Free Terroir by Graham Mort Page A

blistering now, the sky almost white with heat. A few black kites soared in thermals above the shantytown to my right. I passed a group of boda - boda riders straddling their Chinese motorcycles and hoping for a fare. Then down Kampala Road, slackening my pace a little. I’d had to learn to walk slowly. Heat shivered on the tarmac like white spirit evaporating. There was a dead dog at the kerbside, bloated with heat. The stench was a stifling muzzle of decay, sickening. A few years ago the same road had been strewn with human bodies.
    I walked past the area they called Bat Valley where thousands of fruit bats roosted at night. I’d watched them earlier in the week from the guesthouse terrace, flying in their thousands, flapping into a yellow tropical storm. I passed a half - built hotel clad in bamboo scaffolding that never seemed to get any bigger. Then a Shell garage where security guards in blue tracksuits and baseball caps lounged in the shade with cheap, pump - action shotguns. I saw a woman with dust in her hair, blinded by cataracts, sprawled under a blanket, too weak even to beg. I put a few coins into her hand and she stared through me as if I didn’t exist.
    The sun was really bending my head. Usually I made a point of never getting drunk in Africa. For obvious reasons. One was to avoid doing something stupid. The other was feeling like shit. But that would pass. Hangovers do. There were worse things here and you didn’t have to look far to find them. I bought some more water from a boy lugging a box of Rwenzori Spring and walked on past the tennis courts where two Brits were playing a feeble game of doubles with a couple of local girls. They didn’t look as if they knew one end of the racquet from another. I bent down to tie a lace and saw the leather was cracking on my shoes. I had an idea that this visit I’d find what I was looking for.
    I turned off the main drag to the market at Nakasero, teeming with Saturday shoppers and piled with cheap household goods: bolts of cloth, clothing, electrical plugs and sockets, pots and pans, plastic ware, knives, fruit and vegetables. The food was piled up neatly in pyramids – oranges, peppers, pineapples, watermelons, eggplant, cassava, passion fruit, tomatoes and Irish potatoes. Then an open - air butchers where goat meat darkened in the sun. Then a whole area dedicated to plumbing and tiling, its chrome and enamel gleaming. Coils of copper and plastic piping. Baths and toilets and bidets lined up against the pavement. Bidets? It was hard to find a bath plug in most hotels. The marketplace was pure sensory overload. A press of humanity from all over Uganda and beyond. A daze of sweat and heat and talk. Muslim. Christian. Poverty - stricken. Laughing. Proud. Abject. Above all, on the move. It was Babel. It was Kampala. It was the pulse of Africa. The pressure of life; the pull of death.
    Beggars reached out from where they lay, twisted legs on the stained earth. There were skips piled with rotting vegetables, marabou storks picking over the rubbish. A stench of decay and diesel fuel. Charcoal sellers laboured, grey with dust. I passed a group of women cooking matoke and beef stew in huge aluminium pans. They were laughing, eyeing me up as I went past. Mzungu . The only white man walking in the market. Mzungu . Sometimes they called it out as a joke. Hey, Mzungu! At the heart of the market was the bus station, glittering with glass and steel under hoardings advertising Guinness and Nokia where hundreds of mini - bus taxis – matatu – gathered like a migratory herd. Their touts were busy doing business, soliciting passengers, heaving their bags into place. From here to anywhere.
    Beyond Nakasero and the bus station lay Owino market, equally vast and equally hot and tumultuous, where you could buy anything from clothing to crockery, baskets to bicycle parts. There were sacks of maize meal and rice, bunches of plantain, sugar cane, soap,