Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  “One will watch from here,” he said. “Eh, Patsy? Latterly, one has begun to think that one’s returning to Uganda would be completely foolish. Anyway, we were thinking of spending some little time in Tanganyika.”

  The country had changed its name to Tanzania five years before, at independence, but Vidia went on using its colonial name, as he did Ghana’s, always calling Ghana the Gold Coast. When he saw that using these names enraged Africans he did it even more, teasing them. He pretended not to know the new names, and when he was angrily corrected, he said “Really” and expressed effusive thanks.

  From Dar es Salaam he reported “extensive buggery” and asked for news.

  The news was bad in Uganda. This was in late May 1966, during the confrontation between the prime minister and the Kabaka—King Freddy. One Sunday four of the king’s important chiefs were arrested on charges of sedition. Because they were so closely linked to the king, the chiefs’ subjects, their villagers, became a mob and stoned the police. Early the next morning the Uganda Special Forces, commanded by Idi Amin, launched an attack on the Kabaka’s palace at Lubiri.

  All day there was fighting—the sound of cannon fire and automatic rifles firing in stuttering enfilade, raking the bamboo pickets of the stockade. From my office desk at Makerere I could see smoke rising from Lubiri. The shooting was continuous. In late afternoon there were still gunshots, and much darker smoke—the fires had taken hold.

  “The Kabaka is holding them off with a machine gun,” my colleague Kwesiga said.

  No one knew what was happening, though.

  “Whose side are you on?” I asked him.

  Kwesiga was of the Chiga tribe from the Rwanda border, a despised people who practiced wife inheritance—passing the widow on to the dead husband’s brother—which was based on a curious marriage ceremony that involved the bride’s urinating on the clasped hands of the groom and all his brothers. One of the wedding-night rituals required the bride to fight the husband, and should he prove weak—for she was expected to struggle hard—his elder brother was allowed to take charge, and subdue and ravish the woman while the groom looked on. Kwesiga was being summoned to take his recently widowed sister-in-law as one of his wives.

  “I am an emotional socialist,” he said. “But Freddy is a good king.”

  In the evening the explosions were louder—mortars, perhaps. And flames were visible where during the day there had been smoke. At last the palace was captured, but when Amin and his men rushed inside, the Kabaka was not there. The clumsy siege of this wood and bamboo palace had taken an entire day and had not accomplished its objective. The Kabaka had escaped to Burundi—dressed as a bar girl, one rumor went.

  That was the first night of a curfew. It was illegal to be out of the house from seven in the evening until six in the morning. It was still light at seven, so confinement in bright daylight seemed strange. The enforced captivity and severe censorship also produced many rumors, often conflicting and violent-sounding: stories of arson and beatings and killings, the murder of Indians, cannibal tales and incidents of vandalism, humiliation of expatriates at roadblocks. The Uganda Army was said to be wild—furious that they had failed to capture the king. When darkness came, the gunfire started. I collected rumors in my specially begun curfew notebook.

  Besides King Freddy, Kabaka of Buganda, there were three other kings. Sir William Wilberforce Nadiope, a fat little man noted for his bizarre robes and blustery speech, was Kyabazinga of Busoga. The Omukama of Toro was a twenty-year-old Mutoro named Patrick, whose sister Princess Elizabeth was a Vogue model. The Omugabe of Ankole was a cattle owner. When the Kabaka fell, the other kings caved in and went quietly, and the government commandeered their palaces—though “palace” was a misnomer for what were actually comically lopsided houses.

  The curfew was a period of intense confusion and fear. There was widespread drunkenness too, which added to the atmosphere of insanity. People boasted of their boozing. No one worked. The urgency about drinking was marked, because the bars closed at six P.M. in order to allow people time to get home. Food was scarce because the trucks from the coast were held up at the Ugandan frontier. Matches became unobtainable, no one knew why. There was much petty crime: robberies, looting, a settling of scores. People traveled in convoys if they were headed upcountry. Mail was suspended for a week. The distant gunfire continued, pok-pok-pok, until dawn.

