by Giles Foden
I was a bit worried that Peter might indeed have taken umbrage at this, but he just looked at Swanepoel for a second over his beer glass, and then said, “You’ll be the first!”
We all burst out laughing, and then I said, “I was talking to the British Ambassador’s wife the other day.”
“Hey, big man!” Swanepoel said mockingly.
“No, seriously. She didn’t seem to think there was a purge on the way.”
“Marina Perkins?” said Swanepoel, scratching his beard. “What would she know? I met her once or twice. She’s a nice enough woman but, come on, she hasn’t exactly got her finger on the pulse.”
“But that is it,” said Peter, “nobody has their finger on the pulse. Not even Amin. I know this, I know people in his household.”
“Who?” said Swanepoel.
“I can’t say,” Peter said, looking nervous suddenly.
“You guys,” said Swanepoel, shaking his head. “If you tremble in front of people like Amin, they’ll stamp on you. That’s how it is. Like when you’re walking past a big slavering dog and he scents your fear.”
“You don’t understand,” said Peter. “He stamps on us anyway. The soldiers have been beating up the students at the university.”
“Don’t worry,” said Swanepoel. “Someone will knock him off his pedestal soon. They always do.”
It was raining as we left, and by the time I reached home a fully fledged electrical storm had developed. The beer had made my throat dry, so I made a cup of tea before going to bed. I stood in the porch to drink it. Leaning against the doorpost, I watched as the blue and purple sheets of charged light flashed above the lake, and the wind shook the golden lamps of the grapefruit tree. It was terrifically noisy, more noisy than I can explain, but the strangest thing was how the noise had a smell, almost a taste: you could smell the charge dispersing in the air. A harsh metal taste of tarnished cutlery, battery terminals, or zinc supplement without the sugar coating.
19
It rained all weekend, as a matter of fact, and on the Monday morning I got a shock. The outside of the front door was covered with flying ants. Not the brown type but bright green ones. It was surreal. The rain had obviously brought them out in some seasonal sexual frenzy. I tried not to stand on them as I walked to the van, but in the end gave up and just crunched straight on. On the way to Kampala, the road was covered with them, and I had to brake several times to avoid the bands of kids who were collecting them up in little bags. As I drove, I remembered the whitebait taste of them from the banquet.
The rain had also turned the city to mud, not the usual red mud but a curious purple shade. And lots of it. As I sped through the puddles, it was as if the whole settlement was sliding down off the seven hills on which it was built. It was like Rome in that way, and the morning after the storm it was like Rome had been spilt.
Each hilltop was shrugging off its significant landmark: the King’s Palace (or the ruins of it, since Amin and Obote had bombed it), the big water-tank, the mosque, the UTV aerials, the barracks, the Anglican and Catholic cathedrals, the Poor Clares’ convent…they were all coming down, sliding down in the slick purple mud. The same mud which sucked at my shoe, battening on the heel like an animal. It pulled it right off in the hospital carpark, and had me hopping around. After that, I thought, as I checked the blackboard roster, it’s bound to be a bad day.
It was the usual stuff marked up there: GSW for STS (Gunshot Wound for Surgical Toilet and Sterilization). That was debridement, when we had to pick out dirt and foreign matter (soot, fragments of cloth) with the forceps. I’d learned already that you had just to leave bullet wounds open for a few days. A gamble with infection. The latter is always a complicated business, in any case.
As Bailey and Love’s Short Practice puts it, “Staphylococci do not always cause sepsis; they may merely colonize an already discharging wound. Wound discharges containing staphylococci are sources of cross-infection…” But basically, if you see the pink flesh come and it starts to heal, you know you’re all right. Otherwise – well, you can tell from the smell.
As it was Monday, we also had the the usual cases of ‘Monday Drip’, as Paterson dubbed the venereals – the soldiers coming in after their weekends in the brothels.
“All bad things come from France,” he said, his face crumpling into a conspiratorial grin as he waved about one of the bougies over the patient between us. “Except in this case it applies to the cure as well as the disease.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Bougie’s a French word. It means candle as well as these.”
