The Last King of Scotland (1998)

by Giles Foden

  That night, however, as I lay in the dome of leaves and branches, a furious argument took place. In the firelight I caught occasional glimpses of the faces of the participants. From time to time one of them – most often the old man with the beard – gestured towards me. I couldn’t, of course, understand a word they were saying.

  The following morning the man in the anorak shook me out of a deep sleep and gestured that I should follow him. We went for about two hours down one of the forest paths. He kept having to stop to let me catch up with him: I was still quite weak but wouldn’t have been able to keep up in any case, such was the speed with which he moved through the vegetation. He picked out the path with ease, at moments when I thought it had simply vanished into a sombre fence of green. More green than one can describe – except that everywhere there were clouds of white butterflies, so many it was almost unnerving. Not the big, mountain type, but small forest ones, floating around without purpose. Or so it appeared. There are no flowers, I thought dumbly, as I stumbled on.

  On one of the rest stops, in a clearing much like the one where the soldiers had taken my van, the man suddenly looked at me and held his nose. I realized that there was a smell of decay about the place. The man pointed where the path in front of us bisected another: it was much wider, wide enough to take a vehicle and I noticed that there were indeed deep tyre tracks there, pressing flattened leaves into the soil.

  He began to walk down the wide path, much more slowly than he had been going before. As I followed him, the smell got stronger. We soon came upon a sight which made me quail with horror. In front of us was a large pile of bodies, nearly twenty feet high. They hadn’t been laid neatly but they had the appearance of repose, none the less, as they lay breast upon breast of each other. Heads, some still in helmets, lolled on the shoulders of their neighbours; feet were put up, as if comfortably, on the stomachs of the same; arms and legs were intertwined like the lianas of the forest.

  The whole thing was covered by a pullulating swarm of mottled blue insects, which rose and fell as if the mound itself were the gently breathing body of a sleeping giant. At the bottom, apart from shreds of camouflage, the gleaming bones of the oldest corpses were the only way of distinguishing where flesh met plant in the sweltering mush of organic material. At the top, the faces of the recently dead retained their dreadful expressions of fear or surprise or abject entreaty.

  You could, in some cases, still see their wounds: here and there the simple dark hole of a bullet, elsewhere more disturbing signs of pain and torture – burns (one man’s arm simply a charred stump), gougings and twisted limbs. The forehead of one had deep cuts in it like those on the top of a loaf of home-made bread, another’s was simply caved in, as if some essential element had been removed. In front of the bodies – nearly all of which were male – were odd bits of clothing and military equipment: a forage cap, a brass buckle, a yellow plastic shoe. Beer bottles were scattered about the clearing too, and at my own feet I could see where cigarette butts had been stamped into the earth. My calf began to throb again and I felt unsteady: it was the sight of the butts and bottles, I think, that did it, more than the mound itself, or even the smell. The image of men standing here, smoking and drinking as they dispatched or disposed of their victims – that was what made me, finally, begin to vomit.

  It was only when I had finished – by which stage I was on my hands and knees in front of that awful altar – that I realized that the man in the anorak had gone. I was suddenly struck by a fear of the trees again. I ran back up the wide path, crossed over the point where we had joined and carried on. I had only run for another hundred yards or so when I heard the loud blare of pop music, and rounding a corner I crossed the threshold of the forest.

  As the unobstructed blue light poured down over me, my calf gave a valedictory throb. I crouched down and pulled aside the ragged flaps of my filthy trousers. The poultice the hunter woman had put on the snake-bite was itching. Black, and criss-crossed with fibrous matter, it looked like a badge. I got under one of the edges with my finger-nail and pulled at it slightly. It came away to reveal a medallion of white flesh, stark amid the grime. In the middle of the circle were the two eyes of the puncture, the skin around them dead: whiter than white.

