by Giles Foden
The US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, had cabled Amin, with the intention of persuading him to withdraw from Tanzanian territory. On the radio, Amin replied by accusing America of ‘interfering in an African dispute with the aim of creating a second Vietnam’.
“The Uganda armed forces have made a record in world history,” Amin continued. “In the supersonic speed of twenty-five minutes they have taken back this Kagera territory, which has been held by Tanzanian and Chinese imperialists for too many years. All Tanzanians in the area must know that they are under direct rule by the Conqueror of the British Empire.”
President Nyerere of Tanzania broadcast a call for the Organization of African Unity to act against Amin, while defending his right to retaliate without negotiation: “Do you negotiate with a burglar when he is in your house? There has been naked, blatant and brazen aggression against Tanzania. I want to know what the OAU will do about this. I expect African countries to tell Amin to withdraw before people talk about restraint. I expect no dithering…Since Amin usurped power, he has murdered more people than Smith in Rhodesia, more than Vorster in South Africa. But there is a tendency in Africa that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans. Had Amin been white, free Africa would have passed many resolutions condemning him. Being black is now becoming a certificate to kill fellow Africans.”
As I drove, though I didn’t know it for a fact, Tanzanian infantry were marching towards the Ruwenzoris, the ‘Mountains of the Moon’. I was worried that my escape route passed so near to a likely war zone. But I didn’t have much choice. The crossing point to Kenya was closed. Sudan was too far. The Rwanda-Zaire border would be the easiest to pass through, there being a large number of border crossings in the mountains. In any case, I reckoned that in the confusion of military operations I would be able to cross over unnoticed in that vast area. I toyed with the idea of getting special clearance from Amin to check medical facilities in the field – but in the end decided that this would only draw attention to me.
The first hundred miles or so were fine. I passed farms hedged with spiky green manyara plants, forests of blue-gum trees, fields of bright green maize stalks, the usual fleets of banana lorries – one with a bundle of pink tilapia fish tied to its wing mirror to keep them fresh – and the customary complement of people riding sidesaddle on the backs of bicycles, as the cyclists struggled in the heat. Children waved at my white face and cried, “Muzungu! Muzungu!” For a moment it seemed that all was well in Amin’s Uganda.
There were also a lot of army trucks on the road, but I just overtook them in the van and carried on. Some of the soldiers even grinned at me from the back of their trucks. The van still had the red cross Swanepoel had suggested I have painted on it, so I suppose that helped.
I crossed over the equator – I could just see Angol-Steve’s little encampment to the right – and began to recognize familiar landmarks as I got closer to Mbarara: Masaka, Lyantonde, Lake Mburo, a tree near Sanga where I noticed pelicans nesting, their great, scooping bills clearly visible from the road. I thought about the poor Kenyan – his bloody face and my gaucheness, the soldier with the bedroom slippers. That had been near here.
I had just passed through Biharwe trading centre when I saw a sign for Nyamityobora Forest on the right: it brought to mind the sign I had seen with Waziri – the one for the Impenetrable Forest, farther west. It was at that point that I saw an army checkpoint on the brow of the hill. I came to a halt. The sun was going down by now and I could see the silhouettes of the soldiers, the apex of a tent, and the square shape of a Land Rover in the distance.
I didn’t know what to do. I had my usual papers, but those might not be enough. They could send me back, even arrest me. I could try to brazen it out with my red cross, say I was Amin’s doctor – but even that was risky in this kind of environment. I sat for a moment in the van, the engine idling, wondering what to do.
Then I saw that the Land Rover was coming down the hill. It was half a mile away but they had obviously, through binoculars, seen me waiting and come to investigate.
I panicked, hurriedly shifting the gear into reverse and turning round. In the mirror I could see that the Land Rover was speeding up. I looked about wildly – at the tarmac coming up at me and the bush on either side of the road. I put my foot down and the van’s engine squealed. Then I saw the sign to the forest and I veered off left down the dirt track. I looked to see if they were still following me. They were, they had turned off as well. I pressed down harder on the pedal and it soon got very bumpy, and darker, too, since I had passed under the canopy of the forest.