  The curfew was for me an extraordinary event; it was also the perfect excuse. I did no teaching. I got on with my novel. I spent the day collecting rumors—always violent, always of massacres. Indi ans often figured in them. My curfew notebook thickened and I considered writing a book like Camus’s The Plague, describing the deterioration of a city during a siege and curfew.

  I realized that in time of war or anarchy people lived out their fantasies. There were many fights, but just as many love affairs. Scores were settled because the police were not a presence—the army was in charge, but its roadblocks were used for intimidation and robbery and, if the rumors were true, killings. Roadblocks were always manned by the most thuggish and rapacious soldiers. Most were from the far north, from a minority tribe noted for its ferocity.

  I carried my curfew notebook to the Staff Club. Each rumor had a date, a time, a place.

  “What is the point of that?” one colleague asked.

  I said, “I want to calculate how many miles an hour a rumor travels.”

  The breakdown of order had its excitements. People became reckless and slightly crazed. A Muganda man committed suicide after an atrocity in his village. His friends and family were summoned over the radio.

  “He has hanged himself,” the announcer said.

  My own fantasies took the form of being a real writer and writing all day. I had two books on the burner: my novel and this detailed curfew journal. In the late afternoon I hurried into town and got drunk as quickly as I could. I was energized by the tumult and the noise, which would, I knew, stop dead at seven, when we had to be indoors.

  “Can you come home with me?” I asked when I saw a woman I liked.

  Sometimes, without my asking, a woman would say, “Take me home with you,” because it was more pleasant to be stuck in a large house than in a small hut in a turbulent township.

  Boredom was the cause of all sorts of unruly behavior, and the streets were always littered with broken glass. I enjoyed the drama, the release from the routine, and found it a period of stimulating turmoil.

  One day, hurrying home with a woman in my car, worrying about beating the curfew, I took a side road and a bat crashed against my windshield. It was a large fruit bat, and my thought was that it could have broken the windshield. I stopped the car, and before I knew what I was doing I began stomping on the bat, killing the injured creature. The woman in the car was screaming, “Let’s go!” The curfew was changing me, too.

  Vidia was shocked by it. The curfew seemed to confirm his fears of African anarchy—casual violence and a climate of fear. From a distance it must have looked awful. He wrote from the Kaptagat Arms saying that he was just about through with his novel and that as soon as the curfew was over, and law and order was restored, he would return to Kampala.

  And, “May I use your spare room?”

  I was just a young man in Africa, trying to make my life. He was one of the strangest men I had ever met, and absolutely the most difficult. He was almost unlovable. He was contradictory, he quizzed me incessantly, he challenged everything I said, he demanded attention, he could be petty, he uttered heresies about Africa, he fussed, he mocked, he made his innocent wife cry, he had impossible standards, he was self-important, he was obsessive on the subject of his health. He hated children, music, and dogs. But he was also brilliant, and passionate in his convictions, and to be with him, as a friend or fellow writer, I had always to be at my best.

  I said, “Of course.”

  4

  On Safari in Rwanda

  THE EVENING before we left for Rwanda, Vidia asked, “What wou
ld you normally be doing tonight?”

  I said, “Going to the Gardenia.”

  It was what I usually did before I left for the bush. I explained that it was a bar where strangers were welcome, and there were always women around.

  He said, “I want to see it.”

  To tell him the Gardenia was a brothel would have made it seem more efficient, more of a business than it was; to describe it as a pickup joint would have misrepresented it as sleazy. It was an African bar, outwardly a hangout but in its complexity and character a sorority of rebellious women. Far from having the sexual ambiguity and low self-esteem of cringing, pimp-bullied Western prostitutes, these African women were as liberated as men. They were not castrators. The Gardenia was a sisterhood of laughing adventuresses and cat-eyed princesses.

