by Giles Foden
I was shaking as I drove to work that day. Swanepoel dead. The newsreader hadn’t mentioned the delivery I’d made, but I immediately suspected that it must have been explosives, not drugs that it had been stuffed with. I realized, in my slow way, that I had been the unwitting instrument of murder. Why would Amin want Swanepoel killed, or his boss? Was I supposed to have got on the plane too?
That event, and the mystery surrounding it, only made me keener to leave. But I felt trapped. There was also something more. Apart from my abortive effort immediately after the cells, I hadn’t been able to summon up in myself the will to leave. Indeed, far from making practical moves towards an overland exit, I began to invent reasons in my mind about why I couldn’t do so. The truth is, there were still things I wanted to know about Amin. Now I wonder if it is that deadly, addictive curiosity, rather than anything tangible, that makes me continue to feel uncomfortable about myself.
So I continued with my ghastly ringside seat. It was six months before I plucked up the courage to ask Amin about the lion’s head. By this time, the ritual of my writing his ‘life story’ and recording his remarks on tape had become well established: as I said, he insisted on it, almost as if he knew that, one day, his tale would have to be told. I took the precaution, however, of regularly mailing the tapes back to Moira in Scotland – she had married and moved to Edinburgh – having already sent my original notebook.
“You know that that plane exploded, the Rafiki one?” I said to Amin.
“Is that what happened?” he replied, ingenuously. “Well, you know that whites are exploding all the time nowadays.”
“What do you mean, exploding?” I said. “Exploding where?”
“Everywhere. They’re just exploding and nobody knows why. You’ve never seen anything like it. You ought to be careful, Nicholas.”
On other occasions, the conversations we had – the big Philips tape recorder whirring all the while – were equally strange.
One time, feeling reckless, I simply said, “You know a lot of people think you are mad?”
“Mr James Callaghan came here. That shows I am not mad. I released Mr Denis Hills from captivity, after all, even though he was a bad man.”
Hills was an English lecturer at Makerere University. He had made some disparaging remarks about Amin in a book, and escaped the death sentence only when Callaghan came out to plead for his life. I was on holiday at the time, doing one of the game parks, as Amin had suggested, so I missed all that.
“But what do you think?” Amin said, giving me a hard look. “Do you think I’m mad?”
“I think there’s a sliding scale,” I said quickly. “Everyone is a bit crazy in their own way.”
He said, “Yes, you are absolutely right, and President Nyerere especially. He has got a chronic disease of bringing crazy misunderstandings between countries. He might well infect the people of Uganda with this disease. He is like a prostitute who has gonorrhoea and every man who sleeps with her is infected with gonorrhoea.”
As a matter of fact, I noticed that Amin was obsessed with sexually transmitted diseases. Perhaps this was what gave credence to the rumour about an STD being the root of his lunatic actions and remarks.
“I find that VD is very high,” he told doctors at Mulago one day. “If a sick man, sick woman comes to the hospital, make them clean, or you will find that they will infect the whole population. I like Ugandan women very much and I don’t want them spoiled by gonorrhoea.”
On another occasion, he said something quite odd, in view of the catastrophic incidence of AIDS that has taken place in the country since I left. “Doctor Nicholas,” he said, “I have been talking among the soldiers. I have been walking among their camp-fires. They say there is a new disease about and that it is fatal. I want you to investigate.”
I did. Though I could find nothing out of the ordinary (that being a somewhat relative term in Uganda at that time), Amin made me publish my report. It was printed by the Uganda Stationery Office in red covers and, I dare say, still exists. But I do wonder now, from time to time, whether some of the people I treated in Uganda in the 1970s might have been early cases of AIDS. Who knows? In the end it is just another death, and God knows there were a lot of those.
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom with Amin. Sometimes he would talk to me about his children, and when he did so I honestly believed what he said. “I love my children, Doctor Nicholas. They make me very happy, and very proud. The child of a lion is a lion – that is how it is.”
