CHAPTER FIVE: Bweyale: the ethnographic field site 5.1 Introduction
5.3 Present-day life in Bweyale
5.3.2 Social and economic activities
5.3.2.1 Economic activities in the trading centre
The nucleus of community life in Bweyale is the trading centre that is located along the main highway linking Kampala and Gulu. This trading centre is made up of rows of shop buildings lined up on both sides of the main road. Smaller dirt ‘streets’ branch off the mains road with shops on both sides and ending up in several paths that lead to the different villages surrounding the trading centre.
The shop buildings are made of burnt redbrick walls, cement and flat iron roofs (see Figure 2 and 3). This kind of architecture was popularised by Indian traders who were the first people to introduce the culture of selling manufactured commodities in shops. Some of the big shops have lots of merchandise for selling, which they display outside in front of the shop to attract potential buyers who could be passing by. These kinds of display are more pronounced on the two market days when many of the people from the surrounding villages come to the trading centres to buy some items.
Figure 2: Burnt redbrick, cement wall and iron roof shop.
Figure 2 shows a glimpse of what the trading centre looks like during the day, with Minibus and Bodaboda riders waiting for customers as seen in the photo.
Figure 3: The trading centre and the main road linking Gulu and Kampala.
This trading centre is always abuzz with many people doing all kinds of commercial activities like bicycle repairs; and young boys, women and children selling roasted meat, maize, cassava, homemade pancakes, and many other edibles to travellers on the Gulu- Kampala main road. As stated briefly above, there is a main market that operates daily but Bweyale has two special market days on Wednesday and Saturday. On those days, many buyers and sellers come from outside Bweyale to participate in the commercial life of Bweyale. The entire trading centre is, on those two days, full of people coming to sell and buy different types of commodities, and vehicles bringing in deliveries from Kampala or Masindi town. This is repeated every week, and towards ‘big days’ like Christmas, Easter, and independence days, the market is even busier. In both the daily and biweekly markets held in the same market location, people sell farm products like tomatoes, cassava, maize and beans, and manufactured goods like clothes, soaps, and salt. Some of the foodstuffs sold in the market, like fish, are brought in from other areas outside Bweyale. Most of the people who sell in the market are women, and they sell mostly foodstuff while the few men who sell in the market sell manufactured goods brought in from towns (See Figure 4 below):
Figure 4: The market in Bweyale
The market sellers not only sell farm products, they also sell old magazines, pamphlets, and old copies of newspapers that are written in English (see Figure 5 below). The purchase and use of these magazines and old newspapers is discussed in Chapter Six.
Figure 5: A display of magazines for sale.
In the trading centre, there are different types of commercial activities. They include, barber shops for men and hairdressing salons for women, tailors, retailers, restaurants, bars and shops, drug stores. Phone kiosks are another very visible commercial activity in
this trading centre. In these phone kiosks, people make calls for a fee, and they are positioned at an average of 10 meters from each other in the trading centre. Related to literacy, there is one newspaper seller, two bookshops stocking mostly primary school books, one stationary shop, and one computer typing and photocopying service in the trading centre.
With their merchandise displayed on the shelves and some hanging on frames constructed in front of the shops, the shopkeepers sit in their shops waiting for customers to come and buy their merchandise. Customers arrive looking around to identify what they want or ask the shopkeeper if they have what they are looking for to buy. The transactions between the shopkeeper and the buyer are carried out across the counter inside the shop (See Figures 5 and 6 below).
Figure 6: A shopkeeper in her mainly cosmetic shop.
Figure 7: A bookshop.
The shopkeepers keep their money in moneyboxes normally kept under the counter inside the shop. In the bars and restaurants, customers are offered seats and tables where they are served with food or drinks. The orders for food are reported to the person serving as the cashier at the counter who enters it in their record and ticks it off after payments have been made. There are also commercial entertainment places like video halls and pool tables.
The open spaces around the trading centre, for example in front of shops, are used by people who engage in different types of artisan and other business activities, like repairing bicycles, roasting and selling meat, cooking and selling food (e.g. cassava) and making tea for sale in makeshift tents. People also display and sell furniture from carpentry and craft workshops that are situated behind the shops. Farmers too sell their surplus harvest in some designated open spaces in the trading centres. All these activities take place along the main road and the small dirt streets that make up the trading centre.
They are some of the different ways people earn their living in the trading centre.
The trading centre has an intermittent supply of electricity, and it can disappear for over three consecutive days. To use my computer I had to buy a standby generator. The use of standby generators is a common practice for businesses that use equipment which need electricity to run them like fridges, big music systems, barber machines, video decks used by entertainment halls showing films for a fee, grinding mills, and telephone charging
shops and the many telephone kiosks. There is no piped water in this trading centre, so, it is either fetched from boreholes, shallow wells, or collected from the roof rainwater in tanks or trapping the rainwater flowing from the roof of a house using saucepans. All these sources including the roof rainwater collection are not clean, and water must be boiled before drinking. The scarcity of water provides a source of income for some families who collect water from the various sources for a fee, charging Uganda Shilling 200 (about US $ 0.10) for twenty litres of water. Figure 7 below shows one of the many sources of water for the people in Bweyale and the twenty litre plastic water containers.
Figure 8: Fetching water in Bweyale (photo by M.J Florino).
People who reside in the trading centre use pit latrines and not water closets. There is also no garbage collection service for the trading centre. Garbage is handled by individual residents or property owners who burn it and bury the garbage that cannot be burned.
The main modes of public commercial transport around the trading centre are bicycles and motorcycle taxis (see Figure 2 above). These bicycles and motorcycles are used to carry people for short distances around the trading centre and the surrounding villages.
They are more suited for travelling in the narrow village paths. These two modes of transport are known locally as Bodaboda meaning border to border because they were popular modes for smuggling goods over the Ugandan and Kenyan borders. Minibus taxis
are use for travelling to distant towns like Kigumba, Masindi, Kampala, Lira, Gulu, and the West Nile region. Both Bodaboda and minibus operators are organised in associations that regulate the behaviour of those involved in their kind of transport business. Their organisations have elective posts for a chairperson, who is the overall leader of the group.
A secretary and treasurer are the key positions in the organisation. They hold meetings during which they make decisions that are recorded by the secretary of the organisations.
In Bweyale, bicycles are also owned by most families. They are cheap to buy and maintain and for that reason, most families have at least one bicycle. People use bicycles to travel between different villages and to the trading centre to sell or buy things and pass time during market days. In addition to bicycles, motorcycles are also used because they can also move easily around the village paths. However, only those who can afford to pay for their higher cost in terms of price, maintenance, hire or fare choose to use
motorcycles. The only problem with motorcycles is that, because of their weight, they cannot be carried across streams that have no bridges over them.