by Giles Foden
We talked a bit more, and then I levered myself out of my chair to get us another round of drinks. Feeling as if I’d left part of my body back in the chair, I walked over to the bar and bought the beers.
As I turned round, there was a sudden commotion at the door. A group of five or six men, all in flared trousers and dark glasses, burst into the room. One had on a flowery towelling sun hat, and there was something heavy weighing down the top pocket of his safari-suit jacket. They marched straight up to Swanepoel, beckoning and shouting. I stopped in my tracks, a beer bottle in each hand.
The one in the sun hat whispered excitedly to the South African, pulling at his sleeve. Swanepoel, however, put his feet up on the table – deliberately, as if to annoy him. The man cuffed his feet. Swanepoel got up, leaning over him threateningly. The dog scrambled up, too, and growled. The man took a step back, delving into his heavy pocket. I saw the black of a gun.
Then Swanepoel laughed out loud and patted the man in the towelling hat on the shoulder. The man in the towelling hat laughed, too, and put the gun away, and then everybody laughed. Swanepoel gathered up his cigarette packet and lighter, put them in his shirt pocket and took a last swig of beer. He paused to make an apologetic, can’t-be-helped gesture across the room to me, and followed the group of men out of the door. The dog padded out behind them.
Bewildered, I went over to the table and spent the next half-hour stalwartly drinking the two bottles. Then I went up to my room. As I opened the door, I caught a glimpse of three cockroaches scuttling across the linoleum. Each one was fat as a hand-rolled cigar.
I got undressed and lay on the bed. A dirty mosquito net hung above me. My opened suitcase was on the floor, its contents in disarray from when I’d got a fresh change of clothes out after my shower. Now I felt unclean again. The room was stale and airless (the window was stuck) and the beer was making my head swim. I took out the guidebook from the suitcase and tried to read.
Following the appearance of Arab slave-traders earlier in the century, the colonial period in Uganda effectively began with the arrival of John Hanning Speke in the country on 24 January, 1862. Thereafter followed a large number of European explorers, merchants (the Imperial British East Africa Company) and evangelical missionaries. The period of 1885–87 was a trying one for the newly converted Christians in Uganda, many being killed by burning, castration and dismemberment, as antagonism flared between them and supporters of the Kabaka, the King of Buganda. In 1892, war broke out between the converts themselves, the Anglicans favouring British, the Catholics French or German colonialism …
While British rule would continue, in Protectorate form, until Independence in 1962, an odd turn in Ugandan history took place in 1903, when the country was offered by the British Secretary for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, to Theodor Herzl and the World Zionist Organization as a possible Jewish state. The offer was refused, as the Zionists were alarmed at the diversion of energies from Palestine …
Finding myself unable to concentrate, I set my alarm clock to Uganda time from my wristwatch and turned off the lamp. I kept thinking about the cockroaches, every now and then flicking on the switch to see if they were there. They were too quick for me. This, and the sound of heavy machinery passing underneath the window, kept me tossing and turning.
And thinking. I was a terrible insomniac when I was a teenager, but never on account of cockroaches. I used to lie awake worrying about myself. And when I did sleep, I fell victim to dreadful dreams: that I had been tossed into the flames, or into the icy floes of some Stygian river. I laboured under the misapprehension that I had committed some inexpiable crime – some nights I even thought I was the devil himself, that his malleable form had insinuated itself into mine, that his scaly horns had become my own dark locks. But it wasn’t all one way. Other nights I went so far as to imagine myself the new Christ – that I had a mission on earth and all these demonic identifications were mere temptations.
All of these dreams visited me within a sensuous geography of temples and jungles and so on. It was all very exotic – and it all disappeared abruptly the moment I had my first assisted seminal experience. This took place in the copse above our house, in the hands of Lizzie Walters – that same neighbour’s daughter. She married young and, so far as I know, still lives in Fossiemuir. Whenever, on trips home from university, I used to see her walking down the street, with her pram and her shopping bags, all I could think about was that exquisite moment: the branches in my back, a celestial light in my head, her sly giggle – and then the wetness on my stomach.
