If you are visiting Uganda soon, you can forego driving or you can see as Africans do, one of the liberating celebratory events of African life.  When most of us get behind the wheel there is a sense of power, a sense of being in control.  There is a good feeling as we step on the accelerator and take off for some distant destination,

My friend began to tell me that Ugandans have had more than their share of repression.   First there was the colonial era in which those who had lived for generations in Uganda became secondary citizens, lesser human beings, lost land, lost their God given liberty and became servants to foreign masters.  Freedom did come to Uganda, but sadly two of the presidents turned out to be twice the sons of hell as the colonial Lords had been. Milton Obote and Idi Amin as presidents of Uganda created a police state in which people lived in fear. They held back their real feelings, repressed what was going on within…life was hard.  Like many things, that too came to an end presently there is much more freedom under the rule of President Museveni. The economy began to grow and cars became available, cars, which turned the soft-spoken men of Kampala into men that celebrated their liberty behind the wheel of their cars by pressing the pedal to the metal.  Sounds like a reasonable justification for erratic driving to me.

That soft spoken, kind, courteous, patient man behind the wheel of a Toyota, Isuzu, Mitsubishi becomes like a person who has been given the power to act, the freedom to be, to step on the accelerator and leave everything, including the everyday struggle for life behind, celebrating that moment of being in control or should I say seeming control. Traffic is that coming together of fellow drivers who are also normally soft spoken and proper, hardly shout until they meet at rush-hour around the clock tower approaching downtown Kampala. There is something celebratory about such traffic that is punctuated by loud shouts, men and women gesticulating, threatening, laughing, pointing at one another and when it comes to a screeching halt, you can feel the inner tension and frustration as drivers begin to look as to where to go, to drive where no one has driven before, over the sidewalk, down the hill to the next street where the traffic is not so heavy.  The police might even wave you on since rules of traffic are seemingly made not followed…As a Westerner you can hold back and try to drive such as you would in Germany, the UK or the USA or you can be like me and jump into the river of Ugandan traffic and celebrate by gesticulating, shouting, laughing, enjoying the moment, the journey…jon