by Giles Foden
In the end, rather than going for consultancy or into general practice, in October 1970 I took the Civil Service (Medical Division) exam, having specified in the application that I was looking to go abroad. Most of the others were Foreign Office hopefuls, taking the main examination. As we waited in the cold on the steps outside the hall, they were all talking about the PLO bombs in Israel and the fate of a British diplomat some Quebecois separatists had taken hostage in Canada. I kept myself to myself.
Naturally, it was an uncertain period of my life, waiting for the results – everything pent up as I thumped down the stairs for the post each morning and disconsolately picked up the Scotsman instead. The envelope finally came on the day the electricians went on strike. I remember, that evening, obsessively re-reading the letter by candlelight. I was in. I was one of the elect. Not according to my father, however, who wanted me to practise as a GP in Fossiemuir. We argued about it, and when I left, I left under a cloud.
It was against this background that I arrived in Uganda – on Sunday, 24 January 1971 – to take up a post as a medical doctor attached to the Ministry of Health. Though I was on secondment from the British government’s Overseas Development Agency, I was to report directly to officials at the Ministry. My specific brief was to join a clinical practice in a remote rural area, and to pursue whatever more generalized researches in the name of public health that my superiors desired. Had I known, on arrival, the breadth of activity that this later would involve, I should have got straight back on the aeroplane.
As for the narrative I am presenting in these pages, it is nothing but the working-up of a journal I made at the time. I also had the opportunity of conducting a number of interviews with Idi Amin, at his own behest. Some of this material will already be familiar to readers of newspapers and to broadcast audiences around the world. But until now, only a fraction of the ‘dictatorphone’ tapes, as the caption writers have insisted on calling them, have been revealed to the outside world. It is eerie, now, to press the button on the machine and hear his voice: I should not, I know, listen so long, so eagerly.
These thoughts bear down on me as I sit here on this third night of writing. Gazing down over the outline of woody sand-hills and rocky outcrops that stretches down to the quay and out into the never silent Inner Sound, I’m overwhelmed with an awful sense of regret. Because good things seem bad to me now – even the light is cross. In the lamps hung in the windows of my neighbours, in the dark-beleaguered cluster of gold that signifies the port village, and in the gleaming traverse of the occasional ship, I see a picture not of others but of my own isolation.
Though I know that those village lights promise companionship, just as the magnificent white horses of the bay promise another sort of consolation, I am steeped in my churning memories. Like the roar of the Sound, the question comes incessantly. Can you tell the truth when you are talking to yourself? What is the truth about a man on an island?
3
During the flight to Kampala – twelve hours’ worth of stale air from London, with stop-offs in Larnaca and Nairobi – I read one book, Uganda for Travellers (thin) by Charles Sabon-Frazer, and flicked through another, Bailey and Love’s Short Practice of Surgery (fat). My nose and ears kept blocking and unblocking as I read, as the pressure in the cabin changed – almost, it seemed, with every turn of the page.
From the snowcapped Ruwenzoris, the ‘Mountains of the Moon’ described by Ptolemy, to lush rainforest and arid desert, the Ugandan landscape offers a rich variety for the adventurous traveller. Abundant with flora and fauna, it boasts the source of the River Nile, waterfalls like the impressive Murchison Falls and two of Africa’s greatest lakes, Lake Victoria and Lake Albert…
Uganda is safari country without a doubt, and all the famous wildlife of Africa is there to be seen and photographed. Friendly guides will show you around the well-stocked game reserves…The host of a flight of locusts makes for one of the great spectacles of the African savannah, as exciting in its way as a herd of stampeding buffalo. But it is, of course, devastating for the crops of the local people and can sometimes result in starvation. Luckily for Uganda, only the millet and maize crop is affected, not her main staple crop, which is bananas…
The naked tribesman of the remote Karamoja region gave British soldiers a great deal of trouble during the colonial period. The Karamojong’s customary manner of subsisting by means of cattle-rustling was not conducive to government by District Commissioner. It is still possible to see them in northern Uganda today – though they often carry automatic weapons and are generally untrusting of strangers…
These strange things bit and scratched, and were so strong and dangerous that Hanno had to have them killed. On the sailors’ return, the skins of these creatures were shown to the wondering eyes of the people of Carthage. We know now that what Hanno and his folk mistook for hairy women were really gorillas, the monstrous apes found in the Ruwenzoris, the mysterious mountain range that spans Uganda, Zaire and Rwanda. Members of this near-extinct species – only 400 mountain gorillas remain today – have enormous hands and make the sound, as they tear off and chew branches in their Afro-montane hideaways, of a human being eating a stalk of celery…
When the pilot said we had crossed the Uganda border, I looked out of the window. I looked down and I imagined myself being regarded as I passed above – as with every wing dip and aileron flutter, the plane changed its relation to what was below: the animals on the plain, the tin roofs of isolated buildings, the gullies of the eroded land, the fertile green squares where farmers tended coffee and bananas. Even, so I wondered, the tawny, cross-eyed tiger-fish moving beneath the glittering surface of the lake.
