Africa39 (6 page)

The next afternoon, I sat in the cemetery waiting for Naalu. After an hour, I started to worry. But just when I was getting restless, Naalu burst through the cemetery, running. She reached me and did not stop. I ran after her, slowing only when Naalu herself slowed down half a kilometre later, by the city council hospital.

‘Is someone chasing you?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, ‘but it is better to run just in case.’ And then, ‘The bastards must pay. It is war. It is war!’

The sun was still hot and evening seemed far away. Naalu and I reached Mama Benja’s house one block from ours to the left. From the safety of her fence, Naalu and I threw stones. There were about nine men under the umbrella tree that day, in the middle of our compound. The tree was small, but in the afternoon its shade turned generous and could accommodate several of them stretched out in the grass beneath. It took at least three stone throws before the vendors noticed that someone was trying to command their attention. They stood up one at a time. One of the men, the one with the keloid scars, made as if to come towards us, squinting to peer through the thick layer of fence.

Naalu and I ran. At the corner of Mama Benja’s block, I fell and scraped my knees bloody. Naalu raced on. She stopped at the large jambula tree. I rose from my fall and darted through Mama Farouk’s fence. When I reached Naalu at the jambula tree, the man with the keloid scars appeared at the corner of Mama Benja’s house. Off we raced again. We never looked back until we stopped at the road that turned into the police barracks. But Naalu was worried that her father would be home, and so we made our way back through the estate houses towards the dead water point.

At one time this water point had been the main source for our neighbourhood. Age and lack of use had rusted the taps, which looked fit for scrap only. Naalu’s father, who was also the chairman of our residential area – the man charged with settling petty quarrels and taking small bribes for writing letters of introduction and stamping passport applications – had raised funds to renovate the water point and replace the taps. Activity returned. People thought it was good they didn’t have to trek half a kilometre to fetch water in Lugogo, but by six in the morning, jerry cans were lined up as people fought over whose turn it was. Then the jerry cans, even if they were carefully labelled, started to disappear. The next time the taps broke, water flowed all the way to the market. It spewed everywhere and children ran around naked, happy for the artificial rain. After that episode, no one bothered with the water point again.

After our first try at evicting the vendors, the evening of the next day came. We were inside our house. In the kitchen, I fetched a bucket full of water that I had used to clean the fresh fish from the night before. The water was going stale now, the scent of rotting tilapia fermenting and turning the house into a fish brewery.

Ma was still at work. She would not be home soon. But I was still worried that if we did not hurry, she would return to find the house still smelling of fish. So I repeated to Naalu that we really needed to be quick.

The men were still in our back yard, basking and anticipating another exciting confrontation with Ma while Naalu helped me carry the bucket of water from the kitchen to the sitting room.

‘I think you can carry it from here,’ she said when we reached the back door. I looked at her and frowned, I knew she would not go outside with me even if I threatened witchcraft.

I descended the stairs by myself, carrying the bucket of water slowly down. On the grass, I pulled the bucket towards the umbrella tree. I wasn’t sure if the men were paying attention, but I knew they had seen me.

I pulled my bucket farther. As soon as I sensed I was too anxious to go on, I lifted. It was heavy but not as heavy as I had expected it to be. I directed the bucket towards the umbrella tree, then I poured and ran. On the stairs I said to myself, ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah. Praise be to God!’ In the house, under the bed in the bedroom where I stayed the whole evening, all I thought was ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah. Praise be to God!’

Ma came home to a riot – men with stones and bricks. She also came home to find Naalu’s father standing on our stairs, trying to make sure everyone understood he’d come as chairman to settle the matter.

