The Shadow of the Sun (15 page)

At last—Lalibela. It is one of the eight wonders of the world. And if it isn’t, it should be. Seeing it, however, is not easy. In the rainy season, there is no passable road, and getting here in the dry season is barely less difficult. One can arrive by airplane—if they happen to be flying.

You cannot see anything from the road. More strictly speaking, all you see is an ordinary village. Boys run out to meet you, each begging that you choose him as a guide—it is their only chance to earn something. My guide’s name was Tadesse Mirele and he was a schoolboy. His school was closed, everything was closed—there was famine. People were constantly dying in the village. Tadesse said that he hadn’t eaten anything in several days, but there was water, and so he drinks that. Did he maybe get a handful of grain somewhere? A piece of flat bread? Yes, he admitted, a handful of grain. “But,” he added sadly, “nothing else.” And immediately asked: “Sir?” “Yes, Tadesse?” I replied, “I’m listening.” “Be my helper, please! I need a helper!” He looked at me, and I saw then that he had only one eye. A single eye in the haggard, frightened face of a child.

A while later Tadesse suddenly grabbed me by the arm. I thought that he wanted to ask me for something, but then realized he was only preventing me from falling into a chasm. For just below was a church carved out of stone. A three-story-high structure cut into the massive mountain beneath our feet, inside it, as it were. And farther on, in the same mountain, also invisible at ground level, was carved another church, and another. All together, eleven great churches. This architectural wonder was constructed in the twelfth century by the saint Lalibela, ruler of the Amhara kingdom, whose inhabitants were (and are) Eastern Orthodox Christians. He carved them out of the mountain itself so that Muslims invading these lands could not spot them from afar. And even if they did, they could neither demolish them nor move them, because these churches constitute an integral part of the mountain. There is a Church of the Virgin Mary here, of the Savior of the World, of the Holy Cross and St. George, of Mark and Gabriel, all of them connected by underground tunnels.

“Look, sir!” said Tadesse, pointing down to the courtyard in front of the Church of the Savior of the World. But I had already noticed the sight myself. A dozen or so meters below where we stood, in the yard and on the steps of the church, surged a crowd of lame beggars. It is odd to say “surged” when speaking of discrete human beings, but that word best describes the scene. The people below were so tightly squeezed together, their crippled limbs, stumps, and crutches so tightly interwined, that they formed a single crawling mass, out of which dozens of arms stretched upward like tentacles, and, where there were no limbs, innumerable gaping mouths extended upward, waiting for something to be thrown into them. As we walked from one church to another, this gnarled, moaning, expiring creature below crept after us, and from it dropped every now and then an inert, already lifeless member, abandoned by the rest.

There had been no pilgrims here in a long while, to throw down their alms, and these cripples were unable to get out of the stony chasms.

“Did you see, sir?” Tadesse asked me as we made our way back to the village. And he said it as though to suggest he thought this the only thing really worth seeing.

Amin

I
once considered writing a book about Amin, because he is such a glaring example of the relation between crime and low culture. I was in Uganda many times, saw Amin more than once; I have a small library of books about him, and stacks of my own notes. He is the most well known dictator in the history of contemporary Africa and one of the most famous in the twentieth century the world over.

Amin belongs to a small ethnic group called the Kakwa, whose territory encroaches on three countries: Sudan, Uganda, and Zaire. The Kakwa do not know to which country they belong, although they view this question with indifference, preoccupied as they are with something else: how to survive despite the poverty and hunger that prevail in this remote region without roads, cities, electricity, and cultivable land. Anyone with some initiative, wits, and luck runs as far away from here as possible. But not every direction is a propitious one. Whoever goes west will only worsen his circumstances, because he will stumble upon the thickest jungles of Zaire. Those setting off northward also err, because they will arrive at the sandy, rock-strewn threshold of the Sahara. Only the southerly direction holds promise: there the Kakwa will find the fertile lands of central Uganda, the lush and splendid garden of Africa.

It is there, after giving birth to her son, that Amin’s mother makes her way, the infant on her back. She comes to the secondlargest city (or, rather, town) in Uganda after Kampala—Jinja. Like thousands of others at that time, and millions upon millions today, she arrives in the hope of surviving, in the hope that life here will be better. She has no skills, no contacts, and no money. But one can make a living in a variety of ways: through petty trade, brewing and selling beer, or operating a portable sidewalk eatery. Amin’s mother has a pot and cooks millet in it. She sells portions on banana leaves. Her daily earnings? A serving of millet for herself and her son.

