Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
“Africans don’t like maps and they don’t use maps,” laughed my Ugandan colleague as he handed Mike Smith’s map to me. Mike wanted me to see the turns in the road, the towns and villages, and the geographical features of the country through which we were traveling from west to east as we headed to Sipi Falls.

“What do you do when you want to get somewhere?” I asked. “Do you just start out in the general direction?” But they laughed as though my question were hardly worth answering. Even without maps, Ugandans are a people on the move and they always seem to end up where they want to be. Ben, our Saturday afternoon speaker for the retreat, told us the chilling story of how Idi Amin had punched him in the face, causing the loss of his eye, and how he had followed the railroad track by foot to escape being murdered by Amin’s henchmen. It took him nine days to walk from Kampala to the Kenyan border to safety, the railroad mapping his path securely.

Ben, at the time the editor of one of Uganda’s English language newspapers, hadn’t caught a typographical error in the headlines. The headline was supposed to read, “Amin Raps Nyerere” or some such other African leader. Someone had inadvertently put an “e” after the “p” in “Raps” and Ben had not caught it before it went to press. Amin was not amused. “Ben is one of the few important people who survived the Amin years,” one of the Ugandans told me later.

Oddly enough, the Amin history is being re-written among some younger Ugandans. “Amin really cared about Ugandans,” is something we’ve heard from several of them. One feels chills down the spine as though someone had just said, “Hitler really cared for the Jews” or “Pol Pot really cared for the Cambodians.” Here is a photo of a man named Simon who is among Amin’s admirers. But I digress from my map thoughts.
The divergent viewpoints about the relative importance of maps have become clearer to me this week, the first week of a class for me. Since the students do not have access to textbooks and couldn’t afford them if they were available, I selected the chapters I wanted the second year graduate students to read from three different textbooks and staff copied them for me, a copy for each of seven students. With the course syllabi for this semester—I am essentially the graduate program of nursing while I’m here—and the copied chapters, the stack I prepared to give each of them was about a ream of paper.

I emailed the group on Wednesday that I was looking forward to meeting with them at 8:30 Friday morning, September 11. The semester was mapped out and the first day was mapped out. I prepared what I thought was an elegant power point; when I previewed it with my Dad, he said, “That’s pretty boring stuff. I feel sorry for those students.” It was an introduction to leadership theory, “great man” theory, trait theory, situational theory and so on. I had to agree with him. How was I going to drone on about leadership theories with Ugandan nurses, adults, as overextended as adult learners are in the U.S.? They deserved better than this.

Thursday morning, Jemimah and I met with the RN-BNS students, about 40 of them, all mature, working RNs whose years of experience ranged from 5 to 30. Areas of specialty were equally diverse, many in HIV/AIDS treatment and counseling. I soon figured out that when nurses in Uganda say they specialize in “counseling,” it’s most likely HIV counseling. Nurses in mental health usually specified “psychiatric nursing” as their specialty. Out of 40 some nurses, there were about 5 or so who identified themselves as psychiatric nurses.
Thursday afternoon we received a call that Jeanne, a neighbor from decades ago when we lived in Ohio and an international rural development specialist, was on her way from Iganga along with two Ugandans. They would be stopping by for dinner in the evening. We had also received a message that there would be a cookie and soft drink meeting with the American students here on campus at the vice-chancellor’s house the next afternoon and we were encouraged to bring cookies.

It was while baking cookies and preparing a spaghetti dinner that we heard the first shots. We thought at first they were fireworks but soon the sirens started and we began wondering what was going on. Jeanne, Kevin (a young Ugandan woman who does rural development) and Godfrey (their driver) arrived. In the local culture, a woman is called by her first name until she has her first child. Then she is called “Mama plus the child’s name.” Kevin’s first child was a daughter they named Charity so we soon were calling her “Mama Charity.” (See photo of Jeanne with my Dad in our living room.)
With their cell phone connections, Mama Charity and Godfrey let us know that Kampala was having riots and five people were already dead. The violence was spreading to Mukono, our town. After dinner (see photo), it was decided that Jeanne should spend the night in the guest house and that Mama Charity and Godfrey would see if they could make it to their homes in Kampala. They were gone less than 15 minutes; the main road was blocked with a truck on fire in the middle of it and other vehicles were burning here and there on the side of the road. I began to wonder how this would impact my Friday morning class since all my students live in Kampala and commute to UCU. Sounds of shooting and sirens continued on through the evening (and through Friday).

The guest house began filling up with people. Rebecca, the guest house cook and housekeeper, made it home late at night but did not make it back in the morning. I was to start teaching at 8:30, just the time our house began filling up with the guest house people looking for breakfast. Bob and I hurriedly began emptying out our kitchen of all breakfast edibles. A very young German couple looking rumpled and forlorn. They said they were high school teachers through a German government program. (Mark, another of the expats living here had picked them up from off the streets, the young man with a bloody nose.) A dignified man from Rwanda, a theology professor whose doctoral research was on the East African revival in the 1950s, a subject of great interest to Dad. Godfrey. Mama Charity. Jeanne. We rushed off, Bob carrying the stack of copied book chapters, to the nursing skills lab, so that at least the teacher would be there at 8:30.
I had text messaged the students to come if they could and to phone or text me if they couldn’t. Two texted to say they hoped to come. No one showed up until 9:30. They had all had troubles getting through the city. Moses, the one male student and a psychiatric nurse, finally phoned, saying his taxi had been hit by a tear gas canister and all the passengers had had to scatter on foot. He and his family were safely home. Moses is also a medical officer in the Ugandan military.

The students were rattled. We spent about half an hour in prayer. The students explained to me why people were rioting. The tribal area in which Kampala and Mukono are located has a tribal king. He had wanted to travel to one of his villages to visit the people. He had sent a representative ahead to prepare for his visit and the elected government had forbidden this person passage. The king’s subjects took it as a personal insult to themselves and, already with many grievances against the elected government, let their anger boil over into violence when a demonstration intended to be peaceful was challenged by the police and military. Then the poor, unemployed, angry young men of the streets saw an opportunity to vent and loot and seized it. It was all quite understandable.

It was also my introductory leadership lesson. After going over the syllabus, my slides went up and I used the riots, the differing types of leadership and followership we had observed in the past 24 hours, to discuss with the students how scholars have thought about the abstraction: “leadership.” One couldn’t have had a hotter case study. We had great interaction with tea and some of the cookies I’d baked the day before for a break. I dismissed them at 1:00 because they were naturally concerned about getting to their homes and we had pretty much covered what we needed to for the day.

We received several phone calls and emails from the embassy concerned about our safety. But neither we nor the other people living at UCU have felt threatened; it has remained calm and secure here and the situation overall seems to be calming down. My class map was sufficiently adaptable for the conditions. And now I must prepare the next power point.