UGANDA: YOUNG PEOPLE IN GULU CITY ARE BODA BODA RIDER, WHILE SHOPS OWNERS IN GULU MAIN MAINSTREETS ARE ALIEN, STUDY DONE BY GULU UNIVERSITY

 

In this section, we case study four stories of Okello, Anywar, Obita and Ochen as stories of emergence from episodes of displacement in its different settings, while motivated by the ideals of emplacement. Gulu city like all other cities, is descended to, assumed to offer to the increasingly displaced young people, and also to the bodies converging in it, opportunities for social becoming.  The stories are an elaboration of the specter of intensified sensibilities and tactics.

(As we shall elaborate, it was this nuance of threats of re-displacement and de-emplacement that mobilised Okello, Anywar, Obita and Ochen, to stake their emplacement in the city and cityscape of Gulu, trying to find ‘cracks’ and possibilities with which to emerge, stay afloat and provide for their families.   of accelerating speed reinforced by hooting. This, he does, as his tactics with which to get emplaced in the city. The details 0follow;)

 

GULU CITY-FRIDAY JUNE 13, 2026.

By Okumu Livingstone Langol, (Uganda Correspondent)

Navigating the speed of Gulu City, the post urban migrants from the rural villages begin a new life of settlement from the former International Displaced People (IDP) Camps. Associate Professor Dr. Daniel Komakech carried out indebted research analysis, the post Lord Resistance Army long conflict, the research gives our esteemed reader an inside.

Our Uganda Correspondent adds more new characters how life goes on in Gulu City amidst absence of gunshot, the new faces who occupied good position both in businesses and government jobs, they are people mostly from other Sub Region, while the likes of formerly displaced people are boda boda riders and self-employees in casualty work.

Most of the shops in Gulu Main Market are controlled by aliens, the research calls for a think thanks debate to chart a way forward. The Uganda Financial years 2026/2027 was read yesterday. Most importantly Gulu Airport which is the longest and biggest Airport, its name was missing from the many Airports the government of Uganda embarked on to construct or rehabilitate.

Gulu Moroto road, one of the original and the first Government Road in the region for years, under Kampala regime, has not been considered for tarmacking, Murchison National Pack the biggest Uganda Wildlife Authority, one of the biggest tourists’ attractions in Uganda, the government is not considering construction International Airport, instead Kidepo National Pack has been considered to have International Airport (sic), where is Uganda heading.

Gulu Regional Referral Hospital, the name appeared to have regional Hospital construction among the Arua, Mbarara. But, did the government aware that Gulu University Specialized 524 beds, and Regional Heart Institute meant for Gulu University, the construction has been back log under scheduled three years down the road, remark not attributed to Associate Prof. Daniel Komakech

 

The research finding are as follows:

Okello, a boda boda rider, aged 32, came from Koch Goma after spending his earlier youth in the IDP camp in Goma. His coming to the city was because there was nothing much and he could not continue staying in Goma. Okello rents two grass thatched houses in Kanyagoga B at about 30 dollars. He has a two- and five-months old baby girl who looks like him and she is called, Blessing. Okello is passionate about his fatherhood and particularly about Blessing.

He plans to take Blessing to baby class in a nearby kindergarten that he can afford to pay 110 dollars per term (a term comprises roughly four months). His wife Lalam is also a young lady of 24 years or about 25. She makes pancakes which she sells every break time in a nearby primary school with a number of school children, and makes between 2 to 3 dollars per day. Lalam, Okello’s wife, is the first born to her mother of six siblings.

Their father died when she was 20. While her mother and the siblings live in Koch Goma village, Lalam and Okello her husband have to provide for her family and pay other school dues and requirements for the two sisters already in a secondary school in Koch Goma (Koch Goma Senior Secondary School is a government aided school under Universal Secondary Education -USE and fees are not paid but other requirements are to be met by parents).

Lalam and the husband have to balance between house expenditure and Lalam’s siblings and mother. While for Okello, he is the third born of four children. Okello’s father is in Koch Goma, while the mother died from internal injury after being beaten by the LRA who had found her at home. She had left the camp to go and pick some vegetables at the homestead. His youngest brother of 17 stays with him.

