In eight weeks of lockdown, the psychological compression of confinement within a radius of five kilometres had built up to an unbearable pressure.
I had walked and bicycled the Entebbe peninsula almost daily, but how many times can you look over the same lake horizon?
The water was rising, locusts descending from the north, everywhere the virus, while a wizened septuagenarian was taking the country down with him. 2020’s dress rehearsal for the apocalypse, unlike the world’s health, was in fine fettle.
For some obscure, important reason, it seemed that the pressure cooker psyche could only be undone by going to Kampala. But there was a further, albeit light, tantalising draw. You could not drive, but you could ride a bicycle. The idea of cycling to Kampala came as a challenge that would not go away.
Getting out was one motivation. The other was that after half a decade studying Kampala, the chance to see it when emptied of human activity was irresistible. The opportunity rarely comes, in any one lifetime.
The last time the world convulsed this much was 1989-90. Those years marked the end of the period in Kampala’s life that had begun with independence, a period I only came to see in later years as its fourth age. By 1990, the forces of neocolonialism that had financed a civil war had taken control of the city, and used it as a base to set fire to Eastern and Central Africa, taking back control, as they now say, of their former colonies.
From the 1990s, the triumphant new ideology of economic neoliberalism set about preparing the city to serve new global masters. The banks, enterprises and industrial properties of the young Ugandan state were parcelled off to the lowest bidders; its people locked off in warfare, while former economic oppressors returned in the guise of “foreign investors”.
Since 2015, I have been tracing the development and expansion of Kampala’s streets. I have been reassembling the city, starting with the 1870s. Each epoch had left its architectural and planning mark on the city. (Planning’s intention was colonial exploitation.)
Here in 2020 was a historical watershed moment bound to once again change the direction of the city, a moment at par with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the stock market crashes of 1873 and 1929. Those previous events had been precursor calamities for the world wars that happened in 1914 and 1939. Their impact had ricocheted down and significantly changed Kampala, as they did the world.
The excitement I felt for my Kampala project was, admittedly, shameful yet irresistible. The pandemic had handed me a chance to study the city in a lab-controlled experiment.
Understanding coloniality is an enormously difficult task. And not just because it is complexly contoured – no two colonised peoples experienced the same history. To talk of independence in Kampala is to refer to a very different event to what happened in Karatina. To speak of the “black” experience is to draw a very broad brush indeed. You cram Malcom X, Jomo Kenyatta, Apollo Kagwa, Omukama Kabalega and Yoweri Museveni into one basket, yet they had different experiences of colonialism, and their attitudes towards imperialism were so wide-ranging that some in that group do not even consider themselves black at all.
It’s all the more difficult because in countries like Uganda and in cities like Kampala, political independence failed to translate into decolonisation. Hence Ngugi’s anti-colonialism can only make sense in form, and not substance, among the educated, southern elite of Uganda. The reason this elite resisted and continues to resist the formation of an East African Federation is because the Kampala-Mengo colonial elite and their counterparts in western Uganda belonged to the same social and economic class and privilege as Lord Delamere. Delamere was not enthusiastic about decolonisation either; like them, colonialism made him a landlord.
Hence, what happened in Kampala in 1962 was administrative independence. There was to be no spiritual (religious) independence because the experience had not been genocidal in intent for them. The reason the very highly educated southern elite never contributed a single writer of substance to the African Writer Series despite the many Ph.Ds they produced is because Shakespeare was not a problem for them. In other words, there was no cultural independence pursued in Kampala. Economically, independence was a disaster for it.
The reason this elite resisted and continues to resist the formation of an East African Federation is because the Kampala-Mengo colonial elite and their counterparts in western Uganda belonged to the same social and economic class and privilege as Lord Delamere.
There remains in Kampala today, hence, that most heinous of colonial pandemics – amnesia. You have to dig very deep to know what colonialism meant here. Otherwise, as presented, it emerges as a tea party of going to King’s College Budo, riding in Rolls Royces in ermine and pearls and being called “Sir”.