This woman, who made her way with her child from a poor village in the north to a town in the wealthier south, became part of the population that today constitutes Africa’s biggest problem. It is composed of the tens of millions who have abandoned the countryside and migrated to the monstrously swollen cities without securing adequate housing or employment. In Uganda they are called
bayaye
. You will notice them at once, because it is they who form the street crowds, so different from ones in Europe. In Europe, the man on the street is usually heading toward a definite goal. The crowd has a direction and a rhythm, which is frequently characterized by haste. In an African city, only some of the people behave this way. The others are not going anywhere: they have nowhere to go, and no reason to go there. They drift this way and that, sit in the shade, stare, nap. They have nothing to do. No one is expecting them. Most often, they are hungry. The slightest street spectacle—a quarrel, a fight, the apprehension of a thief—will instantly draw large numbers of them. For they are everywhere around here, idle, awaiting who knows what, living who knows how—the gapers of the world.

The principal characteristic of their status is rootlessness. They will not return to the countryside, and there is no place for them in the city. They endure. Somehow, they exist. Somehow: that is how best to describe their situation, its fragility, its uncertainty. Somehow one lives, somehow one sleeps, somehow, from time to time, one eats. This unreality and impermanence of existence cause the
bayaye
to feel himself in continuous danger, and so he is unceasingly tormented by fear. His fear is amplified by his condition as a stranger, an unwanted immigrant from another culture, religion, language. A foreign, extraneous competitor for the contents of the cooking pot, which is empty anyway, and for work, of which there isn’t any.

Amin is a typical
bayaye
.

He grows up in the streets of Jinja. The town housed a battalion of the British colonial army, the King’s African Rifles. The model for this army was devised toward the end of the nineteenth century by General Lugard, one of the architects of the British Empire. It called for divisions composed of mercenaries recruited from tribes hostile toward the population on whose territory they were to be garrisoned: an occupying force, holding the locals on a tight rein. Lugard’s ideal soldiers were young, well-built men from the Nilotic (Sudanese) populations, which distinguished themselves by their enthusiasm for warfare, their stamina, and their cruelty. They were called Nubians, a designation that in Uganda evoked a combination of distaste and fear. The officers and noncommissioned officers of this army, however, were for many years exclusively Englishmen. One day, one of them noticed a young African with a Herculean physique hanging around the barracks. It was Amin. He was quickly enlisted. For people like him—without a job, without possibilities—military service was like winning the lottery. He had barely four years of elementary schooling, but because he was deemed obedient and eager to anticipate the wishes of his commanders, he began advancing rapidly through the ranks. He also gained renown as a boxer, becoming the Ugandan heavyweight champion. During colonial times, the army was dispatched on countless expeditions of oppression: against the Mau Mau insurgents, against the warriors of the Turkana tribe, or against the independent people of the Karimojong. Amin distinguished himself in these campaigns: he organized ambushes and attacks, and was merciless toward his adversaries.

...

It is the fifties, and the era of independence is fast approaching. Africanization has arrived, even in the military. But the British and French officers want to remain in control for as long as possible. To prove that they are irreplaceable, they promote the third-rate from among their African subordinates, those not too quick, but obedient, transforming them in a single day from corporals and sergeants into colonels and generals. Bokassa in the Central African Republic, for example, Soglo in Dahomey, Amin in Uganda.

When in the fall of 1962 Uganda becomes an independent state, Amin is already, because of promotions by the British, a general, and deputy commander of the army. He takes a look around him. Although he has high rank and position, he comes from the Kakwa, a small community and one, moreover, that is not regarded as native Ugandan. Meantime, the preponderance of the army comes from the Langi tribe, to which Prime Minister Milton Obote belongs, and from the related Acholi. The Langi and the Acholi treat the Kakwa superciliously, seeing them as benighted and backward. We are navigating here in the paranoid, obsessive realm of ethnic prejudice, hatred, and antipathy—albeit an intra-African one: racism and chauvinism emerge not only along the most obvious divides, e.g., white versus black, but are equally stark, stubborn, and implacable, perhaps even more so, among peoples of the same skin color. Indeed, most whites who have died in the world have died at the hands not of blacks, but of other whites, and likewise the majority of black lives taken in the past century were taken by other blacks, not by whites. And so it follows, for example, that on account of ethnic bigotry, no one in Uganda will care whether Mr. XY is wise, kind, and friendly, or the reverse, evil and loathsome; they will care only whether he is of the tribe of Bari, Toro, Busoga, or Nandi. This is the sole criterion by which he will be classified and evaluated.