Okello tells me that he has not travelled abroad, but that his wife and himself are living in different worlds in this town of Gulu. Okello wakes up at 6 am to ride his customers to their different locations. Sometimes, Okello sneaks as early as 4 am to avoid quarrels with his wife over what to leave home to feed the family. In his view, riding boda-boda is not only for business but also to ride away from stress. In his words; “You think people only migrate to ‘Ulaya’ (Europe)? We also migrate here by riding around, around and around”. He continues, “when you

see money in the form of a passenger, you brake and stop. But when you see your wife, especially when you do not have money, you speed off somewhere, anywhere”.

Okello’s early rise in the morning before the wife wakes up, and riding his boda-boda ‘around, around and around’, typifies a certain mode of flight – a sneaking flight within the realities of helplessness. Although the wife is the reason for the flight, she is not ordinarily the cause for the flight, not even the children. Like his wife with whom they are to fend for their families, Okello in effect has three families; his own, that of his father and that of his wife Lalam.

Lalam’s income of 2-3 dollars a day and boda-boda business in the face of three families, do not enhance livelihood in any meaningful way. Again, life in this new site of displacement is unfamiliar and strange. But, given the aspiration of emplacement which Gulu city is assumed to offer, Okello refuses to get displaced once more and worse still to the village he has fled. Faced with weighing obligations, Okello mounts his earlier capabilities of perceptivity gained in the camp on how to stay alert, to see the outlays of Gulu city. What he discovers is that, with barely any money in his hand or pocket but a motorcycle – boda-boda, which again is in plenty circulating in all the arteries and hinterland of the city, Okello looks again and again.

He has nothing else to turn to but his boda-boda. In that case, he intensifies his insight in relation to that which he has and sees a crack in the boda-boda circuit, namely, speed modes, timing and hooting. It is this nodal point that Okello lets loose his ingenuity of survival. It is in this regard that the circulation, ‘around and around’, makes sense. This flight is not from the family as such but to the city, to knock at opportunities of making money for the family.

The registry of, ‘around, around and around’, shows triple effort of circulating. In the flight, Okello engages various and different gears. When a passenger is met, Okello slows because that is money. As soon as that is done, the speed rages on, with Okello pacing as fast as he can to catch-up with the speeding city. It is when another opportunity knocks, either another passenger or being hired to send some parcel at a good pay or any other possibilities, which Okello slows as well, leaving Okello and the city in a continuous speed-slow continuum. What is also the case is that Okello speeds off from the wife before she wakes up. This again as we said, is not flight in the sense of from but rather, to the city.

The waking up of the wife and the sight of her helplessness, is not only insecurity but also shame to Okello. It is therefore a combination of insecurity and shame that drives Okello to circulate more and harder, hence the phrase, ‘around, around and around’. It is this feeling of being insecure, that makes Okello not slow but engages another gear in circulating and combing the city. Once there is an encounter with possibilities, Okello slows motion while, an encounter with impossibilities, induces another gear of speed. In this sense, speed is not rush, speed is not time keeping but rather, a perceptive and tactical

capacity of maneuver and wit, in the face of uncertainties. In the perceptive frame of Okello, hooting and hooting loudly is not noise but sound to the ears of likely passengers that he is getting close or too near not to wait. Hooting complements speed and both actually intertwine.

When speed does not catch up with the passenger, sound of hooting is a moment of alerting the passenger that whereas speed has not yet created presence, hooting goes ahead to announce presence in a presenting way of allowing speed to come forth in the materiality of the boda boda. Once speed assures moments of timely reach towards a passenger, shooting is momentarily suspended and only to be recalled in situations when speed cannot assure timely presence.

To indicate the importance of hooting, an external hooting device is applied in Okello’s boda boda to reinforce the sound. With these two tactics, Okello tries to avoid further displacement but routes for emplacement with a view to provide for his three families. Marked within Okello’s scale, speed and hooting are not just conceptual or words to be debated or intellectualized, but practical and an outcome of a careful perceptivity and therefore, tactical modes for survival.