Kampala is hence a very strange city, much like Johannesburg. The arrival of Boer settlers in Southern Africa came long before the imperial stage of colonisation, which is what happened in Kampala. The Bantu of Southern Africa and Kenya did not experience the same colonialism as the Bantu of Central Uganda. In addition, the class of British colonisers who settled in Kenya was not the same as that which came to Kampala. To this extent, a Joseph Muthee in Karatina was bound to fight for a different decolonisation from that which Joseph Kiwanuka fought for in Kampala.
The experience of black people in the USA may be colonial in itself, but it was not imperialism; it was not the imperialism that the Native American Sioux experienced. Settlerism was effectively a genocidal ideology, binding Southern African, Kenyan and American black peoples in a similar experience but not including those in Kampala, while imperialism was an expression of “superior” European culture and “civilisation”. Slavery and genocide are the opposite of imperialism since they seek to eliminate rather than wow the natives. While what happened in Bunyoro in Uganda was genocide, the experience of the Mengo elite can perhaps pass as the best example of imperial colonisation. Because the coloniser that came to Buganda was most representative of the high Victorian Age – a class that bought into the haute bourgeois ethos of its time a belief in science and industrial progress emancipated from “European” nativism, the product of the new form of education of the time – the colonising of Apollo Kagwa and Ham Mukasa produced a very curious sense of history in Buganda high circles.
For the Kampala elite hence, colonisation was one continuous tea party with Alexander Mackay and the governor’s wife. This party was then ruined by the likes of Governor Cohen, Milton Obote and Abu Mayanja Kakyama. Attempts by the independence government of Uganda to liberate the Buganda masses from land alienation has never been seen for what it was. It was seen as an attack on Buganda in general, although the struggle by the peasant, anti-colonial movement of Buganda was more anti-Mengo than even the politics of Obote. In conjunction with a similar aristocratic crust in Ankole and Toro (who signed 1901 Ankole Agreement and the 1900 Toro Agreement with the British), this elite, largely Anglophile/Protestant, and who pushed their their Muslim and Catholic kin to the marginal lands, rewrote independence history and successfully fought off attacks on their colonial-era privileges with the result that the peasants of Buganda are today more landless than they were in 1900. The stigma of signing away their people’s freedom lingered long into history, meaning that independence from British rule automatically led to their own loss of power. The fact that decolonisation also meant independence from powerful, African/black collaborators has not been studied properly. But colonial collaboration also meant they were the best educated under the British system and captured the propaganda war very easily, given their cozy relationship with western media and universities (Oxford and Cambridge chums).
The result is that without knowing history better, the views of these aristocratic collaborators is what you likely hold, after all, the BBC and British universities which are more or less British aristocratic establishment, continue to take their views as given.
Black Delameres (a class belatedled created by the British in post-independence Kenya) can only turn on their own people. This was what the Luwero war was about. Four decades later, the tragic irony is that the peasants of that very Luwero have nearly lost all their land today.
It is only in cities like Kampala, in which black elites betrayed black people, that presenters on a local TV station will wear “All Lives Matter” T-shirts. There is a solid history behind this.
It is a hard history to disentangle. By the time the pandemic broke, I had only reached Kampala’s 1930s. But even the bike journey into Kampala was a ride through history, the 36 kilometers a gauntlet through what the five ages of Kampala have left imprinted on the landscape: 15 kilometers out of Entebbe, in Kisubi, you encounter the first age of Kampala, with earlier structures going back to 1904. Entebbe itself, the first port of entry for the earliest Christian missionaries, has a curious collection of old churches, the first High Court (now a metrological school), and a clutch of early, brick and mortar structures hailing back to Allidina Visram, the Indian mogul who defined early colonial mercantilism.
Over the last three decades of the rampant Museveni-era land thefts, the Kisubi area has so far mostly been spared. The largest landowner there is the Catholic Church (itself a beneficiary of the first massive land grab of the 1900 Buganda-British settlement, so few innocents here). The air has a calm, unhurried placidity to it.
It is only in cities like Kampala, in which black elites betrayed black people, that presenters on a local TV station will wear “All Lives Matter” T-shirts. There is a solid history behind this.
