Of the Kampala Christmas exodus

_______________

WHAT’S UP

You all know about the great wildebeest migration, right? It takes place every year, when over a million wildebeest, accompanied by hundreds of thousands of zebras and gazelles, travel about 1,000km between Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve and Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park.

This migration is like a loop, and happens over several months. First, the animals cross over from Kenya into Tanzania, and then they go back to Kenya. It is so dramatic and incredible, especially when they cross the Mara River into Kenya, that it has been described as the ‘Greatest Wildlife Show on Earth’. Tourists pay up to $10,000 and have to book more than a year in advance to get a front seat. Quite a show, eh?

But, we have our own mass migration, and it happens every December around Christmas. Maybe not as dramatic as those gazelles and zebras, but there is a bit, and at times it even includes drawn guns. Every year, hundreds, maybe thousands, of all kinds of vehicles make the journey from Kampala to western Uganda. Small cars, big cars, buses, lorries – but mostly huge SUVs, complete with sirens and flashing lights.

I’m not quite sure when it all started, but a few years ago, my friend Pumla Nabacwa, as a multi-talented person as I have ever seen, but passing off herself as a banker, wrote a post on social media about this phenomenon.

Pumla had noticed that every Christmas time, the streets of Kampala are not congested, there are no traffic jams, no hawkers on the sidewalks, and the city is generally peaceful. She noted that this was because many people left Kampala to go to their villages for Christmas. For lack of a better word, she referred to them as ‘bagundi, a Luganda word meaning ‘those ones’.

And the name stuck. Every year, when Christmas time comes along, there are those who think they are being very eloquent and ask when the ‘bagundi’ are leaving. The ‘bagundi’ themselves have taken it into their own humorous strides and at times swear they are not leaving, that Kampala is too nice, and they also want to experience it when it is not crowded and no ‘gamba nogu’ is creating extra lanes in traffic.

Now, the wildebeest’s migration is an answer to the call of nature. After the short rains in November, the animals move from the Masai Mara into the Serengeti for calving. Not sure why they do that, but maybe the conditions are better for the newborns.

Around July, they move back up into the Masai Mara, crossing the River Mara and in front of hundreds of tourists and all the world’s wildlife photographers and filmmakers. So, the animals answer the call of nature; what kind of call do the bagundi answer when thousands of them decide the days just before Christmas is the best time to go west?

Why Christmas time?

It is the festive season, I’m told, so they want to go and make merry. The English go to southern France to escape the winter, the French go skiing in the Alps, the Spanish complain about all the rude tourists, the Germans grit their teeth and bear it, and the Russians drink vodka. And the bagundi head west.

It used to be that they would start to leave around December 19, when most offices close. But something happened during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. It seems the experience of a peaceful Kampala appealed to them, so now they leave it till almost the last hour before setting off. I bet if they could, they would not go. And then they do the craziest thing, they buy out all the supermarkets in Kampala to take things ‘back home’. Wouldn’t it make sense to spend all those millions on the village shop, so that Mugisha guy could marry another wife? Does ‘this is from Kampala’ still carry the same old magic? Beats me.

But come the 24th, it will be bumper-to-bumper from Kampala’s northern bypass to the Mbarara bypass, an almost 300km traffic jam. Another spectacular sight of the wildebeest migration is the predators waiting to have a relatively free meal. To the crocodiles of the Mara River, it is Christmas every July when the animals return to Kenya.

Do the bagundi have predators as they travel west? None that I know of, except maybe the typically bad driving I-don’t-care-about-laws attitude of many Ugandans.

I’m told incidences of road rage are increasing by the year, and at times, guns are drawn. But so far, no one has been shot, yet.

And, since the ‘gamba nogu’ is probably stuck in the traffic with them, who do they appeal to?

There is another predator to be aware of – Katonga bridge. I think all that stuff from Kampala’s supermarkets makes the vehicles too heavy, and Katonga started to complain. A couple of years ago it got so bad that it had to be closed, and the migration had to take diversions to get to the west. So, I have a suggestion. Why doesn’t the Uganda Tourism Board turn that Kampala-West migration into a tourist attraction?

First, they can do a documentary, follow one guy as they shop to the death in a Kampala supermarket, then pack everything, including the not-so-little woman and the kids into those huge SUVs, and head west.

The stuff they go through, the road rage incidents, the curses that freely flow, and the numerous ‘gamba nogus’ should make for interesting watching and maybe tourists would pay $10,000 and book in advance to watch the live action version.

It used to be that the reverse migration wouldn’t happen till after New Year’s Day. But now the 26th finds them stuck on the road again, coming back. Why don’t they copy the Mara River animals and come back in July? Grrrrr. You can follow.

Kabuye on X @KalungiKabuye