Okello’s idea of waking up “early” is not to be confused with time but a certain sense of temporality different from ordinary time. One notices this by first appreciating the routine of waking up ‘early’, which makes it no longer an episode but a routine. This means, ‘early’ in this case is intended as background to mean timing, without a watch or a clock.

His timing is when the passengers and the city are already awake and going about with their businesses. It is in this sense that he has to catch the city and the passengers early enough. In this temporal continuum, Okello is not aware whether he is within the dominant time schedules and it is outside his purview. To him, the waking up of the town and the busy passengers, is his timing and not time.

Okello therefore uses timing and not time. Whereas time and timing are both in a temporal continuum, ‘time’ induces a certain scale, a certain temporal scale and a miniature of a whole complex temporality. Time to Okello is not a clock or watches to look at. Time is in and it is the city and the passengers. This aspect contests the chrono time series and like Okello or any one entangled in life chasing, periods or periodizing into time schedules is vague.

This is because; one who is entangled in precarious pain of impossibility, lives in a temporality in which time scale remains counter-productive. In practical terms, navigating intricacies in a city transcend linear time zones because the city working of things are not framed in timescales but muzzled up in the dense, which requires Okello’s type of speed to speed up with or slow up with the city. In the next case, Anywar points to an inviolable double which in this case, is gained as an outcome of an intensified viewing of the city ways of things. Accordingly, he notices the white segment of the dense bodies, the white young ladies as his point of tactical negotiation of his continued emplacement.

 

Double Life, Double Living

 

Anywar, a university graduate, aged 28, has a young wife too, who is a High School teacher in one of the

government middle range schools. She teaches English and Religious Studies to seniors three and four and her monthly salary is about 100 dollars. Milly, her name, together with Anywar, have two children with the eldest in primary one in one of the middle level private primary schools in Gulu city and pays about 200 dollars per term as fees. While the youngest is to turn three by the end of this year (2019) and ready to go to kindergarten. Anywar has recently finished and awarded a degree in Development Studies but for about two years now, he has been trying to look for a job but it is hard to come by. Earlier on before joining University, he was employed in one of the NGOs dealing in peace building and psycho-social work.

Given his busy schedule at work, Anywar could not study full time and so opted for a weekend programme. However, in his second year of study, the organisation he has been working for, could no longer pay their salaries since their sources of funding dried up. His contract could no longer be renewed and found himself without a job. Since then, it is his wife who paid his fees and upkeep as well as the rest of the household.

Anywar negotiates with the wife, to add another ‘wife’, a white woman. This second ‘wife’ becomes their bread winner who also doubles as placeholder should there be an emergency like sickness and school fees. Anywar recounts moments when the first wife insists if he has visited the white ‘wife’, especially when supplies seem to dry up. Feeling pushed, and noticing shortage of supplies of the daily routines of the family needs, Anywar would retort.

“I will go. What is your problem now”? Interested in the answer of the wife, I inquired about the replies of the wife to his remark. Anywar tells me, the wife just smiles and sometimes when there is a real shortage, she would even encourage him to spend the whole night at the white ‘wife’s house. Anywar confirms that his sexual engagement with the white ‘wife pays off, as he is given a lofty number of Ugandan shillings and sometimes dollars, as his transport money back home and some items to cook or feed on since to the white wife he is ‘single’.

Anywar not only has no job but also no money. His wife has since his loss of a job been taking care of the children and Anywar. This weighed down on the wife but also provoked a sense of insecurity that comes with the cultural construct of a man as the bread winner for the household.

In this reality, Anywar refuses to get stuck. He intensifies his perception of the city and reads the city through and through. He notices a sector of bodies in the dense city, a sector whose interests and hanging points are most times in the coffee shops. In the city gossip, this sector, the white people, are considered rich but also, particularly the white ladies, casual with the male youths and sometimes, when one is lucky, the gossip goes, one is taken in either as a partner for the time she is in Gulu City or Uganda or, married to her. But, the gossip continues, one has to look a certain kind of a youth; one who is fairly casual in dressing and general appearance.