  34

  The path out of the forest led into a meadow-like area. Beyond it, a road wound down into a town, nestling in a valley. With a surge of joy and astonishment, I recognized the valley as the Bacwezi, and the outline of the town as that of Mbarara. I walked on a bit farther through the tall, brown-and-yellow grass, weary and still faint from my venomous episode, but grateful to be back within the confines of civilized society. As I saw it – and that is how I saw it.

  I stood in the grass, the stalks as high as my knees. In front of me, in a bare space under an acacia tree, two boys – one with a transistor radio under his arm, which explained the pop music – were driving a couple of longhorn zebu cattle to and fro over a pile of millet stalks. Threshing on the hoof. I watched as the thick, horny material, its tracks of brown and blue full of secret biological history, trampled the tiny seeds off the bulrush-like stalks. Out of calcium and gelatine shall come forth carbohydrate, saith the Lord. And out of the jungle, NG MD.

  Flicked at with a little stick, the cows went round in a circle. One lad, smaller than the other, hung for dear life on to several skeins of leather in the middle. His job it was to keep the cows roughly in the area of the millet pile, while the other kept them moving. The pile itself was moving too, the seeds jumping up and down in apparent confusion. Like Brownian motion, I thought. Around me the pop music weaved amid the dappled grasses, and the meadow seemed to answer with its sweet breath, and I had this strange sensation of seeing deep into time. I thought of the Bacwezi again, their rites of cow and fig, and of the Batembuzi’s King Isuza, the one who couldn’t find his way back from the underworld. As I did so, one of the beasts (its anus opening and closing quick as a camera shutter) was moved to defecate. The dollop of dung fell on to the millet pile, sending it scattering.

  I walked past the cowherds – they looked at me amazed; I suppose I must have been quite a sight, a muzungu with his hair matted, his clothes the filthiest rags – and down the road into town. My old town.

  A lorry passed me on the way, its dusty double wheels rolling their thick treads over the warm tarmac: so warm I could feel it softening beneath my shoes. Mounted on the lorry’s flatbed, strangely, was its own trailer, so you had one set of double wheels right on top of another. A man stood on the mounted trailer. He had a white cloth wrapped round his head, half obscuring his face. I looked up at him as he went by (the flatbed-trailer arrangement meant that he was quite high up) and he moved his arm as if to cover his face further still. I thought of Waziri suddenly, his surgical mask at his throat, and feelings of guilt, but more of fear, sent a shiver through me. I hurried on, uncertain what to do.

  As I got nearer to town, I passed four kids in uniform, sitting on a low wall under the shade of a bottle-brush tree. On their way home from school. They stared at me as I passed by – stared at this white man gone bush. Their uniform was bright blue, and I envied them its crispness.

  I hurried on. I had no idea where I would find the boy, but even after my own troubles, Nestor’s letter was still worrying me. You can imagine my surprise when, on reaching the army camp, I caught what I believed to be a glimpse of Gugu’s face.

  It was difficult, difficult to see and difficult to move. There were lots of people, a tight and shouting press concentrated on something in front of the camp gates…men and women, soldiers and civilians, young and old. Some of the soldiers seemed very young indeed.

  I started to jostle through the crowd. As I got closer, through the thicket of limbs I could see someone tied to a chair. Then I saw Gugu’s face again. An arm raised up, a hand gripping a rifle. The rifle came down. The figure in the chair rocked from side to side. Not him, too, I thought, not Gugu, please God.

  I elbowed through. There was a bo
oming noise. I heard one of the women wail and the crowd relaxed a little. And then tightened again. People started to move against me. They were running away. Given this opportunity I burst, mad and ragged creature that I was, into the central circle. One of the boy soldiers who was beating turned to me, and I could see his face and also the bloodied face of the figure in the chair. It wasn’t Gugu.

  Then I heard the booming sound again and the boy soldier, comic in his overlarge camouflage, swung his rifle at me. The brown stock of it connected with my ribs and the pain made me aware of something. That it was him after all; the face was Gugu’s that I had seen. But not in the chair.

