by Giles Foden
He laughed at himself, and the whole gathering laughed, as the waiter swam back sheepishly in his heavy clothes. His white coat had ballooned up: I couldn’t help thinking of the inflated corpse in the Rwizi, the sickening way it had moved up and down in the current.
“Anyway,” said Amin, with his mouth full of chicken. “This bad chief, my friends. He thinks, what he is doing, that it is his plan not the plan of God. But it is in fact God’s will what he is doing all the time. So he appears a very great man because of this. He believes in taking every chance and there is nothing he does not dare do. He never says – simama, finish, he is even like a brave man going on until the last minute when he is taken down. Then, too, he cannot realize his true situation. He just will not see it.”
He waved the chicken leg in the air. You could see the joint move as he gesticulated. The loose, greasy skin was red from piri-piri. He took another bite, then dropped it on the platform by his side.
“So, things would be bad in that country until then. Every morning, when the sun shine, there is a new widow crying in her hut and a baby there chewing on her breast like a dry maize cob. And every day this bad chief is spitting at God in the sky. He puts a finger up at the moon, he does not know when is an equal measure of mealies flour in any thing. For he always goes too much in every area…
“Yes, for with his evil ways, he is like Shaitan and his country the whole of it will be his tomb. For him and many people otherwise. Even he, the top man, he asks himself, “Is this Uganda? Or is Uganda hell?” For no kind of life is as wretched as this fellow’s – he is afraid from leopard dreams, false spirits which do come to him in the night – and when he dies he will die a cruel and an extraordinary death.”
He swigged from a bottle of Coke, and then held his hand against his chest.
“For this is the truths. He goes steps up and it is too much good: his belly is fat and he empties his loins often. But there is a rope around his neck and when he reaches the highest step, God – He pulls this fellow into the fire by the end of the rope I Because he has now done His work for Him already, the will of God goes straight towards taking him, and when He does take him it is one for one, special parcel both ways.”
With that he put down the bottle, clipped his palms together and dived into the pool smartly. We were still applauding when he came up.
“Well,” said Amin, as one of the retinue dried his back with the crested-crane towel, “that is my story for you today, my friends. And now, now we will have a swimming competition – so we are fit on Lake Victoria in case of invasion.”
And so they did, though I noticed that in all the races in which Amin took part the other participants allowed him to win. I crept off after watching it for a while. I felt, in one way and another, that I had done my bit. That no more would be expected of me for the time being.
I went to bed tired that night, and had a strange dream. Well, it was more like a memory returning to me, something I had once seen in a nook-and-corner antique shop in Edinburgh. It was a very small silver music-box, not much larger than a packet of cigarettes but about twice as deep. The assistant wound it up for me, and this is what happened. The top of the box opened and a double bed rose up, all beautifully wrought in miniature, even down to the folds of the sheets. Lying on top of the latter, on their backs, were two naked ivory automata. The man was erect, his prepuce a tiny ruby set into the cream-coloured shaft. As the music played – I can’t recall the tune, except that it was seductive, very slow and Eastern – the male figure ascended and turned over. The woman opened her knees, and the man began to move between them rhythmically, his ruby-crested shaft disappearing into a cunning cavity. All this happened in time with the music, the process concluding with the end of the tune and the woman’s head moving from side to side – except that, in my dream, it all kept going, as if there were no conclusion, no bounds.
Well…there were, in so far as I woke up with the familiar surroundings of my bungalow at State House around me. I lay in bed, running the story of the night over in my head, and then got up and showered. While I was eating my breakfast, I received a phone call (the first of many, as it happened).
“Hello, hello, doctor. President Amin here. Come now to my house. My son is very, very sick. Come immediately.”
“I’ll be five minutes,” I said.
“How can you be five minutes? Are you a giant to make big steps or are you a fool?”
I didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
“I am not in State House, doctor! On working days I am not in Entebbe. I am in the Command Post at Prince Charles Drive. You must motor here at once.”
“But, I don’t have a car,” I mumbled. “It’s quite a way.”
