The Last King of Scotland (1998) (37 page)

As I got nearer to town, I passed four kids in uniform, sitting on a low wall under the shade of a bottle-brush tree. On their way home from school. They stared at me as I passed by – stared at this white man gone bush. Their uniform was bright blue, and I envied them its crispness.

I hurried on. I had no idea where I would find the boy, but even after my own troubles, Nestor’s letter was still worrying me. You can imagine my surprise when, on reaching the army camp, I caught what I believed to be a glimpse of Gugu’s face.

It was difficult, difficult to see and difficult to move. There were lots of people, a tight and shouting press concentrated on something in front of the camp gates…men and women, soldiers and civilians, young and old. Some of the soldiers seemed very young indeed.

I started to jostle through the crowd. As I got closer, through the thicket of limbs I could see someone tied to a chair. Then I saw Gugu’s face again. An arm raised up, a hand gripping a rifle. The rifle came down. The figure in the chair rocked from side to side. Not him, too, I thought, not Gugu, please God.

I elbowed through. There was a booming noise. I heard one of the women wail and the crowd relaxed a little. And then tightened again. People started to move against me. They were running away. Given this opportunity I burst, mad and ragged creature that I was, into the central circle. One of the boy soldiers who was beating turned to me, and I could see his face and also the bloodied face of the figure in the chair. It wasn’t Gugu.

Then I heard the booming sound again and the boy soldier, comic in his overlarge camouflage, swung his rifle at me. The brown stock of it connected with my ribs and the pain made me aware of something. That it was him after all; the face was Gugu’s that I had seen. But not in the chair.

I was on the floor then and he – the little man, transformed, camouflaged innocent with viciousness on his brow – was above me, the barrel of the rifle trained on me. Then another booming sound came, only closer and with a whistle riding on the top of the boom. The noise came so close it filled my ears and nose, so close it was like a taste. There was a smell of metal and burning in the air, and the crowd was crying out, crying out at the flames above us.

The blast hit us. The one in the chair, he went backwards, his legs stuck up. And then Gugu above me, he too was going off the ground. Everything was going off the ground. The
ground
was going off the ground. The force of the explosion sent the breath out of my chest and my body rolling in the smoky air.

I tumbled – upwards! As I lost consciousness, what was in my head – slow, and reaching blindly at its own strangeness – was the thought of losing it. In front of me was Gugu, changed boy with camouflaged wings descending. His sternum was red and departing from itself, red and departing from its centre like a half-opened flower.

A
t one time or another, I see a figure coming towards me, striding purposefully through the millet. The land stretches out steamy and blue behind the bulrushes. In front of me, behind him. Then the landfalls. It is Amin
.

In another place I see an elephant, one ear sticking out farther than the other; one tusk, also, longer than the other. He leans to one side in a camp pose. I can see the wrinkles in his rough grey-brown skin, the sheer thickness of each leg and the little plait of hair that hangs from the end of his scraggy tail. His other tail, his front tail, drops limply down between his tusks. Slaps himself then, flesh-slap with the sudden trunk. It is Amin
.

Elsewhere I see a hippo standing in a grassy space, next to a tall cactus tree. It rolls. What surprises me is the lightness, the almost-pinkness of the underside of its body. But it is Amin, it is the soles of his feet, sticking up on the massage table as I enter the room
.

By a river in the grassland I see three rhinos. Three rhinos standing on the savannah, solid in their armour by a long low river. They move their plates and – I need only say it straight in my sleep – the plates of the earth and the soft bones on the top of some baby’s head would also move. A baby in Fort Portal, a baby in Fort William. But it is Amin, it is just three Amins by that long low river
.

In a garden I see a peacock extending its fan, and howling like a banshee. It, too, is Amin, it is Amin’s medals, his medals and his faraway eyes
.

And then I see my father and I am free. He is reading the
Scotsman.
But the headline on the back says: “The road dark, the destination obscure
.”

Every time this comes round, it’s like a re-run. A re-run of the first time as I’m travelling along, as I’m travelling along and eating up space. Yet it felt like a re-run then, too. And now, as then, I cannot sleep but see Amin…

∗

What I did see, such as I could when I came to, was a concerned black face peering over me. A face topped by an American-style military helmet, a face with a cheroot sticking out of its lips.

