"You will look into the eyes of seeming strangers and know you have come home to your clan."**
Autumn 2007. The Great Uganda Floods. I only know that my daughter, 22, is somewhere near a refuge damp in Gulu, Uganda, when the first pictures filter in of the worst floods in three decades in Northeast Uganda. She is touring a refuge camp with her Rotary International mentor, Larry Rhodes. It is days before I receive word from her, from some remote internet connection near the tiny village of Maundo that their van made it through just hours before the road closed. Several dozen people lost their lives on the road she traveled that day.
*Behold Africa, Swahili
**Indigenous Polynesian prophesy.
"ExLRA boy soldiers who had recently returned from the bush (in 2007), making rocket stove bricks. This was near one of the large Displaced Persons Camps near Gulu. We asked people at the camp how they felt about the return of those who had been terrorizing them, how they could be so welcoming. Their reply was, "how could we do other? These are our children."Larry Rhodes, 2007.
Recalling their 2007 visit, Rhodes, recently returned from another Ugandan trip, doesn't recall any talk of climate change causing the flooding. No, it was more about yet another disaster wrecking havoc on a country seemingly cursed with misfortunes. Yet another African nation whose history has been so catastrophically re-written by the return of the 'White Man' whose ancestral roots are umbilically intertwined with those of indigenous Africans dating back some 3.5 million years to origins in the Great Rift Valley. Link
How things have changed in just three years. Now, he says, even the Chairman of Maundo, knows his people are facing something more unforgiving than Mother Nature. Even he, who still speaks of sacrificing goats to clear impurities from water wells, is acquainted with the western-driven devil of 'climate change.' Link
Uganda, Part II
Murchison Falls National Park. Home to wildlife, the source of the Nile and the Tullow oil fields.
Uganda. First invaded in the 1860s by the infamous British expedition which located the source of the Nile at Jinja. Ethnically diverse, with one powerful region (the Buganda) civically evolved and technologically advanced through wars and interactions with Egyptians, Arabs, and both Protestant and Catholic missionaries. Ripe for the successful application of the trusted and true tenets of colonialism: divide and conquer, rule indirectly by favoring and empowering a select group (the Buganda); and use diversity as a means of control -- accentuating differences to incite conflict.
Even after independence, even after over a hundred years of political and economic corruption, complete cultural and ethnic debasement, topped off by an environmental death blow, Uganda still remains enslaved, blinded by the ever elusively empty promises of some future recompense. Uganda, never capable of unifying, remains still incapable of tossing aside the impinged yoke of wanton imperialism, remaining one of the poorest of all African nations, despite its blessed origins -- highly fertile fields which once yielded sumptuous crops fed by the unparalleled rich sediment of numerous lakes and the Nile, an ideal geographic location. First plundered by the greed of Egyptian slave dealers, then raped again by the indelible imprint of occupation and subjugation. Divided against itself. And, as if this weren't enough, today, a mere stone's throw away from where British explorer John Hanning Speke discovered, in 1858, the source of the White Nile, Yoweri Museveni and his government throw open the doors to this decimated paradise at the bidding of huge Western petrochemical companies. To what end, Museveni? So that you and your family, perhaps accompanied by a few favored members of your cartel, might caravan 21st-century style to those regions of the world which will remain habitable after the apocalyptic shock of a plus 2 degree rise in temperature?
You, Museveni, are but one of the puppet monsters whose phantom gilded strings sail, mindlessly misguided in their arrogance, above the ruins of the roots of the human race.
Beads and Mirrors
In an article published by The Monitor last week, Professor Morris Ogenga Latigo, Leader of the Opposition in Parliament and FDC Deputy President, calls out for transparency in recent $1.5 billion deal between "our greedy political elites" and international oil companies.
"Since it emerged in late 2009 that Tullow Oil was selling its interests in Uganda, statements have been made on oil to reassure, entice and even confuse ordinary Ugandans," Latigo writes. "The oil companies have vigorously defended themselves; government officials have painted pictures of hope; and President Museveni has himself given assurance that oil money will be used to build infrastructure. Yet vital questions remain unasked.
With our corruption, why did we not see our usual predators out and prowling as the oil sale saga played itself out? How were the exploration blocks delineated and given out in the first place, and what political interests influenced the process?
How come ENI, of international repute, did not know Heritage Oil's rights of first purchase when negotiating with Tullow? What are the implications of these sales to the development costs of our oil and the first flow of revenue to government? And what is in all these for ordinary Ugandans and the people of Bunyoro and Acholi where the oil fields are located?
... You see, this sale is like the roasting of a huge, very fat, in-calf Nkore cow in the middle of Serengeti Game Park with all its hyenas, wild dogs and foxes, without these predators stirring at all.
(snip)
Look at the social responsibility record dangled by these oil companies: a $5,000 classroom, a $10,000 maternity unit, and even a $2,000 donation of school desks. Did President Museveni, under whom all these are happening, once not castigate Africa's past traditional leaders for selling Africa for mere beads and mirrors as is happening to our oil now? link
Observations. Uganda: Larry Rhodes, January 2010.