The track twisted through the big curtains of green. My foot was on the floor, my eye flicking between the track and the mirror – but I couldn’t see if they were still behind me because of the twists and turns. Why don’t you just stop, I thought to myself, explain who you are? But fear drove me on.
I didn’t know how far I was ahead of them when I saw another sign – “Nyamityobora Forest Game Lodge” – and suddenly I was in a clearing and the track had just stopped. There was a building made of logs there, like an American cabin, only it was deserted and broken down. I sat in the van, pulling at the steering wheel, not knowing what to do. I noticed a couple of paths leading into the forest but they were too narrow to take the van down.
I turned off the engine and listened. There it was: through the leafy baffles and side-sweeps of liana I could hear the mechanical grind of another vehicle. I grabbed whatever I could – as it happened, only my wallet and passport – and jumped out. I looked about. It was all just bush: bush and the abandoned cabin.
I didn’t know where to go. I looked about. Dark green everywhere, and then I could hear the other engine again. It was closer. I looked at the cabin: they were bound to go in there. The paths? Too obvious. I looked into the bush again. It was full of places to hide but that in itself put me off. It was as if there was too much to choose from and if I ran, I’d have to batter through the vegetation. My tracks would show and they’d easily be able to follow me.
Calm down, I told myself. Stay and wait for them, use Amin’s name to bluff it out. It got darker quickly as I waited. I soon saw the lights of the Land Rover flashing against broad leaves and then they were chopped off again by an intersection of trees. This terrified me further.
The headlights once more, on and off. I looked about again, wildly. Then I spotted that there was a narrow space underneath the cabin. I rolled in just as the Land Rover pulled into the clearing.
The gap smelt musty and I could feel dried vegetation under my back. I heard the door of the Land Rover open. They had left the lights on and I saw a pair of army boots walk into the beam. Trousers with puttees. And then two more. A voice shouted out something in Swahili. By then I’d picked up enough to recognize the word ‘wapi’ – where. Where are you? The voices continued for a little more.
Another light came: the beam of a torch, darting about. I heard them open the door of the van and then the dry hustle of their boots coming over towards the cabin. A creak on the step, the noise of them opening the door, and then their footsteps heavy on the boards above me.
More talking. An insect crawled over my face. I didn’t dare move to brush it off as I listened to the tread of the men above, the sound of them talking and opening cupboards. Looking for me. My heart thumped.
After a while they came outside and wandered about the clearing. The beam of the torch again. Then one of them came over towards the gap under the cabin. The boots – close by me, so close I could smell sweat and leather – and the beam was flashing about in the space. It flickered over me. I thought, this is it. They’ve seen me.
I stiffened. But then the light was gone again and they were walking back towards the van, opening up the boot and looking inside, rummaging in my boxes of food.
Suddenly there was a burst of automatic gunfire. I could see the man’s legs juddering as they absorbed the energy of the recoil. He spun about like a top, sending rounds rippin
g into the broad-leaved grove around us. The bullets went into the cabin, splintering the wood and shattering was what left of the glass in the windows.
I was paralysed, except in my head, except where I was praying that he wouldn’t lower his line of fire, wouldn’t crouch and fire into the space underneath.
Just as quickly as it came, as if someone had switched off a light in a suburban room, the firing stopped. Quiet. Then one of the men laughed. I heard them get into the Land Rover and the diesel rattle of its engine. The arc of the headlights moved across the leaves as the vehicle turned. My breath came out of me in a long draught and I was about to roll back out from under the gap when I heard another sound, strangely familiar. Another vehicle starting up, its headlights coming on. I stiffened again and watched its wheels move off. They had taken the van. I’d left the keys in it, like a fool, and now they had taken it.
I lay there for half an hour, unsure of what to do. I couldn’t stay here till morning. I couldn’t walk into the forest. There was still some moonlight in the grove but if I was to go deeper into the forest, I would be bound to get lost, even if I followed one of the paths. I put up my hand and gripped the slimy edge of the wood to pull myself up. As I did so, I heard a rustle in the brush under the cabin, just to my right. It made me jump and I banged my head on the wood as I came out.
