The escarpment is steep, and the steaming hissing engine finally gives up. The train lurches to a halt. Soon, a man dressed in semi-official clothing appears in the compartment. He is in a uniform, neither dirty nor clean, and on his feet are aging rubber slippers. "We are calling for another injin!" he says. There is an old man outside on the grass along the tracks. He is beating a stretched out sheep-skin.

Snow white silence. Just the gurgle of water flowing in the narrow storm-water ducts. A paper boat sails past, laden with jasmine, leaving imaginary fragrant traces. Pattering feet, a child runs along following its course.

It was the season just after when the baobab had shed its long stringed calabashes. Not far way, was a solitary man surrounded by buzzing bees - he smoked a pipe made out of a hollowed out gourd of baobab. He warned me that the tree was haunted.

‘All roads lead to Kololo today’ – said a headline in one of the dailies.
What's Kololo? I asked someone. ‘Kororo’ they said ‘is the name of the military airbase favored by Museveni for his parades’.
In Kampala, a traffic collision was sometimes also a tlaffic corrision.

It was ‘National Resistance Movement’ day – a national holiday, and a Thursday. It was one of those days, common to many African countries, where the leaders decided that a day was needed to commemorate themselves. It was also an occasion for the president to have a military parade.  Tanks roared past, fighter bombers flew overhead, the president saluted – some people waved and stuck out their thumbs. 

The city was empty.  The main street resembled a desolate movie set.  Rain had sprinkled briefly in the area of the city center, washing its face - the pavements had a swept, forsaken look about them.  Only the territorial cripples who begged on strategic street corners seemed to be around. A few shops had stayed open – displaying mobile phones and the latest designer-wear second-hand clothes. 

Kampala seemed a city without events – this despite the delirious rush-hour traffic, the busy markets, roadside prayer meetings and the endless political debates for the elections next month.  A general world-weariness was apparent in Kampala – it was as if everything had happened here – yet, nothing at all.

So, when someone remarked upon the rampant depravity in the night clubs – I wanted to go there. 

Nile avenue along the Speke hotel usually turned busy by late evening – the prostitutes unmistakable for their tight skirts, high heels and loaded undertones (‘hi honey…wanna fuck?!?’).  They were normally in groups of twos or threes - hovering and posturing along the sidewalk, fidgeting like the marabou storks, which prowled Nile Avenue during the daytime. If you sat at a solitary table in the hotel's garden restaurant – some of the girls would unfailingly sashay past – the classier ones recognizable, not by their clothes but by their unflinching gaze.   Stylized eye contact was the key. 

Club Rouge (next to the boarded up train station) was filled with plenty of diffused red light – and was empty.

Club Al Zawadi was a disappointment – it was a hotdog restaurant selling beer.  Ugandan students danced outside to hip-hop music braying out of boom boxes. The only debauchery in sight: a television playing at full blast – a lingala music video - flapping elbows and very big bottoms rattling the 21 inch screen.  The Sports Bar next door was a tired affair with a couple of desiccated expatriates binging in the company of a football game.  A prostitute lay passed out on the table.

Club Ange Noir had a great theme and promised much: black angels, daring floor shows and naked girls. It was all a deception – the dance floor was full of formally attired men and women capering to Celine Dion and more Congolese lingala.  Customers were encouraged to buy the overpriced beer and cocktails.  The prostitutes were hard at work here – they moved quickly from man to man, sizing up prospective customers from idlers – any sort of dawdling was noticed and the women moved swiftly on. 

A young girl came and danced with me.  She must have been desperate or over enthusiastic, otherwise she might have sized me up like the other girls.  Geena lived in Kajjansi, a down-at-the-heel suburb of Kampala -- parents lived upcountry in some rural hinterland in the Kagera region along the Tanzanian border.  And whenever she could, she sent money home - for life was tough in Kagera.

Geena was a Haya, of the Wahaya tribe. Women from this tribe were reputed in Uganda for their open sexual mores. Marriage among the Wahaya also had its peculiarities:  Paternity among the Wahaya was established not by being the husband of the mother, or by siring the child – but instead by the first man who had intercourse with the mother, after she had delivered the child.
An ingenious social mechanism, for it meant everyone could have some fun, and no child was left illegitimate.  