For that was the approach: Lake Victoria Nyanza. Then we banked and, coming steeply down, went through a breach in the seven hills that surround the city of Kampala. We hit, with the habitual moment of fear, the tarmac. Then, as the rumble of the reverse thrust kicked in, the bumpy scrub of the strip – trees in the distance, sun-scorched grass at the margin – was whipping by like it wouldn’t stop.
The heat was the most of it, I should have expected that. Uganda for Travellers had told me that: “though more temperate than other East African countries due to its height above sea level, Uganda is on the equator and…” etc., etc. But nothing could have prepared me for the hydraulic blast of hot air that came as I stepped out. It was about four o’clock, local time, and although the main of the sun was over, the ground was still giving out all that it had stored up during the day, heat and dust mixing with the smell of aero fuel in the upward currents.
I had watched the runway attendants wheel the mobile stairway past the cabin window as we taxied, peering out through its smeary plastic lozenge. Now, as I climbed down the rickety steps, I looked at the men in the hot air – the jet heat making unnatural patterns in natural light, they in their blue overalls unwinding fat tubes, opening hatches or just plain standing around. And they stared back, but without interest. Or so I supposed. Who’s to tell from a face?
I walked with the other passengers across the apron to the glass-fronted terminal: so much smaller than in Britain, and self-contained. This was the airport tout court, you could see it all – including, which was a shock, a squadron of military jets neatly parked in formation. I turned at the terminal door for one last look at them, their wings sloped like the back of an envelope.
Inside, I proceeded towards immigration and customs, as the sign directed. After immigration I collected my bag from the carousel. Craning my neck, I eyed the rubber flaps anxiously as they parted to reveal a glimpse of daylight. I saw the hand of an attendant reaching into the wire-sided cart outside. After a while, I recognized my own case rotating, by virtue of some weird physics, on its own axis as it came round towards me.
We stood in the customs queue, grasping passports in sweaty palms. At least, mine were sweaty. Soldiers were leaning against the walls, their guns slung at awkward angles as they smoked and chatted. Up ahead, an Indian man with a larg
e family and cardboard stereo boxes bound up with string (AIWA in red letters: bisected by two lines of yellow twine), was gesticulating violently. But no problems for me, when it came to my turn. Slumped in their booths, the officials stamped my papers slack-handedly and nodded me on: case opened, case closed, the blink of an eye.
In the arrivals hall, I changed some sterling into Uganda shillings at a little Barclays Bank booth. I looked about. Someone from the ministry was meant to meet me. There was no one. I strode out of the hall into the sunlit car-park. Outside the door was a tall, bushy tree. In it were perched twenty or thirty bright green, parrot-like birds, squawking very loudly. It was an odd sight. I watched them for a short while, and then looked around again. No one. I went back into the terminal.
