Letter to Uganda’s innovation gods - and Joe the Walker

I receive several requests from good folks in Kampala to go buy, and send to them stuff from some Nairobi store or other; from rare books, computer and camera components, to medicine. Always glad to do my patriotic duty.
One time I went to a big pharmacy in Nairobi to buy medicine for a desperate family in Kampala who couldn’t find it in the city. I asked the pharmacy if they could spark it so the medicine wasn’t destroyed in transit. They said they could do me one better; ship it to Kampala.
“How?” I asked.

The pharmacist asked me to go round the back, and he showed me a table piled high with packed medicines. 
“We are sending all those to Kampala tonight”, he said.
So I paid transit fees and left them with the medicine. Early evening the next day, the grateful family called to say they had got the goods.
It works the other way too. 

I often travel with a Kenyan driver to Uganda on storytelling journeys, and once when we were returning we stopped in a shop in Tororo. He asked for the price of a big bag of maize flour. He couldn’t believe how comparatively cheap it was. We cleared out the shop and packed the flour in the boot of the car. We delivered them to his mother and aunties in Naivasha to much ululation.

Not too long ago I wanted to buy a particular type of mountain bicycle and have it fitted with tubeless tyres. I couldn’t get it in Kampala, so my friends in the Nairobi biking community helped me get one, and I transported it to Uganda.  However, they had a request. When I got to Uganda, they wanted me to help them get buy second-hand sports bicycles and spare parts. They had it down to the addresses of stores in Nakivubo and Katwe that sell them. The quality and prices in Uganda were much better. So I did. It is all I had to do, they had other structures for picking up the parts and bikes and bringing them back to Kenya.

In more recent times, there are requests for sports items; unique types of running watches, sole paddings, and GoPro cameras. When I first got a request, I asked the compatriot who wanted them where I would get them. He sent me the name of the store and their Nairobi address. When I put it into Google Maps, I was bemused to find out that it was a five-minute drive from our house. I had driven by the place for years almost daily, and even stopped in the building to go to a restaurant and the ATM many times, but had never taken the stairs to the next floor up because it looked like there were only offices there. So, I went, to discover a fancy sports store dedicated to extreme sports accessories and wear. It took a sports buff 660 kilometres away in Kampala, to lead me to Nairobi sports store a five-minute drive from where I lived!

From those requests, one can get a crude sense of price movements, social changes (the explosion of running and fitness in Uganda), and even the relative advantages in each of the two economies. But more fascinating, the very informed, intricate and near-invisible, leaderless, networks woven by East African peoples that drive pockets of sustenance across borders. 

The encounter with the running watches and GoPro, perhaps the world’s most versatile action camera, have led to reflections about how and in what type of communities innovation is happening. GoPro was founded by Nick Woodman, a photo and video enthusiast in looking for a better way to film himself and his buddies surfing.
If one watches the brainiac South Korean reality show “The Devil’s Plan”, and others on Netflix, one is struck by how much the games and challenges are derived from real and virtual games communities play. We have “mwesso”, but some of these societies have developed hundreds of new games, and reimagined many old ones.

From the skateboard parks, parkour gyms, and board games in city greens, we are seeing ideas developing from there into new products, documentaries, films, and reality games. These spaces are probably more creative platforms than classrooms and school playgrounds. As a policy to spark innovation, providing these spaces could be the best investment the government makes today. This is why the least appreciated creative space in Uganda could be Kitintale Skatepark, the country’s first and only skateboard ramp.

So we come to my friend, Monitor’s Joseph Beyanga, who as the wonderful Joe Walker, has now walked nearly 1,000 kilometres helming a campaign for road safety. Joe now carries a long beard. We need to get him something to carry up on his head; a light helmet with cooling tech, mounted with a high-end GoPro HD camera.  He would already have recorded enough quality footage on his long walks to make the great 21st-century Ugandan documentary.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, 
writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3