History journalism and the return of Dudu taxis

US media historian Earnest Perry, quoted by Kathryn Palmer in her article, “What journalists miss when they ignore history”, captures the importance of history journalism well when he states:

“Journalists live in the moment. Journalism, as it is practiced, is reactionary. Journalists tend to spend a lot of their available time in dealing with where we are right now and where we’re going instead of how we got here. …by and large, [good] journalists will use historians to help them have a better understanding of how a historical event connects to a possible current event, especially if the journalist recognises that this has happened once before, which in most cases it has.”

So should we turn news stories into half news and half history? Not exactly! As Nicholas Hirshon, et al notes in their article, “Reporting today, with yesterday’s context” (Columbia Journalism Review, September 21, 2020), “Not every piece that a journalist is assigned to do is going to require that you go back to 1619, but certainly, if you write analytical pieces, it’s so important to have that historical perspective.”

The key thing for journalists to take home is Perry’s apt counsel, “Understand that every story has a history that goes further back than the last 48 hours.”

So why am I taking you through this boring history stuff on a languid Friday?

Well, it all started when I recently began to see a number of small commuter taxis on the road, mostly in the make of Nissan Vannette and Mazda Bongo vans. I was reminded of the Dudu commuter taxi vans of the early 1990s that mostly plied the Bugolobi, Mulago, Bukoto and even Entebbe routes.

The Dudu (Kiswahili for bug/insect/beetle, etc) in Kampala street-lingua was a Toyota Townace/Liteace van shaped like a bug, hence the name. It was licensed to carry eight passengers. They were popular among city commuters because they filled up quickly compared to the bigger 14-seater Kigati (bread), Kigege (tilapia) or Kamunye (kite) vans, and were nimble.

The Dudus were outlawed by Ministry of Works and Transport, and the Transport Licensing Board as public service vehicles (PSV) following a tragic accident at Wankoko, Old Port Bell road in 1993 in which 13 people died and only two survived! Meaning a vehicle licensed to carry eight passengers had 15, almost double its allowable capacity!

That accident also had another significant (and positive) impact on our public transport: the 14-seater commuter taxis (Kamunye) that had notoriously abused this regulation, always carrying 18 or even 20 passengers (sitting four people per row), were finally called to order.

The government swung the whip – literally – to ensure compliance not through slow prosecution in traffic courts but through instant corporal punishment on the driver, “conductor” and every fourth sitting passenger in the row.

After a few weeks of traffic police and military police wielding the whip without fear or favour, nobody wanted to be the fourth passenger in the seat/row in a commuter taxi. This sanity largely prevails today in our Kamunyes (now ‘Drone’) taxis.

Can the same approach help end the notorious three or four people riding on our boda-bodas? How many bones must break and lives lost before pulling out the whip? I don’t know.

The new version of the Dudus (Nissan Vannette) have three rows in the short wheelbase vans, thus carrying at least 10 or 11 passengers. We are effectively back to the woods, and a potential tragic accident like that at Wankoko 30 years later!

If you are a reporter or editor assigned to handle this story today, history journalism would be your best approach; thus bringing back the past Transport Licensing Board policy and Wankoko tragedy to ask how we got back here, where we could end up and who is sleeping on the job.

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