Erstellt am: 20. 11. 2012 - 12:17 Uhr
Ugandan Diary Part 3 - Into the Luwero Triangle
- Read all entries of Chris Cummin's Ugandan diary
“Hey Mzungu come on let`s go!”
The voice came from close behind my wheel and then a grinning face whizzed past on my right-hand side. It was a young Ugandan man peddling furiously on a clunky Chinese bike, his buttoned up beige shirt flapping in the wind.
I was passing through a small village on the red laterite road from Kayunga to Luwero in central Uganda and I was being challenged to a spontaneous bike race.
Outsprinted!
I`m from the land of Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish, so there was national honour to be defended here. I kicked into my pedals and clicked up a few gears as I started the furious pursuit.
But, despite my best efforts and despite the fact I was riding a multi-geared, clip-pedalled mountain bike, my challenger, who was pushing a single gear while wearing flip-flops, was still speeding away from me.
The shame of it!
At the sight of the race, villagers cheered and, seeing I was beaten, my challenger bathed in the glory, raising both hands off his handlebars and above his head in triumph. As he celebrated he somehow managed to negotiate both a downslope and the constant potholes of the dirt road. It was in a prestigious show of bike-handling. I could only applaud.
chris cummins
It`s this sense of fun, this clownish sense of humour, that makes travelling through rural Uganda such fun. All day there was always a joke to be had and it usually came at my expense.
“Take us with you!” shouted a group of three beautiful young women, before collapsing into giggles and slapping each other hard on the thighs.
Sent The Wrong Way
As I passed through another small settlement, a group of men, stood by a road junction: “This way! This way! Hey mzungu, you`re going to the wrong way!” they shouted.
I could see they were teasing me. As they urged me to branch off to the right I could see the rest of my team disappear down the road straight ahead. But, I played along, acting confused, slowly turning around and pretending to start off down the wrong road which headed east rather than north. They brayed with laughter and then called me back.
Novelty Circus Act
It`s true, you are treated like a novelty circus act, beamed in from outer space for their slapstick entertainment. But could I complain? I was dressed in body-hugging Lycra and white tights to protect my legs from the equatorial sun. I was wearing a helmet-camera on my bucket helmet. Let`s be honest, clowns look more respectable.
Even if my little band of European cyclists had been dressed more elegantly, I`m sure our appearance in this fertile agricultural region would have created a stir. The area south of Luwero isn’t on the beaten tourist track and when the schoolchildren got wind of the fact that a bunch of muzungu were passing through they burst out of the classrooms, ran to the side of the road to ecstatically cheer us on.
It was wonderful, of course, but I felt a little bit guilty. We were cycling through Uganda to visit schools and to raise awareness of the challenges facing education in the country, raising some money for Link`s school improvement projects, but so far we seemed to be only managing to distract children from their lessons!
"We must be leaving a strange impression!" I remarked to my cycling partner Alex, from Link, who spends several weeks in Uganda each year.
"I don`t think anything we could do would surprise these kids, to be honest," he said. "They think we are crazy anyway."
chris cummins
It was a long day in the saddle today but in Uganda you are rarely short of an energy boost.
This is a country addicted to bananas. Ugandans eat an estimated 250kg-300 kilograms of bananas per person per year. Even the smallest homestead has a couple of banana trees planted in the yard for private consumption, even in the towns, so that the houses are shaded by the lovely, soft, long leaves. Doctors are constantly trying to persuade people to vary their diets more, but Ugandans won't be swayed. When the banana trees were threatened with a blight last year, the country faced a national catastrophe.
