Abyssinian Chronicles (61 page)

Our first assignment was to cross-check an allocation of blankets destined for Nakaseke, a former guerrilla hideout deep in the Triangle. We got on a bus up to Luwero, forty kilometers from the city. Just ten kilometers from Kampala, we started seeing fruit stands along the road, with skulls arranged in neat lines at the front, shin and thigh bones and the rest in piles at the back. The skulls had no jawbones, and many had cracks and holes on top where bullets or axes had penetrated them. Polished by the rain and dried by the sun, they could have been playthings in a morbid ritual game; but with the ghostly, desecrated buildings directly behind them, where signs of life were just beginning to show, curious faces emerging from behind the ruins to peek at the passengers getting off buses, there was no fun in it. The bus stopped at every little skeletal town and dropped off a person or two, sometimes with a bundle, sometimes empty-handed. Heading toward the ruins, the arrival walked through paths and roads choked by five-year-old grass, some of which grew inside the hollow buildings and poured through the roofs and doorways, windows and ventilators. As one saw these individuals heading for old settlements hidden behind the bushes, one wondered what they would find there: Skulls to add to the collection on the fruit stands? Villages wiped out? Or a thing or two to hinge old memories on?

In less devastated places one saw shop buildings left undesecrated. Mostly the strategic spots where the army had stationed its detachments to monitor the surrounding areas, these surviving buildings had escaped looting because the army had left too quickly or too late to loot. In such places, there were more people, and next to the old skull-laden fruit stands were new ones with pineapples, pawpaws, bananas, sugarcanes and potatoes. The tarmac road chiselled through the forests, swamps and elephant grass like a huge blade. The tarmac itself was chewed at the edges by the tanks and army trucks that had used it
incessantly during the guerrilla campaign. There were huge potholes in places where bombs had landed. The silence of the passengers in the bus, broken by a coughing child or a toddler asking something from its mother, was eerie. It increased the feeling that the dead were lying just beyond the road, waiting to be discovered and buried or displayed. The lushness of the grass and the majesty of the tall trees made you think that all that green had been fertilized by the blood and flesh of those who had fallen in battle.

I was becoming more convinced that the afterbirth of war was in ways worse than the actual fighting itself, and that winning the peace was harder than winning the war. Now the guns were silent and the howling of ghosts had taken over, interspersed with the sighs of the survivors, most of whom could not wait to reclaim their land; but the gaps in the silence were punctuated with a sense of anti-climax, a certain lack of direction.

Luwero and Nakaseke were sister towns bound together by the guerrilla war and past history. To get to the latter, you had to pass by the former. At the beginning of the war, both had housed thousands of people and had been fertilized by hinterlands of tens of thousands who brought money and goods. Luwero, the survivor, was showing signs of life with a growing population; Nakaseke, the unlucky sister, was yet to get over the rape, pillage and scars of the fierce fighting she had witnessed. Luwero struck you as a surprise, for, having seen stalls of skulls along the main road, you almost expected to find a mountain of them at the town gates, yet there were none. Nakaseke, on the other hand, struck the imagination as a tragedy, for it emerged from the rich forests, marshes and sprawling grasslands with the halo of a martyr. Her returnees fended for themselves, building temporary structures near the old town or moving into the surrounding villages to await government help and a hard road to recovery.

“What a lucky bastard I am!” Lwendo exclaimed. “I can’t imagine the hardship those who fought in these sodden areas experienced.”

We had travelled from Luwero on an old Toyota pickup van loaded to twice its capacity, and we were bumped black and blue. I didn’t want to think about what these people had gone through, because I didn’t want to think of the village of my birth. I was a tourist here. I had come to check a few documents, after which I would leave as soon as possible. The leaders of the people trying to dig this town
from the ashes had stayed here throughout the war and had witnessed the grimmest skirmishes, but said little of their experiences.

“Bygones are bygones,” one told Lwendo, who had been trying to get details out of them.

