by Giles Foden
“There’ll be a big troop movement this afternoon,” Sara said firmly. “Come on. We’ll be late for work.”
During the week that followed, an increasing number of patients with bullet wounds and blade lacerations presented at the clinic. Mostly farmers, but some soldiers too.
“They’re getting restless,” Ivor said gleefully one evening, slinging an empty blood bag into the over-full bin.
Wrinkled, sucked out like a dried tomato, the bag landed on top of a scrump of white paper: obsolete fever curves torn off the clipboards, and old drug requisition forms. As Ivor went off to lock up, I stared at it like a dumb animal – lethargic, disengaged – and wondered what I was doing there. All the staff had gone home except for us and the night sister.
I heard Ivor’s rich, Christmas-pudding voice behind me. “We’re running out of blood again, you know. You’d think there were vampires here. Come and see this old girl.”
I walked down the dim ward, eyes following me from the stark metal beds, and joined him where he was leaning over the latest case of wounds. The woman groaned as he pulled back the sheet to point out the passage of the bullet: through her breast, from the side, and then down into her hand, shattering a knuckle.
“The breast is fine but the hand is done for. She says the soldiers accused her of feeding the Obote guerrillas from over the border.”
We said good-night to the sister and went out into the car-park. Bats were swooping around under the trees. It was so quiet you could hear their wings.
On the way down the hill, Ivor placed his hand softly in the small of my back. I edged away and carried on talking, pretending it hadn’t happened, and then it was just as if nothing had. I liked old Ivor, he brightened the place up, but I didn’t much fancy being one of his laddies.
“He’s got another new cook-boy,” as Mrs Merrit said from time to time in shock-horror tones. “It can’t be right. Somebody’ll complain to the police one day and then we’ll have trouble on our hands.”
∗
I became quite friendly with Waziri. We went out on our first vaccination safari together after a month or two. East Ankole: Ruhama, Rwampara, Isingiro, Kashari, Nyabusozi, Mitoma, Kiruhura. On rough roads, with the Ruwenzoris stretched high above us, it was quite a trip – we even crossed a river – and the Land Rover bumped about so much that I had to hold on to my seat. Waziri’s sun-glasses case skittered about on the dashboard as we negotiated rocks and pot-holes, tree-stumps and the odd stray goat.
“The steering needs correcting,” he said, when we stopped for petrol: from a jerrycan on the roof. I walked to the edge of the road for a pee while he filled up.
The sound of me going, together with the glug-glug of the petrol behind, made it feel like we were by a brook. As my bladder relaxed, I stared out into the various landscape: dust, marsh, mountain, forest, farmland – smooth green carpets of tea, cotton bushes, grazing for cows – and a clutch of different diseases for each locale.
On my way back to the Land Rover, one of the largest butterflies I had ever seen alighted on my shirt. It was easily as big as my hand. I watched its blue and red wings slowly opening and closing on my chest. It was very beautiful indeed, but seen close up, with its antennae searching the air just below my breast pocket, it was also slightly threatening.
“Ekwihuguhugu,” said Waziri, softly.
“What?” I whispered. It sounded like ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’.
“The butterfly. In Kinyankole-Luchiga, the mountain dialect, we call them Ekwihuguhugu. It means: this one is very fragile. They are the biggest butterflies in the world.”
I looked down at the insect and said the word. It flew off then, as if I had uttered an occult command, flapping over the eroded red earth at the side of the road and disappearing into the bush.
“It was probably attracted by the smell of your urine,” Waziri said, as we got into the Land Rover. “Or the petrol. We don’t usually see them this far down off the mountains.”
We drove from village to village, spraying the huts with their wobbly roofs: you had to spray the cone at the top especially or else the insects could still breed up there, thus becoming immune. Mosquitoes and mbwa – the small black fly Simulium damnosum – were what we were after. The dog fly, it used to be called. Its bite produces a worm which swells up the blood vessels, causing ulcers and, in the worst cases, blindness. The larvae live in river weed.
