by Giles Foden
He pointed. Gugu crept over to look.
‘This is Arua. Aru is prison in Lugbara. When the Germans were fighting you in the war, there was a prison camp here and when the African people went there to be guards they would say they were aru-a. In the prison. You see?
‘And here is Gulu, where the river makes the sound gulu-gulu as it passes. Then the Nile comes to Jinja. Traders in bark cloth crossed over to Busoga there and when they missed the last canoe (they had to go before nightfall because of the hippos), they would camp on the stone and say to their wives that they had to spend the night ku jinja, on the rock.
‘Then to the lake. Entebbe is where you came on the aeroplane. It is the headquarters of the lungfish clan and for some reason the British made it their headquarters also. It is the seat of government, for this’ – he stood up and pointed at his stool – ‘is called entebe in Luganda …
‘Kabarole. That is “watch and see” in Lunyoro, because the king built his palace on a hill there. We call double-decker buses kabandole, “watch-and-see-me”, for this very reason. At Kaliro the hunters would build a small fire on a hill to show they were safe. Their wives at home would say to each other, “Have you seen the fire?” And another would say, “Kaliro. We have seen it.”
‘Kumuli, that is from “small reed” because it was a place where letters were carried to by a runner, the paper put inside in a slit in the reed. Luwero, that signifies “slashing grass”.
‘And Makerere, noise of birds: karere, karere!’ He flapped his arms in the air.
Boniface, leaning against the doorpost, looked at me and shook his head, smiling.
‘Come, come, come here,’ said his father. He stood up, and took me by the arm over to the window, from where we had a fair view of the Ruwenzoris. The Malumbas’ windows, I noticed, had no bars.
‘You see the mountains. You see the mist. That is why Kasese is so called, which means morning.’
Then he rushed me back to the map. ‘Kumam, it is “went to the dance but did not get there”. Kololo, that is from a chief who went mad. He was put there in isolation. It means “the only one”. Muhavara is from “what shows the way” because we put a beacon there. Mbale is from King Omumbale. In the legends he would fly to that place from the Ssese islands in Lake Victoria and land on a tree there …’
‘Father you must leave Nicholas now,’ interrupted Boniface. ‘He cannot be wanting to know all this.’
‘Just a few more. It is very important that all people know our history. It has been hiding. So. See this one, Namagasali. When the Uganda Railway came there, the people were amazed at the train. They would go there and say, “Namusa gali.” That is, “I am greeting the train.” Semuliki: “river without fish”. When the white men came, we thought you would steal the fish, so that is the name we told you!’
He traced some blue on the map. ‘Nakiripiripirit. There is a lake there. When the wind blows, the water moves and so from this the name, which means “moving shining”.’
‘Shimmering,’ said Bonney loudly.
His father increased his own volume and velocity as if to compensate for the loss of face. ‘Mubende, there was a palace on a hill there. Very very steep. So when the king’s subjects came with heavy packs of gifts for him they would be on their knees. Thus, you see “kubendabenda”, this bend-down-double climbing. So, you see, even your English language has added to our store.’
‘What about Mbarara?’ I asked, smiling.
‘Oh, that is very boring. It is from the name of a green grass round here. Better is Koboko, Amin’s town. There is a hill there called kobuko, which the story says was blown by a mystery power from Maya, in Sudan. This strange force pushed it in space to Uganda and where it landed it killed all the people who were there before. For kobuko means in Kakwa the thing which smothers or covers you, stopping your breath. I tell you, Nicholas, all things I am telling you are real. Instance, maya means hill also in a Sudanese tongue …’
‘OK, OK, but this is more real than your crazy talk,’ said Mrs Malumba, bringing in a steaming bowl.
‘That smells delicious,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
‘It is matooke with goat-and-groundnut sauce,’ she replied.
We sat down and Mrs Malumba said grace. ‘God the Father bless this food which has been given to us by You, through Jesus Christ Our Lord.’
Amen, we all said. I watched the others to see how to scoop up the gluey mush with my hand. As we ate, we soon got to talking about tribes again: the bad-penny topic, black and white.
