Abyssinian Chronicles (43 page)

The third scratch jolted her: it was very sharp, as if it had been made with a long thorn or a large needle. In a bid not to interrupt her thoughts, she did the natural thing; she lifted her left foot and used the heel to rub hard and kill the red ant without having to look at it. Her heel, however, landed on a thick, soft, rotten-potato-like thing. She jumped in the air and saw the viper’s tail swing like a thick, dirty rope.
The arrowhead attached to her foot was magnified by fear to the size of a pumpkin. Jesus, Joseph and Mary: What was happening? She screamed and fled the garden. The snake still clung to her foot. She could feel the poison entering her bloodstream. The whole leg already felt heavy. Regaining her wits, she stopped, retraced her steps and reached for the hoe. She battered the viper and in the process almost chopped off her big toe. She could see her husband trudging toward her and the neighbors approaching. Who would look after her husband when she was gone? She had to live. The energetic neighbors got to her first. They pulled the viper off her leg, calmed her down and helped her as best they could.

On the way to the hospital, with the furious sounds of battering, crushing, marauding winds in her ears, she succumbed to the poison.

Her husband didn’t attend her burial. Her death released the chained winds of a ten-year-old malarial storm which surged in the very core of his being with diabolical intensity. The winds sent him vomiting, sweating and laboring for each breath. After only two days he was given the last sacraments by his son. After administering the last rites, Mbale returned home to lead his mother’s burial. As the first mourners returned home, news came that the old man had died.

I didn’t attend either burial: I left the dead to bury themselves, because of exams. Besides, I had to help Fr. Kaanders collect seminary books from the already restless boys. It was a hectic, hunger-ridden, truancy-bitten week. We got help from some volunteers, but the progress we made was slow. We checked each book for both the seminary stamp and the serial number. There were many lost books, but there was hardly much I could do about it. Kaanders kept dozing and drooling into the books he was working on. During the few moments of free time I had, I forged my own expulsion letter, signed and stamped it with the seminary stamp we kept for library purposes. I also recommended myself to the best schools I knew.

Lwendo could not understand why in the world I was quitting. The next time we met, he was a lieutenant in the army. A guerrilla war had been waged and won, and the guerrilla forces he had belatedly joined following his own expulsion had become the nation’s armed forces.

T
HE SEVENTIES
were dominated by self-made men who, defying their limited backgrounds, rose to vertiginous heights of power before dashing their chariots into the abyss. Names that came to mind were Richard Nixon, Chairman Mao, Emperor Bokassa and Elvis Presley. They reminded me of yellow moths which flew long distances in the dark to come and dance round Grandpa’s hurricane lamp. Bewitched by the luminescence, most would circle the glass, avoiding direct contact and keeping away from the lethal ventilators above. The intrepid ones, however, could not resist the ultimate temptation, to explore further. They got sucked into the ventilators and were roasted to death. Others eventually were scalded by the hot glass, and more collapsed with fatigue. The apparent connection between luminescence and death puzzled me for years.

My childhood was undergoing a death of sorts, sloughing into adulthood, the carcass of blind precocity disintegrating in the new light. I was moving in a new direction. My eyes were opening to the world, taking in vistas they had hitherto been blind to. My flirtation with General Amin had ended, killed by the murderous light of truth. I felt I had more or less outgrown the fight with Serenity and Padlock. I realized that I had all along dammed my disgust with the way the affairs of the country were being conducted just to keep fighting in my corner. This peeling away of old skin hurt. I felt sore, lost, trapped. The way to the future seemed bleak. I experienced alternating feelings of jubilation and desolation. I shuddered to think about the task of redefining myself. I shuddered at the thought of confronting the world within and without. For a long time I thought I was chasing a mirage.

During school holidays, I always got the impression that at the seminary we were living inside either a charmed circle or a blind corral. The world outside was a harsh, formless, convoluted chaos in which success was for the fittest. The rules of engagement had to be worked out by intelligent observation and intuition, the very tools we were discouraged from developing. After being told what to do and when to do it for months, we returned with a sick feeling of detachment and debility to the real world of ruthless survivors. The fathers called the world “a den of lions,” and it must have been so in many ways; but along with the fear, it contained the genuine excitement of exploration. This was the only place where we could get to the bottom of our feelings and thoughts, because the type of acting demanded was different from the cut-and-dried roles offered at the seminary. This was the school of hard knocks, but buried under the heaps of chaff were precious grains of wheat, without which the bread of life could not be made.

