A Ugandan Bookstore

Very quickly after I arrived in Uganda, I had gone through my recreational reading.  And although I do a lot of reading on my phone these days, you can't exactly haul out the iPhone in your average Ugandan greasy spoon without attracting a lot of attention.  As I'm alone most of the time here, and therefore spend a lot of time reading while I wait for my food to arrive, I took a hike down to the "biggest bookstore in Uganda" to pick up some new reading material.

"Aristoc," this bookstore, is probably about the size of the smallest bookstore in Juneau, smells mustier than my folks' basement, and requires a security pat-down to enter that rivals the one you apparently receive when visiting the Dalai Lama.  Those people who complain about airline screening procedures in the US have never visited a Ugandan bookstore, supermarket, or tourist café.

One advantage, by the way of being a white guy with an ostentatious moustache in a place like this is that, after the first couple times of checking your bag, they recognize you and just wave you through.  So, tip to potential terrorists: two words.  Handlebar.  Moustache.

Surprisingly, the bookstore is filled with (what else?) titles in Political Science and Economics on development, state-building, and civil war.  Sachs, Easterly, Huntington... All the popular junk, plus enormous tomes like "The Solder and the State."  That's the first sign that there are too many aid workers in this city.  Second sign is that the people in the forestry department at Makerere University refer to my teaching stats as "capacity building," but that's another story.

Had a hard time locating the non-Civil War Africa books (sorry, IR folks.  Not my cup of tea) and ultimately picked up V.S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa, which is sub-titled, Glimpses of African Belief.  Naipaul clearly doesn't have a good understanding of the way oil distorts economies and has a weird thing about not wanting to pay cash when there are religious connotations to an activity, but the book is interesting and engaging, if a bit depressing.

Sort of focuses my attention on religion here.  Will blog more about that later.