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around the nakasero market is a pretty good shopping district. i don’t mean a shopping district like chicago’s magnificent mile or new york’s meat packing district, but rather the place where ugandans go to shop in the city. narrow streets, even narrower alleyways, all lined with little mom&pop shops. it’s like walking through a department store, but on a grander scale. picture sears - bed & bath, kitchen, mens, womens, kids, shoes, jewelry, auto, hardware. now picture the same thing, but instead of floors of a department store, you have streets in a city. the nakasero shopping district is divided up into distinct sections of shops that span several blocks, all dedicated to selling the exact same item. floor tiles or water faucets or cell phones or extension cords or shoes or watches. whatever the item is, there are umpteen shops within a 10 yard radius that are selling it. nakasero as the sears roebuck of uganda.

i don’t understand the economics of how a shopowner survives in this kind of commercial set-up. if everyone’s selling the same thing, how can there possibly be enough customers for everyone to be able to sell enough to break even each month? phil keeps saying that you often find home depot and menards right next to each other in the states. true. i’m sure there’s millions of dollars invested into choosing the right retail location for stores on that scale, so there must be some science to it. but, i don’t know…i’m still not convinced. my theory is that shoppers develop long-standing, generations-long relationships with shopowners. the relationship becomes more important than the item bought or sold.

last weekend, phil & i went to nakasero to buy fabric. the curtains in our apartment were atrocious - dull color, horrible pattern, way too long yet not wide enough - so we were out to buy african batik fabric to make new curtains. brightly colored, loudly patterned. we’d gotten vague directions on how to find the nakasero fabric district, which consisted of “get to the market, go down an alleyway, pass the tile section and the electronics section, then it’ll be 1 of the streets around there.” we followed the directions and sure enough, there was the fabric district. a couple of streets dedicated exclusively to selling fabric. floor-to-ceiling fabric everywhere, plus all the tailors you could need to sew that fabric for you. 1 alley was a line of sewing machines set up against the store’s outside wall, each with a tailor - man, woman, young, old - sewing away.

the same friend who’d given us the directions told us that vendors would start the price for 6 yards of batik fabric at 25,000/=, but that 18,000/= was the reasonable price. phil & i pick out our 3 pieces of 6 yard apiece batik, ask the price. she says 25,000/=. i say 18,000/=. she says sold. we walk out with 18 yards of fabric for $30.

we opted for a tailor closer to home and found one in the bugolobi market right across the street from our apartment. we go into his 1-room shop armed with our fabric and curtain patterns (as designed by us) and he says, “i am francis. we specialize in making only curtains. only curtains.” i guess we came to the right place. a day later we had our curtains and they make all the difference in the world for making the apartment more homey. tomorrow we’re planning on going back to nakasero to buy more fabric - there’s still some windows that need curtains. i imagine that we’ll also be going back to francis. 101paige 101africa