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Kampala Central Mosque
Friday, July 28 2017
location: La Petit Village Hotel, Kampala, Uganda
This morning we soon met up with Gretchen's father in front of a nearby suite. He had some British-style adapters so we'd be able to plug our American-style equipment into various outlets. Beyond that, there were some logistical matters to be discussed between Gretchen and her father, all stuff that I tuned out as I fingered and rearranged the smooth plastic adapters. Finally I'd be able to charge up my laptop again.
After returning briefly to the room to get that happening, I went to find the others at breakfast. In so doing I came upon a man in a mask spraying insecticide and casually filling the air with unpleasant chemicals. It's not a great way to start the day, but, then again, malaria is no joke. The rest of the crew (Gretchen's mother, sister-in-law, the niece and nephew, and their maternal grandmother) all sat down together for breakfast at La Chateau Brasserie Belge, which was part of the hotel complex. There wasn't anything explicitly vegan for us to order, so we assembled a breakfast of sides. The potatoes were the standout of the meal; they were fried and had been covered in some sort of non-ketchup red sauce. I could've eaten a whole bucket of that.
The day had been heavily scheduled in a way that I find relentless and exhausting. I love my me time and my downtime, and I wouldn't be getting even a minute of it until bedtime. It would feel even more like work that actually working, where I can schedule my own breaks and most certainly do.
Our first destination was the Kampala Central Mosque, a not-especially-attractive example of the form atop Kampala's centralmost hill (where, we would learn, the city was initially founded, it's name being a corruption of the English phrase "Camp Impala." Before we were allowed in, all our womenfolk were made to cover their heads with scarves and wrap their bodies with cloth so that their legs were obscured in skirtlike drapery. (Gretchen had initially intended to spend the day in a miniskort, an idea one of our two drivers had cautioned her against.) After she was suitably encased in fabric, I proclaimed, "You'd make a cute Muslim." "Careful!" Gretchen's father whispered. The check-in tent contained a number of bored men (and an infant in a cardboard box), and he wasn't sure they would find such a statement funny. Later, though, he was even more alarmed when Gretchen casually mentioned "we're Jewish."
There wasn't all that much special about this particular mosque. Soon enough, though, our guide revealed the reason for its ugliness. It seems its construction had been initiated by Idi Amin. But after years of work, all that resulted was a foundation. And then, after Amin's overthrow, the project languished until the 2000s, when Muammar Gaddafi sent money to finish the job. At that point, it was discovered that the foundation that had been built would have to be replaced. Thus the current structure is considerably younger than, say, our mcmansion in Hurley. A religious site needs a little gravitas to do its thing, but it's hard to find much gravitas in a building that isn't even old enough to drive a car. Despite its age, the mosque had a musty lived-in feel. The ceiling fans were yellowed and patchy with grime, and there were visible cracks on the central dome. Fancy details had been incorporated into the finishes. But from any distance, things like the hand-carved wall panels looked like cheap wallpaper.
As we walked along a colonade to the mosque's one minaret, I happened to notice a man in the shade who might've been a beggar. he was wearing flip flops and one of his feet was about five times the size of the other. I've seen pictures of elephantiasis, and he must've had some disease like that.
The minaret was startlingly crude inside, with rough concrete walls, some of which had visibly deteriorated in the few years since they'd been created. Halfway up and at the top, the minaret provided good views of Kampala, and our guide took pains to explain the history of the structures atop every hill. Atop the minaret, there was some humming electronic equipment that our guide told me (when asked) was for a radio station, not for the prayer loudspeaker.
At some point we had lunch at a place called Little Ritz in Africa Restaurant and Bar. It had a buffet where one could assemble a damn good meal of rice, beans, potatoes, plantains, some sort of African corn patty, greens, and "groundnut" (peanut) sauce. There was even a hot pepper oil available so I could spice it up (otherwise it was fairly bland).
Next on the agenda was tracking down the house Gretchen's family had moved into a couple months after Gretchen's birth in 1971 (when Gretchen's parents were in their late 20s). First, though, we had to get there. This involved extricating ourselves from the congestion of downtown Kampala, with its slow-moving traffic (apparently due to the arrival or departure of the President from his residence). As we crawled slowly along, I took pictures of storks circling overhead and watched people sleeping in the shade, motorcycles with as many as four passengers, and beggars (one of whom I saw wheeling around a badly deformed compatriot in a wheelchair). Our driver (in this case, Ronald, the other one) was amazing at finding extra lanes and brief openings between other vehicles he could exploit with lightning speed, quickly slowing to a stop as a pedestrian or other vehicle appeared in front of him. Adding to the drama was the fact that vehicles in Uganda drive on the left, defying American expectations of the way right of way is ceded. I would've been terrified, but I had complete faith in Ronald's driving.
Once out of the city center, we then had to get outside the ring of slums and tiny businesses, where butchers, fruit vendors, and the ongoing welding of steel door fabricators all happened there on the bare red earth among a constant human jostle. The old house from the 1970s lay somewhere in a tony (and seemingly depopulated) hilltop community of high walls covered with razor wire remotely monitored by video cameras. It had been 44 years since Idi Amin had forced Gretchen's family to flee, and memories were hazy of what things had looked like. Some of the streets also seemed to have been renamed. The first place we went seemed like it probably wasn't right, so then we wandered the neighborhood and checked another place. A nice white woman came to the gate, but it was pretty clear her house wasn't the one either. Eventually we found a good candidate house in a bend in the street, though (from what we could see) there were more buildings there than there once had been. That made sense; a lot can be built in 44 years. Eventually the homeowner came to the gate. He was an older Indian gentleman named Patel, and, once he learned that we were here on a mission of nostalgia, he happily let us in to see the place. Indeed, it was the house. A part of the yard had been cut off and sold as a separate lot, and various additions had been made. But it was still fundamentally the same, centered around a sunken living room and a needlessly-steep stairway to a second floor (that had since been expanded into a unit that could theoretically be rented separately on AirBnB). In addition to the patriarch Patel, there was also Mr. Patel's wife, his Ugandan housekeeper, and a skinny Ugandan gentleman who seemed to do anything involving actually reaching down and picking things up. There was also a very old man in one of the bedrooms. That was Mr. Patel's father, who, we were told, is deaf. In amongst all the nostalgia were tales of how it had felt as Idi Amin ratcheted up the crazy, first expelling the Indians and then expelling the Isrælis (which Gretchen's parents took to mean "all the Jews"). The only hard artifact from scarier times was a bullet hole in the thick glass of one of the sliding doors. The glass had stopped the bullet, leaving a cone-shaped void and a tiny aperture. It had happened some time after Gretchen's parents fled but before Mr. Patel bought the place.
