Uganda’s roads, villages, and the sound of silence

It is probably more than 25 years since I spent the week in the village. Like with many other people, almost all other times, I have arrived in the village on Friday or Saturday, and left to return to the city on Sunday or early Monday. This time, I was there from Tuesday throughout the week. It was a different – even strange – place. It was very silent.

The children were away at school. The adults were nearly all off to the gardens or tending their cattle and goats. I remarked about the silence to my companion, who said; “it can get even quieter than this during a bumper harvest. Right now, because it is rainy season too, more resources are poured into garden work”.

The local shops are closed. There is no village barber sitting under the mango tree. In the evenings, things come back to life. Children return home, the local bars open and fire up their loudspeakers, the village men pour out in the “square”, while at home, the women (and girls who have just returned from school) make the trips to the well or borehole, and fire up the evening meals.

The silence, though, tells a loud story. For starters, that there is hardly any “in-between labour”, one that doesn’t go to work in the fields or school. In the towns, those who can afford it have house help when they are away at work in offices. In the villages there is no such thing. That domestic work that would have been done by other hands while the women are away in the gardens, is picked up by them when they return. The sound of silence, is the soundtrack to the burdens of the rural woman.

Secondly, it also explains why some rural parents don’t send their children to school. They keep them at home to make some noise – tending the chicken, doing chores.
The other revealing silence was on the roads. The up-country roads are very different on the weekends than during the week. From a short distance outside the eastern town of Mbale to Soroti, and beyond to Lira, the road is actually a beautiful piece of work, but there is very little traffic. There is quite some activity in the townships along the highway, like Bukedea and Kumi, but little on the road itself.

Police officers with no trailers, charcoal, and cattle trucks to shake down at the roadblocks, resort to small beer - stopping motorcycles, bicycles, and even people on foot carrying heavy loads for bribes.

A government official in Soroti, explaining the silence on tarmac, tells me, as a businessman might; “the problem is that our people’s productivity is low…if our productivity remains low, we will never have enough things to carry on these tarmac roads to make a return on the investment”. The point can be debated, but we will leave it standing for now.
On the weekends, though, these roads are alive as the sons and daughters from upcountry travel from Kampala to visit the relatives in the countryside.

Which tells us that the wealth is concentrated in the city – in Uganda’s case, about 75 per cent of national wealth is in and around Kampala. If a lot of vehicle traffic to upcountry is of people going to visit their favourite aunts and grandfathers and not of a commercial nature, how then do you make an economic return on road investment?
I could get lynched for the answer I would give to that question, so let’s instead address the roadside food hawkers and food markets along the highway.

On the whole there are usually very few markets selling fresh food on the outbound journeys on the left sides of the highways. The presumption seems to be that you will find lots of bananas in the village, so you are unlikely to buy it on your way from Kampala to Tororo.

You are, however, more likely to find the roasted chicken and gonja on the left side, the presumption being that you missed these in the city. In that way, the prevalence of roast chicken and gonja on the left side on the outbound journey is also a cultural comment on the state of cooking in the middle class urban kitchen. When you are returning to the city, most fresh food markets are on the left side, and between the Busia and Malaba borders and Kampala, there are just two highway side places where you can buy roast maize or gonja on the left side.

It is not silence this time, but what people buy and chew from the highway side markets, is a fascinating indicator of how the people who run these places view the nature of privilege in Uganda.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3