The Last King of Scotland (1998)

by Giles Foden

  Sara looked about us. “We better go,” she whispered, “we could be attacked.”

  “Do you really think so?” I thought she was being a touch over-dramatic.

  “Come on,” Sara said, forcefully.

  We pushed through the crowd, whose eyes were fixed on Amin, his every word, so it seemed, corresponding to some need in themselves. As we walked up to the compound, with the loudspeaker noise of Amin’s speech and the cheers of the crowd fading away, Sara was silent, replying to me in monosyllables when I spoke to her. I myself was excited by it all, but she declined when I asked her in for coffee.

  “I have work to do,” she said.

  “But it’s Saturday.”

  “My own things.”

  ∗

  On the Monday morning following Amin’s visit, I saw Merrit next to the big pile beyond the clinic boundary. I went over to see what he was up to. He was standing in front of a small but particularly foul-smelling bonfire, with a little bag at his feet.

  “What are you doing?,” I asked, looking more closely. There were bottles and vials popping in the heat, their shiny metal caps twisting with a slow, agonized turn. “I thought you only burned once a year.”

  “It’s the charity groups. They send us out-of-date medicaments. Absolutely useless. If I don’t burn them thoroughly, the patients steal them from the rubbish pit and sell them in the market. See this” – he reached into the bag and pulled out a handful of capsules, half-red half-yellow – “tetracycline: useless if you don’t have a proper course. Do more harm than good.”

  ∗

  Waziri and I went into town for lunch later in the week. Barbecued chicken at the Riheka Guest House (“All-in-one 24 hr Pub for Comfort and Leisure”), with chips and a salad roughly chopped.

  “You shouldn’t have gone,” he said, when I told him about Amin’s speech.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re just giving him credence. If whites turn up, they will all think he is even better than they already think him.”

  For all that, he still wanted to know what Amin had said. And when I told him the bit about the wananchi being the ‘doctors of Uganda’, he told me an interesting story. His grandfather had told it to him, he said. An anti-doctor religion apparently took hold here in the 1920s. Because the European doctors couldn’t cure all the diseases they were presented with, and because the Bible didn’t mention modern treatments, a militant Christian cult evolved around the refusal of Western medicine.

  “They used to smash the bottles – it’s understandable, really. They’d been offered all these things, all these explanations, and yet there were still some other things – plague, the sleeping sickness, leprosy – that weren’t being explained. Not then, anyway. You have to remember that this wasn’t long after a time when every muzungu was perceived as a musawo, a doctor, whether they were a soldier, a merchant, a civil servant. Whatever. You fellows were all miracle-workers in those days, Nicholas.”

  “So they went back to the Bible?”

  “Correct, and often it was only the Old Testament. Some even became Jews. I’m not joking. They trusted the white word but not the white man. They trusted that the Supreme Being, he who dispensed justice and punishment through illness and healing, would take up their case. Katonda omu ainza byonna. God omnipotent, in other words. The strange thing was, this was a European god, really. Before, I mean the African deity, he had just created – and then slipped away quietly. Now he was a kind of consultant, on call.”

  I laughed.

  “I’m serious,” he continued. “That sense, of them being protected by one God, it had really come from the muzungu in the first place…All those missionaries, thinking it was their chosen mission to educate us. Spreading the light. Omushana, except only in English.”

  He shook his head. “That’s what happened to me, that’s why I became a doctor. A true son of the White Fathers.”

  I said, “I promise not to spread any light.”

  On the way back, we saw a girl squatting in the street, her dress pulled up around her knees. The pee ran down the pavement, making a line in the dust, gathering it like a beetle.

  “These people,” Waziri said, shaking his head.

  “Don’t be harsh,” I said. “She was only a child.”

  I took another body down to the morgue in the afternoon. The trolley wheels played up in the sloping corridor. As usual. I got there to find that both the cold chambers were full. So that one just had to sit.

