Yesterday.
We returned the palletts that we rented for Cooking Oil set to Jinja. Alex Wasswa, a theater practitioner who helped up assemble materials for this show, runs an art center there. By coincidence, the owner of the center, uses an unusable stage to store palletts.
Jinja is a tourist town about an hour and a half from the city's capital. Past tea plantations, an eclectic forest, a sugar processing plant, a bottling - (what do you call that factory, plant?) and over the river Nile.
JB and the gentleman who drove us were telling me stories about corruption - the large highway built in Kampala that was supposed to have 4 lanes each way, but has two because so much of the budget when into kickbacks. Soldiers who sell their bullets. A massacre that occured in the north because the general had been telling his bosses that he had twice as many soldiers than he had in order to pocket ghost salaries/rations. And this sense of Uganda as a country with very little nationalism. In my experience of nationalism leads me to associate this word with a fundamentalist concept of identity and xenophobia. It made me think there is also something positive about a collective project, collective sense of stake.
Also, it is interesting because something I note about Ugandan culture is a high value on social thinking and action. Even the rhythm of the language includes gaps for emphasis and response. There's a high value on sharing what you have - food, rides, air time, favors. But at the same time, rampant corruption and individual pursuit of immediate gain.
We'd moved on to a conversation about homosexuality in Uganda when we got pulled over by the police for speeding in a section of the road with an ambiguous speed limit. He demanded the driver's original permit to hold on file. The driver steps out to work out the bribe he's going to have to pay to let us continue the journey.
Uganda's institutionalized homophobia has gotten a lot of press. There was a law proposed by this guy Bahati that takes Uganda's already legal oppression of homosexuality and takes it to another extreme. Death penalty for some cases and legal liability for knowing someone is gay and not outing them. The law hasn't come close to being passed, but it has coincided with an increase in persecution for people who are gay or perceived as gay.
I have heard the argument that homophobia is part of Uganda's culture and that national sovereignty is at stake in criticism of oppression of sexual minorities. This argument makes me a little sad because I heard on CNN that a Ugandan paper published the names of 100 people it identified as gay with the caption "hang them". It's one thing to say that the issue of legalizing marriage practice is tied to sovereignty, but how can this kind of fear or violence against any minority be a respectable choice? This is also fascinating to me because of the strong sense of nationalism implied (as opposed to the conversation about corruption earlier). I wonder, how do individuals decide when to value sharing or collective action and when not to? How do individuals decide what to accept as tradition? I voiced this question to another Ugandan gentleman today and he responded what's more alien to Africa than Christianity? (Not to say that Christianity is an invalid part of present African culture, but to highlight the fluidity and choice involved in continuity and transformation of culture).
We arrive in Jinja. The art center used to be an auto shop. An American couple owns a cafe and craft shop that generate revenue for the center. They have an outdoor stage (that stores the palletts) and the indoor theater in a huge gorgeous warehouse space. Plans for music practice rooms, a recording studio, class rooms, and apartments for a possible artists in residence program.
When we visited, Alex was hosting a workshop for a program he is running in Uganda for UNESCO: recording the region's intangible heritage (performance practices, rituals, social customs, indigenous knowledge and representation, cultural spaces, oral traditions, language). Field workers approach community-identified experts and record information about that individuals' articulation of their culture as it is presently practiced. The records are then kept in a local space chosen by the community. UNESCO also helps provide access to younger members of the community to facilitate transmission. In some cases, they have even organized to broadcast some information on the radio at the request of the communities.
On this day, Alex was talking to field workers about how to catagorize cultural elements in the low ceilinged room of the old auto shop, staring at the projection of the UNESCO power point on the white cement wall. Conversations like: when dance counted as performance, and when it counted as a social event. One gentleman, who apparently enjoys dramatic rhetoric, told Alex "How dare you say [a dance from his culture] was not for entertainment!" - which led to a discussion about multiple purposes and distinctions between relationships to audience in entertainment and ritual. Another interesting topic: how to dictate if something was a living part of culture and so needed to be recorded, or a discarded part of culture (the need to allow for and record contradictions, to record with limited censorship the community experts' self-definings). Sometimes, they say, people are very adament that something is no longer a part of their living practice - the example that came up in the meeting was a tradition in that region of beating the bodies of suicide victims with sticks.
Another one of the field worker's (who had come to see Cooking Oil three times) journeyed with us back to Kampala. There's a dance company there who fuses element of Latin dance and African dance. The perform the last Wednesday of every month at the National Theatre. They are physically energetic, sensous, playful and - what's the word - not acrobatic. Ah, athletic! That's the word! The performance was structured as a sample of different dances - tango, cha cha, merenge (sp?) with a MC's that introduce the next dance. In the end, the audience comes on stage and dances too. Something that thrilled me was that they recycled part of our set ( a skeletal series of frames) and lights in a gesture towards formal experimentation. They hung a curtain over the middle two panels and played with dancing in sillhouette, revelation of body parts over the edge of the curtain, and casting shadows of dancers on the curtain to multiply dancers in front of the curtain.
Outside, two European clowns perform to a group of hip hop dancers. Graffiti out of the mouth. It doesn't rain, but the ground is wet. I go out til 3 am for my friend's birthday and discover an Iranian restaurant near the US embassy called Flamin' Chicken that has an impressive amount of trust among its employees. popcorn black tea empty street
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