Abyssinian Chronicles (59 page)

Aunt Lwandeka was overjoyed. She told me that she would never get involved with guerrillas again. She was happy that the victory had come when it had: she was tired of waiting and fearing for her life. “I have been reborn, son, given another chance. Nobody gets born thrice.” Recalling what had happened in 1971 and 1979, I became gripped by fear: What was I going to lose, or rather, whom was I going to lose, this time? Jo, Aunt Lwandeka or someone else? I could not face the idea of going to the Triangle: I didn’t want to know what had happened to the village. It felt better, at least for the time being, not to know. Already estimates put the death toll in the Triangle anywhere between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand. I preferred the dead to bury themselves.

The most remarkable change regarded security: one could sleep at night without fear of getting killed by robbers, raiders, soldiers or unknown people. One could travel and stay out late. The roadblocks were tough but fair; there was no stealing or raping going on. The people gained confidence in the new government, and their expectations rose. At first, sleeping peacefully at night was enough. Now they found out that you cannot sleep peacefully on an empty stomach or without knowing what has happened to your home, your people, your history. Those who had come from the Triangle wanted to go back; those who had people there wanted to know what had happened to them. They all made excursions to their ghost towns and came back depressed. Their old homes had no roofs or windows or doors, and the dead lay where they had fallen. The shrines of their gods had been desecrated, and there was a big lacuna between the past they knew and the present that faced them.

The task of reconstruction was enormous. The government promised to help devastated areas, but the help did not come quickly enough. People with money decided to go it alone. They bought building materials, transported them to the Triangle on rickety pickup vans and rebuilt their houses. Most waited, going there only to do a little work like digging and clearing the yards.

I sponsored Jo’s journeys to the Triangle but refused to accompany her. After each visit, she would come back feeling sad. Her former
school lay in ruins. She wanted to be part of the restoration process, but the government was finding it hard to provide the necessary materials. It bothered her a lot that so much had been destroyed. She could hardly understand or let it go. She would go on endless tirades about why it should not have happened, going back to Obote II, Amin, Obote I, up to the colonial government and its local agents. She blamed all Ugandans, all colonialists, all arms manufacturers and dealers and dumpers. She blamed the hatred and the indifference and the inequality that made all this possible, until I either ran out of the house or shouted at her to stop. The tirades helped her to jettison her frustration, but they ended up getting on my nerves and making me ponder things I preferred to leave frozen.

Aunt was still waiting for her reward. She frequently went to the city to meet the brigadier, who was organizing the guerrilla forces into a regular army. He had promised to help her set up a business by recommending her for a low-interest loan from the bank. He asked her to marry him. She said that she would think about it; she had never thought about marriage after her adolescent fiasco with the veterinary officer. He gave her a ring. She at first wore it shyly, and her friends made jokes about it, but she took it in her stride. To start with, she was given the task of organizing women. She set up clubs and held meetings. She worked very hard, and she was as happy as I had ever seen her.

All this time, I had been wondering where Lwendo was. It was months since the takeover. I went to the city and inquired at the cathedral whether he was still in the seminary. He had been expelled. When? At around the time when the country was cut in two. A month later, a military jeep came to SIMC while I was away, and a soldier asked to see me. He refused to leave a message. A week later, Lwendo came. He was clad in military fatigues. He was a second lieutenant now. We embraced. He had learned my whereabouts from a former schoolmate. There was so much catching up to do. The underlying question was, was it curiosity that had impelled Lwendo to come, or was there something else? It was more than curiosity. He wanted me to join him. In what capacity? As semi-spy, semi-ombudsman. I was shocked. It did not make much sense. I had left the seminary to escape dictatorship, and I was not going to get involved with military or security agency dictators. He reassured me that we would be working for an individual,
a big boss in government whose task was to fight corruption. I detected clericalism, and sure enough, the man was an ex-priest. It was the reason he had been put in charge of rehabilitation and reconstruction: Catholics still had a reputation for honesty. But what about me, and my former mate Lwendo? I could detect the danger: What would the people whose corrupt plans we would be sabotaging do? Would they try to bribe us or attempt to pop us off? I rejected his offer. I had a good income. What reason had I to get involved in such dangerous stuff? I changed the subject of conversation. I wanted to hear his personal story.