Towards the rising ground to Bwebajja, at 20 kilometers, you run into the latest, fourth age. A space open still to negotiation, these big, saddleback hills watching over moist valleys are neoliberal era developments, with the full complement of commercial bank-funded mortgages and Akright’s promises of bright, suburban futures, loans to be repaid over negotiated periods of time, families raised in garden cities, all as advertised. These dreams, still held onto a decade and more since the credit crunch, are so new that the concrete is still sluicing down muolds and the air is cement-grey and wet with enterprise.
Bwebajja, rather than colonial era religious land grabbing, is neoliberal era bank land grabbing.
Quickly, the air declines to a more pedestrian, urban mess as the road drops, then rises, to Kitende. And it is starting from these densely settled, unplanned, slum areas that the times begin to register.
What, beyond the abstract concept, is a lockdown anyway? Is it this listlessness you meet here, these anxiety-laden forms, the rabbity, scared eyes that search yours out (as you search theirs) asking for comity? As a Ugandan of a certain age, something of this reduction is familiar in the cut-off life, afraid of wandering beyond those hills. It is familiar to us when the dynamic sounds of enterprise suddenly become distant memories.
What we don’t remember is a time when dystopia was so omnipresent. In the darker days of civil wars, the world outside our borders had maintained their dynamism, with Nairobi, Toronto, New York, London, Paris, pulsating beyond our unique hell as steadfast beacons of hope. From there, our kin might send a dollar or two. Now, the world had no bright spots. The kin has come back sick and broke. The world is now one big Uganda circa 1987.
The failures of neoliberal economics – like the failure of the earlier original ideology, liberal economics, which it attempted to resuscitate hence the “neo” – has been spectacular.
Here is Kajjansi, a town packed tight as a tin of sardines, but whose chief feature, a clay factory, is listed on the stock market, as if in mockery of the poverty all around it. For a brief while, motor horns and din make Kajjansi feel lively. But its only a veneer. The people milling about are a combination of curious pandemic tourists like myself or parents escaping hungry families.
At the 28th kilometer mark in the steel rolling mill town of Seguku, you start to smell Kampala proper. There is great tension in the air the closer you get to the centre of power. The military patrols come in at ever closer intervals. There are more police roadblocks. Like the early 1980s, when the third age of Kampala was tottering to its demise, a sitting regime frightened of its hold on power was arming itself.
Now, as then, we are living out the final days of an ideology that has given up the ghost. In the 1980s, it was the remnants of the colonial economy. Forty years later, it is the debris of the neoliberal – but also neocolonial – economy.
I arrived in a ghost city and could not stay more than a handful of hours. Such was its sadness. Is there something we might have done differently back in 1990, when the ever so edgy American delusion of limitlessness started to be sold to us? Might we have questioned the usefulness to a poor country of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Rick Dees Weekly Top 40, tank tops, hamburgers and ESPN? Might all that money have been best spent on agriculture and education?
Hot on the heels of Michael Jackson and Top Gun – but more abstract – had been Friedrich von Hayek. Barely detectable, he had steadily mined the waters of common sense, and implanted in our young people the lie that jeans, T-shirts, sneakers and an attitude would turn them into Steve Jobs (not saying that 400 years of slavery was necessary to build the war chest of capital for that to happen).
The Soviet counterweight was gone, an example was made of Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Which Third World ruler was foolish enough to spend money on health and education instead of on Tom Cruise, Macintosh and the NBA?
Now, as then, we are living out the final days of an ideology that has given up the ghost. In the 1980s, it was the remnants of the colonial economy. Forty years later, it is the debris of the neoliberal – but also neocolonial – economy.
One hundred and twenty years ago, Kampala had been in such tension. It bore the marks of civil war while all around it, people were dying like flies from genocide and disease (sleeping sickness). There are a handful of rammed earth houses from that age surviving in the areas around Mengo.
It may be hard to believe, but colonialism, like the neoliberal gospel of 1990, had in 1900,come to some as the ideological force for good. “Uganda” was praised as much then for embracing colonialism as it was under Mr. Museveni, who was lauded for welcoming neoliberalism.