  I was on the floor then and he – the little man, transformed, camouflaged innocent with viciousness on his brow – was above me, the barrel of the rifle trained on me. Then another booming sound came, only closer and with a whistle riding on the top of the boom. The noise came so close it filled my ears and nose, so close it was like a taste. There was a smell of metal and burning in the air, and the crowd was crying out, crying out at the flames above us.

  The blast hit us. The one in the chair, he went backwards, his legs stuck up. And then Gugu above me, he too was going off the ground. Everything was going off the ground. The ground was going off the ground. The force of the explosion sent the breath out of my chest and my body rolling in the smoky air.

  I tumbled – upwards! As I lost consciousness, what was in my head – slow, and reaching blindly at its own strangeness – was the thought of losing it. In front of me was Gugu, changed boy with camouflaged wings descending. His sternum was red and departing from itself, red and departing from its centre like a half-opened flower.

  35

  At one time or another, I see a figure coming towards me, striding purposefully through the millet. The land stretches out steamy and blue behind the bulrushes. In front of me, behind him. Then the landfalls. It is Amin.

  In another place I see an elephant, one ear sticking out farther than the other; one tusk, also, longer than the other. He leans to one side in a camp pose. I can see the wrinkles in his rough grey-brown skin, the sheer thickness of each leg and the little plait of hair that hangs from the end of his scraggy tail. His other tail, his front tail, drops limply down between his tusks. Slaps himself then, flesh-slap with the sudden trunk. It is Amin.

  Elsewhere I see a hippo standing in a grassy space, next to a tall cactus tree. It rolls. What surprises me is the lightness, the almost-pinkness of the underside of its body. But it is Amin, it is the soles of his feet, sticking up on the massage table as I enter the room.

  By a river in the grassland I see three rhinos. Three rhinos standing on the savannah, solid in their armour by a long low river. They move their plates and – I need only say it straight in my sleep – the plates of the earth and the soft bones on the top of some baby’s head would also move. A baby in Fort Portal, a baby in Fort William. But it is Amin, it is just three Amins by that long low river.

  In a garden I see a peacock extending its fan, and howling like a banshee. It, too, is Amin, it is Amin’s medals, his medals and his faraway eyes.

  And then I see my father and I am free. He is reading the Scotsman. But the headline on the back says: “The road dark, the destination obscure.”

  Every time this comes round, it’s like a re-run. A re-run of the first time as I’m travelling along, as I’m travelling along and eating up space. Yet it felt like a re-run then, too. And now, as then, I cannot sleep but see Amin…

  ∗

  What I did see, such as I could when I came to, was a concerned black face peering over me. A face topped by an American-style military helmet, a face with a cheroot sticking out of its lips.

  “Ah, you have woken, bwana. We were worried if we had injured a muzungu. It would not be good for our international relations.”

  “Uhnn?” There was blood in my eyes.

  I realized that once again I was moving along, except that now I was in a vehicle. I looked about. There were weapons and equipment hanging on the sides and up front I could see the heads of a driver and a passenger and a thick glass window.

  “President Nyerere would be very unhappy with me if that was the case, so I am very happy to see you,” said the cheroot man, who was bending over me, crouched under the low roof of what, I was becoming aware, was an armoured personnel carrier.

  “Where am I?” I struggled up on to my elbows, a ripple of pain coming up from my bruised ribs.

  “You are in the custody of the Tanzanian Defence Forces. May I present myself? I am Colonel Armstrong Kuchasa, officer i⁄c the operation of our country against the Ugandan aggressor Idi Amin Dada.”

  He handed me a mug of tea and a lump of stale bread.

  “Those boys,” I said,“ – just children.”

  “Kidogos,” the Colonel said. “Kid soldiers. Amin has started to use them. They are the most vicious of the lot. They have been raping women in my country. Boys…raping grown women.”

  I sipped at the tea thoughtfully, soaking the hard bread with it in my mouth.

