{UAH} To Uganda at 59: One time you smelt very sweet

Folks;

This is a remarkable travelogue that captures the promising rise and cascading fall of a great country. We all have such comparable nostalgia, but Onyango-Obbo's vintage position, of being a child of a vibrantly opinionated, mobile professional, adds flavor to the memory.

Pojim

https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/oped/commentary/to-uganda-at-59-one-time-you-smelt-very-sweet-3574058

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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Our old man was not exactly a flag-waving patriot. He was too questioning and troublesome for that, but he served his country well.

He was a polyglot who, in addition to speaking Kiswahili and English extremely well, was also adept at about seven other Ugandan languages. During Idi Amin's time, he developed the art of trying to figure out which part of the country the grumpy-faced soldier at the roadblock was from, then addressing him in his language. It eased his passage through many roadblocks and probably saved his life many other times. On many an occasion, after he had had more than one in the pub, he would tell an Amin officer not to speak in broken English and stick to a language he was more comfortable with. His plea in the soldiers "native" language when things got thick, would save his neck.

He was, well, also an intellectual snob. He was a polymath, knew his science, Geography, English, and he was a kind of genius at Mathematics. You know the type, he is one of those fellows who suspected that if you couldn't crunch your numbers, you were probably not fully evolved. 

He was a democrat. In 1962 he and his buddies protested what they thought was the rigging of the independence election, and were thrown in the cooler for their democratic pursuits. 

Then he threw himself into educating, spreading math, science, and his other talents, crisscrossing Uganda in that enterprise and taking us along with him. And thus it was that, perhaps from a position of comparative privilege in the later periods, we got to see more of this country than children of that age then or today do. I tell these vignettes because Saturday will be Uganda's 59th independence anniversary.

And it is appropriate to reflect on the country our old man, who is no longer around, made it possible for us to see, and to make meaning of what it has become.

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For many of those years, it meant travelling from Eastern to Western Uganda, outside Fort Portal, and back at least three times a year. It was a different world. A short distance outside Kampala, if you were travelling to Fort Portal through Mubende, you would hit a murram road all the way. The smooth tarmac drive that it is today, is a recent phenomenon of the Yoweri Museveni years.

Everything in the country has changed and, except for healthcare, mass education and intellectual enlightenment, mostly for the better.

On the long trips, we would fall asleep but were always woken by the sweet smell from Asian-owned bakeries in the towns along the way. Like Pavlov's dogs, we knew that the sweet smell meant a bathroom break and a snack stop were likely on the cards. They could blindfold you on a trip from Mbale to Fort Portal and you would know you were passing a town from the sweet scents from the bakeries or mandazi parlours. You also passed by pine forests as you headed into many towns. The scent of the pine was blissful.

At that time, travel was organised around bus stops. You could travel the breadth of Uganda, and along the highways, there would be bus stop signs. People went to a bus stop to catch a bus. And the buses stopped at designated stops. There was order and method. There was no "stop at the big mvule tree there".

In the last two years of my secondary school, the old man moved. It was decided I should finish school at St Leo's Kyegobe. So at the start of every term, according to the wisdom of the old man, I would either get on a bus from Soroti or Mbale to Kampala and on to Fort Portal. Or on the train from the later-to-be-infamous Mukura station in Kumi, Teso, or Tororo, depending on where the holiday found the family, and head on to Kampala, Kasese, and take a taxi to Fort Portal. In a Second Class cabin, I would stretch, be fed, and arrive less disgruntled than one would be entitled to be on such a long journey.

The bus stops are long gone and have been replaced by chaos. The cross-country trains haven't run for decades. But perhaps the biggest change is the smell. You still know when you are approaching a town along the highway by the smell. But the smell is foul; of piled up garbage, of overflowing sewers; of putrid abattoirs. 

The sweet wafts from the bakeries and pine trees are history. If I had to write a letter to Uganda at 59, I would tell her that one time, she smelt very sweet. And I will never stop thanking the old man for introducing us to its best scents and sights.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the "Wall of Great Africans".