And then he would spoil it by doing something like coming to the hospital and insisting on being left alone with a corpse. I spied him once through the mortuary curtain. It was the body of a high-ranking military official who had been brought in by some other soldiers. They said he had died in a car accident, but his injuries were plainly the consequence of a severe beating.
Anyway, Amin turns up at Mulago and demands to be left alone. I see his shadow through the curtain. First he gives a military salute. Then I hear the stamp of his boot on the floor. Then he bends over the body, the shadow going out of my field of vision. There is a faint, liquid noise, like someone sucking a boiled sweet.
When I go in afterwards, there is an incision in the abdomen – surprisingly neat – and I see that the spleen has been removed. I don’t know whether he ate it, or put it in his pocket, or what. Truly, in this case it was, as Galen put it, the organum plenum mys-terium, the organ full of mystery.
That was about it so far as the cannibalism was concerned. All those stories about heads in the fridge…well, I didn’t see any of them. Not in the fridge, anyway. But I wouldn’t have done. I was close to Amin, yes, but it wasn’t like he opened the fridge door every time I visited him.
I did confront him on this issue once, though. “There are many reports in the Western press about you eating human flesh. I remember you said that you had done so in that speech.”
He just burst out laughing. “Ah well, Doctor Nicholas, you know the thing about cannibalism?”
“What?” I asked.
“You just can’t prove it.”
He slapped his thigh.
“Why?”
“Because the evidence – it has been eaten!”
As I say, faced with that sort of thing, what was I supposed to do? I just became quietly desperate. I hated the ambiguity of the whole situation. I knew that, by associating with him, I was being drawn deeper and deeper into a horrific morass – but I didn’t know how to continue there without being associated with him. Killing him, after all, was not really an option. It would only mean endangering my own life. But there was one moment, just one, when I was tempted to carry out Stone’s deadly instructions.
It was a Friday night. Amin was having a massage at the Imperial Hotel, and he wanted to see me – ‘immediately’. Well, that was nothing new. He made me wait outside until it was finished. When the girl in the white coat pulled back the curtain, I went in. Amin was lying on his stomach on the cushioned leather of the massage table, so sated with pleasure that he was hardly conscious. His skin glistened in the light of an infra-red lamp. There was an electric massager, which looked a bit like a hair-dryer, lying on a table nearby and also some mysterious tubes of cream. I noticed a screw of damp-looking tissue in a wicker basket at the foot of the table and then I saw, hanging on the back of the chair, the cowboy holster and in it the big silver revolver which I had seen in his bedroom.
I suddenly realized that I could reach for it then – that I could reach for the revolver and shoot him in the head as he lay there grossly. Part of me wanted to. I didn’t do it, because I didn’t want to do it for the reasons that Stone had outlined to me. What provoked me even to think about it was something much deeper and darker: I confess that I actually found myself thinking about how pleasurable it might be to kill him, to hold the heavy gun against his temple and feel the kick as it sent his hoggish brains over the wall.
And that was it, really. That was what finally provoked me to flee
Uganda, that was when I crossed the line: the sudden and crushing realization that I had become enough like Amin to contemplate killing him for the sheer pleasure of it.
In the event, he simply turned over and started bellyaching about Tanzania. “They have been troubling my troops on the border,” he said. “I am going to invade Tanzania with ultimate force. I would like you to provide advice on the healthiest rations for the soldiers involved in the operation. I want you to do this by tomorrow morning.”
The murderous instinct having passed in me, I drove back to the bungalow and started to draw up the kind of nutritional schedule he seemed to want. I thought that if I gave it to him, any suspicions he had (though he hadn’t voiced any) about me trying to leave would be allayed.
