Cooking Oil

I enjoyed last night's performance of the thought-provoking play Cooking Oil by Ugandan playwright Deborah Asiimwe.  The play is about a teenage girl, Maria, (compellingly portrayed by Esther Lutaaya) who dreams of completing her education and graduation day as a lawyer, but whose family forces her to sell cooking oil misappropriated from a US Foreign Aid program where it is meant to be freely distributed, to support her brothers through school.  The corrupt local politician, Silver, who gave Maria's father the misappropriated oil to sell as a favor, tries to persuade Maria to sell it across the border since the village is his market, but Maria is afraid of being molested and robbed by the border guards and continues to illegally sell the oil in the village.

The performance took place in the round at In Movement, a beautiful studio venue with an open-sided platform covered by a reed-thatched roof; with the audience seated on woven banana fiber mats and pillows.  The play incorporated music played on guitar and a large inanga or Rwandan zither.  Maria's mother washes, peels and fries cassava during the performance, and she handed round freshly cooked cassava chips afterwards during the audience discussion. 

The discussion topics included "Does Uganda need foreign aid?", corruption and women's education.  The expats were the first to speak up; our view in general was that aid is needed but the problem is a lack of processes to get it to the people that need it.  It was very interesting to hear the perspective of the African audience members present; some argued that aid is not helpful - for example cooking oil and powdered milk are not useful in times of famine and drought when there is no food to cook and no water to reconstitute the milk.  Others said that aid was not necessary and that leaders should set an example by investing in development and should empower citizens to help themselves rather than rely on handouts.

On the topic of corruption, the view was less optimistic, that it is too dangerous to stand up against corruption, so if you can't beat corruption, you have to collude to survive.  On education, an audience member argued that the Ugandan system need to change to teach people to think for themselves rather than blindly follow what they are told.

For Beth and I, both working in development, it was a very stimulating discussion, which we continued over Ethiopian food at Fasika - spicy chicken, goat, beef and lentil stews or wats with chopped spinach and mixed root vegetables served on a huge slab of injera, a spongy sourdough flatbread.

In the car on the way home we agreed with the taxi driver's view that the kind of Ugandans that can afford to go to the theatre have probably not experienced the poverty and hunger that is all around the slums of Kampala and the rural areas of the country, and that foreigh aid is still very much needed as well as development.