Teacher on Two Wheels

Strange fruit. That’s what Billie Holiday famously called them in her song.  They looked so odd, so grotesquely out of place, swaying back and forth amidst the branches.  They were different in every way from the fruit that brightens orchards at harvest time.  Charred, often dismembered, and bound at the wrists and ankles, they were symbols of that which poisons man, not that which sustains him.

Less than two centuries ago, trees of the American South bore the weight of one of our darkest acts:  lynching.  By the thousands, Americans—usually of African descent—were ripped from their homes and local prisons, only to be killed by mobs of their fellow community members.  A single black stare in the wrong white direction was enough to start rumors and spawn violence.  When judges handed down verdicts that clashed with local opinion, the masses took the law into their own hands, meting out murderous mockeries of justice in the process.  State governments have since apologized for the barbaric actions of their residents, yet still America’s darkest nights live on in the images of photo essays and books devoted to lynching.  Even being raised in the North didn’t immunize me against the shame I felt on learning the extent of my nation’s brutality.  So when a friend recently admitted that he had participated in two lynchings here in Uganda, I sat with my mouth agape, stunned.

*****

We crowded into the long lunch table at our favorite local restaurant like kids at a Ugandan school desk, hip to hip.  The waiter brought out trays of the food I’ve come to crave—beans, matooke, millet bread, posho, rice, sweet potatoes, malakwang.  Like always, I reached for a fork and knife before digging in.  My Ugandan lunch mates passed on the utensils, like always, and, cradling wads of millet bread in their cupped fingers, formed small doughy spoons.  Submerging their fingers, they dipped the tiny bowls of bread into the beans and sauces in front of them.

Above:  Malakwang, a delicious nutty sauce made with greens

As we ate, in between mouthfuls of soda and beans, we talked.  Morning minutia, plans for the weekend, after-lunch meetings—the conversation was typical in every way.  After a stretch of silence someone asked about a laptop that had gone missing recently.  An American co-worker chimed in.

“You know, whoever stole it will never come forward.  I’m sure they’re too afraid to show their faces.  People kill thieves here, right?” he asked, turning to the Ugandans at the table.

Everyone nodded, barely stopping a second to think about the question before stabbing again at their meals.

“I once watched as a group of Ugandans beat a guy who stole a computer just so local villagers wouldn’t kill him,” my co-worker continued.  “They had to beat the crap out of him just to stall time, just so the villagers wouldn’t jump in and kill the guy.”

Two Ugandans sitting across from me, two men I know well, nodded in agreement.  One spoke up.

“Yeah, here we don’t allow people to steal.  If people learn that someone has stolen something, they don’t hesitate to hurt or kill that person.  I think we punish thieves more than murderers,” he said.

“What?  Really?  That’s crazy!” I exclaimed.

“That’s what we do,” the man answered.  “We throw stones at thieves or use lashings to kill them.”  The way he said it—confidently but with a slight grin, as if to say We give these people what we know they deserve—made me wonder if he’d ever personally seen a lynching.  Before I could ponder this any longer, he casually added, “You know I helped with two before.”

I was shocked.

“Two what?” I asked.  “Two murders?”

He nodded.  “I was younger.  I remember one was for a thief who was breaking into people’s huts and using a gun to steal things from people.  We circled around him and used stones to punish him.”

“How many people gathered around?” I asked, not sure what else to ask about.

“Oh, many, many—a thousand or more.  Once people knew the thief had been caught, they ran to where he was.  There were a few police, but they couldn’t control the crowd.  They had to stand away,” he said, grinning.

This man before me, someone I had shared laughs and meals with before, had helped to do something that I considered to be man’s most atrocious act.

The man next to him, after waiting to speak for a few minutes, blurted out, “I participated in one in university.  We didn’t kill the thief, but we almost did.  We lashed him for stealing car headlights.  When the police tried to enter the dormitory, we had students on the top floor pour boiling water down on them to keep them from entering the building.”

Boiling water?  They boiled water in advance? I thought.

*****

If you ever get into a car accident in Uganda, I learned during that same conversation, you should never stop.  Damaging someone’s car is enough to have you killed by a lynch mob.  Drivers in the past who have destroyed someone’s car or killed a passenger in an accident have been ripped from their cars and beaten or stoned to death.  The best thing to do after an accident?  Speed to the nearest police station and file a police report—anything else could put you in danger.

A Ugandan at the table told me about an area taxi driver who was carrying a mother and her young daughter in his car.  After the cab plowed into another car, killing a small child inside it, an angry mob pulled the daughter from the taxi and beat her to death, claiming that they were simply ‘settling the score’.

*****

Trying to make sense of this later, I talked with a friend about the role material goods play in the developing world.  Here, a car is far more than a car.  Here, a television broadcasts more than Nigerian soap operas; it broadcasts one’s completion of secondary school or one’s entrepreneurial  prowess.  Objects are symbols of years of work, years of cultivating a certain type of work ethic and a social standing.  Destroying an impoverished person’s hard-earned peace of property erases record of his effort, of his sweat.  Granted, the same stuff-as-symbol principle applies to things we save up for and buy in the developed world, but here, where so few people have more than bare necessities, certain material goods assume near-mythical qualities.

Obviously, in a place in which material luxury goods are so rare and cherished, necessities, too, are also hard-earned and valued.  If you’re too poor to buy a TV or a radio, you are also so poor that you value your food, clothing, and shelter.  In such an environment, the man who steals radios is seen as one who is also capable of stealing something like food.  No tolerance is afforded a village thief because of this.  Allowing such a person to live amongst you would be inviting potential future catastrophe into your home.

Do I think thieves should be stoned to death?  No.  Do I see, though, how my cultural upbringing is shading my opinion on this issue?  Yes.

Which makes me wonder:  Is there any single value that all cultures share?  Can any one group of people claim to know what’s right for another?