I’m Glenna Gordon, an American photographer and journalist, presently commuting between West Africa and Brooklyn. Previously, I lived in Liberia. And before that, I lived in Uganda. I’ve traveled and worked in over a dozen countries in Africa.
2008
On Wednesday at around noon, I walked down Kampala Road, listening to the traffic and the crowds and the taxi touts and the energy that all just seemed noisy. Then, all of a sudden, the traffic stopped flowing. Where dozens of cars should have been traveling, suddenly there were none. The street was silent. I paused, as did several other people who were walking near me, and glanced into the now empty street. An ambulance siren went off somewhere in the distance. Actually, I don’t know that it was an ambulance. I don’t know what kind of siren it might have been. I just knew it was ringing, somewhere, for some unknown reason. Ambulances are not common in these ends, and most sirens indicate a government convoy. Maybe it was the foreboding quiet that made me associate the distant sound with an ambulance, I don’t really know. I kept walking, in the direction of where the traffic should have been flowing from but wasn’t, eager to see if there was some kind of source to its end.
Eventually, I got to a place further down the thoroughfare where more cars were flowing. There was no particular or apparent cause to their stop, as if it had just been a regular bottleneck. But something more must have happened. It just wasn’t anything I could see.
I kept walking. At the next junction, an expensive car, the kind with tinted windows so that wananchi wouldn’t know who had such an expensive car, a Jaguar, I believe, hit a boda boda. Not badly, just a small collision. But this once again stopped the already halted traffic. A police officer in the normal khaki that seems to be all to frequently sited these days, stopped him, and yelling was involved. The police have been cracking down on boda boda drivers who travel without helmets or permits, which is basically all of them. He grabbed the driver by the belt of his pants, as someone else pushed his idle bike towards the curb. I watched until the police officer started watching me, making it clear I was doing something I should not have been doing, and then I continued. The man in the Jaguar continued along his way as well.
The siren in the distance continued.
Nothing big or violent or obvious seemed to have happened, yet it also seemed that much had transpired. Everyone just continued on their way, the unremarkable quiet now filled with noise, the street filled with cars, the unnamed boda going to meet an unknown fate.
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