Years later, Ma would say that when she came back from work and saw him standing on the stairs trying to calm everyone, she didn’t know whether to be pleased or annoyed. It was well known among our neighbours that Ma and Naalu’s father did not like each other. Naalu’s father thought northerners were to blame for every single thing that had ever gone wrong in the country – the
coups d’état
, the bad roads, the hospitals without medicine, the high price of sugar, his addiction to nicotine, and the fact that the country was landlocked. As for Ma, her reasons for disliking the man were simple. He was Catholic, like the unforgiving nuns of her school days; he supported the Democratic Party; and he was a Muganda, like most of the vendors who messed her back yard. According to Ma, all three things were incurable ailments. Catholics worshipped idols. DP was a dead political party led by a goat of an old man who did nothing but make dead deals. And Ma thought the Baganda were thieving traitors who’d been selling the country to the highest bidder right from the time of the British. Ma said it often that Baganda treasured money over loyalty. They would steal your hand if you turned away. The Baganda were banana eaters. They consumed 
matooke
 for a staple. Ma said 
matooke
 was a useless food, one per cent air and ninety-nine per cent water. She thought the Baganda were a weak people, fearful of confrontation and conflict, who chose the easy way instead of the upstream path of honesty, clarity and directness. My friendship with Naalu Ma had tolerated for the most part because of the day she found Naalu and me in our sitting room sharing a plate of dried fish and millet. Ma asked Naalu if she liked it.

‘Yes,’ Naalu said.

‘Good,’ Ma said. ‘Tell that to your father when you see him. Tell him you eat millet these days, not bananas!’

In our back yard, Naalu’s father forgot about his ongoing war with Ma. He focused on the vendors and spoke with eloquence and seriousness. He told all the gathered people that the market and the estates were two different entities. It was irrelevant that they were both owned by Kampala city council. If the men wanted to use such flimsy arguments, he said, we should as well go and camp at the state house and tell the president it was our right as citizens. If the vendors did not stop coming to Ma’s back yard, or any other back yard in the estates for that matter, he would take this issue up with the market management.

That evening a new law came into force, written on plywood with charcoal and hurriedly constructed by a carpenter. It was erected right next to Ma’s newly planted red euphorbia fence. Anyone caught crossing over to the estates would be fined twenty thousand shillings. When I saw the sign from the safety of our window, I thought it would be pulled down. But that signpost survived hail and dogs, vendors and trucks for years.

Red Devil came home just when Naalu’s father was trying to settle the matter. With the confidence he’d built over the weeks of coming to our home, he tried to intervene on her behalf. Someone took the pens from his brown suit pocket and pocked his skull with them. They ordered Red Devil to shut up because he had no right to speak. A man who knew him well took the opportunity to embarrass him. He said that Red Devil was not a Christian. He did not care about God – only about the Christian women he infected with gonorrhoea while reciting verses from the Song of Solomon.

I did not see Red Devil after that, but neither did I see Naalu. Over the next days, I searched for any sign of her in their front yard. When she did eventually surface, it was only because her father had sent her to the market to buy cooking oil for the house. Naalu hurried there, running as if there was fire on her hem. When she saw me following, she broke into a sprint and left the market without buying the cooking oil. She did not look back either. Maybe she was afraid she would turn into a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife. Naalu raced up the hill as if it was a flat football field. And that was the last time I saw her. Ma was not speaking to Naalu’s father again, and Naalu’s brother, Nviiri, was not talking to me, so I could not ask him. Only the silly estate boys seemed available to offer some answers. It took several tries before they told me what they knew. They said that Naalu’s father, fearing that I would turn her into a good-for-nothing millet-eating uncivilised northerner, had enrolled her in a Catholic boarding school to join the Order of St Bruno, the crazy nuns who committed to a vow of silence and solitude for the rest of their lives.

Chei
, I thought. Such nonsense.

But it was not nonsense, of course, because Naalu did not return.

from a novel
in progress

Rotimi Babatunde

The Tiger of the Mangroves

Perhaps the sorry-looking, rat-infested boat that came in weekly from Fernando Po was to blame for the end of the affair. When the new steamships arrived hungry for the palm oil needed by the smoking factories of Europe, Chief Koko seized the moment to establish – with arms bought from his white merchant friends – a monopoly that stretched along the length of the palm coast.

