Africans and Queuing

I have meant to write about this for a long time and for some reasons, I kept finding better and more interesting topics. However with my latest argument about queuing, I find myself urgently compelled to put my thoughts on paper about this subject. I have travelled a bit here and there, but I have not found any other place where people have no respect for a queue like it is on the beautiful continent. Not only at the market, but also in bars, banks, airports and traffic, Africans find it very hard to line up and patiently wait for their turn. I have seen this and some times, I have been the direct victim of queue jumpers in Kampala, Nairobi, Accra, Lagos and Lusaka. To the contrary I have not seen any body jumping a queue in all the other countries I have visited outside Africa. So my question is; what is it that makes Africans so antipathetic to queuing? Is it simply the way we are brought up or just a desire to have commotion and mayhem in every thing we do. I come from a very humble ground, but I do remember that we used to line up patiently and in an orderly manner for us to be able to fill our containers from the village water well. I don’t recall specifically being taught to line up at the village well (I must have learnt through observation) but I remember vividly that our teachers used to ask us to line up in an orderly manner every morning and there after walk to our classrooms in single file. We were also expected to line up for all services in school. Therefore I derisively dismiss any body that claims that ‘Africans do not queue up because they were brought up like that’. It is my contention that we are genetically chaotic and although we are trained and brought up to be orderly, we will try and be anarchic at the slightest opportunity. I am not the person that usually likes being trampled, so I have a had a few altercations with queue jumpers, but the most recent one at one of the numerous supermarkets on my way home turned out to be the most bizarre I have ever been involved in:

I (to a lady queue jumper - lets call her Miss x): Excuse me; there is a queue here
X: What (in the heaviest of one of Uganda’s English accents)
Yours truly (YT): I said there is a line here, you found me waiting for that gentleman ahead of me to get served, so that I could get served. So if it is not too much for you, I would appreciate if you stepped back (behind me).
X: Ah, stop that lugezilugezi, if you want to be served first you go, me I am standing here, I have not stopped you from being served.
She was clearly one of those in things (and wide enough), so the only way I was going to be served while she stood at that point was either by taking my basket over her head or by physically shoving her out of the way.
YT: But you are clearly in the way and unless you observe a proper queue there is no way, I am going to be served.
X: You people who are slightly educated want to bring lugezigezi by copying everything you see on TV, now what is the queue for here with only 3 people being served. Stop copying everything you see.

While being educated has nothing to do with standing in a queue, she was clearly behaving as the one who had been slightly educated (and I told her as much). After about 30 seconds of exchange, my senses got the better of me and I thought it would be in the best interest of everybody in the store, including the lady at the till (whose time we were clearly wasting with our continued exchange) if I left her to be served first. To my surprise after she was served, she had energy to fight for something that is clearly wrong. “If you want to have queues, why don’t you go and live in Europe”. At that moment I prayed that our country Motto should be changed from ‘For God and My Country’ to ‘God Save My Country’.