Abyssinian Chronicles (19 page)

For Grandpa, the shock of being barred from law school brought into focus the racial inequality at the heart of the colonial system, and he decided to fight back. He campaigned and became a subcounty chief in the forties and a county chief in the fifties. These positions gave him a better view of how the system worked, and he learned how to fight it from the inside. The British were safely at the top, insulated from the Africans by the Indians, and the Indians enjoyed the middleman’s role without soiling their fingers. During the forties, Grandpa did two things he detested: he collected taxes to fuel the administrative machinery and gathered conscripts for the World War II effort—young men sent off to die in theaters of war whose names they could hardly pronounce. His only brother by the same mother volunteered; he was eager to go and kill white people, especially British soldiers, because they had stripped and whipped him for loitering near the British Club. Grandpa tried to stop him, asking him to stay behind and fight for change locally, but in vain.

During the war, Grandpa supported Germany. Actually, to him, the war was a European affair he had no interest in. He regarded it as a bizarre game of football, the British and German teams resuming where they had left off in 1918. Because he disliked the British team, especially their colonial rule, he settled for their biggest rival. News from the front line took an agonizingly long time coming, and when it did, it was mostly brief, bad and insufficient. Thousands of young men “returned in envelopes,” meaning they died on the front and their families were notified by mail. Many young men returned that way, in soiled pieces of paper passed from hand to hand. He expected to receive his brother’s envelope too, but it did not come. The war finally ended and the veterans came home, without any news arriving of his brother.

In the meantime, he backed the raging economic boycotts. It was his way of dealing with his brother’s loss. He also felt he owed it to the conscripts who had returned in envelopes. During the boycotts, however, his brother resurfaced. His leg had been blown off by a land mine in Burma. He never said anything about his war experiences, for he had lost the power of speech. He spent his days locked away in the miasmas of his mind.

The biggest achievement of the boycotts was to lessen the Indian stranglehold on trade and put some coffee mills and cotton ginneries in African hands. Yet ruin came hot on the heels of success: somebody accused Grandpa of anti-government activities, including sabotaging the war effort. He was impeached, and his efforts to return to office ended in a crushing defeat at the hands of a Protestant chief. More ruin followed, and his life crumbled round his ears. As the boycotts raged through the fifties, he fought to pick up the pieces of his life, without much success. To begin with, his favorite wife was taken by another man, and not long afterward she died. Serenity, Tiida and Nakatu became orphans. Grandpa’s household fell apart: relatives, wives and friends left, and had it not been for Grandma, it would have collapsed totally.

The sixties were ushered in on the back of mounting political pressure. The British Empire was disintegrating from the center, and there was unrest in its constituent parts. The British were on their way out. Locally, they were escaping the flames of the house they had set on fire. Grandpa did not like that. He would have liked them to stay and pay for the sins of dividing the people and heightening intertribal strife, for the economic exploitation of the country and for creating a recipe for future disaster. Protestants had the upper hand in national politics; the northern peoples controlled the army, police and prison services; and the central and southern peoples were peasant farmers and bureaucrats. There were far too many fault lines along which seismic activity could erupt.

By that time Grandpa was more a watcher of than a participant in both national and local politics. He talked at a few small meetings, espousing non-partisan political views, which sounded strange to political neophytes who had been promised opportunities if they voted for this or that party. The local elite had entered the political arena in the process. The Indians, however, stayed out of it, content with their 90
percent control of trade and their royal role as the geese that lay the golden eggs. After sixty-eight years of British rule, for much of which Africans had been more spectators than participants in the political and economic life of their country, Grandpa could see no ground for optimism. He could only see powder kegs smoking, waiting to go off.

Pre-Independence partisan violence, manifested in the cutting of banana and coffee trees belonging to members of rival parties, made Grandpa sure that the house built on divisions and exploitation was going to be undermined by the same, and sooner rather than later. When he was attacked by mastiffs angered by his criticism of the victorious Protestant, northerner-led Uganda People’s Congress party, he saw the wound he suffered as a vindication of his theories. It was the conviction that he was right which fueled his quick recoveries, fired his intransigence and empowered his stoicism. The explosion was near, and so was the construction of a new house in which everyone would have a stake. The old house built on British supremacy, Indian collaboration and African tribal strife did not belong to anyone. Nobody felt safe in it. It was a house to be used and abused for petty gain. It was a house to be pulled down, because of the piratical cancer at its heart. At the time he was telling me these things, I thought he had made up some of them.

Grandpa was speaking from experience. When he lost power, and the women left, and the army of relatives and hangers-on dispersed like feathers in the wind, his vision became clear. The cloud of power was gone, but he felt unburdened, liberated from the ghosts of control, unyoked from a parasitic household. His home had been a small island infested by pirates, terrorized by conflicting interests, incessant jealousies. It had been a joyless place. He hardly knew what went on within its walls or outside them. It burst with intrigue, insincerity and competition. He would feel the strife as soon as he entered the compound. He could detect the negativity in the branches of the trees, and in the smell of the soil of his coffee shamba. The proceeds from his crop haunted him, torn at as they were by the claws of greedy hangers-on.

At the peak of his power, awash with worshippers, he could hardly get anyone to tell him the truth. He could feel masks going up as soon as he arrived home from work. Each word uttered was a spear, a costly bullet not to be wasted but to be carefully used in individual or collective battles for favor, for money, for position. Grandpa did not
think that the national powder keg would go off in the same way his house had crumbled. He knew it would take time.

Nineteen sixty-six. Four years after Independence. The constitution was suspended, a state of emergency declared in the central region. Armed soldiers were stationed in Grandpa’s village for the first time in national history. He believed that the time had come for the national edifice to go up in flames. He stoked the conflagration with the oil of his eloquence. He spoke to the political idiots about their no-win situation in biting parables. He acted with the bravery of a man who knew that destiny was on his side.