All in all, I waited about an hour, walking in and out of the terminal with my hard blue suitcase and the little BOAC shoulder bag. I soon found myself beset on all sides by a ragged band of boys. “Taxi, bwana,” they cried. “Taxi! We find you fine good taxi, fine good hotel.” They tugged at the handle of the big case and gestured to the rank – to where the drivers sprawled on their bonnets in the sun, confident of eventual capitulation.
They were right. Jealously clutching my bags to myself, I finally clambered into one of the old Peugeots. “A hotel in Kampala, please. Somewhere clean.”
Flies buzzed about in the cab. Distracted, I heard the voice of the cab-driver, repeating himself. “I will take you to the Speke Hotel, bwana. It is a good place. Very clean indeed. You have come from London?”
I told him, yes, I had, then, suddenly tired from the journey, tried to avoid further conversation. We drove along an initially well-tarmaced road, past the docks and some ranks of sheds with rusty tin roofs, and then out into a rural area. I could see the blue of Lake Victoria on my left. On the other side were straw shacks with piles of produce outside – stippled ovals of jackfruit and avocado, painted wicker stools, stacks of firewood, charcoal and irregular bricks made of dried mud. Behind the shacks stretched miles of rough grassland, punctuated now and then by yellow-flowered acacia trees and the mysterious brown shapes of termite mounds.
After about twenty minutes and the final dilapidation of the tarmac into a sort of beaten clay, we came to a roundabout. In the middle was a spiky multiple wooden signpost, black letters on peeling white paint: NORTH (Kampala, Gulu, Sudan); EAST (Jinja, Tororo, Kenya); SOUTH (Entebbe, Lake Victoria) – the direction from which we had come; and WEST (Mbarara, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zaire). I had never seen countries on a signpost before, it made me feel like anything was possible – like I was the king of infinite space.
I dumbly watched the bush landscape reel by as we headed towards Kampala. The engine groaned with the effort as the driver shifted the gearstick to cope with the inclines, tutting with frustration each time he did so. Through the gap between the front seats I could see the stick’s dusty canopy of weary black rubber. Above that was a dark hole where the heater or radio should have been. Some kind of charm made of bark, animal skin and beads dangled from the mirror, swiping the road ahead as it dipped up and down into the distance, bush on each side. I watched it all, until trees developed into shacks, shacks into concrete buildings and we were suddenly on a major highway in the middle of the city.
∗
Installed in the Speke, I took a shower and came down from my room. Already prickling with sweat, I went in search of the bar. The room was enormous, a high ceiling with rose reliefs, and on the walls dark wooden boards with the names of cricket and rugby players – Rider, D.G., Inglis, R., and many a long-dead Brown, Smith and Jones – picked out in white and gold. In between these, at intervals, were the horns of antelopes mounted on plinths and one lonely, gigantically long, grotesquely distorted rhinoceros horn. Underneath, out of place amid the colonial bric-a-brac, were three or four gaming machines – pinball, and several of the old-fashioned, one-armed bandit type with whirring dials.
Idly, irrationally wondering whether anyone from the Ministry was about, I looked around. Above the optics was a large sign: YOUR COUNTRY IS YOUR FAMILY. There was also a cloth picture of a man I took, from the grainy photograph in Uganda for Travellers, to be President Obote, the incumbent. A group of women in nylon dresses and plastic jewellery sat together at one end of the bar, watching me and muttering amongst themselves. A fleshy barman in a smudged white jacket looked at me expectantly as I approached.
“Prisoner?” he said.
“Sorry?” I did a double take.
He looked pained. One of the women, as if they had made a decision between them, stood up and began moving along the dais towards me. A tooth-filled smile travelled before her, as if it was separate from her tiny face and some kind of mechanism was training it down the bar. I edged nervously away, crab-walking my elbows.
“You drink Prisoner?” The barman repeated himself, gesturing irritably with his thumb at the rack of bottles behind him.
Then I understood: Pilsner.
“Yes,” I said, and handed over some of the shillings I’d converted at the airport.
“There’s been trouble in the north, you know that?” a white man said abruptly, jerking his head round in front of me as I clasped the bottle. He had a big black beard, an open-necked khaki shirt, and a strong South African accent.
