I am getting much better at sleeping on my regular international bus journeys and while travelling from Kampala to Nairobi on Wednesday I managed to doze off before we had even left the suburbs of Kampala. I was soon awoken by a loud discussion at the front of the bus. A Somali man was shouting and gesticulating at the driver, waving his yellow ticket and saying something like 'sasa unalipa' (now you pay!). The driver was Ugandan and did not speak Swahili very well and was telling the Somali man in English he was crazy over and over again.
Apparently the Somali man had followed the bus on a motorbike taxi ever since we had departed from the bus terminal. He had flagged down the bus when he eventually caught up with us (nearly getting run over) and forced his way on. Now he was claiming the driver had to pay for his motorbike taxi because we had left early.
I was a bit shocked at how rude the Somali man was being to the bus driver - his abuse was getting louder and more desperate and I was angry with him for waking me from my snooze which I knew would elude me for a while now. But what was more alarming was the response of the rest of the passengers. Firstly, two men on the bus thought it was their role to step in on behalf of the driver and find any reason why this Somali man was in the wrong. 'You can't treat our driver like that'; 'apologise now for your language'; 'you were late for the bus you cannot enter now'; 'get off the bus this instance'. Then the women who were sitting around me started gossipping: 'if it was me I would have accepted I had missed the bus'; 'this man has not been checked he is a security threat'; 'do we even know who this man is, he could be a terrorist'; 'how do we know he isn't carrying a bomb'; 'let's just call the police'.
At this point I started to wonder if the same reaction would have been provoked if the man trying to board the bus had been a Ugandan. After all he had paid for his ticket and we had left dead on time so maybe it was a bit unfair that we left without him. Maybe he had a really important engagement in Nairobi - if I had paid $25 for a bus and I missed it by a few minutes I think I would have done the same. Eventually things settled down and we continued on our journey. From the back I wasn't sure if the Somali man was on the bus or not. A few minutes later the women started chatting again: 'the thing is he's a Somali, you know Somali's have hot heads, they can't control their temper'; 'you know what makes me happy is that all of us stood up against him, it shows how we all know what is right and what is wrong, and that man was wromg!'
At the next police stop about half an hour later we were held up and the bus driver was summoned outside. I saw the Somali man and the bus driver being led away to a police car. The same two busy body men went to give evidence (risky in with Ugandan police) and they were away for forty minutes. The women continued gossipping: 'if he wasn't so hot-headed he would have realised it would have been much cheaper to wait and buy another bus ticket than pay this bribe to the police.' Everyone, including the Somali man, were put back on the bus and as the two witnesses walked back up the aisle they thought it their duty to inform us that everything was OK - the bus driver had been given points on his license but he was allowed to carry on driving us to Nairobi.
How did they arrive at this outcome? My theory is that after their heated discussion the driver eventually gave in and let the Somali man stay on the bus. Then one of the passengers called the police to alert them of this 'security threat'. The police at the next stop therefore stopped our bus and officially punished the driver for being negligent. Then after releasing the driver they probably accepted a substanial bribe from the Somali man who had also broken the law by entering a bus when it wasn't at a bus stop. They checked him for bombs and then let him board the bus he had paid for. Crazy and intriguing. I wanted to find out more and I'm sure the gossipping women would have divulged all their unauthorised knowledge if I had done some investigating but I fell asleep and woke up to the Nairobi morning rush hour.
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