Abyssinian Chronicles (58 page)

On chosen Sundays, we would go to the Catholic cathedral and hear mass. Neither of us was that devout, but sometimes one got information about what was going on in the country, especially what the papers missed or just hinted at. The Catholic Church was still playing chief political critic of both the government and the guerrillas. We would have lunch at a decent restaurant and then go to an alfresco bar and sit and watch the people and the soldiers. She liked beer. By the fifth bottle,
she would start singing nursery rhymes and some of the songs her pupils sang in the end-of-term concerts. I enjoyed the show and the childhood it invoked. It seemed we were both looking for an anchor to steady us in these turbulent times.

At such moments, the war faded to the oblivion of the Triangle and its phantoms, suffering and wantonness. We were in our own small world, locked behind steel gates, allowing in those we wanted to see, barring the undesirables. Soaked in beer, we would tell stories that evaporated with the stupor and remained on the sheets where we made love. Lovemaking itself was an act of war, an expression of the tension ripping the country apart. By trying to create something new and beautiful, we were firing our weapons, opposing forces of evil and destruction, throwing a lifeline to something on the other side that had to be redeemed. By driving ourselves to the limit, we were steeling ourselves for battle, for all those confrontations ahead of us, and making sure that we would have the capacity to survive the most painful ordeals. We were both orphans, people from whom something dear had been robbed. The common bond drove us further into the search for fulfillment.

As I thrust deeper into the marshes of love and the triangle of life, I kept wondering where her child had passed through, because this was one super-tight woman, the tightest I was ever to encounter. Had she lied about the child and the marriage? Was she just another mythmaker and I her gullible victim? I knew almost immediately that even as I was savoring the splendors of my paradise, I was also witnessing the beginnings of my doom. This was one experience that would not be duplicated, one act that would be almost impossible to follow. My joy was bruised with sorrow, my happiness touched by fear. I had hit the sexual jackpot: if I lost this, I would only have memories to ruminate on. I savored the sweet torture of her excruciating contractions with unease. I felt that loss was inevitable. I could feel her slip away. Such marvellous things never lasted. If they did, they enslaved their owners and turned them into drooling fools. I had either to enslave her or to pass her on. One side of me wanted to chain her, to tie her on a leash, to saddle her with bells that would betray her every movement. One side wanted to set her free to go out into the world and inflame and torture and madden others with the bruising grip of her hidden treasures. I could see old men drooling and getting heart attacks on top of
her. I could see young men driven insane by her flame, getting rid of their wives and girlfriends and ending up bankrupt and alone. I could see men walking round and round, asking themselves where it had gone wrong, how and why they could not stop this pearl from diving back into the depths whence she had come. I loved it.

It would have been easy to ask Jo to move in with me, but I was into the torture games of letting her go and welcoming her back, watching her vanishing backside and embracing her when she returned. I was steeling myself for the loss, preparing the trap for other men to fall into. When she left, I kept thinking that she would never return. When she returned, with the smell of the school on her hair and the heat of passion in her veins, I kept wondering whether she would ever leave. I kept wondering how Husband was taking his loss of this woman or girl or phantom or whatever she was. In the midnight hour, when the bed or the trench or the ambush turned into a torture rack of lust, he must have pined for her. His lust for her must have turned into lust for blood. He must have embraced her in his dreams, but on waking up cold and alone, his head must have spun. I hoped we would never meet.

My time with Jo helped me gain insight into the ways other people conducted their love affairs. Had Grandpa not lived with Uncle Kawayida’s mother’s buckteeth? Had he not known that Serenity’s mother had fallen for another man? Had Serenity not accommodated his wife’s ways? Had Padlock not accommodated the fact that her husband was in love with her aunt? Was Aunt Lwandeka not in love with the mysterious brigadier, keeping his picture in her Good News Bible under the mattress? Didn’t they maintain trust in each other despite the distance and not hearing from each other for months? Wasn’t Uncle Kawayida in love with three sisters? Affairs of the heart had never been perfect; imperfection was part and parcel of the package. I was prepared for the worst. In the war to find and free myself, Jo was one big skirmish, not the final battle.

