costs two days’ income. There are 28 million people in Uganda, 1.2 million in Kampala, and about 20 people at Café Pap at any given lunch hour.

Today, like most days, it bustled with a laptop-donning crowd of elite Ugandans and wazungu. (Wazungu is the plural of mzungu, or white person, directly translated, means one who walks in circles or one who takes up space. I’m called mzungu so many times a day that I actually turn my head and respond some of the time, but on a daily basis it’s hard to take in the true definition of the word.)

Ali and his friend ordered coffees and cakes and soups and sodas. The many dishes came mpola mpola, slowly by slowly. Café Pap was more famous for its WiFi than its service.

“We ordered the soda at the same time as the cake,” Ali demanded. “Why is it not here?” She didn’t really respond, just demurred and went to fetch it.

His next complaint was about his iced coffee drink. It came in a plastic cup. “Is this for take away? Tell me, am I going some where or am I sitting here?”

“We always serve this drink in this cup,” she said. A frequenter of Café Pap, for the internet and the smoking tables, I knew this to be true.

“No, you bring me a proper cup, a glass cup, a ceramic cup. Nyabo?”

Once again, she demurred, and took his drink with her.

I knew the waitress, she was nice, worked hard, always brought me plenty of internet codes to allow me to access the café’s network, and I’d had enough of this.

“You don’t have to be rude, you know,” I said, briefly looking up from my laptop.

“Have I raised my voice?” said Ali. “I have not raised my voice. I’m not being rude, I’m being demanding.”

“Fine, demanding.”

“I’m Russian, that’s how we are.”

“You don’t look Russian.” He didn’t look Russian, except for the sweater, but he explained that his Ugandan father went to St. Petersburg and married a Russian national.

He paused. “Listen, I can afford to come here once a year, and I want what I want.”

Once a year, he explained, he could afford to come to this Café. And he’d been coming here once a year since the place opened. He waxed about the Café and Kampala in years past.

I didn’t mind when the service was bad. I came often enough that bad service sometimes didn’t bother me since it wasn’t a special occasion for me. It was the place I went to get some work done, not my annual outing.

“You see this envelope? It’s from the bank. I’ve just come from the bank so I can afford this meal.” The brown envelope with an orange Bank of Baroda insignia contained a few dozen 500 shilling coins. They stacked them into neat piles of four like casino chips, just adding up to their 23,000 tab.

But still, the towers collapsed and rolled all over the floor.

They didn’t leave the waitress a tip.

Kampala’s Kalooli: Storks, Disney

A preview here…

“Birds of Eastern Africa,” by Ber van Perlo, is an staple you’ll find alongside any Lonely Planet book. The shelves are sparsely lined with guidebooks for individual East African countries, but Amazon lists “Uganda’s Popular Birds Handbook,” “Where to Watch Birds in Uganda,” “Check-List of Birds in Uganda,” and others. Few books of Ugandan history, politics, or literature export beyond the borders of COMESA, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa.

Thugs hired by the government to disperse rioters carry sticks and chase civilians. Several people were reported to have been beaten by the stick-welding-mafia. The riot’s cause was once again the saga of Mabira forest. I don’t know anywhere else that an environmental cause would get this much coverage or create this much disturbance, though part of me wonders if it’s just an excuse to riot, and an excuse for tear gas…

But I got a full page in the Monitor today, and it’s online here.

Egypt: The land of camels
Glenna Gordon spent a week in Egypt. She didn’t expect so many camels; she thought that was just a myth. But they were just everywhere. “How many camels?” men asked.
When you mention Egypt, people imagine pyramids seated in the middle of a vast expanse of desert. Really, they’re just half an hour’s drive from Cairo’s bustling streets. When the
weather and the pollution levels agree with each other, Cairo’s jagged skyline is visible
peaking out among the pyramids’ tips…..

Thankfully, my mom is too far away to see the detail of her thigh… but all of you in Kampala get to spend a thousand shillings to get a glimpse.

Mom, if you’re reading this blog, I’m sorry. Just be glad that you know no one in Kampala. Your thigh is just another mzungu thigh to all the 28,000 people who buy the Monitor and the three to five times as many who read it because of shared copies…

Does anyone know how I actually load this onto the top of my blog??

Jackfruitys says to say hello to all and that she hasn’t been posting because she has malaria, and since she wrote a post similar in format to this one, this entry goes out to sick fruit.

Boda driver: You have a husband?

Me: Yes. (Not true, but a worthwhile lie.)

Boda: You have a sister I can marry?

Me: No, just a brother. You want to marry him?

Boda: Eh, no, no.

(Pause. Traffic. Chickens. Exhaust. Etc.)

Boda: Maybe, eh, you know, some Ugandans, they take two wives. Maybe you take two husbands.

Dark chocolate and Mango Splash*? Who would have thought?

My brother used to eat bananas and hummus.**

First, for the mzungus outside Uganda who read my blog, and second, for the Ugandans who do…

*Mango Splash: Boxed mango juice sold in Uganda, very tasty, especially with dark chocolate.

**Humus: ground chick peas, also very tasty, though I don’t think so with bananas.