A muzungu’s first time in Africa

By Oscar Bamuhigire

I always wondered what a Muzungu coming to Africa for the first time in his whole life would feel like. What is it like to look at us through his own lenses? I met one such Muzungu, and asked him about his first landing at Entebbe International airport and what he thought of it:

“Wow! I thought. There isn’t much here! What a small place,” said Michael Williams, a 25-year-old white Briton, who was camping at Lake Bunyonyi.

Michael, who is a student at London Metropolitan University, was brought to Uganda, as a tourist, by his fellow classmate, a Ugandan called Carol Busingye.

Carol could barely understand this guy. “This guy is confused,” Carol complained bitterly. “He wants an itinerary everyday. He wants to be doing something, on a specific programme all the time. Man! Here in Uganda you just do what comes. There are no itineraries. These Bazungu are crazy.”

This turns out to be Michael’s biggest problem: doing nothing. “My biggest problem,” he said with a tinge of irritation, “is that I am not used to doing nothing. People here just seem to do a lot of nothing. I went to Carol’s village in Kabale, and about 20 people all came out of their homes, lined the road, and started waving. Why were they waving? Didn’t they have work to do? And the men just sit around all day drinking, leaving the women to do everything. This place is crazy!

You can’t see this in London.”
I ask him about Kampala, and what he thought of it. His response is prompt: “Mayhem!” and he begins to laugh heartily. “Cars are flying everywhere! I have never seen this and can’t believe my eyes. There are no laws here. There are no traffic rules. There are no specific lanes for cars. A car just drives anywhere. People speed past in scooters without helmets. My God!

Everyone is wondering about on the road doing nothing. There are shops lined up all across the road like little huts. People are selling everything, even corn, and meat on sticks when you go upcountry.”
Michael breaks off for a while in deep thought. He talks, in a state of disbelief about our lifestyles. “Here, people can just do what they want.

You could never see people selling meat on sticks in London!”
He complains about people’s general reaction towards him. “When people here see me, they just stop doing whatever they are doing and stare,” he says.

“The other time when I was with Carol on Kampala road, I took off my shirt because it was hot, and people started saying all kinds of things to me, and crowding allover to stare! It’s as if they are doing nothing.” Worse still, when Michael got sunburns, no one could understand that. A Muhima woman, working for Carol’s family in Kabale, laughed incessantly at a man whose skin could get fried by the sun! It was the funniest thing she had ever seen.

In Kampala, Michael put up with Carol at Naalya Estates, and he could not bring himself to believe what he saw there. “The houses there have huge walls, with broken glass and spikes at the top! It’s as if everyone fears that his neighbor is gong to steal something from them. The houses are so heavily guarded, and have powerful dogs and flash lights.”

When he starts talking about the roads in Naalya, I almost die of laughter. “The roads in Naalya are not roads, they are just big holes, and if you are not careful you fall in one,” he says.

Michael had the opportunity to visit our favourite night spots and watering holes, and was not in the least amused by what he saw. “My God, the men here can drink,” he bellowed out in shock. “A man can drink two litres of waragi and still drive himself home. It is unbelievable because this is the norm here. It’s mayhem! It’s absurd!”
For Michael who had never been to Africa, his trip to Kabale was an adventure of a lifetime.

Along the way, he ate muchomo, gonja, maize, and jackfruit, until his belly was full. He said he loved the food for it tasted nice, but he soon suffered severely from stomach upsets. He was in bad shape for a whole day.

Staying with him at Crater Bay Camp, Lake Bunyonyi, was comical. This guy had a thing for jackfruit. He ate it every morning, and stored the remainder for the next day. He stored his bushera in tight bottles, and when he tried to open them in the morning, their entire contents spilled allover him.

He quarrelled with Carol about the right way to fry chapatis, a skill he praised himself of learning from another Ugandan called Doreen Mununura. He wanted to fry his chapati on the underside of the saucepan, rather than inside it. This almost caused a war between them. When lighting his charcoal stove, he would put the charcoal inside the stove, rather than on top of it, and then mix the charcoal with newspapers, rather than burn the newspapers underneath the charcoal!

He was not amused by the Bakiga’s lifestyle. “A lot of people here just seem to be chilling, sitting around drinking, and doing nothing,” he said of the Bakiga . His adventures were further heightened by the general response of the villagers.

Wherever we passed, women stopped digging, and some rushed to the roadside to call out, “Muzungu how are you?” kids, in tattered attires, or bare bottoms, chased him for several hundred metres calling out ‘Muzungu’.

Whenever we tried to take a photo of them, or attempted top speak to them, they quickly dashed into the nearby bushes, only to re emerge when we resumed our walk.