  “Now,” he said, watching me, “you must explain to me what you are doing here. Quickly. We have just completed a successful offensive against Mbarara. We are very busy.”

  In the distance, I could hear once again the boom of artillery fire and – much closer – the sound of men’s voices.

  “I was trying to leave,” I said. “I had had enough. I thought I could get over into Rwanda.”

  “That would not be possible. Now you must stay with us. The problem is, our medics are very busy because of the righting. You will have to come all the way to Kampala. You needn’t worry, this is a war we will win.”

  I felt a jolt, searing my ribs, as the APC went over a bump.

  “I’ve just come from there,” I said. “But you don’t have to look after me. I am a doctor myself. Maybe I can even help the medics. I am not badly injured. It’s just my eardrums, they are very sore.”

  “You – a doctor? In truth? What is your name?”

  “Garrigan,” I said, sitting up. “I practised near here first and then up in Kampala.”

  Colonel Kuchasa slapped his thigh and then sucked on his cheroot.

  “This is very ripe. We have been giving Tanzanian medicine to a muzungu doctor.”

  The vehicle pulled to a halt, sending him lurching forward, his binoculars swinging round his neck.

  “Well, Doctor Garrigan,” he said, steadying himself. “I will have to go now. Stay in the APC: although they haven’t yet stood and fought, there are still a lot of Ugandan forces around.”

  “Near here?”I said.

  “Don’t worry. You will be safe – unless they have RPGs.”

  “What are they?”

  “Rocket-propelled grenades. For piercing armour.”

  He laughed. Then – picking up a stick, which, I slowly realized, was actually a short spear – he lifted the hatch of the turret and poked his head out. The noise of men talking was suddenly louder. I heard him shout in Swahili and then the reply coming back.

  The Colonel called down to me. “The Simba garrison from Mbarara has retreated to Masaka. That is where we are heading now. Major Mabuse, the head of the garrison, has holed up in a church at the top of a hill. We must now make the assault on foot. You must stay here in the APC. It will follow as the action is completed.”

  He clambered out then, and I lay there for a few minutes, listening to the noises of the soldiers moving around me, their voices muffled by the steel walls of the armoured car. I was still quite weak from the snake-bite – though whatever gunk the hunters had daubed on it had been a triumphant success – and my head continued to ring from the blast. Yet I was curious to see what was happening, so after a few minutes I got up and cautiously looked out myself.

  There were two or three other APCs next to the one I was in, also three fuel tankers, a couple of ambulances and ten or so lorries with howitzers and other artillery pieces pulled behind them. Otherwise the whole contingent, wh
ich was deploying across the road in front of me, was on foot. As I watched, a pair of scarlet-and-black shrikes flew up out of a bush, disturbed by the movement.

  A little way away, the Colonel was waving his spear about, drawing lines in the dust in front of some other officers. (As I recall it, I can’t help myself thinking of Michael Caine in Zulu – “Don’t throw those bloody spears at me!” That old vision of Africa I’d had, the same that led me there and doomed me: it returns like a spectre.)

  A sergeant-major called out an order, and the body of men came to a halt. With the Colonel continuing to make his dispositions, the sergeant-major began to address the troops. They must have been up to a thousand strong – jaunty-looking in their grey ponchos, camouflage uniforms and jungle hats. Once he had finished, they began to move forward.

  The road to Masaka cut on into the blank bush ahead: there was no target as such. I couldn’t see where they were going to attack. Smelling petrol in the air, I turned round in the turret to see where it was coming from.

  About a quarter of a mile away stood the remants of Mbarara. Even from that distance, and through billowing smoke, I could see that the Tanzanian shelling had been devastatingly effective. Through a gap in the opaque vapour – a space, in that odd perspective, no bigger than a man’s hand – I suddenly caught a glimpse of something familiar: a steel water-tower. I couldn’t tell whether it was the one in the compound or the one at the clinic, but it made me sad all the same. The sun caught the steel again. Then I realized the tower was lying on its side.