Postcard from Kampala: Observations on public Christianity

We have now been in Kampala for six Sundays and have been struck by the numbers attending the churches we have visited here. Apparently most churches, at least in the city, are very large - a congregation of as few as 100 in one sitting would be very rare. Hundreds, if not thousands, attending in the one day is quite a normal scenario. As a result, many churches run multiple services back-to-back throughout the day and sometimes also on Saturday night. We experienced for the first time the need to arrive early enough to a Sunday service to get a seat inside, and queuing up outside while the previous service finished! This creates a bit of a 'revolving door' feel - once the service is over, you need to leave as soon as possible so the next lot of people can come in - so it's quite difficult to get opportunities to meet and talk to people before or after the service. The after-church morning tea or supper we are used to in Sydney would be logistically and financially impossible with the numbers here! One church we have been to here might have 20,000 people attending over once weekend (Saturday night and 5 Sunday services)! As with large churches we know of in Sydney, these churches operate on a 'cell-based' structure, where people meet in smaller groups during the week, and this is how you get to know people and become part of a family of fellowship.

The atmosphere here is very different from that of Australia, where Christianity has been marginalised from the public sphere over the last few decades, especially in academia. In contrast, I have heard of lecturers here praying aloud at the beginning and end of each lecture to commit the time to God and ask for his help with the teaching and learning of the content. If I did anything like that in Australia I would likely be thrown out of the university! Here, you hardly have to convince anyone that there is a God - this is a widely acknowledged fact of life, from the city to the smallest village. The difference is in which God, god/s or spirit/s people worship.

Uganda is statistically 84% Christian, about half of which is Protestant and half Catholic. I gather that this total includes a degree of 'nominalism' (as it does in Australia) and also a degree of mixing Christianity with traditional tribal religions and ancestor worship. But, whether sincere or not, the language of faith is everywhere: from the taxi-buses that hurtle around the city with slogans such as 'God's Blessing' or 'Jesus Saves' emblazoned across the windscreen, to the Bible verses on the majority of greeting cards that you find for sale, to the way many people greet each other saying 'Praise the Lord' or 'God bless you'.

Interestingly, although only a small percentage are Muslim, some Muslim festivals are marked as public holidays (such as Idd, which was celebrated last Friday) - apparently this is a legacy of the dictatorship of Idi Amin (in office 1971-1979), who was of the Muslim faith. The majority who are not Muslim are not averse to the extra public holiday, though! It caused me to reflect on what might happen if, as the Muslim population of Australia increases, a suggestion were put forward to make some Muslim festivals public holidays. I imagine there would be considerable resistance.

Postcard from Uganda: More local expressions

Since my last 'postcard' about language, I have begun to learn some words in Luganda and learnt some more local English expressions.

• "sorry" - used in the same way as Australian English (to apologise for something you've done), but also to express sympathy for something that clearly has nothing to do with you. For example, I was telling a Ugandan friend that we had discovered a decomposing rat in our apartment, and she said "Oh, sorry!". I have heard it many times since in similar kinds of situations - e.g. when telling someone I'd had food poisoning or had hurt myself getting into a bus. It sounds strange to my ears because in Australian English, in those kinds of situations people are more likely to say something like "Oh no, you poor thing!" or "Oh, that's terrible!" or "How awful!" You may hear "I'm sorry to hear that" in AE, but it's more likely to come in response to more serious bad news such as a death or chronic illness or relationship breakdown or loss of a job.
• "we pray from…" - instead of saying 'we go to such-and-such church', most of the people I've met say 'we pray from such-and-such church'. So now instead of asking "which church do you go to?" I try to remember to ask "where do you pray from?". I'm intrigued as to how this phrase came about, though, as Christians know we can pray anywhere and God will hear us. Maybe I'll find out one of these days.
• "benching" - this is a genuinely Kampalan term, and in fact it originated at Makerere University where we are living and working! Apparently it stems back to the days when there were just two residential halls, one for women and one for men. The one for women, Mary Stewart Hall, had some benches placed around the foyer and the young men used to go and sit there on the benches waiting for the object of their desire to come walking through so they could talk to them or take them out. They could sit there for hours, and so the expression 'He's benching' came about to describe this activity. Now the meaning of the term has apparently broadened. One meaning is when someone you know comes to your place and hangs around and it's hard to get rid of them - "they're benching". Another meaning is when someone is trying to get to know someone of the opposite sex and tries to spend as much time around them as possible - "he/she's benching". Apparently there are other Makerere terms that have become widely used, but I have yet to find out what they are.
• "where do you stay/sleep?" - if someone wants to find out where you live, they ask "where do you stay?" or "where do you sleep?". I've even had someone asking me "are you sleeping around?", which means "are you staying somewhere around here?", not the meaning Australian (and probably American and British) English speakers would understand from it! However, if someone says "he/she's sleeping around", it means they are away for a few days, e.g. out of town on business or visiting a friend or relative in another place. A Ugandan friend told us that this expression had caused a lot of concern to her British-English-speaking friend who was looking for her in Kampala and was told "oh, she's sleeping around" because she was out of town!
• what not to ask: as in many places, it's very rude to ask a woman's age. For men, the question of age is nowhere near as rude as asking how many cows he has (which would be like asking someone how much he earns or how much he has in assets).

