Out of frustration, Kasawo asked her sister what she had done about Nakibuka.
Padlock winced for a split second, then bounced back. She had committed that whore into God’s hands. Nakibuka too would get her warnings and her just punishment for defecating on holy matrimony. Everybody got amply warned, Lwandeka too. Up to the time of her arrest, she believed that she was Babylon: big, important, impregnable. God sent Amin’s henchmen to wake her up from the complacency of sin. God would not hesitate to do the same thing again if she refused to change. She knew the rules from the start: a woman who had carnal knowledge of more than one man was a whore, and whores who don’t repent in time get stoned to death.
Kasawo was in tears now. Padlock smelled victory and pressed her advantage.
“You are moaning about your violation because of your apostasy. You are crying about how Amin did this and did that, and didn’t do this and that, and shouldn’t have acted this or that way. A nation of moaners and whiners. A nation of foolish, ungodly people who cry when God raises His big stick, Idi Amin, to hit evil, disobedience, greed, selfishness and vice out of its fibers in preparation for justice, virtue and salvation. Just like you, this nation did not heed the voice of the prophets and the warnings from God’s mouth.
“The white man, thinking that he was God, came, subjugated the land, imposed his laws and way of life on the people, and sat back to relax and enjoy the fruits of his iniquity. He had Indian assistants to help him milk the resources of the nation. Together they shared the milk and honey God gave this nation. They made laws to protect themselves from the wrath of the people. They built bigger and bigger castles. They built higher and higher monuments. They amassed deadlier and deadlier weapons. They flaunted their political, economic and social power. Until God decided that enough was enough. He stirred the formerly docile people. He turned the white man’s black collaborators into his worst enemies. He cut the white man with his own sword. He crushed his huge empire in His fist. White men started looking over their shoulders as they drove through the city, as they walked their dogs, as they went to their godless temples. The white man was no longer absolute master. The white man was no longer in control. The white man had been defeated by Jesus’ words: he who gets much will have much demanded of him. He finally turned tail and absconded like a thief in the night.
“The Indian, imprisoned in his greed, did not heed God’s warning. In 1971, God raised a new sword, flashing with a new wrath. A year later, the Indian was bleeding, whimpering, wallowing in his sorrows. God took away his home, his security, his peace of mind. God turned his former ally, the white man, against him. Suddenly nobody wanted him. He was kicked from border to border like a dirty ball. The black man rejoiced: God had judged in his favor. Instead of learning a lesson and turning to God, the black man took everything for granted. He took over the booty left by the Indians. Muslims and Christians took to eating, drinking, fornicating and indulging the flesh like the white man and the Indian before them. Castles built on sand never survive big storms. The house built on godlessness was shaken by internal storms, and by the wrath of God’s sword, Idi Amin, and it fell on its occupants. From within the ruins, people cried out for salvation, and God heard them. In 1979, the sword was dislodged. But as soon as the sword stopped flashing, the people reverted to their old ways. The nation had not repented or learned from the past. Kasawo, you and the nation have not learned and have not repented and will once again be put to the test.
“Don’t cry, Kasawo; don’t cry, nation. God tests those He loves the most. Look back and you will see that St. Bartholomew was skinned alive, St. Lawrence grilled, St. John boiled in oil, St. Erasmus disembowelled, the Uganda Martyrs wrapped in reeds and burned alive. All of them were God’s beloved, yet He did not spare them. Today’s people act as though they were the first and will be the last to taste the bitter chalice of God’s test. Why don’t you, Kasawo, and all of those whiners out there look at the Holy Land, a land I walked with my humble feet and touched with my humble fingers? I found it in flames, and I left it aflame. During Jesus’ time, the stones groaned and wailed under the feet of Roman soldiers and the air trembled with the deadly clangor of Roman swords. Nowadays, the ways and byways of the Holy Land lament under the steel soles of modern soldiery. The Holy Land is, true to history, still a battleground in many ways. Did God test this nation more than the birthplace of His only son?
