by Paul Theroux
Leaving Makerere later that day in a taxi, I asked the driver who he had voted for in the recent election. He laughed and said, ‘These elections are held mainly to impress donor countries – to prove that we are doing the right thing. But it was a rigged election, and we voters are not impressed.’
I asked someone in the know about this. He said it was true, that in order to run for election a candidate had to give money to voters, the equivalent of about a dollar each would do, but the most successful candidates gave out pots and pans, lengths of cloth, and shirts (‘not T-shirts’). Mobilizers wanted free bikes. All elections in Uganda involve giving out money and gifts.’
I had time on my hands. I got a tailor under a tree to mend my tattered canvas sports jacket. The result was wonderful, a mass of beautifully stitched patches, and a new green lining. As a favor to a friend, I gave a talk to about thirty university students from the English faculty, many of whom having written poems and stories said they wanted a career as full-time writers.
I wanted to go to the bush. The day I planned to take a bus to the western province, to Kabila, to see the chimps in the primate reserve, there was trouble thereabouts. A news item appeared saying that an attack from the bush in a small town near Kabila had left eleven people dead (‘hacked to death’) and fifty cars torched. The government claimed that the opposition might have had a hand in it, but most people felt that it was a group calling itself the African Defense Force, an anti-government organization. A few days later, a van-load of students on a game viewing drive at Murchison Falls Park were fired upon by another anti-government group, the Lord’s Resistance Army – ten students were killed. This sort of thing seemed to be fairly common, armed men appearing from the bush and committing acts of mayhem. So I didn’t go.
I stayed in Kampala, looking for the past. Even with grenades being lobbed occasionally into the central market the city still seemed quiet. ‘The economy is improving – it’s back to where it was in 1970,’ an economist told me. That was round about the time I had left. What kept Uganda together to a large extent was church-going and, in general, religious tolerance. There was a large Muslim population – minarets spiking up everywhere, and muezzins wailing. The Church of Uganda was Anglican, with a well-attended red-brick cathedral on one of Kampala’s hills. Its bells were audible every Sunday. One of Uganda’s kings, Mtesa the First, had disapproved of his subjects becoming Catholic converts and made a bonfire of a number of them. This martyrdom and their subsequent sainthood had given Ugandan Catholicism a tremendous boost, even before the pope visited.
‘We must preach harmony and reconciliation,’ a priest was saying one Sunday in his sermon, amplified on the sidewalk. He talked about the election, how winners ‘were jubilating, even as others were mourning.’ He finished movingly with, ‘Love one another.’
It was a mild evening, and all the strollers were within earshot. Some of the strollers were urchins and prostitutes and schoolgirls hustling for money. Some were selling newspapers. Others were hawking sunglasses and cigarette lighters. It was impossible to tell whether any of these people understood what was being said.
Why were there so many prostitutes in this part of town? In the past they had just hung around bars and nightclubs. But these women and girls were on the street, lounging on low walls, leaning against trees. There was shade here, it was quiet, and there were three hotels in the area. I guessed that there were customers here, the aid people, the visiting bureaucrats, the foreigners. But the women also solicited passing cars driven by Africans. In my day, not many Africans owned cars, so these hookers were one of the features of the new economy.
Some prostitutes sat in the veranda café of my hotel, sizing up any man who passed by, with that lingering gaze and familiar smile that is common to prostitutes and car salesmen – the lock of eye-contact. They even had the same pitch, ‘What can I do for you’ which meant, ‘What can you do for me?’
What these women wanted was a drink, so that they would not seem so conspicuous. By buying them beer, I got acquainted with three of them who always sat together speaking Swahili – Clementine from the Congo, Angelique from Rwanda, Fifi from Burundi.
Fifi had arrived in Kampala from Bujumbura only the week before. ‘Because there was trouble,’ she explained. ‘There’s a lot of fighting in Burundi right now.’
She had taken three buses and had come via Kigali in Rwanda.
‘Rwanda is – ha!’ Angelique threw up her hands in despair.
‘But it was worse before?’ I said. I was thinking of the gruesome descriptions of massacre in the book We Wish to Inform You that We Will All Be Killed Tomorrow with Our Families. Even if you didn’t agree with the author’s historical premise that Belgian colonialism had imposed tribal distinctions and a class system in the Watusi and Bahutu society, the book was excellent, if upsetting, reportage.
‘Much worse before,’ she said. ‘I mean, my family was killed.’
She was the youngest of the three, hardly more than seventeen. The eldest was Clementine, from Bukavu province in the Congo. Her ambition was to go to America.
‘Ku fanya nini?’ I said, ‘To do what?’ I asked in Swahili because it was a delicate question, given the sort of work she usually did.
‘Ku fanya une salon de coiffure,’ she said, and explained, ‘I can do hair well. Look at Angelique’s hair. So pretty!’
Swahili, not French, was their common language. Their English was fine but embarrassed questions they asked in Swahili.
‘Mimi na sakia njaa,’ Fifi said to me, pouting a little: she was hungry.
