The Last King of Scotland (1998) (17 page)

B
y the time Wasswa’s letter came, inviting me to become the President’s personal physician, everything in Mbarara simply reminded me of Sara. It couldn’t be borne. So I was happy to leave, although it was quite tricky with Meirit, who made out that I was letting him down.

A few days after I had replied to the letter, Wasswa phoned me up, saying he would send a driver the following week, and on the appointed day a car duly turned up. I said my goodbyes, such as they were, stowed my luggage in the boot, and began the journey into a new part of my life. Going in the opposite direction, we followed the same string of towns I had watched from the matatu: Sanga, where the Kenyan man had snubbed me, Lyantonde, Mbirizi…

A strange incident took place on the way, in a spot not far beyond Masaka (I had given the Tropic-o’-Paradise a miss this time). Barclay – the driver whom Wasswa had sent for me – suddenly pulled over, saying there was a tourist attraction that I ought to see. And so there was. Surrounded by bush, we got out and stood under the concrete rings painted with the words
UGANDA EQUATOR
in big letters.

Leaning there, with my arms up on one of the rings, I turned to look east and west and tried to work it all out – the thing about water going round one way down the plughole on one side of the line, the other way on the other. I looked towards Kampala, and wondered what my life there was going to be like.

“It is possible to get a cold drink here,” Barclay said, interrupting my reverie and pointing at a homestead on the left, some way away from the road.

“OK,” I said.

“But we must be careful because a madman lives there.”

“Oh.”

Intrigued, I followed him through a field of millet – thistles and African daisies, yellow and pale orange, poking up among the brown bushels – to the gate. The homestead was half-hidden in an encirclement of trees. Within stood an irregular palisade of thin sharpened logs, and through that I could make out the house, the mud-hut norm except that everything was thicker, with the same sense of fortification suggested by the fencing.

The gate was made out of three or four sheets of corrugated iron fastened on to a wooden trellis. Next to it a bell – very old – hung on a post. Barclay rang it.

“People, people, I see you. Come inside my place,” shouted a voice.

We opened the gate and went in. To the left, under the shade of a tree, sat a man with dreadlocks, wearing a suit jacket and shorts. The plaits poked out from under a deer-stalker hat. Next to him was a battered-looking cool-box.

“Welcome, welcome,” he said, leaping up. “This is Uganda equator refreshment centre. We can please you any way here.”

Barclay said something in Swahili and the man reached into the box and brought out two dusty bottles of Coke.

“You will have to give him ioo shillings,” Barclay said, turning tome.

“It is very cold,” said the Coke man, opening the bottles with his teeth and handing them to us. “But sometimes the machine is breaking.”

I swigged the sweet liquid a bit queasily. The man had bad teeth.

“My name,” he said, “is Angol-Steve.”

Barclay tutted, shaking his head with embarrassment.

“I am the chief in these parts. No person comes from outside to tell me my business.”

He tugged at my sleeve.

“No, of course not,” I said, “we were just thirsty and…”

“I am the top person,” he interrupted, sitting down again and glaring at us. “Even when there is trouble in Kampala they do not touch me.”

“He is a crazy fellow, sir,” said Barclay. “Do not take any notice.”

“I am perfectly sane and very clever also,” said Angol-Steve. “For I see things from many angles. That is why I am called Angol-Steve.”

I burst out laughing in spite of myself. I’d thought it was some kind of tribal name.

“Ahh, this man, sir,” Barclay said. “He is called that for one reason only. Because he is a fool who cannot see straight or talk straight about anything.”

“Do not laugh at me. I have crossed to many places between here and Mombasa. Even Paris and Amsterdam I have been inside there.”

“You are a fool,” said Barclay. “That is why you live here alone.”

“I tell you. I have been many places, I am not just manager of this refreshment centre. I have been a magnet for many professions of the earth, and I change all things. Even I have been a policeman. You see. Wait here.”

He rushed into the house, the vents of his suit jacket flapping behind him.

“I am sorry, bwana, it is the only place to get a soft drink here,” Barclay said.

