Uganda's veejays give Western films a home-grown spin

Although the art of veejaying has not yet a emerged as a rags-to-riches path, it holds allure for a growing number of impoverished Ugandans who dream of making it big by tapping into their creative and entrepreneurial sides rather than spending their days driving a boda-boda (motorbike taxi) or selling vegetables.

After dropping out of school because he couldn't pay his tuition, Jingo began translating movies as the phenomenon took off. "Robocop" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" were among the early translations that made him famous.

Video halls proliferated in Uganda in the '80s and '90s, and today they are a thriving local industry. According to the Union of Video Owners and Operators, a trade group in Kampala, there are some 600 video halls in greater Kampala and 2,500 countrywide.

With better technology, video jockeys have become increasingly sophisticated, dubbing their translations onto tapes and discs that they then offer for rent or sale.

In particular, the advent of the DVD, which made dubbing easier, has fueled their success. Jingo runs two "libraries" - storefront kiosks - of his translations. Each DVD costs 3,000 Uganda shillings (about $1.60) to rent and 10,000 shillings (about $5.50) to buy. He now has six employees.

Neighboring countries are getting caught up in the trend, prompting Jingo to begin mixing Swahili into some of his Luganda translations. That has earned him an audience from as far away as Rwanda and the Congo. Jingo estimates that he has translated about 3,000 different movies during his career.

But, like an actor whose first love is the stage, Jingo still veejays live most evenings at a video hall in his home village of Kajjansi, a trading center about 15 miles south of Kampala.

At 8:30 on a recent Tuesday evening, anticipation is thick as people crowd onto wooden benches in the dark, airless hall.

The film is "The Escapist," an obscure 2001 thriller starring Jonny Lee Miller. Tickets cost 200 Uganda shillings (about a dime.) Some of the viewers buy mugs of steaming porridge or plates of offal with steamed green bananas.

Jingo is seated at the front before a pile of stereo components, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and clutching a microphone. Somewhere, a generator sputters to life.

The opening credits begin to roll, and Jingo shouts the familiar refrain of the veejay: "Tugende maso!" ("Let's go forward!")

Some church groups and other conservative outfits here complain that the video halls and veejays are polluting the minds of Africans with the sex and violence of Western mass culture.

But Ellickson, for one, sees the work of veejays like Jingo differently. "They have adapted these films in their own way; they have made something new."

Jingo, for his part, defends the morality of Hollywood movies.

"It's true that many American films start with violence," he says. "But in 99 percent of them, in the end, the police always come."

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