Of thunderstorms and instantiation

The wet season has arrived in Kampala, and we can expect to have a thunderstorm at least once during most days. The other morning there was an almighty one that woke us up around 6.30am and, as you do when half asleep, we started talking about meteorology and climatic expectations in the different places where we have lived.

Image from typicalugandan.tumblr.com

When thunderstorms happen daily and the rain lasts maybe half an hour and then the weather is clear again for most of the day, thunderstorms are not very newsworthy. You hardly hear anyone talking about 'the thunderstorm early this morning' because that's no different from the day before when there was one in the afternoon, and the day before that, and the day before that... When they occur only every so often, as in Sydney, it's much more noteworthy and may even make the news, and much of the conversation of casual encounters refers to the event - 'did you hear the thunderstorm this morning?', 'well, the rain was so heavy at our place that our guttering was overflowing!', etc.

It reminded me of Halliday's illustration of the difference between a language system and an instance (the 'cline of instantiation'), using the analogy of climate and weather (Halliday 1992: see also Halliday & Matthiessen 2004:26-27). Describing language from an instance perspective is like describing the day's weather: well, it was clear in the morning, then it clouded over and there was a thunderstorm and it rained for about half an hour, and then it cleared up again. This would be a fair description of the weather in Kampala on most of the days this past week. It's a specific description of a particular instance that you experience.

Describing language from a system perspective, on the other hand, is like describing the climate of a geographical area: it's a view of what the tendencies are over a much longer period, when you take each instance into account. For Kampala, there is not a great deal of difference in practice between what you experience on a given day, and what the probabilities are across a given year. The average maximum throughout the year is between 24 and 27 degrees C, with reasonably high humidity, and high annual rainfall (mainly concentrated in March, April and May, and then October and November). This climatic 'system' can also be described even more generally as a 'tropical wet and dry climate'.
The relationship between the instance and the system gives an instance its 'value' for those observing it. Hence, the 'value' of a storm in Kampala is different from the value of a storm in Sydney, and therefore the 'newsworthiness' of a thunderstorm is different for people in each place.

It's not as if thunderstorms here have no impact on everyday life, though. The main 'life impact' is that rain causes even greater havoc on the roads, worsens potholes, and makes it very unadvisable to try walking along any roads or going by boda-boda. So class might be cancelled if the teacher can't get to uni, all because of a systemically predictable thunderstorm!

Halliday, M. A. K. (1992). The notion of context in language education. In Le, T. & McCausland, M. (eds), Interaction and development: Proceedings of the international conference, Vietnam, 30 March - 1 April 1992. University of Tasmania: Language Education.
Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.

Semiotic Resources of Kampala Boda-Boda Drivers

There are literally thousands of boda-bodas in Kampala. Boda-bodas are essentially public transport by motorbike. There is apparently no system of licensing or accreditation for someone to start charging a fee for members of the public to hop on the back of his (I haven't yet seen any female boda-boda drivers) motorbike to get to their destination. Anyone who owns a motorbike and needs a bit of extra cash can do it, it seems. They also operate as couriers for goods, not just passengers: on Saturday I saw a huge pile of mattresses, at least 2m high, being carried on the back of one! Some people even move house by boda, we are told.

Boda-bodas have a reputation, even among the locals, for being reckless drivers. We have seen them cross the median strip and drive on the wrong side of the road if there is a traffic jam. We have also seen them driving every which way around roundabouts. This is with a passenger (or two) on the back, who of course has no control over how or where the driver drives the motorbike on the way to the destination!