‘Why am I called a muzungu?’ My mouth was full, and the word came out scrambled, as if I didn’t properly know the name for what I was.
‘It is the same as before,’ said Mr Malumba. ‘Mu-zungu, except you say Wa-zungu for many people.’
‘But what does zungu mean?’
‘It’s just you European people, like the Asians are just the wahindi. Except that there is also kizunguzungu, which means dizzy. Only I don’t know which came first, muzungu or kizunguzungu. Or if they are connected. In any case, muzungu is what we christened you when you turned up. Only the tribes here have more complex names.’
‘And the big men in the Mercedes-Benz,’ shrilled Gugu, ‘at school we call them wa-benzi!’
We all laughed and then Mrs Malumba said, seriously, ‘Be careful what you say, boy. It could be bad for you in these times.’
Bonney, meanwhile, was looking despondent over his plate. I sensed that he wanted to show me off but also show off to me, and was irritated that others were taking centre stage.
Or maybe I was just imagining it. He put his oar in, anyway: ‘It’s not always tribes, though. Sometimes ba just means from, or a small collective unit, like the Abanabugerere means people who live in Bugerere. We don’t like to think about tribes now anyhow.’
‘When someone’s attacking you, you need to have a tribe. You need to stick together when the knives are out,’ said his father sternly.
‘You are not modern, Father. These old things, we do not need them now.’
‘You will see. When I went back to Kampala I saw all those Anyanya and Kakwa thugs Amin has brought down from the north to put into the police and the army. It is not good. Those people are not like us. Even their bodies are different. They are bony and look angry all the time. No wonder they cut so many people. Even they have brought some here, to the barracks.’
‘They are still people, Father, whatever tribe they belong to.’
They broke into Luganda to argue. I sat in silence, trying to deduce something from the ebb and flow of their words. Mrs Malumba smiled at me as she cleared up the plates, and then took them through. Gugu ran outside, the mesh door swinging behind him on its spring.
Irritated, Boniface changed the subject, I supposed, and the language, asking me if I could get him into a university in Britain. ‘I want to do postgraduate food science at Reading University,’ he said, ‘It is the best place. But I will need a scholarship. Then I can come back here and work for the World Bank.’
As I tortuously went into why there was not much I could do, Gugu saved me by coming back in. He was holding – by the tail – a chameleon. Mr Malumba got up and started shouting. It was apparently bad luck to injure or interfere with them. There was a brittle rustle as the reptile fell from the boy’s hand on to a straw mat. Ignoring his father, the kid got down on his knees and started poking at it.
Mr Malumba shook his head, and went off for his post-lunch nap. ‘Ah, Doctor Garrigan, never have children. I must go for my sleep now. It is very kind of you to have eaten with us.’
‘No, no,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘It’s been a pleasure. It’s been fascinating.’
When he had gone, Gugu said something to Bonney in Luganda, and flicked at the poor animal again.
Bonney replied in a cutting voice. The boy shrugged.
‘What did he say?’ I asked Bonney.
‘He wanted to know what is going to happen. The colours of the chameleon, people think th
ey are all the spirits of your ancestors passing by. It’s crazy – the idea is that you must not disturb them. The bagagga, the magic specialists in the villages, pretend that you can tell your own fate from the changes. Well, they tell it and you pay them.’
We looked at the piebald creature on the floor, motionless except for one moment when it lifted a front leg, like a dog holding up its paw to beg. But its lidded eye seemed oblivious to us, and it didn’t change colour for me, not once, whatever Gugu held next to it. Eventually, Bonney told Gugu to take it back outside.
I stayed quite late into the afternoon. We watched a kung-fu film on the television. It was fuzzy enough already – bad reception – and when the electricity current dipped, everything faded to grey. Walking back, I rehearsed Bruce Lee’s intermittent acrobatic manoeuvres in my head: lots of leaping about and crunching of bones, all in the cause of some complicated and improbable revenge. Hong Kong Phooey. Yet it was fun and, having seen it, I suddenly missed British television. Or perhaps I was really just missing Britain. Or Scotland, anyway. Home.