“It’s fine,” I said, shrugging.

Angol-Steve came out with a dented brass bugle.

“Listen,” he said, and blew.

The sound went out over the bush, the two tones of it making me think of the cavalry in Westerns.

“So you see. I did parade call for Uganda Police. It is truth.”

“When was that?” I said.

“It was before. I have done it many times a distance ago. So, you are from London?”

“No, I’m from Scotland, in fact.”

“Scot-land. I know that place. Come, come with me just nearby here. There is a Scottish man lying near here.”

“Eh, Angol, do not bother us with your lies,” said the driver.

“It’s all right,” I said, fascinated.

We followed him out of the gate and through the trees, towards a patch of untilled ground among the millet stalks. A pied crow started up, disturbed by our passage. I watched it rise up and then bank away to the right.

“No, no, that is only bird. Look here,” said Angol. He squatted down and pulled away some vegetation. Underneath was a rock with a brass plaque riveted to it.

Astonished, I got down and read the faint letters:

HEREABOUTS lies Alexander Colquhoun Boothby, born 5 December 1842 and left Scotland his native country in 1871, and died 5 July 1893.

Altogether he lived highly respected and beloved for his integrity and his humanity and died most sincerely regreted.

His Death was occasioned by the great fatigue he endured during the course of the campaign against the Waganda Mohammedans in which he bore a distinguished part.

“That man, I believe,” said Angol-Steve as we walked back towards the car, “was a very great fighter. There again, the acceleration of history is the job of ruthless men.”

“What do you know about anything of this,” said Barclay. “Were you alive in that time? Are you a ghost? Eh?”

“I was not there but my spirit was there. For all sides are this side to me. It is truth. I have seen dog-whips and batons and I have held diamonds in my hand in Johannesburg. And I know also the cure for serpents.”

Barclay shook his head despairingly and turned the ignition. Angol-Steve stood waving at us as we moved off- and then suddenly started running after us.

“Wait, wait,” he cried, “you must pay me for soft drinks.”

We slowed down. Barclay turned to me. I fumbled in my back pocket and handed him the crumpled note. Taking it through the open window, Angol-Steve said something in Swahili.

“What did he say?” I asked as we drove off, the road stretching out straight as a die in front of us.

“It is nonsense. Everything he says is nonsense.”

“No, but tell me.”

“He said this: look behind you, the child might get burned.”

“What does it mean?”

“Bwana, I do not know. Even in our country, we have some crazy people.”

Bewildered in Uganda, and not for the last time, I looked into the rear-view mirror and watched the rolling ground recede. Still waving, the figure of Angol-Steve diminished into a speck, and then nothing.

I
have been able to find out little of the history by which Idi is come to us. After all, who knows where any of us is come from, who could go to the cause? Our current Prime Minister, indeed, might be distantly descended from the conjunction of a stonebreaker and a lady’s maid caught short on the highway. But this is the story of H.E., as I have had it recounted to me – by himself and by others. He wasn’t always to be trusted.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they say, in the region of the Kakwa tribe on the scrag-treed borders of Sudan, where Idi was born, that he was eleven months in the womb. Or some such monstrous thing. It is, so far as one can ascertain, New Year’s Day, 1928 (though it could be as early as 1925), that he comes into the world, in a village not far from the dusty little village of Koboko. Who knows what curses beat down on the straw roof of the hut that night, what blessings rose from the hard earth floor?

Such questions are germane to the Kakwa territory. I recently found an excellent book in the Fort William library, by a Mr George Ivan Smith. He says:

Power, in this landscape, was vested in rocks and trees, in streams and animals. And power, as everywhere, was one of the forces that determined human intercourse. Only here it was more naked. I’ve underlined in thick dark pencil where Smith writes:

The Kakwa people, numbering some 60,000, are identified as often as not by a series of tribal markings: three parallel cuts on the cheeks longways. Later, in Amin’s regime, these would become known as ‘one-elevens’. And the people who wore them were feared by those who did not.

