by Paul Theroux
A poet-friend of mine who lives in Amherst, Mass., has a rattletrap camera that is more of an oddity than anything else. It is a very old box camera, and before my friend takes a picture he must measure distances carefully and read the yellowed directions about five times. Chuckling privately to himself he snaps the picture. Cranking the film forward takes more time and having the pictures sent to be developed requires all the mystery and care of an income-tax return.
But it is really not the pictures that intrigue him. It is the fun of owning an infernal machine (when he is not actually snapping the picture he holds the camera as if it were a time bomb). After he had taken some pictures of me he announced that none of them looked like me and he suggested that we refrain from taking any more pictures. This was fine with me because, as I have said, no camera is like no hands.
Ignoring cameras is also good for the eyes. I have often sat staring at something wide-eyed, feeling a fabulous clicking in my skull, snapping everything in sight and, occasionally, things that aren't in sight. Afterwards, strenuously gesturing and leaping out of my seat, I have described these phenomena to my friends.
This is also good exercise. What I have told may not always have been the pictorial truth—a camera may easily have seen something different. But when you see a sunset or a giraffe or a child eating a melting ice-cream cone there is a chemical reaction inside you. If you really stand as innocent as you can, something of the movement, entering through your eyes, gets into your body where it continues to rearrange your senses. Also—and for a writer this bit of information is priceless—a picture is worth only a thousand or so words.
State of Emergency
[June 12, 1966]
Yesterday I finally got down to marking the political science papers from the correspondence students, and yesterday an uprising started in Kampala. The students would like their papers back. I don't blame them; the papers have been sitting on my desk for two weeks.
Yesterday was a bad day for marking papers. Today is not much better. The Kabaka (or King) of Buganda was President of Uganda until a few weeks ago; under the new constitution all political power has been taken from the hereditary monarchs of Uganda. The Kabaka once controlled the richest and most powerful Kingdom in Uganda, that of Buganda. But Milton Obote, former Prime Minister, has taken over as President.
While I was grading papers yesterday there was some shooting in the streets near the Kabaka's palace, about a half a mile from my office; roadblocks were put up, streets and pavements torn apart, and railroad ties and telephone poles ripped up. Travelers were deputized by the Kabaka's people and made to dig up the roads and help make effective roadblocks against government troops.
The Special Forces and riot squads rushed around with night sticks and Sten guns. And rumors, like locusts emerging, flew about the city. I couldn't grade papers yesterday. I had to buy some food in case the shops closed. They might not reopen for a week or more. I only looked over a few papers.
This morning I was determined. I sat down at my desk. The weather is beautiful in Kampala, the rains have just stopped after about six weeks of downpours, and everything is emerald in the sun; the herons in the large tree outside on the lawn are flapping around and tending to their fledglings. But no distractions this morning! I must get those papers graded.
The first paper, the first question. What is a Nation? "A nation," runs the quite elegant handwriting, "is a group of people of common consciousness and like-mindedness." I check it right. He has understood the lesson.
And then I hear a small pop. Then another. I look across to the Kabaka's palace on one of the hills opposite and see nothing. I can see a few open streets from my window. There is no traffic. I hear the pop-pop-pop of an automatic rifle. Are they gunshots? I ask the secretary—she lives near the palace. She tells me that she had trouble getting through the army lines when she came to work in the morning. She saw five truckloads of government troops. Some were battling with the people of Buganda. I turn back to the paper. "The difference between Government and State is that the Government is not permanent while the State never changes..."
The people of Buganda are proud. They love their king, they are polite and wise and seldom get ruffled. It is undignified, they might say. It was one of their kings, the first Kabaka Mutesa, who welcomed the first white men, Speke and Grant, into Uganda in 1862. The wide avenue leading to the palace is still called the We-Love-The-Kabaka road in the vernacular. This is the road where most of the fighting is taking place this morning. Back to the papers.
