by Giles Foden
“Because the World Bank is very happy with Uganda. In fact, I have decided to help the World Bank. I have decided to offer food relief to countries with food problems: millet, maize and beans shall be sent in sacks to all thin countries. And cassava also.”
I thought of the terraced plots back in the west. I used to watch the women set out to work as I ate my breakfast on the wooden veranda. They carried strange, broad-bladed hoes on their shoulders and had children strapped to their backs and bundles balanced on their heads, their chatter floating up to me as they walked by.
“Ambassadors who are here, please ensure that the food delivered in your countries is equitably distributed. Even you who are from superpowers. Remember this: I do not want to be controlled by any superpower. I myself consider myself the most powerful figure in the world and that is why I do not let any superpower control me. Remember this also: superpower leaders can fall. I once went for dinner with the Prime Minister of Britain, Mr Edward Heath, at his official residence Number Ten Downing Street. But even he could fall from a great height, even though he is my good friend.”
“I don’t think we need give too much credence to that,” muttered Perkins. His wife fiddled with her spoons, putting the dessert spoon into the curve of the soup spoon. And then she changed the arrangement around.
“But the truth is, I would like to be friends with all of you. As I have repeatedly emphasized, there is no room in Uganda for hatred and enmity. I have stated I will not victimize or favour anybody. Our aim must be unity and love. And good manners. So guerrillas against the country will be met with countermeasures. You will forgive me for ending my speech here. I have said it before: I am not a politician but a professional soldier. I am therefore a man of few words and I have been very brief throughout my professional career. It only remains for me to draw your attention to one thing more: the good foods coming to the table before you. A human being is a human being, and like a car he needs refuelling and fresh air after working for a long time. So: eat!”
With this last declamation, he threw up his arms and stood there motionless for a second, like a preacher or a celebrant at the Mass. Behind him, his raised arms were reflected dully in the great gold dish on the wall, altering the pattern of light as it fell on the tablecloth.
And then he sat down. The diners hardly stirred, staring at him still. Idi savoured the sight of it, his own lips moving silently, as if he had carried on speaking. Only the rattle of the trolleys, bringing in the starters, broke the spell, and everyone began to applaud.
The hors d’oeuvre were placed in front of us, a triple choice: fillets of Nile perch, thick gumbo soup made from okra and crayfish, or, most disturbingly for the Europeans (it was the kind of thing Idi would do on purpose), a variety platter of dudu – bee larvae, large green bush crickets, cicadas and flying ants, fried with a little oil and salt. They were actually quite delicious – crisp and brown, they tasted a bit like whitebait.
“I think I’ll stick to the gumbo,” said Todd, horrified, as Wasswa and I crunched up a few.
Wasswa pushed the dudu platter towards him. “But these are a local delicacy. You may not know, sir, that gumbo is an imported dish even in our own Uganda. It is from just over the fringe of our south-western province, into Zaire, where, as you may know also, many of the border peoples speak Swahili like our Ugandan soldiers here, and come to trade fish or to be treated medically by such fellows as Doctor Garrigan, who was in those parts before.”
“That’s right,” I added, lamely. “I was in the west before I came to Kampala.”
“I guess it must have been quite rough to live out there. I went down there on tour last year,” said Todd.
“But in Zaire it is too bad more,” interjected Wasswa. “They are real washenzi, savages, in that place. In that country, sir, this gumbo, it is called nkombo, which means ‘runaway slave’ in the Nkongo language – it is how he, this dish here, came to your country America. I am sure you were not knowing this.”
“No, I can’t say I was aware of that, Minister Wasswa. Of course, American cuisine is nourished by all manner of national traditions: Dutch, German, English, but also Korean and, as you say, there’s the whole African-American thing. The melting-pot, you know. It is fascinating, isn’t it, this gourmandizing business? Every plate tells a story.”
“I thought you chaps just ate hamburgers,” said Stone. It was hot in the banqueting room, and two damp strands of flaxen hair fell over his forehead like tendrils of seaweed.
“Now don’t you mock me,” the American replied, chuckling. “I had a Paris posting when I was young. They’d call you Monsieur Rosbif there, or John Bull.”
