Today, I had the chance to experience my first real riot.  I’ve heard talks of riots past…where teargas flies, stones are thrown and almost anything goes.   I was expecting my first glimpse of such civil unrest to occur following the recent presidential elections.  However, I have to admit I was a little disappointed when Museveni gained a sixth term, and the country remained relatively peaceful despite widespread dissatisfaction over the conduct of elections.  It took steadily rising fuel and food prices along with increasing inflation rates for Ugandans to finally take to the streets.  Monday and Thursday were declared “Walk to Work” Days in protest of the increase in fuel prices.  Monday was relatively peaceful, but Thursday was a different story. 

Thursday morning, I awoke and went straight to my early morning Swahili lessons.  With my phone on silent, I missed the numerous different text messages and calls of warning from my Dag neighbors, leaving me oblivious to the chaos that was breaking out in Wandegeya, the neighborhood right outside of the campus gates. Apparently the Ugandan government wasn’t going to tolerate even the slightest bit of well-intentioned civil disobedience from its citizens.  As the people peacefully made their way to work on foot, riot police were sent to the streets, and chaos quickly ensued.  I even heard rumours that police were declaring it illegal to walk the streets at all in some neighborhoods, arresting and beating anyone who wasn’t in an automobile or on the back of a boda-boda.  Yep, police can do that here. 

Still innocently unaware of what had just occurred, I left class and made my way to Wandegeya for an appointment I had with a tailor there.  I left the gates of campus and immediately realized something was amiss.  On a street that is usually packed with chaotic traffic, there were only two cars.  All the shops were barred shut.  For a minute, I thought maybe it was just a public holiday.  I cautiously made my way to the main street, where an open-bed truck full of police men in full riot gear came screaming past me…this is when I knew something wasn’t right.  If you have ever seen a cop in full riot gear, you’ll understand the flood of panic I instantly felt.  I rushed back to the sanctuary of campus and Dag where I joined a group of neighbors watching the chaos unfold on television.

The next day, I awoke to find that the roles were reversed.  Again, I made my way to Wandegeya to follow through with the appointment I missed the day before.  This time, I found relative peace in the city but returned to utter chaos on campus.  Walking through the gates, I was passed by several groups of students carrying limp branches.  This to me was immediately a warning sign, as I knew enough about the culture here to understand that these students were part of a protest.  Turns out that the school administration recently announced that they would be raising tuition prices from 1 million shillings a semester to 6 million shillings a semester.  To all of my fellow CofC alumni, how’s that for a tuition increase?!

Some of the destruction on campus

My friend John came by a few hours later for a visit.  He had been battling campus all morning trying desperately to carry-out the finishing touches on his Master thesis and was witness to most of the chaos.  I must admit that it didn’t take much convincing before he had me willing to go out and explore a bit with him.  (Sorry Mom, but I just didn’t know when I would have the opportunity to witness something like this again.)  I was immediately on edge.  Within a few minutes of leaving my Hall, we encountered screaming people desperately running for cover.  After a few seconds, we realized the source of their panic as a heavily armoured truck with two giant guns perched on top rounded the bend in the road.  John told me to take cover in some nearby bushes, explaining that this was the same type of truck that had shot at him just the day before during the protests in his neighborhood. 

The remains of an earlier fire

Maybe I should have turned around then, but I just had to see what else was happening.  It’s curiosity that killed the cat, right?  Next, we came across the entrance to one of the local slums where people were running in fear from a group of policemen taunting them with the threat of teargas.  We continued on, casually passing groups of students who were constantly yelling for the two Muzungus to come join their protest.  This is the ironic part of protests here.  If you join, you will be beaten and teargassed by the cops.  If you don’t join, then the students will beat you for not supporting them.  They’ll beat you if you do and they’ll beat you if don’t.  So what do you do?   You run!  Pretty counter-productive if the point of the protest is supposed to be to gain student support.  That concept seems to go right over the heads of the students here, though. 

As we continued on, we came across the aftermath of the early morning riots.  Vendors’ stalls had been overturned and destroyed.  The charred remains of fires were littering the streets where tires, limbs and furniture were burned in protest.  We were slowly making our way back to Dag and taking a few photos along the way when we suddenly found our paths blocked by a stand-off between riot police and the boys of one of the Undergraduate residence halls.  This is how things went for the next hour or so…the boys would thrown stones and antagonize the police.  The police would come in with their gear, fire teargas into the dorm and then retreat.  A few minutes later, the boys would resurface, their faces protected by hankies, and continue their antagonism, chanting phrases such as “We want teargas.” The police would advance again and the teargas would continue to flow.  It almost seemed like a game that schoolchildren would play.  Who is going to have the last word?  Who is going to give up first?  How much can the boys get away with before the police act? At one point, the police even pretended to depart by loading up their truck.  The boys were lured from their hiding places by a false sense of security before the police turned and, full-out, opened fire of teargas canisters on them.  Then they left for real, mockingly waving good-bye to the boys as they drove off. 

Water cannon extinguishing flames

Riot police getting into formation

Storming the boy's dormitory to fire off teargas

The fire that was set outside my dorm later that afternoon

It was an eye-opening experience for me.  After my little escapade, John and I returned to the relative calm of Dag and had a brief political discussion.  With the recent events in Egypt and Libya (just to name a few of the most obvious examples) there are murmurs of change almost everywhere.  Uganda itself is a country that has existed under the same leadership of Museveni and his NRM party for the past 25 years.  You can almost feel it in the air here…change is coming.  But how?  How do you bring about change in a country where people can’t take to the streets without fear of being beaten, gassed, or worse?  How do you bring about change in a country where the president has been in power for almost half of his lifetime and still seems pretty comfortable?  How do you bring about change in a country where over sixty different tribes make achieving any form of real national unity a particularly challenging task?  These are all questions that Ugandans must answer for themselves. I hear whispers of change…Uganda, I’ll be watching.