Someone decided that the Karimojong needed iron sheets in order to develop, and then some others decided that they needed them more. The insatiable greed among the inhabitants of the great lakes area and its surrounding areas is a good topic for a research thesis. There must be a psychological disorder of perpetual mental state of scarcity and a propensity to waste the same coveted resources among the creatures who inhabit this place.

If you ever travel northwards towards Chobe and Para, one of the main reasons (if you are not returning home) you would be visiting is not because of the towering shiny glass buildings, pollution and traffic jam. You would mostly like be visiting for a view of undisturbed nature- for Rothschild (adopted name) giraffes, elephants and antelopes. Among other beautiful things you would come across would be a building style that is quickly becoming extinct. Low height, circular, ‘hand-crafted’ intricately designed structures with an elaborate thatch roof top are scattered around an endless patchwork of green grass. When I visited, that is something that I had never seen. It is also something that my little ones may never see.

If we had colonised the world, weaves, wigs and straight hair would not connote professionalism or formality. We should always question our need to throw iron sheets on top of one of the few cultures that refuses to be subdued by ‘modernity.’ Not all things traditional are good. Tradition is like most things, some good, some bad and you have to choose which to keep and which to learn from. But, somethings were purely made out of an indigenous thought for an indigenous landscape. Some of our ways are an identity being lost in decades at a time. We do not need everything about us to only be found in a dilapidated museum, stale and inspected only in front of safe glass screens.

What did the mass manufacturer of iron sheets tell the owner of a grass thatched roof? If the mark of an exclusive eco resort is that it can afford to maintain a thatched roof and the Karimojong with their ‘limited’ resources can handle the thatch of their own roofs, why donate iron? Maybe an iron roof at 35 c is not such a good idea. Maybe glinting iron at eye level is neither good for humans or cattle.

I read in the Newspaper, when the Old Taxi Park was being rehabilitated that Kampala road was probably designed for fifty European cars more than sixty years ago. It seems therefore that we should not be praying for more cars, but we should design a more intricate, climate friendly, pro-efficient, time saving transport that caters to more than just people who can survive the ASYCUDA system. If everyone in Wakiso owned a car, how long would it take you to reach Kampala on a rainy Tuesday morning if you got out of bed at 5:00 a.m.? It took two and a half hours today.

I think nomadic pastoralists might need land security and pasture more than they need modern markers of ‘development’. We, down here by Lake Victoria (near the rift valley that is splitting into another continent in the next hundred thousand years), need roads and transport more than we need more gigantic fuel guzzling second hand cars. The markers of our identity and development have been decided by people who benefit the most from the scarcity which only they can cure.

…kitt kiarie on her youtube vlog was asking, Where did the fireflies go? I too would like to know.