The age began with the grabbing of African lands, notably in 1902 when the British, under the guise of sending Kagwa to England for the coronation of Edward VII, lied to the Lukiiko that the powerful Katikiro (Prime Minister) had okayed the chasing away of black land owners on Nakasero Hill. Kagwa could not complain much since he and his class got huge cuts of the land theft. (In later years, when the European and Asians depossessed by Idi Amin were compensated, no word was raised by the World Bank on the Africans who had been evicted from their ancestral lands, which is in keeping with the 19th century ethos of compensating slavers but not the slaves, the last compensation of which the Bank of England paid in 2015).
In a decade, rammed earth gave way to raw bricks, then to clay, fired bricks, and at the end of the era, in the 1920s, started to arise some of the earliest, still-in-use buildings in Kampala.
The railway had reached Kisumu. Heavier equipment, higher tonnage, could be transported overland and steamed in over Lake Victoria. In a sense then, the arrival of the railway to Kisumu led to the grabbing of Nakasero Hill, and gave breathing space away from the cramped quarters of Old Kampala.
The current Namirembe Cathedral is the fourth structure of the church, after the raffia and reed thatch earlier versions were struck down by lightning and represents the best of this period. Makerere Art School, the Government Chemist in Wandegeya, the Ministry of Agriculture in Entebbe, these make up specimens at the end of Kampala’s first age, the busy days of governor Sir Coryndon, creator of Makerere College. In 1990, I went to senior one in a building marked 1927.
The years after 1927 I think of as the second age of Kampala, the age of colonial consolidation. The First World War, the sleeping sickness epidemic and the eventual death of Sir Apollo Kagwa, mastermind of collaborationist politics and great enabler of British colonialism, in 1927 (in a Nairobi hospital) brought the uneasy 1930s.
It would await the 1930s for the railway to reach Kampala before the most characteristic feature of Ugandan towns emerged. The colony grew lucrative. Greater tonnage was shipped out. Bigger equipment steamed in.
Experiments with reinforced concrete, and increased earnings from plantation agriculture, the triumph of the poll and hut tax in forcing Africans into unwanted labour, brought in prosperity. By then, a new city plan had been drawn, covering the Nakasero area, long emptied of black people. To a large extent, this period remains the essential character of Nakasero Hill, a 1930s open-air museum. The venerable Old K’la Club, now an Ethiopian restaurant directly below Gaddafi Mosque, moved upmarket to the conjunction of Ternan Avenue and Baker Close, just past the Sheraton Hotel.
This was a busy, building period in the life of the city. (To get an idea of what Kampala was like before the 1950s international style arrived, travel to Jinja, Mbale and Soroti).
The pressure on the Protectorate Zone of Kampala city – which confined the Asian and European sectors to Nakasero Hill, and whose expansion in the early 1900s doubtless cost Kagwa his clout – happened slowly, one scalp at a time. The grabbing of the rest of Makerere Hill was to cost Prime Minister Martin Luther Nsibirwa his life.
The grabbing of Kololo Hill had awaited the passing of Daudi Chwa in 1939.
Prior to that, Kololo had been occupied by Africans with tended farms. The golf course began life as a green zone, for it was believed that the female anopheles mosquito flew 1.3 kilometres in a straight line, and after biting a black person, must not be allowed to land on white skin, hence, this cordon sanitaire was necessary to separate the still African Kololo from the European Nakasero.
By 1951, the combined Asian and European population of the Protectorate Zone (run under a different set of laws while the Africans were governed by “Native Law”) was around 20,000. For this population, the colonial administration allotted half a million pounds sterling (about 17.4 million pounds sterling today) in 1951 for town maintenance. The black area around it, with an estimated 200,000 Africans, was given 16,000 pounds sterling (in 2020, half a million pounds sterlings) for the same year. It is important to note that only the Africans paid poll and hut tax.
