MOST of us in rural Uganda and Swaziland are involved in farming. On first arriving in Kampala, a young Baganda gardener at Nsambya Hospital told me that if you threw a handful of seed onto your shamba patch in the afternoon, come the morning you’d be a farmer, so rich was the soil round Lake Victoria and so regular the afternoon showers.
My wife runs our small farm not far from the South Sudan border with help from her cousin, Carlos, who implements her strategic planning for crop rotation, water conservation and drainage systems. Climate changes mean drought or floods, hence the vital borehole, rainwater tanks, and large areas planted with indigenous grass to act as sponges (which double as sources of insects and grubs for chickens, and worms for catching fish). At sowing and harvesting time, communities help each other. Another cousin, Itimo, looks after all our neighbourhood’s cattle including his own.
City dwellers think of small farming as a peaceful rhythmic idyll following the seasons. Not at our previous farm in southern Sudan, it wasn’t. After the onset of the civil war, the Dinka tribe’s cows ate everyone’s crops after pushing over fences and fouling the communities’ water sources. As they were the only tribe allowed to carry firearms, we could only watch. Their attempts to commander hens and goats from our chicken factory failed because Dowdie, our guard there from the Nuba mountains, did have a gun legally as an ex-Ugandan army man. He polished and stripped it daily in public view, and counted the bullets in his box loudly when Dinkas appeared.
One of the final straws that forced us to leave and start again across the border in Uganda was the death of two relatives. Both young men were inside their huts when government soldiers arrived and demanded they come outside. Both men shut the hut entrances in response – and were shot in the chest through the wooden doors.
Dagga or cannabis farming, widespread in Swaziland, is also not without risk although direct mortality is rare. Its scale first dawned on me when I asked our clinic nurse in Piggs Peak why the main bank in the village was shut down once or twice a month. “Oh, that’s because Mr M is depositing his takings,” she laughed. Mr M later became a patient and explained how his dagga sales were paid for in small denominations. “You can’t be too careful these days. The police can trace the big banknotes.” Little wonder the bank staff’s energies were channelled into counting one and two Emalangeni notes, soiled and creased, for much of the day.
The South African police anti-drug teams worked with the Swazi police, taking off in helicopters beside our home in the mountains. The cannabis fields were easy to spot, being bright green, but inaccessible by road. The teams would land beside the crop and spray it with herbicide. Several of the police told me of their misgivings after spraying as, with every year, they watched small communities sink further into poverty – no cash for school fees now, little enough for food, and rags and tatters for clothing.
It’s very different from my own career as a farm labourer which began as a teenager on Andrew Robertson’s farm in the Carse of Stirling, half an hour’s cycle from home. From sunrise to late on summer evenings, we never stopped. The main danger was the hay stacker, a large cage hitched to the tractor, cut hay spilling into it.
If you had been forbidden to drive the tractor due to incompetence, you were demoted to stacker. Holding on by outstretched arms, your task was to trample the hay as it began to fill up the cage, compacting it as much as possible. When it was judged to be full, you shouted to the driver who pulled a lever. You had to move fast as the cage upended itself. With luck you grabbed the far side of the stacker’s rim and swung clear, landing with both feet on the ground. The cage was unbolted, the new stack emerged, and onto the next loading. Without luck, you might disappear under the now-inverted haystack.
Dr David Vost studied medicine at Glasgow University and is currently working at a hospital in Swaziland. He and his family live on a small farm in Northern Uganda near the Albert Nile. davidvostsz@gmail.com
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