by Tahir Shah
Oswaldo poked me as I tried to draw conclusions. The meal was so cheap that we ordered all four courses again.
Next morning, before the sun had risen above the bullet holes in the windows, Denzil, Oswaldo and I drove out to Entebbe. The famous botanical gardens had borne the brunt of war and neglect. Denzil apologized every so often for tormenting me at school and, sweeping a hand to push back his long hair, he would snort through both nostrils into a very large and grubby handkerchief.
Oswaldo and I took turns sitting in the sidecar. Denzil drove to Entebbe Airport.
Renowned as the scene of the Israeli midnight raid in 1976, Entebbe’s chapter of history is hard to forget. Palestinian hijackers took hostage over one hundred Israelis aboard a French aircraft. Three Hercules cargo planes — escorted by Phantom jets — left Israel packed with airborne commandos. Within one hour of landing they had rescued the hostages. In the course of the operation, eleven MiG fighters, supplied to Uganda by the U.S.S.R., were destroyed.
The debris of that attack was still lying about, having been pushed off the runways so that life could get back to normal. One aircraft, it looked like a DC-10, was parked on the tarmac of a taxiway. Covered in green algae, it lay abandoned, I suspected, because the necessary engineers to repair it did not exist.
We took tea in the airport cafeteria, which was open although no flights were expected. A hundred people struggled for good places from which to watch a twelve-inch television screen. Whole families were clustered around the flickering reception of Ugandan television. The cook and cafeteria helpers had deserted their posts and were also crouched around the miracle of technology. Amongst the interference, Michael Jackson was pacing through the robotic steps of his music video “Thriller”.
Denzil knew a lot about Uganda and its history. He told with great animation of the brutality of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. And he spoke of the burial grounds where the earth was parted and filled with corpses. These were Uganda’s killing-fields.
As the sun sank down behind Kampala’s concrete buildings, Denzil strapped two jerrycans brimming with petrol onto the sidecar. Oswaldo and I risked instant incineration trapped in that death seat. Petrol slopped about as we set off at dawn the next day to witness the evil legacy of Amin and Obote. Although I was apprehensive — and at first unwilling — to visit the killing-fields, Denzil maintained that such a trip would be of significance.
For several hours we drove along red mud-tracks bordered with lush vegetation. Once in a while Denzil would pull out a hand-scribbled map. His up-to-date information and interest in such matters as the killing-fields, led me to suppose that the lanky Englishman had unrevealed contacts: perhaps in the Foreign Office. Rather oddly, he seemed reluctant to brief Oswaldo and me as to where the killing-fields were located. When I asked him to give me names and directions for my notebook, he said firmly that these details were irrelevant. Perhaps, I reflected, I had contracted the Developing World paranoia, which almost everywhere holds that newcomers are undoubtedly spies.
At what seemed like the middle of nowhere, Denzil stopped driving, glanced at the tatty map, and switched off the engine.
“We are here,” he said.
An albino boy ran up to the motorbike and screamed when he saw Denzil.
The child plucked up courage, slowly approaching the Englishman and rubbing his fingers through Denzil’s long brown hair. Then he chortled, because he had never before felt such a thing. A moment later he touched Denzil’s freckles. There were cries from behind us, and the child’s mother ran over. She yanked the boy up into her arms, smacked him, and rushed over to a trough to wash his hands. Denzil looked a little disconcerted. The woman had obviously never seen freckles before and thought, quite naturally, that they were due to a disease which might be contagious.
We stayed the night at the back of a teahouse. A fire burned in the middle of the little room. The flames licked at the corrugated iron walls, crackling and squeaking as the fire was fed with a few old pieces of damp wood.
The man who put us up was very old indeed. His name was Albany; and his eyes were rheumy with age. He spoke wearily, as if he had seen the history of the world and all those who had walked upon it. And he told stories of the slaughter.
Albany had seen corpses being dragged into open pits — often by the victim’s own children.
