The South African Constitutional Court is the sort of place ours might have been ... well, never, actually. It's a peculiar sort of place by the usual Anglo-American notion of a "court." It's short on cloistered spaces, for one thing, as most spaces other than the courtroom itself can be viewed with good clarity from multiple angles, so, for ( Read more... )

If it were, I'm not sure how many of the players would survive a given game without concussions and the like ( Read more... )

Titles are important in Uganda, or, at least, they seem to be. This may be because I was getting buried up to my ears in them up until the day before I left, mostly "Your Worship" and "Your Lordship" or "My Lord." The former is the proper means of addressing a magistrate; the latter, a judge or justice ( Read more... )

South Africa isn’t quite Africa, at least in the way we usually think of it, and it isn’t quite Europe, either. It’s very definitely not Uganda, though bits of it seem to have some things in common. In a way, it’s much closer to India or China than to any of the more obvious points of comparison: a domain of fantastic wealth and crushing poverty ( Read more... )

Anyone who thinks women’s liberation has a long way to go in Korea (to say nothing of the United States) has never been to Uganda. Let’s not deal here with “female circumcision” (read as, “horrid, twitch-inducing-by-description-alone genital mutilation”), which is still practiced by one tribe. Let’s also not discuss the rape statistics, which are ( Read more... )

Yesterday, Her Worship Nabafu, a prosecutor named Simon, and I accompanied His Worship Kataswa on his rounds ( Read more... )

The days I'm feeling like I have much in common with a laundered dress shirt. Most Ugandan meals come with a starchy vegetable of some kind, whether it be a mound of rice, a mass of matoke, or a slab of "pohsho," which resembles cornmeal-based tofu in concept, looks like a wedge of fresh mozerella, and tastes like cold cream of wheat (even when hot ( Read more... )

The internet is not a widely available commodity in Uganda. In fact, relatively few homes, and even major institutions, have access to it. Most access comes through Internet Cafes, such as the one I'm currently sitting in (with Christian music continually doing its best to lodge itself permanently between my ears as I type). While these people's ( Read more... )

One of the more common (and unhappily necessary) modes of short-range transportation are bodabodas, which are the short-range bicycle, moped, or motorcycle equivalent of taxis. These (I’m sorry, Mom) are not only ubiquitous, but absolutely necessary for travel within communities, since taxis here stick to set routes with set destinations in the ( Read more... )

So it seems the penalty for stealing a dollar fifty worth of matoke (the starchy, plantain-like bananas so beloved in Uganda) is eight hours really hard community service for the first offense if you plead guilty to Magistrate Nabafu. I say “really hard” because it consists (or consisted, in this particular case) of cutting the grass of the ( Read more... )