When the bastards dipped him in a cattle pool, he believed that he was going to die, and that his death would blow the conflagration all the way to the top. When they let him go, he felt he had missed a historic opportunity. When the villagers invited him back to help them deal with the question of military brutality, he saw it as a golden opportunity to fulfill his mission. When he was shot on his way home after a stormy meeting, he prayed for death to take him, but only one bullet was fired at his leg. He waited for more bullets to come and thrust him into national martyrdom, but in vain. When he opened his eyes and found himself in a bed at Ndere Parish Hospital, without any soldiers guarding him, he felt sad. The day of national reckoning had shifted a few more years into the future. He was afraid he might miss it.

General Idi Amin’s coup took Grandpa by surprise: either he had misjudged, or a quirk of fate had manifested itself. He had expected the president, Milton Obote, to lead the country down the red road of Communism or Socialism. He had expected to see the nationalization of Indian businesses, and British military intervention to protect the interests of British capital. The British would force Obote to rescind the nationalization plans; banking on Russian or Chinese help, he would refuse, and he would be taken out in the name of anti-Communism. But before any of that occurred, Amin was there, and Grandma had died in a mysterious fire.

Intoxicated by sorrow and uncertainty, and left on his own without his favorite adviser, adversary and sister, Grandpa suspended his political musings and soliloquies. At the back of his mind was the twitching pulse which intimated that Amin might be the man everyone had been waiting for, the man who would fire the next explosion, or
series of explosions. The British pirates had left the political arena to their local counterparts and had concentrated on running the economic show by remote control, aided by their Indian agents. Was Amin the man who was going to smash the whole setup?

Grandpa was plucked from the depths of his nostalgia by the news that the Indians had to leave the country within ninety days. “This is it,” he said to himself, sediments of unease gathering at the bottom of his heart. “A few more explosions, and the house will be reduced to ashes and reconstruction can begin.” For once, he allowed the bug of optimism to bite him, and he believed Amin’s vows to return to the barracks after putting the country back on its feet. Grandpa started going out to drink. There was too much electricity in the air to stay home and moan about the past when the future was looming on the horizon. People sang Amin’s praise. He could see the mighty padlocks on Indian businesses falling away like rusty trinkets, opening the way for Africans to storm the bastions of economic power. Voices of apprehension were gobbled up by the noises of jubilation. No one wanted their euphoria poisoned by doubt; they had waited so long that they wanted to imbibe it in its purest form. Grandpa ignored talk about the economic abuses of Indian business owners. His mind was already on the next step, the next explosion, for what had been started had to be pursued to its logical end. Amin obviously had balls, he conceded, but how would he use them?

November 1972. Indians had started to leave. Grandpa did not miss the departing Indians, because he did not have any Indian friends. He had always made big purchases from the same shop, where they served him politely, but that was where the relationship ended, sealed by the tinkle of coins. He had seen Indian shops begin, expand and flourish. He had also seen a few edged out, but it had been an Indian playing field.

Now Indian temples would be desolate, worshipperless; Indian school gates, torn open to allow everyone in; Indian clubs and sporting facilities, penetrated and occupied by new faces. As a group, Indians were too powerful to sympathize with, but he could not help thinking about the old. What were those creaky-boned, triple-chinned old men and women going to do? What would he have done, God forbid, had he been in their shoes? What would Grandma, God forbid,
have done in their predicament? What would she have felt and said? He could not imagine how the old were going to cope in Britain, a place he never desired to see, for he reasoned that if the British could cripple his future in his own country, they had to be worse on their home turf, where they had even more power.

Grandpa could see the Indian community splitting like a jackfruit dropped on concrete. There were the rich and the poor, the skilled and the non-skilled, the highborn and the untouchables, the Indians and the Goans. How were the untouchables, despised and discriminated against by their own people, going to fare in Britain, where many of them would look darker than Africans? Had he been in Amin’s position, Grandpa would have given the old people the choice to leave or to stay. It was only fair. It would not be new to the country: when the chiefs from the central region were expelled from the regions where they had gone to establish British rule, the people who wanted to follow them left and those who wanted to stay remained behind.

All the Indians were leaving. Already there were rumors of suicide: people setting themselves on fire, eating poison, drowning. Grandpa felt happy that the British could, this time, not escape the boomerang of race which Amin was sending them. He was putting thousands of Indians on their doorstep, many of whom had been kept out of Britain by the immigration quota system. The irony was that British officers had promoted Amin, and Britain had had a hand in his coup, and now the bastard was paying them back. British officers had certainly passed over many more deserving African officers when they were grooming this hydra, and now it was too late to start chopping off its multifarious heads. What had indeed come on the wings of racism and piracy was flying home on the same.

Gripped by fear for the future, Grandpa partook of the bonanza of cheap sales by going up Mpande Hill to the shops. He got himself a fifty-kilo sack of sugar, a ten-liter tin of cooking oil, a twenty-liter tin of paraffin, and cement for repairing cracked graves in the family burial ground near my favorite tree. Grandpa could see that Amin was a robber baron, a corporate raider, a mafia boss, a man who, in other circumstances, would have built himself a financial empire as big as Barclay’s Bank, for he had the guts, the luck and the ruthless drive of a successful pirate. What bothered Grandpa, however, was that Amin
had far too much power and was too unpredictable. No one seemed to know what he was capable of. The future thus looked overcast.

Grandpa remembered that when Serenity migrated to the city after Independence, he found the place still as segregated as ever, with the proliferation of slums the newest development. Life still went on in diaphanous chambers of adjacent experience, with every race, every class and every tribe separated by a glass wall. This was the post-Independence city, and the former classroom teacher was dazzled by its aggressive energy.