I always spent my school holidays with Aunt Lwandeka. It was to her house that the tyrants had dispatched me after the incident of feigned sex with Lusanani. Like many students, I looked forward to the holidays. The ordeal of collecting hundreds of library books at the end of each school term meant that I always arrived home burned by exhaustion. I would spend the first few days in sweet bewilderment, trying to find my feet, fighting to regain my strength. In a way, I was like
a tourist who came with the season and left as soon as his appetites had been sated. I enjoyed the anonymity of living in a shrinking industrial town with a past larger than its present. I enjoyed watching people who were totally different from the seminary crowd, and I was fascinated by their stories. I relished the feeling that I was temporarily part of this doomed crowd, savoring the ways of Sodom and Gomorrah with no real danger of perishing with the lot. Images from Uncle Kawayida’s descriptions of town life careered through my mind again. I would refresh them with news of Amin’s latest capers, fluctuating prices, stories of bribery, murder, military mayhem, rape, betrayal, bravery, love … and try to work them into a composite whole. At such times, I gorged like a bear preparing for the arrival of winter.

It was during these school holidays that I realized how powerful the poison of the hydra at the heart of the seminary system was. All the work the fathers put in at the seminary, telling us how special our call was and how different we were from the sinners in the world, paid off now. It was hard to really feel part of what was going on around us. Reality was a Pandora’s box of conflicting loyalties. Amin’s capers became things happening in a cartoon film. The people found dead in forests became characters playing dead. The scarcity of essential commodities and the general hardship became transient phenomena that would vanish as soon as the picture was over. The stoicism needed to endure attained a heroic luster. The air of creeping doom acquired apocalyptic echoes. It became the last turn of the screw, foreshadowing the arrival of the savior. Self-preserving as this refracted view of the world was, it exacted a heavy tax on its espousers. I was neither the first nor the last seminarian to groan under the tremendous burden.

I approached Aunt Lwandeka like a puzzle, a split persona I had to reconstruct in the quasi-surreal circumstances of the time when many things were not what they seemed to be. To begin with, she never gave me any details of her abduction, imprisonment and subsequent release. Occasionally, she spoke of being pushed into a car, interrogated, threatened and taken to court, but she provided only the merest outline. Aunt Kasawo and Padlock and other adults knew everything. I wanted to join that exclusive club. If I was not going to get what I wanted from the horse’s mouth, I knew I had to tap other sources. It
cost me about two school years to put the final piece of the puzzle in place.

At the beginning of my holidays, I always hoped to find some new document, some loose rumor or story adding to the original. My biggest find so far had been a chit written by Aunt Lwandeka in fat, girlish letters on a page torn from an exercise book belonging to one of her three children. I found it tucked away in a small Good News Bible at the bottom of her suitcase. It read:

The first time I saw the chit, I laughed. I had never seen such a childish interpretation of the English language by an adult. This kind of writing could crack up a classroom for days. The names Cane would give this unfortunate individual! But this was my maternal aunt. This was the peasant girl who had rebelled against her strict Catholic parents and refused to finish school. How I wished she had kept a diary, with all the juicy details! But like many peasant girls, she never kept details of her life on paper. She had written this chit to aid her memory, and I knew that the decision had cost her a lot of thought. Her childish English suddenly made me feel protective of her. I felt closer to her because I knew her secret, her weakness. I also felt that I had the power to redeem her.

I added the new facts to the sketch of events I already had. Now I knew that she was arrested on the seventh of March, 1973, and was taken to the barracks, where she was interrogated by a tall man with a knife. She referred the tall man to a certain brigadier, who influenced the subsequent course of events. The case was taken to court, and she was finally freed. Who was Snek? Was “snek” an anagram? If so, was he a foreigner or some home-grown bruiser? Was Snek the tall man or the brigadier? Maybe Snek was none of the above and she was the woman who had written Aunt the trouble-causing letter. I was tempted on very many occasions to casually mention the name Snek and watch Aunt’s reaction, but I valiantly restrained myself. I did not want to get into her bad books.

