Last Orders at Harrods

by Michael Holman

  “Remember Mboya,” they echoed with a ferocious gravity: “Remember Mboya.”

  “Good luck, Titus. Good luck, Cyrus.”

  Ntoto gave him a mock salute.

  He returned the salute. Cecil felt that an appropriate gesture was necessary, and had been about to shake their hands, but thought the better of it.

  One never knew where their fingers had been.

  17

  “Only the lion may piss in the watering hole”

  President Josiah Nduka stood in the bay window of his State House study, looking out over Kireba.

  Much had changed since that first time he had stood in that study, so many years ago. Then he had looked at a dam, where people swam, and where a handful of sailing craft had been tied up to a wooden jetty.

  Today his view was interrupted by a series of obstacles, natural as well as man made. First there was a thicket of mature eucalyptus trees, home to hundreds of crows. Then came rows and clumps of shrubs and bushes, followed by what looked like barracks, but which were in fact the living quarters of middle-ranking staff. Next was a strip of vacant land with the carcass of the occasional rusting car, and which was rumoured to have a few land mines buried below the surface. Then came an electric fence. And finally there was the three-metre-high, white wall topped with a roll of razor-wire that surrounded the grounds of State House. And on the other side of that was the now stagnant, weed-encrusted dam that long ago used to be the base for the city yacht club.

  Ever since he became president he had wanted to clear the blight that was Kireba. And every few years he sought pledges from aid donors to rehabilitate the slum, and to provide tarred roads, clean water, and electricity, and a primary school and additional clinics.

  But the residents did not trust him – they were convinced that were they to move out of their plastic-and-tin shanties to allow the renovation to get under way, they would never again be allowed back. Their land would be sold to supporters of Nduka and his party, and Kuwisha’s middle class would welcome the opportunity to buy residential plots in a location so close to the city centre.

  They were right, of course.

  And so he had changed tactics. The road that was to run through Kireba would in itself be of little benefit to residents, for there would be no pedestrian access. But if the road were to become accessible, the land alongside the highway would rocket in value. Market forces, that creature the World Bank urged him to set free and let roam across Kuwisha, would come out to play. The gentrification of Kireba would become unstoppable. Housing would indeed become available, but unaffordable for any resident of the slum.

  Nduka sighed. Perhaps it was no more than an old man’s dream . . .

  Had the city developed according to any plan, Kireba would never have been allowed in the first place. The very existence of the slum was an accident, going back to a decision to provide cheap land to former soldiers who had served in World War Two. It had been approved by the colonial authority, which had then failed to provide the basic services that the site needed. But planning, whether for white or black residents, had never been the city fathers’ strongest suit.

  Just as Kuwisha was an accidental country, its boundaries the result of colonial whim, the capital itself was an accidental city. Without the railway from the coast, which thrust its way into the interior some one hundred years ago, it is doubtful whether it would have existed. The city had not been strategically positioned. It was not located, for example, at the point where a huge river could be forded, or where residents could be defended. The men who built the railway had simply stopped for the night at what was to become the country’s main administrative centre. It became convenient to make it a staging post for supplies, as the railway pushed westward, carved out of what was called virgin bush, until it ended up in Uganda.

  The city’s main street, the original Uhuru Avenue, as opposed to the track that ran through Kireba, was lined by palm trees, once stately but now looking threadbare. The banks were built like fortresses, alongside trading houses that could trace their origins to the slave trade. Today, dozens of potholes turned Uhuru Avenue and other city highways into an obstacle course. Formerly an East African landmark, a symbol of modern, post-colonial independent Africa, Uhuru Avenue had become a barometer of Kuwisha’s decay.

  In Kireba, however, there were no potholes, for there were no roads at all, whether tarred or paved, gravel or scraped. None at all. The only reliable thoroughfare was the walkway formed by the railway line that began hundreds of miles away. It served two purposes: cut into the side of the hill, it demarcated one boundary, while the track of the rails provided the only route through a shanty town of ramshackle shacks and shelters.

  On the one side of the track, the formal city began, with brick-built shops, albeit tatty and run down; on the other side was the dam, marking Kireba’s western boundary, which used to be the home of the long defunct sailing club. The heavily protected grounds of State House formed the third border, completing the triangle. As many as half a million people were squeezed into this space, the size of a couple of dozen football stadiums. Every now and then the residents rioted and looted, egged on by old rivalries excited by local politicians, exploiting the daily battles for space, jobs, and survival.

  Many outsiders believed, indeed hoped, that Kireba could perhaps become the place where a revolution might begin. The more pessimistic analysts of Kuwisha, driven by wishful thinking rather than cold logic, had an apocalyptic vision of the people of Kireba rising as one, joining in with the citizens of the other slums around the city. Together they would march on the so-called “low density” green suburbs, bearing the loot from the Asian businesses that dominated the city centre, chanting the Swahili equivalent of: “We cannot take it anymore.”

  Back at the British High Commission, a drab grey building near State House that unsuccessfully attempted to combine aesthetics and security, David Podmore was pacing his office and taking stock, sucking on an unlit cigarette, and preparing for his forthcoming meeting with Mayor Guchu.

