The Uganda Potato Index, the fisherman, and security guard

The sun was setting last Sunday over Kumi in Teso, northeastern Uganda.
Not too far away, was the Okungulo Railway Station.

There on July 11, 1989 during the insurgency in the region, soldiers of the National Resistance Army (the predecessor of the UPDF), rounded up more than 300 men, children, and women, and locked them in disused railway wagons. In the evening, soldiers lit a campfire nearby, raising the ambient temperature, including in the wagons.

The story of what happened is horrific, and despite some attempts by the government to acknowledge the atrocity, the full extent of it is still only told in frightened whispers. One day, surely, we shall hear it all. In the end, more than 60 people were all but roasted to death in one of the worst such massacres of that troubled period in the country’s history.

On the surface, the dramatic surface changes in places like Kumi and neighbouring Bukedea; the busy towns, and building boom, suggest a people who have overcome the ravages of the past. Maybe some have.
There is something about Teso, its lands, and spirit. The mango trees there grow big, rich, into dark green canopies, towering against the setting sun like giant creatures from a prehistoric era.

The roadside markets display huge pumpkins and potatoes. This Sunday, it wasn’t its painful history, its pumpkins, or spirit that took me. It was the potatoes.
Though the Teso region had a war, the poverty rate there is lower than in all other parts of eastern Uganda, including Busoga, with the districts forming the old “Bukedi” doing the worst.

A few weeks back, deep in Tororo District, I spoke to a streetwise schoolteacher about economic opportunities, food security, and the dreams of people in the area. He told me that the Tororo potato tells the whole story.
In most places, he said, the potatoes grow so small, that people can “no longer cook it the traditional African way after peeling it. Peeling the potato will take away up to 20 per cent of it, leaving them with a small thing that’s not worth cooking”.

Call it the Potato Index. In Teso, they don’t only need to peel their potatoes to cook it; they probably cut away chunks of the “flesh” because they are too big. Whether or not people peel their potatoes, therefore, gives you a quick sense of their economic fortunes, and the bountiful the produce of their land is.

If I thought I had heard the last of quirky poverty indicators in Uganda, I was wrong. The next day I got schooled in how the working underclass live. I heard that many don’t rent their accommodation by the month, or even week. They rent it for half a day. Guards fall in this category of the working underclass. This is how it goes, I was told: one bloke works as a night guard, another as a day guard.

The day guard rents the room to sleep in at night, and the night guard rents the same room to sleep in during the day. Simple and neat, though definitely not uplifting.
The most extreme form of it, I learnt, happens in the fishing villages around Lake Victoria, particularly in places like Katosi in Mukono - with an interesting power play.

The roomlets in the fishing villages are controlled by women. The women don’t fish, because of the widespread superstition that they “bring bad luck”.
Most women also don’t like to live and work in especially the remote fishing towns, with only the very hardy ones doing so. This shortage of women has led to what you could call Fish Madams to amass a lot of power on land.

The rookie fishermen, having arrived from upcountry, can’t afford to rent rooms long-term. The fishermen who fish at night, sleep during the day. Those who fish during the day sleep at night. The rooms they rent for the day or night belong to Fish Madams.

In this case, the fishermen also rent the rooms with the Fish Madam as their day, night, or in-between “wife”. A night fisherman who doesn’t get on the boat, and returns home at night, I gather, might be told something like; “What are you doing here? Go away, it’s not your turn”. And he will.

This polyandrous arrangement might shock the puritans, but it’s normal, apparently. They pay for the rent with prime fish, so the Fish Madams have become the leading fish traders. Many of them don’t only own the rooms in the fishing communities, they own the boats.
In a very masculine trade, they hold the power. If a Fish Madam banishes an errant fisherman-husband-tenant, he won’t get on the water, and won’t have a room.

The underpaid security guard on land in Kampala, and the lowly Katosi fisherman on Lake Victoria are in the same boat, but separated by the potato. The suffering security guard eats the Tororo potato. The Katosi fisherman eats the Teso potato.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is curator of the “Wall of Great Africans” and publisher of explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3