Dark Star Safari

by Paul Theroux

  ‘We like the senene,’ a young African man said. He was strolling with two other men and we stopped to talk.

  ‘Locusts, right?’ I said.

  ‘No, no,’ he said, as though I had maligned them. ‘Not locusts. They do no damage.’

  ‘How do you catch them in the village or in the bush?’

  ‘Very hard there,’ one of the other men said. ‘Not enough light.’

  So this urban illumination was a splendid feature of the donor aid that had allowed Uganda to light its city streets: never mind the traffic – there were few cars on the roads at night anyway. But the modernity of city lights, a multimillion-dollar aid project, made it possible for Ugandans to harvest edible grasshoppers on the bright night streets.

  ‘They’re tasty, right?’

  ‘So tasty!’ the first African said.

  ‘How tasty?’

  ‘Better than white ants.’

  This I found so funny I exploded with laughter.

  He said, ‘But that is the only other food you could compare them with.’

  True, they were both insects and the preparation was exactly the same. They were stripped of their wings and legs and deep fried in fat, and sold by the greasy scoopful out of big sacks in the market as a nutty delicacy.

  Among the whirling grasshoppers and the grasshopper gatherers and the shoeshine boys and the strollers were a multitude of prostitutes, and they were insectile too. They lingered in the street, they stood under trees, they sat on low walls, they leaned against cars. They were most of them very young and well dressed and looked demure, even sweet, and as I approached they hissed at me, and made kissing sounds, as you would call a cat. ‘Want a date?’ ‘Want a massage?’ And some of the most innocent-looking pushed their glazed faces at me and whispered softly, ‘Want a fuck?’

  One of the youngest tagged along and pleaded with me to take her. She mentioned a small sum of money. She was seventeen at most, wearing a glittery red dress with sequins and high heels – the sort of girl I might have met at a university party thirty-five years before, someone’s daughter, someone’s girlfriend, perhaps a high school student, spirited and pretty. This one’s English was reasonably good. ‘Let’s go dancing,’ I might have said. But I said no, and when she hung on, promising pleasure, I said I was tired, but in fact I was flustered.

  ‘Tomorrow then,’ she said, and reached into her expensive handbag and took out a business card. ‘Call me on my mobile phone.’

  ‘From an economic point of view, going into prostitution is a rational decision for an African woman,’ Michael Maren writes in The Road to Hell. ‘It’s one of the rare avenues open for her to make real money. The sex industry is one of the few points where the local economy and the expatriate economy intersect.’ In this country, people sold much more than she ever had, and did a roaring trade, as Stephen Dedalus remarked. ‘Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to buy the soul.’

  My own feeling was that prostitutes were an inevitable adjunct to the aid business, camp followers in the most traditional meaning of that old expression. They traipsed after the army of foreign charities. Wherever the expatriate economy was strong in African countries – the aid-heavy economies in Addis, Nairobi, Kampala, Lilongwe and Maputo – there was prostitution, usually pretty girls dressed in a peculiarly Western fashion to attract expatriates, the bankers, the aid experts, the charity bureaucrats. There was no mystery to this. The prostitutes followed the money.

  But that night in Kampala, as on many nights on my long safari, I stayed in my room and advanced my lengthening story of the young man and the older woman in summery Sicily.

  Kampala in the rainy season had always been lovely, because it was a small city of wooded hills, and every street had been lined with flowering trees – tulip trees, and flamboyants, and jacarandas. Many of the trees had been cut down to widen the roads for the new high-rise buildings, and what trees remained were the roosts of scavenging, garbage-eating marabou storks. The storks also stood on the street, fussing at dumpsters or else propped on curbs or strutting in twos and threes – somewhat resembling indignant Africans themselves in these postures.