But back to the mother: a Lugbara (another of the Nilotic tribes) impregnated by a Kakwa man, she is that rare thing, a slave with power. For even as she is heaving in her labour to expel her twelve-pound burden into the sweating night, she is by many accounts held to be a witch. Though I am not so sure.

But let us follow the other historians in their garish story. She offers amulets and fetishes at market: the backbones of birds and the skulls of small reptiles, powder ground from the bark of rare trees, berries, roots, coffee-beans and sea-shells…A child with colic, or an uncle in debt, a thief in the village or rats raiding the wicker maize bins – these are her charges, this the genus of problem that her charms will solve.

Others, contrarily, have her as a camp-follower. Nicknamed ‘Pepsi Cola’, she makes herself available under canvas, in the tents of the army lines. Others still say that Pepsi was actually a mad old woman, possessed of a devil, whom Amin’s real mother failed to cure, lowering the stock of her reputation. Who knows?

Sex or sorcery, these are the options. Otherwise starvation, no doubt about it: the land is fertile in places but Pepsi (if it is she) is landless, a traveller whose ambiguity the peasants can only countenance when – out of necessity, all else failing – they turn their face to magic. Looking up from where they are bent at their plots, hoes in hand, to the strange figure passing on the roadway – the baby wrapped in a colourful calico bundle on her back – they recognize what Pepsi is. They call her to them, bid her service, and feed her for it. Then, the next morning, send her on: Lugazi, Buikwe, finally Jinja.

The father, he is unknown, most people believe he was a soldier – a trooper, with trooper’s ways. Perhaps, beer on his breath, rifle leaning against the chair, he pierces Pepsi against her will, brushing aside a whimpered plea for payment. Or perhaps they make love with mutual joy and care, each softening like tallow the pain of the other’s hard life. Or perhaps the noble fellow means to spill his sons on the bed but sloppily forgets. That being so, did 300,000 deaths ensue from a single accident of birth, or would another tyrant have come, certain as the steam engine or automatic flail?

Ah well, I have said it before: the cause – that is the place where we cannot go.

So the father disappears, as fathers do, and the mother plies her wares in Jinja – King’s African Rifles town, town of factories and godowns, town of foul vapours and gunny sacks, town of the source of the Nile and the great railway lumbering up from the coast. Idi, he thrives here, beefy enough from an early age to make his mark in the dusty scraps that kids get into.

Then a gap. Some say Idi is briefly a bellboy at the Imperial Hotel in Kampala, bright buttons shining. Some say – he has said, in fact – that he sold sweet biscuits in boxes by the roadside.

In any case, by 1946 he has enlisted in the 4
th
King’s African Rifles. The KAR, E Company. A thumbprint is the accepted signature for enlistment. Rations and equipment are issued. Idi works his way up for seven years, perhaps for some time as a cook. But his military merits soon become apparent, and he is made company sergeant-major.

What a passage that must have been. In idle moments, I have often pictured Idi in the training camps, climbing netted gantries. Or, on the barked command, running full-tilt, bayonet at the ready, at the wooden rick where men filled with straw are hung by the neck. Then retiring, his gear trim at the foot of the green truckle bed, to sleep soundly on a belly full of rice and beer.

Already a six-footer, he is noted for keeping his uniform neat and clean, and for excellence in sports. Boxing and rugby are his forte. He would later become boxing champion of Uganda; later still, I understand, he would challenge Muhammad Ali to a bout.

As for real work: 1953-1954, operations in Kenya against that country’s notorious Mau Mau freedom fighters. I recall the occasion he explained, those great paws describing the motions from the podium, his special garrotte technique to the horrified Organization of African Unity conference, Kenyan delegates included. Later on, there is hunting-down of cattle poachers among the nomadic tribes, the Turkana and the Karamojong, who inhabit the far north of East Africa. The pursuit of shifta – bandits with ancient First World War rifles or home-made ‘daneguns’, bound with wire and muzzle-loaded – is said to take his patrol across the borders of Somalia and Sudan, trudging through the desert landscape, razing villages or, still under the British aegis, looting them for food.