In Uganda a generation was stolen by the deeds of tyrannical rule. Albany’s raspy words echoed around us. As the flames licked higher than before, the old Ugandan spoke about the lost years of the second Obote reign.
Obote had returned to a people who were beginning to recover from Amin’s terror; a people who had not realized that a new dictator had just replaced the last. Albany said that he would rather the truth be told just once, than it never be told at all.
Next morning Albany took us to a leper colony near to the hut in which he lived. I was not sure of the reason for visiting the enclosure and its inhabitants. At first I felt like a voyeur or a child being taken to visit a zoo. Albany knew the lepers well and introduced us to them. Their features and bodies were actually rotting; holes had formed in cheeks, and finger-joints had dropped away.
It was the first time that I had seen serious disease since Mumbai. Dry leprosy is not usually as highly contagious as people tend to believe. Oswaldo reached into his pack and pulled out a bag of boiled sweets. They were striped with white and black lines. He handed them to the oldest of the lepers. The joy was no longer expressed in physical demeanour, but in a distinctly higher sense, as if an aura surrounded him.
Few people lived in the region. Visitors were unknown. It was as if the world were trying to leave it alone, in peace.
We walked across a field to buy some milk from a stall. What looked like thick sticks were scattered about, their ends fat and rounded. Skulls were spread about like orbs, some enmossed — others shining brightly — polished by the rain. Many of the bones and skulls were small and delicate; they were those of children and their mothers.
Albany gave us some bananas when we left. He told us to tell our friends that his country had found peace at last. And called out:
“Smile, when you think of us here, because we are smiling for the world.”
The jerrycans were secured and we mounted the black machine. The fuel was hardly the purest: clouds of noxious gases spiralled behind us as we pulled away to seek the source of the Nile.
* * *
A group of white men carrying large sacks were heading towards us. We studied their movements in puzzlement, trying to make out what country they were from. The tallest one moved with a limp in front of the others. Their skin was so white that for a moment I wondered if they were albinos.
The men had in fact come from Jinja’s grain mill, where they worked. A second skin of blinding white flour covered each from top to toe.
Denzil left the motorbike with the manager of a backstreet bar who had assured us that he was the right man to take care of the machine. A table took pride of place in the bar at which a school of card-sharps threw down piles of bills, each bearing Milton Obote’s face. A monster with eight heads was rearing up from a pinball machine in the middle of the room. Oswaldo tamed it, becoming addicted to the game; until Denzil walked over, picked him up, and threw him outside onto the grass.
The Patagonian and he were very different. One was tall, the other short. One liked knife-throwing, the other was a pacifist. Yet they were fascinated with each other, both respecting, yet each not quite comprehending, the other’s viewpoint.
Bicycles were for hire to take visitors to the source of the Nile. Each came equipped with a pedal-man.
I perched on the back of the Chinese-made frame, and it began to gather speed, powered by the gangling body of the Ugandan youth. We passed a golf course on the edge of Lake Victoria where two old colonials were having a vociferous tee off.
Buildings in the 1930s style, neglected statues of Mahatma Gandhi, and small, overgrown Hindu shrines were dotted around. One day in 1
972, Idi Amin decided that all the Indians were to leave Uganda. Most went to neighboring Kenya. One told me later that they were allowed to take no possessions: they crossed the border wearing only their three-piece suits.
Lake Victoria came into view, surrounded in a gaggle of teenage boys and glittering tilapia. The morning’s catch had just come in. Scaly fish bellies were being slid into yellow wicker baskets, which were put onto heads and whisked away to market.
Noah, my pedaller, offered to find us a boat so that we might visit the very spot where the Nile is born. He went off and chatted to every boy with a canoe. After lengthy negotiations, we lumbered aboard a craft with three slow leaks. Noah, who insisted on accompanying us, bailed with a jam jar as we pulled out into the expanse of Lake Victoria.
The boat was long and thin. An array of wooden struts held the two sides together, while a child with a paddle propelled us into the middle of the lake.
