Entry fourteen - London and cosmopolitanism

A World War I statue in London.

I got back from London around 8 am on New Years Day after a loud and bumpy flight. They announced that it was New Years (GMT) somewhere north of Libya, but no champagne. Entebbe and Kampala, though not deserted, were certainly much calmer than on most Monday mornings. The special hire guys at the airport refused to budge from their demand for ten US dollars for a five minute ride to the Entebbe taxi park. Under normal circumstances I might have bargained a bit harder (I was hoping for something about a quarter of that), but being exhausted and having just come from probably the most expensive city I've ever visited, I gave in fairly easily.

The two weeks in London were fun. My parents stocked me up with books and sunscreen among other stuff, and I got my fix of cold weather for the year - and a cold as well, on my last day no less. We stayed in Covent Garden, in the heart of the downtown shopping / tourist district. After learning to stay off of a few particularly crowded streets and venture outside of the city centre, I ended up liking the city very well. Walking around downtown is a veritable history (or art and architecture) lesson in itself. However, it is tempting to imagine what it would look like had it not been for the Great Fire of 1666 that destroyed most of the city.

Bordering Trafalgar Square is Uganda House, which houses the Ugandan embassy, and still has its cornerstone proclaiming that it was opened by Idi Amin in 1975. A Ugandan Christmas dinner was advertised, complete with matooke and posho, for thirty pounds (sixty USD)! Although this is probably the most expensive matooke dinner in the world, it is not out of step with London's often unbelievably high costs. Perhaps once upon a time when the US dollar wasn't in such a sorry state it may have been different. Things were generally the same (or slightly less) in pounds than they would be in dollars in the US - though the pound is worth twice as much. As a friend who used to live in London warned, don't think about living there unless you are earning pounds, preferably lots of them.

Although it is hard to get more than a fleeting impression from such a short visit, I was most intrigued by areas such as Brixton and Brick Road with diverse (cultural, economic, gastronomic) communities, the former mostly West Indian and African and the latter mostly East Indian. Although Brixton is probably most famous for riots in the 1980s or from an odd Black Uhuru or The Clash song, it reminded me slightly of a larger version of Kensington Market in Toronto. Stalls in both the indoor and outdoor market sell everything from Bob Marley t-shirts to plantain to Nigerian DVDs (Nigeria has a large film industry that produces an unbelievable amount of horrible low-budget movies). Although there is a substantial Caribbean community, I also heard Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Hausa (I think), and numerous types of English on two short visits.

In some ways I miss that type of "cosmopolitanism" that is found so easily in London, Toronto and New York. While there are people from nearly every corner of the globe in Kampala, there are far fewer of them, and the city's "internationalism" is slightly more subtle. While you can walk down the street potentially hearing all fifty-two of Uganda's languages, not including Arabic, English, Hindi, Kiswahili and Kinyarwanda, it is hard to compete with the three cities mentioned above when it comes to diversity in language, food, fashion or material culture. However, that type of "cosmopolitanism" can lead to a style of parochialism that is less common here. As a Canadian I met here remarked about Toronto, it is one of the more parochial places in Canada because so many people there are convinced that there is nothing of importance outside the city. Rural Canadians are presumably conscious of an "outside world", while Torontonians are more likely to think that they know all they need to know about the outside world by eating Chinese food on Dundas Street, watching Brazilian films at the Bloor Cinema and looking at South American art at the ROM.

While this is a bit of an exaggeration and does not really apply to anyone I know, there is a case to be made for calling many urbanites back street parochialists. A rural Ugandan who has made it through primary school is likely to speak more languages, know more world geography, and have much more curiosity about the world outside his/her village or country than the most sophisticated New York urbanite, whose interest in the world may be confined to the NYC city limits. S/he is also plugged in, if on an unequal level, to global culture (listening to American and Tanzanian hip-hop, watching Nigerian and Indian films, following British football, practicing truly global religions); is dependent on the world economy (selling coffee or other crops for export to Europe, washing clothes from the US in soap from Kenya, lighting paraffin lamps from India containing fuel from the Mid-East with matches from China); and vulnerable to international politics (debates at the United Nations, the international price of oil, the whims of a few voters in Ohio, the workings of the international court, and the aspirations of terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan all directly influence civil wars in northern Uganda and over the borders in Congo and Sudan). Although most Ugandans have less access to information about, and less power to shape, global cultural, economic and political realities, there is an awareness and interest in 'the world' that is often lacking in supposedly more cosmopolitan centres.

While I wouldn't mind a bottle of Red Stripe and a plate of fried duck while watching Battle of Algiers or listening to Manu Chao, I do appreciate being in a worldly conscious society. So I'll settle for some goat pilao, matooke, and a glass of passion-fruit juice over some South African sit-coms on TV. (But once the DVD player is fixed tomorrow, I'll be watching Easy Rider with some Chicken Tika Masaala and a Castle Lager.)

I hope everyone's holidays went well, and all the best in 2007.