It was a relationship that benefitted both parties. The merchants got their oil, the Chie
f
’s coffers swelled by the year, and the romance between the African middleman and Europe’s merchants seemed set to last for ever. But on the last leg of the trip from Europe, the boat from Fernando Po brought, along with passengers and the mail, newspapers already a month old. After those dailies brought the white merchants the good news that the resolutions of Berlin had granted the British dominion over Chief Koko’s kingdom, the merchants converted to the gospel of free trade and began grumbling about the fortune Chief Koko was raking into his palace vaults. The Crown will soon fly the Union Jack over the hinterland, Europe’s merchants reassured one another, but the months lengthened into years and yet the Crown dawdled over taking possession of the territory. As the years went by, the resentment of the merchants towards Chief Koko mounted.

Almost a decade would pass after the deliberations in Berlin before the decrepit boat from Fernando Po finally brought over the boyish-faced fellow who couldn’t sleep in his cabin because of the crawling vermin but instead spent most of his time on the deck with the sailors. No one paid much attention to the nondescript man who stood on the boat’s prow and continued applying brushstrokes to a canvas, even after the vessel had dropped anchor and his fellow passengers were making their way down the gangplank. Only later would people come to know that the painter was no one less than Henry Hamilton, the territory’s pioneer consul, who was recording his first view of the creeks Europe considered the Crown’s because of a few signatures scribbled years earlier in Berlin.

Chief Koko was conducting his weekly council when he received the report that Henry Hamilton was the person mandated to oversee the affairs of his nation on behalf of Her Majesty. The Chief laughed. No wonder people from Hamilton’s native land always pray that God should save the Queen, he said. Surely, the poor woman must have an appetite for sticking her nose into troubles bigger than she could handle. Why else would her subjects be forever begging God to save her from one distress or another?

He laughed again. No other person in his royal chamber was relaxed enough to laugh along with him.

Chief Koko and Consul Hamilton met under a brightly coloured parasol on a beach a long way down the coastline from the stretch where the European merchants had their warehouses. Henry Hamilton was surprised by how young Chief Koko was. The consul had been expecting a wizened warrior, like the battle-hardened sheiks he had encountered a decade earlier during his youthful travels along the fringes of the Sahara studying Maghreb art and architecture. This anticipation had been reinforced by the fat dossier containing chronicles of the Chie
f
’s military and political exploits which Hamilton had been given during his briefing at Whitehall, but the beguiling face of the man scrutinising the consul with intense but tender eyes belied the fearsome portrait painted by the dossier, and for a moment Hamilton wondered if he wasn’t in the presence of an impostor. Could a man with a visage this mild be the general whose legend had been transported from Kingston to Calcutta and whom even the merchants from Europe called the Tiger of the Mangroves?

Hell, he can’t yet be forty, Henry Hamilton would record that night in his diary. Just about my own age. Had Koko been born in a different clime and of a fairer hue, Hamilton would go on to note, they could have been in the same class studying Classics at King’s College. Like the consul, Koko could also have picked up employment in Her Majesty’s imperial service. Instead, the Chief, who came from common stock, had become the delta’s most prominent monarch by spending his youth waging war to unite several small domains and installing himself sovereign over the expansive new realm. His accomplishments make one feel inadequate, the consul concluded in his diary entry for the day.

The foppishness of Chief Koko’s manicured fingers, his striking coral bracelets, and the stylishness of his walking stick, on which was carved a menagerie of marine creatures, reminded Hamilton of the famous dandies in his own country. The consul imagined Koko promenading in a top hat down the Strand, wearing a bright brocade waistcoat with a carnation in its buttonhole and clutching a rare edition of Byron’s
Don Juan
, but that train of thought was derailed by a glance in the direction of Chief Koko’s dreaded canoe boys. Standing about a hundred feet from the parasol, a platoon of the Chie
f
’s elite guards, each holding a loaded musket, was eyeballing a company of the Crown’s khaki-clad constabulary ranked at attention on the other side of the canopy. The uncompromising gaze burning in the eyes of Chief Koko’s men undid Hamilton’s casting of the general who had drilled such fierceness into them as a dreamy aesthete. The consul snapped out of his fanciful flights and returned to the reality of the moment.