‘Kelele City’ and the agony of being a helpless resident

"Noise” may be an apt one-word description of the city where I live. Indeed, anyone coming from a sane, serene city (like Nairobi) cannot help wondering how we survive with any semblance of eardrums in Kampala.

I was living in Nairobi when I wrote my play, A Hole in the Sky. But now I realise I must have been thinking of Kampala when I got one of my characters, Nguvu Kikongwe, to describe what he calls “a place unfit for love”.

Love cannot thrive, he says, in a polluted environment, especially one polluted with noise.

A noisy place, muses the old man (as his name Kikongwe suggests), is unfit for love. “Love requires a quiet, tranquil space, where eye can speak to eye, and heart can call to heart, even without a word being spoken.”

Unfortunately, such spaces are increasingly becoming an endangered species, all over Kampala.

Take Gayaza, for example, the suburb where I live, some 16 kilometres from the city centre. When I moved here, just under five years ago, it was a quiet, leafy, semi-rural neighbourhood.

It was almost entirely residential, with our modest bungalows dotted around our modest plots.

Today, it is a brazen chaos of high-rise apartments, shanty shops and “churches”, kiosks and improvised workshops, and bars and nightclubs. The country road running through it is now a cross between a traffic-choked street and a racing interstate highway.

The road cannot be widened or even provided with pavements because many of the structures we mentioned sit bang on what would have been part of the road reserve.

That is the view. Now listen to the sound. Well, you do not have to listen. Just brace yourself for the most violent non-stop assault your ears will ever encounter. Looking for another one-word picture of this hellish score, I can only think of: pandemonium. This Greek-derived word means a collection of all the devils.

I think it is the 17th century English poet, John Milton, author of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, who popularised “pandemonium” in our usage. He uses it to describe the place where all the rebellious devils end up, following their ejection from heaven.

I suppose there is quite a bit of fire out there, considering that Pandemonium is the capital city of Hell. But in the popular mind, and in mine, pandemonium is first and foremost noise.

Back to Gayaza, our “pan-demonic” orchestra plays to the background of endless coughs and pops of bodabodas, vrooms of cars and vans, rumbles and roars of trucks and trailers.

Over these leaps the cacophony of electronic “music” from every shop and kiosk, at full volume, competing with the “entertainment” from the day and night clubs and the emphatic preaching and prayers of the spirit churches.

As if that were not enough, it appears as if anyone is free to carry a hailer or public address pack and yell through it to their heart’s content. The users range from the humblest market stall vendor of the freshest spring onions this side of the Nile to the holiest good news street preacher this side of life.

We even have mounted PAs, on the top of cars and the back of pickups which ply our street, blaring out information on Chameleone’s next performance venue or the latest virility-boosting concoction.

But the night clubs are the worst pests. We all know that Ugandans love “enjoying” (enjoying themselves, that is). But what kind of enjoyment is provided by the twenty-four-seven playing of raga and other types of pop music at maximum intensity and with extreme amplification?

I understand that in many places such measures are used as harassment tactics, as the Americans did when they were trying to drag Gen Manuel Noriega out of his hideout in Panama in 1989.

Of those who patronise such places, I can hardly say a thing. I imagine they are just catatonic zombies totally addicted to noise, and maybe a few other things as well.

It is well-known that exposure to extreme noise is a health hazard. Indeed, there are laws against indulging in and especially exposing the public to extreme noise. One just wonders why these laws are never enforced.

Out here, the ball of responsibility is endlessly tossed from intimidated local authorities to harassed and ill-informed police to a distant and aloof National Environment Management Agency (NEMA).

Ask any member of these groups what a decibel is, or what level of decibels constitutes a contravention of anti-noise regulations, and you are likely to draw a blank.

Meanwhile, we continue to languish and suffer in silence, in this sea of noise.

Inside our own houses, we cannot talk to one another and we cannot sleep without totally closing our windows and stuffing our ears with cotton wool.

We and our children are being rendered progressively deaf by the constant exposure to extreme noise, and those who have conditions like heart ailment and migraine resign themselves to the permanent agony of demonic noise.

Ironically, one of these noisy nightclubs has cropped up opposite the only clinic and healthcare centre we have in the neighbourhood, about 150 metres from where I live. Of nightclubs, we have three so far, within an area less than a square kilometre.

I just wonder how the patients and the health workers are going to cope.

There is, however, a ray hope on the horizon of our discontent.

The Uganda Communications Commission and Ms Jennifer Semakula Musisi, the no-nonsense Executive Director of Kampala, have issued detailed directives against fortuitous noise.

But there have been similar orders before. As I lie battered and tattered in my noise-rattled cottage, I cannot help wondering if the iron lady’s edict will, this time, have a positive effect on our miserable neighbourhood.

Incidentally, the quietest and most peaceful spaces in Kampala are the matatus. You hardly ever suffer in these vehicles the infernal noise so common in — some other cities!

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and Literature in East Africa. [email protected]