Chapter 5 - in which our heroine travels to Kabale, almost makes her peace with dying as roadkill, and lives to meet a king

Ok, so I know Ugandans are polite. So much so that I usually feel like a badly dressed potato around them. But the amount of messages I got after arriving me to Kabale, asking if I was alright, seemed kind of extreme, even for Ugandan standards. But then my colleague Paul told that people weren't just polite, they were asking quite literally if I had survived the trip. Looking at Ugandan road statistics, actually not a surprising question. I know I'm a spoiled European and all that, and that I cannot expect the same level of comfort than at home, blablabla. But that hasn't really mattered so far, as I've actually been quite comfy in Kampala, snug as a bug to be precise.

Not so on the way to Kabale. In a way, I thanked the stars that I was so utterly exhausted from the past week that I slept through 2/3 of the 8-hour trip to Kabale, and chatted with Gerald (who's a lecturer in Human Rights at Makerere and who took my wacky ideas about Ugandan politics in good humor) for the rest of the way. Had I not been distracted, I might have had an encounter of the 3rd kind with my breakfast (well, more of the 2nd kind, but you know what I mean). I truly cannot express the nightmare that is traffic in this country - full of insane people speeding around in 3 lanes on roads that were clearly built for a maximum of two motorcycles, even them driving to close together for my taste. But instead of motorcycles, you have trucks. Big trucks. Speeding trucks. Trucks full of gasoline passing us at an estimated 2 inches. And occasionally, overturned trucks. Put all of these on a road full of potholes that would be more accurately described with swimming pool (which people tend to do), add a few tons of dust and the occasional burst of heavy rain, and you've got your trip from hell. So all in all, I'm very happy I slept through most of it, and wasn't aware of the danger.

However, in time we made it to Kabale, thanks to our driver and whoever is the patron saint of the insane traffic. Kabale is on the smallish side (well, maybe rather on the 'whoops you blinked and missed it' side, but it's located extremely picturesquely between some of the greenest hills I've ever seen, cultivated in beautiful terraces. The Green Hills Hotel is situated above town, with a nice view of the above-mentioned hills, and very large comfortable rooms.

For the next three days, I attended the workshop on (Ba)Twa rights that was our reason for traveling to Kabale in the first place. The Batwa are one of many, many tribes in Uganda (the actual numbers I heard differ enormously, between 12 and 60, depending on how you define tribe - around 50 seems to be closest to the truth though). Originally, they were hunter-gatherers living in the forest, but the forest has been severely decimated in the region, and the Batwa consequently became landless, making them one of the poorest tribes in the whole region. For those who like their inappropriate colonial references, forest peoples were once known as pygmies, and are still referred to as such by the category of people who think that people living in forest are just one (very short) step above animals. For the rest of us who like their terminology to be non-insulting: the Twa (Batwa for plural and Mutwa for singular) are an ethnic group living mostly in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC. They are traditionally low in the 'hierarchy' of tribes, with many people considering themselves better than the 'forest dwellers'. Their number, historically low, has shrunk over the years to an estimated 80.000 overall, making them very small minorities in the countries they live in. Consequently, they tend to be overlooked in policy-making and public discussions, even where their interests are centrally at stake - such as during the Rwandan genocide, in which about a third of the Twa population lost their lives.

Although I would love to give more details on the situation of the Batwa, I will leave it at this for the moment, because I realize this is Travelblog.com, not 'Post-all-your-political-issues-with-pictures.com'. However, do take a look at MRG's (Minority Rights Group, the organization I'm volunteering for) website, or at least read the Wikipedia entry on the Twa. I know, I know, why would you be interested in that, it's not your fault that they are poor and die young, is it? If that is what you think, take another look at that wooden table in your living room, and your nice cosy bed. No, I'm not saying the wood came from Uganda - most likely it didn't. But it probably came from somewhere around the world where a lot (or most) of the forest has by now disappeared, as it did in Europe. So what does the ecologically-minded European or North-American do when they have destroyed their own resources? They force poorer countries, which haven't yet have the means to destroy theirs, to transform whole regions into national parks, to which only really really rich tourists are to have access, never mind that people are living there and have been living there for the past few thousand years. Now, far be it from me to view national parks cynically, they're a wonderful thing, but I sometimes wish we would think before acting, be it destroying resources or seemingly 'protecting' them. Ok, rant over, it's all massively oversimplified anyway, so let's all pick up a book and learn something.

In any case, the traditional Batwa lifestyle seems to be gone for good, and the goal is now to help them assess the minimum rights that all ethnic (and other) minorities should have. Simple stuff, you know: land for food, water, medicine so that their kids don't die of diseases that no one has seen in Europe for the past 150 years. Ok, ok, no more ranting - it's not like I have the patented solution to the world's problems myself, so I'll shut up.

The workshop itself was in 4 different languages, none of which I understood, so I sat there like a brain-dead Muzungu a lot of the time, trying to figure out what was happening. In classic Princess Leia style I had to rely on the Jedis of the language force to navigate me through the workshop chaos. Robert, the Obi-Wan of all translators (he speaks something like 8 languages, and seems to pick up new ones rather effortlessly), managed to relate most of what was happening back to me, even though he was rather busy sorting out the modern version of the tower of Babel. Gerald also translated quite a few bits and pieces, so that overall I had a pretty good idea of what was going on, even though I missed out on the details.

What was going on was somewhere between university lecture, classroom teaching, and motivational seminar. It seems like everything was covered from the international treaties from which minorities derive their rights to the right way to brush your teeth (up and down, not just side to side). Their view on gender relations was very interesting, if slightly sobering - a lot of men seem to react to the loss of their traditional way of life in the same way by declaring women the better house-elves. While this might not have mattered as much in a society where everyone had a specific role which was essential to the survival of the community, it changes the dynamics quite a lot when some of these roles become obsolete: after all, who needs a hunter when there's nowhere to hunt. Traditional females roles, however, are as important as ever, if not more so: the bigger the role hygiene and education play in a society's daily life, the more important the role of women seems to become - and the more uncomfortable the men with their new-found idleness. So many of the men seem to reassure themselves of their value by re-asserting their traditional 'superiority' to women, for instance barring them from access to land and inheritance.

Not that the situation in the mainstream Ugandan society is much better. The book of 'Women's do's and don'ts' appears to grow longer every day, and of course I take special pleasure in torpedoing every single one of them. But more on that topic another time.

Anyhow, the workshop was very interesting, and, most interestingly, I got to meet the king of one if the local Batwa tribes, although I had a hard time determining his actual position in the hierarchy. In any case, it seems that he invited me to come and visit him, although I will have to ask Paul for more details, as I didn't quite get him and his personal interpreter seemed to melt away every time I spoke to him. Still, how often do you get to meet a king?

So much for the workshop, next time more about Lake deeper-than-anywhere-with-the-name-I-can't-remember. Lake Bunoyi? Lake Bunion? Oh, google says it's called Lake Bunyoni and that I'm a culture-less douchebag. Whatever.

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