And then we inoculated: TB, polio, cholera, smallpox, the empty vials chinking as I threw each one into an old biscuit tin.
Though I knew that they were not, to my stranger’s eye each village seemed the same. The chickens would scatter as we drove in and the women look up from their mats of drying millet, or the matooke they were steaming on charcoal grates. Everyone would gather round. A hubbub. We’d set up our white trestle table and lay out the syringes. They’d all queue up – excited, mistrustful or just plain scared. I’d rub the arms. Sometimes people would wince more from the coldness of the alcohol on the cotton wool than they would from the needle.
Afterwards, Waziri would read the riot act in Kinyankole, the smoke from the matooke grates swirling behind him. This was how it went:
All persons to vary their matooke with other fruits and vegetables and to have meat when possible.
All persons to wash at least once per diem.
Each sick person to have a well-ventilated hut.
All dead persons to be buried not thrown in the swamps.
On the penultimate day of the tour, night fell before we could get to Butogota, a village in the Bwindi district. It started to rain, bringing the smell of tropical vegetation into the cab. On the way we passed a track on the right and a wooden sign with ‘Bwindi Impenetrable Forest’ written on it, flashing up wet in the headlights. I couldn’t believe it, but it was for real.
“Your explorers called it that, not us,” Waziri said. “Bwindi just means dark. Bwindi dark, omushana light. The pygmies live inside, what’s left of them. It’s not a nice place. You must never go there, Nicholas. It is full of army as well now, anyway.”
So was everywhere. The following night, as we got back to Mbarara, we nearly ran into a road-block that had just a single hurricane lamp as illumination. And I do mean nearly ran into it: stopping just short of the spiky mat laid out to burst the tyres.
“Simama hapi!” a voice shouted. A figure emerged, rising up from the bushes on the side of the road as if from the wings of a theatre.
“What’s that mean?” I whispered to Waziri.
“Stop there.”
As he replied, the tip of a rifle appeared on the window sill. I could smell beer on the soldier’s breath when he leaned in, his camouflage hat pulled down tight. He said something. Waziri replied, quite short with him, I thought, and then there was silence for a few seconds, with the soldier just leaning there over his gun and looking at us. Eventually Waziri flung a 200-shilling note at him and we drove off, skirting the mat.
“Goatfuckers,” Waziri said, shaking his head.
To calm our nerves, we went for a drink in the Changalulu, one of the bars in town. We got quite drunk, or I did at least. I was upbeat, in spite of the road-block incident.
“I really feel like things are coming good for me here,” I confided to him. “It’s like I’m in the real Africa.”
He laughed. “You muzungu are always saying things like that, as if there’s some kind of secret to be discovered. We had one man here looking for the site of King Solomon’s Mines. The idiot thought it was up in the Ruwenzoris. I told him he’d find it in a maize patch if he looked hard enough.”
“The alien corn,” I said. “You know the Bible story.”
“Of course. I went to the mission school. We all did. Well, those who went to school.”
He drained his glass and stood up, his tall ascetic frame a shadow against the wall. “Want another?”
I looked round the bar as he went to get them. A woman in a red bandanna was wiping tables. It was getting late and there was just on
e other customer, a soldier, quite high-ranking, I could see from his peaked cap and brass pips. He was staring moodily into his glass. I noticed that he had fierce-looking ritual scars on each cheek.
“So, you want to see the real Africa, my friend?” Waziri plonked the beer down in front of me. There was a slight mocking tone in his voice. “You should go down to the hotel some time. Every third Tuesday they do the devil dance or the witch sniffing or whatever you want to call it there. For the tourists.”
He scratched his head. “Though God knows, there’s not many of those nowadays. It’s fun, though. The usual thing: the dancers moving their knees up and dropping shells and powders in the dirt.”
“Do they really believe it all?”
“Who, the tourists or the dancers?” He raised his eyebrow.
The officer got up to leave, giving us a hard look as he passed.