“But in Zaire, too, those people eat monkey meat,” Wasswa said loudly, laying it on thick, piqued at no longer being the centre of attention.
Suddenly Amin himself, overhearing, called down from the top of the table.
“And what is your fault with monkey meat, Minister of Health? I, your President, has eaten monkey meat.”
Wasswa, craven, toyed with his cutlery.
“And I have also eaten human meat.”
This His Excellency almost shouted. A shocked silence fell over the table – almost visible, as if some diaphanous fabric had come down from the ceiling and settled over the steaming tureens and salvers. We looked up at him, not sure how to react.
Amin finally rose to his feet. “It is very salty,” he said, “even more salty than leopard meat.”
We shifted in our chairs.
“In warfare, if you do not have food, and your fellow soldier is wounded, you may as well kill him and eat him to survive. It can give you his strength inside. His flesh can make you better, it can make you full in the battlefield.”
And then he sat down once again. The candles fluttered light on to the silver, which threw off distorted images of the faces round the table. Oddly, I found myself thinking of ants, clay mounds, the distribution of formic acid – I suppose it was having eaten the insects.
No one said a word until the waiters wheeled in the centrepiece of the main course. It was a whole roast kudu hind. Her little stumped-off, cauterized legs stuck up in the air like cathedral spires, and she was stuffed, so the menu told us, with avocado and sausage meat. The latter spilt out, crusty and crennellated, at one end, the Limpopo-coloured fruit-vegetable at the other.
The display rolled up to Idi. We watched him rub knife against steel, rhythmically, the noise marking out still further the silence over the table. Then he slit the torso and, with a rough majesty, hacked off a ceremonial slice of meat for himself, flipping it on to the gold-rimmed plate. A drop of grease flew on to the princess’s cashmere, causing her to jump back in her seat and then, when Amin looked down, to smile at him obsequiously. Finally, he handed the knife to one of the waiters, who proceeded dextrously to layer slice after effortless slice – the meat falling away like waves on a beach – on the edge of the platter, while others shuffled them on to plates. Yet more waiters, moving swiftly behind the chairs in a complicated shuttle system, sliding along the parquet, brought them to each guest.
I prodded the kudu steak in front of me. A thin trickle of juice came out. I thought about how the beast must have been stalked and shot, dragged or perhaps carried home slung on a pole, flayed and gutted, the crouching hunters palming prize portions (heart, kidney, liver) into bloodied banana leaves to take home to their wives. And the carcass itself, too, might well have been wrapped for transport by lorry back to Kampala: as well as keeping off flies, the banana leaf is said to contain a tenderizing enzyme. Out in the bush, I’d often mused about analysing and isolating it, selling the formula to make my fortune back home.
Nathan Theseus Todd attacked his steak with gusto. He cut off such a large piece that the dark meat, darker than beef, covered his mouth as he forked it in, making it seem – ever so briefly – like a gag. Or another mouth altogether. A second mouth.
Nauseated, I turned to Marina Perkins. “What’s really interesting about all th
is, is that none of the meat is chilled at any point; refrigeration breaks down the cell structure of the meat, you know. That’s why it tastes different from English meat.”
She looked at me slightly quizzically. “You’re lucky, being a man of science. I sometimes wish that I had a better idea of how things fit together.”
The accompanying dishes for the kudu began piling up: a little ramekin of chilli relish; mounds of vegetables – sweet potato rissoles, yam chips, fried groundnuts, pigeon peas; and a chopped mess of green I called jungle salad: spinach, shu-shu and black-eyed-bean leaves.
“Watch out for this foods,” called out Idi, tapping a dish. “There is an old Swahili proverb: if you give pigeon peas to a donkey, he will fart. That is why I never eat this foods.”
I thought of the donkey I had as a child in Fossiemuir. It died from bloat, having eaten grass cuttings I’d left in a bin outside the paddock. They’d fermented in its stomach, blowing it up like a balloon. The only way to cure it was to stick the point of a knife between the beast’s ribs, cutting into the stomach wall where it pressed against them. I remember how the green liquor came out, when the vet did it, but the animal was too far gone – we couldn’t save it.
