Abyssinian Chronicles (53 page)

She was not wrong. After her twelfth child, Padlock had given up even the little sex she used to have, and felt that she was better than all the people around who smeared themselves with devil snot. Secure inside the armor of die-hard Catholicism, she climbed up onto a pedestal, from which she looked down on those wallowing in sins of the flesh. Now firmly installed on her puritanical throne, she felt it was her duty to judge the sinners in the hope that they would cling to the tentacles of her verdict and personal example and pull themselves up from the cesspit of their doomed lives. As Kasawo retold her woeful tale, divulging details of her ensnarement, violation and abandonment; as she recounted her struggle to get up and crawl out of the dungeon
of defilement; as she gave details of how she lay half-dead in the path, Padlock felt sublime delight coursing through her. At her feet lay the body of a sinner stripped naked, crawling out of the sty of sin into the path of salvation.

“Sister, why do you persist in sin? Why don’t you heed God’s warnings to our family?

“God began by sending you your first man, Pangaman, sweetening his lugubrious evil character and making him say sweet things in your naive ears. This man inflated your little ego and led you onto the bumpy path of rebellion and self-destruction. You rebelled against our parents. You drank alcohol. You became unruly. You flaunted the clothes he ensnared you with. You bragged about the sexual sins you committed with him.

“Despite all that, God did not abandon you: He gave you another chance, but you ignored Him. You went on and had other men, sinned as never before, and completely forgot Him. You built a new life for yourself, disowned Pangaman’s son, acquired a new name and lived in safety. To make sure that Pangaman would not pursue you, you befriended Amin’s soldiers and created an artificial security wall around you. It worked as long as God allowed it to stand. God let you walk unmolested through ranks of killers, rapers and robbers, and you felt inviolable. God gave you access to goods and money, and you felt ten feet tall. You watched as women cried and lived in fear of Amin’s henchmen. You wondered why they did not wise up and befriend soldiers to protect them and punish anybody who touched them. God gave you another chance: He spared you the filthy hands of Amin’s henchmen but put the sting in the tail of liberation. He sent you the seven brothers. He struck you with the very stick you thought you could not live without. He drenched you with the very waters you believed to be the elixir of life. He struck you down and let strange men piss down your throat. You now retch at the mere thought of it, why? You pissed down God’s throat too and wiped your bottom on His plans for you. The violation was the last sign, the last warning before the death of the firstborn. There will be no more locusts and no more storms and no more violators. This is your last chance to repent and turn to God.”

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 liberators 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.