Despite all this, they are very widely used, even by local friends we think are relatively cautious, and are the fastest way to get around, especially in the traffic-clogged roads. A local friend of ours studying at the university, who has a very nice car, says if he's running late for class he leaves his car at home and jumps on a boda-boda. Yesterday some expats working locally told us some American friends of theirs who had a seriously sick child put the child and her mother on the back of a boda-boda to get the to a reliable medical centre as fast as possible, as the international hospital where they initially went had not the facilities or staff to attend to the child as quickly as her condition required.

There are always at least a dozen boda-bodas hanging around the entrance of the university (this is known as a boda-boda 'stage') and I pass them daily when I go to buy food for dinner (our fridge doesn't work too well, hence the daily excursions). So over the past 2 and a bit weeks I have observed a range of semiotic resources that the boda-boda drivers use to attract customers.

• the wave: if the boda-boda driver sees you coming from a distance, he raises his hand as high as he can (perhaps to elevate himself above the other drivers around him) and waves at you to come.
• the shout: as you come closer, the driver shouts 'mam! mam!' I don't yet know what they shout if you're a male.
• the beep: if you are walking along the road, and a boda-boda is driving along the road nearby without a passenger, he'll beep at you to let you know there's a ride available if you want one.

One good thing about boda-bodas is that they know the city very well and are good people to ask for directions!

Postcard from Uganda: language

Greetings from Kampala, Uganda! We arrived about 10 days ago to work as visiting scholars at Makerere University, and there have been many interesting things to observe in this initial time, including some language points.

I have noticed the following systematic uses in Ugandan English that are different from Australian English, which may well be a feature of other Englishes elsewhere:

• 'pick' - instead of 'pick up', e.g. 'I called the number you gave, but no one picked, so can you call me back on Monday?' and 'I'll come and pick you around 2.30pm'.
• 'thank you too' - in response to a 'thank you', as an adjacency pair, e.g. in the supermarket when I thank the checkout person they often say this, as opposed to just 'thank you'.
• 'born-agains' - used to differentiate Christians who have been spiritually born again from 'nominal' Christians. For example, our apartment attendant asked 'are you people born-agains?' and another friend introduced us to someone else saying 'these people are born again, too'. In Australia asking 'are you people Christians' would probably get the answer she was looking for because people are less likely to identify as Christians unless they are actually believers. But a larger proportion of Ugandans would identify as Christians (statistically about 84%!), at least nominally, so the word 'Christian' doesn't have quite the same value here. It's almost the default. Hence 'born-again' is a useful alternative.
• 'done' - meaning finished, e.g. waiters/waitresses might ask 'are you done', rather than 'have you finished?' This usage also occurs in American English I think. But there is another usage, when a waiter/waitress might say 'the chicken is done', meaning there is no more. I think this meaning is less common in American English, as the expression would normally mean 'it is cooked and ready'.
• 'You are welcome' - as an elaborated form of the simple 'welcome', which is more common in Australian English. I have heard this from a wide range of people: new colleagues at the university, students, supermarket attendants (especially the friendly guys at the meat counter at the nearby supermarket), waiters/waitresses,  and people at the church we visited. I find it rather endearing and somehow more sincere than just 'welcome'.
• 'dear' - seems to be used as a generic term to address someone who might be a peer (rather than specifically as a term of endearment), e.g. the young woman who sat next to me in church on Sunday wrote me a note on her bulletin that said 'My dear, I would liked to speak to you after the service', and a colleague replied to a line in an email I sent with 'thank you dear'.
• 'what': in a number of teaching contexts (church sermon, Bible study group, introductory linguistics lecture), I have heard the teachers/leaders using a construction in which they use 'what' in a sentence to prompt the hearers to supply the word they are about to say (at least internally). An example (loosely based on a lecture I attended this morning) would be something like 'Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. We say that words have one or more morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful units of words. For example the word 'students' has two meaningful units: 'student' and 's'. So we say it has two - what? - morphemes.' The construction has a particular prosodic and intonational pattern - there is a slight pause before the 'what' and and a slight rising intonation on 'what' followed by falling intonation on the rest of the clause (which is usually just one key word or phrase that the teacher wants to emphasise).
• etc: On a number of occasions I've heard teachers (and some others not in a teaching role) use 'etc' to indicate that they are providing an incomplete list. But instead of saying 'etcetera', they say 'e. t. c', i.e. spelling out the abbreviation.

Hopefully I will discover more as we go along!