I stood in the grove, my back to the cabin, staring into vast obscurity of the forest. I was on my own now. I might as well have been naked. All I could see was a dark wall of leaves, broken every now and then by shafts of moonlight and intermittent pinpoints of gold: the living lamps of thousands of glow-worms. What a fool you have been, their Morse code seemed to say to me, oh-what-a-fool-you-have-been.
I don’t know what made me turn round. Maybe I heard another rustle from under the cabin. Maybe it was just a sixth sense. But there behind me, swaying vertically in the emphatic quietness of that moonlit clearing, was a snake. Four or five feet long, it was raised up on itself, with its small hood drawn high and each eye as clear and green as a good emerald. A mamba, I thought, stupefied.
I turned to run but it had already begun to strike. I felt – very precisely – the two points of its fangs go through the fabric of my trousers into the back of my calf. I didn’t feel any pain at first, though, and carried on running, flailing blindly at the enormous heavy leaves that overhung the path. I ran until my breath burned in my chest. I ran and I ran, and all the while I could feel the dull throbbing rising up my leg. It began to hurt, and then it began to hurt a lot. Eventually, the swelling wave of pain flowed up past my thigh, over my pelvis, and I had to run slower. I slowed down, in fact, to a walk. And then I stopped.
I stopped in the darkness, amid the ceaseless soughing branches and the deep sappy smells of the forest, with its bird calls and strange animal squeaks. I started to cry, the tears running down my besmirched face. I wept and I lay down. I curled up on the forest floor and fingered the back of my calf, where I could feel the raised flesh around the puncture points. I suddenly felt terribly thirsty and I realized that it was because of the poison flooding through my body. As I frantically rehearsed my options, grasping at odd bits of snake-bite pathology, I felt my nervous system start to revolt against itself, every bit of me seeming to go into spasm. My arms and legs began to jerk about and the last thing my rolling eyes saw was the face of Idi Amin, high up in the treetops and stretching from pole to pole.
∗
I don’t remember much about the next – as a matter of fact, I don’t know how long the period of time was. My next memory was of something prodding me in the side and blue fragments of sky coming down to me through the forest canopy. Except that I couldn’t see them properly, as my eyelids had swollen up. All of me, in fact, had swollen up. My head was pounding like a steam-hammer and my shaking limbs were pouring with sweat.
I felt an unseen hand hold something to my lips. The rough nozzle of a skin bottle. The hair of it – goat’s hair? I thought, dumbly, monkey hair? – tickled, and then the cool water was coming down, splashing over my lips and chin and going up my nose. Then the hands were turning my body over, gently going over it. I winced as they touched the swollen calf. I heard a grunt and the sound of someone rootling around. I felt the fabric of my trouser leg being pulled up and then I heard the noise of a blade cutting through the material.
I yelped as the point of the knife searched the flesh where the snake had bit and then I felt a pair of lips close about the wound and suck. And then a spit, the gob of it tapping sharply as it hit a leaf. Another suck, another spit. And then, as my mind wandered off, my consciousness struggling like someone scrabbling to hold on to a cliff, I heard a series of piercing whistles.
The next thing I recall was being in the womb. At least, it felt how a womb might. I was moving – moving rhythmically – forwards and side to side. I realized I was going along a forest path. The dappled sky was still above and the broad-flanked leaves paddled my face as I passed by them in my cocoon. I was wrapped up, swathed in rank-smelling skins. I could hear, as I rocked from side to side, the sound of men talking and I could see the soles of their feet flashing up from the forest floor as they ran with me.
Every now and then I felt the weight of the ground on my back, and I saw the shapes of the tribesmen above me. And then they would lift up the poles again and we would continue our journey. When we got to the village, the hunters gave me more water and put me in a low hut. It was like an igloo, only it was made from branches and leaves that had been bent round and stuck into the ground. With the skins still about me, between me and the hard earth floor, I fell asleep once more.