“Ah, you have woken, bwana. We were worried if we had injured a muzungu. It would not be good for our international relations.”

“Uhnn?” There was blood in my eyes.

I realized that once again I was moving along, except that now I was in a vehicle. I looked about. There were weapons and equipment hanging on the sides and up front I could see the heads of a driver and a passenger and a thick glass window.

“President Nyerere would be very unhappy with me if that was the case, so I am very happy to see you,” said the cheroot man, who was bending over me, crouched under the low roof of what, I was becoming aware, was an armoured personnel carrier.

“Where am I?” I struggled up on to my elbows, a ripple of pain coming up from my bruised ribs.

“You are in the custody of the Tanzanian Defence Forces. May I present myself? I am Colonel Armstrong Kuchasa, officer i⁄c the operation of our country against the Ugandan aggressor Idi Amin Dada.”

He handed me a mug of tea and a lump of stale bread.

“Those boys,” I said,“ – just children.”

“Kidogos,” the Colonel said. “Kid soldiers. Amin has started to use them. They are the most vicious of the lot. They have been raping women in my country. Boys…raping grown women.”

I sipped at the tea thoughtfully, soaking the hard bread with it in my mouth.

“Now,” he said, watching me, “you must explain to me what you are doing here. Quickly. We have just completed a successful offensive against Mbarara. We are very busy.”

In the distance, I could hear once again the boom of artillery fire and – much closer – the sound of men’s voices.

“I was trying to leave,” I said. “I had had enough. I thought I could get over into Rwanda.”

“That would not be possible. Now you must stay with us. The problem is, our medics are very busy because of the righting. You will have to come all the way to Kampala. You needn’t worry, this is a war we will win.”

I felt a jolt, searing my ribs, as the APC went over a bump.

“I’ve just come from there,” I said. “But you don’t have to look after me. I am a doctor myself. Maybe I can even help the medics. I am not badly injured. It’s just my eardrums, they are very sore.”

“You – a doctor? In truth? What is your name?”

“Garrigan,” I said, sitting up. “I practised near here first and then up in Kampala.”

Colonel Kuchasa slapped his thigh and then sucked on his cheroot.

“This is very ripe. We have been giving Tanzanian medicine to a muzungu doctor.”

The vehicle pulled to a halt, sending him lurching forward, his binoculars swinging round his neck.

“Well, Doctor Garrigan,” he said, steadying himself. “I will have to go now. Stay in the APC: although they haven’t yet stood and fought, there are still a lot of Ugandan forces around.”

“Near here?”I said.

“Don’t worry. You will be safe – unless they have RPGs.”

“What are they?”

“Rocket-propelled grenades. For piercing armour.”

He laughed. Then – picking up a stick, which, I slowly realized, was actually a short spear – he lifted the hatch of the turret and poked his head out. The noise of men talking was suddenly louder. I heard him shout in Swahili and then the reply coming back.

The Colonel called down to me. “The Simba garrison from Mbarara has retreated to Masaka. That is where we are heading now. Major Mabuse, the head of the garrison, has holed up in a church at the top of a hill. We must now make the assault on foot. You must stay here in the APC. It will follow as the action is completed.”

He clambered out then, and I lay there for a few minutes, listening to the noises of the soldiers moving around me, their voices muffled by the steel walls of the armoured car. I was still quite weak from the snake-bite – though whatever gunk the hunters had daubed on it had been a triumphant success – and my head continued to ring from the blast. Yet I was curious to see what was happening, so after a few minutes I got up and cautiously looked out myself.

There were two or three other APCs next to the one I was in, also three fuel tankers, a couple of ambulances and ten or so lorries with howitzers and other artillery pieces pulled behind them. Otherwise the whole contingent, which was deploying across the road in front of me, was on foot. As I watched, a pair of scarlet-and-black shrikes flew up out of a bush, disturbed by the movement.

A little way away, the Colonel was waving his spear about, drawing lines in the dust in front of some other officers. (As I recall it, I can’t help myself thinking of Michael Caine in
Zulu
– “Don’t throw those bloody spears at me!” That old vision of Africa I’d had, the same that led me there and doomed me: it returns like a spectre.)