This is what I came up with:
Breakfast
2½ lb maize ⁄ millet porridge
Coffee mixture or tea
Dinner
2½ lb matooke (mashed, steamed banana)
6 oz boneless meat (goat or beef) or 12 oz Nile perch steak
½ oz fat (lard or ghee)
1 lb seasonal vegetables (tomatoes, okra, pumpkin)
Supper
½ lb bread (kisra pancake)
½ pt coffee
1 oz sugar
1¼ oz butter or margarine
9 oz meat or fish, as available
Also: beer and cigarette ration
Having done this, I went to sleep – not peacefully, however, as I had a hideous dream about Idi that night. He was sitting at a desk. I saw him from behind. He was holding something in his hand. It was frosty…calcified and jagged – like a splinter of rough slate dusted with chalk dust. Only, he was writing with it, scratching with it, and there was nothing on the paper. Just nothing. Then everything went to pieces and the silver revolver was there, lying in a corner on the floor of a cell. Something was on the metal. Grey viscous fluid lying on the shine of it. Then it all changed…How quickly do these things happen? A big rock came, and began to break into…into two parts. The sky red behind and a figure in the gap in the rock. The shape of a man, but huge and primeval and overbearing. Then I had that vision again, the one I kept having, of a vessel filling with dark liquid. It reaches the top…
∗
I have been thinking about those times even when not writing. Peeling potatoes at the sink in the bothy and thinking about those times. Digging out the eyes with the triangular end of the scraper and thinking about those times. I was standing at the kitchen window and the sun, for once, was streaming brightly through. The wind has been quiet, too. Maybe summer’s coming in at last.
It’s been a funny week for more than the weather, though. A band of hippies, all dreadlocks and kaftans and grubby-faced children, arrived off the ferry in a convoy. They’ve parked their caravans in one of the fields next to the Ossian and the management are kicking up a stink. They think it will put off their guests. But the farmer who owns the field has given them clearance, so there’s not much to be done. It’s odd to see their camp-fires and hear their loud, strange music when you walk down the hill.
I suppose they have as much right as anyone to be here. The local people don’t seem to mind, or they only mind as much as they mind anyone new arriving: we’re all just ‘incomers’ to them. That’s what they call me, that’s what they call the smart visitors to the Ossian, and that’s what they are calling the hippies too. Malachi, my fisher friend, says they’ve come here because of Mael-rubha’s ruins. That’s the old monastery which sits on the brow of the mountain. There’s a stone circle nearby as well, and all the usual pagan nonsense is attached to it in the tourist brochures. Sacrifices, ancient rites…Saying that, a festival is still held here every year, and Malachi reckons that’s why the hippies have come. He says if that’s the case, they won’t be welcome. One of the rules of the festival is that no stranger must take part in the work of it, or touch the tools used for the work.
Malachi has been the friendliest of all the people I’ve met since I arrived. He’s been letting me use one of his boats: a lovely old, deep-keeled thing, clinker-built, its wide, overlapping planks caulked with tar at the edges. Malachi says it’s built on a model descended from the old Viking ships. Centuries ago, they raided these shores, and many of the locals think of themselves as Scandinavian rather than Scottish. Only I guess the Vikings didn’t have a big lamp in the stern for night fishing like Malachi does. It’s powered by a car battery. I don’t take the boat out at night, of course, but I have seen him do so: the yellow fan of the lamp cutting into the dark fields of the Sound. I myself just potter around in the bay at the weekends. Only then do I feel cleansed and full of vitality: the voice of the sea, the amniotic rock of it, the burst of salt air in the lungs, they can do this to you. As if the old soul, the bad soul, had been changed into little water drops and fallen into the ocean, never to be found.
There has been another bomb, the television said. A police station in Lothian. You would think they’d sort the parcels more carefully at somewhere like that. The same people, the Army of the Provisional Government, have claimed responsibility. No one was killed, but a police constable had her hand blown off.
Note to myself: Scotland and Uganda inextricably linked. Their Law Societies twinned, I read today. Another union. God knows why. Our Good Lord is in His heaven and He hath done what He hath pleased.
