In a small town in Uganda called Mbarara there is a BP service station. There are few cars in Mbarara, no electricity, no gas, no sewerage. Yet this service station uses more electric power than the whole town. It provides petrol for travelers and the few public vehicles in the region, but it is the brightest, best-lit and glossiest place in Mbarara. Here is an extravagant image of the intrusion of global capitalism. What, we might ask, does this absurd symbol of the West's profligate use of energy have to do in this small African town? Yet when we look more closely, when we track the procession of people through this place in a week, we discover that this service station functions very differently from similar outlets in the West. It is the best-lit and main meeting place of the town; it is the place on which bicycle taxis converge; the many bicycle owners in the region come to inflate their tyres here, a task made much easier by pressurized air; groups of people can be seen sitting around talking at all times of the day. This service station has a different meaning for the local inhabitants from the meaning it might have in the West; it is possibly less artificial, less soulless, than it might be elsewhere, it is perhaps even less anomalous, because it is incorporated more seamlessly into a broader spectrum of local life. Consider a typical scene: a woman comes with a small Coca-Cola bottle to have it filled with paraffin for her stove. Without demur she inserts the simple round of her life in between two significant forms of global capitalism-- Coca-Cola and British Petroleum-- to maintain the simplicity of her daily cooking. This place has a different meaning to these inhabitants because they inhabit it differently. -- Bill Ashcroft