Abyssinian Chronicles (55 page)

The Kasawo that rose from her knees was a woman full of a fresh
fire and a blazing, peppery zeal. She dominated all conversation during her visit to us. Aunt Lwandeka looked cowed by her. Kasawo was not my favorite political analyst, but I agreed with her that the departure of the Tanzanians was good for all parties. She swore that the exiled dictator Obote was about to return. This greatly disturbed me, for all along I had been holding that as an abstract possibility. Aunt Lwandeka did not like the news either. It made her sacrifices in fighting Amin look futile. She angrily responded with the view that a guerrilla war would break out as a result.

“Governments are there to fight guerrillas,” Kasawo said smugly. I kept thinking about those words long after her departure.

Within a few months, most roadblocks were gone and most Tanzanians were back home. A new army was being formed. The curfew now started at eleven o’clock and ended at five in the morning. There was much talk about elections, democracy and development: the magic trinity.

I was feeling inviolable once more. I had survived the dark days without a body scratch. I was going to the university to study law. I never bothered the few female liberators who were manning the last of the roadblocks. They did not seem to notice me either. I kept slipping past them as though by magic. Within three weeks they would be gone, I had heard on the news. Every other evening, I visited a friend, a fellow student who was living on his own. We enjoyed weighty discussions, especially about politics and women and power. Sometimes I took him a little liquor, which loosened his tongue, and he talked as if the world were coming to an end. We both felt that we could change the world. We talked as though we were in parliament or in some national forum where our words turned into law.

One evening, I was stopped by a voice emanating from the front of an old factory building where surprise roadblocks were sometimes staged. There had been no roadblocks there or in the suburb as a whole for the last five days. I stopped in my tracks and saw two bricks on the shoulder of the road. Sometimes they used a car tire or an oil drum, anything. I was very apprehensive: these people could be up to no good at this hour. To make matters worse, I had neither money nor a watch to bribe them with. Three uniformed women came toward me with rifles casually held, muzzles down. Each rifle had three magazines
held together with rubber bands; each woman had ninety bullets with her. What I saw next made my lower lip fall: I thought I recognized the large girl as one from Ndere Primary School whom I had told that she would birth a limbless creature.… It seemed logical that she had joined the army to avoid the risk of having such a child. When had she crossed the border to join the guerrillas? When had she recognized me? Had she been stalking me? How long had she waited for this moment? How many men had she shot in my stead? I could not tear my eyes from her. I wanted to make sure that it was her. I tried to look under her cap. Had she changed so little over the years?

I was given little chance to complete my investigations. The Infernal Trinity mistook my questioning look for ogling. But who in their right senses would dare ogle three women armed with two hundred and seventy high-velocity bullets? I was accused of disrespect, disregard for military procedure, subversive activity and more. I was dazed by a sense of impending doom. Shtudent? Yes. Amin shtudent, he-he-heee. In the meantime, I looked around for a drunkard, any passerby, who could distract the Trinity with his arrival. This was the road that had eaten the northerners: How come it was so dead now? I was ordered to produce my identity card. I had never been asked to show my card at any roadblock before, and I wasn’t carrying it. I explained my predicament and volunteered to take them home if they deemed it necessary.

“You sow uss to do worrk?” one who had so far said nothing burst out. I turned to address her. At that moment, a whooshing sound and a kaleidoscope of hellish colors exploded. I felt my knees go. In fact, by then I was already on the ground, my back in the gravel. I had not been knocked down like this in years. I looked groggily at the night sky. I could hardly move. I wasn’t feeling any pain except for a heavy, dull pulse in my head. The women looked very big from where I was. I was vaguely aware of how afraid I was of getting disfigured by the muzzles or the butts of those rifles.