One has to keep the hair untidy or uncombed, wear fairly worn-out shoes or sandals, walk in a certain

particular rhythm that portrays one as imposing, unique and flattering. Anywar picks this gossip and thinks it over and over to gain some insights. His interest is how to tap into this segment and get a young white lady for himself to try out his luck for money.

This to him was the crack in the city that he needed to catch and utilise. So Anywar plots with the wife to try out on this as he details his new look for attraction. To his expectation, it worked and Anywar ‘hooked’ a white lady but told her he was ‘single’ with no partner. In a sense, Anywar employed a tactic of remaining single while his wife was invisible to the white lady. But double to the wife because to the wife, the white lady is visible and both of them are sharing Anywar.

This inviolable double, characterises Anywar. His dressing in a particular way and in constant company with the white lady, is to enhance his survival. Indeed, as he tells the story, the white lady is happy with him and at most times, gives him dollars and some presents to live on since he was ‘single’. As supplies increase, Anywar and the household are secure and life goes on pretty well. In case of supplies drying, Milly, the wife of Anywar, would ask why and if Anywar has since left the white lady? In this scheme, Anywar is equally enhanced by the wife to intensify this tactic and maneuver. Consequently, the economy of Anywar improved and he was no longer to go to the makeshifts (small grass thatched huts or small rooms made of rusty iron sheets where young men hang up to eat pork, gossip and watch football). He together with the white lady now goes to the coffee shops, a new public space that expresses a new economy and a new status.

One needs to understand the status of construction coffee shops in Gulu city. It is a withdrawing space (withdrawing room) where the city elites gather to express economic distance with the rest of the city inhabitants. Here, even when one does not take coffee, one forces oneself to or takes other status foods like pizza, hamburger and so forth. But there is also another segment of young men, men who enter this space not necessarily to take coffee or pizza but, on a hunt, on a look out to also ‘hook’ a white lady. They are dressed in a particular way as well, similar to Anywar and normally with their eyes wide open, to catch sight of a curious looking young white lady. Many times, they do not order anything but sit on and on, looking in all directions. Once he believes he is soon being suspected for being ‘idle’ by the attendants or the coffee shop crew, he orders a simple bottle of soda which he sips with a meticulous calculation to last for nearly an hour.

So, coffee shops become a kind of public space that is familiar to similar kinds of inhabitants. But also, within, there is a second public space to which this sub-segment of young men and white ladies as ‘partners’ or ‘lovers’ withdraw to. This public space of appearance is likened to the ‘drawing room’ or the British ‘withdrawing room’ (Habermas 1962,1991, Bourdieu 1970:290,

Foucault 1984, Thad 2001:12). These rooms are normally not secluded in the physical sense but spatial and so, not visible in the manner in which Anywar and his friends are insulated from a particular viewing. He is to the rest of the outsiders coming for coffee or pizza in the same place, not viewed as having a second wife but having a friend. His friends with whom he has shown presence are also not viewed as a batch of young men with white girls as second ‘wives’ or ‘livelihood wives’. The outsiders – those outside this withdrawing ‘room’ view them as friends and simply taking coffee or eating pizza. While some of the ‘outsiders’ – also young husbands on mission, think they are in a ‘withdrawing room’, in this case, a coffee shop, for an opportunity to knock, by getting a white girl. In their view, the boys with the white girls already, are simply friends having fun, while they (the outsiders) are the real contenders to ‘snatch’ the girls.

Therefore, unlike the physically secluded, this ‘withdrawing room”, is in a co-presence; a double and a simultaneous space, namely, a space shared by different segments of maneuver. Both of the maneuver segments however, share something in common. Dress and act in a particular way to express entry to this space. With a particular way of acting and dressing, they are variously referred to especially by the boda-boda riders as; “nigger man”, “cowboy”, “spider man’ or “ninja” and many other coded names. Having mastered the preferred way of appearance to attract the white girls, Anywar like the other boys employ schemes appearing just as that, ‘improving to stagnate’, a tactic to remain or become more and more shabby.