Nathan Theseus, excited by mouthfuls of meat, waved his fork in the air.
“We saw these wonderful cows when we went down to the Rwanda border. You know, the ones with the long horns and humped backs. Herds and herds of them, with white birds sitting on their backs.”
“They are called zebu,” said Wasswa. “The birds eat their ticks, and the hump is for storing fluid during drought.”
“Like a camel, I suppose,” said Perkins. “Don’t cows have two stomachs, Doctor Garrigan?”
“Three. Grass is very difficult to digest. Though I believe the digestive structure of zebu is even more complicated than that of the European cow – more like buffalo or wildebeest.”
“You have buffalo cheese in Italy, don’t you, Bosola?” asked Todd, leaning forward.
“Yes, mozzarella. But it is mostly made from ordinary cow’s milk these days.”
Amin cut him off, booming. “Only in Africa are there real buffalo, strong like me.”
“A nice display,” Marina Perkins whispered to me, touching the flowers in front of us. It was the first time I saw her smile. I lifted up my glass of wine and looked straight into her eyes over the rim.
The sweet, like the starter, was a choice of three: guava fool, pumpkin pie with cream, and, as the menu put it, “Delicious Pudding” – some kind of blancmange, each portion moulded into a quaint little castle shape.
This last Idi himself had, scooping it up swiftly, closing the distance between mouth and plate with every spoonful. By the end, he was almost bent double.
“All gone,” he said then, pushing it aside like a little child.
As I finished my own Delicious Pudding, the waiters began to bring in the coffee and liqueurs, and the jazz band struck up for the dancing. I watched transfixed as, in one fluid, seamless movement, Nathan Theseus brushed a bead of sweat off his brow, reached into his jacket, pulled out a cigar from one pocket, a clipper lighter from the other, cut and lit the cigar and put the silver contraption away again. All in a matter of seconds. It was a quite astonishing piece of prestidigitation. I almost felt like asking him to do it again, to prove that it had happened at all. But it was final, this perfect execution: the tip of the cigar was already glowing fiercely.
Much later that evening, I took a walk down by the lake. The moon was high and the first birds had begun calling from the shrubs and marsh grass by the edge. As I looked out over the water, I supposed the crocs were moving in the dark shallows that stretched out towards the fires and lamps of Kenya on the other side. And I fancied, standing there, that I could see the circles of tilapia rising to the surface for crane-flies, rising as if coming up for air; denizens of the lake, our scaly forebears: white eyes, blind mouths.
2
All that, it feels so long ago. Strange times in a strange place. But things here seem strange enough, in their way. For instance, a bomb went off last week. A ‘device’, as they put it, was remotely detonated on the mainland. An electricity pylon was knocked over and one person was killed. They showed the funeral on the television. There was a shot of the steeple and you could hear the knell – you could hear the clank of it – and that reminded me of something.
What it put me in mind of was a very bad joke that once ran in my family. Ask not for whom the Bell’s tolls, it tolls for you. That’s what my father used to say whenever he took a glass of the hard stuff. This wasn’t often, but the repetition of the joke made it seem so.
Perhaps, to begin with, I really ought to explain how I’ve come to be writing this, my tyrannical history, my rainy-day rhapsody. Rather than stumbling around like a drunken man. Which, I must concede, I am. Though only a little.
The dwelling I presently inhabit is little, too. It seems an inappropriately northern place to embark upon this tropical tale. For as I take up my pen, the snow has been falling for several hours, and it seems likely that the road will be blocked by morning. I know the portents of my new habitat, I have been learning my local lore. I know that ‘track to the village impassable, NG runs out of milk’ will be tomorrow’s story.
The real story, of course, lies somewhere quite other: “I am going to write it all down in my book. I am going to write what I did bad and what I did good.” These are, truly, the words of the man – H.E., His Excellency, Idi, the number one id – whose deeds I am about to describe. He has never written it, so here I am. It is a story of various strange happenings in Central Africa, happenings which involved the author, Nicholas Garrigan, in a professional and private capacity. I have resolved to publish not for the purpose of exonerating myself, as some will no doubt believe, but to provide a genuine eyewitness account. For while the newspapers continue to execrate me, I’m committed to preserving for posterity a fair judgement on a history of blood, misery and foolishness.