  In the days that followed my arrival I left messages with some of my old African friends and colleagues and then walked around, trying to get my bearings. Kampala was no longer a city of Indian shops. The shops remained but very few were run by Indians. Some were derelict, some were managed by Africans. The city was much larger, and the new buildings tall but graceless. The older buildings had not been maintained and looked blighted, haunted relics of an earlier time. It seemed to me that the new buildings would go this way too, fall into disrepair and not crumble but remain, defaced and unusable, while still newer ones were built. This seemed a pattern in the African city, the unnecessary obsolescence of buildings. Nothing was fixed or kept in good repair, the concept of stewardship or maintenance hardly existed. In Kampala, the big elegant Grindlay’s Bank had become a horror, the National Theater had become a seedy monstrosity, the railway station was uncared for. Lacking a center, the city seemed to lack a purpose.

  ‘Every one of those new buildings involved a huge number of kickbacks,’ a Ugandan insider told me, asking not to be named.

  Nothing is more distinctive than a movie theater, for it is a sort of architecture that advertises itself, with a big brow of a marquee and a wide entrance and long flight of steps, an open lobby, and a facade that is designed to display movie posters. In Kampala, the Odeon, the Delite, the Norman and the Neeta, where I had seen the early Bond movies, and What’s New Pussycat? and Midnight Cowboy‚ were closed. A newer multi-screen theater had taken their place but it was a flat-faced building of plastic and aluminum and was already falling into disrepair. The old Kampala movie theaters helped me get my bearings, though. Inside this big tumbledown city was a smaller more familiar one.

  With so many of the trees cut down the city looked balder and uglier. Towards the university, the last half-mile of Kampala road had been lined by trees – very tall ones, dark with foliage and during the daylight hours even darker because of the bats. It was the district of Wandegeya, called Bat Valley. Bat Valley was near where I had lived. It was a location I would give to a taxi driver: ‘Drive me to Bat Valley.’ The odd place was a landmark, something that made Kampala special, and the university area a little more African, for the university was adjacent to Bat Valley.

  All day long, tens of thousands of small bats hung in the branches of these trees, twittering and squealing, sometimes dropping and circling to a new branch, and these idly squabbling peeps and squeals filled the air. Newcomers mistook them for birds, and if I pointed them out they’d say, ‘Sparrows?’ and smile; but when I said, ‘Look closely,’ and they saw the huge confusion of bats, a whole tall grove of roadside trees black with them, the newcomer would wince in disgust.

  At dusk, as though at a signal, the bats took off, great swirling whorls of them, like sky-darkening clouds of gnats or blowflies. Then the abandoned trees looked lacy with the last of the sun shining through the boughs as it did not do in the day. Bats this size, none of them bigger than a human hand, went into the swampier outskirts of the city in search of insects. By dawn they were back in the trees, drizzling shit and twittering like sparrows.

  I walked along the road, looking up. The trees were gone. Huts, shanties and sheds had taken their place. No trees, no bats. Bat Valley was gone.

  Hardly any trees, but many shacks. I kept walking, past the rotary, which was full of idle taxis and shops. Little shops run by African women were the visible economy now. Inside the gates of Makerere University was a mosque, painted green. The sloping landscaped front lawn of a university was the last place you expected to see a mosque and minaret. But there it was – a gift of Muammar Ghaddafi, I was told. Africans refused nothing. A road, a dorm, a school, a bank, a bridge, a cultural center, a dispensary – all were accepted. But acceptance did not mean the things were needed, nor that they would be used or kept in repair. Ev
en this mosque, which was clearly an eyesore, was falling into ruin.

  Makerere University had been my place of employment for four years, from 1965 to 1968. After the expatriates went home I ran the Extra Mural Department. I became a husband, a householder, and a father in Kampala – my first son was born in Mulago Hospital. I was encouraged in my writing in Uganda and began a thirty-year friendship with V S. Naipaul, who had been sent to Makerere on a fellowship from the Farfield Foundation. Innocent times: some years later the Farfield was revealed as a front for the CIA. But Uganda had been the making of me.

  After a series of disruptions – the early signs of the coming of crazed, monstrous Idi Amin – I had left in a hurry. I had not been back until now, this hot afternoon, thirty-three years later. I had wanted to return, for the passage of time is marvelous, and I see something dreamlike, even prophetic, in the effects of time. Aging can be startling, too: the sapling grown into a great oak, the vast edifice made into a ruin, the ironwork – like this elegant Makerere perimeter fence – rusted and broken. Places can become haunted-looking, or can astonish you with their modernity.