They led us on a tour of the town, showing us where the soldiers had camped on different occasions, where they used to torture people, and where they had positioned their guns on the day they bombed the town for the final time.

“We were like traffic wardens observing and sometimes directing very dangerous traffic,” the leader said.

“It’s unfair,” Lwendo said later. “The war zone should have been called the Nakaseke instead of the Luwero Triangle.”

“Some people have all the luck,” I replied.

The drama of war had ended, leaving behind the harrowing task of putting it into words for later use. Our job finished, Lwendo and I could not wait to return to Kampala. The dead of Nakaseke would have to keep themselves company a little longer. As I watched the towns along the main road flying past, their stalls of skulls, gaping roofs and hidden histories a blur, I was excited. The city was where I belonged.

I was happy that the first mission had gone well, but when I considered what we were going to be paid for it, I became sad: people working so hard and dealing with so much responsibility and temptation deserved more. Officially, they were paying us a hundred dollars a month, a tenth of my brewery earnings. I kept seeing huge bales of new blankets, glittering bolts of virgin iron sheets, warehouses full of cement. I knew that I was back to where I had started: we were going to either convert these to money, or malinger.

It took me a few days to get over my Triangle experience. When I saw the one Triangle girl I intended to keep on seeing, I felt she had edited her story a great deal. She had probably seen more death and destruction than she admitted. I wanted to penetrate her mind and get to her secret. Had Jo told me everything? No, she had not. Her daughter had probably died in the fighting or in flight, dropped in a river, claimed by fever or crushed by stampeding feet. It was also possible that Jo had no daughter, and it was the death of many girls in her area that had impregnated her with the fantasy. We all walked around with skeletons rattling in our cupboard-like souls, editing carefully what we
revealed, depending on whom we were talking to. We always second-guessed our audience and told them what they wanted to hear, or what would cause the least damage or best enhance our image.

The first deliveries went well. We went back to Nakaseke and found the goods there. The people were happy. They thanked us as if we had supplied them from our own private stock. Some had already begun repairing their houses. The sound of hammers falling on wood, the chatter of excited builders and the glowing eyes of expectant women touched something in us. People were back in their old ways: doing things for and by themselves. The general feeling was that the dead had not died for nothing, the living had much to look forward to and the children had a future.

Things started changing around the fifth mission. First we travelled to Kakiri, a small town on Hoima Road, and to a few other places, surveying both the damage and the needs. That went well, and the journey was less arduous. In a few weeks’ time, we understood that the goods had been delivered: bales and bales of blankets and truckfuls of cement. At the Ministry of Rehabilitation, we were shown the papers. When we returned to Kakiri and the other places, though, cooperation was slim. All signs were that only part of the goods had been delivered. Someone in this little hollowed-out town knew something but did not want to talk. We had to go back to the source. In Kampala, we managed to get reliable records in duplicate. We went to Radio Uganda, and our contact filled in the gaps. He was always a step ahead. I kept wondering which spy organization he was part of.

It transpired that a truckful of goods had been sold to the Kibanda Boys, our own version of the mafia. They had begun with currency speculation in the early eighties. Now they had taken over business operations in Kikuubo, a strip of old Indian shops and warehouses between the bus park and Luwum Street, and were moving from strength to strength.

Kikuubo was crawling with people, traders and customers jostling one another in the narrow street in which Tata trucks were being unloaded. Lines of naked-torsoed young men were being loaded with bags of cement, sugar and salt, bolts of cloth and iron sheets and taking them inside warehouses behind grubby-looking shops. Looks misled: this was serious business. Instead of expanding Indian shops,
the Mafia had chosen to use the warehouses and garages as shop fronts. It saved money, and considering how brisk business was, it was obviously a smart idea. Facilities were bad—hardly any toilets existed—but then traders and customers came here to make money, not calls.

