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Our newest promotional initiative is to install our systems free of charge in schools and health clinics throughout Uganda. If you would like to support this program and help light up a school, you may do so through the purchase of a very cool solar LED keychain flaslight. Village Energy can be in your pocket for only 6 USD, and you'll have the assurance that every purchase goes towards the installation of our solar lighting systems in a school or health clinic in Uganda.

Our partner in this effort is Giant Steps of St. Louis, a school for children with autism spectrum disorder. The great folks at Giant Steps have agreed, as part of a global awareness and service project for their students, to help coordinate the packaging and shipping of the keychains.

Together, we've named this program Light up Africa.

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Thursday
Nov182010

A Small Patch of Blood

DateThursday, November 18, 2010 at 6:16AM

The blood on my shirt is still drying as I write this, and surprisingly there is not much of it, just a small patch no bigger than my thumb on the side just about ten centimeters under the sleeve.  Hardly enough to make you think that I was just in a mob that was trying to kill someone. This small bloody patch is my only memento from my most recent traverse searching the back roads of Kampala for electrical components.  A few hours back, it was flowing through the veins and arteries of a boy between 15 and 16 years of age. Hopefully he’s still alive, but I really can’t be too sure. 

 It started as a normal enough day. For the last few days, Eric, who is a visiting electrical engineering student from Duke, and myself have been attempting to make a hot wire foam cutter and we've met with variable success. After destroying a toaster in an attempt to extricate the heating element, and combining a 12V transformer with a wooden frame and guitar wire, we discovered we would need more current, and so like many a day in Uganda, we jumped on my TVS 125cc Max-R Motorcycle (the best engineered bike from the Indian Sub-Continent) and drove into town.

 Downtown Kampala, for the unitiated is an extremely chaotic place. The streets are crowded with 14 person passenger vans called Matatus, with the torsos of conductors prodtruding from the windows singing the vehicles various destinations. “Nakawa, Nakawa, Jinja Road, Lugogo, Ntinda, Bukoto.” On every block, in addition to the vans there are 40 motorcycles,  20 or so bicycles laden with large bags of bananas (aka matoke), and a hundred pedestrians with equally gigantic bags of stuff on their heads. All of them moving every which way as the matatus swerve around 8 inch deep potholes, causing everyone else to shift accordingly.  That’s about one square block of downtown Kampala. 

 Parts shops in Uganda are also incredible. As I was telling Eric today, you feel as if every morning trucks arrive with all the world’s detritus:  old auto-parts, broken televisions, factory reject generators, discarded cell phones and audio equipment. All of it comes to Kampala where  an incredible number of workshops crammed into the smallest corners, with 10 people working in 15 square feet will break things apart and almost seemingly through nothing more than will power and incredible mechanical aptitude gained by ceaseless fucking around will make things work.

 But as usual, navigating this milieu took forever. A local guy offered to lead us around, the first shop he took us to a guy offered to build a hand wound transformer for 35,000 UGX (about $15) but we were worried about the reliability. So we began a four hour transformer hunt.  About five shops later we still hadn’t found what we were looking for, well, at least not at a reasonable price.  As we were heading back to the first shop to talk to this fellow about building one.

 It was on our way back that it happened.  We were at a major intersection near a place called King Fahad Plaza, on a street that sloped steeply down towards the Old Taxi Park, a central transportation hub where a thousand matatus maneuvering in open lot that turns into a lake of mud in the frequent rain. But even in that mud, they must transport hundreds of thousands of passengers a day to hundreds of destinations.

 The first sign of trouble happened when I heard a high girlish scream piercing the air. “My Chain, Theif! He stole my chain!” The entire street turns to watch as a young boy in a green shirt and dark khakis runs, but at the same time makes attempts to look incredulous. Later, Eric would tell me that he overheard someone in the crowd say that he had actually swallowed the girls gold necklace.

 A group of men coalesced from the street and quickly gave chase. It didn’t take very long for the kid to be grabbed. As I watched from the opposite side of the street three men reached him first, one a traffic officer, dressed in a white uniform and blue beret. I thought to myself “at least that policeman will protect him.” That thought quickly dissolved when the officer shoved him against a car and begin kicking him with his black shiny boots. The kid dropped to the ground and the throw punchs as his head, then kicks to the ribs, then ten people stamping on him like he was a bag of bones that needed to be crushed.

 The rest of the crowd joined in, there were maybe thirty people taking turns, taking a kick to his head, his chest, pulling at his clothes, ripping off his shoes and next going for his pants.

 I had read about mob justice in Africa. I had heard the stories of extra-judicial killings. I even had some experience when my own wallet was stolen in Tanzania, and amazingly the thief was apprehended and I met him at a police station. After my wallet had been returned the police begin to beat the thief in an attempt to get information from him on who he worked with. Despite my protests they refused to relent, and continued hitting him on the arms and head with a wooden baton.

 But there at least there was some semblance of control, it was clear they had no intention of killing the man who had stolen my wallet. At least not while I was watching. My protests eventually got them to stop…but they told me it was necessary to extract a confession and information about his gang.

This was uncontrolled chaos, and the crowd seemed to have an uncontrollable blood lust to see this kid murdered under their feet.

