Big ideas. Dont get any.

Kampala, May 29th- 2.30 pm.

The town is almost gloriously chaotic- traffic jams stretch as far as the eye can see. It takes 30 minutes for my taxi to cover the last 200 meters to my destination. Boda Boda's peform acrobatic dances with death. The Taxi park smells of fruit and fish.
As I head towards the center of town, I notice that every lamp-post is covered with the same announcement: PENIS ENLARGEMENT together with a number at the bottom. It's not even a question- DO YOU NEED IT?- just a bald statement. It's a clever strategy- keep hammering the point over and over until every guy begins to whether he does actually need an upgrade. What kind of man sees sexual salvation in a random number on a lamp post? Are there people actually responding to this?

I attended Blogger's Happy Hour with Raymond whose energy could easily power Kampala to kingdom come if science eventually finds a way to harness it properly. Dee and Carlo were good company. Dante was pretty cool. The Back2basics guy kept trying to trip me up rhetorically. Nobody had the foggiest notion of what 27th Comrade was talking about. I did have a brief debate with him which was triggered when I told him that I thought Mao was a monster and furthermore considered communism a joke and about as useful as a condom machine in a convent. He said I was 'brainwashed' by Western imperialists and their media. Nothing screams irony like a man who treasures Mao's little red book but calls other people brainwashed.
Meanwhile I had a series of increasingly unhinged conversations with Raymond. He was in good form. This is about as sane as it got:

(watching a reckless guy speed down the road on a motorbike late at night)
Me: Now who is that guy going to blame if he dies there?
Raymond: That fat chick behind him!

And there were these two kids who were outside the restaurant where we were talking and began to preach about God in that raspy evangelical tone that suggests an acquaintance with a Russian black market veteran who knows 200 ways to brew alcohol. The kids became increasingly more annoying as they kept coming back to shout at us to turn to God every ten minutes. The lead evangelist couldn’t have been more than nine years old. It would have been enough to drive me to atheism if I hadn't already been heading there at a brisk pace.
Carlo knew the kids story. Apparently he had informed her that at five years of age he had battled a drug and alcohol addiction ( Cue MY DRUG HELL headlines) before finally having a ‘Road to Damascus’ moment and turning to God after having a conversation with him one night (Do people in Syria get a special kind of satisfaction that they can have those kinds of moments while actually on the road to Damascus?) Turns out that God had appreciated the gesture so much that he was sending money directly to their Bank account which is how they earned their livelihood (presumably this was all tax-free) More interestingly, the boy claimed he had once been attacked at his shack by three robbers who had stormed the premises with machine guns and grenades while he slept but God had done something or other because the boy had survived. Guns didn’t work, grenades didn’t explode…you know how it goes when thieves try to attack nine year old preachers while using enough ammunition to keep a SWAT team in business. Where is your weapons dealer now?

Later on I took up that dangerous activity-thinking-as I lined up at the Kenya-Uganda border in transit to Arusha (note to Akamba buses: having windows that actually open is NOT A FUCKING OPTION. If you think it is, you may want to look into transporting cattle instead) I was staring at my passport- this magical document that somehow makes you legit. Wave it around and you merrily glide past scowling policemen and curt customs officials. It’s a wonderful thing that passport.
My friend lost his a few months ago and entered a bureaucratic nightmare that was almost Kafkaesque except that in The Trial it was soon pretty clear to Joseph.K that these people were setting out to screw him over and there wasn’t too much pretence that they intended to make things easier for him which is the pretence we have here. The book also suggested bureaucracy as a sort of temporary thing which is solved-in Kafka’s book anyway- with the summary execution of the main character. It's efficient and linear.

Now just try and get a passport in this country- or worse still report your passport missing and then try and get a new one. My friend learned to his cost that this process is so long, complex, and at times just plain bizarre that Homer would probably have written about it were he alive to witness it today. Achilles may have had to deal with ferocious warriors but my friend was facing a much more difficult foe- the Rwandan bureaucracy. The story was so ridiculous that it had to be true- you need about 300 signatures before you even get to the immigration people (all the way from your local nyumba kumi) you will obviously also need about 300 passport pictures. Needless to say the relevant people wont be there when you need them and you have to keep coming back. If you lost the passport, you will even need two separate ‘I Lost my passport-help!’ documents because-get this- the relevant ministry doesn’t recognize the police document! Forget Kafka, this is Lewis Carroll territory.
People get a real kick out of bureaucracy here. For some its their raison d'etre. Its as if they actually enjoy making everything a bit more complicated for the common man. To make the process simpler and more efficient, they have to make it more complex and time-consuming. They want you to have a passport which is why they will make it almost impossible for you to get it. They want to help you which is why they are never there. It is devilishly simple really.

As for Arusha, there's not much to say about it really. It’s like the beige of cities- mediocre but inoffensive, aspiring to something more but never quite getting around to it. Everyone is mild-mannered and speaks Swahili at a rapid-fire pace. They have sensible drivers and polite beggars and a strange obsession with Mount Kilimanjaro. The President appears on a lot of billboards as if he is selling something. Maybe he is.