“Actually,” interjected Hassan, one of the Algerian doctors, “it’s Algerian. Bujiyah is an Algerian town centred on the wax trade.”
“You’ve got me there,” said Paterson.
The poor chap over whose bed we were having this abstruse discussion had a urethral stricture on account of gonorrheal infection. Medically speaking, the bougie was the flexible steel rod we had to introduce into his penis in order that he could pee. But in this case it was all too swollen and weeping so we had to make a supra-pubic puncture and drain off the bladder that way.
It was a messy, nasty business, and so was much else we did. Tropical medicine is essentially pyomyositic. It centres on the collection of pus in areas of muscle. Or in the gut: we got a lot of abcesses as a result of strangulated hernias. This was often a direct consequence of bad diet: too much matooke and nothing else. Later that morning, in fact, we had a poor woman come in with a stomach so distended with wind that when we introduced the tube to – how shall I put this? – allow her to let off steam, the noise went on for eight minutes. Her kneeling the whole time, clutching a rosary as she said her prayers. She felt better afterwards, but we would still have to cut out the redundant piece of gut, the dead bowel, later in the week.
At lunch-time I rang Marina Perkins. Having made some plans with Paterson about going out on the lake, I remembered what she’d said about it. It was just a thought, inviting her, but when it came, I realized I’d been thinking about her a bit. I guess I was really missing Sara.
“It’s…Nicholas Garrigan here,” I said, uncertainly, into the big black mouthpiece.
“What a nice surprise!” Marina said. “I haven’t seen you at the swimming pool recently.”
I told her about my encounter with Amin.
“Oh, he’s always doing that,” she said. “I should have warned you.”
“I wanted to ask you,” I said. “What you were saying about the lake, well, my colleague at the hospital here, Colin Paterson, he’s organizing a fishing expedition. The two of us, maybe some others, are going to hire a boat with an outboard motor and perch rods. Next weekend. I was wondering if you fancied coming along for the ride. What do you say?”
There was a pause. “Well, I don’t see why not. But it couldn’t be next weekend. Nor the one after. We’ve got Embassy functions. The first one in February would be good, though. Bob’s going down to the Kagera Salient. Amin’s invited a deputation of diplomats down there to prove he’s not planning to invade Tanzania.”
“OK, then,” I said, relieved but still nervous. “I’ll speak to Colin and ring you the Friday before.”
“I could get the cook to prepare a picnic,” she said.
With that over, I went back to the seemingly less awesome task of stitching up a panga wound. Pangas were the big cutlasses they used for agriculture – and the violent settling of a quarrel. It was a very particular type of injury. People would put up their arm to protect themselves from the assault, naturally enough, and what you got was a series of linear cuts, severing tendons and, usually, producing a compound fracture underneath.
Well, those were the easy ones. Sometimes, and it was like that with this fellow, they get cut on the skull. This one was fractured. The blade had gone nearly right through the dura mater, the fibrous layer beneath the bone. It looked as if he would be OK, but a damaged dura mater gave infection a direct route to the brain.
&n
bsp; And if the blade had gone in farther than that, the case was altered substantially. Even with all the research teams, not one of us there, not even Paterson, could debride the brain. We’d need a proper neurosurgeon. But it will happen one day. There will be brain surgery in Uganda. Hospitals are like people: they grow, they develop, they learn. And they decay too, and they die.
Towards the end of the month, as a matter of fact, Paterson and I went out to one of the first hospitals in the country. Built by the missionaries in the late 1800s, it was once the best hospital between Cairo and the Cape. When we visited it was a dump, with no dependable electricity supply and so short of beds and linen that some of the patients doubled up on single mattresses, or simply lay on the floor. Several just had logs for pillows. There was a sign in the toilets – “Please do not expectorate in the sink” – but it was pretty pointless, so far as the prevention of infection went, since there were faeces all over the floor.
