Dark Star Safari

by Paul Theroux

  Apolo listed the mistakes and then hung up, nodding approvingly that I had been taking notes – I felt that in note taking I had been making him self-conscious and verbose. But perhaps not, since he had always been verbose.

  ‘They are mesmerized by my understanding of the constitution,’ he said. ‘My wife says “Apolo is unelectable.” It’s probably true! If people are foolish I tell them they are foolish.’

  I wrote this down, and the phone rang again – another ministry, Apolo shouting the other person down.

  ‘My response to the Ministry of Health is, do they really need nine billion shillings to buy drugs? If so, why did we name the department “Microfinance”? What I am saying to you is that the emperor is naked in some respects … Yes, I whispered to him about that … Please listen to me. We have a saying, “When you wrestle someone to the ground you don’t then bite him.” ’

  Before he could talk to me again, there was another call, from someone in his own party.

  ‘This proves what I have always said,’ Apolo crowed after listening for a few seconds. ‘Traditionally the Muganda looks to the chief to tell him how to vote. For the first time, democratization has reached the countryside. This is good, because Buganda has been lagging behind. They must be accountable! Unless we fulfil Article Two-forty-six we will perish!’

  He hung up and turned to me again.

  ‘You see? I am a technocratic premier,’ he said. ‘I run the state in a specialized manner.’

  ‘Apolo,’ I said, ‘people say that this is turning into a one-party system. What do you say to that?’

  ‘Ours is not a one-party system, but a movement, unique in Africa,’ he replied. ‘In a one-party system you sack the man who does not toe the party line. In a movement you try to find a consensus.’

  ‘How do you manage that?’

  ‘Ha! The elites here are very poor at bargaining. The British concluded that in the 1950s and I can confirm it.’

  ‘In Buganda?’ I said, thinking of the kingdom not the country.

  ‘You-you-you-ganda,’ he said. ‘Do you remember Obote’s way of running the country?’

  ‘Obote was selfish and single-minded,’ I said.

  ‘I like your statement. Yes. He was that. Museveni has much more confidence. He listens. As for the multi-party system, Article Seventy-four states that during the fourth term of parliament – Paul, it is very important for you to quote our constitution. Please write this. Clause Three states that in three years this must take place. But the issue is not to be too legalistic. Better to bargain politically and attain a sustainable consensus.’

  He was still pacing, monologuing, stabbing his finger at the map of Uganda. He took more calls. He sipped a can of Coke. His aunt had died in France. He arranged for the body to be transported to Uganda.

  ‘Yes, we will identify it. Yes, we will have a funeral on the twenty-eighth. Yes, we will cry.’ And he hung up.

  Like everyone else, he said that the Idi Amin years were the worst he had known. ‘Too horrible for words,’ he said. ‘The soldiers took my derelict car. They seemed to be very pleased when they saw that a university professor was living in such reduced circumstances.’

  He teased his secretaries, he took another call, he drank two Cokes, he waved his copy of the Ugandan Constitution, which he had had a hand in drafting. It was as annotated and thumbed as a sacred text. We talked about the need for political parties, and moral authority, the necessity for public debate. It was the same sort of conversation we had had in the Makerere Staff Club over bottles of Bell Beer in 1966.

  ‘Who do you want to meet? What do you want? What can I do for you?’ he said. ‘I must go to parliament. You see how busy my day is!’

  I said, ‘Do you remember the story you told me about being in Chicago when you were a student – how the police stopped you and called you a nigger?’

  He laughed and said, ‘Oh, yes. The Chicago police were quite racist in the sixties. It’s a lively city. I get back there occasionally.’

  Then he was off to parliament and I was off to the Railway Board.

  ‘No ferry tonight. Maybe tomorrow.’

