RETURN TO MBALE AND THE QUEST FOR MT ELGON

this story first run in the New Vision of Friday July 24th, 2020

I still remember the very first time I went to Mbale. It was sometime in 1998, on an unremembered assignment. I had always had a fascination with mountains, and couldn’t wait to see Mt Elgon.

So we turned that last corner, and there it was, in all its majesty. It affected me so much that I wrote an effusive article about the mountain, how I could almost reach out my hand and touch it. But I was kind of embarrassed when my colleague Ayeta Wangusa, who calls Mbale home, laughed and said that it was not Mt Elgon, but just a rock named Wanaale. I still cringe when I remember that.

Mbale’s Republic Street, with Wanaale Rock in the background

I have passed through and been to Mbale several times since then, but the last time I actually spent time there must have been in the early noughties, when Sylvia Owori was still running Miss Uganda. My general impression those days was of ‘organised chaos’; the people seemed genteel enough, but nothing really went right, and they didn’t seem to care too much whether it did or not.

When you meet the Bagisu away from Mbale, they act all aggressive and assertive. They are intensely proud of who they are, and don’t care much what others think about them. So it is a bit of a let-down when you get to Mbale and everybody seems to be all laid back.

Last week I returned to Mbale, and although I spent a week there, I still haven’t really got my finger on its pulse. Last time I was there, few ‘decent’ hotels were available. Wash & Wills just had a handful of rooms and was still very much a work in progress; Mbale Resort did not seem to know what it wanted to be, and Mt Elgon looked like time had stopped in the 1960s.

So I got quite a shock when I Googled Mbale hotels and found that Mbale Resort had become 5-star, Mt Elgon had put up a swimming pool and charged Sheraton prices, and Wash & Wills wasn’t that far off either. What had happened to Mbale? Was there a kind of boom when I was away?

The boom, as it turned out, had been tourism. The area around Mbale lies on the foothills of Mt Elgon, a massive extinct volcano that, at over 80km at the base, was one of the largest in the world. The high hills, reportedly much steeper than the ones in Kabale or Kisoro, make for picturesque landscapes.

Mt Elgon is apparently one of the easier mountains to climb in Uganda, and mountain climbing is fast becoming a very popular pastime for Ugandans. A friend told me about her experience climbing Mt Elgon, which takes about 4 days; including a 9-hour, 32km hike, which she said was long but boring.

The project I was involved in meant we spent the days in the steep hills of Bududa, famous for its many landslides and subsequent flooding. The district people told us that if we had anything to do in Bududa, we had to go there early and leave by 1pm. Apparently, as regular as clockwork, it starts raining after 1pm, and the roads become so slippery it is easy to get stuck till the next day. Or you might find one of the numerous trucks going to fetch matooke stuck in the mud, and then you’re done for the day.

traversing the steep hills of Bududa

As far as one can see, the hills of Bududa are covered in matooke plants. The hills go up to about 5,000ft high, and they are full of matooke, right up to the very top. We could see magnificent homes way up the hills, and wondered how they got the construction materials up there, since no vehicles can possibly get there. The folks in my team just could not understand why people would want to live all the way up there; “it’s their home”, was the answer we got.

The Bududa soil is loose soil, hence the numerous landslides, the last of which happened in December 2019. But by the time we got there, many of the scars of the landslide that killed over 30 people had been covered with crops. Why don’t people leave and go somewhere else? Because it is very fertile, was the answer. Anything and everything grows in Bududa, thanks to the volcanic soil.

We were told that there is something of an early warning system, and people are told to evacuate at the first indication of landslides. But people being people, some inevitably refuse to move till it’s too late.

After the sojourns in Bududa (by the way, we got to see the ‘backside’ of Wanaale rock, which showed it is a free-standing formation), we would go back to Mbale, where folks did not seem to be aware that covid-19 is causing chaos around the world. Face masks were a novelty (it was interesting to see shop mannequins with masks on, but not the people in the shops), and bodas were operating freely.

in Mbale people do not wear masks, but mannequins do

Tourism still has to pick up, so many of the hotels in Mbale were empty. In fact, for most of the week I was there, I was the only guest in the 20+-room Pretoria Hotel. Talk about a Hotel California experience.

Before I left, I had a short meeting with one of the descendants of Semei Kakungulu, whose influence in eastern Uganda is still very evident. It was a brief meeting, so the story of Kakukngulu’s legacy will have to be for another day.

The ‘table cloth’ over Wanaale Rock as you leave Mbale

The last sight of Mbale is the same as your first one, Wanaale Rock. You turn the corner, and it is gone. It was a misty morning as we left, and the top was covered in clouds, which was an eerie resemblance to the more famous Table Mountain in Cape Town. When clouds cover the top of Table Mountain, it is referred to as the ‘table cloth’; so the last view we had of Mbale was a table cloth on top of Wanaale Rock.