KIDNAPPINGS
One afternoon in Kampala I was out running errands when I decided to hail a boda-boda (a motorcycle taxi and the most common public transport there and across East Africa) to get me and my bags of groceries home.
The initial interaction with the driver was totally normal: I told him where I wanted to go and what I wanted to pay, he agreed, and then I climbed on the back of his bike. We took the usual shortcut up an alley connecting two busy streets. But half way up the alley he unexpectedly turned off to the right onto a narrower offshoot to the alley. I immediately said, "No, I want to go back that way." He responded, "It’s okay. I know a shortcut." That didn't make sense as we were on the shortcut and he just left it. I replied, "No, I'd like to go back the way I know. It's fine, just turn around here," and pointed over his shoulder in the direction I wanted to go. He told me, "It's okay. Shortcut!"
It was my first time in Africa, and I knew well that travel often presents one with confusing and sometimes uncomfortable situations. If I was ten years younger and hadn't yet considered more deeply violence indicators and avoidance I may have just tuned out, looked at my phone, and waited to see where we ended up; brushing off my intuition as illegitimate – triggered, no doubt, by my ugly, inherent, and manifold prejudices.
As soon as the driver said "no" my gut spoke up and I listened. I went from being curious and mildly annoyed to concerned. This situation here was highly unusual: drivers don't ignore the wishes of their passengers if they expect to get paid; I'd looked at the map plenty of times and had been taking this route for weeks and knew of no shorter path; and, shortcut or not, I definitely didn't want to be on the offshoot of the first alley, heading toward a slum I'd never been through. I immediately felt like I needed to get my driver to stop the bike or otherwise be prepared to jump from it.
We suddenly slowed to make a u-turn, or so I thought; instead, the driver turned left, down a still-narrower alley. As we rounded the corner I saw three guys stop what they were doing, turn toward us, and move quickly into the path ahead, taking up the whole road. The one in the middle was moving fast. He was big and looked like a fighter, missing some front teeth and was shaped more like a gorilla than his friends. I noticed the fellow to his left was holding a machete. I didn't make time to read the third fellow.
In hindsight, though all of this happened very quickly, over the span of mere seconds, I should have stopped the driver sooner. But because my head was up and I was already primed by feelings of concern (not suppressing that, as I've been otherwise trained by culture and media) I was ready to respond to anything that came across my subconscious and triggered fear in me. I was actively looking for any reason at all to jump and to run like hell. And so the very moment I saw this unfriendly roadblock I was able to act. If I hadn't been paying attention or I'd delayed my jump two seconds for some reason as we sped toward my would-be attackers I'm certain things would have gone disastrously.
As it was, I had enough of a head start, landed on my feet, and was able to turn the corner and run back to the main alleyway before the bike could turn around in the narrow passage we were on. Also fortunately, being on a narrow path meant the bike was partly blocking the way between myself and these thugs. As I fled the scene I heard yelling and assumed they were all in pursuit. Though I never saw those guys again, the boda did turn around and come for me. By the time he caught up I was near the main road. As he approached I crossed over some grass, through some bushed and a cluster of trees, over an open sewer, and then darted out into traffic where I imagined he could not easily follow.
Immediately across the busy street I hopped onto the back of another waiting bike and told the driver, who was asking where I wanted to be taken, to “just go.” I didn't want to get on another bike but I felt like I'd already been very fortunate to have somehow outrun these guys and had to stop and catch my breath if I was going to run again. I wasn't sure at all where to turn, or not. What I'd learned in my time there was that Uganda isn't the kind of place where you call the police for help. I mean, it didn't seem entirely unfair to guess one or more of these well-coordinated folks was an off-duty cop. And the alternative – showing up at the near-by US embassy unannounced, rushing toward the gate in a sweaty panic while carrying a bunch of bags, seemed like an effective method for experiencing friendly-fire. That being so, I hopped on another boda. I had so much adrenaline I could hardly remain seated. After about a block, and seeing that we weren't being followed, I guided my new driver with vague and immediate directions to the street where I was staying and paid him before disappearing behind the gate to my stay.
Naively, and perhaps as emotional self-defence, I initially considered this event an attempted mugging. But, obviously, it doesn't take four to mug someone and they were not so organized for the purpose of evenly dividing up my tomatoes, garlic, and $3 in change. Later some locals convinced me that, given my appearance and that I was walking just blocks from the US embassy, I would have been targeted as consular staff or some reasonable analog – for which a handsome ransom could be asked. Of course, those folks commonly move from one razor wire wrapped compound to another via SUV and aren't out in the world all that much, certainly not alone.
(I was told by many that various types of roadblocks are the theft and kidnapping method du jour, and that there are many roads throughout and beyond the city that even locals are reluctant ever to travel on at night. As an illustrative side note, when picking up Emily's parents from the airport our driver hadn't planned well and our vehicle ran out of gas as we were returning to town. But in Kampala running out of gas, at night, on a stretch of road outside of downtown, presents a driver with a series of problems not immediately related to gas acquisition. Quickly our driver was sweating. Not only had he fucked up, his boss was going to be mad and we couldn't be thrilled either, but he also couldn't just walk down the road to the last gas station while we waited. First he had to find and pay someone with a rifle to stand guard over our car in his absence. And, even with such visible protection, that absence really needed to be as short as possible, as having the four of us stranded on the road was a mighty rare and provocative situation that grew more dangerous with each passing minute; so he had to hail a boda to get himself to the gas station and back, too – which also had the side-effect of alerting still more people, folks with phones and vehicles, to our little situation. It's for just this reason, that there are people everywhere in Uganda practiced at intercepting vehicles and looking for the opportunity, that consular and government staff, with escort, tend to bomb down the road in SUVs at twice the speed limit...)
In my case, they said, the boda driver would just be cruising around looking for easy targets who appear like they aren't from Uganda, like myself, and then deliver unsuspecting prey to this alley, which wouldn't otherwise see any motorized traffic. And three guys are used because two are needed to quickly and easily restrain someone or otherwise carry the victim after being knocked out. Guy three is responsible for doors, driving, and dealing with anything that comes up, as needed... It was suggested that they would deliver a message to some authority, wait a few days, and if nothing happened, or things became problematic, they would just slit my throat and roll me into a ditch some place. And this was because, of course, my worth to them wasn't actually the sum that may be won for my return but instead something proportionate to the total up-front cost of and associated risk with my kidnapping: nothing. Thusly, any real risk at all wouldn't be worth taking; but, without a functioning police force (Uganda having among the most corrupt and incompetent on the planet), the only probable threat would come from releasing someone alive who'd seen faces and places and could recount the scenario. And, in case you think otherwise, the ditch would actually be a pretty safe place to dispose of a body as – aside from accepting tremendous volumes of tropical rain, mud, and discarded plastics – finding dead things large and small along the side of the road (wrapped in a bag or not and accompanied by all of the expected visual, acoustic, and olfactory gore) is revoltingly common and would garner little attention.
So, yeah, that happened.
...I don't know how many more times I can cross paths with evil and come away unscathed. Blessings have been counted more than a few times.