  There was none the next day, which gave me time to see several more of my old friends. Like Apolo, they were pillars of society, still married to the same spouse after thirty-odd years. The four of them had produced twenty-four children. They were plumper, grayer, and like Apolo they were great talkers. In African terms they had defied the odds, for all were around sixty, the age of a respected elder in Africa. They had survived and flourished in a country that had known regicide, two revolutions, a coup d’état, AIDS and Idi Amin. My old friends were people of accomplishment. The one woman, Thelma Awori, was a former ambassador married to a presidential candidate who had come third in the recent election; another friend, Jassy Kwesiga, was running a think-tank; a third was a presidential adviser, who had refused an ambassadorial post on the grounds, ‘I am not good ambassador material – I told the president, and it’s true.’ That was Chango Machyo, who had been a Maoist in the 1960s and was still a radical, the scourge of ‘imperialists,’ ‘neo-colonialists,’ and ‘the black bourgeoisie.’

  ‘You mentioned my tribe in one of your books,’ Jassy Kwesiga said, as a form of greeting.

  Yes, the Bachiga of southwest Uganda and their curious marriage rite which included the groom’s brothers and the bride in the Urine Ceremony. I could not hear the name of the tribe without thinking of the piddle-widdle of this messy rite.

  Kwesiga had spent several decades as a university lecturer. His wife was a university dean, his children were successful, he was fat and happy. We reminisced about our lives as young men in Uganda in the 1960s, when our haunts had been the White Nile Club, the Gardenia, the Susanna Club, the New Life, and City Bar. Like many others, he was nostalgic for the earlier more orderly time, when the country was still intact, before any political violence, before AIDS, an age of innocence.

  ‘The sixties were wonderful,’ he said. ‘We were the elite without realizing it. The seventies were a disaster with Idi Amin. People disappeared – for so many reasons. It is a period to forget. Things are improving. Democracy is a process. The process is democratization. Democratic growth has its own momentum. What are you writing, bwana?’

  ‘Nothing yet – just traveling.’

  ‘People on the outside just write bad news – the disasters, Ebola virus, AIDS, bombs. And they ask the wrong questions.’

  ‘What should they ask?’

  ‘The question should be, “How did anyone survive?” ’

  ‘I think I know the answer,’ I said. ‘Because it’s a subsistence economy and survival is something that Africans have learned.’

  ‘Yes. Years and years of just getting by,’ he said, in a tone of regret, almost sorrow, and in that same tone he went on. ‘I’ve traveled, too, you know. I went to Beijing some years ago. I thought I was going to a city where people were poor and miserable. It was amazing. I was on the thirty-third floor of a hotel that was beautiful – and the city was incredible. How did this happen?’

  He was remembering our colleague Chango Machyo and his office copies of Peking Review and China Reconstructs. We lived vicariously through Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution this way, the whole of socialist Africa did. The Chinese in those magazines planted rice, harvested beans and made pig iron. Their motto was: Serve the people. They wore cloth slippers and faded blue jackets and looked like geeks. Now they were a billion grinning plutocrats in neckties.

  He meant: Why can’t Africans do the same?

  I said, ‘Do you want to live in China?’

  ‘Never,’ he said.

  ‘Then maybe what you see in Uganda is more or less what you asked for.’

  In a reversal of fortune, the now prosperous People’s Republic was investing in Uganda’s peasantry, because of Uganda’s large cotton crop. A Chinese factory had recently opened in the northern town of Lira, for milling the cotton and making clothes to sell locall
y and for export. More joint ventures were planned. What China had failed to accomplish in East Africa through Maoism it might yet succeed in through venture capitalism.

  A sign of Kwesiga’s confidence in the country was that he had encouraged his five children to live and work in Uganda – some had married, none had left the country. My friend Chango Machyo, the Maoist, had nine children. All of them were still working in Uganda. The proof of your political faith was the way you guided your children. A loving parent did not willingly sacrifice children to muddled thinking or a doomed economy.

  Thelma was a Liberian, American educated, married to a Ugandan, who had lived and worked in Uganda for thirty-five years. I knew the others by their tribal affiliation. Apolo was a Muganda, Kwesiga a Muchiga, Chango a Musamia.

  Chango’s office was in the presidential office compound on Kololo Hill, a number of mud-spattered stucco buildings behind a tall fence. His title was National Political Commissar, a vague position, but since Chango had always been an ideologue the president must have found him a useful mentor. He looked battered and ill, and a little unsteady. He apologized, saying that he had malaria that week and felt dizzy. I said we could meet another day.