When it finally dawned on me that “snek” was not a person but a reptile, I felt angry that Aunt had not told me what had happened to
her. I knew that she lived in mortal terror of snakes, but I wanted to know why. Had the thug made her eat raw snake meat? Or fuck a snake? What was this snake thing about? I felt that she had locked me out of a vital secret.

Aunt Lwandeka’s involvement with politics started after her release. Something had changed in her during those weeks of proximity with death. One could even say that the snake poison had gone to her head. Her handwriting might have remained girlish, but girlhood had ended for her. Her involvement, however, remained low-key and only became open in the mid-seventies, when guerrilla activities across the border in Tanzania increased. She gradually told me about it. She was a member of the National Reform Movement, or NRM, as everyone called it. The NRM was a small organization within the blanket guerrilla movement in Tanzania fighting to oust Amin. It was charged with the task of executing small anti-government operations like blowing up power lines, wrecking bridges, attacking military roadblocks and disorganizing government figures.

From the little she told me, I learned that Aunt’s role was to supply information about local troop movements, roadblocks and the whereabouts of key local government officials. She was also part of the group that housed NRM guerrillas in secret locations and supplied them with travel documents, graduated-tax tickets, identity cards and the like. All this was playing with fire, of course. If Amin’s men arrested her again, they would not let her go: they would torture her, rape her, possibly kill her, or make her beg them to end her suffering. I was sure they would make last time seem like a schoolyard prank. It was no longer a secret that the State Research Bureau, military intelligence and other security organs were scared of whatever was brewing across the border. Aunt knew what Amin’s men could do, but she thumbed her nose at them. She had already crossed and burned the last bridge: fear of death. All this did not make me feel very safe. At the seminary, there was this thing about all authority coming from God; I did not believe it, and yet I felt there was some truth in it. The jigsaw puzzle I was putting together at times seemed to form some devilish configurations. I did not like it.

The first time Aunt got into serious trouble, the time when Padlock left her domain for four full days and I remained in charge of
the shitters with the bobbin already in my possession, it was a letter from a German lady that triggered the whole thing. Dr. Wagner had come to Uganda with the intention of setting up her own practice. She first worked for a Catholic hospital in order to acclimatize, and that was when Aunt ran into her. Aunt worked as her housekeeper. Later, after being impressed with her diligence, Dr. Wagner made plans for her to go back to school in order to improve her English as a precursor to further schooling. Aunt was very enthusiastic about the plan, and being in the proximity of a learned person motivated her more. She admired Dr. Wagner and found her easy to live with because the rules were clear-cut and everything happened at a fixed time, in a fixed order. The 1971 coup did not bother Dr. Wagner. She knew that whichever regime came to power, doctors would be needed. The Indian exodus shook her but did not unhinge her: she was a professional, after all. If anything, the exodus hardened her resolve. The scope of her duties could only widen, as there were all those patients formerly treated by Indian doctors to care for. However, the Economic War—the effort to indigenize the economy—bred instability, which worried her. Since the mission hospital she worked for had been standing from the beginning of the century, she did not fear for her job, though she now doubted the feasibility of striking out on her own. Then the hammer fell on Britons, Americans and Germans. She was allowed to stay, but things went from bad to worse. Two hospital vans were stolen. Staff members disappeared and wouldn’t say where they had been when they returned. Dr. Wagner’s view was that somebody in government was harassing the hospital because the archbishop was very critical of the Amin regime. The hospital took measures and employed security guards, and staff were advised not to go out at night or open doors for anybody after curfew time. Dr. Wagner believed she still had a chance. She was not yet ready to return to Germany; her mother had died of cancer, and she was too shaken up to go back just yet. Then she got notice that her work permit had to be renewed on a monthly basis. She thought of going to neighboring Kenya, but she had not liked the racial climate there. When, out of the blue, she was given twenty-four hours to leave the country, she flew home in a huff.