Noah pointed to a small island and a lone tree which sprouted from the water. He said that the tree was the exact source of the Nile, and that the island moved about according to the moon. As to what he meant, I was unsure. Yet it was something on which he was very emphatic indeed.
Oswaldo gave a short address on his homeland to the occupants of the boat, which he instructed them to tell to their various peoples. The Patagonian was eager to make the most of the auspicious moment. Afterwards Noah asked me exactly what my friend had said. When I admitted that I had no idea at all, Noah burst out laughing and ran off to tell his friends.
The Owen Falls Dam raged as Denzil’s little black Triumph ran across the road bridge towards the Kenyan border. At a checkpoint, at Tororo, on the border we were received with great courtesy and hospitality. A cluster of young women, who wore colored cotton dresses with pointed shoulders, stood about chatting to the soldiers. A bucket of hard-boiled eggs and packets of biscuits — which tasted of grit — were passed round at the border post. The officials lounged beneath a wide acacia, smoking cigarettes from pink cartons.
Out of all the countries I had visited, Uganda was the hardest to leave. A curious sense seemed to bond all Ugandans together. As if it developed like an extended family which is united by hard times.
The supply of cash that I had brought from London was running out. Somehow I had to contact my bank there to send more money from my account. Although concerned that problems would inevitably arise, I was reassured that very soon I would be with Mich — my childhood friend — in Nairobi.
Before crossing into Kenya, we had a last bottle of Coca-Cola in a rowdy café. At the bottom of the bottle there was an inch of black silt. Swirling the remaining fluid around this deposit, I leant my head back to drink. As I did this, my eyes caught on a few words scrawled across a blackboard on the café’s wall. Each letter was carefully formed. It read:
As for me, God will help we all in the judgment day for the work we doing today. And also God will help human being more than anything in the world. He is our guide and he we love.
TWELVE
Beowulf and Buckweed
“Lingo hear, your Gonds are asses,
Eating cats, and mice, and bandicoots,
Eating pigs, and cows, and buffaloes;
Filthy wretches! wherefore as me?...”
In the early afternoon we reached the edge of Nairobi. A dented sign announced:
Welcome To The Green City In The Sun.
Breaking with our tradition, we stayed in a rather extravagant hotel in Westlands, a suburb where many Indians and European expatriates live. My traveling companions had refused to put up with the bug-infested rooms with no windows which they thought I favoured. I would have preferred luxury, but was living on a tight budget. The sword money would not last forever: and Gondwanaland extended, after all, to the farthest reaches of South America.
Denzil had negotiated with the hotel’s manager and swapped his motorbike for lodgings for us all. He was delighted, secretly confiding that the vehicle would only be good for a few more miles.
I telephoned Mich, who was attending the Kenyatta University. We arranged to meet in the centre of town.
Bus number 118 was very full. Oswaldo dangled from a window and yelled with exhilaration as the driver swerved around the huge roundabout near Tom Mboya Road. It was hard getting used to metropolitan life once again. Buildings stretched twenty storeys into the vast African sky, and had elevators that worked. Tour guides herded flocks of package ‘safari” tourists from one souvenir shop to the next; as the bustle of suit-clad commuters hurried home. My companions were thrilled to be in a big city once again. Denzil ran off towards Woolworth’s and Oswaldo hugged a businessman from Argentina.
At the Thorn Tree Café outside the New Stanley Hotel we met Mich. He had changed considerably from the twelve-year-old whom I had known many years before. Built like a Marine, with a square body and a shaven head, his hands were as wide as soup plates.
Mich had roamed the trouble-spots of the world with his father. A military man, his father was, as he put it, “A Colonel — the Full Bird”, now stationed at the Pentagon. They were always at loggerheads. Mich’s father had expected his son to follow in his footsteps and join the Marines. But Mich was dedicated to other causes. He loved animals and detested war. His favourite creature was a ferret called Buckweed. The two had been almost inseparable. But, before coming to Africa, Mich had been forced to leave Buckweed with the Full Bird: who hated animals and loved war. I dreaded the consequences.
