Snakepit (4 page)

“How could you do this to us? How could you do that to your father? A soldier! A northerner! Have you no sense of who you are?”

Victoria replied that there was no longer any family since her father's disappearance. She further made the naïve mistake of betraying her mother to her lover, and the head of the Armed Robbery Cracking Unit exploded with anger.

“Who does she think she is? Doesn't she know who the boss is in this city?”

“Don't take any notice of her, please,” she begged, down on her knees.

“Your people are living too far back in the past. We, the military, are the new royalty, the kings and princes. We do what we want. Your people should get that into their thick heads. The very same people who sold out to the British and let their king and their chiefs lead them to oblivion, but still have the nerve to feel superior! I will teach them a lesson.”

“Please don't do anything to her, I beg you.”

“Are you telling me what to do? You! Are you like the rest of your family?”

“No, I am not. I just don't want anything to happen to them,” she said with tears streaming down her face.

“Get out of my sight before I cuff you,” he roared, his eyes popping out of his head.

Something did eventually happen to Victoria's family. They were attacked by men in civilian clothes driving an unmarked Euphoria. They were beaten, stripped of every penny, made to beg for their lives and warned to leave the city as soon as possible. They disappeared in the maze of villages in the countryside and never returned.

Colonel Bazooka took Victoria and there she was, confused as children of privilege are when deserted by fortune, defenceless in a hostile world without a road map or course of action. He found it thrilling to roll brats like her in the gutters that they believed destiny had spared them from and set apart for the others. He had done it time and again and it still felt good. At this juncture he revealed that he was happily married to a tribes-woman with whom he had three beautiful children. She was deeply hurt as, no matter what she did, a good Protestant girl eventually got married to a man in a monogamous relationship, as concubinage was both sinful and sacrilegious. Her confusion and guilt came out in the urge to compete, to be what he wanted her to be, in the hope that she would supplant the first wife, whom she imagined to be old and worn out. What she did not know was that there was no competition. Wife Number One was unassailable. Queen to all latecomers, she got first priority in everything.

For a time they lived in a senior army quarter. On weekends they would go out to drink, as he enjoyed showing her off. During the week she kept house, which she did badly due to lack of experience. The food got burned and she cut her fingers and she did not know how long to cook the meat or how to wash clothes properly. He realized that violence would not achieve anything and he hired help.

He had a plan worked out for her. If she conceived, he would keep her as a second wife to bear him children with some southern blood in them. If she remained barren, he would enroll her in the State Research Bureau and use her as a decoy. He would only have to anger her to unleash the beast inside. A beautiful decoy would do wonders trapping rampant southern subversives.

To start with, he began to reveal to her what he did. He told her about army operations to curb robbery. He told her the number of people he had killed, how interrogation and extraction of information proceeded. He frightened the hell out of her because till then she had a black-and-white picture of good and evil wherein she believed deep down that bad people were totally bad and good people totally good.

After a year without her conceiving, his patience ran out. He had risen higher and was now in charge of the South-western Region, and his sense of power had reached mammoth proportions. He took her to different towns, and she saw how both civilians and soldiers respected and feared him. There was something mesmerizing about his demeanour. He was like a god, an apparition, a natural phenomenon. He enjoyed the adulation, and in his good moments he said that she had brought him good luck. In his bad moments, however, he accused her of being barren. He asked her if she was doing it intentionally so as not to have a child with a northerner.

“I need a child before I die. I have many enemies. I want to make sure that when the moment comes, I have a successor. There are big plans ahead with very bad odds. I don't want them to proceed before you are pregnant.”

The gynaecologist found nothing wrong with her. The Colonel started having violent outbursts, wearing her down to a frazzle. He made her confess to earlier affairs and said that her earlier looseness made her barren. He started using military tactics to intimidate and control her. He would ask for tea and then smash the cup against the wall saying it had been dirty. He tinkered with guns, putting the barrel in his mouth and firing empty chambers. She would plead and cry and beg, but he would ignore her and continue firing away. When she was almost out of her mind, he would open the clip and drop the only bullet on the floor. Sometimes he asked her to pull the trigger when the gun was in his mouth.

