Abyssinian Chronicles (29 page)

“Nobody is being forced to convert,” Serenity said after what seemed like a lifetime.

“They are being bought,” she replied, thinking about Dr. Ssali, her husband’s brother-in-law. “They are being given cars, jobs, businesses, promotions, anything to make them convert.”

“People choose what they think is best for them,” Serenity concluded.

Disappointed, Padlock resumed her lookout for those who wolfed their food, or blew onto it instead of patiently waiting for it to cool like decent people, or ate the meat or fish first, or slurped or munched or let soup crawl through the gaps in their fingers. Thank God, everything was in order.

My conclusion was that Padlock was stepping up her anti-Islamic campaign in order to wean me from Lusanani, which proved a noble but doomed endeavor. Lusanani was my partner in crime. She had already shown signs that she would do practically anything for me, which was more than I could say about Padlock. I was hatching a vague plan to keep myself out of the seminary, and although I did not know what role Lusanani was going to play in it, I was sure that she would figure in the final draft.

For the moment, I was very excited by King Faisal’s impending visit. My admiration for my godfather soared. He had got rid of all the foreigners, plus a few foolhardy missionaries, and had turned to the Arab world for sponsorship. Good thinking. I had seen snatches of his visits to the Arab leaders on television. It all looked good. Now I was eager to see King Faisal.

School routine had changed. Every morning we did gymnastics and athletics, sang the national anthem, recited poems and practiced dances and a march-past with the school band.

The city was shivering under the great visitor’s spell: shop buildings
were pasted with paper flags of Uganda and Saudi Arabia. Many other buildings flew proper flags. All the shops had received a face-lift, and roads were undergoing major repairs. General Amin appeared daily on television and was seen making speeches, supervising road repairs, opening new schools and hospitals and launching multifarious functions. He flagged off a motor safari rally and joined the race in his Citroën Maserati. He was indomitable, indefatigable and as indispensable as air.

Soldiers decked out in new uniforms, new boots and new guns appeared on the streets. On our way to and from school, we passed them, as stationary as trees, as committed as suicide bombers. I felt proud to go past them. They were there for my own good, and for the good of the country. I only had to open my mouth and they, like faithful mastiffs, would come puffing and panting to my aid. They made me feel kind and generous; after all, I had only to summon them and the despots would be in dire trouble.

On the day the great man arrived, we stood on the roadside with two flags in our hands: the green one of Saudi Arabia and the black, yellow and red one of Uganda. Amin, like a bear on a crane, towered over the king, who swayed dizzily in the morning air. A mild sun was shining, creating a sweet haze which touched thousands of years back into the pages of the Bible and thrust onto our asphalt the phenomenon of Elijah going to heaven on a chariot of fire. Every one of us seemed to be saying “Father, Father, don’t abandon me” as the chariot swept by. All we got in reply was Amin’s schoolboy grin and the king’s stationary hand trapped in a salute or a wave. The king’s face did not move; if it did, the gesture was swallowed by a mass of crisscrossing wrinkles. A quaint haze of power emanated from the thin old man. I thought of Abraham. He looked at the world with the sublime dignity of somebody totally at peace with life and death.

The king never stopped at our school; obviously we were not important enough to detain life and death on wheels. Personally, I was not disappointed. I felt that I had been touched by the sweep of his garment. I was no longer afraid of death in the real sense. It seemed to have entered and inhabited me. If this man wanted to Islamize Uganda, he could do it. Gaddafi, on the other hand, had not done it, possibly because he was too jumpy, like somebody with too much to prove, somebody with too many balls in the air. This man looked out of the strange eyes of eternity, had nothing to prove, and every word
he uttered reverberated with the weight of the centuries and the powers of heaven and hell. I was captivated, because that was what I wanted to be. That was the power I was seeking in life. I wanted to extract some people from the jaws of death, and to condemn others to the bowels of hell. I dreamed about King Faisal for weeks. Harmless dreams in which nothing much happened.

Serenity and his cronies kept abreast of the changes in the country. They ruminated on them for hours on end, searching for the best way into the future.

