How Uganda was reborn as a land of walkers and runners

Uganda has become East Africa’s most mobile country. Ugandans are running, walking, climbing mountains, hiking through forests and hills, travelling around the country in large groups. Their social media pages are awash with stories and photographs of these exertions.

I visited Kapchorwa in December, 2022, and a few weeks later in February 2023. On one occasion there was a Coaster minivan, and on another, a bus, of young “Kampala people”, in sunglasses, rumpled natural hair, the ladies with tank tops showing pierced navels, milling at the fall, taking photographs, and touching.

Six years ago, they would have been a rare sight at Sipi. I was in Tooro and came upon a spot with a breath-taking view of Kibaale Forest. I got out to behold the wonder. The quiet was broken by the noisy arrival of a bus full of good-looking young people, who jumped out to take photographs. I was looking contemplatively at a colourful meadow at the edge of the forest and wondering how it came to be. They were probably not interested in such obscure things. They were there for the place, the moment.

This is something relatively new. It is not more than seven years old. It is likely the result of unintended consequences and the quirk of social evolution.

We mean, it is like what happened when mobile money came. One result was that men and women could no longer lie about their phone numbers. The ka-money will go to the wrong number. And when Uber and company came along, the young lady wary of giving her actual address to a chap she wasn’t yet sure about, had few options. In the past, she would ask to be dropped 200 metres and walk home, until she was comfortable enough to tell her keen pursuer that she lived at 33 Nkima Road. A while back I read that wine sales and pubs in many parts of the Western world, were suffering. It is not that people had dropped wine for beer, or new exciting pubs had opened. They were being hammered by the most unlikely competitor – dating apps like Tinder. Turns out, many people there went to pubs to prospect for dates. When you are waiting for a date, you don’t want him or her arriving to find you drinking Balkan 176 Vodka. A wine is safe and neutral bet. But also, as you hang out in the pub waiting for an interesting person to show up, you are downing drinks. Dating apps came. You swipe left or right. Most of that business was lost.

We have to look left field. Something happened in or just before 2016 when this phenomenon took a big turn. First, Uganda had its first very large influx of educated young people (at least they had gone to school for some years) who had made it to university and colleges, coming to the work and public market. They were the inaugural cohort of Universal Primary Education (UPE) which started in 1996.

Secondly, they were the products of the better face of the ruling NRM’s African-centric and anti-colonial ideological project. It created the idea of looking on African things more lovingly, and debunking colonial ideas. For example, that explorer John Speke didn’t discover Lake Victoria. Our people had lived on its banks and fished it for thousands of years. And, oh, they also had different names for it, depending on where they lived – like “Nyw’alubaale” (Nalubaale), or “Nam Lolwe” to the east. Hard to believe that a young man who went to school in the 1960s and 1970s wouldn’t have learnt, let alone heard about, that. It created a self-love for the country that bred a wandering spirit.

It also happens that 2016 was the last election Dr Kizza Besigye contested, and his final electoral confrontation with President Yoweri Museveni. Something was different in that election. Besigye endured the same torment he had in the past. For that election, he debuted the chequered light hoodie. It was very contemporary, but it also stood out in remarkably stark contrast to the grey and dull dark colours of the police and security forces that kept pouncing on him. And that year, too many of Besigye’s battles with the system ended with him in ditches, or bundled on the roadside. There was something haunting about those images.

He also announced he wouldn’t stand again. A light went out.  Ugandans, many losing hope, scrambled to find new forms of safe social engagement and conversation that transcended ugly partisan politics. Kampala, too, had exploded, and the places where the young people made their homes, like Najeera, with all their beautiful apartments, didn’t have safe room to stretch.

They took to the hills and roads to hike, and to run further afield. They also found the highways; to Sipi, to Fort Portal.

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

Twitter@cobbo3