“That’s Major Mabuse,” Waziri said, turning to watch him go. “He was just a taxi-driver before the coup. A nasty piece of work.”
“They all seem to be.”
“Not all,” he said, after a pause. “Well,” he continued. “Amin is the nastiest, I’ll grant you that. You know he’s coming here next month? There’s going to be a reception at the football stadium.”
“Will you go?”
“Of course not. I wouldn’t be associated with that monster in any way whatsoever.”
We sat in silence for another moment and then I asked him more about the dancing. “Is it just like a custom or something to believe in properly?”
He nodded, or half-nodded. “Properly.”
“Really? In this day and age, even here?”
“Here is my country, Nicholas. Well, they do in a way and not in others. When it suits, like any belief. Sometimes it’s useful, though: for explaining the inexplicable. And the frightening aspect of it is like a form of psychotherapy. Shock treatment. In that way, it’s the show of the thing that’s interesting. It all depends, I’ve come to this conclusion, on the rustling of the dried leaf skirts. It’s like a form of vagueness that lets you imagine things, only you hear it. And obviously the masks as well. They have a big lion one that is very wonderful.”
“And tom-toms?”
“Naturally. And beans in gourds and a big blue cockerel whose blood you throw down in the dust, whatever you want. They whip the bad spirits out of the place and the tourists all stand there clicking it with the cameras and then the man in the lion mask comes round for the collection. You know it is Nestor, the night watchman from our place?”
“No! I wouldn’t have thought he has the energy to leap around.”
“He does when he gets the fever in him and there’s some young girl bouncing about. Then his legs spring like a young goat. But he helps people, too. They go to him and he rubs the stuff- the magic substance, the muti – on their bodies. And sometimes it works, too. Not often, but now and then.”
9
The boy I had talked to when I first arrived, the one with the T-shirt and the wire toy car, was waiting for me outside the clinic one evening. He handed me a folded note: “Dear Doctor Garrigan, this is my brother Gugu. I believe you have met him. I am writing to ask if you can come for lunch on Sunday. Yours sincerely, Bon-ney Malumba.”
So at the weekend off I went to the Malumbas’. Boniface, smart in a pair of bell-bottom trousers, greeted me in the hall.
“My long-lost friend Doctor Nicholas.”
Gugu scampered about between us. Mrs Malumba, a portly matron in a long gown with tufted sleeves, offered to wash my feet, but I declined, of course. It was quite a swish house, by local standards. They even had a television, a small black-and-white one with a V-shaped aerial on top.
The father was stout and distinguished-looking. He retired relatively wealthy, Boniface told me later, having been Chief Headman for the Directorate of Overseas Surveys. Also wearing a long gown, he was sitting on a straw stool when I came in, with a glass of beer in his hand. Boniface introduced us with great formality and I sat down on another stool to talk to his father. We started with politics and I soon learned that he was no fan of Amin.
“That fellow is no better than Obote, let me tell you. It is because of Obote that we had to move away and I believe many will be moving on account of Amin also.”
I learned that the family was Baganda, from near Kampala, and had emigrated down here to Ankole country when Mr Malumba retired. I asked him about the different Ganda words, which had been puzzling me.
This was how it went:
Mu-ganda (a single Ganda person)
Ba-ganda (“the people”)
Lu-ganda (the Ganda tongue)
Bu-ganda (the land of Ganda).
“It is the same in many places, even Tanzania,” Mr Malumba said. “But sometimes you have to put in a y or even other letters depending on what has come before. So you have Banyankole, the people who live round here, or the Banrwanda over the border. And all these places I have worked in.”
Before long, he was telling me the story of his life with the Directorate, from its early days as part of the Colonial Office to after Independence, when he had helped run the East African tri-angulation project for ODA, the same people from whom I was seconded.
“What exactly is triangulation?” I asked.
He leaned forward on his stool, making gestures with his hands over the straw mats on the floor. “It is dividing an area into triangles for mapping. Distance and height, so you can put hills on a map that is flat. We had to make chains of triangles which would be connected to chains in other countries. The chain had come up from Tanzania and Zambia through to the border of Burundi. Just over there. In my time, we extended it through Uganda and Sudan to connect with Egypt. This was done a long time ago. It was called the Thirtieth Arc.”