“I am going to open a shop for my wives,” Hajj declared. “Come join me. My bank will finance the deal. There are many schemes to help entrepreneurs. It is a matter of presenting a viable plan, and the bank releases the cash. Let us join forces before it is too late.”

“I am not the business type,” Serenity confessed. “The mere sight of goods on display sends cold shivers down my spine.” His old prejudices were still alive and kicking. He could never get the fear of shops and shopkeepers out of his system.

“The trouble with you Catholics is that you are natural-born followers,” Hajj commented as they watched the evening traffic, some of it bearing Saudi Arabian stickers. “You are always looking for somebody to follow, to obey, to work for. You are bred to fear leadership and power and to play it safe. We Muslims are natural-born hustlers, always looking for an edge, a chink to squeeze through. This is a government for doers; those who dither will be left inside a burning house.” Pearls before swine; Serenity was unimpressed.

“People do not change their ways overnight.”

“For the first time in the history of this country, Muslims are in control, and a Muslim man is calling upon his Catholic brother to join hands and walk into prosperity.”

“I want to fight in my own field. I have my sights on the Trade Union of Postal Workers. I want to be the chairman or treasurer of the accounts branch. That is my ambition,” Serenity confided for the first time.

“Should I put in a word for you?” Hajj asked, a conspiratorial smile on his face.

“If you can,” Serenity said reluctantly. “A man with many mouths to feed needs all the help he can get.”

“I know the right people who can nudge the right ribs. Remember, Amin is here to stay. Those who believe that he is here now and gone tomorrow will regret it.”

Thoracic locusts attacked Serenity’s insides with a vengeance. His wife’s paranoid lamentations donged in his ears. What would his benefactors ask in return? Conversion to Islam? Or recruitment into the State Research Bureau? Security organs were infiltrating the civil service; Serenity wanted no part in the game. He wanted to ask Hajj about the benefactors, but he failed to find the right words to carry the message without insinuating that Hajj might be involved with the wrong people.

“I will inform you when I am ready,” he said vaguely, keeping the door open without committing himself.

“Nobody will ask you to do anything dangerous. I help you just because you are my friend and my neighbor, the person I can trust with my life.” Serenity had not fooled him; Hajj had sensed the caution.

“I am very grateful for the offer. When the elections are ready, I will inform you.”

“Take your time, but don’t wait too long.”

I still had one big pressing problem on my mind: how to avoid going to the seminary. Twice I asked Serenity for permission to go to the village to see Grandpa. My plan was to involve the old man, with the hope that he would nip the ridiculous idea in the bud. On both occasions, however, Serenity sent me to Padlock, who made me kneel in front of her for ten minutes before giving me a cold refusal. I was stuck, and angry too. I had money, from selling the stolen bobbin, but I could not declare my financial position. My box of tricks was empty: Cane, a Dummy A look-alike, had warned me never to use the same trick twice. But what was I supposed to do? I decided to turn to him for help.

My association with Cane had its origin in my letter-writing days. I had helped him write a few letters to girls he desired. Two had fallen into his net, but he never paid me. He just promised to be of use much later. Cane was big, tall, dark, with a conspiratorial charm that left you convinced, or pretending to be convinced, even if you nursed serious reservations. We, his classmates, both admired and feared him because he was a northerner, born somewhere in the harsh northern Ugandan plains, abandoned by his father, a soldier, at a tender age and raised by
his mother, who had followed the great asphalt road south to Kampala. Like Uncle Kawayida’s mother, she sold food and anything else she could lay her hands on in order to support herself and her son. What a strapping young man he was! Cane bubbled with the angry confidence born of hatred and too much familiarity with society’s underbelly. He had an opinion on practically everything. He used to say to the majority of us, who were from the central region, “It was not the British who messed up this country; it was your sycophantic forebears, your greedy chiefs and your king who finally sold the country to Obote.” Reared on loyalty, most of us were surprised that he was openly criticizing his fellow northerner Obote. “And those who sold to Obote might as well have sold to Amin. So please don’t moan when things go bad. Take your punishment like real men.” Unable to figure out what side he was on, we usually kept quiet.

