Kampala

In Kampala rain puddles and refuse pile up like wasted promises. It is a dusty sarcophagus of a city, its edges coated in burnt-red clay, as if something long abandoned were being carelessly unearthed. African cities like Kampala lack a vertical axis; they spread out horizontally into the bare hillsides, no building taller than ten stories. The buildings themselves are half Havanna and half downtown Fort Langley: Soviet-inspired Brutalism meets Pioneer Theme Park, with three decades of war layered on like a torn bandage. Indian cities are maybe uglier, definitely busier and smellier, but they have a manic dynamism Kampala and Nairobi lack. Indian cities are cancerous - they proliferate; turn away for a moment and they will wash over you, victorious. Kampala has jettisoned the illusion of forward movement. There is always more noise and more traffic and more people than yesterday, but it is largely movement without purpose, movement made to alleviate a long boredom, like shifting one's weight from foot to foot, endlessly. The artist Robert Smithson would have loved it here, an entire city dedicated to his pet project, entropy; proof that things must indeed run down, an antidote in crumbling concrete and abandoned engine block to the mirror-shined fetish that dominates Western cities: Eternal Progress Forever And Ever, Amen.

We eat at packed middle-class restaurants that remind me of the Ovaltine Cafe on East Hastings: cigarette stained ceiling, dark decaying wood, tepid tea sugared with wasted time. These are places where human vulnerability shifts to the forefront of the mind. Kampala in general is like that: one walks through its streets as if in the past, but without a sense of nostalgia. There is no yearning for an idealized history here, no frightened turning away from the future; it is rather that the future has simply not found fertile soil here. There is a yesterday and a now but no tomorrow. The city and its people seem stuck between an impossible to escape past and an equally impossible to envision future. The hope that is said to have infused the county a decade ago has gone, a memory rubbed to keep one warm on a moist evening.

Like most things in Africa, accommodation in Kampala falls between extremes: there are the pricey tourist enclaves set in idyllic (trellis of Begonia, neo-colonial brickwork) but stifling gated compounds in neighbourhoods similar to Vancouver's Shaughnessy; or there are the vast concrete and corrugated steel transport hotels lurking over the matatu stands and night markets downtown. Our hotel, the 'Sun City', would be a good place to bunker down in were one engaged in a month or two long urban guerrilla siege. This being Uganda, it was likely once used as such. Hotels like this provide complimentary filthy sandals to keep one's feet off the complimentary filthy floor.

Our room is painted the New Autumn Collection Colour of Leper Flesh, a daring blend of pasty greenish grey-brown augmented by highlights of grease stain, spittle and mould. Single bare bulb. Were I Kafka or Camus I would claim it a fitting place to hang oneself in. Above the bed someone has scrawled something in Aramaic, likely: "Allah will flay the infidel sinners." But we are married, so Allah permits us to sleep in peace. Dayna has grown delightfully fond of a Raid-like aerosol product; she sprays the room down and we listen for the squirmy plop-plop of dropping carapaces. Nope, no Buddhists here. We kill things - sometimes gleefully.

Down the lightless hall the hookers lounge chain-smoking on a musty collapsed sofa. Acid wash miniskirts, big hair, pink lipstick matching pink fingernails matching pink stilettos. They twitch and titter like garish flamingos, all show. Terminal boredom is a terrible affliction, perhaps one of the worst - and the Sun City hookers command a variety of exhausted boredom entirely their own.

A skinny guy with a head too big for his body, dressed in a baggy sports jersey and fake Nikes, is pulling a woman up the stairs. She is carrying one of her soiled pink high-heels, and the clumpy awkwardness of being dragged upstairs in one shoe is slowing her. The guy is impatient, wheezing and tugging alternately at her hand, arm, shoulder; she is doing a weird sideways wobble, trying both to hurry and not fall on her face. Neither speaks nor smiles; their faces are like two people nearly asleep in front of the television. The silence and absence of expression turn the slapstick absurdity of their movement into something wretched and surreal; and you've seen it all before but tonight you're thinking: "What art is worth this sadness? What line or image or object?"

The night market stretches for ten square blocks beneath us. A man below is screeching into a megaphone of such shitty quality that his words blur into one long prehensile moan of distortion. His tone suggests he is delivering a racist rant to a crowd of incensed bigots, but every now and then he slows for a moment and utters a solemn "Amen." Kampala has a large Roman Catholic population; the animists of the jungle found it a relatively small spiritual step to the mutilation and brimstone of Catholicism. A few buildings over a woman is singing from a balcony. Her voice is an unfulfilled desire, it undermines the screaming man's righteousness, softens it, and returns it to him with wings. Further off the unsurprising thud of bass issues from a nightclub opened illegally in an abandoned building. There is also a parade of drunken drums somewhere, epileptic, and the constant subterranean crash of traffic. Noise is a city like Kampala.

The front of the hotel is where transport trucks unload their wares to be sorted and sold to the market vendors. Gangs of sullen labourers sit idly for hours, then leap up to unload cargo: stacks of empty buckets, bags of shoes, rugs, cushions, boxes of unknown contents - all carried on their heads. When a truck arrives the sidewalk vanishes and we have to crawl over people and crates to reach the street. Heavy boxes are thrown at random from the roofs of trucks, and if one lands on you, tough shit. At night the entire place is converted into an open-air kitchen with bonfires of garbage to cook over. The labourers and drivers eat, smoke and gamble, served stewed goat and plantain on squares of discarded cardboard scavenged by street-kids. The men, satiated and drunk, punch at one another, or snatch greedily at the huddle of teetering pink-lipped hookers, urging them into alleys and truck-cabs. A drunk throws a harmlessly irritating arm around me and yells: "You Muzungo! Me black man! Me like you!". "Good!" I yell back, smiling, and we share a few intimate moments of the drunk man smothering/sober man escaping dance.

The naked baby is sitting plump-bottomed in the muck on the sidewalk, her outstretched hand no bigger than a pack of matches; you are nudged by someone in the crowd and forced to step directly over her, lifting your leg up and over precisely, as if to avoid trampling a lovely flower in a friend's garden, and you think: "I am stepping over a child." And when the thought fades you are grateful for a while, and then that fades, also.

Kampala spreads across seven hills. At night blackouts sweep through, entire neighbourhoods winking salaciously. The last step out of the hotel and onto the street isn't there. It's not broken - it isn't there, as if the builder suddenly ran out of concrete and said: "Fuck it. A two foot drop here is fine." But a two-foot drop is sometimes decidedly unfine, like when it's as dark as only an unelectrified African capital can be, when darkness takes on the symbolic tone and quality of something other than itself, when it reaches out and touches back, and you are stumbling hands-out, feelers-out, trying to remember where that seven-foot deep pit you noticed earlier is, because it would amuse the crowd of nearly invisible drivers, labourers and hookers if the muzungo fell into the pit and got all broke up. But instead you make it to the missing step and are hassled one last time in that uniquely African way: "I'm hassling you, yes, but I'm hassling you in such an insincere and disinterested manner because we both know that, ultimately, this is all your fault, and I am therefore absolutely entitled to hassle you, obligated even, and you cannot get uncomfortable or remotely frustrated with my hassling you, since of course this is your fault, and the only thing that can maybe change this is for you to give me something, anything, right now, which of course I shouldn't even have to ask for because I deserve it, it is owed. And besides, muzungo, the real issue is not the missing bottom step or the pit or the baby or even my hassling you, no, the real issue is what the fuck are you doing on the street of an African city after dark?!"

And walking up to your room past the shot-gun guard you begin thinking of warm cinnamon buns, sticky and sweet and as large as your hand.