I smiled to myself as I remembered all this, and eventually dozed off into a reasonably peaceful sleep. Or so I thought. Later, in the early hours, waking with a full bladder of Pilsner, I turned on the light once more. On top of my big white alarm clock sat a cockroach bigger than any I’d seen, waving its antennae and eyeing me speculatively. I knocked it to the floor and whacked it with the guidebook.
The cracking of its carcass gave out a loud report. Pulling on a shoe, I toed the yellow mess towards a corner. I pushed the shoe off with the other foot, and then sat naked on the edge of the bed for a while. Disgusted but triumphant, I finally lay back down, confident that the revolting trophy in the corner – like the jackdaws, jays and stoats that Scottish gamekeepers hang on barbed-wire fences – would ward off the others.
I turned off the light and had almost gone back to sleep when I heard the rumbling of machinery again. Much louder this time. It was now about three in the morning, and I was feeling pretty sick at heart about my first night in Uganda. It was hot, and the sheets were clinging to me like a shroud. I got up and went over to the window. The warm, dirty lino stuck to the soles of my bare feet, and yet softened with each step through the unlit room. I felt like I was leaving impressions – Man Friday tracks for some hunter as yet unknown.
But it was me that was the stalker as I pulled aside the curtain and stood there amid the blankness, an observer hidden from the world outside. Below me on the street, a column of tanks was moving past, their black shapes outlined, in the way of things in darkness, by the obscurity of the night. As they passed by, I could also see the silhouettes of men in helmets in the turrets, and now and then thought that I could hear shouting through the jammed, smeary glass.
Though I knew that they couldn’t see me, I was conscious of my nakedness, of my pale, presbyter’s face with its straight, jet-black hair, my narrow chest with its own damp, hardly there tuft in the depression, the sharp curve of my iliac crests – those pelvic bones above the thigh – and of my long, thin legs. Like a pair of pokers, my mother used to say, and I’d look at the companion set by the hearth, that small coal fire that glowed like a red eye but never heated the place up, and think, no they are not.
4
I took breakfast by the veranda doors, down in the Speke’s dilapidated dining room – a pulpy, orange-coloured fruit I didn’t recognize, a boiled egg with a grey yolk, and coffee in a battered silver pot engraved ‘E.A.R.’. Below, in smaller letters, ‘Property of East African Railways’. I remembered what my guidebook had called it, ‘the Lunatic Line’, and how Winston Churchill had entered Uganda by it, strapped to the cow-catcher of the train to get a better view.
I noticed that the waiters were all crowding round the copper radio grille in the wall near the lift-hatch to the kitchen. At the time I was not aware of the significance of what was being emitted. This was about the sum of it, in the rather shaky ‘Voice of Uganda’. I strained to hear it from the table:
The Uganda Armed Forces have this day decided to take over power from Obote and hand it to our fellow soldier Major-General Idi Amin Dada … and we hereby entrust him to lead this our beloved country of Uganda to peace and goodwill among all … We call upon everybody … to continue their work in the normal way. We warn all foreign governments not to interfere in Uganda’s internal affairs. Any such interference will be crushed with great force … because we are ready … Power is now handed over to Major-Genera
l Idi Amin and you must await his statement which will come in due course. We have done this for God and our country.
My belly danced with fear, in spite of the food I had just eaten. The muscles in my shoulders knotted as I got up from the table. Coffee cup in hand, slopping the liquid in its saucer, I went out on to the terrace. The balcony gave out on to the hotel forecourt, with Nile Avenue and the corner of Pilkington Road beyond. There were drowsy clusters of bats hanging upside-down in the trees in the forecourt – dark and wrinkled, like big sultanas – and a smell of wood-smoke in the air. I sipped the coffee and looked anxiously around for signs of disturbance.
People were gathered in the avenue, talking in little groups round parked cars. They didn’t seem unduly perturbed. Many were apparently going about the routines of their daily business: produce-sellers balanced piles of green bananas and laid out rusty iron pails of peas and beans; carvers arranged ebony figures on hessian mats; foreign-exchange dealers looked on, leaning against the walls in their shiny suits; women in coloured dresses printed with President Obote’s face took charge of children and shopping. Others were passing by on bulky black bicycles, some with bales of cotton or churns of milk strapped to the back, or in old cars with rounded roofs and wooden boards on their wings.
