Interlude

Abstract

The bus careers down the pitted highway, kicking up red-orange dust. Within, we are packed shoulder to shoulder—businessmen from Kampala visiting their families in the villages, women with sacks of sugar, salt, and soap to trade or give away. On the return trip, they will carry produce from their home farms: sweet potatoes, plantains, groundnuts, mangoes, pineapples, and passion fruit, as well as live goats and chickens. Some will also bring large gourds full of home-brewed beer, or, discreetly, plastic jugs full of the illegal distillate known as waragi. I am touring Senator Extravaganza events scheduled along the main eastern highway, from Jinja to Mbale, Kumi, Soroti, Lira. There will be one event in each town, an overnight stay, then back on the bus. Out the window, the scenery changes; papyrus swamps give way to small, intricate family farms, with hoe-tilled rows of sweet potato and cotton shaded by banana leaves. The land grows drier and flattens out. Mt. Elgon looms on the horizon like a mirage. I try to imagine the landscape as Godfrey Alibatya sees it—as a variegated map of folk cultures, each with its own distinctive instruments, dances, songs, and folk stories. Go 30 miles in any direction, he assures me, and I will hear something new.