Quote:
idk if this is common knowledge or if you even want to say, but how old are you now?
FYC
I'm 35. The thirties are goooood.
Kampala. What a city. A mish-mash of architectural styles – 1920’s English art deco, Indian, Arabic, 1970’s concrete bunker. Over a million people living packed in together. Huge wealth right beside abject poverty. Streets with beautifully paved, tree lined avenues. Streets with no discernable path amidst open sewerage. People, people everywhere. Complete chaos on the roads. A road built with two lanes will have four lanes of traffic in either direction. Driving became a situation of playing chicken and showing who was boss. I became very good at it. Once I came to a railway crossing and the crossing gates came down. On both sides of the crossing every car filled up a space. The gate came up and there were eight cars abreast on either side facing each other. Everybody gunned it. Amazing. Mutatu taxi’s everywhere. Toyota vans with touts leaning out the side door gathering customers. These guys were crazy. A Toyota built to hold 9 people. The most I ever counted inside was 26. That doesn’t include semi-domestic animals. Corey and I became addicted to walking around the city. Exploring it’s hidden byways and nooks. Seeing an interesting building we would just enter. If they didn’t want us in somebody would tell us to leave. It almost never happened.
Everyone on the street wanted to be your new friend. Wrap-around sunglasses were mandatory. If they couldn’t catch your eye then you could slip past. We knew every bar in town. Our favorite was perched five stories high in a tiny turret overlooking the Owino markets, the massive bus and taxi park and the soccer stadium. It had a small outside balcony. We used to sit up there drinking beer and watch the pickpockets at work on the tourists. It was like a scene out of the desert city in Star Wars. A heaving mass of humanity trying to survive from day to day. When the city became too oppressive we would retreat to the luxury of the Kampala Sheraton swimming pool, and spend the day chatting up British Airways hostesses. They flew in on a nine day stopover with a shuttle to Tanzania. If you hooked up with one of them early you had a week in the Sheraton. We had the time to do this as we weren’t working much. I was averaging 2 trips a week. The Bwindi massacre had killed off Uganda’s tourism overnight. We only got paid $50 a trip. But that was still enough to live it up in Kampala. But not nearly enough to save some money for an eventual ticket out.
I’d been there about three months when Corey came to me with a proposal. He had a contact in the Ugandan Special Forces. The plan was to go into the Congo and buy coffee directly from the Belgium coffee farmers who were still inside. They couldn’t get their goods to the markets in Nairobi due to the huge war that was in full swing in the Congo at the time. Described as the first world war of Africa, it pitted 14 African nations against each other in a mad race to rape the country of its resources. Estimates put the casualties at something like 3 million. Corey wanted to go in. We would provide the money, the Ugandans the trucks and soldiers. We could buy the coffee for $3-4 a kilo and sell it for close to 4 times that amount in Kenya. I had managed to save up about $1000 at this stage, mainly from a juicy expat poker game in the American embassy. Those marines sure were crap at poker. Nice guys though. I gave Corey $500 and told him to have fun. He looked at me strangely.
“Don’t you want to come?”
“Where?”
“Into the Congo.”
“You must be mad.”
“Dude, think of the opportunity here. We get to see a war.”
“You don’t see a war, you are in a war.”
But I was tempted. It was just two days. In and out. What the hell. We went in with two trucks. The special forces captain was this big, young, smiling Ugandan called Mututu. He loved the fact that he had two mazungu’s as buddies. He gave us each an AK47. I told him that I had no idea what to do with this thing. He told me that if we were shot at just put it up over the side of the truck and press the trigger. Right, sure, whatever you reckon. Corey had brought a crate of beer along with us. We crossed the border illegally and we were in a war. Cool. Or so I thought.
We traveled at a fast pace along dirt roads for about 6 hours. We had passed through a few villages without any problems. Until we came to this one town. It was market day. It was the dry season so the ground was like cement. They had mortared the town about half an hour before we came through. There were body parts in the trees. People screaming and dragging bodies around. The brown earth was soaked red. We didn’t even stop. Just sped through with two shocked whitey faces staring out from one of the trucks. We started drinking rather heavily.
After another 8 hours or so we pulled into the coffee farm. They knew we were coming. There was this Belgium family just going about their business of growing coffee in the middle of a huge conflict. Their property was like a little oasis of peace. If you’ve seen the movie Blood Diamond, the scene where they get taken to the Africans villa in the jungle where he looks after orphaned children, it was just like that. Husband and wife and three children. The oldest was a girl about 17 years old. This wasn’t jail bait. This was get shot bait. Corey and I kept a wide berth. We purchased 700 kilo’s of coffee and stayed the night to sleep. They organized a big meal for us all. It was a charming atmosphere. Surreal. The soldiers, apart from Mututu, ate separately outside with the help. We went to bed, studiously ignoring the darted looks from the daughter.
The next morning we rose early and bade farewell to the family. I have often wondered how they managed over the next few years of war. Mututu decided to make a detour around the town that had been shelled. It meant an extra two hours on our trip. Corey and I finished off the warm beer. At one point we heard shots close by. The soldiers tensed and the truck accelerated. That was it. Hours later we were back in Uganda. The trucks headed on to Nairobi after dropping Corey and I in Kampala. We spent the next month trying to get our share of the profits. We never saw a cent. At one point I tracked the captain down in his abode in one of the nastier parts of Kampala. He was very jovial, big smiles all round. And a big gun on the table. I realized that I was in a place where I could disappear very easily. I bade him farewell and got the hell out of there. Back to the poker game for some no limit action.
Last edited by Yeti; 09-24-2015 at 12:00 AM.