“Kasawo, the Lord rewards His own. He rewarded me. He revealed His glory to me in St. Peter’s Basilica. I felt the great walls quake with holy fever. At consecration, I saw chains of white doves dropping from the golden window behind the altar and collecting round the altar itself. I saw the papal chalice and the candles melt and flow in golden rivers down to the feet of the altar. God showed me all these wonders so that you can believe and repent and give up Devil worship. I am your last warning, Kasawo. There will be no more storms, no more violators, no more verbal warnings.
“God saves, God leaves no prayer unanswered,” Padlock said, making her sister believe she was experiencing a trance of sorts.
Kasawo felt something akin to disgust, pity and reluctant admiration. Her sister was so convinced of her righteousness that Kasawo, despite her skepticism, could not dismiss it as mere madness or delusion. Padlock seemed so attuned to the divine that she had lost contact with mere mortals. Kasawo had not come to be converted, and her sister’s conviction only served to convince her that she was on the right path. She would always be a God/Devil worshipper. The combination worked for her, as Catholicism did for Padlock. All the niggling doubts and guilt she felt were gone, buried at the feet of Padlock’s fanatical faith. She could never see the world in terms of black and white. The shades of gray she had negotiated from the beginning felt more real than ever. She had gone to the depths of hell and was now convinced that the worst was over.
Kasawo had always found Catholic dogma both abstract and deficient, unable to stand on its own in the real world. Catholicism did not provide practical ways to confront evil, and its dismissal of witchcraft was too complacent in its essence. As a businesswoman, she could never afford to be complacent about evil. The business community was infested with ruthless Devil worshippers and practitioners of the worst witchcraft. In business, luck was a holy sacrament which was sought both in the grandest cathedrals and in the dimmest witch houses. Kasawo consulted witch doctors, burned mysterious herbs on hot coals and mouthed incantations. On Sunday, she went to church, because it was good for her image and also because she had never managed to dismiss Catholicism as a total hoax. She felt comfortable with keeping a leg in both worlds, because deep down she knew that God and the Devil were two sides of the same coin, and she wanted to play it safe.
There was another side to it. In her desperation, Kasawo had visited her parish priest soon after the violation, wanting some neutral party to talk to. The good man had advised her to commend the rapists into God’s hands, and to hate the sin but not the sinners. Such complacency had left her feeling betrayed and more determined than ever to go to a witch doctor, who would assess the possibilities for revenge and purification. Kasawo was itching to get it over with and to avoid suffering for years as she had after the Pangaman escape. Now, as she looked at her sister, she was sure that if she had relied on her and on her parish priest in her darkest moments, she would have ended up raving mad.
Kasawo felt asphyxiated, as though her sister’s house were a sealed box. She felt the need to take a walk and never come back. She looked at her watch. She was glad that she was leaving early the following morning.
The Kasawo that came to visit Aunt Lwandeka and me, two days after re-enactment therapy, was not my picture of somebody who had been gang-raped. She was brimming with confidence and energy, and talked almost non-stop. It was evident that her days of self-pity were over. Her ordeal seemed to be just one more hurdle she had cleared. She talked a lot about politics, expressing her skepticism over the new coalition government. She said that she was very happy the libera
tors were being sent back home to Tanzania.
As she talked I kept thinking about all those men on top of her, and I wondered at how resilient she was to bounce back so quickly. I kept thinking about how African women were Olympic-medalist camouflagers of pain: my mind was filled with twenty-minute pissings, drop by drop, through infibulated holes by women in the Horn of Clitoris- and Labialessness. I watched her closely to see if she was just putting on a show for us. But halfway through her four-day visit, I was convinced that it was for real. The Vicar General had performed wonders for her.