I bought them fried potatoes, three plates of them, and it was obvious that what they really wanted was not a chance to perform oral sex on a strange man, or ten dollars for a massage, or a quickie in the back seat of an African bureaucrat’s car, but a big plate of French fries and a beer. And perhaps a ticket to America. Anyway, they were ravenously hungry and did not hide it.
‘So you’re traveling?’ Clementine asked.
I said yes, that I had just come from Kenya.
‘We hear that Nairobi is very dangerous.’
This from a Congolese who had lived in one of the most anarchic parts of the Eastern Congo, and traveled through the massacres of Rwanda. I mentioned this.
‘Yes, but there are good places, too,’ Clementine said. ‘Let’s all go to the Congo together and we’ll show you the good places.’
We planned the Congo trip. I would hire a Land-Rover and buy some food and cases of beer. We would need presents to give away to people. Good shoes, raincoats, maybe some medicine, and money of course – American dollars would be best. We would head southwest, cross through Rwanda into the border town of Goma, and then just wander through the Congo, wherever the roads took us.
‘The roads are very bad, but we don’t care!’ Angelique said.
‘We will give you massages for nothing – three girls, all together. How you like that?’ Clementine said.
‘I like it very much.’
‘We go now?’ she said, pointing upstairs.
‘Wewe napenda wazee?’ I said. You like old men?
She said, ‘You’re not old. Maybe – what? – forty or so?’
That was another welcome touch. I was fascinated by them – by their travel, their resilience, even their glamor. These girls in tight satin dresses and upswept hairdos and stiletto heels came from dark and dangerous villages in the dead center of Africa and had reinvented themselves as sex goddesses. But I was not interested in anything more than their stories. Though the rule in Uganda was ‘no condom, no sex’ they were following a risky profession in an AIDS-ridden city, competing with hundreds, perhaps thousands of other women. I had to admire their resourcefulness. Now and then I heard of American or European women’s groups who went to Nairobi and Kampala to encourage prostitutes to get off the streets, to retrain them, ‘empower’ them, the agents of virtue explained. The prostitutes I met would have laughed at such a proposition.
‘So?’
Clementine was smiling. ‘We go to your room?’
But I went to my room alone, and scribbled.
For my onward journey, I was trying to arrange passage on a boat across Lake Victoria. In my comings and goings I often bumped into Clementine, Angelique and Fifi at the hotel, and I usually stopped to buy them a drink or some food. I even asked them what work they liked doing, what they wanted for themselves. Hairdressing loomed large in their ambitions, but mostly they wanted money.
Clementine said, ‘I want just one man – someone to look after me. If he is good to me I will be good to him. What about you?’
Yet, as always, I slept alone in my narrow bed.
Repeated trips to the offices of the Board of East African Railways had convinced me that if I persevered I might get a berth on a ferry. There were several ferries a week from Port Bell in Uganda to Mwanza, the port town at the opposite side of the lake, in Tanzania. But for the past three months, passengers had been forbidden to ride on the ferries across Lake Victoria.
‘Why is that so?’
‘Ebola virus,’ the secretary to the chairman told me. ‘There was an outbreak in Uganda two months ago and so the Tanzanians took steps.’
There had also been a tragic ferry sinking. In 1996, the MV Bukoba went down in the southern end of the lake, and more than 1000 passengers drowned. Because of the liability and the high cost of insurance very few passengers were carried across the lake these days. This was all news to me, but where had it been reported? The sinking of the Bukoba was one of those African catastrophes that hardly rated a mention in the world press.
‘Maybe I should write a letter?’
I asked for paper and sat in the office writing a florid pleading letter to the chairman. After two more visits a letter from the chairman was awaiting me stating that if I accepted the liability (Ebola virus? A sinking?) an exception would be made in my case. I could ride on one of the ferries. They would let me know which one I might take. This was somewhat indefinite but having secured permission I felt I had achieved a victory.
‘How will I know when a ferry is leaving?’
‘You must come here every day to check.’
‘The prime minister left a message for you, Mister Thorax,’ the desk clerk said one day. This was Apolo Nsibambi, my old friend and colleague, who had risen in the world. I called him back and he said I should come to his office the next day. He said it was a waste of his time to give me directions.
‘The prime minister’s office! Everyone knows where the prime minister’s office is! Ask any taxi driver!’
The same bluster – he hadn’t changed. From the beginning, when he joined my department as a lecturer in 1966 I had found him interesting. He had just come from Chicago where he had earned a Ph.D. in political science. On first meeting him I asked him how he had liked Chicago. He said, ‘Immensely.’ Some months later he said he had had several run-ins with the Chicago police, what is now known as racial profiling.
‘Each time it was the same. I would be walking home late at night after studying at the library and a police car would pull up to the curb and a white policeman would say, “Get over here, nigger. Where are you going?” ’
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘I said, “Officer, I am not a nigger. Do not call me a nigger. I am Ugandan, an African. I am a student here and I am doing nothing wrong.” ’ And then his voice becoming shrill, ‘I am not a nigger!’
Saying that he was an African usually worked, one policeman had even apologized, saying, ‘Sorry, we didn’t know you were an African – we thought you were a nigger.’