This scheme ranges from; the hair left untidy, uncombed or weaved in a Rastafarian fashion. The shirts are half or quarter way buttoned and most times on casual shorts with open saddles, walking in a particular way. The magic seems to work, as the white girls most times are seen in their company.

The white taste has therefore begun also to invert dressings among young boys in Gulu city, as the boys find it working and profiteering. To try and remain in the company of white girls, the African female folks have also tactically changed their imaginings of a ‘hot guy’. He is as to the white girls, this particular ‘rasta’ or ‘ninja’, making both finding a common definition of the ‘hot guy’. This makes the white company sustained just as the privileges of being invited for coffee and pizza does not also halt but increases instead. In the section that follows, we case study Obita, his insights into the city and how it leads him to a conclusion of swinging within the city and the rural, in order to extract from both, a tactic he employs as the most realistic way of his and family emplacement in the city.

Rural-Urban Circuit Obita, a mechanic, aged 36, left Koro for town five years ago when life in the village of Koro could no longer make much sense to him. He now renting a one room semi-permanent house with no ceiling board and

with a rusty iron roof, in the hinterland of the city. Obita has three children with the eldest is a son in Senior two in one of the government secondary schools in Gulu city and pays about 120 for other costs and requirements since the school is under USE. The second born is also a boy in primary five in a primary school that is also under universal primary education (UPE) but still other costs and requirements such as school uniforms, scholastic materials and packed lunch, makes him pay about 50 dollars per term. The youngest child, a girl, is in kindergarten and Obita pays about 100 dollars for fees (since pre-primary is not yet covered under universal education).

Obita rents two grass thatched houses at about 30 dollars per month. The wife, Akot, does small scale tailoring at the verandah of their semi-permanent house. She does simple stitching on torn clothes and sometimes, makes simple dresses and shirts for young children. She earns about 2-4 dollars a week from this. Obita has a huge piece of land in his village in Koro Abili, about 120 acres. But this land has so far not been fully utilized because he is most of the time in the garage. His mother who is in the village is already old. His only brother is a security guard in Kampala and seldom available as well. His two younger sisters are all married and in their homes in the same village.

But they together with their husbands are simple peasants with hardly anything. Every Friday evening afterschool, Obita sends off his family of three children and their mother (his wife) for the weekends to his mother who lives in Koro Abili, about twelve kilometers away from Gulu city. As his routine, late evening around 6 pm on Fridays, he sits the last born in front of his motorbike while the two children are half seated and half carried by their mother on the back seat that barely accommodates more than one person. Once seated, the family runs away from town to the village. Once reached and empty handed (a situation the mother of Obita is accustomed too), Obita hurriedly disembarks the family and as usual, tells the mother that he is hurrying to “yele (to struggle)”. Once I asked him why he sends his family to the mother every Friday evening and picks them every Monday morning at 6 am (a ride of about 40 minutes to and fro)? Obita remarks with a broad smile and sarcastic laughter; ” eh, are you the only one who does not know what life is in this town of ours? Do you stay in Gulu?”

To these questions, I answer in the affirmative. In that case, Obita opened up to me saying; ” when I take them to my mother, I am assured of nobody going hungry at least. Second, I also rest from the many demands from my wife. She is normally troublesome, asking for too much. She wants; lotion, nice food like cabbages, wants to buy a dress every day and so forth. Third, I move around and find extra income which I save to take the family from Monday to Friday. As for me, once I am alone in the house, I figure out and live like an ‘animal’. You see, ‘ I am a soldier’ !”.

Sensing getting stuck in the everyday life of Koro village, Obita decides to flee to the city which is only twelve kilometers from Koro Abili. Obita remarks that, “life is hard in Koro Abili. There is nothing much to do. You wake up to the routine of nothing but to sit and do nothing”. Whether there is really nothing to do, remains problematic. But what is clear is that Obita decides to get displaced to the city. With his natural skills of being a mechanic, Obita gets to work to support his family and his desire to keep his children in the schools and pay all the dues mentioned.