  11

  To the Merrits for supper, as I put it, rather Jennifer’s Diary-ishly. Ivor and Sara were there, the latter in a dark blue silk shirt. I couldn’t keep my eyes off where her hair touched the collar. Auburn and dark blue, honey and blood mixed together: the colour of a bruise.

  Ivor got drunk during the meal, which was slightly tense at one point. Merrit had launched into some interminable tale about an Oxford friend of his who had made a fortune in the clothing industry, in the course of which he described the friend as being ‘very Jewish’.

  He broke off and looked at Sara, who was sawing away at a tough piece of chicken. “Oh, Christ, I’m sorry,” he said, clapping his hand to his forehead.

  “Why be sorry?” she said, continuing to cut at the chicken. “If he was very Jewish, then he was very Jewish.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “You really should get yourself a gardener, Nicholas,” Mrs Merrit said, eventually. “It’s just not fair on the garden.”

  “No, but the garden wasn’t fair on Adam and Eve,” slurred Ivor, his chin sliding into the grubby knot of his yellow tie.

  Mrs Merrit eyed him coldly, and then her husband continued with his story.

  “Anyway…”

  On the way back, after we’d poured Ivor into his bungalow, Sara invited me in for whisky. Her place was even more sparsely furnished than mine: not much more than a desk, a chair and a sofa. And a bed, I supposed, though I didn’t get to see that.

  She also had a big short-wave radio. Like Merrit’s, only it was a send-and-receive, with the aerial whip up on the roof and a black microphone with a coiled wire. The latter looked odd on the wood.

  “All doctors get them in Israel,” she said, when I asked her about it, “it comes with my grant.”

  “But who do you talk to? Martians?” I was already quite tipsy.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  She got up and walked across the room towards the radio. I watched the light play on her shirt.

  “I could even call Tel Aviv if I wanted; the idea is that you can have medical advice on rare diseases. Or whatever.”

  She turned a knob and a wave of white noise came out. On top of it or behind it, or wherever things happen in radio world, was an eerie electronic neighing, going up and down jaggedly, and a deep squelchy voice choppily declaiming in a foreign language some repetitive sounding set of orders or other permutation of words and numbers. Altogether, it was as if the football results were being read by one of the prophets. In a snowstorm. On a runaway horse.

  She turned it off and came to sit at the other end of the sofa. I edged closer as we talked. Centimetre by centimetre. And I would happily have stayed on drinking for longer, and edging closer still, but eventually she threw me out, patting me on the shoulder.

  “Nicholas, it is time you went home. You will turn into a drunk like Ivor.”

  I pecked her on the cheek at the door. About this her eyes were completely neutral, not revealing whether it was a welcome move.

  God, I was awkward.

  Walking in the bush a few days later I saw – to my great surprise – a leopard on the hill above the clinic. It glanced at me, and then just lay down mellow in the grass, washing its paws like a cat. I was terrified at the time, but quite pleased with myself when I told Sara about it.

  “You just have to keep calm when wild animals are around,” I said. “You mustn’t let them smell your fear.”

  “You obviously know a lot about it,” she replied
, coolly.

  ∗

  The following Friday I saw a pair of cranes in the garden. The national bird of Uganda: magnificent yellow crest, black-and-white face and long beak sticking out like a comic surprise. All the better for killing snakes with. Tall, manic creatures, with big personalities, they strutted about on the lawn and came over to tap on the living-room window with their beaks. They thought it was an enemy but it was only their own reflection.

  Once a year, Waziri informed me, others will come and together they do a special mating dance in a circle on the lawn. But I never saw it.

  ∗

  In April I went on tour with Waziri again. We stayed in government rest-houses, hotels, and once in the room above a bar. West Ankole: Buhweju, Bunyaruguru, Kajara, Shema, Igara. Tuesday to Friday. We travelled along the volcanic ridge, at one point passing a border post for Zaire, which is Francophone, after a fashion. There was a sign there which made me chuckle: “Bienvenue a Zaire, prodigieuses visions d’enfer” – and a picture of mountains spewing forth lava and ash.