33
While I was planning the means of my escape, preparations went on apace for the invasion of Tanzania. Uganda Radio was carrying regular broadcasts about the situation. I remember hearing, at one point:
Doctor Amin today briefed diplomats on the Tanzanian invasion into Uganda. He said that the force which invaded Uganda was a mixture of Ugandan exiles and Tanzanian soldiers.
Doctor Amin said: “It was President Nyerere’s army who set the ball rolling in aggressive military confrontation towards Uganda for reasons President Nyerere has not even bothered to explain to us, and to reveal the truth behind his motives of directing his army to courageously penetrate into Uganda with black ambitions. If Tanzania tries a second time to enter Uganda, they will suffer the consequence, because it is not difficult for Uganda to harm Tanzania more than what they have done to us.”
The Life President, however, stressed that he loves the innocent people of Tanzania very much and that is why Uganda did not react when the Tanzanian forces invaded us.
But they were reacting; I knew this myself. When I gave him the ration schedule, Amin said that he also wanted me to draw up guidelines for the army medics. I wrote a pamphlet for them, entitled Treatment of Wounds in a War Zone. I felt, before I left, that this would be one way in which I could do the right thing. At least it could save some lives.
I detailed various procedures that might be followed in the field. I described how the first duty of the surgeon was to prevent sepsis. I emphasized the difference between healing by first intention (closing the wound by joining its edges with stitches, as in a panga cut) and healing by second intention (allowing skin to grow over the wound of its own accord). I explained the importance of distinguishing between viable and non-viable tissue in a wound. How the latter could, if unexcised, lead to gangrene.
I also laid out the basic procedures for the management of shrapnel and bullet wounds. The theoretical mechanism was as follows: tissue necrosis occurs several centimetres to either side of the missile track. The missile releases energy which is absorbed by adjacent tissue particles, imparting to them an acceleration which flings them forward and outward. The kinetic energy can be calculated from the formula KE = ½MV², where M is the mass and V the velocity of the missile.
On delivery of the pamphlet, Amin was very pleased. I was very much back in favour. And still I hadn’t gone. It was several months later before I was prompted, finally, to do so.
I was sitting in my office at Mulago when the post-boy brought me a batch of letters. There was a bank statement from UK (which showed, to my surprise, that Stone’s money was still in the account), a letter
from Moira telling me that a great-uncle had left me a bothy on one of the Western Isles, and also a grubby envelope with a domestic crested-crane stamp.
This was the letter inside, jaggedly written on a scrap of lined exercise book in black biro:
Bwana,
i am having to write you because you were here before and hearing what happened in that time. The boy Gugu who you took in your house has been very bad. he is been done in great trouble, pliss move quick to Mbarara to help him from these bad tings.
yours faithfully, Nestor
(watch-man).
The letter brought all the memories of Mbarara – now, as I see it, the happiest time I spent in Uganda – flooding back to me. I suddenly felt a rush of tenderness and responsibility towards the young boy I had left behind. The thought of Amin’s brutal troops dealing out to him the like of what I had seen in Kampala in the last few years filled me with dread and guilt. I resolved that if I would do anything, I would take Gugu out of Uganda with me. It would, I thought, be my way of atoning for my association with Amin.
Once I had decided, I made my preparations rapidly. I took out as much money as I could from the bank in Kampala, filled some cardboard boxes with food and bought two jerrycans full of fuel. My plan was to drive down to Mbarara, pick Gugu up and make my way over the border into Rwanda, by bush roads if need be.
The situation was made more complicated by the increasing amount of military traffic on the road since Amin’s offensive into Tanzania had hotted up. He was sending large numbers of tanks and troops down to the border. Only the previous night, the radio said, a Libyan Tupolev jet had dropped five bombs on northern Tanzania. Three thousand Ugandan soldiers had gone across the border into the Kagera Salient in north-western Tanzania, led by the so-called ‘Suicide Strike Force’. The Tanzanian border guards had fallen back and hundreds of local people had been taken hostage. The Ugandans had raided a cattle ranch and driven thousands of cattle back across the border, and blown open the safes in banks and shops. Factories and homes were razed to the ground.