A city of two tales: The struggle for the soul of Kampala, first among African capitals

In his play about the 1170 political assassination of the head of the Church in Britain, T.S. Eliot portrays the Archbishop’s rejection of temptations to betray his conscience and do a deal with the King. “The greatest treason”, he points out, is “to do the right thing for the wrong reason”.

Kampala City, just about the only African-founded capital city in the region, is undergoing an attempt at a massive shake-up. On the one hand, there is an irrefutable logic to targeting decades of congestion, squalor and planning best described as haphazard.

On the other, there remains a deep suspicion as to the real motives behind this sudden passion for order from a central government whose cronies’ “funny money” has contributed significantly to the current mess.

In the meantime, the hounding of vendors, market evictions, and demolition of buildings continues apace. Like most things Ugandan, the roots of the story run deep, and involve the native claims that successive government have simply trampled on.

This longstanding conflict of ownership was made symbolically overt in July this year when President Yoweri Museveni found it necessary to cancel a scheduled tour of a major city market upon learning of one scheduled by the Kabaka of Buganda for the very same day.

With a large daytime population of young traders never afraid to express their loyalty to the Kabaka, the market acts like something of a “ground zero” for many of the riots and spontaneous demonstrations that have flared up here over the past decade.

But the gamesmanship stretches back much farther, and involves much more than this.

It was the Arab explorer Snay bin Amir who, writing of the “Sultan of Buganda who resides in the Kibuga” (Luganda for administrative seat) first reported the existence of this capital to the outside world in 1860.

A century later, the newly independent federal republic of Uganda was legally a tenant in Kampala, paying a symbolic one shilling a year to the Kingdom. After this tenant violently usurped her landlord with the 1967 republican “revolution,” each successive new central government has attempted to refashion the city after itself in an attempt to pretend that history does not exist.

For example, the entrenchment of urban squalor can be traced in part of the near-death of the Buganda traditional monthly communal clean up (known as “Umuganda” in Rwanda). The new republican regimes preference for appointing non-Ganda local chiefs in Buganda rendered those officials impotent when trying to mobilise their alienated subjects.

The city started life as a settlement and later capital for the Baganda. Its high hills and deep swamps led to a culture of officialdom settling on the hillsides, native shrines settling on the hill tops, and the ordinary people navigating the fertile valleys, often in canoes.

Kampala’s intimate relationship with water is still reflected in the numerous water-linked native toponyms like Lugogo (“water channel”), and Nakivubo (“fishing-place”).

The waterways disappeared with colonial-era draining to make way for the modern city. This has not prevented the water from emphatically reclaiming its space every rainy season, when massive flooding basically overwhelms the city’s drainage system, leading to death and disruption.

This comes on top of the poor zoning that leaves noisy all-night churches and night clubs in residential areas, no real public transport system, land-grabbing, unplanned building projects and pointless traffic jams.

The ordinary people have sought to ride out this storm of alleged progress through the informal co-operative system of markets — many of which are owned by the Kingdom, thus holding on to their spaces in the city. “This plot is not for sale” has become a near-ubiquitous notice painted on the sides of the older buildings as a talisman against the rampant nouveau riche who have scarred the city with hideous and badly constructed mock-Dubai malls using misappropriated money and the discretionary distribution of what are supposed to be public development loans.