10
Another Sunday, the week before Amin’s visit. A page or two from my journal, which is in front of me as I scratch away, under these iron skies. My God, do not look so fiercely down upon me! I am too tired to redo it (so tired I nearly wrote, I am too tired to read it), but perhaps copying it verbatim will give a richer flavour of the place. It’s an argument. Anyway, here it is:
Church bells, and the sound of the women in the village pounding millet in a pestle and mortar. Thump thump thump. I have felt lonely all weekend and done nothing. There hasn’t been much to record, except that I saw a snake in the garden. No one ever said how boring Africa can be: just the slow sweat of time.
The veranda, the valley, me. The Bacwezi valley. Waziri says that the Bacwezi were a tribe who lived here long ago – around 1350, migrants from Ethiopia or Sudan. They lost all their cattle in a plague and were then wiped out themselves in an invasion by the Luo. The latter seem to be gone from here now, leaving the Ankole with some of the Bacwezi traditions: a drum of national unity – now lost, apparently – and a belief in cattle as the centre of life. They certainly do have hundreds of cattle, the longhorn type. There is even a concrete statue of one in the middle of the roundabout in town. So strong is the identification, in fact, that at four days old every boy-child, dressed in the soft, suede-like skin of a premature calf, is placed on the back of a cow and given a miniature bow-and-arrow with which to defend it.
As well as cows, the Bacwezi used to worship fig trees, and there is a sacred grove of them somewhere near here. Waziri says that the local people think it is full of ghosts, and that he’ll take me there some time. Then he tells me that the Bacwezi themselves had actually ousted the Batembuzi, who had ruled since 1100. Isuza was their last king, but he fell in love with a princess from the underworld. He followed her there and couldn’t find his way back. And yet it was his grandson, Ndahura – ‘the uprooter’ – who founded the Bacwezi. And now the Ankole claim that dynasty as their heritage; and there are still Bacwezi cultists around today, who scatter coins and cowrie shells in the soil beneath the holy trees.
I couldn’t get to grips with it. ‘So really, it’s all the same tribe?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘You’d be totally wrong if you thought that. And in fact, there are two sections of the Ankole, the Bairu and the Bahima, the one aristocrats, the one slaves …’
Or was it the other way round? So much for tribes.
My tin breakfast plate is on the table beside me, a spoon and the empty half-scoop of a pawpaw lying side by side upon it. A canoe and its paddle. I love the fruit here, but I crave a decent joint of meat. I’m still holding out against a cook-boy, which means I have to wander round the market in town once a week, haggling for produce. A trip to the butcher involves watching a fellow with a panga hack at a carcass hanging from a tree. Longhorn beef doesn’t taste like beef and the pork is too liable to tapeworms – which leaves scrawny arse of chicken or goat so tough it really needs to be chewed by Eskimos for a few months first. That’s how they soften their hides. The Nile perch is quite coarse, too, and quite far gone by the time it gets here from Lake Victoria. It’s best to curry it, Mrs M. says, but I don’t like curry.
Every now and then they kill a cow in the marketplace, roping in a soldier with a rifle to do the dirty deed. I saw this last week. He shot it through the neck. The poor dun creature standing there looking into the middle distance with mild interest. When the shot rang out it crumpled to the ground, looking amazingly human (all knees and elbows) as it did so. Like someone who has to sit down because they’ve been told some really bad news. Then they cut it up, with everyone crowding round, ready with banana leaves in which to wrap their piece.
So. Things go on. There is the view. The sun that shines. Banana plantations creeping up the hill. Their ranks of gleaming leaves going off into the distance. When I look at them, I think of the roofs of the housing schemes in Edinburgh. Here in front of me, there is the odd hut scattered about, but most people live in Mbarara and come out to tend their plots. These irregular squiggles and torn-off corners of produce – millet, cassava, maize, groundnuts – are shored up against erosion by plucky little terraces of red earth. Otherwise, when the big rains come, everything would slip down the hill: down to the marsh at the bottom of the valley, and that ditchy little spot of brown water where the Rwizi River wills itself into being from a confluence of tiny streams.
