My son, Enrique, 19, passed his Ugandan driving test today. He is a fairly proficient driver but would have passed anyway, however bad he was, by the simple—and apparently routine—procedure of handing the examiner a tip of 30,000 shillings (USD 15).

In the early hours of yesterday morning fire engulfed the outdoor Owino market, Uganda’s largest, in a walled enclosure hard against Kampala’s city centre. The dense labyrinth of stalls covered an area the size of two football pitches and provided a livelihood for thousands of small traders in cheap clothes, shoes, household utensils and other goods, all now gone up in smoke.

This review has been reprinted (June 2010) on the inter-faith Patheos website.

‘Doubt’
Director: John Patrick Shanley
Screenplay: John Patrick Shanley
Miramax Films, 2008

Pope Benedict’s remarks to the Curia at the end of 2008 deploring the tendency of social gender theories to promote “emancipation of man from creation and the creator” drew predictable scorn from secular liberals and disappointment from Catholics who would like to see the Roman church remade in a 21st century image. (Benedict did not, actually, say that homosexuality was as great a threat to humanity as global warming, but that tabloidification of his message is what appears to have stuck.)

On Saturday we finally got round to visiting the Muammar Gaddafi Mosque and Namirembe Anglican Cathedral in Kampala Old Town.

This began as purely accidental tourism for the mosque was the chosen site of an assignation with two mysterious young men who had accosted me on the street a few days earlier. “We’re from Liberia,” they had announced, seeming to think that this information would convey to me much more than it in fact did. So I just said “Yes?”

‘Marrying Buddha’
(Zhou) Wei Hui
2005 Constable and Robinson (London) 248 pp.

Trivial, narcissistic trash. I picked up a copy of this because I had been too busy to catch the author’s 2000 international bestseller, ‘Shanghai Baby’ (six million copies sold in 34 languages according to Wikipedia) and was curious to see what all the fuss had been about; but I couldn’t get past page 23 of this, it is so awful.

The preceding chapter of this work in progress departs from glimpses of Kunming, in southwest China’s Yunnan Province, where my family and I made our home for the first five of our 12 years in China. My wife, Kate Wedgwood, spent those years directing Save the Children UK’s extensive China programme while I established an independent publication, China Development Brief.

This second chapter back-tracks to our 1994-95 transition through Hong Kong. It pauses to consider that city’s nature as a cultural and social as well as an economic entrepôt and then goes on to discuss the—at that time, topical—subject of child abandonment in China. This serves as an introduction to many of the complexities of working for ‘development’ there.

The visit of an old friend from the UK provides occasion for a Friday evening pub crawl to test Kampala’s reputation as a city that really knows how to party.

We enlist Peter, a boda boda (motorbike taxi) man whose number I once took because I was impressed by the absence of lunacy in his motoring style, and he sub-contracts another driver to help because we are a bit heavy both to sit aback just one 125cc machine. Peter had taken Tim (my friend) around town a few times the week before and has now become confused about our identities, is no longer able to tell us apart. Embarrassing for him but not surprising, really: two big, affluent (little does he know) middle aged white men who talk oddly; the commonalities must be more striking than the differences. Tim rides ahead with dependable Peter while I follow with the other guy who doesn’t seem too bad but blows it in the closing stages when, by the roundabout near the golf club, he attempts to overtake Peter—why bother?—and gets stuck behind a truck.

It will be good once again to have a U.S. president who is a fluent speaker of English. And how fluent! Obama’s victory oration was a fine display, my favourite part being the closing remarks when, in ritual contradiction of those who doubt America’s ability to recover her economic and political prestige, he threw out that quiet little ‘Yes we can.’ Said too empathically, with a rising tone, too rousing a tone, this would have sounded strident, embattled. Instead, he deftly threw the line away, no emphasis at all, just quiet assurance. It was a beautiful delivery. Every bit as beautiful as the entire Obama family.

In June 2008 I was invited by the pressure group, Human Rights in China (HRIC), to serve as guest editor for an issue of their quarterly journal, China Rights Forum. The piece below is an introductory article, discussing the role of human rights organizations like HRIC, that I contributed in my capacity as invited editor. HRIC declined to publish the article, offering instead to publish a truncated version comprising the first four paragraphs followed by one or two sentences selected from the subsequent text. I did not consent to this arrangement so the article sees the light for the first time here.

Various Western commentators have noted a resurgence of ‘Confuciansim’ in China. But will Chinese youngsters buy into it? This essay, which appears in China Rights Forum (2008, No. 3), discusses other influences at work on younger generations: smaller family size; increased access to education; wider exposure to culturally demotic media; increased personal freedom and responsibility. It concludes that 21st century Chinese will certainly differ from their ancestors substantially (although in ways that are not easily predictable); and that a neo-Confucian discourse need not imply either loss of cultural diversity and experimentation or reversion to cultural type. (This was written in my capacity as guest editor of the journal. Unlike my ‘guest editor intro’ piece, which the journal’s publisher, Human Rights In China, declined to use, this was published with only minor modifications.)