This was what I saw. None of it seemed that strange, really, considering the news on the radio. Yet I realized, standing there, sipping my coffee, that I had tipped up in Uganda in momentous times. And I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that. I remembered something Swanepoel – the man in the bar – had said: ‘Coups in Africa are normal, they just come round, like the rainy season and the dry season.’
Looking back, I’m aware that he was, in fact, quite wrong about that – I mean, there are plenty of peaceful places in that big continent, aren’t there? Though it has often struck me that it looks, cartographically, like a gun in a holster.
I scanned the Speke’s crumbling façade to my right and left. Then I put down my cup and saucer and walked to the end of the balcony, where my eye followed the dingy stucco colonnades of the shops along Pilkington Road. My gaze was caught by a group of women washing clothes at a stirrup-pump, singing as they scrubbed and pummelled. They took a sheet at either end and began to shake the water out of it. As they shook, the sheet clapped against itself and an unnatural sound, half like a drumbeat, half like a slap on human flesh, echoed between the trees outside the hotel.
At this one of the bats suddenly took flight; or dropped into flight – fell straight down from its branch, then twisted about and, becoming a black spot at the edge of the retina, disappeared into the sky.
Mixed in with the sound of the washerwomen, there gradually came another, more uncertain one. Nile Avenue began to fill up with a crowd, so much so that people soon had to stand to one side. What started as a trickle, a noise in the distance, in minutes turned into a walking, running mass of bodies, shouting slogans and ululating. Army jeeps with long radio aerials and mounted machine-guns appeared round the bend of the road, threading their way through.
Teenage girls leaped on to the running-boards of the jeeps, handing garlands to the soldiers. Shouts rang out, rising to my balcony: ‘Welcome, Idi Amin Dada! Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, we support you! Major-General Amin is the one for Uganda! Amin is the saviour of Uganda! Eh, eh, eh, eh!’
I was amazed at this sudden endorsement of an enforced government, and shocked at the speed with which the character of the street had changed. Cars and vans rolled through the crowd, in the wake of the jeeps. Their occupants waved out of the windows. Buses and bicycles, too, joined the parade, and also a solitary tank – ungainly, the barrel of its gun quizzical as the antenna of an insect. I wondered what had happened to the tanks I had seen passing in the night, around which vital locations they had been positioned.
Vehicles and people both were festooned with banana leaves – symbol of rejoicing and fertility, I later learned. I found myself recalling one of those Green Man pubs I saw on a trip to England, the face itself a wreath of vegetation, swinging on the sign in the wind. Then my attention was suddenly drawn by a group of young men ripping down an Obote poster from one of the colonnades.
‘Obote afude!’ they cried, stamping on the shreds of paper.
Obote is dead. (Not true, I discovered later. In fact, returning from the Commonwealth Conference in Singapore, Obote had diverted to Kenya, where he had received short shrift from Vice-President Moi, and from there fallen into the consoling arms of President Nyerere of Tanzania.)
And then I saw another group of young men, carrying burning images of Obote on spikes, and smashing to the ground melons painted with his face. It was more comical than sinister – though I suppose there are ways in which those two things can be one and the same.
I decided, after some thought, to go down into it all. After all, whatever was going on in this godforsaken place, I still had to present my credentials at the Ministry. I wondered whether I ought to report to the British Embassy, too, just to be on the safe side.
So down I went, pleased with my rare flash of courage. Outside, the mob surged around me, retiring and returning like a spring tide. There were soldiers everywhere by now, shabby-looking in peak caps set askew and ill-fitting camouflage. Ahead of me, I saw, the tarmac had been churned up by the passage of the tank. I walked on, stepping from side to side to avoid the crowd. I passed the window of a clothing store with a brightly painted sign: ‘Khan Fashions’. Across the street, one of the women in a dress with multiple images of Obote’s face on it was suddenly surrounded by the same young men who had earlier pulled down the poster. Jeering and chanting, they thrust her down on to the kerb. Her head hit the concrete with a sharp crack.