I was half-dragged, half-carried into the old factory. I tried to think about my first day at the seminary and the jerk-offs in the middle of the night. I tried to think about my campaigns against Fr. Mindi and Fr. Lageau, and the way the night watchman had surprised me. I remembered the two corpses Cane had shown us. Grandpa had lain like this, I thought, looking at those terrible muzzles and large-toothed
boots. I was slapped a few times into a reasonable wakefulness. At about the same time, the air was invaded by the mustiness of dirty underwear and dirty bodies. Pigs, I thought. No. Hyenas. When had these hyenas had their last proper bath? A week, a fortnight, a month ago? I kept my mind on the worst possible scenarios just to get through the ordeal and not to vomit into their genitalia. I kept thinking that these women had raped other men before. I was sure the men had kept quiet about it. I was also going to keep my mouth shut. This was a secret never to tell, even inside a torture chamber. In the meantime, I collected some grim statistics: the ordeal lasted approximately twenty minutes before I was thrown out of the building. My face got ridden two hundred and twenty times. My penis got pulled very roughly some forty times. My balls were kneaded very violently twenty times. My skin got ripped thirty times. I ejaculated once. I ended up with a broken nose and a lump on the temple. I nursed sore ribs for a fortnight.

I spent that fateful night at my friend’s house. The next morning, I told Aunt Lwandeka that I had been attacked by thieves. A nation of moaners? No, I never moaned. It could have been worse, I kept saying. How ironic that Kasawo had left not long ago! For a day or so, I kept thinking that Kasawo had brought her bad luck to our house and left it on my shoulders. Nonsense. The only pattern I could discern was that I had become another statistic in our family history. I too had been violated, and my tormentors had escaped unscathed.

A week after the attack, roadblocks were removed from all roads.

In the space of a year, we had three caretaker governments, the first lasting just over two months. The exiled dictator returned. He contested and won the elections. There was disagreement among the foreign observers as to whether the elections had been rigged. The innocents, who believed that the observers had the power to tell one political tree to plant itself in the sea and one political hill to move to another location, got slaughtered. Amin had proved such innocence to be fatal; the hopefuls should have known better. Guerrilla war broke out. Aunt Lwandeka’s National Reform Movement was among the first fighting groups to join.

The hurricane-lamp-and-moths syndrome had started all over again: all that luminescence, all that death.

T
HE FIRST TIME
I stood at the top of Makerere University Hill, with Mulago Hospital reclining in front of me and two cathedrals and a mosque piercing the deep blue horizon in the background, Grandpa’s old lawyerly dreams boiled inside me. I felt I had stepped onto holy ground. Grandpa’s spirit seemed to have been transported, transformed and spread over this hill to drive a new generation of knowledge seekers to the limit. A son at university was the culmination of many a family’s dreams of a better future. I could feel general expectation rising from the ground, swelling like the city’s seven hills and willing every candidate to get in through the narrow gate of elitist education. The university’s main hall, breathing the supercilious airs of grandeur, intimated entry into a secluded fraternity. I could feel myself grow wings to fly into the rarefied ranks of those chosen to reach great heights. These were the eighties: the burdens of the seventies
were behind us, so it seemed. You felt that the worst was over and that shrewd individuals could at last stretch their arms and pluck the fruits of a progressive future. I surveyed the hill again. I waited for clues to my future with bated breath.

Makerere University had emerged from the seventies bearing the motley scars of a survivor: during the last decade, it had neither advanced nor expanded. The days when it was sacred ground were long gone, alive only in memories of alumni like my laconic literature teacher at the seminary. In his capacity as the chancellor, President Idi Amin had done his best to stamp his authority on the institution. On several occasions, the army was dispatched to quell campus riots and opposition. One vice chancellor, an Obote supporter, had not survived: he disappeared in the aftermath of the abortive 1972 invasion. Many lecturers had fled, and the dim economic prospects of the eighties had not enticed them back. Those who stayed saw their status and earnings plummet, the former eroded by the low esteem education suffered in the seventies, the latter by inflation. Now many lecturers held jobs outside the university in order to make ends meet. Scarcity of scholastic and other materials plagued the campus. A culture of corruption had set in at the top: political appointees did their best to enrich themselves while their benefactors still held the reins of power. But all these factors had not diminished the zeal with which students did their best to make the most of a bad situation.