But his wage as a mechanic is only about 100 dollars a month, and his wife’s earnings as a tailor, is equally meager. Both however, cannot switch to any other work or jobs for lack of required qualifications. Obita has to remain a mechanic and so is the wife as a small-scale tailor. Obita had to intensify his insight into the city and could not see much for him. But after listening to his peers at the garage of how their families stay in the villages, Obita gets an insight.

His family cannot stay forever in the village since his children, he is proud of, are getting better education in the city. He decides then that the idea of the village is good but only over weekends when his children’s education is not interrupted, but also saving him some costs. How much Obita saves from this frequent flight out and in, whereas important, points to a more apparent reality of calling back the rural to support his stay in the urban, while at the same time, mobilising the

rural cape should there be heightened threat or impossibility of living in the city. Obita, with his family on a boda-boda like passengers moving somewhere, is in a momentary weekend displacement to the village, to the rural in order to firm his presence in the city. The village to which the scheme of displacement is made every Friday evening, is for a better meal or food for the children and their mother while at the same time, a pause on the city demands. In the estimate of the young husband, momentary displacement to the village performs a fleeting function of; the children eating better, the wife stopping worrying him with her demands while also reinforcing family rootedness with the village, the kin and kith. In that sense, the village, the rural, is also a space of possibilities.

It subsidises and easily improvises as a saviour or saving space, a space that readily welcomes especially when city maneuvers are not easy or failing. That means, the village, the village life and its rurality, is maintained alongside the city life, making both, co-present, co-extensive and simultaneous. To Obita, the rural is an extension of the city and city life while the city is also an extension of the rural, making rural cape and cityscape not distinct but blurred and ambiguous.

While in the village, there is hardly any dense population segmented as in the city. There are no any discarded materials, which would in the first appearance give an impression of little possibilities to improvise, navigate and survive. However, considered as less utilized and yet utilizable in times of difficulties, the village land is at a foreseeable range with which to improvise and navigate a number of possibilities. It is this competing role that makes urbanity- rurality blurred and creates a back-and-forth pendulum among the city dwellers. Second, is the social support of the kin and kith that constantly gives support in events of episodic calamity like death and bankruptcy.

In the city, the support levels are minimal. The city is only willing to support when one has ‘security’ to guarantee pay back. In the absence of a guarantee, the support level collapses and one cannot borrow from workmates who normally are ‘familiar strangers’ or from friends, banks or any other support systems. In the post and persistent conflict, there is virtually nothing as security that young husbands can offer as security. The only security available is not in the city but in the village, and that is land. In that case, in the intricate dealings, the village or more specifically, the land in the village, is involved and mortgaged. One therefore sees the intersection between the city and the village as not only visible but also intricate.

Rurality is a sense of connection with kin and kith, a sense of connection while also expressing disconnect with the urban which is impersonal. In the city, distance is kept as no one is expected to know or ask personal questions about the wife, children or the family. Everyone is only a familiar stranger and so, intrusions are not allowed. Life here is in a sense, a life of multitudes, of mere persons who are up to something and this something is only relations with materials.

The village, as a rural site, functions pretty much as a “placeholder”, a security from the city. While Abdou Maliq sees African cities as a platform for evacuation and building territories elsewhere (2001:18), Obita’s constant return in and not to the village, functions to elaborate “placeholder’ capacity of the rural, should life enhancement or emplacement in the city fail completely. In that case, the village instead of the city, is a site of evacuations. What is evacuated from the village is to enable functioning and elaboration of life in the city. In that case, urban life trajectories.

“Requires the insertion of the rural in its midst” (ibid.). Rurality is therefore not only present at the time of momentary flight to the village but also coextensive in daily city life, making the distinction as we said earlier on, pretty much absent. That also means, there is an embedded competition between the village and city, on two fronts. The first is the possibilities and improvising on one hand while on the other, social support. Whereas both claim these, the city ways of things is dense, more competitive and requires an intensified perceptivity on a routine basis.

In the last section, we note that whereas it is a lot easier to improvise in the middle of a dense city, it is not enough to create opportunities. This dense population segment creates a competitive urge for value addition and money-worth in order to turn it around and let it circulate once more in this intricate relation. This requires ingenuity. Ochen looks around and looks again.

