Sunday market, sugar cane, kitenge, kitsch
This isn't much of a photo, because it's taken from the window of a moving vehicle, but it's a reasonably representative shot of most of the northwestern Ugandan countryside. I realized earlier this week how different most of this area looks compared to images I had of Africa - there is no jungle, and there is no savannah. Aside from the pet monkeys people buy elsewhere and bring to the West Nile region, there are no monkeys. Outside of the national parks, there aren't elephants, hyenas, lions or all the rest. There are only these small subsistence farms of cassava, matooke (green plantains), corn and the like. Each farm has at least one small round or square thatch-roofed hut, always as red as the dust that covers all of Uganda. These farms abut one another for miles, maybe hundreds of miles. When you're on a high hill, as far as the eye can see are these small farms, sometimes fallow fields or brushy areas, but mostly farms to every horizon. For some reason, there are no oxen or horses, only people hand-hoeing their little plots of land, and there are certainly no farming tractors. In each district there is a sometimes cash crop - in Yumbe it is tobacco bought by the British American Tobacco company, elsewhere it is cotton or sugar cane or corn. But by and large, you do not see the commercial agricultural landscape that defines rural America and Europe - no grain elevators, no railways, few fields larger than a hundred feet on a side.
There are times when I've thought of this part of the country as fitting the Jeffersonian ideal - every man a farmer - and maybe, in a way it is. It certainly is picturesque from the hilltop where you can see a thousand farms and a thousand farmers, each field a green, square blanket laid on a hillside dotted with a man or woman with a hoe raised in the air. But the lack of plough animals or tractors means there isn't much in the way of surplus, so there isn't much in the way of markets, and both education and government accountability are lacking. So it's got a little ways to go.I took the first photo on the way to a large open air market on the Uganda/DRC border (for those rusty on their African geography, DRC is short for the Democratic Republic of the Congo - a country that has exemplified neither democracy or republicanism). Half of the market lies in Uganda while half lies in the Congo. Needless to say, it is a "porous" border. There is more security and signage between American counties than there is between these two countries, at least at the "Kampala" market. The name of the market is, I think, supposed to increase it's appeal. It would be a bit like naming a rural Minnesota outlet mall "New York City Mall." But it was a busy market, with what loked like around 5,000 people buying and selling everything that could imaginably be available in the middle of central African nowhere: pineapple, guava, bananas, and other fruits of all kinds, goats, sheep, beef, chickens, eggs, sugarcane (pictured above), plastic bowls from China, illegal gas from the Congo, palm oil, vegetable oil (sometimes straight from the UN World Food Programme tin), flour, cassava, millet, etc. The highlights for me were the sugarcane, which I'm chomping on above, and the textiles, called Kitenge (ki-TEN-gay). The sugar cane cost 10 cents American for two three foot stalks, shaved of the hard outer bark while we waited. You chew on the fiber, which is about as hard as wet birchwood, crush it in your teeth to suck out the delicious juice (which, not surprisingly, tastes like brown sugar), try to not think about the terrible things it's doing to your dental health, and then yack up the chewed fiber on the ground. It's okay to spit out just about anything just about anywhere here. Amazing, eh?
Of a more aesthetic bent is the Congolese kitenge. These textiles are designed and produced in the Congo, and at the Kampala market, they cost about $2.50 for a large two meter by three meter sheet. In the city of Kampala, which is eight hours away, the same cloth may cost five or six times as much. These are the cloths you see everywhere here in Northwestern Uganda. They are wrapped around women's heads, used to pad them from the enormous objects they carry. They are sewn into skirts, dresses, pants, everything. They are also exceedingly beautiful. Most kitenge come in brilliant colors and strange patters, though all with a certain similar style. Sometimes they remind me of diagrams from molecular science textbooks - golden mitochodondria or blood red viruses. Sometimes they look like giant, endless Roy Liechtenstein prints - the spots and curves of comic strips blown up and redoubled. Maybe even more interestingly, they sometimes include bizarre, almost inexplicable modern objects, which I think maybe are code for something. Padlocks and keys appear in one (chastity?). A kerosene lantern appears again and again in another (knowledge? wisdom?). Chickens are a popular motif. Faucets, fish, cages, bibles, the Koran, people in profile, in prayer, open hands, it goes on and on. I bought one for my sister that is composed entirely of tree stumps topped in red - a field of bloody deforestation. I'm not sure why you would wrap a baby with a pattern like that, but should my sister have a baby, it'll be an option.