By the time I joined this highest institution of learning, the pressure on its capacity was asphyxiating. The residential houses had swollen, burst and overflowed into the puny annexes where six students shared a room. Top A-levels alone did not guarantee one a place in the most coveted faculties. Over the years, competition had risen to a murderous level. Political influence and bribery moved things faster, but you had to know whom to contact, and that did not always guarantee positive results either. Like the majority of hopefuls, I could only count on the gods and on the selection committee’s favor. Both let me down.

The radio had summoned thousands of us to the campus, and we swarmed the main hall like locusts, perusing endless selection lists. My heart went to my mouth as my eyes combed the coveted Law List. Historical precedent paralyzed my limbs: the first lawyer in the family! It was not to be. My name was not on the list. There was, of course,
the lame recourse of the damned: appeal. It did not work: so many explanations, so many justifications, so many technicalities.

My first reaction was to consider giving up education altogether. And do what then? I was kidding myself. I had to keep sharpening my intellect. I was finally dumped in the social sciences section, that no-man’s-land between the real sciences and the humanities.

I was doomed to become a teacher. Like Serenity! And have to take rear-guard action to work my way into better jobs. I was disgusted with myself, with life, with everything. I knew one thing for sure: I was not going to be a committed teacher. I was going to be a sort of nanny for secondary school children. I would need a lousy day school with a laissez-faire policy. There were quite a few of those around the city. The government encouraged the opening of day secondary schools in order to give more primary school leavers the opportunity to pursue secondary education near their homes. Gone were the days when secondary education was chiefly a boarding school affair. I already had a school in mind.

Having set my priorities, I concentrated on making money and fighting my private wars. I still had the legacy of the Infernal Trinity to deal with. As a non-resident student, popping in only for lectures and use of the library, I had both time and freedom. Above all, education was not a hard course, at least not for me. I went to the campus as little as possible. I kept out of campus politics and wrangles over cramped accommodation, bad food, books and the excesses of a big student body.

The Obote II regime wasn’t having things its way. The party and its leader had achieved a first by returning to office by the ballot box after an ouster, but it was a tainted victory whose genuineness was questioned by many sections of society. The same people who were terrorizing the new government now sympathized with the guerrillas. At the time the guerrillas went to the bush, there was a famine in northern Uganda. World Food Programme and Red Cross trucks trekked north via the famous road. I saw them going in flag-waving convoys. The government did its best to keep news of the famine low-key, a situation helped by the activities of the guerrillas in the south.

The day belonged to the government and the army, the night to the guerrillas and their sympathizers. At night, the guerrillas moved
from their hiding places and attacked army barracks, detachments and roadblocks, and on occasion, police stations too. The aim was to capture arms and other supplies. Soldiers lived in perpetual fear of attack and ambush. The army, composed mainly of northerners and easterners courtesy of Obote II government policy, found itself fighting in strange and hostile circumstances. The troops were drawn into lethal campaigns in ominous valleys and on isolated hills, in gigantic swamps, endless grasslands and dank forests, and they had a hard time hitting mobile targets. The mathematical configuration of death, the triangle, which had first appeared in 1978, returned to haunt us. Ours was now called the Luwero Triangle, hundreds of square kilometers of land locked between the three lakes: Victoria in the south, Kyoga in the north and Albert in the far west. The core of the Triangle was a sparsely populated grassland area of massive papyrus swamps, huge marshes and thick forests. The uncanny quality of this triangle was that it contracted and expanded at will as guerrillas moved from place to place attacking or fleeing government forces. This magical quality was helped by the fact that the Triangle was near enough to the heartland, allowing easy access to the city, the seat of government and the big army barracks, while also offering a gateway to both northern and western Uganda. Thus, sometimes the Triangle stretched precariously to within a few kilometers of the city center, and sometimes it contracted devilishly to its wet core, hundreds of kilometers away. The village locked between Mpande Hill and Ndere Hill was among the many areas on the periphery of the notorious Triangle.