Midway into the decade, it was clear that there was a stalemate in the fighting. We would see army trucks, as indifferent as sealed coffins, carry their stiff, blank-eyed cargo into the Triangle. We would see dishevelled soldiers returning from their nightmare campaigns with the look of death in their eyes. We would see intelligence officers, walkie-talkies
sticking out, eyes red with fear, legs stiff with uncertainty, moving up and down our little town in a frenzied daze. There were rumors, corroborated by Aunt, that the guerrillas were about to start an urban campaign, focussing on the city. After many weeks, they attacked a big army barracks near the two cathedrals. They caused considerable damage, as the army, despite all outward show of vigilance, was caught unawares. In retaliation, the army picked up people from around the city and detained them and interrogated them and tortured them. The dragnet netted few, if any, real guerrillas.

This was when the running games, or Olympic Games, as wags called them, began. During office hours, a report would suddenly circulate that the guerrillas were in the city, and people would stream out of offices and businesses and dash to their cars or to the bus and taxi parks. The pandemonium would be heightened by rumormongers who claimed that even as they spoke, a few suburban towns had already fallen. I was once caught in the wave. People poured out of the filthy Owino Market, Kikuubo, Nakasero Hill and everywhere, and made the taxi park tremble with the noise of their cries and the stamping of their feet. I got knocked in the back and spun around, but luckily got pushed upright by those behind me. Everybody was clearing out. Supercilious snake charmers, trapped in their flaccid dignity, saw their boxes kicked into the air, the reptiles ground into the asphalt. Rat poison merchants saw their goods flying all over the place. Hawkers ran with cardboard boxes on their heads. Van drivers made incredible turns, cutting through the masses before the doors could be ripped from their hinges. Lost shoes, torn bags, shirt buttons, roast maize, white bread, were all ground into the asphalt as people ran from the invisible enemy.

Hordes of unemployed youths who paraded the bus and taxi parks quickly got the hang of the game. They would come to town ready to snatch bags and fun whenever possible. They would stand in little groups by the roadside and watch well-dressed women and men wobbling down the hills, blowing like cows chewing cud at the fireside. They concentrated on women who fled with high heels in their hands, burdened with vanity bags and sacks of clothing, tongues protruding out of parched mouths.

“Lady,” they would chime. “Are you a sprinter or a marathon runner?”

“She is a marathon runner.”

“How long have you been training for this race?”

“Every day, once, twice, thrice a week in bed?”

“Are you going to be the first Ugandan woman to win Olympic gold?”

“Take this, it is my lucky towel. It will help you come in first. I don’t really mind following you.”

Like many times before and after, false alarms set the games rolling. At the back of most people’s minds was the feeling that there was really nowhere to run, but that they had to keep moving. In the Triangle, people fled toward the city. In the city, people could only flee toward their homes. These panic alarms went on for a few months, till people began to question them. Mission accomplished, they finally disappeared as quietly as they had started.

It was during this time that the guerrillas were moving out of the Luwero Triangle to western Uganda, in the direction of Lake Albert. In the city, there were rumors that the guerrillas had given up and had cut a deal with the government. The army itself was confused: in the Triangle, the troops found only ghost towns and deserted villages loaded with the stench of the dead and the decay caused by aerial bombardment, mop-up operations and the elements. There was nobody to fight. The emptiness of their former hunting grounds was the last warning that they had lost both their prey and their grip on the situation. They had recurrent nightmares of getting ambushed and hit from the back. The eerie silence emphasized the fact that they had let “the bandits” escape to a place where they could hardly be reached. Already there were divisions in the army, and morale was dwindling rapidly. Many soldiers had not been paid for months and were tired of having to loot and kill in order to get money. The casualties—comrades who lay on their sickbeds knowing that somewhere in the Triangle their blown-off legs, arms, jaws, ears or balls were rotting—brought the desperation of the situation closer to those on the front line and those waiting to be dispatched to the war zone.