I knew the man they called the Vicar General. Nobody called him by his real name. He was given that title because he was one of the few Catholic witch doctors, the majority being Muslim. He first caught my attention when I came to live with Aunt Lwandeka. At the time, I thought he was the tall, dark man who had threatened to damage her with a knife and a snake. Later the man reminded me of a Catholic parish priest. He had a lot of land, a new car, and lived in a huge house on a nearby hill. He knew many influential people. He had a big practice and had that pompous air of conceited priests. I felt a sneaking admiration for him for posing a direct challenge to the Catholic Church and for pointing out to them that, despite being in business for the last one hundred years, their teachings had left a big, unaddressed hole in many people’s lives.
If Kasawo was any example to go by, people were cured by what they believed in. The psychology behind the Vicar’s therapy was that those who came expecting pain got painful treatment, and those who came expecting sweet words, blood sacrifices, incantations or cuddles got exactly that. He had such wide experience that as soon as a client started talking, he knew what would work for them.
Kasawo had arrived at the famous man’s headquarters feeling special and anticipating immediate attention. She felt she was the big man’s special prize, because she had just rejected her sister’s Catholicism and opted firmly for him. She also had the feeling that she was the only champion survivor of a vicious gang rape to arrive at the headquarters that day. She expected to find about a dozen people waiting in line. She knew that by using her trader’s tongue, she would quickly get the attention she felt she deserved.
It came as a shock to Aunt Kasawo to realize that she had greatly overestimated herself. She arrived at around ten o’clock to find a crowd whose size reminded her of her primary school days. If all these people had not come from nearby, then some must have arrived when it was still dark. She thought that some might even have spent the night waiting in line. The long lines strangely reminded her of the sick, the blind, the deaf and the infirm who travelled long distances to go and meet Jesus in the hope of a miracle cure. The place had the ambience of a school compound: there was the main building, a registration office, a dispensary, dormitories, a kiosk, playing spaces for children, clotheslines, water taps, lines of toilets and of course the many assistants keeping order. This was the most pompous and most organized witch doctor Kasawo had ever seen. She was awed by the thought that all these people had come to meet only one person. She felt proud, in a way, because this man had rescued the business from dirty little places run by dirty old men and shrivelled old women and elevated it to the realm of modernity.
The quarter-kilometer walk up the hill had left Kasawo sweating. The wet-look grease in her hair was trickling down her head, and she kept wiping it off her neck with a large handkerchief. She kept looking at the many well-dressed women, who far outnumbered the men. It struck her once again that if women abandoned the business, witch doctors would run out of work.
She was annoyed that there were so many people ahead of her. She was irritated by the bawling children and by the arrogant airs pulled by some of the visiting women. She could tell the die-hards from the beginners by their indifference. The first-timers looked around nervously to make sure that nobody they knew could see them from the road. The discomfort they felt about being here also came out in the way they shifted uneasily, coughed or blinked as though their bodies were in open rebellion.
Quite a few of these people were supposed to be in a hospital, but they were awaiting clearance from the Vicar General of the Devil’s Diocese. Western medicine had been around for more than a hundred years, but many people trusted their witch doctors more than they did medical doctors. Kasawo could understand their reaction. There were many greedy medical doctors who milked people’s money without telling them the truth. It was a question of trust. In her case, though, she knew exactly when to consult medical doctors. A little education is not too bad, after all, she thought sourly.
From her experience, Kasawo knew that half the people here had not come to be relieved of physical ailments; they were here in pursuit of luck, success, revenge, love, power, favor and divination. There were housewives who wanted love potions to make their husbands love them more than other women; and some in search of evil magic to cause car accidents, illness or other disasters to their competition. There were barren women desperately searching for babies after combing every church and hospital for help, and fecund women who wanted more children in order to ensure their position in the home. There were mad men and women tormented by “voices” which told them to walk naked, to attack people, to sit in fire, to climb roofs or to talk to themselves; and men and women who wanted to drive somebody they hated mad. There were people with psychosomatic and psychological ailments, and others with migraines, cancers, swollen legs and broken limbs. There were people in search of themselves who needed the big man’s magic touch to peel away layers of self-delusion, self-pity and old pain before moving on to a better life. Last but not least were those who had lost loved ones in the recent past to deep forests, swollen rivers, dank dungeons and mass graves. They wanted to locate the remains, lay wandering spirits to rest with a proper funeral and, where possible, make the killers pay.