  Young and old, they had left their villages, because African villages were full of restrictions on women. Fleeing bad marriages, ditching boyfriends and family quarrels, escaping blood feuds and hoeing and child rearing and agonizing circumcisions in mud huts, they had come to Kampala for its freedom. Most came from upcountry districts, but some were from the coast and from as far away as Somalia and the Congo. At the Gardenia every woman’s face was different. These women were not coquettes; there was no wooing involved—they wanted to dance—and as for sex, they were more direct than most men. If they wanted it, they said so, and if not, they did not waste your time. I went there to be happy; always I left in a good mood. If I happened to be going on safari, it was the best farewell.

  I knew I was a dog, but so what? Such a lively place made me hate polite company and loathe the tedium of dinner parties—parties generally, all chitchat and ambassadorial bottom-sniffing. Most of the expatriates lived at a great remove from the real life of Kampala, and the diplomats were even more remote, and consequently paranoid. From the embassy residences on Kololo Hill this would have seemed like lowlife, yet African women fascinated me. Their common language was Swahili. Many spoke better English than my students. They lived by their wits. They fluttered like moths around the lights of these bars.

  On the way to the Gardenia, Vidia said that Pat had gone to London to put their house in order and prepare for his arrival in about a month. She awaited his return. I thought fondly of her. I said I hoped that, in time, I would be married to a woman who would treat me this way.

  “Marry a woman who can earn a few pence,” Vidia said. “Then you can get on with your writing.”

  He smiled at the Gardenia. It was a friendly-looking place, a three-story building on a side road at the edge of town, beyond Bat Valley. It was brightly lit, with strings of light bulbs on its two verandahs and more bulbs in the mango trees next to them. Several women who stood on the upper verandah called out softly, welcoming us.

  It was early, so there were many more women than men. The miniskirt, popular that year in London, had arrived in Kampala, but some of the women wore wraparounds and robes, and the Somalis were dressed in white gowns. We were the object of their attention. The women stared and smiled, but they would not sit with us until they were beckoned.

  Seeing us on the upstairs verandah talking, the women were more teasing towards Vidia, because he apparently was not interested. They saw him as a challenge. Vidia debated what to drink. He disliked beer and cheap wine. He asked for sherry. There was none. He decided on a glass of waragi, banana gin—the word was a corruption of “arrack.” I drank pale ale and called to a woman I knew, Grace.

  “What is your muhindi friend’s name?” Grace asked me in Swahili.

  “Bwana Naipaul,” I said. “But my friend is not a muhindi. He is British.”

  She laughed at the notion of this Indian’s being British. Vidia looked content. He had picked up the word rafiki, friend. And this was clearly an abode of good humor and ease. The Gardenia had private rooms where people could lounge and canoodle without disturbance, but I never used them. I usually stayed awhile in the bar, talking, and then asked a woman if she wanted to go home with me, or go dancing. She nearly always said yes. Afterwards I drove her back to the Gardenia. A present was expected, but there was no set fee, never a specific sum. Often no money was asked for, and the woman feigned surprise when I handed over some twenty-shilling notes.

  “Muhindis have lots of shillings,” Grace was saying.

  “He is a writer. He has small-small shillings.”

  Vidia frowned at the mention of shillings. Money was on Vidia’s mind, and therefore on mine. He constantly talked about the money he had lost in coming to Uganda.

  The front door opened, a woman muttered muzungu, and I saw two burnt-nosed planters heave themselves into armchairs and yell for beer. The best-dressed drinkers were Africans, wearing suits and ties, and they mingled with Indians—the hard-drinking Sikhs, the more abstemious Gujaratis, the teetotal Muslims.

  “I see perfect integration here,” Vidia said, and he laughed, repeating it in his usual way. I suspected that such a pronouncement was like a rehearsal for something he intended to repeat in another place (And I sat back in the brothel and said, “I see perfect integration...”).

  At just that detached and observing moment, as he was being so objective, I realized that, pleasant as he was, I did not want to be with him. How could I take a woman home with me? I was too self-conscious. And yet I wanted to, because we were leaving for Rwanda in the morning and I needed some sort of farewell.

  As I brooded, Vidia said, “When you come to London I want you to tell my brother that you sleep with African girls. I want you to shock him.”

  “I don’t get it. Why should he be shocked?”