“Do you mean to say that you have never thought of killing me?” he would roar. He would go on till he had forced a confession out of her and then say, “If you kill me, my soldiers will burn the whole town to the ground.”

He would take a rifle and start shooting in the back garden till the whole place smelled of gunpowder and was filled with smoke. He would enter the house and spit on the barrel to show how hot it had become. He pressured her till she reached snapping point, ready to do anything to improve the situation. Then he announced his plans to her, saying: “I saw the killer instinct in you the first time I saw you. You are going to make a perfect decoy. You are going to rise to the top of the Bureau. Everybody is going to bow down to you. The Bureau needs beauties like you. It is too full of ugly men and unsightly women. Hold your position and they will eat your shit. If you show them fear, they will make you eat theirs, and you don't want that to happen. Every time you feel afraid, think about your father. Avenge him.” Afterwards his mood would change and he would cuddle and tickle her. Through her tears she would start laughing, grateful that the danger had passed.

After the coup of 1971 he took her to a training camp where she stayed for months and they tried to break her down and reprogramme her. They began by shaving off her hair, burning her clothes on a bonfire and giving her military fatigues. Her name was replaced by a number. They verbally abused her, the word “turd” being one of the softer varieties of insult they hurled at her. They exhausted her body and mind with tough military drills till she felt like fainting. Food was deplorable, accommodation even worse. Trainees were made to sleep in holes for days, to camp in bushes. They chanted Amin's praise songs like mantras for hours on end, and they were made to pledge undying love and loyalty to him. At the end of the course they took the oath of obedience and allegiance at a graduation parade attended by army officers and the State Research Bureau's bigwigs, and were let loose on the world.

If Victoria thought she would get off lightly, she was wrong. Her first assignment was to frame a woman doctor, accusing her of supplying drugs to dissidents. She knew that it was a test to see if she could do in a fellow southerner. By taking the oath she had already crossed the line, and all she had to do now was to bury her conscience, that feeble agitator, under an avalanche of rage. One evening they attacked the woman who was going to die “while attempting to escape.” She and her two children were made to lie on the floor. She was then dragged to the bedroom, made to cough up every cent and valuable item, and was shot. For Victoria there was a burst of fear, then euphoria. There was a flashback to her days of victimhood and a feeling of freedom and of being above both divine and human law. The sweetness of unreason drowned out any feelings of guilt. The woman's body stopped twitching and groaning; silence descended like a curtain; the gun smoke drifted; the drug wore off slowly. The partial deafness Victoria felt was a salient reminder that something had happened. Now and then the blast of the guns seemed to be banging in her head like trapped thunderclaps.

The Colonel, shortly afterwards promoted to major-general, was delighted and took her back to the city. He found her a job with the Ministry of Works. As lovers, they were finished, although he still kept an eye on her. Victoria endured periods of personal hell: diarrhoea, black-outs, searing pains, flashbacks. She tried to erase it all with alcohol, in vain. She realized that the General had used her and then cut her loose. She wanted somebody to talk to but could not trust anyone. She thought about running away, but where could she hide? The General's spies were everywhere and if caught she would most certainly be killed.

As the situation deteriorated, she pined for somebody to love. Her failure to save her father still dogged her. She wanted a man to reassure her that she was still human. She was tired of not being able to hold on to anything of value. She wanted a child although she doubted whether it would happen. Certainly not with the intellectuals, traders and bureaucrats she was sent to lure to death or destruction. The more she thought about it all, the more she believed that Bat was her godsent deliverer.

BY RISING to the heights many had expected him to attain, Bat had become a force in his family. He attracted visits from relatives who travelled to the city in search of jobs, loans, recommendations and connections. He did all he could to deal with this new popularity. He thought about investing money and using the profits to help such people and about involving his brother and sister in the scheme. But when he approached them, he met with disappointment. His sister was too busy with her nursing job to take on any other responsibility, and his brother had no interest in a regular job. He earned his living by exploding fireworks at wedding feasts and, when he felt like it, he repaired cars and nursed dreams of participating in the East African Safari Rally. Bat tried to talk to him but failed to change his mind. He felt angry with and afraid for his young brother. He finally scrapped the project, having reached the conclusion that business did not run in the family.

