Surveying today’s newspaper here in Kampala to figure out what is on Ugandans’ minds…
Unremarkably, 10,000 Congolese fled into Uganda on Tuesday. Remarkably, the article says that all 10,000 spent the night at a primary school. Meanwhile, conflicts within and with the Democratic Republic of Congo have led to a ban on night fishing on Lake Albert, which the two countries share. The newspaper also discusses the smoldering 15-year war that the Lord’s Resistance Army, with support from Sudan, has been waging against the Ugandan central government in the northern region of the country.
Several articles chronicle accusations of corruption among Ugandan officialdom. An article on Kenya notes that it ranks 142 out of 163 on a world scale of corruption, with more than half of transactions requiring bribes and the police force being the most corrupt institution.
Maxine Ankrah researched the decline in HIV rates here in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She concluded that the decline was due to a reduction in extramarital affairs. President Yoweri Museveni called for “zero grazing”. I read this piece within sight of two US AID-funded billboards. One depicted four young people with a woman saying “Abstinence is for me–how about you?”. The other showed a young couple saying “I do” and an older couple saying “I still do”, reminding Ugandans underneath to “Be faith to each other and avoid HIV”. An alternative perspective was presented in “Not all truth is useful”, an article on a TV show in which spouses are caught on camera “grazing in foreign pastures”. The writer notes that most of the cheaters are forgiven and says “Once you decide to get married, have children and a career to work on, it is diversionary to play detective when after all you are not going to leave your spouse. So why sniff at all? … The official version is often the safest document. What if HIV is unavoidable? An article reminds us that South Africa’s health minister “advocated garlic, lemon, and African potatoes over conventional anti-retroviral drugs.”
[A teacher at Makerere University brought me up to date on marriage in Uganda. First, one can have as many wives as one can demonstrate the financial capability to support. Second, a wife won’t expect much attention. If she is able to buy what she needs and wants, she will be satisfied. (caveat: this is according to a computer science professor)]
Jenn Jagire, a Ugandan living in Canada, discusses the virtues of the bride price and how women were more valued in the old days. “In the West, Canada in particular, where there is no bride price, women are sometimes called ‘bitches’ by men. Men still beat up their wives, but not necessarily because they paid any bride price for them.”
There isn’t much news from the U.S.; one article about a woman attacked by two pit bulls in Washington State and another about US-Libya ties (Libya is a big investor in Ugandan infrastructure).