Lwendo was an orphan. He never knew his real parents. He had been brought up by a kind Catholic couple with a big family as one of their children. It was while he was in the seminary that he discovered that his benefactors were not his real parents. By then, they had mapped out his life for him: he had to become a priest, help the needy and repay God for what He had done for him. Lwendo had never liked the idea: his childhood dream had been to join the air force and fly planes. His benefactors could not entertain such un-Catholic vanity. His misbehavior in the seminary had been geared by his resentment of the choice his benefactors had made for him, and the feeling that he had no way out.

After my departure, he had soldiered on. By the time guerrilla activity started, he was in the major seminary, but the regimen was harder than he had anticipated. He quickly got fed up with the place and the staff. He started playing truant and flirting with girls when he went out for pastoral work. He opposed priests in the open. He asked sharp questions about the existence of God and gave political speeches. To work everybody up properly, he supported the Uganda People’s Congress and the actions of the Obote II government in the Luwero Triangle. When asked about the killings, he quoted the old Biblical line: “All authority comes from God.” He also referred to the time of the Crusades, when the Church waged genocidal wars. The conclusion many priests drew was that he had no vocation. Others defended him, seeing his attitude as residual adolescent rebellion, which would wear off. He was warned to change his ways and pay respect to the fathers and stop political agitation. He refused. They set spies on him. He was caught returning late to campus one evening. He was expelled.

At that point, Lwendo had two options: to go home, across Lake Victoria, or to stay in the liberated areas. Home: Where was his home? Would his benefactors receive him well? If so, what was he going to do in the troubled city? He had no job, no money, no immediate prospects. The theological education he had garnered could only land him on the sidelines of teacherdom or in some function related to religion, which he was not ready to countenance. Above all, the stories that trickled into the liberated areas from the city, with a dose of good old exaggeration, said that people were dying like flies at the hands of desperate government soldiers. Having tasted the relative peace and order reigning in the liberated areas, he was not ready to face whatever lay on the other side.

He decided to stay and join the guerrillas. Already he knew the ex-priest called Major Padre or simply Padre by all, who was a prominent personality in the guerrilla movement in that area. He had visited the seminary twice, trying to sell guerrilla ideology to the priests and seminarians. In what to many seemed like a strange ideological turnaround, Lwendo had been the only seminarian to express interest in his message and to hail the guerrillas for fighting the murderous regime. The ex-priest had given him a faded visiting card, the only one he gave away on both occasions, because the others were uninterested. Not one to hold back, Lwendo used the card as his talisman, and boasted to fellow seminarians that he was the only one with vision.

“You are a chameleon,” they said, “with no sense of loyalty or principle.”

“I am a child of the darkness,” he countered. “I sense where the wind blows.” They laughed at him. He shouted guerrilla slogans on campus, alienating even the few priests who believed that he was only suffering from arrested adolescence. Not long after, he said that if he were the leader of the guerrillas, he would have closed the seminary and sent both the seminarians and the staff for military training. Before joining the guerrillas, he visited the padre and talked to him about his intentions. He got the green light: the padre needed people he could trust, and Lwendo, with his big mouth, looked like a perfect tool.

Beset by transport problems, Lwendo entered the training camp at night and almost got shot at the quarter-guard. The soldiers on watch barked at him, ordered him to put his arms in the air and took
him in for interrogation. The guerrillas were very wary of sneak attacks from the remnants of government forces they had driven from the town, and of infiltration by spies masquerading as aspiring fighters. Lwendo spent the night in a filthy room guarded by two soldiers, because the padre could not be disturbed at that late hour, not even by those bearing his talisman. Salvation arrived early the next morning. The padre vouched for him, and he was immediately sent for training. Afterward, he did guard duty and patrol, and twice his unit was dispatched to flush out government soldiers who had turned into highwaymen. After lying in ambush for a week, he and his comrades killed four of them. This did not go unnoticed. The padre was happy that his ward could get the job done and appreciated his communication skills, a far cry from those of most Triangle veterans, who only obeyed orders and spoke only when spoken to. Lwendo exaggerated the part he had played in the fight. “When the thugs started shooting, I thought I had been hit. Then I started shooting, and the sound of my gun charged me up and everything changed. It was the best feeling in the world. I wished there were fifty of them out there. I would have killed them all,” he told the padre, who had asked him to secretly report back to him. A shadow of doubt passed over the man’s face, but he said nothing about his ward’s declared interest in killing. He could always use a good story.