It turned out that Mr. Patel was something of a wine merchant; he had many cases from South African in his basement.
Our next stop was out in the country some distance from town, where we drove to a small primary school for the poor and disadvantaged called Brain Tree. Gretchen's sister-in-law had a friend who had paid for a music room to be built at the school in honor of a dead parent, and she wanted to see it for herself. This was our first experience seeing how school was done in Uganda. At Brain Tree, all the children wear school uniforms and do their classes in concrete-block classrooms, each illuminated by a couple glassless windows and a single dangling light bulb that, in the day time, is invariably off. Thus the light in the classrooms tends to be murky. This is great during nap time (which it was for some of the younger classes), though it probably made it harder on teachers with older eyes. That said, we'd seen very few people even as old as me in Uganda; Robert said that half the population is 17 years old or younger. Most of the teachers here at Brain Tree looked to be in their twenties.
The staff paraded us as a group in front of one class after another. Each time, the class would do something in unison, such as sing a song or welcome us. It was a little creepy in a North Korean forced-celebration kind of way, though we did versions of this stuff even in America when I was a kid. Sometimes the kids were then asked to ask us questions, and some bold kid would raise a hand and ask us what our names were. It was all kind of sweet and embarrassing at the same time. I found myself looking around at the walls, cluttered with hand-made charts and lists with essential information from various disciplines. Some where about history or science, though there would also be one entitled "RELIGIOUS EDUCATION" and it would have a list of Christian saints or even a picture of Noah's Ark or God creating Adam and Eve.
Finally, after being greeted by nearly all the students in the primary school, we were taken to the music room, the one funded to honor the mother of a friend of our sister-in-law. It had been cleared out of nearly everything except some seats on a low stage. This was where us gringos were told to sit while we waited for our entertainment. Eventually a group of primary-6 students paraded in wearing semi-traditional dress and proceeded to do a song and dance number. It was a song from a tribal village, one actually having something to do with the ritual of circumcision. The dance appeared to be semi-choreographed, though most of what held it all together was the loud drumming of one of the staff. There were two others songs after that: one that told the story of making wine from bananas, getting drunk, and causing trouble, and another featuring the energetic shaking of butts (twerking) beneath outfits designed to heighten the appearance of movement. The themes were surprisingly adult, and level of intimacy between boys and girls during the dances were of the sort that would never be acceptable in an American school. People tend to think of America is the most permissive and sexually flamboyant in an otherwise sexually-demure world, but it's just not so.
Just before leaving, my sister-in-law's mother slipped on the uneven ground and fell on her butt. She wasn't injured, though it was humiliating, and from then on her daughter felt the need to hold her hand whenever she walked anywhere. Kampala is full of uneven ground in a way that would never be legal in the United States. That mother of my sister-in-law shared a first name with a tiny little girl who happened to be present when she fell. Initially the little girl seemed disturbed to see such a thing, but she soon returned to her normal adorable and vaguely impish state. When asked to dance, she pantomined a hip-shaking thing for about two seconds.
I'd wanted to somehow avoid the next thing on the schedule, a dance performance at Ndere Center (a complex that includes a hotel and conference rooms; today it was also hosting a wedding, which tend to be huge in this country). But the van never returned to the hotel, so I there I was with everyone else at Ndere Center. Happily, though, Gretchen decided we should get drinks at the bar. So I had myself a Nile (a locally-produced lager; it's good and comes in big bottles), while the others had wine. The kids' maternal grandmother took the opportunity to get herself a vodka with water, what was to be her signature drink.
Part of our arrangement with Ndere Center was to eat there. They had a buffet similar (but somewhat inferior) to the one we'd had earlier at the Ritz. We dined outside on tables arranged in front of a stage, where we were supposed to see traditional African dances performed. But there was some sort of delay; the dancers were probably trapped in Kamapala's dreadful highway congestion.
When it finally began, the dancing was a little hard to take seriously; they were wearing huge blond wigs and the movements weren't that compelling. But things got better, and we were soon treated to the various rump-shaking dances, some even done by men. The dancers wore what appeared to be little hoola hoops in their clothes, which exaggerated the movement and kept us entertained. Still, though, I was jetlagged and tired and just wanted to go. The same was true of everyone but Gretchen's parents. But eventually even they were ready to go, well before the dance performance was over. As we left, the highlight of the evening seemed to be happening, as dozens of dancers blowing long, straight wooden horns descended on the stage.
Dressed modestly for Kampala Central Mosque, from left: Gretchen's mother, my sister-in-law, Gretchen, my niece, and my sister-in-law's mother. Click to enlarge.
Looking down the spiral stairway of the minaret at Kampala Central Mosque. Click to enlarge.
A disheveled construction project near the mosque. Click to enlarge.
A feminine hygiene option not available in rich countries. Click to enlarge.
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