Mzungu Circles

Liz's boyfriend Nathan here. I am at the tail end of my visit to Uganda, and having seen Kampala, Mulago and toured a fair bit of the countryside, Liz has invited me to write a post to her blog. I will do my best to do justice to it.

We have just returned from Lake Bunyonyi, a lake in the southwest corner of Uganda formed by volcanic eruption only 10,000 years ago. Free from crocodiles, hippos, and schistosomiasis, it’s safe for swimming, both for us and for the otters that hunt crayfish. Along the shores live a variety of birds, including weavers and the crested crane, Uganda’s national bird. Over twenty islands dot the lake, and in the early morning they are interspersed with clouds of mist rising from the water. Because of its high altitude, the area is cooler than Kampala.

Liz and I spent three nights and two days at two different locations around the lake. The first, the Bunyonyi Overland Resort, is a popular stopover for enormous overland buses, on their way to or from gorilla trekking. Each evening, tourists spill out and fill the restaurant and bar, cheering football and rugby matches beamed in by satellite. The incompetent, mustachioed restaurant manager hovers near tables, berating the waiters when service seemed to slack. Not exactly a peaceful scene.

On our first morning on Bunyonyi we decided to escape the other tourists and take one of the dugout canoes out onto the lake, with the goal of paddling to Punishment Island. A desolate piece of local history, Punishment Island is a small flotilla of reeds with a single tree where women impregnated outside of wedlock were brought to either starve, or be picked up by any opportunistic man who could not afford to pay a bride price. (Many Ugandans, even those who live on the lake, have never learned to swim and the pregnant women would flounder in the few hundred meters from Punishment Island to the shore.)

As it turned out, paddling the dugout canoe was much more difficult than it appeared from the shore, where we had watched locals crisscrossing the lake with ease. Heavy, long and wider at the front than at the back, they were very different from the aluminum canoes we were used to. Paddle on the left, and the canoe would, as expected, turn to the right. However, gain too much rightward momentum and paddling on the right to straighten the canoe would only accelerate its rightward turn. Savage backpaddling could, eventually, straighten the boat out – and bring it to a halt. So we meandered our way happily enough, tracing a curlicue course out into the lake

But then the rain came up. It appeared over the hills behind us, wrapping the lake in grey curtains with the sound of a waterfall. Liz and I looked at each other, each without a raincoat, and suddenly, our inability to chart a straight path wasn’t so funny. We made for the nearest shore to beach the boat and get under a tree out of the rain. Liz, piloting, did her best to keep us on course, but we couldn’t avoid a thorough soaking.

While we waited out the rain under a eucalyptus tree, I decided I would try my hand at piloting on the return trip, confident I had learned from watching (criticizing) Liz’s technique. Not so. We didn’t make it to Punishment Island that day but we did, eventually, make it back to the restaurant. Eating lunch, we laughed as two canoes left the dock, filled with American tourists, to make wide, unintentional circles in the bay. Our waiter told us that these were “Mzungu circles” – the expected outcome when white tourists paddle the dugout canoes.

One of the surprises I’ve had here in Uganda is how infinitely forgiving Ugandans are of foreign tourists. While so much of getting around Uganda is completely unintuitive to me, Ugandans are always happy to help point in the right direction, or explain the way things work. (Luckily, I have Liz as a guide, so I don’t have to ask very often.) Mzungu tourists can be loud, arrogant, demanding, and oblivious. But as we make Mzungu circles around the country, Ugandans seem ever willing to straighten us out with a helping hand and a smile.

That afternoon, we walked to the Heart of Eridrisa, a commune where foreign volunteers and local employees run a nursery, a primary school, and a rudimentary, three-room clinic. The manager, who repeatedly invited Liz, the soon-to-be-doctor, to come back and volunteer, gave us a tour of the facilities. The seven-classroom primary school hosted nearly 600 pupils, and the nursery another few hundred. Like most Ugandans, the manager was mostly nonplussed with the beauty of the lake; unlike tourists who can see the countryside while sheltered from want, for the locals, the beauty of the region is of a piece with its remoteness, its poverty, its lacks. Tourists value remoteness while the locals curse it, and our compliments must seem deeply ironic.

The next morning, we planned to transfer to a camp on Bushara Island, more secluded and quiet than Overland Camp. But before leaving, we wanted to hike one of the hills along the shore to get a better view of the lake. While ascending on a local footpath, we ran into 14-year old Lucky and his younger brother, Christophe. Lucky immediately demonstrated his very skilled English, and asked if we wanted a guide up the hill. When we told him we were only on a short walk, he offered to paddle us out to Bushara in a dugout canoe. We negotiated a price, and he ran the few hundred yards to his house to collect his paddles.

Liz and I, meanwhile, returned to Overland to checkout. Lucky and his friend Moses paddled up a half-hour later, helped us into the canoe, and provided me a paddle. As we made our way to Bushara, a trip that took about 45-minutes with Moses piloting an arrow-straight course, Lucky told us about himself. He is a Manchester United supporter, and a fan of Christiano Ronaldo. He attends the primary school at Eridrisa, which we had visited the day before. His father died before he was old enough to remember him, and his mother farms to support him, his younger brother, and three older sisters. Two of his sisters were in secondary school, their school fees paid by sponsors, and he was currently working to save the 100,000 shillings ($50) he would need to take his tests for the term. So far, he had saved 65,000, and would need the balance by early April. Upon reaching Bushara, we paid Lucky and made arrangements to have him pick us up the next morning before school to paddle us to Rutinda village for transport back to Kabale to catch a bus to Kampala. Lucky asked us to give him our email addresses, and we said we would have them for him the next day.

Our stay on Bushara was very restful. We read, watched the rain, and made the trip to nearby Punishment Island late that afternoon, catching a glimpse of two pairs of otters. Liz demonstrated what she had learned from watching Moses; I still couldn’t paddle straight.

The next morning, it was 45-minutes back to Rutinda. Liz and I decided to pay Lucky double what we had given him the day before, and throw in the rest of what he would need to pay his school fees that term. When we reached Rutinda, Liz handed him the money and our email addresses, and we waved goodbye.

Our ten-hour bus ride back to Kampala featured mid-journey repairs and a live chicken in the overhead luggage rack. Along the way, we passed stores in every village selling mobile phone credits, painted pink (Zain), turquoise (Uganda Mobile), yellow (MTN), or white (Warid). As a student of economics and business, I found myself thinking about development – why it had moved so quickly in some directions (mobile phones), and so slowly in others (absence of free secondary education).

And so it seemed to me that the story of African economic development is a massive Mzungu circle. Western governments gave large loans to newly independent countries for development in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and then forgive the debt, sometimes, thirty years later. American policy propped up brutal dictators during the Cold War, and today the World Bank punishes countries for corruption and bad governance. The World Bank spends billions digging tube wells and building dams with dreams of development at a grand scale decades ago, and then the Nobel committee awards the Peace Prize for the development of microfinance. Western policy-makers still don’t really know how to guide development, and we have just taken another turn in our great Mzungu circle to try and fix our own broken economies. Hopefully we’ll find someone who can paddle this thing straight ahead.