The question was, What are the advantages and disadvantages of decentralization of power in a state? I check some of the answers: "When many people exercise responsibility many of them will be interested in the government..." I look up again. I have just heard more rifleshots, this time a long volley, some louder than others.
The fighting seems much heavier today. It is hard to concentrate on the marking; and now students who are enrolled in evening classes are dropping in to say that, because of the curfew, they won't be in class tonight. Will I pass their names along to the teacher?
A few weeks ago Uganda was a Federal State with each king acting as lawgiver and tax-collector for his particular kingdom. More recently the federal constitution was suspended and Uganda made a Republic. The Kabaka and the other monarchs, people said, would be angry; no longer would they have any power. But they have loyal subjects, as loyal as any medieval farmers standing in the rain on a muddy road to watch their lord pass in a gilded carriage. But I have it all before me in one of the papers: "Federal government is that in which a number of states join together, each state keeping control of some matters, but allowing the Central Government to control national defense and foreign affairs."
Uganda is no longer a Federal State. I hear some objection to it, out the window, across the valley where there is shooting.
The Kabaka has issued what amounts to an ultimatum: he will give Obote's government until May 30 to leave his kingdom and change his mind about the constitution. We can assume that the state of emergency will last until then. I may even be grading papers until that date, perhaps these same papers.
Grading papers is not hard work and, after all, some students seemed to have grasped the principles pretty well; they are teachers and they do all their studying by mail. The last question has provided some very good answers: Why We Should Study Political Science—a short essay. I can let one of my students speak: "As we live by the government we have to know our place and the part we have to play in political matters. This will also enable us to sort out current affairs and understand them when we read the newspapers..."
Meanwhile there is shooting here in the capital of the state emergency. I'm a teacher. I presume I don't belong on the street making barricades or breaking them down. But the smoke from the palace, which the office boy has told me has just burned down, has something to do with politics; and the soldiers on the street; and the persistent pop-pop of the guns—that's politics, too. But it's not political science, and I'm a teacher; my correspondence students have just sent in their exams. I have papers to mark.
Leper Colony: A Diary Entry
[1966]
Leprosaria: it could be a tuber, a jungle vine, a thing from the bush with dark petals and fruit, ovoid, bitter to the taste.
The lepers are idle and so they fight with knives and they knit wool caps, and they crouch and applaud when the white priests pass.
Bats have the faces of pigs and three hang in the privy and squeak; soft mouse-fur, kite-strutted wings, bones showing in skin. And they live, heads hanging down in the warm cesspit.
And all around the place elephantine baobabs, gray: exploded creatures plastered hastily back and patched with the rough stubbled hide; stiff ears protrude from stumps of shoulders; they stand like dead sentries, fat, useless jugs.
Khate: the Chinyanja word is a call for help if ever there was one; choke, clear your throat with a khate or two. The fishermen say it and then point toward those t
rees.
There is leprosy which causes a "tiger's mouth" in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger; the toes and fingers shrink back and hang down; the skin, hard, scaled like a night thing living among the stones; and the nose absorbed into the face, tilted up and monstrous, almost bat-like. There is nerve leprosy which clouds the eye and aims it off, which makes claws of hands and stills and jaw; limbs are clubs to thump dirt pits for trash, to wish for knives.
For three days the Nyau, the image-dance, drums through the bush, ticks pulse and thunder; and because the dancers are lepers they go longer and naked. The image they have chosen is a car made of sticks and cloth—the soul of the dead man fives there for three days, conjured by dwarfish lepers dancing, whirling their stumps of hands.
Ugly, the khate a thousand times over; creeping back into huts and ditches and sleeping on mats; flies and dung-ugly geckoes; even children with the dead furred rash and small faces sucking bladder breasts, toying with green reeds.
Night, and a woman in labor wails in the leprosarium; her fingers are gone and she cannot grip tight, but only hangs, leprous, pregnant with pain; one last gasp signals the tearing of the bulbed head down hard against the membranes; fluid from one wounded body, a child, smooth seed from the ravaged husk, brought among the drums and into the night of this cursed community; out of its freakish crust the world exudes the novelty of perfect form.