  As well as conducting the vaccination safari, we stopped in Kabale, a hill town on the Uganda side, and visited a banana wine factory there. The sickly ‘Banapo’ vintage was made by a Belgian called Grillat, who wore a crumpled white suit and had a gold tooth. We sampled some from little glass tumblers. Grillat said that bananas were not just the staple here in Uganda.

  I see that I made a note about it. (I suppose I am quite an orderly person, though the way my life has gone it doesn’t feel that way.) As well as food and wine, bananas were used for:

  Roofs

  Cattle feed

  Clothing (Adam and Eve)

  Medicine (poultices)

  Dye

  Vinegar

  Packing material (guns, bodies).

  On the Thursday, Waziri left me at the White Horse Hotel (up in the hills) and went off for the afternoon. “My folks are from round here,” he said, “I have to go and give them money.”

  He didn’t come back till morning, which annoyed me, as I had waited up to eat with him. I noticed that his clothes (usually spotless) were all dusty when he came in.

  “Old flame?” I asked him.

  “You could say that,” he said, looking irritated.

  We drove through one of the most intensive areas of banana cultivation on the way back. Waziri said that he liked to watch the tree go through its calendar. When the time comes to flower, the plant – by this stage five or six feet high – forces a reddish bud from its centre, which then curves downwards, slowly opening up to uncover three rows of small flowers.

  According to Waziri:

  The top row becomes bananas

  The bottom row makes pollen

  The middle row drops off

  The tree dies.

  “It is a fascinating spectacle,” he said. “The cycle takes about eighteen months to complete and I watch it every year. I missed it when I was doing my post-med in America.”

  When we got back, I went round the other side of the fence at the bottom of the compound, to look for myself. The fruit is green while on the tree, grouped twenty or thirty close, pointing upward in serried ranks, with the red bud hanging below. The latter looks like a placenta and has the same consistency, too. Living tissue.

  Only one bunch of bananas comes from each bud. The tree does die, but a new plant springs up each season at the foot of each dead tree. God is great, as the Moslem patients used to say when they recovered. Most of them went to Doctor Ghose in town, though.

  ∗

  In May a young woman – a girl, really, overweight but with an astonishingly pretty face – came in with her mother, complaining of backache.

  “I have been hoeing too much,” she said to me, groaning.

  So I put her on the couch and, not seeing anything immediately obvious, was about to send her in for X-ray. Suddenly she sat up and started thrashing around. She went into labour right there and then.

  The poor girl appeared to have had no idea. Feeling foolish, I had to deliver myself, as none of the other doctors was available. It was my first since arriving in Uganda, and basically Nyala, the African sister, did it. As I watched the delivery, I remembered the chilling, yet slightly comical words of one of my father’s more stringent colleagues, delivered in a broad Fife accent on hearing that the birth rate in Fossiemuir had gone up sharply: “Why do they do this? By being born we already – the most of us, anyway – exist in sin. The best the others can hope for is a little to be pardoned. That drop of forgiveness is sparely poured.”

  I initially supposed that what had brought the girl to such a dramatic change in her vision of herself was a form of denial. I thought to myself, this ‘hoeing too much’ stuff is obviously a doubling up of her own conscience: she is ‘guilty’ about backache rather than pregnancy. I later realized I was wrong: there was no stigma attached to pregnancy in Uganda. The girl’s mother was happy to find out what was wrong.

  It struck me that if something as basic as pregnancy could be overlooked, then how much else? No diagnosis is infallible. It took me (medical training encouraging the opposite) a long time to understand this. To understand that there is no comprehensive system of understanding, at least not in the way that the organs of the body are part of a common structure.