Apolo was more than a Ugandan; he was something of an aristocrat, from a distinguished family. One of his grandmothers had been a princess, and so he was related to the king, the Kabaka. The Kingdom of Buganda, ruled by the Kabakas, was centuries old and still powerful. The Kabaka known as King Freddy was overthrown in 1966 – from our offices at the Adult Studies Center we could see smoke rising from the siege, Idi Amin and his men firing on the palace. That week, the man who would be king, Ronald Mutebi – the present Kabaka hid at Apolo’s house for safety.
‘I decided to be a commoner,’ Apolo said. ‘My children are commoners – free to marry whom they like.’
The Eton of Uganda is King’s College, Budo. Apolo’s grandfather had been head prefect at King’s, his father had been head prefect, Apolo himself had been head prefect. His father, Semyoni – a version of Simeon – had been a major landowner. In a mood of religious fervor in 1922, somewhat in the spirit of Tolstoy in old age, Semyoni divested himself of his land, abandoned political belief and started a religious revival called the Balokole Movement.
Apolo called them ‘spiritual purists,’ explaining ‘they believed in putting things right, and repentance, and being “saved.” They were not fundamentalists. It was a movement within the Church of Uganda.’
The first time I had met Apolo’s father he had been lying on a sofa, suffering a spell of illness, and from this supine position his first words to me were, ‘Are you saved?’ I told him I didn’t know. That made him laugh. He said sharply, ‘Then the answer is no. If you don’t know it means you are not saved!’
Apolo, my age exactly, had gotten married the same year as I had; we had gone to each other’s wedding, and were in all respects contemporaries. I left, he stayed. Idi Amin took over: nine years of horror. Apolo fathered four children. The eighties was a decade of adjustment – Apolo had been a university lecturer; in the nineties he had become a government minister – Public Services and Education – and now he was prime minister. He was as well known for his reforms as he was for his patrician ways. ‘I saw him in New York last year,’ a mutual friend told me. ‘He had a man to carry his briefcase. I asked him why. He said, “Because I am premier.” ’
He was also a famous tease, and his affectation of pomposity made him much more devastating as a needler. On seeing me after thirty years his first words were, ‘Ah, Paul. You are in deep trouble in Uganda. You made love to my cousin! Why didn’t you marry her? You were vibrant! I shall fine you ten thousand shillings for not marrying her.’ He made a gesture suggesting gross indecency. ‘You used to do this to her.’
‘I never knew your cousin, Apolo.’
‘You also did this to her,’ he said, flailing his arms and contorting his body. This was an odd sight, for he was full-figured, in a pin-striped suit and natty tie and affecting a plummy accent.
‘Never,’ I said.
‘You did. She was quite fond of Europeans, actually.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘You know her name. It will appear on the charge sheet when I fine you the money. Ah, you were so busy in that area.’
‘What area?’
‘The ladies,’ he said, and at that moment he was buzzed and he took the call and immediately began abusing the person at the other end, in the same plummy voice, saying, ‘Tell me why this man wrote a stupid letter to me … But you are in charge of this man … What I resent is that I am regarded as a bulldozer – please let me finish. I despise him, and in fact we had a clash before … I want action – I don’t want to hear that I am doing your work for you.’
There were eight trays on his desk labeled, Very Urgent, Urgent, Normal, Ministers, Chief Justice, Speaker, Vice President, President. Each tray was filled with memos and papers. Very Urgent was overflowing.
Apolo was still shouting into the phone. ‘He deliberately distorted what I said. Why does he personalize the debate? I had said, “You are a good man, but you are autocratic and over-bearing.” He said I am the same! Impossible! The idiot wrote “grieved.” But I didn’t say that. I said, “Aggrieved.” … No, no, no! Why not say, “Those people have created a culture of defeat”?’
‘I am a technocratic premier,’ he said to me, after he slammed the phone down. ‘What does that mean? It means – write this down, Paul – I have no electoral pressure.’
He saw that I was taking notes while he had been denouncing
the person at the other end of the phone. He had always been something of a monologuer, and I think he took to the idea that his words were being recorded, if only in a notebook on my knee.
‘Under our constitution, if you are president or minister you are ex-officio MP under Article Seventy-seven.’
I must have stopped writing – anyway, was this interesting? – because he said, ‘Paul, write that down, “Article Seventy-seven.” And consider the pressure on an MP. Pressure from constituents. Making payments for them.’
‘What sort of payments?’
‘Buying coffins for them, paying school fees, what and what! They demand one’s time. They invade one’s house!’
He was pacing now like a statesman, in front of his enormous desk and the large map of Uganda and all those trays, Very Urgent, Urgent and so forth, his right hand grasping one lapel, his other gesturing.
‘As I see it, Paul, the crisis of governance is that ministers are overloaded and laboring under excessive pressure, parliamentary business, constituency work and cabinet affairs. One of the functions that has suffered in parliament is attendance. We sometimes don’t have a quorum.’
His phone buzzed again. Another call being returned from a newspaper.
‘Your reporter distorted what I said. I said the candidate “conceded.” I did not thank them for conceding. Then I open the paper today and what do I see on page five? “The prime minister commended those who accepted defeat.” I did not. Your reporter made several other mistakes, relating to the constitution.’