Not long after, he received the news that his sister had found a suitor. It struck him that she had grown up and was no longer a girl to be protected and told what to do. The news seemed to ambush him, and when she came to inform him in person, he found it hard to be genuinely cheerful. The fact that the suitor was a former clerk turned town planner left him reeling.

“Town planner?” he said, shaking his head a few times and almost whistling with sadness. “In this day and age! Most towns are just shrinking and dying. The few that are expanding are doing so without plan, spontaneously like a colony of mushrooms. What is he left to do?”

His sister, whom everybody in the family, including Bat's parents, called Sister because from the age of five she said she would become a nursing sister in the biggest hospital in the country, calmly, almost emphatically, said, “It is his occupation.”

Bat had always assumed that she would marry among his former schoolmates, university graduates turned lawyers, doctors, heads of parastatal or private companies. There was also the Professor with his sickly wife. Maybe he would divorce and marry Sister. Bat felt that Sister owed it to herself to get a man who would look after her capably. She seemed to have thought about it too, and perversely settled for this town planner, a time-waster in Bat's book. It is his occupation, Bat thought unhappily. Accepted, full stop. No room for argument or compromise. Take it or leave it, Big Brother. He had already lost her to this mediocre man. He suddenly felt very distant from Sister, all past warmth and affection eaten by a blaze of anger, the goodwill turned rancid.

“Where do you plan to live?” he asked for lack of something better to say in these matters of the heart, of feeling, and of little logic.

“We plan to move to the country after the wedding. The need for nurses is acute in rural areas.”

Where no sane person wants to go, Bat wanted to say, where you shouldn't waste your talent and energy, where career chances are dim. How about living in one of the towns the bastard planned to build out of ether? I always had the perception that you were dynamic, visionary, calculating, but the evidence here is different, demoralizing. I see resignation with the missionary spirit thrown in to sweeten it up. Are you so deep under the influence of that old narcotic, love? Has it juggernauted and crushed your judgement out of shape?

At Cambridge, I wrote you a few letters telling how tough my financial situation was, how rich some students were, how I had to wash dishes to make ends meet. I had not written out of self-pity but as a warning about the dangers of poverty. Now it is evident that you took nothing to heart and don't see marriage as an investment. You obviously have other values. You probably despise me for working with scum as I do in order to break the yoke of poverty.

“What have dad and ma said about this?” he said to break the train of thoughts.

“They are overjoyed. Father can't wait to hold his first grandchild.”

“I am happy for you,” Bat said, trying to put on a cheerful face.

“I am happy to hear it. When your turn comes, I will be happy for you,” Sister said, beaming, joy suffusing her face.

You should be so lucky, he thought. After making my money I will just get the hell out of this country.

They talked about family, their young brother Tayari, the wedding plans, and finally Bat offered to take her out to eat. He drove her round in his XJ10 looking for a decent restaurant. His gloom lifted, and he realized that he could not control his sister's life, that he had never intended to. His affection for her slowly returned and he wished her well.

SISTER'S HOPE THAT the two most important men in her life would get on well, and produce a close-knit unit, did not materialize. The meeting between Bat and Mafuta Mingi was an uphill battle. At the end of the day, Bat failed to hide his feelings about his future in-law. He was a big overweight man with a paunch. In one so young, the paunch seemed to indicate a sedentary indolent life of overindulgence. Mafuta Mingi arrived dressed in a bad suit and was obviously uncomfortable with himself. Bat's villa, the staff, the sumptuous surroundings and especially the lake view reminded him of his first wife. He had a knack for getting women from well-to-do families. He always seemed to overreach himself, with the result that he had never been fully accepted by his in-laws.