On the way to Kampala, when the guerrillas started pushing government forces toward the city, Lwendo had seen some fighting, but only as a quartermaster, supplying ammo. The padre had put in a good word for him. Already that had caused some friction and accusations of favoritism, but Lwendo’s advantage was that he was educated, whereas most of the veterans, especially the child soldiers and ex-peasant farmers picked up from the Triangle, were at best primary or lower secondary school products. The movement needed brains in addition to brawn. He was among the most highly educated, and with his Latin expressions he caused much resentment. When annoyed by his fellow fighters, he would smile and say,
“Non compos mentis.”
They knew he was insulting them, but not how much, until one sneaked up on him and put a bayonet to his throat and asked for an explanation.

After the war, the padre sent Lwendo to the Triangle, where he fought retreating army forces passing through on their way to the north. He did not do much fighting, but did well the few times he saw
action. That was how he had ended up a second lieutenant. Now his benefactor wanted him to keep an eye on goods destined for the devastated areas: iron sheets, cement, brick-making equipment, blankets and the like. Judging by the dedication with which he had handled ammunition and other supplies as a quartermaster, the padre believed that Lwendo could be trusted with larger things.

The post-guerrilla-war economy was in shambles, inflation was very high, there was a chronic lack of production and the thriving black market did not make economic planning any easier. Fighters used to the hard life and discipline of their bush days were now out in the world, open to temptations of quick money and personal enrichment. Many felt they deserved opportunity as a reward for facing death and hardship in the Triangle and elsewhere in order to liberate the country.

Lwendo made it clear to me that he did not intend to stay in the army for long: “I hate being cooped up in the barracks. I hate the lack of freedom, the power of the officers and all those drills. I want to get out early, but with something in my pocket. I have many plans for the future.”

“You mean …”

“I intend to get my cut of the action.”

“What is the padre’s attitude to that?”

“He is high up there; I am down here at the bottom. He can fire me if he does not like my modus operandi.”

“How about the hostility of your colleagues?”

“It is there, but it does not deter me from doing what I want. The sooner I get what I want, the sooner I quit.”

“This whole thing scares me. I am not a soldier. If things go wrong, I will be the bad guy.”

“Let me worry about that.”

“I already have a job …”

“Getting twenty, thirty dollars a month! Come on, man. How long will you stay in that rotten profession?”

“I have no intention of getting beaten and locked up by soldiers accusing me of corrupting you, Mr. Liberator.”

“I need you. The moment the padre appointed me, I knew you were the right person to work with. I need somebody I can trust, somebody who won’t stab me in the back.”

“What if we get caught?”

“Discretion will be paramount. We are not going to do things carelessly, you can take it from me. I am a different man now. I am systematic, patient, wary. You don’t have to worry about that,” he said earnestly. “Think about it and about your future and then come to me. I won’t accept the job unless you cooperate.”

The temptation was huge: the smell of adventure and daring, the exploration of unknown territory, the squaring off against bigger guys! The sense of danger had something magnetic about it, a feeling of beating the odds, a feeling of chopping heads off the hydras left in my garden by the Infernal Trinity. I was tired of teaching and achieving little in my profession. The seduction of piracy was like a lantern to a suicidal moth on a cold, dark night. I craved being on top, not in a little brewery where everyone called me boss, but in the larger world. The prospect awakened old seminary ghosts: the raids on Fr. Mindi and Fr. Lageau. I missed the adrenaline. I had done nothing like that in years. I felt that Lwendo and I could hold our own against security agents. It was a mind game, and my brain was afire with images, moves, feints which would bring us victory.