On waking, I was able to gauge more about my rescuers through the oval gap in the hutment. They were a band of about nine – three women, three men (one old and bearded) and the rest children. They didn’t seem to have much with them, if you didn’t count hunting equipment, which included one high-powered-looking rifle, several bows and arrows (the heads of the latter bound tightly with string and coated in what looked like tar), and a couple of large nets. All were more or less naked, though two of the women wore skirts made from dried banana leaves and one of the men was wearing what looked very much like a Woolworths anorak: blue terylene, with a fur trim. Unfastened and almost in shreds, it hung about him like a greatcoat.
At one point a woman came into my hut with a lump of indistinguishable, half-cooked flesh, at which I gnawed hungrily. She squatted in front of me at the oval opening. With her long, dried-out breasts hanging down almost to her waist, she looked to me – in my hallucinatory, venomized state – like an athlete with a towel over his shouders.
Then she handed me a tin can full of a sour-smelling liquid, motioning me to drink it. I sipped the bitter, herby draught gratefully. I felt dozy then and hardly noticed as she turned me over and began massaging the swollen flesh around the punctures. I had a vague sensation of something sticky and warm being plastered over the place, and then I fell asleep again.
When I woke up, the taste of the herb potation was strongly present in my mouth – as if it had been reduced, like the mysterious caramelized sauces my mother used to make over the stove in Fossiemuir. I thought of her in her rose-printed apron in that cold stone house, and then I thought of him, as impregnable as a strong-room door behind his newspaper in the lounge. I couldn’t blame them for this situation, I knew that; nor, in truth, for the closed-in, oblivious temperament that had got me into it. I knew it was simply myself, this casket of emotional defects and diffident, inward-turning passions…Not once, I thought, as I lay there in that stinking hut, have you snatched anything glorious or courageous from the world as it passed you by.
I had an odd vision, then, of Amin in the driver’s compartment of an old-fashioned steam train, dressed in uniform and cap, and grinning manically as he whipped past in a cloud of steam and dust. Strapped to the cowcatcher was Winston Churchill, my father, me…I didn’t know, the faces kept changing.
As this surreal picture passed out of my feveri
sh head, I felt – in that dark, stale space with its oval gap of light – something crawl over my ankle. I reached down and, pinching where it was, felt an ant crumble between my thumb and forefinger. I remembered another insect then, the moth – its dusty wings the colour of dried blood – that had alighted near us in the beer garden when I had had my last talk with my father. Well, not quite a talk: we had just sat there over our pint glasses and squares of cheese, the day before I left, and we had hardly said a word. A smile had broken across his tight face when the moth settled on the wooden table, and he had taken off his spectacles – I can see them now, clenched in the papery skin of his hand – and spoke, something close to fierce emotion in his eyes. “The most important thing,” he’d whispered, as if imparting heretical information, “is to minimize the harm you do to those around you.”
As the thick tiredness crept over me again, I tried to retain the image of his face in my mind – the eyes with their grey mist of something half-said, the high forehead that turned into a bald patch between two clamps of white hair, the mouth that tended naturally downwards – but I couldn’t hold it for long. I cursed myself for not having gone back for his funeral; perhaps she would have... I did no harm, I mumbled aloud, as if he was beside me in the furry semi-darkness of the hut, I did no harm. 0 my father –
The irresistible force of sleep pushed down my eyelids, closing off him, closing off Amin in that runaway train, closing off my cloistered view of the hunter’s camp, closing off light.
∗
After another day, and more food and herb soup, I was strong enough to get up and wander round the encampment. The whole place smelt strongly of woodsmoke and roasted flesh. Busy mending their nets and skinning a baby antelope (its small, button-like horns covered in felt), they didn’t take much notice of me once I ventured out. In spite of pot bellies, and faces, even those of the children, that seemed creased like ancient parchment, they seemed in the rudest health – and totally contented. I felt like a strange animal that had been captured and was being allowed to domesticate itself. I wondered whether they were the pygmies Waziri had mentioned (but they seemed too tall), or even some long-lost strand of the Bacwezi.