  “Because he’s always talking this liberal nonsense. And he was brought up in Trinidad. Yet it would not occur to him to make love to a black woman.”

  “That’s too bad. He doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

  And I also thought: This brother of his is a fool. I knew that he was at Oxford, studying Chinese, and that Vidia thought he was lazy. His name was Shiva.

  “I think we’ve done this,” Vidia said.

  “So you are leaving, then?” Grace said, seeing us stand up to go.

  “Safari tomorrow,” I said.

  “I want to dance,” she said. She raised her arms and took a few dance steps, African dance steps, swaying her hips. A whole message, an unmistakable promise, moved through her body.

  “I am coming back for you,” I said, and I meant it.

  At home, Vidia noticed my kitchen was dirty—dishes in the sink, food left uncovered, some scuttling cockroaches on the floor.

  “Sack Veronica,” he said fiercely. “Sack her!”

  I said I would speak to her. I hated anyone criticizing my servants, especially Vidia, who didn’t know her.

  “At least have a row with her. It will keep her on her toes.”

  A safari was not a hunting trip but any long journey upcountry. “He’s on safari,” people said when someone was out of town. But for our safari Vidia was kitted out like a hunter or a soldier: bush hat, bush shirt, thorn-proof khakis, and a stout walking stick that doubled as a club, should he wish to disable or brain an attacker. He wore heavy, thick-soled shoes that he called veldshoen, an Afrikaans word meaning skin shoes. Though he had a purposeful, marching way of walking, what wrecked this attempt to seem soldierly was his small size, his delicate hands, his tiny wrists. He had bought an expensive camera at a discount from an Indian shopkeeper in town. He wore it as an accessory, a big thing thumping on his chest or smacking his hip as he strode along. With his downturned hat brim and his downturned mouth and the way he sweated in these heavy clothes in the Ugandan hot season, Vidia appeared conspicuous and comic.

  In those days of roadblocks and sneering soldiers, it was not a good idea to dress in a military way. Casual clothes were best, the less serious the better, to advertise nothing but innocence or naivete. Any ostentation was seized upon. If you wore an expensive watch it would be taken. I worried that the simple brutes who manned the roadblocks outside Kampala would wonder abou
t this muhindi in bush clothes with the severe expression. Soldiers wore hats identical to Vidia’s khaki one. Indian shopkeepers never dressed this way, and being an Indian, Vidia would be seen as a shopkeeper. But I hadn’t the heart to tell him any of this.

  We set off through early morning Kampala just before dawn, when the roads were still clear. Africans got up with the sun and mobbed the roads in daylight; their bicycles and animals made it slow going. Even in the murky light we could see the effects of what was now known as the Emergency. The fall of the Kabaka meant that his kingdom was no longer the dominant province, and as if to prove it the soldiers had become an army of occupation. The whole city looked vandalized and neglected, there was garbage in the road, cars had been tipped over and burned—another rumor confirmed—and some houses and shops looted and torched.

  “Good God,” Vidia said. “But you see? I told you. It is going back to bush.”

  We were stopped at a succession of military roadblocks and asked where we were going. At one of them the soldiers took an interest in Vidia’s bush hat and sunglasses, but Vidia scowled back. One soldier said, “Nice goggles,” and I thought he would demand them, but he just smiled in admiration.

  Soldiers made Vidia nervous. These men had a fearsome reputation for incompetence and bad temper. They had recently been engaged in a messy full-scale siege and many of them had been involved in killing. I told Vidia how, during the Emergency, a Ugandan soldier had stopped an Indian friend of mine. The soldier’s friends had called “Hurry up!” to him from their Land Rover.

  “What should I do with this muhindi?”

  “Kill him and let’s go,” one of the soldiers yelled.

  “Please don’t kill me,” my Indian friend said.

  “Hurry up! Kill him and let’s go!”

  The soldier waved his rifle back and forth and was so flustered by the nagging of his comrades and the pleading of the Indian that he left the man standing, gibbering in fear, beside his car. There wasn’t enough time to kill him. Many of the murders had happened in that casually violent way. Kill him and let’s go!