The original note, as written at the time
An underground shadow organisation in Uganda run by taxi drivers and conductors.
Ongoing development
You do not need a permit if the pickup is moving.
That is the first thing they teach you, and it is a whole philosophy compressed into a sentence. A stationary vehicle is a business. A moving vehicle is a coincidence. All of it — the whole thing — is built on the fact that the law is written for things that stop.
There were nine of us at the stage that evening and four of us were in it. Not the driver, of course. The driver was just driving, and would be shocked, genuinely, to find out. The conductor collected the money and the second conductor collected the other money, and the woman selling drinks on that stage had been in it since before I was born and could name every inspector in three districts and what each one of them would take.
It is not a criminal organisation in the way the films say. There is no room with a long table. It is a union that never registered, and its power is the timetable. If you control when the vehicles move, you control who eats, and everyone downstream of that knows it — the market, the kiosks, the traders who pay to be loaded in the morning rather than the afternoon. Nobody is threatened. The threat is the schedule, and the schedule is enough.
I was brought in because of a ledger, because my handwriting was good and the old man’s had gone to pieces, and for the first year the ledger was only money.
Then the ledger got a second column, and the second column was people — who had been seen, who had been moved, which inspector had begun asking, which trader had gone to the authorities about the loading fee. And I wrote it all down in the same good hand, and nobody at the stage ever looked at it twice, because a book of numbers is the most invisible object in the world.
The moment I understood what I was doing, I was in a moving vehicle, and I thought — you do not need a permit if the pickup is moving. And I laughed, which frightened me more than anything in the ledger.
I have kept copies. Not because I am brave. Because my handwriting is good and I am the only one who thinks that a book of numbers might one day need to be read aloud.