Kasawo sympathized with this group, because all the killers had fled or were in hiding, and no one had been brought to justice.
As Kasawo sat, patiently watching all these people, she wondered whether this was not a nation of gullible moaners and corrupt mythmakers. The Vicar of the Devil was certainly a mythmaker, an enigma, but Kasawo did not agree with her sister that this was a nation of moaners. The pain was real. It was just a nation in search of proper leadership. She too needed guidance from time to time. She wondered whether her belief in enigmatic characters was not a nostalgic search for another man, a resurrection of the Pangaman of her pre-elopement days, the Pangaman who took charge of every aspect of her life. The nation, she felt, was in need not of repentance but of proper stocktaking and action. She personally fantasized about a good man to grow old with, somebody to take care of her. She could not help thinking that after the purification rites it would be that much easier to find him.
Kasawo waited for half a day. By the time her turn came and she passed through the polished wooden door of the consultation room, to be immersed in the crisp redness of the new bark cloths covering the roof, the walls and the floor, she was trembling with nervous irritation. Her center had been hollowed by fatigue. The dry woody smell coming off the bark cloth made her feel drowsy. The man in front of her looked bigger and more imperious. His huge eyes, guarded by hard-bristled caterpillar eyebrows, made her more restless. The wide round nostrils made her believe she was looking down a double-barrelled abyss. The woody smell made her fear that she was being chloroformed. This man was a new force, a juggernaut that fed on dirty old witch doctors and would not stop before engulfing all their customers. This man with his enormous wealth and imposing personality inspired instant faith. Kasawo felt like an old disciple.
“Give me all the details.” The words dropped from his despotic lips like heavy gongs whose reverberations were accentuated by the red darkness they were uttered in. Kasawo was grateful for the darkness: it made her feel less self-conscious. Unlike the time she went to see her parish priest, for the Vicar she did not reduce the number of her attackers by four. Kasawo told the man everything she remembered and even felt like ad
ding elements from her imagination. At first it felt strange to hear herself in the darkness; then she got used to it. By the time she came to the end, words were flowing of their own accord. Her anxiety doubled during the subsequent silence. Her heart raced madly as she waited in the darkness for the big man’s verdict. He grunted and snorted and finally said that everything would be all right. The relief she felt was phenomenal.
Kasawo was sent to the dormitories, which turned out to be long buildings with either single or double rooms. There was a small shop selling soap, razor blades, bandages, cigarettes, salt, maize flour, tea leaves and other items necessary during a stay. Behind the kiosk, one could get cooked food, tea and porridge. The thought of porridge made Kasawo’s stomach turn. She hurried to her room.
There was a spring bed, a cupboard, a basin and a cement floor to rest her feet on as she contemplated the cost of all this. The Vicar was one of the few modern witch doctors who gave credit, because clients could not contemplate cheating them. Kasawo felt that the man deserved every cent he got: she had been here for only half a day, but she was already feeling better. As she lay on the bed waiting for night to fall, she wondered whether this was not a mental asylum where patients checked in whenever the burdens of the past and the present became too much to bear. She sat up in one fluid movement: the thought that her rape could be the figment of a diseased mind horrified her. No, no, no. It wasn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t, she said out loud. She lay back slowly, happy that she was not mad. She thought about a boy she had seen that day. He had been brought in fastened with ropes. His father said he was possessed by spirits. She remembered the boy’s blank eyes, so fathomless yet so shallow, and the way he fought when they untied him. It took three men to hold him before the Vicar came. She remembered the Vicar’s taking him by the hand and saying a few words to him. She remembered how he stroked the sick boy and led him inside. The power, the tenderness, the confidence, the many sides of the Vicar kept Kasawo thinking for a long time.
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 41