  ‘No. It’s good to see you after so long. What do you think of the country now?’

  ‘More people. Fewer trees.’

  ‘That’s right. And no Indians.’

  ‘Is that good?’

  ‘Very good. They were exploiting us and sucking our blood.’

  Even malaria had no effect on his Maoist rhetoric. We talked about the president, Yoweri Museveni.

  Chango said, ‘Don’t you remember him? He was one of our students at Ntare, when we gave those weekend courses.’

  Ntare was a school near the rural town of Mbarara. In the sixties, we younger lecturers in the Extra-Mural Department of Adult Studies went to these country areas and organized classes in English and Political Science. As for Mbarara, all I remembered was a mass of students of the pastoral Banyankole tribe, taking notes in the classrooms, their cattle lowing and browsing under the windows.

  ‘I didn’t remember him either,’ Chango said. ‘But he remembered me. Times were so bad under Amin I went to Nairobi. Museveni was there. He saw me. “Mr Machyo!” I said, “Eh, eh, what are you doing?” He was a soldier. He was named after his father’s battalion, the Seventh. He said he had a plan. He had trained with the FRELIMO in Mozambique. I went to Dar es Salaam with him, but I missed my family. Then, after Amin, after the anarchy, after the guerrilla war against Obote, when Museveni took over in 1986, he sent for me. He made me Minister of Water, and then Minister of Rehabilitation – we gave out blankets. Later I became National Political Commissar.’

  ‘You were always a political commissar.’

  ‘Yes, I haven’t changed. I am still saying the same things.’

  ‘ “Neo-colonialism.” “The proletariat.” “Imperialism.” “Black bourgeoisie.” “Blood suckers.” ’

  ‘They have it in Kenya,’ Chango said. ‘The African bourgeoisie inherited settler farms. They took over white hotels. Just so they could make big profits. That type of African is no good for Africa. At the bourgeois level it is a struggle for power.’

  I told him that it seemed to me that Uganda was still recoverng from the anarchy of the Idi Amin years. Chango said that was partly true. He had lost his job at the university, like many others. He had gone back to his village near the eastern town of Mbale.

  ‘Life in Uganda was terrible under Amin,’ he said. ‘There was always shooting. For years there was a curfew from six p. m. to six a. m. If you were outside you would be shot. People were fearing. If you saw a soldier you got very worried, because a soldier could do anything to you. Many people were taken away. Me, myself, I was taken but released.’

  ‘How did you live?’

  ‘I had nothing – times were very bad. I resumed my old job as a surveyor – yes, I am a trained surveyor – but there was no work.’

  ‘Weren’t you safer in Mbale than you would have been in Kampala?’

  ‘No. One day I was in a coffee shop in Mbale and a soldier came in. People were greeting him – but I had a bad feeling. I left the place. As soon as I got home I heard shooting, from the direction of the coffee shop. What happened was this. Two men were coming down the road. The soldier said, “Watch this.” And he shot them both, for no reason. After that I went to Nairobi.’

  Hearing this, it occurred to me that all this talk of ‘it was a time to forget’ and ‘look to the future’ was perhaps a mistake. University students had asked me, ‘How can we become better known writers?’ But the real question should have been, ‘What should we be writing?’ And the answer was: About those lost years. Because of the shame and humiliation and defeat, no one liked talking about the Amin years, but it seemed that the best use for someone’s writing skills would have been in compiling an oral history of those horror years.

  Thelma Awori, the Liberian, was an old friend and colleague. Thelma had a horror story. Her husband, Aggrey, had been head of Ugandan Television in 1971 when Amin was in power. Soldiers came to his office and took him by force. One wanted to shoot him on the spot, but another said, ‘Not here – take him away.’ They took him outside and put him against a tree. A soldier drew a bead on him but just before the man fired, Aggrey dropped to the ground.