Mich invited me to see Kenyatta University. We took a matatu, a private van, out to Kahawa, which is on the road to Thika. At the matatu-stop on Moi Avenue hundreds of people ran into the road as soon as any of the private vans approached.
In Africa seldom is there queueing: a surge of arms and legs push against each other, in the hope of squeezing aboard. A woman forced her head towards my face. As the bushy mop of hair obstructed my nose and mouth, I began to suffocate. Forget-me-nots were embroidered on her dress. I wriggled in horror that they should be the last thing I would see before finally collapsing.
The bus plied a course through the military base at Kahawa, until it reached the University grounds. A sly move on the part of the government, it was said, to ensure that the University was constructed beside a military base. Student demonstrations in past years had caused various Kenyan universities to close and a gigantic backlog of students to develop.
Kenyatta University was very spread out. Students crisscrossed the campus along the sand-covered paths as if they had a definite purpose. I asked Mich why he had not bought a bicycle. He shook his head and said, “Nah, I’d just look rich... people here don’t have as much as we do. I brought all these clothes from the States, but usually I wear the same pair of pants and just a couple of the shirts.”
I asked what the dropout rate was.
“Man, if a guy dropped out he’d be throwing away his life. Kenya has the highest population growth in the world. You know, it’s funny... when I was in the States I used to grumble all the time at what I had. At Virginia Tech we had multi-million dollar wind tunnels and we weren’t happy. But just look at our physics lab over there...”
He motioned towards a pair of huts with tin roofs.
Mich shared a room with two others. Three beds were pushed up against the walls, leaving just about enough space for two people to stand in the surrounding area. Mich pointed to a duffle bag and said:
“That’s where Jimmy keeps his stuff; Kennedy doesn’t have anything but what he wears. I’ve got enough equipment to kit out an army. These guys have become closer than my brothers; they”ve taught me so much by their example of modesty.”
Above Mich’s bed was hung a framed picture of his ferret, Buckweed, and a three-toed sloth. As I was admiring them, the door swung open. Kennedy stumbled in and we were introduced. He stuck out one of the largest hands I have ever seen: bigger even than Mich’s. It seemed to grip at my whole arm. He was wearing shorts and was agitated for some reason.
“What’s
wrong with you?” asked Mich.
“Well, I don’t want to bother you, because your friend has come. But I remembered that yesterday was your birthday...” Kennedy rummaged under his bed. He pulled something out wrapped in a page of the Times of Kenya. “I didn’t forget, but it took longer than I had hoped to make you a gift.” He held out the small package and Mich took it.
“Open it. I made it myself.”
Mich unwrapped the paper which was scrunched up at the edges. A pouch made from denim was revealed. Mich examined it with praise, opening it for a moment, as if he expected something inside.
“It’s for Buckweed,” said Kennedy.
“I shall treasure this, but you cut up your jeans,” Mich said.
“I don’t mind wearing shorts,” Kennedy replied, laughing.
He sat on his bed and picked up a Mills and Boon romance. We left him to read and Mich offered to take me to eat dinner.
* * *
Mich had given me the address of a place in Eastleigh — an overcrowded suburb of Nairobi. From this secret establishment one could telephone, at a low fixed rate, anywhere in the world and talk for as long as one liked. We took bus 106 out to Eastleigh — where Ethiopians and Somalis are the majority — to meet our contact, whose name was Francis.
A river of oozing mud was surging down the main street of Eastleigh. Oswaldo took charge of the scribbled directions and navigated us passed the Disco Day and Night Club to the house where Francis lived.
A doorway led to a passage and then to a house with dry mud walls. We entered the main room and Francis greeted us. His teeth were many shapes, and rather unusual in that most of them were twisted at right angles to what would have been their normal positions. And as he talked, he used them to strip bark from stems of mira, a bitter-tasting plant containing amphetamine, which is legal in Kenya.