There is a video that lives rent free in my head. I have it saved in a folder on my TikTok. I did not stop at that. I downloaded that video and have it on my mobile phone.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!I did not stop at that. I uploaded that video on my Instagram profile because I want to watch it whenever I can. I did not stop at that. I’m writing about it to you, months after I got it because I cannot stop thinking about it.
The video was uploaded by a TikTok user registered as @dantero16. She is a trader in Kigoogwa town, Gombe sub-county in Nansana district. She runs a soft drinks depot in her roadside shop sits alongside the Kampala-Gulu highway.
Until that day, Tuesday, October 27, 2024, the highlight of her day had been the stop-over travellers. She had a boy that would run with a basin of ice-cold sodas and energy drinks over his head as a bus hissed to a stop, to entice the weary travellers, who had been dozing in the heat of many miles driving to water their throats, if they did not have a full bladder to empty.
Her days were usually humdrum. Just like an office worker yawning through unread emails in Outlook on a Friday afternoon waiting for 5:00pm.
But that Tuesday, her day in that Matugga town was no ordinary day and the events that unfolded have changed her life.
At around 2:30pm, every ear turned and feet ran out of shops, their two room homes, the market, the nearby Petrocity station to see what had happened as the squeal of tyres ended with a thunderous bang. A speeding truck transporting fuel was on its side. Tipped over. The driver had lost control. Right at the electricity poles. Exactly where a girl who had her set up for frying chips was located.
She had just stepped away to talk to a neighbour a few feet away when the careening truck came to rest almost on her work table. Besides her station were her fellow hustlers preparing Uganda’s quintessential snack: rolexes.
The truck could not have tipped over in a worse location. It was tipped over in the heart of a trading centre where every child and adult fully understand the value of a shilling, they wake up each morning to chase. Fuel is one of the most expensive and vital products in Uganda.
On the day this truck tipped over, at the pump fuel was going for 5,400/- Uganda Shillings and likely to rise. Yet here was “free fuel” that had delivered itself. Started seeping from the truck onto the ground, looking for trenches to flow away, like water, looking for home.
Only a fool would miss an opportunity to grab a jerrican or four and scoop that liquid gold out of the truck, to stash away and surreptitiously sell to motorists and bikers desperate for lower prices. But not too low!
Within minutes of the truck losing control, the shaken driver of the vehicle scrambling out, the carcass of the upturned FUSO had been descended upon. A young man Morgan Samuel Matutu used to heights because he was a builder was on top of the truck, yelling to a friend to ensure that he had at least two jerricans in the pell-mell of cans being shoved at him to fill up. He had already unscrewed the top off the tanker.
At a distance, those late to the scene, looked on in wonder. Torn between joining the once in a lifetime bonanza or being cautious and missing out. There is a video on @pointmedia27’s TikTok account where an eye witness is saying, “Police is taking their time to reach and people are swarming the truck. I have just survived. People are siphoning fuel like they do not fear to die. They don’t fear danger. We thank Allah no one has died.”
He had barely spoken. A loud bang shook Kigoogwa. Then another one. And another one. A flush of heat fiercer than the midday sun fanned out so quickly that people four hundred metres away were scratching their skin like it was burning. The truck was on fire!
Dantero16 finishes what PointMedia could not. In that video on her TikTok she talks about the aftermath of that accident in Kigoogwa town. She was there that day. She was not recording. But she recorded thereafter. From across the road, every morning since when she opened her depot, she could see the disaster that fuel truck had wrought upon her community.
She remembers the chips lady who died trying to save her table from being trampled by the crowd jostling to snatch some fuel from the truck before it exploded into a ball of fire. “Burnt to ashes where she stood,” Dantero16 says. She looks where that happened and wistfully adds, “At this time she would be already setting up her table and lighting the charcoal stove the Uganda Fire Brigade speculated help to ignite the fire.”
That morning, the stove was already lit when the truck tipped over near it. No one seems to have thought of carrying it away from the truck.
She continues to look at the husk of a burnt out building directly across her, the dead keep rising up, calling to her, “Remember me. Remember us.” So she does. There is a grandmother that died with her four grandchildren in one room including Kitibwa, a Hajjati who died with her child, a young man who was running a video and computer library who sacrificed his life trying to ensure all the children who had paid up to play games in that library got out and he did not: Joseph Muwonge was his name.
She cannot help but think that, “We walk with our death every day and we don’t know.” In Uganda more than anywhere else. And few will remember who you were. Fewer will care you are gone.
You can only hope the fewest that cared about you to remember you will try to erect a memorial in marble or words that will go on long after you and your memoirist are no more. To say I was here. Why? Because we don’t know where we are going after here. Or of we are even going anywhere.
She did that for the 26 victims (at last count) who lost their lives that October 22, in a hurriedly filmed video while waiting for customers to walk into her depot.
She has done more than most.