It turned out that we had a transfer from there later in the week. Not just any transfer, but a top-level patient, a VIP. It was one of Amin’s daughters. She attended a Catholic boarding school somewhere in the bush and had managed to sit on a needle during an embroidery class. I reckon it must have been a practical joke: someone sticking it in her chair. The needle had apparently disappeared into her thigh, so the nuns had rushed her to the hospital. There, a pair of North Korean doctors hadn’t been able to find it in a cursory examination, so they had decided to operate.
For two hours they dug about. Steel seeking steel. No joy. Eventually, everyone panicking now because she’s Amin’s daughter, they bundled her into an ambulance with her bleeding leg and brought her to Mulago. Paterson and I were on duty.
We looked at the girl, who was face down on the trolley in front of us. Moaning into her pillow, she was already togged up in green gear by the nurses, with the relevant area of her thigh exposed, where black knots of dried blood had gathered round the sutures the North Koreans had made.
“We better put her under a general,” I said. “There’ll be hell to pay if she says we butchered her.”
Paterson looked at the girl, and then looked at me, and then clapped his hand to his forehead. “Nick, I’ve just realized, we don’t need to go digging around. We just need to run the X-ray over her. They’ll stand out bright as the Queen of Sheba’s ear-rings.”
So that was what we did. No joy again. Well, nothing showed on the film.
Then we realized. “So there never was a needle?” I said, when my colleague explained.
“Of course there wasn’t – Scotland 1, North Korea nil.” Paterson shouted this down the ward, making the auxiliaries look up in surprise.
He held her hand. “You just wanted some attention from your nasty old dad, didn’t you, sweetie?”
I felt uncomfortable about him saying this. What if she reported it back to Amin? She started to sob once we’d rumbled her, and didn’t stop until we put her in the ambulance to take her back to school.
I spent the next few days fretting about what Amin’s reaction to it all might be. One morning, a week later, the call came, as I think both Paterson and I knew it would.
“You go,” said Paterson. “I’ll be bound to say the wrong thing.”
I walked down the ward to take it. Wherever there was a window, the sun was sending sharp-edged, mote-filled beams of light into the dark spaces under the beds. I felt odd as I walked straight through them, as if I were a hurdler ignoring his fences. I picked up the phone.
“Hello, hello, it is Doctor Idi Amin here,” said the disembodied voice. “I am very pleased with my fellow doctors at Mulago. I would like you and Doctor Paterson to join me here at Cape Town for lunch tomorrow. One o’clock sharp.”
The line went dead before I had the chance to reply.
Everyone knew about ‘Cape Town’. It was the name given to a new residence directly on the lakeshore that Amin had just acquired – bringing the total to four in Kampala-Entebbe alone:
State House, Prince Charles Drive, Nakasero Lodge, and now Cape Town. There was an island nearby which he used for bombing displays. The target was supposed to represent the South African city (thus the name) at the moment of its capitulation to the liberating forces of African nationalism, in the guise of Amin’s bombers.
“I saw them do it once,” Paterson said on the way. “They always miss. Look, I know what this’U be like. He’ll try to get us to do down the English because we’re both Scots. He did it at the Uganda Caledonian Society dinner last year. That chap from the Embassy, Weir, he was there, gladhanding Amin to everyone. Very strange. Anyway, it’s important to get Amin on to something non-controversial.”
“Like what?” I said, as the emerald expanse of Lake Victoria swept by on our right-hand side.
“Seat-belts is a good one,” he said, “the importance of seat-belts on Africa’s roads.”
So that was how Paterson and I came to be discussing car safety policy with Idi Amin one afternoon, in the garden at Cape Town. It was hot and still, with only the smell of the blossom from the bushes and trees stirring the air around us, as we sat beside a wrought-iron table laden with a large jug of iced tea and a plate of cucumber sandwiches. As the other two talked – Paterson explaining the needle episode, Amin the concerned, if occasionally guffawing father – I looked about.