Source of the Nile at Jinja, Uganda by neiljs
"We spent a few days of R&R at the world famous Murchison Falls National Park, just to the north of Lake Albert, where the oil operation is getting into full swing. We took a boat up to the Falls, and the guide showed us the high water mark...the level the Nile River used to be. He announced, as if it were another interesting piece of trivia, that at the current rate of decline, the Nile would be gone at Murchison in 50 years."
In the northeast, near Lira, Rhodes visited Okwaloagabo, "one of the villages rebuilt from scratch three years back after the villagers were sent away from the Displaced Persons Camp --with no tools and only three weeks worth of food. This is a picture of Yapi Sam Bob, the President of the Lira Rotary Club, explaining the loss of the cowpea crop (you can see the cowpeas are black) as a result of drought. He said the crops grow with a lot more difficulty because of global warming, and that rains were no longer following the former patterns." (Photo by Jerry Rhodes)
"Okumu John, our host in the village of Maundo in Eastern Uganda, said that when he was a child in the village, there was thick vegetation, many wild animals. He saw dangerous snakes every day on the way to school. Today, in most of the villages, all in this area of Uganda, the dense forests are gone, the animals are pretty much gone, and each family’s plot of land of a few acres gets smaller with each passing generation. The problem, Okumu explains to me, is that the plots are too small to farm, providing just enough acreage to create the large casava, ground nut, corn, gardens that provide subsistance to more than ninety percent of the rural population. The lack of crop rotation and of using permaculture or organic farming practices such as mulching, have led to a depletion of nutrients in the soil. Uganda used to produce for export; now it seems to only be the large farms of the southwest that export such crops as coffee and banana."
In the north and east, there is a growing awareness that arid conditions (the conditions that are marking much of northern Kenya and southern Sudan) are becoming the norm. There were dozens of starvations in North Eastern Uganda this past year –they didn’t make our news, but despite serious lack of nutrition and protein in the diet in Uganda, death by starvation has been rare. The cause? Take people living in abject poverty of under $1 a day (way under), no safety nets, very little that could be called a medical system, and give them an extra dry season. One growing season of crop failure from drought is enough. And unfortunately, the weather patterns in Uganda are changing as they are everywhere else in the world. When my group arrived in January—the "dry" month, or at least most dry—we experience a fair amount of rain for the first couple of weeks. Okumu says, "There are no more seasons—anything can happen anytime." Even the village leader, Chairman Oboth, talks of "climate change."
"Chombo cha kuzama hakina usukani."*
A few weeks back at Sunday meditation services at Green Gulch Farm, Buddhist priest and master gardener Wendy Johnson speaks of how she wakes most nights in terror unlike anything she has experienced before. She is speaking of the perilous conditions the human race is collectively experiencing, the sense that there is no escape. She asks the sangha if anyone else is having this experience. More than 2/3 of some hundred-odd people raise their hands.
And so Saturday, at the conclusion of the State of the World Forum's Women 2020 Climate Change conference, as a group of some 20 diehard participants gather around the tree we are planting to offset the carbon cost of our gathering, the leader asks that we each silently make a vow. A vow to bring forward into the world.
I think of the terror that twists my soul each morning, the sense of resources and time and sanity and choices slipping like sand gone slightly mad through an hourglass at ever increasing velocities. I visualize that terror, as it has traditionally presented itself to me: the image of myself, at worst a mere ten or fifteen years out: I am penniless, homeless, with no means of transportation. Surrounded by strangers. No water or food. No family nearby. The world around me bears no resemblance to what I once recognized as home.
And it suddenly occurs to me that if it has to end this way, if it is to end this way, my vow is to travel, sooner than later, to my true home. I would rather face the end from where it all began, 3.5 million years ago. Someone deep in the Zaire River valley. When the wonder of it all began. Where the wonder of it all is most likely to end. If we do not act. Now.
*A sinking vessel needs no navigation. Swahili. Kamau Njoroge
Part I of the Uganda series: Kampala, Uganda, Case Study I launched the EcoJustice series last September. These two diaries are part of the Ecojustice Africa series, being researched and written by rb137, sven and boatsie.
Photocredits not referenced above
Maundo schoolgirl by Bryan Wilson
EXLRA boys building rocketstove by Larry Rhodes
Bore Hole Maundo by Larry Rhodes
Source of the Nile at Jinja, Uganda by neiljs
the dress seller by nirsha
"Uganda - climate change and poverty by Time to Click
Maundo school boy carrying water by Bryan Wilson
EcoJustice series discuss environmental justice, or the disproportionate impacts on human health and environmental effects on minority communities in the U.S. and around the world. All people have a human right to clean, healthy and sustainable communities.
Almost 4 decades ago, the EPA was created partially in response to the public health problems caused in our country by environmental conditions, which included unhealthy air, polluted rivers, unsafe drinking water and waste disposal. Oftentimes, the answer has been to locate factories and other pollution-emitting facilities in poor, culturally diverse, or minority communities.
Please join EcoJustice hosts on Monday evenings at 7PM PDT. Please email us if you are interested in hosting.