Dirty Kampala

Give me a Dirty Kampala. Like a dirty Martini. I’m not sure what the ingredients of a dirty Martini are, but I know what a dirty Kampala would have; vodka with tiny bits of maize cobs thrown out of people’s windows and buveera in the drainage.

Walking during the lock down was great, [for a few minutes], therapeutic. The air was breezy and the sun was soft against the skin. The roads were empty and we could walk in them…And then black fumes and dust filled our lungs and speeding cars almost knocked us off the roads. Along the Northern bypass on the Naalya highway, we bumped into heaps of rotting clothes and polythene bags which would never decompose in our lifetime. The drainage was filled with more soil, more garbage and more polythene bags. Depending on where you were walking, some places had done a little better for themselves, but most of the city nevertheless is still covered in garbage and cars that should have been taken off the road more than 10 years ago.

Kampala is after all, a car and boda boda city. In one of his lock down addresses, the President had compared boda boda activities to drinking tea with a spoon. I call it Complete Utter Chaos.

It is interesting that even though the streets are littered with garbage every few metres in most places, we still met a few KCCA women sweeping dust into grass. Glove-less, mask-less they sweep the dust into drains and ignore the polythene and most of the garbage inside.

Polythene is one of the biggest contributors to soil toxicity and when burnt also pollutes the air but for most of us, it is an essential part of our households. It is paramount to market day and worse still, even used by some to cover their cooking.

The pollutants of Kampala include a wide array of specimen – the slum dweller whose lack of access to waste disposal infrastructure necessitates the use of kaveera as a toilet and – the occupants of an that car who imagine that some invisible someone or the rain will clean up after them. They throw a maize cob outside the car window and two months later when they see it rotting in a pile of rubbish on a street outside their house, shake their head in disapproval and wish they could to move to Europe, because it’s clean.

Many of the pollutants in our atmosphere have also infiltrated our daily lives by highly targeted marketing and design in such a way that makes us believe that they are an indispensable part of normal life. They swim in our food as pesticides, they vibrate in non-stick pans as PTFEs, they are in our bathroom products as sulfates, they are in polythene bags as Ethylene oxide, they are in our water and plastic water bottles as micro plastics, and they are in our bodies activating things that should not be activated.

Laws about abolishing kaveera came and were protested by companies which manufacture kaveera, and now laws about boda bodas are being put in place and they are being protested by those who never think beyond the status quo.

I imagine that a clean city, one with pedestrian pavements and organised transport could change our lives.

Maybe, one Monday morning, I will catch a bus going to the city. The bus would leave every thirty minutes. It would be a clean bus, in which no one puts their armpits in my face because only the proper number of passengers would be allowed and there would be no boda boda whizzing in and out of traffic to drop a passenger on their bum in the middle of the road. Or maybe, someone among us, in our time, will think up an even better way to recreate the city- for the love of walking, clean air and good health.