It was an impressive place; at least, it made an impression, with its pink-flowered oleanders and creamy, sickly scented frangipa-nis, its shaved lawns where peacocks flashed their spotted trains and white-coated servants hovered. The house was only single-storey, but expansive in the Moorish style, with serial white arches and terracotta tiles. I spotted the amazed face of a child up at one of the windows, looking out at us. One of his, I supposed, though I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl.
I also caught glimpses of three young women in diaphanous gowns, strolling airily down the many paths that weaved through the shrubbery. I didn’t know who they were. Amin himself was wearing white trousers and a jade-coloured shirt which, hanging over his belly like a tent, suited exactly the green seraglio he had created for himself there at Cape Town. Well, in fact he had appropriated the place from an expatriate businessman. I wondered idly who had lived here originally, before all this lakeshore area had been developed for villas…
A peacock howled – a horrible noise – and then Amin’s booming voice brought me sharply round. He was now fulfilling Pater-son’s predictions to a tee.
“You see, it is very true. Scotland and Uganda, we have both suffered hundreds of years of English imperialism. That is why I am going to extend the Economic War to British interests in Uganda. What do you think?”
Paterson stuck to his plan. “Your Excellency, as a doctor I’d like to talk to you about motor accidents in Uganda. You could save many lives.”
At that point, Amin put down the half-eaten cucumber sandwich he had in his hand, and drew himself up for the full public address. It was a mode with which I was becoming familiar.
“There will be no accidents in the new Uganda. It has all been planned before. In the new stage of the Economic War, as I dreamed it from the beginning, BAT, Brooke Bond, Securicor, British Metal Corporation and the Chillington Tool Company will all become the property of the Uganda Government. Every one hundred years God appoints one person to be very powerful in the world to follow what the Prophet directed. When I dream, these things are put into practice. I am determined to wage the Economic War to ultimate victory. Before, Ugandan companies were controlled by imperialists. Africa has tremendous natural resources which could be harnessed for the benefit of the people of Africa, making it a modern and industrialized continent. African countries must co-operate to achieve their common objectives.”
He took a deep breath and smiled at us. “You see, we must provide African solutions to African problems. Africa has its own laws.”
“But Mr President,” urged Paterson, “the most important law you can pass will be to make seat-belts compulsory in Uganda.
You will save many lives that way.”
A furrow went across Amin’s brow. “Why do you keep on seat-belts? Every time I am meeting you, Doctor Paterson, you are talking about seat-belts. There are more pressing problems for Uganda than seat-belts.”
He got up from the table, knocking it with his knees as he stood up, so that the iced tea shuddered in our glasses. “Now you must go. You have made me angry with this talk of seat-belts.”
He turned on his heel, for all the world like the sergeant-major he really was, stomped through his stolen paradise and climbed some steps. He gave us a scornful look from his vantage-point, and then went through one of the white arches along the side of the house.
“Maybe,” said Paterson, on the way back, “seat-belts wasn’t such a good idea after all.”
Getting up the next morning, I heard Alec Douglas-Home on the World Service, condemning Amin’s proposed nationalizations as ‘outrageous by any standard’. I retied my dressing-gown – it had fallen open, and I always feel exposed when that happens, even when there is no one else in the house – and poured boiling water over the coffee I was making. The grounds expanded, fattening in the wet sac of the filter. I watched as the water subsided, leaving a crumbling brown crater. Breathing in the vapours, I suddenly realized that my bare feet were cold on the kitchen floor: the sun was already out but the wood had retained the night’s coolness. I had no slippers in Africa, only a pair of hand-made leather sandals I’d bought in Mbarara and seldom wore. Now Sara, she had worn them once, when she stayed with me. A feeling of sadness came over me as I tipped in the milk. I stared down at the swirling cup. She hadn’t written. She hadn’t called.
20
Someone else did, though. One day the following week, Stone summoned me to a meeting at the British Embassy. He wouldn’t say what it was about over the phone. I wondered whether they knew about my invitation to Marina. What did it matter, anyway? As I drove down Parliament Avenue, I remembered that I hadn’t yet told her that Paterson couldn’t make the weekend she’d specified.