“Ah. Then you must tell the soldiers at the gate to bring you. At once!”
He rang off, leaving me holding the receiver, bewildered. I looked down at the ear-piece, and saw that it was glistening with sweat.
I gathered up my things and went outside to organize a driver. This took some time, but eventually I set off, in the passenger seat of an army jeep. Worried about being late, I tried to take my mind off it by looking at the brightly painted signs as we passed through Nateete and Ndeeba, the townships and light-industrial areas on the outskirts of Kampala: ‘Muggaga Auto Menders’ (muggaga means witch-doctor); ‘Cold Joint Meats’; ‘Volcano Dry Cleaners is the Answer’; ‘Desire Agencies – Unisex Barber and Dying Salon’; ‘Bell Lager – Great Night, Good Morning’; ‘Super Fast-Acting DOOM’.
The most common advertisement was for Sportsman, a popular brand of cigarette. Red and yellow, the posters showed a picture of a slightly tawny English jockey, circa 1950, and carried the slogan, “Yee ssebo!”
“What’s that mean?” I asked the driver as we passed a shop emblazoned with it.
His beret skew-whiff, he looked at me as if I were mad.
“Yes, sir!”
“No, but what does it mean?” I spoke slowly, thinking that he hadn’t understood me.
“It means, yes, sir! Like, very good.”
“Oh, I see,” I replied, embarrassed.
We carried on into the city, past a coffin-maker with his wares stacked up outside the shop, past the Hindu temple – deserted since the Asians had gone, it looked like a large, crumbling wedding cake, full of peaks and crenellations – Nakasero Soap Works and the market near Burton Street, finally going up Sturrock Road and into Prince Charles Drive.
It wasn’t quite what I expected, the ‘Command Post’: just a pleasant suburban house of the type many expatriate executives lived in, only a bit larger. You wouldn’t have known it was any different except for a tall radio aerial on the tiled roof and the machine-gun emplacement at the gate. It was surrounded by spruce trees and bougainvillaea, with a high bank leading up to the front door.
I was ushered in by the guards. One of Amin’s wives – I supposed – greeted me at the door, wearing a blue cardigan, some kids pushing at her legs from behind.
“I am sorry, Doctor. The President is now gone away on urgent government business. My name is Kay, it is my son who is ill.”
I followed her in. The living-room had a brown suite, a television and a drinks cabinet. Plastic toys were scattered over the carpet. There were dinosaurs painted in lurid green and red, and two big yellow Tonka trucks. And a couple of Action Man dolls in uniform, their limbs splayed at odd angles. A faint smell of cooking emerged from the kitchen. It was all quite normal.
“Through here,” said Kay Amin. As I followed her, three or four children were shouting and running around us with the strange, pointless energy of the young. She gave one of them a slap.
I put my bag down. The boy – about ten years old, he reminded me very much of Gugu – was lying on the bed, curled up like a foetus, and wheezing. I turned him over. There was blood running from one nostril. I took his face in my hands and looked at him closely.
“Is it bad, doctor?” asked his mother, fiddling with the edge of he
r cardigan.
“Oh no,” I said. I could see at once what the problem was. There was a slight swelling on the side of his nose. I pressed it gently, and the boy let out a yell. I crouched down to check with my penlight.
Definitely, I thought. “Don’t worry, laddie,” I said. “Now, you’ve put something up your nose, haven’t you?”
The boy looked a little guilty as Kay Amin questioned him in Luganda, and then wailed when I took a pair of tweezers out of my instrument case. He leapt up off the bed. There was a little tussle before she could grab him and hold him down. I slowly inserted the tweezers – quite difficult since he was squirming around – and delved around. I hit a solid obstruction, and after a few attempts extracted a bloody something.
“What is it, in God’s name?” cried Mrs Amin.
I held the tweezers up to the light: between the pincers was a small piece of green Lego, dabbed with red.
“Tcha,” she exclaimed. “Campbell, you are a very bad boy.”