“Do you have children?” I asked her promptly.
“No”. The husband was away in Zimbabwe, she said, flashing her wedding ring from inside a zipper handbag. 
“Why don’t you go there?” I suggested.  “He hasn’t called me”, she said and then added rather too quickly, “I like Kampala very much.” 
I asked her a few more questions, but she abruptly changed the subject.
“Shall we do something fun fun?” She demanded. No, I said, shaking my head.
“Shall we do something fun? Massage?” She repeated pleading, clutching her hand-bag with both hands. Not fun-fun? I thought. Her desperation made me depressed.

Later, I stepped out onto the street. Three in the morning, and it was full of parked cars. The only people smiling were the mumbling drunks sharing a slab of sidewalk, and the hustling taxi drivers.  Get me out of here.  I left.

But all that was yesterday night.  It was still National Resistance Day today.  And Kampala lay in vacuo.
I bought a bottle of water in an Indian shop.  The owner was a pensive looking man who sat atop a raised platform, on a student’s desk and chair – and on the desk, was an old-fashioned cash register.  From this vantage point, he directed his all African staff to pick items of the shelves. 
“How is business?” I asked him.
“Phipty-Phipty”, he said mumbling and dribbling through the wad of pan jammed in his mouth.  Then clammed up completely when I asked him about the elections.
“Haa-haa-haa…” , he said nervously, “…you are asking many queshchan… everything fine, hoping everything peaceful…haa-haa-haa…”

Near the parliament, there were soldiers on patrol – tall blokes, over 6 feet tall with pot bellies and guns matching their brawn. I walked to the national theatre.  The building was but a shell, peeling plaster, broken window panes and a cafeteria which sold dusty bottles of coca-cola.  As a last resort the theatre authorities had rented out their grounds to set up a large crafts market. But, even this enterprise wasn’t doing well – not many tourists came to Uganda, and all the shops sold exactly the same things. 

Few Ugandans ever shopped in the craft market – most of the local action lay outside on the streets.  Where, smooth talking street vendors with snappy footwork and twitching eyebrows peddled knock-off Ray-Ban sunglasses, ‘genuine’ Rolex watches and pressed Diesel jeans suspended stiffly on aluminum hangers – it was all about the brand.

A rambunctious transaction was on between a backpacker tourist and a stall owner selling ‘antiques’.  The tourist didn’t have enough money to buy the sculpture –but the stall owner was willing to trade the backpacker’s faded jacket and baseball cap for the item. 
“you are sure this is a genuine antique?” queried the gangling backpacker.
“yes…sah, real real…100 pa-sent…my father bought it in the boosh many-many years ago....eh...”, the story of the father indirectly lending age to the ‘antique’, “....this jacket, it is good condition…original…ya?” said the trader conducting a minute examination of the fabric of the backpacker’s jacket.
“yeah mate…that’s a genuine Columbia…”
It went back and forth for a while, and then the deal was concluded.  The tourist left with his prized sculpture – the trader looked a bit overdressed in the jacket and baseball cap.
They were both second hand dealers – each viewed the other’s item as having great value. 

The art historian, Christopher Steiner makes similar observations in his excellent book -- “African art in transit”.  In it Steiner wanders around the various craft markets in West Africa studying the dynamics of the art trade. Steiner notices that nothing in any of the craft markets is ever sold as “new” – everything was either “a little old” or at best: “It’s not ancient, but it wasn’t made today”. He makes the telling observation that:

            “…both the African trader and the Western tourist search for the genuine in each other’s culture, and both usually find only mere approximations of the ‘real thing’…”

 A stall holder who meets Steiner in the plateau market in Cote d’Voire, explains :

            “……When a European comes to Africa he buys African things –boubous, masks, textiles and so on. He likes these things because they are African, they are not from where he comes. The same holds true for us. We want what the Europeans have…If I had more money, I would collect European art, and the European would continue to collect our art. That’s just how it is….”

I walked away from the crumbling theater and its shops – and later, on the BBC, there was bad news.  More explosions in Iraq. A building had collapsed in Nairobi. The price of oil had hit a record high.  And more unusually: A tortoise had adopted a hippopotamus in Kenya.