Scenes Front a Curfew
[1966]
It was not odd that the first few days of our curfew were enjoyed by most people. It was a welcome change for us, like the noisy downpour that comes suddenly in January and makes a watery crackle on the street and ends the dry season. The parties, though these were now held in the afternoon, had a new topic of conversation. There were many rumors, and repeating these rumors made a kind of tennis match, a serve and return, each hit slightly more savage than the last. And the landscape of the city outside the fence of our compound was fascinating to watch. During these first days we stood in our brightly flowered shirts on our hill; we could see the palace burning, the soldiers assembling and making people scatter, and we could hear the bursts of gunfire and some shouts just outside our fence. We were teachers, all of us young, and we were in Africa. There were well-educated ones among us. One of them told me that, during the Roman Empire under the reign of Claudius, rich people and scholars could be carried in litters by lecticarii, usually slaves, to camp with servants at a safe distance from battles; these were curious Romans, men of high station who, if they so wished, could be present and, between feasts, witness the slaughter.
But the curfew continued, and what were diversions for the first few days and weeks became habits. Although people usually showed up for work in the mornings, work in the afternoons almost ceased. There were too many things to be done before the curfew began at nightfall: buses had to be caught, provisions found, and some people had to collect children. We visited the bars so that we could get drunk in the company of other people; we played the slot machines and talked about the curfew, but after two weeks it was a very boring subject.
The people who never went out at night before the curfew was imposed—some Indians with large families used to matinées at the local movie houses, the Africans who did manual labor, and some settlers—felt none of the curfew's effects. Arid there were steady ones who refused to let the curfew get to them; they were impatient with our daily hangovers, our inefficiency, our nervous comments. Our classes were not well-attended. One day I asked casually where our Congolese student was—a dashing figure, he wore a silk scarf and rode a large old motorcycle. I was told that he had been pulled off his motorcycle by a soldier and had been beaten to death with a rifle butt.
We left work early. In the afternoons it was as if everyone was on leave but couldn't afford to go to Nairobi or Mombasa, as if everyone had decided to while away his time at the local bars. At the end of the month no one was paid because the ministry was short-staffed. Some of us ran out of money. The bar owners said they were earning less and less: it was no longer possible for people to drink in bars after dark. They would only have been making the same amount as before, they said, if all the people started drinking in the middle of the morning and kept it up all day. The drinking crowd was a relatively small one, and there were no casual drinkers. Most people in the city stayed at home. They were afraid to stay out after five or so. I tried to get drunk by five-thirty. My memory is of going home drunk, with the dazzling horizontal rays of the sun in my eyes.
The dwindling of time was a strange thing. During the first weeks of the curfew we took chances; we arrived home just as the soldiers were drifting into the streets. Then we began to give ourselves more time, leaving an hour or more for going home. It might have been because we were drunker and needed more time, but we were also more worried: more people were found dead in the streets each morning when the curfew lifted. For many of us the curfew began in the middle of the afternoon when we hurried to a bar; and it was the drinkers who, soaked into a state of slow motion, took the most chances.
Different prostitutes appeared in the bars. Before the curfew there were ten or fifteen in each bar, most of them young and from the outskirts of Kampala. But the curfew was imposed after two tribes fought; most of the prostitutes had been from these tribes and so went into hiding. Others took their places. Now there were ones from the Coast, there were half-castes, Rwandans, Somalis. I remember the Somalis. There was said to be an Ethiopian at the Crested Crane, but I never saw her; in any case, she would have been very popular. All these women were old and hard, and there were fewer than before. They sat in the bars, futile and left alone, slumped on the broken chairs, waiting, as they had been waiting ever since the curfew started. Whatever other talents a prostitute may have she is still unmatched by any other person in her genius for killing time and staying on the alert for customers. The girls held their glasses in two hands and followed the stumbling drinkers with their eyes. Most of us were not interested in complicating the curfew further by taking one of these girls home. I am sure they never had to wait so long with such dull men.