  I didn’t always use to think so. One of my favourite books as a child, alongside the adventure stories, atlases and stamp albums, was a leather-bound, encyclopedic, calendar-anniversary affair of my father’s called Odhams’ Book of Knowledge. Published in the 1920s, it listed the important events that happened on a particular day and noted where you could find information about them elsewhere in the book: everything was connected, each element ratified by another. As a matter of fact, the hospital library was full of similar stuff: Harmsworth’s Household Encyclopedia, Squire’s Companion to the British Pharmacopoeia and so on. They must have been brought by my predecessors, and found their way across the continent, from mission-station to mission-station, hospital to hospital. A light seeking a light. A guide.

  Talking of which, I must relate what Waziri told me about the honey badger. The honey badger and the honey guide. The guide is a small bird that hops about, thereby leading the badger to a hive too solid for the guide to break into. The badger breaks it open with his long front claws, eats his fill, and what’s left is plenty for the honey guide. I had heard something like this before – what surprised me was how the badger escapes bee-stings: apparently, he first claws a small hole in the hive, then turns around, holds on tight, and stuns them with a blast of noxious gas from his behind.

  12

  My God, how the time passed. I went inside and came back out with a hurricane lamp. The veranda again, my second year in Uganda. Getting too dark, too quick, as I recall. Writing in a failing light, a light you actually notice failing – as there on the equator – is like staying in the bath with the water running out. That is a curious feeling. How it might be if your soul was leaving you. Just displacement, really, your body realizing its own true mass. But odd none the less.

  A lot of noise at the barracks one night, shooting and then a loud explosion. I could see the flames below. The next morning we heard from Waziri that a detachment from the north had killed all the Langi and Acholi soldiers.

  He looked drawn as he told us about it, sitting staring at the table in the office and speaking in a monotone. His green surgical mask hung at his throat.

  “Scores of them. I saw the lorries taking the bodies myself, even an arm sticking out from under the tail-gate. It was disgusting. They say they have dumped them in the forest and that they had put them all in one room, with dynamite. Stacked up round the walls. They cut the throats of those who survived.”

  It was in June that the two Americans disappeared. They had apparently come up here in a blue Volkswagen asking questions about the soldiers. I didn’t see them but Sara told me she had actually spoken to one of them.

  “He said he was a journalist. He wanted to know about the
killings.”

  We were lying next to each other, naked and looking up at the ceiling. It was the first time. More or less the whole weekend in bed. Like a sexual training course for the rest of my life, as I rather foolishly thought back then. Her hair spread on the pillow and the flame-tree in bloom in the garden outside.

  I wanted her to stop talking about those other, darker things. I could only think of us. “Tough but tender Sara from Israel,” I said, turning over on to my side and stroking her stomach.

  She smiled, in spite of herself. “Don’t be a – what is it you say in English? – don’t be a…twit!”

  I moved up my hand and tried to tickle her but she held my wrist hard, and then climbed on top of me, pushing my hands into the pillow.

  “You’re my prisoner,” she whispered in my ear. “You must do as you are told.”

  ∗

  “The Americans argued with Major Mabuse,” Waziri said at the clinic on the Monday. “The rumour is that they were bayoneted and buried just off the road.”

  The very next day I saw Major Mabuse in town. He was driving a blue Volkswagen, his peaked cap on the dashboard and the scarification on his cheeks so noticeable, in broad daylight, as to make me touch my own to check their smoothness.

  “That’s a bit daft,” Ivor remarked, when I told everyone in the clinic canteen. “You’d think he’d be a bit more secretive than that.”

  June was also the month I saw the corpse in the Rwizi, below the Ngaromwenda bridge. It was blown up with putrefaction, like a sheep’s carcass I’d seen once back home, and the head was wedged between two rocks. The balloon of the man’s torso rose and fell with the current, a ghoulish instrument of measurement.

  And that month, too, the flimsy blue airmail letter came from my sister, Moira. It was about Father’s death. And then the one about Mum. The two events brought closer by bad post. Consequences, consequences: the whole thing is that. Me wondering whether I should go back each time, and then feeling guilty about not doing so. Now I cannot understand how I was so callous. But perhaps even then, as early as that, something in me had begun to close down.