They’re not so tiny, actually, when the rains do come and throw into the gullies all of their thunderous, psycho-pompic, kitchen-sink performance. Like on my first night. The skies rattle and for anything between a few minutes and whole weeks, the land turns dark as death, barely visible. When it is over, it is as if something that needs to have been said, has been said – but you’re not sure if you believe it because the performance has been so over the top. Then the sun shines again and eagles and kites come down off the Ruwenzoris to hover for mice and bush-rats.
Recently, a bird of prey dropped something from its beak on to the lawn: I’m not sure if it was an eagle or a kite – or for that matter whether the creature I picked up by its tail was a mouse or a bush-rat. I swung it over the fence. Every now and then a troop of vervet monkeys shows up too (I heard some on the roof the other night, which frightened the life out of me) and there is a family of banded mongooses that dash around looking for snakes. They look like ferrets, except plumper, and rather beautifully striped with grey and brown. I hope they get that snake I saw.
Things are getting a bit out of hand on the garden front, but it’ll be a few years yet before it returns to the wild. The previous occupant of the bungalow – like Merrit, a Medical Officer from the colonial administration who had decided to ‘stay on’ – was a keen gardener. Steps from the veranda lead down into the overspilling flower-beds: frangipani, bird of paradise, elephant grass, roses, African marigolds – they grow like weeds here – succulent cacti, too, pagoda flower, prickly pear, poinsettia and shrimp plant.
Mrs M. has taken me round, showing me what they are, but they’re soon enough only words to me. Some of them are not indigenous, she told me proudly. ‘Old Saunders – he died in his sleep, you know – actually introduced species to the country, sending to Kew for packets of seeds.’
So that was how my ordinary life went. And then something happened: Amin came. They put up bunting – banana leaves – round the stadium that day. A Saturday. I went down there with Sara. We couldn’t see very much because of the crowds, except for his big helicopter coming down in the middle of the pitch.
There was a tremendous roar when he stepped up to the podium, the bulk of his large body hidden beneath traditional robes. This was the first time I actually saw him, and it was an impressive sight. He had this aura that is difficult to describe, and it had much more to do with the rhythms of his voice than the furs, hides and feathers of his head-dress.
‘It is astonishing he is so popular,�
�� Sara said. She was holding me by the arm, the swell of the crowd was pushing us so much.
‘I have come,’ Amin said into the microphone, ‘to talk to you about the god. Because it is he who has been helping you people in Mbarara to make yourselves the best citizens of Uganda. Yes, I am very proud of you.’
The crowd wailed with happiness.
‘But,’ Amin continued, ‘better worlds than this are possible. To make them happen, you must believe in the god very strongly. Even if you are Christian, Moslem, or whatever you are. Because his rule is a rule beyond what has happened, beyond all that you can think of. Just because you cannot think of him, or what it would be like to shake his hand, it does not mean that he is not there.’
‘Quite a philosopher,’ I said to Sara.
‘You think so?’ she said, seriously. ‘Don’t be fooled.’
‘You always take things literally,’ I teased her.
‘Who do you think made this world?’ shouted Amin. ‘Who do you think made me? It must be the god. That is why you must work very hard. If you do not, and the god wishes it, the sun will not rise tomorrow.’
‘They should try this back home,’ I said. ‘It would work wonders with the unemployment figures.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Sara said. I noticed that she was writing things down in a notebook.
‘So,’ Amin continued, ‘you must do your duty in the fields and the factories. You must be with the god for that reason. Now, let me say this. I have been receiving some complaints about the state of affairs in Uganda. Wananchi have been complaining about searches and seizures. Well, let me tell you, anything that is done in my name, it is the right thing. Any bad thing done, it is by those who are disobeying me. I cannot be everywhere at one time, I cannot make myself invisible.’
‘Why are you writing it down?’ I said to Sara.
‘Just out of interest,’ she said, looking up at me quickly. How could I have been so thick-headed, I wonder now, so impervious?