One afternoon a girl put her hand on mine. Her palm was very rough; she rubbed it on my wrist and when I did not turn away she put it on my leg and asked me if I wanted to go in the back. I said I didn't mind, and she led me out past the toilets to the back of the bar where there was a little shed. She scuffed across the shed's dirt floor, then stood in a corner and lifted her skirt. Here, she said, come here. I asked her if we had to remain standing up. She said yes. I started to embrace her; she let her head fall back until it touched the wood wall. She still held the hem of her skirt in her hand. Then I said no, I couldn't nail her against the wall. I saw that the door was still open. She argued for a while and said in Swahili, "Talk, talk, we could have finished by now!" I stepped away, but gave her ten shillings just the same. She spat on it and looked at me fiercely.
Anyone who did not crave a drink went straight home. He took no chances. There were too many rumors of people being beaten up at five o'clock by drunken soldiers impatient for the curfew to start. As I say, the drinkers took the risks, and with very little time to spare dashed for their cars and sped home. For many the curfew meant an extra supply of newspapers and magazines; for others it meant an extra case of beer. A neighbor of mine had prostitutes on his hands for days at a time, and one of the girl's babies in a makeshift cot. Many people talked about rape.
The car accidents were very strange, freak accidents, ones that could only happen during a curfew. One man skidded on a perfectly dry road and drove his car through a billboard six feet wide; dozens of people, as if they had been struck blind, plowed straight across the grass of rotaries. And there were accidents at intersections: not hitting oncoming cars, but smashing into the rears of the cars ahead of them. These rear-end collisions were quite numerous and there were no street sweepers to cope with all the broken glass. It was hard to go a hundred yards without seeing shards, red plastic and white glass, sprinkled on the roa
d. Overturned cars on the verge of the road are rare in Africa, but they became very common around Kampala. Accidents in Africa are usually serious; few end with only a smashed headlight or simple bruises. Either the car is completely ruined or the car and driver disappear. We had some of these fatal accidents during the curfew, but there was also, for the first time, a rash of trivial accidents: broken lights, smashed fenders, bent bumpers, bruised foreheads. I think these were caused by the driver glancing around as he drove, half expecting to see angry people about to stone him, or troops aiming rifles at him. I know I tried to pick out soldiers as I drove along, and I always watched carefully for roadblocks which were so simple (two soldiers and an oil drum) as to be invisible. But it was death to drive through one.
There were so many petty arguments those days. In the bars there were fights over nothing at all; with this, a feeling of tribe rather than color. It was not racism. It was a black revolt; northern Ugandans were killing Bugandans, and neither side was helped to any great extent by anyone who was not black. The lingua franca in Kampala was bad Swahili instead of the usual vernacular which was Luganda. At any other time Swahili would have been a despised language, because only the fringe people used it—refugees, Indians, white men, foreigners. But after the curfew began it was mainly the fringe people who took over the bars.
The curfew reminded many of other curfews they had sat through in their time. During the day, in the bars, if the curfew was mentioned, old-timers piped up contemptuously, "You think this is bad? Why, when I was in Leopoldville it was a lot worse than this ..." Sometimes it was London, Palermo, Alexandria or Tunis, or, for the Indians, Calcutta, Dacca or Bombay during the Indian emergency. It brought back memories which, though originally violent, had become somewhat glamorous in the long stretch of intervening time: days spent in haggard platoons in the Western Desert, in the dim light of paraffin lamps in Congolese mansions, in London basements with the planes buzzing overhead, in Calcutta with the sound of blood running in the monsoon drains. These men enjoyed talking about the other more effective curfews, and they said that we really didn't know what a curfew was. They had seen men frightened, they said, but this curfew only bored people. Still, I knew then that some time in the future I would recall the curfew—perhaps recall it with the same fanciful distortions that these men added to their own memories. It is so strange. I was in Africa for five years; I remember nothing so clearly as the curfew.