I turned away, scared and not wanting to get involved. The proprietor of the clothing shop, an Asian, was rolling down the steel blinds in front of his display of bolts of cloth and mannequins draped with saris. He turned briefly towards me as he ducked under the blinds, shaking his head at once despairingly and apologetically – as if explaining both that he couldn’t let me in and that he, too, was nothing to do with all this – and then slammed the door.
I carried on walking through the crowd. A little way along was a small shack with a stripy canvas roof, where an old woman was selling fizzy drinks out of a cool-box. The awning bore the legend ‘Shongololo Bar and Eating House’ and then below: ‘Coca-Cola: the Real Thing’. I ordered a Coke and sat down at a rickety table, glad to be out of the crush. There was a brazier in a corner, where bits of chicken on wooden skewers were hissing over the coals.
Nearby, at another table, two men, two citizens of Kampala, were talking animatedly. One was a big, greying elephant of a man, wearing a safari shirt, the other long-legged and bespectacled. Very tall, he looked donnish, or like one of those marabou storks. I listened to their conversation, pretending to be distracted by the cavalcade passing by outside.
‘Ever since the UPC conference, I knew this would happen. They are saying now it was Amin Dada’s bullet which smashed the cheek of Obote that other time. But I have also heard that Amin took flight over a barbed-wire fence when the shot rang out, and was telling Obote that he was fearing an attempt on his own life.’
‘Well, from then all the time Obote has been chasing him. But he could not catch him because Dada runs too fast. You know he was, in the white man’s army, the champion of sprinters. He is fast as a cheetah.’
‘He boxed with the whites also, and played in their front line for rugby, and the white soldiers who were playing, they hit him on the head with a hammer before the outing, many many times, to make him go faster still. They must have been nothing more than animals, those people.’
‘Maybe things will work out now. I hope so. You know that when Dada went on the Hadj to Mecca, people were saying that he would be put in gaol when he came back.’
‘Mecca is a great thing in this affair. It is because Dada is a Moslem man that the favour of Obote fell no longer upon him, and because he is a Kakwa man, and not of t
he Acholi or Langi tribe like Obote’s fellows.’
‘And because Obote is a left-wing man and Dada is a right-wing man. The wazungu in Europe and the United States – of this fact I am sure – they must have blessed this movement today, for fear that we should become like the Chinese bandits of Dar es Salaam and Maputo.’
‘And for us Baganda people this can only be good, for Dada will surely bring back our king. It was Obote’s orders, for certain, that sent Dada bombing to the palace and sent the Kabaka to England. Kabaka Yekka!’
‘Kabaka Yekka!’
They got up to leave, exchanging some words with the old woman and then going out into the street. Swiftly finishing my Coke, I stood up and went after them, to ask for directions.
‘Sir, it is not wise for you to be in this place,’ the man in the safari shirt said, with concern. ‘It is wiser for you to return to your lodgings, there are many things happening here in Kampala today.’
‘I’m on government business, I have to get to the Ministry of Health.’ The crowd jostled me as I spoke.
‘But, sir, the government has changed,’ protested the other. ‘The soldiers, they are saying that wazungu must return to their homes. I have heard some missionaries, several of the White Fathers order, got shot at the airport. I am afraid that some of these army men can be very cruel.’
‘I really do have to get to the ministry,’ I said, anxiously. ‘And I need to go to the British Embassy as well.’
‘The Ministry is on Kimathi, near the Neeta cinema just down there, the Embassy on Parliament Avenue, which is farther, first you must …’
I repeated their directions to myself as I pushed through the mob. Having passed the cinema, outside which gaudy posters were advertising a Hindi film, I eventually reached my destination – a grim block with an empty car-park. The askari at the gate, towering over me in his brown uniform, asked me what I was about. I said I had to see Mr Wasswa, the Minister. He looked at me suspiciously through bloodshot eyes, then shrugged and let me pass.