chris cummins
Bananas here come in all shapes and sizes. Ugandans claim they grow 60 different varieties. You see bikes carrying massive bunches of the long green savoury types that are wrapped in the leaves of the banana trees and boiled up in a pot into a thick, stodgy porridge-like mush called matooke. It`s a tasty dish, particularly when covered in a rich peanut sauce, but it`s hard to digest and Alex, who used to teach in Malawi, told me that when the kids ate it at lunch they`d sleep drowsily through the early afternoon lessons. There are medium sized bananas called gonje that are roasted on a brazier but I was addicted to the tiny bananas called, if I heard right, Mdese. These were about the size of my thumb and were firm and sweet. I ate them incessantly along the route and considered quitting journalism and setting up an export business.
chris cummins
A Beautiful Place With A Tragic History
For over 80km we climbed and descended hills, past leafy plantations, brick kilns and bustling one-street rural communities. At one point we had to negotiate a large herd of long-horned cattle languidly loping their way down the main road.
This was gorgeous countryside of relaxed, smiling, waving people. As a traveller you can`t gauge the ghosts and traumas hidden here:
Before leaving, I`d read up on Ugandan history so I knew we into the infamous Luwero Triangle. During the early 1980`s current President Yosewi Museveni waged his Bush War against the then despotic leader Milton Obote, whose UNLA troops carried out massacres on civilians in this area. In the morning, as I was sipping my African tea, I`d read an article I'd brought with me called Uganda: Land Beyond Sorrow by journalist Robert Capute. In it he described how “in what must rank with the worst atrocities in human history, men of the UNLA ravaged the countryside and slaughtered between 200,000 and 500,000 people before they were defeated by the (Museveni`s) National Resistance Army."
Unimaginable Horror
I tried to visualize the terror, I tried to register that this had really happened, and that massacres were still taking place in Africa just one country further north in Sudan but I utterly failed. It was the same when I visited Auschwitz – your imagination boggles at the horror. I think it is a defence mechanism.
chris cummins
Nearly 30 years on Museveni, ultimate victor in that brutal war, is still in power. In the dining room of the simple hotel where we are staying the night, his portrait, receding hairline and thin moustache, beams down on us from the wall.
Ugandans I spoke to complained that his paternalistic “no-party state”(designed, he claimed, to overcome tribal and ethnic animosities and finally unite the nation) is intolerant of dissent and breeds complacent corruption. They complained with a resigned smile – this is a young country, half the population is under the age of 15, and few can remember a Uganda without their current president.
Gulu and the Lords Resistance Army
The next day we are headed in the direction of more recent horrors. The long road northwards headed to to town of Gulu – a place synonymous with the horrors of the Lord's Resistance Army who kidnapped children from the surrounding countryside, brutalizing and turning them into cannon fodder for battles against government troops.
Terrified children used to have to leave their families and walk miles to the town before dusk to sleep in halls because they were too vulnerable to kidnapping in their home villages.
Children were maimed, raped and sometimes forced to kill their own parents. It was a period of uspeakable horror and it was not long ago.
"Obviously that`s left a real scar - the brutality, the killings and the kindnappings", Alex told me. "You`ve got a traumatized population and a part of the country that really needs a total reconstruction of its infrastructure."
Obviously giving the northern children some future is a massive challenge. Many of them are struck in camps, refugees in their own country:
Alex`s education project Link Community Development works in the Katakwi District in north eastern Uganda that has not only been affected by the LRA but also by murderous attacks by the Karamojong cattle raiders.
"Many children and young adults have only known camp life," explains Alex, "and these are not good places to be. There`s lots of insecurity within the camps - crime and abuse, things like that."
chris cummins
Link is trying to encourage and support the healing process by making sure that the schools functions not only as effective places for the children to learn but ensuring that the schools act as centre for food security.
"We try to encourage things such as vegetable gardens in schools and in the communities so that the families can resettle back on to village life."
A Potentially Lost Generation
If the children of the north aren`t given the support they need, they face becoming another lost generation, which would make the north a potential tinderbox for future insecurity.
Better education can`t change everything, of course, but it can change a lot. It`s the thought I`ll have in my mid when we set off on the longest day's ride on this tour to advocate education - 105km tomorrow, but every bead of seat will be worth it.
To Be Continued.