  A soldier passing by recognized him and said to the soldiers, ‘Don’t shoot him.’ But the others insisted and a great argument ensued. ‘Let’s take him to Amin,’ one said. And so Amin decided Aggrey’s fate: he was released, he fled the country and taught at a school in Kenya until it was safe to return home. He had been unsuccessful in his run for president but he was still a member of parliament.

  ‘And our children are here,’ Thelma said. ‘We wanted them here. We said, “Come back and get your foot in the door. Get a decent job. Try to be part of the process.” ’

  There were five children, mostly American educated like their parents – Thelma was a Radcliffe graduate, Aggrey had gone to Harvard. One of the daughters had a master’s degree from Wharton.

  Thelma said, ‘She was on Wall Street. Aggrey insisted that she come hack. She was earning less money by far – and she couldn’t believe how inefficient things were here. But she says, “If I weren’t here they wouldn’t do things right.” ’

  Everyone was talking openly about the country’s problems – Uganda had not changed in that respect. Uganda, even in its apparent recovery, was still a welfare case. More than half of its budget came from donor countries. AIDS had peaked in 1992 at 30 percent and through intense education had decreased: now 10 percent of the population was infected. But the disease had killed off the best part of a generation. It was a country of two million orphans.

  ‘I’m paid to be optimistic,’ an American diplomat said to me in Kampala shortly before I left. ‘I mean, you have to be optimistic to work in places like this. But if I weren’t being paid for that I would despair of what Africans have made of their countries – the deforestation, the disorder, AIDS – God.’

  And he asked what I thought, for I had seen Before and After.

  I said, ‘People I know – very smart people – want their children to stay here, not to emigrate. Speaking as a parent, that’s a good sign.’

  I had nothing else to go on, but that was something: the belief that their children had a future in the country was a measure of confidence, and a way of saying that the country had a future.

  In Kampala, I had begun to live a tranquil life, not as a traveler but as a resident of a place I had begun to enjoy anew. I saw old friends, I had leisurely meals, I went for walks, I went bird watching on the lakeshore. Most nights I worked, writing my long erotic story.

  My sort of travel was sometimes expensive because it was improvised and always involved last-minute plans. But this residence in Kampala cost me very little, and sleeping in the same bed night after night, and writing a story, restored my energy. Some days I did nothing more than stro
ll, watching children playing with homemade toys, hoops made of plastic, little vehicles of twisted wire, pull toys and sometimes live insects – rhino beetles – flying on pieces of string.

  One of my strolls was always to the Railway Board to find out whether a ferry was leaving. I left it to the afternoon one day. And that day the chairman’s secretary stood up at her desk and pointed to the door.

  She said, ‘Go to Port Bell right now. Bring Chairman Sentongo letter. Bring you passport. Bring you cloves. The ferry leaving just now!’

  11 The MV Umoja Across Lake Victoria

  For three hours at the Port Bell ferry pier I watched weaver birds building nests in the papyrus stalks by the lake’s edge. I was due to sail on the ferry Kabalega. ‘Soon, soon,’ a dock official said. ‘They are welding the ship.’ A fish eagle swooped. A man casting a net came up with some tiny fish after many tries. Another hour passed. Near some sunken boats ten or twelve boys fished for tilapia with bamboo poles. This was not recreation, it was their next meal. Another hour.

  I walked up and down, thinking how every book I had ever read about Africa contained long passages and sometimes many pages about enforced delay. ‘We remained in the chief’s compound for many days, awaiting his permission to return to the coast,’ is a sentence that occurs in many books of African exploration. Burton’s African travel contains shouts of complaint against delays, so does Livingstone’s and everyone else’s. Livingstone, who believed that ‘constipation is sure to bring on fever,’ ordered his men to go on long bush marches because such exertion was efficacious for their bowels. ‘[In Africa] with the change of climate there is often a peculiar condition of the bowels which makes the individual imagine all manner of things in others.’ For Livingstone delay spelled constipation. Heart of Darkness is a book of dramatic and maddening delays, even the narration is obstructive – halting and deliberately tangential. Delay is now and then a form of suspense that makes you concentrate, but much more often it is a nuisance that drives you nuts. And who wants to hear about it? This paragraph is already too long.