He discovers Gulu city throwing opportunities as ‘garbage’. To him, this was the ‘crack’ in the city ways of things and concluded to turn the garbage around in a contrapuntal way, and make him and his family emplaced.

Living on Garbage

Ochen, aged 29, is a former LRA child soldier whose involvement in the brutal war could not allow him to settle back in his village in Awach, about 10 kilometers from Gulu city. He had to displace himself from Awach on fear that he might be hurt by those who accused him of wreaking havoc in the village when he was in the LRA. Ochen comes and settles together with his 24-year-old wife Atii and a child in Kanyagoga B, a suburb near the 4^th Division military barracks. Without formal education, Ochen falls back to his skill of art work. His art works are; making beads, lady’s handbags, flower pots, necklaces, earrings, and so forth. But also, he has a workshop next to his tinned house in Kanyagoga.

In this workshop, Ochen repairs and remakes computer body parts for his customers to re-sell in the computer market. So are radio body parts which he fixes for the owners and gets paid or remakes them and sells them. For his required materials, Ochen goes about the town in the garbage and waste sites or in the middle of the streets, collecting; papers, polythene bags and discarded plastic bottles. Occasionally, he employs some few young boys to get him these materials.

 

 

Ochen recounts that even when he was enthusiastic to return from the bush as a former LRA, he found Awach unfamiliar and scaring. A home that once was, had turned an accusing finger on his brutal roles of killing and burning houses in the same village when he was conscripted into the LRA. Awach, to him, was no longer home to stay in but to flee from. Armed with the training in electrical installations and computer repair he got from Labora Youth Center (supported by the government of Uganda as part of rehabilitation), Ochen with his family, displaced oneself to Gulu city. Many youths were also engaged in the same electrical and computer business as he was to add to their number. Intensifying his surveillance as he used to do in the bush, Ochen realises that he could not go the same way many were. A number of youths would wait in the small makeshifts for customers to bring their radios or computers for repair, and

many times, spending the whole day without a client. Ochen realises that he would soon be displaced once more but this time, to the village. This thought of the village was frightening because he could no longer fit. Watchfully and alert, Ochen gets insightful about the side business of art and craft which he would display and sell at strategic places such as the coffee shops for the white segment of the population to buy. But I also noticed that the garbage all around the city was, after all, not garbage but simply that the city has not seen any other use on what was being thrown.

Ochen decided therefore to inspect the garbage sites and concluded that he was going to live on garbage.

Garbage in the middle or on the outskirts of the city became important to Ochen. Without them, his business would collapse. Meaning, garbage production and disposal somewhere and anywhere was useful to him. To Ochen, this was a ‘crack’ in the city’s ways of things and defining of things. He picked up this ‘crack’ and made business out of it. He re-makes the ‘garbage’ body parts and recreates them into re-usable and re-sellable items, which he sells back to the city at relatively lower prices, gaining traction and customers, especially those who could not afford a brand-new computer or radio. So, garbage, and its re-making and selling back to the city, made garbage and

cities intersect and relate in a back-and-forth circulation. What is also the case is that, as Ochen re-

makes part of the garbage, he is also in the works of clearing and cleaning the city’s dense population of things. When Ochen or his boys go to garbage sites, they are not wary of the garbage as such but as an opportunity site. The garbage is turned over once again since it is not. yet settled and so, recast as a mining extraction ground. Not only one person turns the garbage though, but several. Each with different expertise and on a look out for his specific item.

But all are in a network. In this network, there are those who are experts in plastic materials, those in computer parts while others on radio spare parts and still others on paper and card boxes. All get busy to make maximum extraction possible. Soon, the turning over makes what was a heap of garbage, become a scattered throw of things that after a heavy rain, it flows back onto the city streets, re-introducing itself into the streets. This re-introduction of garbage on the streets is not in the imaginations of Ochen.

In any case, it is not his workings, and as popularly known, it is the workings of the heavy rains and the poor city drainage which is a resultant effect of low funding of city order. In the section that follows, we reflect on the stories and discern a common thread of the logic of perceptivity, navigation and maneuver, and what that means in the bigger picture.