The night before, I had dreamed a dream: I was a bird, an enormous and magnificent great blue turaco perched amid grey, dusty buildings, in a city much like Kampala. I was colorful but I couldn’t soar – for that was the domain of the kites.  I could glide, slow and weightless, from one grimy structure to another. And then they came, monstrous grasshoppers (perhaps the same ones I had eaten that morning), as big as three-storey houses – they were ravenous for they bayed low deep sounds like dogs, their serrated hind-legs ripping through the trees, their antennae sensing my presence.
I tried to fly, I could only shout, and all that came out was a  grating gonc-gonc-gonc-gonc.  

I woke up sweating, to the sounds of the night.
A clamor: cacophonic shouts, footsteps in pursuit, dogs howling in concert.   And suddenly: silence, tranquil calm, the buzz of the cicadas. It was some time before I fell asleep again.

My laundry list read:

• 1 grey shirt
• Black trousers
• 1 pair socks
• 1 underpants
• Handkerchief

It was certainly my handwriting scrawled across the page.  Which still didn’t explain the giant lace-work bra (42D) that had turned up neatly ironed with knife-edge creases in my laundry. I was determined to return it, immediately.  The under-garment was slipped discreetly back into the rumpled laundry bag, with the marked list of clothes upon it – the original bag and label lending veracity to the action, just in case someone asked any embarrassing questions.

It was close to midnight when I ventured furtively out of my room.

The hotel soundless, except for the contented murmur of the cicadas from the cracks, sounds of traffic muffled and far away, a stifled sound of giggling from one of the rooms, glasses clinking – some people were having all the fun.

At the reception, two people spoke a foreign language in low voices. 

"my things was grebbed outside this hetel…" sobbed an enormously fat woman dressed in a severe looking maxi-skirt – a tent-like costume very much in vogue among missionaries. She had vast satchel like arms, the tanned leather of it frightfully bitten, some had broken out into sores from her scratching them. I pondered briefly if this was the owner of the offending piece of lingerie. The size seemed a perfect match, but the style was a completely different matter.

It was going to rain soon -- a few grasshoppers whirled about dashing themselves aimlessly against the flickering lamp on the counter.

Down by the lake, people harvested these insects using bright halogen lamps attached to wooden poles. The whole contraption sat on inclined corrugated sheets, which funneled the insects downed into a drum. The grasshoppers were fried, salted and sold out of lunch-box sized cartons by men who yelled "N’senene! N’senene!" It made for a greasy, crunchy snack – not unlike sardines.

"Now, with elections we not know…things happen", said the bloodless Chinese woman at the reception "…I cahl police but they no help, you couldun geht license number of boda-boda".

The fat woman had been walking back to the hotel when a man on a motorbike (cruising in the manner of a moto-taxi driver) had snatched her hand bag and disappeared into the night.  The woman was grieving because she had lost her passport and return air ticket.

"You know it happens…" the Chinese woman said turning towards me, her expression transforming, as if on auto-pilot, from one of sympathy to a friendly smile "…this is Aafrica…...  Yes sirh….How may I hehlp you?"

Subtle chaos prevailed in Kampala.  Elections were round the corner. 

The politics of Uganda is essentially tied to its past – personalities like Idi Amin, Milton Obote – famous larger than life ‘strong men’ from history who seemed to embody all that was bad in Africa.  The current president Yoweri Museveni had made his mark by waging guerilla wars – first against Idi Amin in the 70s and then against Milton Obote in the 80s.

Obote’s wife was now back – contesting the elections, hoping to topple Museveni.  But the leading opposition contender was a man called Kizza Besigye – a former comrade and personal physician of Museveni.  The struggle for power had turned him a bitter critic of the president. 

A couple of days before my arrival, the opposition had organized a demonstration in Kampala. The government had called in the dreaded "Black Mambas" – a heavily armed paramilitary unit, who rode about in black four-wheel-drive trucks. These soldiers were from Northern Uganda, taller, heavier and darker – outsiders in Kampala, men with no local sympathies. The ‘black mamba’ had set upon the marching opposition. A few people were killed.
"They are outsidahs…" a shopkeeper said of the ‘black mambas’, "...they don’t care who they shoot".

Even with the occasional violence, and the threat of more to come, the city seemed quiet. 

Most of the protest rallies began after Besigye was detained under Uganda’s unusual parallel justice system.  In Uganda a common criminal caught with a firearm can be tried by a military tribunal – justice is rendered swiftly – with a firing squad.
While countries like Kenya, with a long history of peace, struggled to tackle crime – Uganda had emphatically stamped out crime, using military tactics.