I want to do this right. My father was a Presbyterian minister, and I was brought up according to the strictest precepts. “Sometimes I do think,” he would say over his steel spectacles at the breakfast table, after some misdemeanour of mine had been reported to him, “that you are as set for damnation as a rat in a trap.”
My sister Moira would giggle into her bowl, and my mother would sigh, readying herself for the concentration – upon me, over the toast and marmalade – of the full force of my father’s oratory. This was considerable. His sermons at Fossiemuir were well attended. Yet for all his proverbial fire and brimstone, my father was not a violent man. He had a sort of dry, if unadventurous, humour in him, as suggested by that dreadful Bell’s adage.
I should point out that he died himself while I was abroad. It’s a matter of eternal regret to me that I didn’t have the chance to make some kind of reconciliation with him (though we hadn’t exactly fallen out), not least because my mother’s death followed hard on the heels of his own. Pure grief, she died of: the learned doctors may not have rehearsed it to me on the hard wooden benches of the lecture halls of the university, but I know it can happen.
Apart from its ecclesiastical atmosphere – religion covered our family like the fine soot that would sometimes come down from the clouds, spewed out by the automotive products factory on the edge of Fossiemuir – my early life was unremarkable. I attended the local school, went to the swimming baths on Wednesdays and the cinema on Saturdays. I chased about with my friends in the pine-wooded hills above the town – the hills that began at the end of the paddock where my donkey grazed, and might have stretched, so far as I was concerned, up to high heaven. Emotionally speaking, the death of ‘Fred’ was the most significant thing that happened to me as a child; I cannot see creme de menthe but think of that green stuff coming out of his stomach.
But even then, I didn’t let it show very much: while I had inherited from my mother a capacity for hard work and for worry, from my father I had learned that
feelings, if one is to be successful in life, must be strictly controlled. There was none, in our household, of that ‘express yourself mentality that is today’s common wisdom. So if I was ever wild as a young boy, I was wild in my head, which was full of wandering yearnings: I was mad for maps and stamps and adventure stories. Firths and fishing villages, hills and golf courses – Fife’s rich, venerable landscape bored me, and in my overheated imagination I played out stories of Hickok’s Wild West, Tarzan’s Africa, the Arctic of Peary and Nansen. And I, oddly, was always the Red Indian, the Zulu, the Eskimo…
Come puberty, these evagatory longings were transmuted in the customary fashion, though I didn’t lose my virginity until my post-Highers year, with the daughter of a neighbour. At that stage I took some specialist scientific subjects, my natural sense of orderliness standing me in good stead in this respect. Oh, the files I had. Then came Edinburgh and the long hard slog of a medical degree and the various hospital training jobs that followed.
My student life was eccentric, rather than revolutionary or louche. My college friends and I did have a dog-eared old exercise book, called the Sweaty Betty, in which we recorded the results of our weekly poker game and odds for proposed (and most unlikely) sexual conquests – but it wasn’t like it seems now. As for those 1968, paving-slab ructions, we didn’t see any of that, not in the medical faculty at Edinburgh at any rate.
We did like a drink, though. This image sticks in my head: several of us stumbling out into the stony light of the High Street at dawn after a fancy-dress party, one a clown, one a pirate, one holding a plastic skeleton kidnapped from the faculty. I myself was Dracula, my lips (I saw, as I caught my reflection in a shop window) conveniently stained red from the night of wine: a happy vampire!
Such antics aside, I lived in digs while I was at Edinburgh, along with another doctor and two humanities students, under the watchful eye of Mrs Berkeley. She was a nice old bat really, but I think it was partly the combination of her refusal to let us bring girls back to the rooms and my slightly oppressive home life that made me want to spread my wings when I qualified. I had a brief, raucous holiday in Malta – it was cheap – with a couple of my friends, and then pondered what I would do.