My Dad got this much later to fetch food from the farm on Jinja Road and take us back to various boarding schools. The moment in the picture was taken at Katwe on our way home to Makindye from the farm. These and many more memories have been triggered by the Uganda movie, Queen of Katwe.
I agree with Olly Richards of the Sunday Times, United Kingdom, that even with a clearly signposted ending, the movie still manages to offer surprises. Nair delights in Uganda, painting a country of many social contrasts and cultures to embrace possibility, and not poverty.
Katwe, since , has been a center of African ingenuity, where artisans, craftsmen, and technicians repair imported products, improve them, or make imitations of the original articles using what the Baganda call Magezi ga Baganda Wisdom of the Baganda. Some of the good and fun things we had growing up have disappeared, changed, or been replaced over the years.
Boda bodas , striped taxis, traffic jams, floods, telecom providers, mobile phones, hair salons, hawkers, aluminum saucepans, kaveeras plastic bags , rolex chapattis, potato chips, and brick making are evidently current phenomena.
When I was growing up, it was taboo to go near or walk along the railway line. People we considered brave, walked on the railway line bringing back some of those black stones that many women used as knife sharpeners. The railway line had shiny black stones in between the metal tracks running into a thin line that disappeared into the distance. As a child living in Katwe between and , it was a reward to get out every evening from the back of the shop and see the train with its endless set of carriages chugging away.