“That’s a lot of ground to cover.” I thought of the map in my guidebook and tried to imagine the vast distances he was describing.
“We went from one mountain to another, making stations. I was a helioboy to begin with. I held the mirror and the surveyor caught my light in his theodolite, many miles away. Sometimes as far as sixty miles. Other times it would be dark and we would send lighting parties. Then the surveyor would send the closing-down signal with his light and we would move to the next hill. And the next, and the next, and the next. Until we met with the other party. The other triangle. That was how we made the chain.”
“Hard work,” I said. Mrs Malumba smiled at me over his shoulder. Then she went into the kitchen, leaving me with Bonney and Gugu, who were listening to their father as closely as I was. Though I suspected this story was one he had told many times before.
“Yes,” he continued, “and much walking. And much heavy equipment to carry. We went in Land Rovers and lorries and camped each night. And other things, too, were hard. I began in Karamoja. Up north. It was difficult there. Very rough place. The Karamojans kept taking the wire the beacons were tied with. So we tied them with bark cloth, but they took that too. And also herds of buffalo and elephant would knock them over.”
“It must have been exciting to see them, though. The animals.”
“I suppose so. The soldiers have killed them all now. For food, and I believe sometimes for pleasure also. It was different in those days. Now and then we went up in planes. With the RAF. I had to carry the heavy camera which took pictures of the shape of the ground. The Fairchild K17. Fifty thousand square miles we covered. Very far. Below we could see the white wooden crosses we had put on the ground.”
“What were they for?”
“To mark the points. We paid the wananchi to repaint them once a month or they would become faded by the time we took the shots. And you know, in some parts they are still painting them now, so many years later. I believe they thought we were missionaries. So many of those crosses became holy sites.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said, laughing.
“It is so. But in the work, the films would go to England, and there the cartographers would scale and plot
maps from the shots – one-to-fifty-thousand, one-to-twenty-five-thousand – putting the films over. Then the maps came back, when we were already in a different place, and we studied them with joy. For they were very beautiful. Hill shades, roads, rivers, vegetation. All in colour: pink, green, blue, yellow. I can show you.”
He went to a shelf, selected a couple of maps, and spread them out on the floor. One was an old one, the folds nearly developed into tears. On it were notations like ‘Rudolf Province’ and ‘East African Protectorate’. The other map was new.
“We put on the names, we would ask the people and they would tell us the name and why it was used. Like here.”
He pointed. Gugu crept over to look.
“This is Arua. Aru is prison in Lugbara. When the Germans were fighting you in the war, there was a prison camp here and when the African people went there to be guards they would say they were aru-a. In the prison. You see?
“And here is Gulu, where the river makes the sound gulu-gulu as it passes. Then the Nile comes to Jinja. Traders in bark cloth crossed over to Busoga there and when they missed the last canoe (they had to go before nightfall because of the hippos), they would camp on the stone and say to their wives that they had to spend the night ku jinja, on the rock.
“Then to the lake. Entebbe is where you came on the aeroplane. It is the headquarters of the lungfish clan and for some reason the British made it their headquarters also. It is the seat of government, for this” – he stood up and pointed at his stool – “is called entebe in Luganda…Kabarole. That is ‘watch and see’ in Lunyoro, because the king built his palace on a hill there. We call double-decker buses kabandole, ‘watch-and-see-me’, for this very reason. At Kaliro the hunters would build a small fire on a hill to show they were safe. Their wives at home would say to each other, ‘Have you seen the fire?’ And another would say, “Kaliro. We have seen it.”
“Kumuli, that is from ‘small reed’ because it was a place where letters were carried to by a runner, the paper put inside in a slit in the reed. Luwero, that signifies ‘slashing grass’. And Makerere, noise of birds: karere, karere!” He flapped his arms in the air.