I swabbed the blood away from the boy’s nose and aspersed the nostril with an antiseptic spray. As I pressed the plunger, I had a sudden vision of my father spraying the weeds along the fence of the paddock in Fossiemuir. He’d borrowed a spray canister from one of the farmers nearby. You wore it like a rucksack, waving the piped wand in front of you. It had leaked when he did it, burning his back with insecticide. I remember my mother leaning over his bare back in the kitchen, pressing cold towels against the weals…
“He’ll be fine,” I said, patting the boy’s head. “Just tell him to watch where he tries to build his castles. They’re more fun outside your head than in, Campbell.”
She walked me to the door. “Thank you very much, Doctor. The President will be very pleased you have cured his son so successfully.”
And so he was. One morning the following week, I went out to find a Toyota van parked outside the door of the bungalow. On the side was the legend ‘Khan Fashion Emporium’ and below, in smaller letters, ‘Latest styles direct Milan London Bombay tel. Kampala 663’. There was an envelope tucked underneath the wiper.
Inside, on official government paper with the crested-crane device, was a message. “Well done! The President has insisted you have this van as reward for expert treatment of his son. The keys are under the driver-side mat. I am sorry it is second-hand, but if you bring it to Cooper Motors they will remove the sign on the govt, account. Give my name. Wasswa, Minister of Health.”
I was delighted, and my life in the city began to open up after that. For a start, I could go out at night. I had Cooper’s respray the panel and valet the innards with hot steam.
18
I missed my Mbarara veranda, having to write up my journal on a table dragged into the garden at State House. But still, it was breathtakingly pretty. A grapefruit tree stood right outside the bungalow, fifteen to twenty of the fruit hanging from its branches, bright yellow and oozing with odoriferous juice. I didn’t pick one. They looked so gorgeous there I could hardly have wanted to.
I used to get up early on Sundays, while the air was still fresh, and listen to the morning noises over a cup of coffee as I wrote: the cawing of pied crows and the long trill and peep of plovers and cuckoos. In the distance, I could just make out the buildings of Entebbe town and farther beyond, Kampala itself, red and brown blocks piled carelessly over the hills. Marabous walked thoughtfully over the lawns and then took flight, labouring like some great, lumbering Lancaster or B52 until they caught a thermal and soared high above.
Three days a week, I did the rounds at Mulago, the main hospital in Kampala. I was a sort of consultant there, in addition to my as yet negligible presidential duties. I ended up mostly working in casualty. The hospital buildings looked like some Deep South plantation mansion, with a big clock in the gable of the entrance. The condition of the outside walls – a dirty yellow, as if something of the slums down the hill, the other side of Kitante Road, had found its way across – gave the lie to the grandeur of the place.
Towering above us were the aerials of UTV, Uganda Television, and every now and then a light plane buzzed over, to land at Kololo airstrip nearby. “That’s Amin,” everyone always said. The Command Post on Prince Charles Drive was just round the corner, as was Amin’s third residence, Nakasero Lodge, where he lived most of the time.
Most of the work at Mulago – unlike in Mbarara, where it was fever that had busied us – was concerned with the surgery of infection. Infected muscle, infected cartilage, infected bone. So a lot of cutting, then – which was an education for me, since I am a physician not a surgeon (not that I think I will ever practise medicine again in any capacity). But in Africa needs must. Excursions with the lancet, adventures with the helpful knife, that was the excitement in my life in those days. You had to learn not to press.
Surgery of trauma also: wounds, fractures, amputations. The predominance of the latter was on account of nothing more outlandish than car crashes. Colin Paterson, the senior surgeon there (another Scot), told me that more people died in Africa from motor injuries than from malaria. It was a gross exaggeration, but there was a grain of truth in it. No tests, no insurance, madmen at the wheel.
