Feel of the local ambience

By Vivian Craddock Williams There are many walks open around Kampala. The city is surrounded by villages, connected to the capital by roads, tracks or footpaths. The villages lie in superb rolling countryside, with magnificent trees, flowering shrubs and brightly coloured birds. Visitors to Kampala tour the city by car. They are thereafter taken to the Source of the Nile at Jinja, and possibly to the Equator Sign on the Masaka Road. Rarely do they get a chance to walk in the open countryside, where they can meet the locals and see for themselves the conditions of village life. This is a rare treat which the Membership of the Mountain Club of Uganda temporarily makes possible. If you are in Kampala over the weekend, Mountain Club Members are available to take you for a walk. The club organises a walk to special destinations within easy reach of Kampala. The tomb house on Wamala Hill in Mpigi district, north of Kampala, is one such destination we have been to many times. It is the tomb of one of the kings of the Buganda Kingdom, Kabaka Ssuuna, who died in 1856. His tomb is housed in a large thatched rondavel, smaller than Kasubi Tombs where some Buganda kings are buried. The inscription at the entrance in Luganda, says the tomb house was re-built in June 1958. The tomb was rebuilt with concrete pillars and steel girders. This explains why the vast weight of the thatched canopy and bound reed purlines is still strong. At the back of the tomb is a gaping hole through which the rain pours. The Mountain Club Members (MCU) were astonished that the Buganda government at Mengo reportedly spent (US$3300) over sh5m building a small thatched guest house at the entrance to the Wamala compound, when so much emergency repair work is needed on the tomb house. The true delight of these walks is not so much in reaching an interesting destination like the Wamala Tomb, but in the detail of what you see on the way. The first spectacle was an unprotected spring, full of greenish water, from which villagers draw their household supply, as Wamala is well beyond the mainspiped water of the National Water and Sewerage Corporation that serves parts of Kampala. You can see now why dysentery and other water-borne diseases cause so much morbidity and mortality, particularly among children, in the area. The second spectacle was the valley wetland waters sluicing through a culvert at a rate sufficient I thought to drive a water turbine able to pump water to the village. Later, we saw a small dairy farm with cattle ‘zero grazed’ in a pen, with a slope in which a trench to a biogas tank had been cut. This is one of the many ways in which villagers can save woodfuel, their normal fuel for cooking, but which threatens to deforest large areas of Uganda. The Ministry of Energy is believed to be planning a demonstration centre where these technologies can be seen and copied. We walked on along the track, meeting many villagers on the way, all friendly and ready to talk about their lives. At one house, an old man greeted us and told our Ethiopian member Magda Wood that he had been with the East African Rifles driving Italian colonisers from Abyssinia during the Second World War. He then engaged us in a historical discussion that lasted until we reached the tomb. The writer is the Expeditions Secretary, Mountain Club of Uganda, P.O. Box 7558, Kampala. ends