Our target was, in City Council terms, an illegal structure: a garage converted into a shop front. We asked for Oyota, and a big, fat man in shorts appeared, eating corn on the cob. Lwendo had brought a gun with him. He had not allowed me to handle it. The only thing I knew was that it was heavy and loaded. The man invited us to the back of the shop, a dark little cubicle we found piled with money: heaps of local currency and stacks of American dollars. Lwendo swallowed hard. My palms itched.

“We would like to search your warehouse, sir,” Lwendo said.

“No one is allowed to do that.”

“We have a search warrant.”

“What are you looking for?”

“That’s our business,” Lwendo said nonchalantly.

“You cannot just walk into my shop and ask to see my stock. I can call security, or one of the chiefs running this area.”

“The law is on our side.”

“We are the law; we fought the war; we lost people,” the man said disdainfully. At the front of the shop, business was going on as usual. We could hear porters calling to each other, feet crunching, trucks roaring, car engines grinding and high voices warning pedestrians to watch out lest they get crushed. In and out of the shop came people with big bundles of money. They ordered large quantities of merchandise. Everybody paid in cash.

“I know what you boys are looking for,” the fat man said coldly. “You want money, and I can understand it. You went to the bush to topple the old government, and now that you are in power, you realize that a man needs cash to enjoy victory.”

“We just want to search your store, sir.”

“I can understand your frustration. Here are traders who never seem to have done anything for the country. We never went to the bush. We were rich before you went to the bush, and we are richer now. Yet you who went hungry and thirsty and faced death have nothing. But remember, we financed the war.”

“Show us your stores, sir,” Lwendo said, toughening, evidently unimpressed with the lecture.

The man was biding his time, probably waiting for somebody who had not shown up. He finally took us to the store, whose location Lwendo already knew because of the tip. He also knew the license plate number of the vehicle which had brought the goods, and many other details. I felt a chill going down my spine as we followed the man. Somebody might be hiding in the corridors with a knife, or one of the naked-torsoed men could dump a fifty-kilo bag of cement on one of us, making it look like an accident. It was all in my head. The place was stacked with goods up to the rafters. Lwendo was looking for a little logo, nearly invisible, on the blankets. They couldn’t have removed it; it was almost impossible to do so with poor technology. Cleverly enough, the goods were at the very back, and some men had to come in and move bales of things before we could get to them. We were all sweating: the men with effort, me with nerves, Lwendo with the excitement of the scoop. When the man realized that the game was up, he sent the men away and made his proposition. Lwendo calculated how much the things were worth in dollars.

“The best thing would be to take you to Lubiri Barracks and get some of that maize kicked out of you,” Lwendo said coldly. “As you said, you have been having too much of a good time all these years.”

“No, no, please. You have to understand. I am not the sole owner.”

“Do you want to tell us who sold you the goods and how the deal was cut?”

My impression was that the man, like many traders, had a few contacts in government or in the army, but that they were weak. Also, no army officer or government official liked his name getting splashed around in criminal circles. The deal always was: once the goods left one hand, it was every man for himself, good luck to all involved. In the past, the man would have made only one phone call and we would have got picked up and made to look like the criminals. Things were different now. Lwendo considered how the people in Kakiri had created a wall of silence, and he decided that if he took the man in, the investigations might go on forever. He asked for a few thousand dollars, and he got it. We had crossed the line; there was no turning back.

I had never felt so exposed as on the way out of that building. The skin on my back tingled. When people pressed against me, I expected the cold blade of a knife to sink into my ribs. There were even more people now, because it was lunchtime. There were men carrying saucepans of boiling meat and fish to places where women sold food to traders and laborers. What if somebody emptied a seething pan on us and made off with the money? It was all so easy in the confusion. Why hadn’t somebody thought of that? Out on Luwum Street, overlooking the taxi park on one side and the mosque and Nakivubo Stadium on the other, Lwendo said, “This is why I insisted on working with you. You can never cut such deals with somebody you don’t trust one hundred percent. You see how easy it is to betray someone?”

I laughed, and he slapped me on the back.

“I am on my way out of the army,” he said joyously.