It was not long before the guerrillas started attacking and taking over big towns in both the west and the south. Mubende, Hoima, Masaka and Mbarara fell. The guerrillas set up a provisional government. The country was now cut in two. For some time, Aunt was left without anchor. She started brooding, wrapping her worries in few
words. She was very afraid that she might never see the brigadier again, for the possibility of a protracted confrontation with government forces looked imminent. She tried to look cheerful and hide her suffering. Then one day she told me that she was going to Masaka, deep in guerrilla territory. At this time it was still possible to go and return. Ostensibly, she was going to visit Uncle Kawayida. In reality, she was going to check on the brigadier. She was gone for a week. My fear was that she might get trapped on the other side. Government roadblocks were bad, but she survived them and came back. “It is peaceful on the other side. There is no shooting in the night. People leave their doors open. There is nothing to fear,” she said very excitedly. “As a matter of fact, I am going back.”

I was both alarmed and angry. I told her that it was sheer madness. How could she push her luck like that? “I have been doing it all my life.” Off she went. This time, however, the guerrillas denied her permission to leave Masaka. They did not want their secrets betrayed to government forces, voluntarily or otherwise. They were highly suspicious of anyone coming and going. Aunt pleaded that her children needed her badly, but they countered that they badly needed her to organize women in the liberated areas. The brigadier, however, made a plan for her to escape. She went by boat and landed at a port near the city. She had picked up a fever, but she was so relieved to be back with her children that she never complained about it or the hardships on the way.

There were upheavals in the army. A leading faction of the commanders wanted to negotiate with the guerrillas, end the fighting and form a coalition government. The smallest guerrilla groups, which had remained inside the Triangle on a knife’s edge, came out and handed over some guns and signed papers. The group in the west, half a country under its control, did not budge. There was a lot of political shadowboxing and jostling for power, which I ignored as I concentrated on Boom-boom Brewery and on Jo. Money was still coming in, and I could afford to seal myself off in my little cocoon.

The war that dislodged the Obote II government and buried the remnants of the army in both northern Uganda and southern Sudan took the same route as the one that had ousted Idi Amin. The guerrillas followed
Masaka Road. They pushed toward the city step by step, town by town. On many occasions, the army tried to use tanks to break through the advancing ranks and reoccupy the liberated areas, but to no avail. At best, they recaptured areas for a few weeks but were later driven out of them. Their hearts were no longer in it, and hardware alone never won a war.

Pressured by powerful army officers, the government asked for negotiations. A cease-fire was called; both government and guerrillas took turns violating it. In the meantime, more civilians were getting killed in sporadic fighting. The triangle syndrome was spreading elsewhere. With bated breath, the nation watched the negotiations. When the fighting reached Aunt Kasawo’s little town, everyone knew that it was now or never. Twenty-five kilometers from the city was as near as the guerrillas had ever come to accomplishing their goal. Weeks of negotiations and accusations and counter-accusations of cease-fire violation followed.

Finally, the agreement between the guerrillas and the government was signed. Within a matter of weeks, however, the fighting picked up steam, and the guerrillas captured Kampala on January 25, 1986. It was almost like a repeat of the 1979 show, with government soldiers fleeing both north and east and a new force in power. This time, though, the city had been captured by units with many child soldiers, little boys with uniforms too large for them. It was simply amazing to watch these often ragged units marching through the city, hard on the heels of the retreating army.

Anticipating a repeat of the 1979 bonanza, the looters came out in full force. They were mistaken. Orders had been given that there would be no looting, no duplication of the lawlessness of the seventies. Brave looters got warning shots fired in the air above their heads. Those who persisted got shot. News spread that the guerrillas meant business. Everyone got the message, and the looters returned home wondering what government takeovers had come to.

There was jubilation in the southern part of the country, albeit a little overshadowed by what had happened in the Luwero Triangle. The celebrations were muted; there were no wild drinking parties and ceaseless drumming. Jo came to see me, and we spent the day talking, theorizing about what would happen next. What did the future hold for us? She was thinking about returning to the Triangle to survey the
damage and see what she could salvage from the ruins. I was wondering whether Boom-boom Brewery would keep on growing.