  “You need to know these people if you’re going to do business with them,” he would tell his visitors, and Podmore felt that he knew Kuwisha and its people pretty well. In fact, he considered himself something of an Africa expert – a label he modestly denied, but in a way that made clear he had earned the description.

  He had become adept at letting his expression grow sombre, with a far away look in his eyes, as if contemplating distant horrors still keenly felt. Yet Podmore’s direct encounters with Africa’s bad news were rare, even if the look on his face implied that he was a veteran witness to slaughter, from Rwanda to Somalia, from Liberia to Congo. The truth was that the nearest Podmore had got to the action during his time in Kuwisha was to accompany the British aid minister on a day trip to the Congo town of Kisangani. He seldom missed an opportunity to refer to it, usually in the form of saying “Kisangani,” followed by a doleful shake of the head, as if the city that sat on a bend in the great Congo river symbolised all the ills and travails of a troubled continent.

  Podmore had fallen into a joshing, patronising relationship with what he called the “ordinary people” of Kuwisha. Waiters or petrol station attendants would be addressed as bwana. But if they offended him, he made clear his anger by calling them “my friend.”

  Apart from “ordinary people”, the citizens of Kuwisha were referred to as “these people”, or “friendly people” and sometimes “lovely people”, who had won his heart. And he told his colleagues that when the time came to leave Kuwisha, he would say his farewells with genuine sadness. But as he approached the last stage of his three-year tour of duty, he readily acknowledged that he was burdened by dark and pessimistic thoughts. It was the sheer cussedness of Kuwisha’s citizens that made them partly responsible for their wretched plight, Podmore believed. The stubbornness he found in most of the people he encountered was an obstacle to the good work he and his colleagues attempted to do.

  He accepted that corruptio
n was endemic, that the government was venal and incompetent, and that much of the international aid was wasted, or “inefficiently used”. But one matter worried Podmore more than any other: the failure of the citizens of Kuwisha to put their regional and ethnic differences aside, rally behind a single leader, and take the opportunity to get rid of President Nduka at the ballot box. It had left him perplexed and sometimes despairing.

  The phone on his desk trilled.

  It was his colleague from the Dutch embassy, proposing a meeting that afternoon of the European Union development counsellors regional economic committee. Podmore reluctantly agreed. If there was any doubt about the validity of national stereotypes, let the sceptics attend one of the meetings of the EU economic and aid committee, he thought. The Germans would be belligerent, the French would be devious, the Scandinavians would be censorious, the Italians wouldn’t turn up, and the Brits would do all the work, and take the flack if things went wrong.

  The phone rang again. It was that self-righteous prig Pearson.

  “What’s the line on cholera? Well, by and large, all things considered, on the one hand and on the other, we think it’s a bad thing. But that’s off the record.”

  Podmore guffawed, knowing how irritating Pearson would find this heavy-handed humour.

  The diplomat made rude faces at the picture of the president he had hung in his office, and read the selection of droll headlines which he had cut from the local papers, and which he had pinned to the notice board.

  “Why not drop round later,” he found himself saying.

  “Splendid . . . see you then. Look forward to it, Cecil.”

  “Tit,” he thought to himself, as he struggled to light an illegal cigarette with the local matches. “Devious little prick.”

  On the fourth time of trying, the match-head detached itself from the brittle wooden shaft as he struck it, fizzed over his desk, and landed on the carpet. It took two more matches, held dangerously close to the volatile sulphur-coated heads and struck simultaneously, before the cigarette was lit.

  Podmore took grim comfort that one of his rules of Africa had been tried and tested, and found good. There was a direct relationship, he believed, between the number of locally made matches it took to light a cigarette, and the state of an African country’s political and economic decline. If only one or two did the trick, one was either in South Africa or Botswana, models of stability. If four matches were needed, the country was in trouble. If it took six matches, the country’s decline was irreversible.

  It was not the only such rule though the others could be more pithily expressed.

  “The more a country needs foreign exchange, the longer it takes to change a travellers cheque.”

  “The more run-down the country’s capital the more expensive the hotels.”

  “The more incentives offered by investment centres, the more corrupt the country and the greater the problems of the private sector.”

  “The more prominent the president’s wife, the more her husband is on the take.”

  “The bigger the capital’s traffic jam, the worse the economy.”

  Podmore sighed, and called to his secretary:

  “Get out Mrs P’s shortbread, please Leslie. I’m expecting friend Pearson.”

  Before Pearson arrived, however, he needed to read the files in preparation for a meeting with the mayor. He rubbed the palms of his hands together, vigorously, as if he was trying to warm them.

  Look out, Guchu, Podmore of the FO was on his way . . .

  18

  “When maidens dance, hide the corn cobs”

  It was time to confront the jipu.

  Furniver finished drying himself, and crossed the passage into his bedroom. He had given the manoeuvre that lay ahead some thought while lying in the bath: an old rugby injury had left him with a dodgy back, and he was far from confident that his right hamstring was up to it. But there was no alternative. He had to go ahead.