Serious research was also undertaken at Mulago, and I toyed with the idea of joining one of the teams on a part-time basis. We had several nationalities there: Vietnamese, Russians, Algerians, Chinese, as well as the Ugandan doctors. There was a bit of racial tension. One team ran a Lymphoma Treatment Centre. Another, an American one, tested cultured polio vaccines on a bunch of monkeys brought in from Kivu province in Zaire. They used the kidney tissue. I once saw the monkeys chattering in the cage when a lorry came in. One ran to the bars, gripped them with its little hands and looked – so I fancied – right at me. Deep eyes, like pots of maple syrup. Then one of its companions bit it on the ear.
But to be honest, I didn’t know if I could be bothered with getting involved in the research side of things. I was having quite a pleasant life exploring the city in the van. Following the swimming-pool incident, I still hadn’t actually got to attend to Amin properly, so I had plenty of time on my hands.
There were lots of clubs and bars to go to. It amused me that these favoured names with connotations of air or space travel: ‘Highlife’, ‘Stratocruise’, ‘The Satellite’. In fact, they were absolute dives, where Zaireans in sharp suits and winkle-pickers played skipping guitar music and the bar-girls milled around like tsetse fly. I supposed the aviation theme was popular because most of the Ugandans in those places wanted to escape abroad, to build more prosperous lives.
I took the van back to Cooper’s and had them put a red cross on the bonnet. Swanepoel, the pilot whom I had met when I first arrived in the country, tipped me off to that one. Every now and then I would run into him in one of the bars.
“Helps you get through road-blocks,” he’d said on that occasion. “I picked it up in the Congo. The meres used to use it for ambushes.”
“Mercs?”
“Mercenaries. Katanga.”
“Really?” I said.
I never knew whether to believe Swanepoel’s stories. The next time I saw him, I was out on the town with Peter Mbalu-Mukasa. He was one of the African doctors at Mulago. It was very noisy in the Stratocruise that night, the usual Friday crowd.
As meaty and coarse as ever, Swanepoel was sitting on a bar-stool, with a girl on his knee. Her hair was all glossy – treated so it hung down and caught the light off the trashy spinning chandeliers – and her arms were draped around Swanepoel’s thick neck. One of his hands, meanwhile, was exploring her back, inside her red shirt. Cocking his head to one side, he raised a bushy eyebrow at me over her shoulder, as I pushed through the sweaty throng in the narrow gap behind them.
“Hello,” I shouted. “You’re back in Kampala, then.”
“Well, we all come back here,” he said. “Cradle of the human race!”
“What?”I said.
Peter, pushed from behind by carousers, was shunting into me in the gangway
. The stench of beer, perfume and body odour was overpowering.
“Let’s get a table,” Peter said in my ear. “Tell your friend to come.”
“Come and join us,” I said to Swanepoel.
“Sure,” he said. And then, to the girl: “See you later, sweetheart.”
Once we found somewhere to sit, Swanepoel started banging on about the Semuliki discovery. That’s what he’d meant, I realized, about the cradle of the human race.
“Yep,” he said, “it’s official. This is where we all came from. Did you see the news? It was your part of the country.”
I had seen it. On the Zaire border, in the Ruwenzoris but farther north than Mbarara, they had recently found a cache of prehistoric human remains. There had been a display of bones on UTV – femurs and a jawbone and other bits and pieces lying on a bit of dirty cloth.
“Missing link?” Swanepoel said, “You’d have thought they’d have filled the whole puzzle in by now.”
“It’s very complex,” Peter said. “It is all going to New York for carbon dating.” Then he sighed and shook his head. “They are saying Amin made a museum there go up to $500,000 to be able to export it.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Swanepoel said. “Did you hear him on the TV?” He stood up and, puffing out his chest, did a passable impression of Amin: “Ladies and gentlemen, it may be that my ancestors were the first people on earth. I may be all your fathers, all the world’s fathers are inside of me.”
“Careful,” Peter said, frowning. “You will be reported.”
“He wouldn’t touch me,” Swanepoel said. “I’m too bloody useful to him.”
“Everyone is useful to him – for a while,” said Peter. “But now even some of the coup officers have been killed. They will come for the whites soon, I am warning you.”
“No, they won’t,” said Swanepoel. “No offence, but someone’s got to run the place.”