“Oh,” I said, surprised.
His body, his manner, everything about him was chunky and muscular, even his face: it was as if, above the sprouting black hair, he had biceps for cheeks.
“Off you go,” he said.
For a second, I thought he meant me, but then he waved the girl away, brushing at her shoulder imperiously. She was right next to us by now, my crab-like escape having been thwarted by a thick post of rough-carved wood going down through a hole in the dais. Pulling a face, she turned on her heel.
“You want to watch out for that lot,” the South African remarked, “they’ll have every last shilling out of your pocket before you can say jack rabbit. And then there’s, you know…the disease and all that.” He finished his sentence with a hearty laugh.
I smiled, embarrassed, and turned to walk across the room to a table. But he came with me, walking alongside.
“Don’t mind if I join you, do you?” he said. He had a dog with him, too, I realized: an Alsatian was trailing along behind us, its claws ticking on the parquet floor.
“No,” I said. “Please do.”
We sat down at a table. “Name’s Freddy Swanepoel.” Taking a cigarette himself, he tossed the packet across the wood.
“No, thanks…Nicholas Garrigan.” I held out my hand.
“Pleased to meet you, Nicholas. What you doing in Kampala?”
I bristled slightly, half-annoyed, half-flattered at his interest. “I’m a doctor, I’ve got a government contract.”
“Contract with the devil, more like. Anyway, plenty of work here for you, then.”
He sipped his beer. As we exchanged information, the Alsatian sat at our feet, licking the salt out of an empty crisp packet. It occasionally looked up at its master with soulful eyes.
“Boetie, he’s called,” said Swanepoel, seeing me study the delicate salt-licking operation. “Take him in the plane with me sometimes.” He patted the dog’s head proudly.
“And what do you do?” I asked.
He explained that he was an emigre South African, based in Nairobi. “I’m a pilot. I work for an outfit called Rafiki Aviation. We run things about for the Kenyan and Ugandan governments. And other bits and pieces.”
“Don’t they mind you being a South African? I didn’t think you were allowed up this far.”
He raised his eyebrows. I realized I might have sounded rude. There was an awkward pause before he answered my question.
“My mother was English, so I managed to wangle myself a Brit passport. That’s how I get to work in black Africa. The British Coat of Arms. Otherwise they wouldn’t let me in here, you’re right.”
I began to quiz him about the situation in the country.
&n
bsp; “A coup in the offing, I had it from one of the air force boys. No worries – I’ve seen it before in these places, they usually leave the whites alone.”
We talked a bit more, and then I levered myself out of my chair to get us another round of drinks. Feeling as if I’d left part of my body back in the chair, I walked over to the bar and bought the beers.
As I turned round, there was a sudden commotion at the door. A group of five or six men, all in flared trousers and dark glasses, burst into the room. One had on a flowery towelling sun hat, and there was something heavy weighing down the top pocket of his safari-suit jacket. They marched straight up to Swanepoel, beckoning and shouting. I stopped in my tracks, a beer bottle in each hand.
The one in the sun hat whispered excitedly to the South African, pulling at his sleeve. Swanepoel, however, put his feet up on the table – deliberately, as if to annoy him. The man cuffed his feet. Swanepoel got up, leaning over him threateningly. The dog scrambled up, too, and growled. The man took a step back, delving into his heavy pocket. I saw the black of a gun.
Then Swanepoel laughed out loud and patted the man in the towelling hat on the shoulder. The man in the towelling hat laughed, too, and put the gun away, and then everybody laughed. Swanepoel gathered up his cigarette packet and lighter, put them in his shirt pocket and took a last swig of beer. He paused to make an apologetic, can’t-be-helped gesture across the room to me, and followed the group of men out of the door. The dog padded out behind them.
Bewildered, I went over to the table and spent the next half-hour stalwartly drinking the two bottles. Then I went up to my room. As I opened the door, I caught a glimpse of three cockroaches scuttling across the linoleum. Each one was fat as a hand-rolled cigar.