The impact of land theft, forced labour, extraction and unequal distribution, even inequality before the law, remains to this day. The line between the Protectorate Zone and the black settlements can be clearly seen once you cross from Katwe/Owino Market, over the Nakivubo Channel, or the Sir Apollo Road separating Makerere West from the university. From a distance, you can tell which bits of Kampala were black and which were white by tracing rust and opulence on a map.
The coming of the third age of Kampala, the 1950s, saw a flurry of international-style Bauhaus architecture. This bulldozed 1930s Kampala Road, and ran down many old structures. Tellingly, it is the age that characterises Kololo Hill, built from the 1940s, where art deco thrives.
This momentum spills over into the early independence years, prime examples being Uganda House and Apollo Hotel. But the telling feature of the fourth age was to be, rather, the desiccation of the past century. The black people coming into power made a beeline for the Protectorate Zone, and ever since, each successive coup saw the officer class grab properties in Nakasero and Kololo. An interesting subtext to this is the “Kololo residence” mentioned in news stories about soldiers, businessmen and hangers-on of the Museveni regime.
To this point, you could say that there is a missing age in the Kampala skyline, as the 1970s and 1980s, even the 1990s, saw nothing of significance built. Where are the Kampala equivalents of Upper Hill, the Hilton Hotel, the Cooperative Bank Tower, or the Lillian Towers of Nairobi?
The coming of the third age of Kampala, the 1950s, saw a flurry of international-style Bauhaus architecture. This bulldozed 1930s Kampala Road, and ran down many old structures. Tellingly, it is the age that characterises Kololo Hill, built from the 1940s, where art deco thrives.
Rather, the legacy of those two decades is the decline of the colonial heritage. How else could a city created via racialist exploitation be maintained once the oppressed race has freed itself? The matter is not a paradox. Next door in Kenya, it was done via deals between the new black elite and the colonial era interests to maintain structural injustices as the lives of the Africans barely changed, or got worse.
This system of the oppressor-liberator cohabitation was the answer that returned progress and development to Uganda. They called it Structural Adjustment Policies, while the return of colonial economic interests was dubbed “foreign investment”. The result has been renewed land grabbing and the second phase of mass African poverty.
This time, the culture that came to characterise the fifth age of Kampala was American, consumerist, rather than British. The renewal of the development of Kampala followed where it had stopped in 1951 – northward and eastward expansion (not westward to avoid conflict with Mengo). The malls, the mortgaged, suburban plots, express motorways, and “Max” cinemas are more in keeping with Pax Americana than Pax Britannica. Interior decor, mansions, even baby names, are taken off American TV shows.
A new age came in which Will Smith, rather than William Shakespeare, is the balladeer, Joan Collins, not Jane Austen, the chief novelist, and rather than high tea, Coca Cola and fries. Washington did not wait to take the place of London, and the royal visit of the Clintons in 1997 came as reward for a kowtowing Kampala – but only after delivering the goods of the Congo Basin into American hands. Where Kagwa had earned his trip to London by decimating Bunyoro, Museveni won the visit from Washington by laying waste to Congo.
Fast-driving highways, factory-sized shopping malls, ad agencies, multi-channel TV packages – these have come to characterise present-day Kampala. And buildings have been erected to reflect these tastes. The Village Mall, on the Spring Road-Luthuli Avenue junction in Bugolobi, which perhaps best represents the turn Kampala took 30 years ago, may look as far as you can come from the cramped quarters of Delhi Gardens, which sits enclosed in a historical bubble just behind the Old Kampala Police Station, but they are ideological cousins.
Now that the neoliberal fifth age of Kampala is gone, we begin a prolonged period of uncertainty. It is likely a precursor moment to a greater global tragedy, and we cannot discount the collapse and descent into catastrophe of the Ugandan state. All signs point to it.
But as I cycled back to Entebbe that afternoon, and looked over the landscape, I wondered to myself what will replace the big shopping malls as the cathedrals of the future? What new bright ideas will the future people bring here and how will they divide the land?
What I was sure of was that when the current masters of Kampala’s fifth age are gone, the city’s sixth age will probably also not belong the common Ugandan man or woman.