  Still naked, he positioned himself with his back pressed against the full-length mirror that was attached to the built-in cupboard in the room. Legs akimbo, he cautiously leant forward, slowly bending from the waist. In his left hand, he held a pot of Vaseline petroleum jelly. The forefinger of his right hand was poised, ready to scoop out a substantial dollop to apply to the itch.

  Once in position, he placed the pot of Vaseline on the floor, leaving it within easy reach should he require a further application. Until this point his eyes had been closed, the better to concentrate.

  Now came the bit he had been dreading. His back began to feel the strain as he bent closer to the floor. With his head now well between his legs, his left hand propped himself against the cupboard, he forced himself to look.

  “Good Lord!” he exclaimed in hushed tones as he looked upon an expanse of pink and hairy flesh. Revealed was a part of his anatomy which Furniver had never imagined he would get to see, the equivalent of gazing at the dark side of the moon.

  A lesser man might have given up at this point, and surrendered to the indignity of submitting himself to a doctor’s scrutiny, but Furniver was made of sterner stuff.

  “Get a grip,” he murmured, and concentrated on the task at hand. Biting his lower lip, he guided his Vaseline-coated finger towards what looked like a mosquito bite with a small off-white head. It now itched acutely.

  There were several false starts, due to the confusion created by the mirror image, not to mention the distraction of the distressing spectacle itself. He had to learn that when his finger needed to go right, it moved left in the reflection in the mirror, and vice versa. Finally his lubricated digit was within striking distance of the target. Furniver, brow furrowed in concentration, sweating heavily, muttered to himself – or rather to the maggot:

  “Die you bugger, die!”

  The imprecation, the knock on the bedroom door, the rattle of the handle as it opened, and the cheery greeting from Didymus Kigali, carrying Furniver’s dinner tray, came almost simultaneously.

  “Good evening, suh!”

  Kigali broke off, his jaw on his chest. It was hard to say which of the two men got the greater shock.

  It was the pent up sigh of achievement and satisfaction that Furniver let out as his finger finally hit home that so distressed Mr Kigali.

  “Not even a baboon would do such a thing,” Didymus told his wife Mildred when she came home later that evening to find him sitting in the doorway of their plastic-sheeted shelter, looking out into space. It had been, he said, his most trying day in forty years of working for the white man.

  Not that Didymus Kigali was a prude. He had observed at close quarters the weaknesses and frailties of white men and their women. He had noted the various sexual proclivities of mankind in general during his time in domestic service, and soon came to realise that neither race, colour nor creed was a barrier to aberrant behaviour. Usually he turned a blind eye to the peccadilloes of his employers. This time it was impossible to ignore such a gross display.

  “Even baboons, they do not do such a strange thing with their finger,” he repeated. Given that baboons are notorious for their unabashed and uninhibited sexual behaviour, Mildred Kigali had been sceptical. But when her husband had finished his account, she realised he was not exaggerating.

  “How,” he asked Mildred, “can we tell this to Charity Mupanga?”

  Kigali crossed himself, a legacy of his upbringing by Catholic missionaries, and shook his grey peppercorn-curled head.

  “Forty years. Forty years I have been doing my job, but never, never have I seen or heard of this business with a finger and Vaseline. And watching, in a mirror.” He shuddered.

  His voice trailed off, but his distress and distaste was evident. The ways of the European were very odd, very odd indeed.

  Mildred did her best to comfort him. She had seen a thing or two in her sixty-odd years, and kept in touch with the world through that excellent local weekly, Christian Family, and Hi! magazine, kindly sent to her by a relative in London. Sh
e also was a regular attendant at the Kireba Christian Ladies’ Sewing Circle, which met once a week at Harrods. She had listened, horrified and fascinated, to accounts of the extraordinary things that herd boys did with goats, and the unnatural relationship that some parking boys had with donkeys.

  It was her duty to inform Charity Mupanga of this bizarre matter. She pursed her lips, and drew on all the compassion and wisdom of a woman who had seen life, and who was on the committee of the Kireba branch of Kuwisha’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The frustrations of bachelorhood took many forms, but this white man must really be desperate. There could only be one truly Christian response to Furniver’s compelling need for physical relief.

  Mildred Kigali pronounced.

  “Poor man,” she said.

  “Poor man. I will speak with Charity Mupanga. It is time she decided. Otherwise we will find that Furniver doing donkeys, or going with goats, even.”

  Jonathan Punabantu was insistent, and Pearson gave in: without accreditation, said Puna, there would be no meeting with President Nduka.

  He had applied for an interview months ago, more in hope than expectation, and when he did not hear from the president’s office, had assumed the request had been turned down. Then came the message from Punabantu, the president’s press secretary, telling him to be at the international airport, where Nduka would be on hand to greet the visiting head of state who would be his guest on Uhuru Day, the anniversary of independence.

  “Can’t promise,” said Punabantu when Pearson had phoned in response to the message passed on by Shadrack, “but the president will try and fit you in for an audience.”

  “And you must have your accreditation card” added Punabantu, knowing full well that Pearson had never bothered to apply for one.

  “Don’t forget you’ll need three passport photographs,” he added.