A sergeant-major called out an order, and the body of men came to a halt. With the Colonel continuing to make his dispositions, the sergeant-major began to address the troops. They must have been up to a thousand strong – jaunty-looking in their grey ponchos, camouflage uniforms and jungle hats. Once he had finished, they began to move forward.

The road to Masaka cut on into the blank bush ahead: there was no target as such. I couldn’t see where they were going to attack. Smelling petrol in the air, I turned round in the turret to see where it was coming from.

About a quarter of a mile away stood the remants of Mbarara. Even from that distance, and through billowing smoke, I could see that the Tanzanian shelling had been devastatingly effective. Through a gap in the opaque vapour – a space, in that odd perspective, no bigger than a man’s hand – I suddenly caught a glimpse of something familiar: a steel water-tower. I couldn’t tell whether it was the one in the compound or the one at the clinic, but it made me sad all the same. The sun caught the steel again. Then I realized the tower was lying on its side.

Messages from the dead, I thought, as the steel glinted again. I watched the black smoke balloon up above the town. Then my mind returned to Gugu. How could he have become such a creature? From son of a distinguished cartographer to bloodthirsty kidogo in just a few years. Was this what Amin had done to Uganda? Or was it my fault – should I have looked after Gugu, should I have stayed there and been a father to him? Or killed Amin when I had the opportunity? By that stage, I reflected, it wouldn’t have done any good.

The sharp rattle of machine-gun fire jerked me back to the present. As I turned round, I saw a Tanzanian soldier drop to the ground. The sergeant-major shouted. There was blood on the dead man’s face.

The troops fanned out on either side of the road, running and then crouching behind the stumpy trees and tall sharp grass. They held their automatic rifles out in front of them, occasionally letting forth a jerking volley of fire.

Up ahead, flitting among the trees, were the indistinct shapes of Amin’s fleeing soldiers. Beyond them, high up, a battery of artillery started a fusillade. I could see the yellow and red flashes illuminating the brow of a hill. The bullets whistled by, and shells began to fall round and about, many to the rear. When the high-pitched whine of a shell came in the air, the Tanzanians threw themselves down and curled up in tight balls. Once it had exploded, they got up again and continued their darting runs forward.

The APC – in which, probably foolishly, I felt quite safe – began to move forward slowly. We passed a detachment of gunners setting up mortar base-plates down on my right in the soft earth. I watched them attach the three slanting tubes on to the plates, feed in the bulbous charges and turn away their heads in anticipation of the noise: thud! thudl thud! and then the awful wait before the explosion proper. I felt my eardrums press in, and the noise and brightness of it made me want to close my eyes.

When I opened them, clouds of blue smoke were drifting over the battlefield. The Tanzanian infantry moved ahead, with the APC and other vehicles trundling after them. In front of me I could see the bodies of those I assumed to be Ugandan soldiers sprawled in the tall grass – both armies were wearing exactly the same camouflage fatigues – while behind the mortars continued to send their deadly charges in high loops over my head.

As well as the bodies, there were bits of equipment (rifles and ammunition pouches, knapsacks and canteens, crumpled items of clothing) sprinkled over the rough yellow vegetation. The road itself was also scattered with the debris of war – brass shell cases, the guide wires from rockets and other assorted bits of metal – all of which the caterpillar tracks of the APC crushed as it went over them.

The bombardment and mopping-up operation continued all afternoon. We passed through the deserted towns and villages that lined the road: Sanga, Lyantonde, Katovu, Kyazanga, Mbi-rizi. In every one, the shops were shut up, in every one there was not a soul to be seen – the inhabitants had all fled into the bush – not a soul to be seen, until the whip of a sniper’s bullet was heard and we would stop and flush him out.

The Tanzanians slowly moved forward, with the Amin soldiers somewhere in front. The Tanzanians were much more disciplined, if the bunch nearest to the APC were anything to go by. Three of them manned a heavy machine-gun, which they mounted on its tripod for each engagement. One man lay on the ground pulling the trigger, his legs apart, while another fed the belt of bullets into the breech. The third man lay next to them, his rifle at the ready, to provide cover for the others. I watched transfixed, heedless of any danger to myself. There was something hypnotic about the way the spent cases sprung out, each tumbling along the ground beneath the tripod in response to the orange flames that came out of the muzzle with every burst.