  Uganda had a good reputation now, yet nothing I saw in Uganda astonished me with its newness, everything was on the wane. I did not lament this, nor was I impressed by a new hospital donated by the Swedes or the Japanese, a new school funded by the Canadians, the Baptist clinic, the flour mill that was signposted, A Gift of the American People. These were like inspired Christmas presents, the sort that stop running when the batteries die, or they break and aren’t fixed. The projects would become ruins, every one of them, because they carried with them the seeds of their destruction. And when they stopped running, no one would be sorry. That’s what happened in Africa: things fell apart.

  The ruin seemed like part of the plan. It had been the idea of the British Colonial Office to establish a university here. The Makerere motto was Pro Futuro Aedificamus – we build for the future. What a nice idea! But it is a rarified humanistic notion of the West, not an African tradition. Change and decay and renewal were the African cycle: a mud hut was built; it fell down; a new one replaced it. The Uganda of the university was a country with a subsistence economy – a hand-to-mouth method, but a way of life that had enabled people to get through terrible times. When the university was closed and became a ruin under Idi Amin, when the structures of government no longer existed, and the markets were empty and the fuel was in short supply, and anarchy seized Uganda it was the traditional economy that kept Ugandans fed. As the university, a useless compound, became ruinous, Ugandans fled and saved themselves in their mud huts, in the ancient refuge of their villages.

  The one-story building where I had worked, the Center for Adult Studies, was in poor shape and had not been improved in over three decades. It was being used by the Faculty of Law.

  ‘Most of the new buildings you see have been put up in the past ten years,’ a law lecturer told me. He was John Ntambirweke, a man in his late forties I guessed, but a big strong fellow, who was pleasantly self-possessed and opinionated. Suitably enough this man was occupying my former office. He showed me around the campus – the old neglected buildings outnumbered the bright new ones. It was obvious that after all the political turmoil in the country the university had still not recovered to the point where it had been thirty-three years before.

  I missed the trees. Why was it that I remembered the trees more clearly than the buidings? As we passed by the crumbling main building and the cracked windows of the library I asked John Ntambirweke about the recent election.

  ‘An election is not the only indicator of democracy,’ he said, at the wheel of his car, negotiating the obstacles in this battered ivory tower. ‘Democracy means much more – after all, the Romans had elections. Was Rome a democracy? We need a wider definition. We need more Institutions, not one thing but many, so that people can be free.’

  ‘They are free, aren’t they? But they’re hungry.’

  ‘The people here need to be granted some political space,’ he said.

  That seemed an appropriate term for Africans who were always lumped together.

  ‘What I really object to is an intelligent man like Nsibambi, the prime minister, explaining in so many words that we require a one-party system. That we Africans are not clever enough or mature enough to think for ourselves. That we are somehow less than other people – inferior to people who have a real opposition.’

  ‘There were several opposition parties fighting the election,’ I said, ‘They lost, right?’

  ‘The election doesn’t prove anything.’

  ‘Some African countries don’t even have them,’ I said.

  ‘We need them, but we need more than that,’ he said. ‘I am really Disappointed with the level of political debate in this country.’

  ‘Haven’t people in Uganda been saying that since 1962? I used to hear it all the time.’

  ‘It’s worse now,’ he said. ‘We are treated as though we are unworthy, not capable of making choices and distinctions. It’s insulting!’

  ‘What do people in Uganda say when you mention these things? Or maybe you don’t mention these things?’

  ‘I do – all the time. I write them. I say them on the radio. I was saying them last Thursday on the radio just after the election. These days we are free to say anything.’

  ‘That’s great,’ I said.

  ‘But it doesn’t do any good,’ he said. ‘They will just say, “Oh, there he goes again – that’s John, complaining as usual.” ’

  ‘That’s better than being locked up, which was the traditional response here.’

  ‘No one is going to lock me up for saying these things,’ he said, but with an air of resignation at how ineffectual his opinions were.

  He told me that for shooting his mouth off he had had to flee to Kenya after the fall of Amin, when Obote regained power. Realizing that his life was in danger he had gone to Canada to study and teach. He returned to Uganda with the new regime as a consultant in legal affairs and as an adviser to the revived East African Community, an association for the development of trade and communications.