I’m not sure when I made the decision to do something. In retrospect it wasn’t very precise. I just remember walking, moving closer, thinking what I was doing was crazy, then shoving my way through, and then suddenly there I was standing above this bleeding half naked teenager, cowering in  the fetal position, bleeding from several wounds that were pink and red on his black skin. My arms were out- stretched, shoving people back.

“He’s a thief,” “A thief” people kept yelling. Staring at me as if I was the crazy one. Amidst the crowd was the woman whose necklace the boy stole, no doubt now lodged somewhere in his esophagus and not coming out without a bowl movement.  The woman came towards me, an upper class fashionista Ugandan. She was wearing tight designer jeans, an olive top, and clutching some kind of brand name purse. Her face was dominated by oversized sunglasses with white frames, and I could make out in perfect, boarding school British, “He took my chain…why are you stopping them?”

 “Get the police. “  I said, “You are not going to kill him. Go get the police.” The crowd kept at it, “He’s a thief, he deserves it!” Cold sound, biblical logic I guess. Eye-for-an-eye, a life for a gold chain.  I stared at the women, and in slow even words I said again, “Go get the police.” Trying to imply somehow in my gaze that she was better than this, that whatever anger she had at this boy was not worth his life. For some reason I seem to have gotten through, at least to her. “Ok, hold him here, I’ll get the police,” she said and with that disappeared.

 For a minute then the crowd held back, unsure what to do in the presence of this thief’s white benefactor. The boy grabbed onto my leg sitting up in a daze, then made an attempt to stand. I helped him up, which is when his bloody arm must have brushed my shirt. “Don’t hurt him, hold him here, but don’t hurt him,” I yelled, in a vain attempt to reason with people. The crowd lunged forward, and the boy, quite logically, ran, pushing through with amazing strength considering the beating he had just received,  and took off down a side street with half the crowd in hot pursuit. I thought about running after them but as I was thinking they were quickly disappearing.

 I turned around suddenly worried about my companion Eric, and still receiving dirty stares from the leftover crowd, found him a short distance away, no doubt waiting to step in if things became ugly. Our guide was still there, with a strange smile on his face, and he motioned that we follow him down the steps of a nearby building into the safe hollow of shops within.  Before I did someone stopped me on the street. A plain looking middle aged Ugandan man, with a goatee, perhaps a local shopkeeper. “Thank you… for what you have done,” he half whispered in halting English. I nodded and went down the stairs, wondering why he couldn’t have done something himself.

 About ten minutes later Eric and I were back on our search, trying to pretend I guess, that everything was normal. Just another crazy day in Kampala.  Unfortunately it may have been a crazy day for us, but business as usual on the Kampala Street.  After a while, Eric suggested that I could go sit down for a while and he could finish the shopping we needed to do. As I usually do when frustrated with my life in Uganda. I retreated back to Nakumatt, a mall, as fancy as you would find in most towns in America, where I sat down at a yuppyesqe café called Mokka Terrace, and got a really well done cappuccino and inspected the patch of blood on my shirt.

 Much has been written about mob justice, and extra-judicial killings in Africa.  But honestly, given the right environment, it’s not an unusual human predicament, no different than hangings in the Wild West, or lynching in the American South.  Mob justice happens anywhere that the rule of law is weak and people have so little that the cost of a crime that takes their personal effects is very is so high that only blood will pay for the smallest infraction. It happens when police and judges can be bought off for a penance, and when elections to hold officials accountable are manipulated. But it also happens, as per usual, when good people stand by, like the shopkeeper who spoke to me, and do nothing. But please don’t think that just because you live in the West things are any different.

 There is a story that I read about once, involving a young woman named Kitty Genovese, who on March 13, 1964, was  stabbed by an assailant, then left outside her apartment complex bleeding to death after being attacked by an assailant. Her killer left then returned after  10 minutes, raped her, stole $49 from her wallet and then left. All of this took place over the course of half an hour in densly populated New York neighborhood, clearly visible through windows and the screams audible through walls. The headline that ran in the New York Times, after an investigation was done  ran a story entitled“38 People who Saw murder Didn’t Call Police.” One man reportedly turned up his radio so he wouldn’t have to listen to Genovese screaming.  There is also of course the more drastic case of the Holocaust. Many people would be surprised to learn that just a few miles down the road from Auschwitz  there was a peaceful little town that woke up every day, went to work, mowed the lawn, and watched on as trainloads of human beings were brought into town and mysteriously vanished into the barbed wire surrounded camps at the towns edge.

Perhaps the Holocaust isn't an appropriate comparison, to one small teenage thief. But overall I think the same principals apply. After all, a society that accepts mob justice, perhaps may also accept the extradition of its minorities and ransacking of their shops as Uganda did in the 70s under Amin, and if that as acceptable, perhaps liquidating a competing tribe isn't such a bad idea either. 

Another part of me says, being a foreigner, gave me an advantage. I don't own a shop on Kampala Road, and though I've been mugged twice in the US, I didn't take the same economic hit that someone who is robbed in Uganda usually takes. I can retreat back to the mall, my cappuccinos, and in the end if all else fails, fly back to the United States. Still there is no component of my psyche that would justify what I saw this afternoon. The question remains, how can Ugandan, and really societies throughout the developing world be changed to make these events a thing of the past. 

AuthorRoey Rosenblith | Comment10 Comments |

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