For a long time Cane disorganized Grandpa’s political dissertations in my head and almost dislodged them. That I had memorized most of them without really understanding them was an additional problem. I could not analyze them. As soon as I tried to take them apart, they crumbled like rotten paper, but by and by I asked myself the right questions: Did Cane mean that if our chiefs had not been divided—Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, pagans—they would have stopped the spread of British colonial rule and imperialism? Did we, at the turn of the century, have military superiority over British forces in the East African region? What about Captain Lugard’s machine guns? No, Cane was wrong; the British would have come in anyway. The chiefs were minor players in the drama. I would have liked to ask Grandpa some of Cane’s questions, and taken Cane’s side just to tease the old man, but I was not allowed to visit him.

Cane was also our sex educator. He introduced us to the world of pornographic magazines. He had an uncle in the army who smuggled them into the country from Kenya. For the first time in my life, I knew what those white nuns looked like without their habits—some models resembled them so much that I at first thought they were sisters or the same people. Most models were not pale, but gold-brownish like sponge cakes. Others resembled mulattos or half-caste children born of Indian and African parents. We had many questions to ask Cane. How did the magazine makers collect all those beauties? None of them was obese or ugly or unattractive in any way, so how did they get them
to pose naked, bums in the air like grasshoppers, glistening pink lips beckoning, brown assholes peeping? Were these people for real, or were we seeing dolls? How unfortunate that Grandpa was old: he should have seen this.

I was privileged to examine the magazines as much as I wanted. Other, less fortunate voyeurs had to pay, in cash or kind. Cane also brought booklets with titles like
All You Need to Know About Sex
and
The Complete Sex Handbook.
Cane loved to watch our reactions as I read passages, surrounded by a group of eager faces. There were intriguing words like “penis,” “sperm,” “semen,” “vulva,” “vagina,” which Cane made us recite, but which he refused to explain. He was also not good at answering questions. Everyone wanted to know the difference between a vulva and a vagina, sperm and semen, but he refused to elucidate.

It was Cane who told me why Padlock had knocked me out on the red-ink-patch day. “Mothers pretend that they don’t bleed, those fakers,” he said, laughing. I was too angry to laugh. “And you should hear the childish, sniveling noises they make when they are being fucked.” He guffawed and slapped me on the shoulder in the process.

When we went back to the group, he said, “All your mothers get fucked every night, except when they are bleeding. Your fathers pour their … in your mothers’ …” He made us fill in the missing words. Somebody wanted to know how fathers poured their … in our mothers’ … Somebody suggested that they used spoons or funnels. Cane almost slapped him; he couldn’t believe that we were so ignorant.

Cane was not afraid of teachers, and he took special pleasure in teasing female teachers who acted tough with pupils. In fact, that was how he got the name Cane, because he used to tell them, “Cane me, bitch.” The first woman to fall for it caned him till she started sweating and wet patches appeared in her armpits and between her breasts. She finally gave up. Cane liked lying on the floor for the strokes, and when he got up, he usually had a big erection. He would stand there with arms akimbo, his penis pushing against his fly like a big impatient rat. Female teachers soon learned their lesson. Nowadays, they referred him to the headmaster or to their male colleagues.

I met Cane on the way to school and introduced my problem. He patted me on the back and said it was nothing. In class he tore a precious page out of a porno magazine on which a golden-haired, blue-eyed girl was sitting on a chair, legs apart. He tore a blank page from
an exercise book, folded it in two and sketched the head of the biology teacher, accentuating her hairdo, her nose and her lips. He pasted the sketch over the head of the girl. He glued the picture onto the blackboard.

The teacher found the class rumbling with juicy murmurs, which died down as soon as she appeared. She entered the room, put her bag on her chair, surveyed the blackboard and got a massive attack of nerves. “Wh-wh-who?”

“I did,” Cane said from the back, double-bass booming.

“Why?”

“Isn’t it funny, mistress?”

“Remove this dirt from my blackboard, and get out of my class. Stay out for the rest of the month.”

“I prefer to be caned, mistress,” Cane said very calmly.