  He had traveled to most of the countries in Africa. His opinions on other African countries were trenchant, too.

  ‘Kenya is another story,’ he said. ‘They had white settlers who were tough and who were determined to dominate. But here we just had a few – those tea planters around Fort Portal. They were nobodies. I’ve been looking at the records. If a white district commissioner offended one of our kings in some way he could be immediately transferred. The white officials had to learn how to get along with Ugandan chiefs and kings. This policy lasted until independence. We were not colonized in Uganda. This was a protectorate. Our kings continued into independence.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘but if the chiefs and kings had that much power, then maybe that’s a Ugandan problem – authority figures become very bossy.’

  ‘Maybe. But it wasn’t the case in Kenya. And there’s the racial thing,’ he said. ‘I travel a lot with other Africans. And I notice that Kenyans, Zimbabweans, and Zambians have a strange way of dealing with white people. They behave oddly when they’re around them.’

  ‘Really?’

  He laughed and said, ‘Yes. When we’re traveling in Britain or America, these other Africans detect slights – or they imagine reactions that I don’t see. They are very uneasy around white people, but this is not the case among Ugandans.’

  I told him I was glad to hear him say that, because it was how I had felt about Uganda; it was one of the reasons I had liked living there. People looked me straight in the eye. But racism crept into the political rhetoric and at last I was just a mzungu from Wazungu-land, someone to blame, and at last I had found Africa an easy place to leave.

  John and I had come to the end of the Makerere campus tour. In spite of some new buildings it looked a ghostly and ruined place. Music blared from the dorm windows, many of which were broken. My old house had become a horror o
f rotted window sashes and splintered doors and scorched walls. The campus roads were full of potholes. The library – always a good gauge of the health of a university – was in very poor shape, unmaintained, with few users in sight and many empty shelves.

  I said, ‘The prime minister you mentioned, Apolo Nsibambi, was a friend of mine – we taught together.’

  ‘He lives near here, because his wife is in the university administration.’

  After John Ntambirweke dropped me I went to Apolo’s house – a stucco bungalow with a well-tended flower garden. I rang the bell, and the door was answered by a woman housekeeper who told me the master was not at home. I left a Remember me? note and asked him to call me.

  I sent similar notes and left messages with other old friends, who were now political advisers, commissars, consultants, and members of parliament. Several had been presidential candidates, and the wife of one of them had been a colleague. Everyone knew them. In Africa everyone my age knew everyone else.

  I went back to the library and looked around: what few books remained on the shelves were dusty and torn. I guessed the books had been stolen. There were no new books. What had been the best library in East Africa was now just a shell. The trees around it had been cut down. Only the fact that the buildings had been well made so many years ago had kept them from falling down altogether, but anyone could see that the campus was a disgrace.

  Descending the grassy hill towards Faculty Housing I remembered how just here, one hot noon in 1966, by a shaggy-bark eucalyptus tree, I was taking a walk with Vidia Naipaul, who said he hated living here. He became ugly-faced with fury. He said, ‘The weak and oppressed. They’re terrible, man. They’ve got to be kicked.’ He kicked a stone, very hard. ‘That’s the only thing Africans understand!’

  Naipaul was usually ranting in Uganda, but he wasn’t confidently angry, he was afraid, for the source of his rage was insecurity. Africans looked at him and saw a Muhindi an Indian. As time passed, Naipaul became more narrowly Indian in his attitudes and prejudices. Subsequently, everything he wrote about Africa was informed by the fear that he had known as an isolated Hindu child in black Trinidad. The childhood fear he brought to Africa became terror in his Ugandan months, horror on his Congo trip, and as a face-saver he made his timid emotions into contempt when he wrote about Africa. In a Free State and A Bend in the River are veiled attacks on Africans and Africa by an outsider who feels weak. Rigid with a Trinidadian Indian’s fear of the bush, he never understood that the bush is benign. Africa frightened him so badly he cursed it, wishing it ill until the curse became a dismissive mantra that ignorant readers could applaud: ‘Africa has no future.’