Besigye now faced treason charges in a military court, and rape charges in a civilian court. A ruse, his supporters said, to prevent him from contesting the elections.

The whole thing had degenerated into a complicated tussle between the judiciary and the military.  The military tribunal was headed by a man who always appeared dressed in camouflage uniform, wearing a beret and very dark sun-glasses – even at night. In the days that followed, a judge resigned, and another recused himself. Meanwhile the man heading the military tribunal was appointed as the new coach of the Ugandan football team ("the flying cranes"). After a number of injunctions and protests, Besigye was finally allowed out to campaign.

Things had never been quiet in Kampala – it was a city used to turmoil. People went about, business as usual.
A preacher stood atop a traffic island, bible in one hand and a magic wand in another lecturing to the passing traffic. Sofas hung precariously from first floor balconies with ‘for sale’ signs pinned to them. The pock marked buildings stood mutely, misshapen dentures lining Kampala road - still looking like they had been ravaged by civil war. Most of the newer buildings looked shambolic and out of place, constructed not with some definite purpose in mind, but because someone had the money to raise them.

Marabou storks, big slobbering birds with pink bulbous necks, watched and scavenged impassively. They were everywhere – roosting in the trees, strutting in pairs on the boulevard across the up-market Speke hotel and rummaging in the dingy, rubbish strewn streets around Nakasero market

Some people were dismissive about the elections. "heh heh…it’s all fixed anyway" they snickered as if I had told them a ribald story. But most were simply apprehensive.

"Are you visiting?" asked a boda-boda driver – he meant "Are you an outsider?".
"Yes", I said.
He giggled, it was meant to be a laugh.
"I like Uganda" I said.
"Don’t come now" he said pouting, still giggling "Come after…after the elections"
But I was already here.

So, one day I took a boda-boda moto-taxi to Kasubi, to visit the tombs of the Kabaka, the rulers of the old Baganda kingdom.
The tombs were on the summit of a hill and were actually elaborately thatched huts, quite like a giant gazebo. "The largest thatched roof in Africa" said the sign, as if laying claim to some long forgotten record. It was a melancholic and gloomy place – and smelt of bats.

Some Royal artifacts were lined up on display inside the hut. Framed black and white photographs of the kings propped up on the floor, assorted spears and head-bashers, big tom-tom drums, anonymous articles of clothing. On one side, was a dusty Victorian style table-and-chair set, the chair turned upside down upon the table – a "gift from the queen of England" – the guide said.

The ticket-counter outside also operated a small shop selling expensive trifles and post cards.

"What is that?" I inquired - the object resembled a table mat.
"Banana fiber bainting…" the shop-owner said, waving his hand like a brush "...just 15 dollas goodu price…"

Notable among the post-cards were the ones depicting a grim looking Idi Amin in full military splendor: "Idi Amin Dada – president of Uganda 1971-1979" – printed on the back. It seemed a contradiction for the post-card to be sold at this place, for Idi Amin had once commanded a military assault on the palace of the Kabaka. The king – a Sir Edward Mutesa (the Second) then fled to London. And, the kingdom was subsequently abolished.

Meandering back to the center of town, I found myself caught by the evening traffic. The main thoroughfare - Kampala road was now a slithering, dusty monster. I stopped by one of the roadside stalls, where an elderly woman waving a fly whisk hawked stacks of secondhand books. "Gray’s anatomy" and "The Merck Manual" kept company with "How to be an African Woman" and James Hadley Chase. I flicked through the titles and picked up a tattered paperback: "The White Maasai".

It was dark when I walked back to the hotel. Away from the main streets, Kampala was a procession of murmuring shadows and the kwir'kik....kwir...kwir'kik ...kwir of the cuckoos among the fig trees. That night I addressed the post-cards to various people who I had not contacted for years. It was just a brief 'Hi' and 'Hello' followed by a nondescript ‘I am fine’ note and signed off with a smiley cartoon face - and I printed no return address. I flipped the card around, and it was still Idi Amin glaring back.

The cicadas whirred contentedly outside, the glassware tinkled next door and the chants of the midnight mass began at the 'Maximum Miracle center' across the road.