For its first eight years of independence, Uganda is ruled by Milton Obote, an extraordinarily conceited man, boastful and sure of himself. When it is exposed in the press that Amin has misappropriated the cash, gold, and ivory given him for safekeeping by anti-Mobutu guerrillas from Zaire, Obote summons Amin, orders him to pen an explanation, and, confident that he himself is in no danger, flies off to Singapore for a conference of prime ministers of the British Commonwealth. Amin, realizing that the prime minster will arrest him as soon as he returns, decides on a preemptive strike: he stages an army coup and seizes power. Theoretically at least, Obote in fact had little to worry about: Amin did not represent an obvious threat, and his influence in the army was ultimately limited. But beginning on the night of January 25, 1971, when they took over the barracks in Kampala, Amin and his supporters employed a brutally efficient surprise tactic: they fired without warning. And at a precisely defined target: soldiers from the Langi and Achole tribes. The surprise had a paralyzing effect: no one had time to mount a resistance. On the very first day, hundreds died in the barracks. And the carnage continued. Henceforth, Amin always used this method: he would shoot first. And not just at his enemies; that was self-evident, obvious. He went further: he liquidated without hesitation those he judged might one day develop into enemies. Over time, terror in Amin’s state also came to depend on universal torture. Before they died, people were routinely tormented.

All this took place in a provincial country, in a small town. The torture chambers were located in downtown buildings. The windows were open—we are in the tropics. Whoever was walking along the street could hear cries, moans, shots. Whoever fell into the hands of the executioners vanished. A category soon emerged, then grew and grew, of those who in Latin America are called
desaparecidos:
those who have perished, disappeared. He left his house and never returned.
“Nani?”
the policemen routinely replied, if a family member demanded an explanation.
“Nani?”
(In Swahili the word means “who”; the individual reduced to a question mark.)

Uganda started to metamorphose into a tragic, bloody stage upon which a single actor strutted—Amin. A month after the coup Amin named himself president, then marshal, then field marshal, and finally field marshal for life. He pinned upon himself ever more orders, medals, decorations. But he also liked to walk about in ordinary battle fatigues, so that soliders would say of him, “You see, he’s one of us.” He chose his cars in accordance with his outfits. Wearing a suit to a reception, he drove a dark Mercedes. Out for a spin in a sweat suit? A red Maserati. Battle fatigues? A military Range Rover. The last resembled a vehicle from a science-fiction movie. A forest of antennas protruded from it, all kinds of wires, cables, spotlights. Inside were grenades, pistols, knives. He went about this way because he constantly feared attempts on his life. He survived several. Everyone else died in them—his aides-de-camp, his bodyguards. Amin alone would brush off the dust, straighten his uniform. To cover his tracks, he also rode in unmarked cars. People walking down a street would suddenly realize that the man sitting behind the wheel of that truck was Amin.

He trusted no one, therefore even those in his innermost circle did not know where he would be sleeping tonight, where he would be living tomorrow. He had several residences in the city, several more on the shores of Lake Victoria, still others in the countryside. Determining his whereabouts was both difficult and dangerous. He communicated with every subordinate directly, decided whom he would speak with, whom he wished to see. And for many, such a meeting would prove the last. If Amin became suspicious of someone, he would invite him over. He would be pleasant, friendly, treat his guest to a Coca-Cola. Executioners awaited the visitor as he left. Later, no one could determine what had happened to the man.

Amin usually telephoned his subordinates, but he also used the radio. Whenever he announced changes in the government or in the ranks of the military—and he was constantly instituting changes—he would do so over the airwaves.

Uganda had one radio station, one small newspaper (
Uganda Argus
), one camera, which filmed Amin, and one photojournalist, who would appear for ceremonial occasions. Everything was directed exclusively at the figure of the marshal. Moving from place to place, Amin in a sense moved the state with him; outside of him, nothing happened, nothing existed. Parliament did not exist, there were no political parties, trade unions, or other organizations. And, of course, no opposition—those suspected of dissent died painful deaths.

Amin’s support was the army, which he created according to the colonial model, the only one he knew. Most of the men came from small communities inhabiting Africa’s remote peripheries, lands on the border of Uganda and Sudan. They spoke Sudanese languages, in contrast to the country’s native population, which is Bantu-speaking. Simple and uneducated, they were unable to communicate. But that was the intention—they felt alien, isolated, and wholly dependent on Amin. Whenever a truckful of them arrived, panic would erupt, the streets would empty, the villages grow deserted. Savage, enraged, most often drunk, the soldiers would pillage what they could, beat whomever they could. Randomly, indiscriminately. In the market, they would seize the sellers’ goods. (If there were any, that is, for the Amin years were a time of empty shelves. As I was leaving for Kampala once, someone advised me to take along a lightbulb—there would be power in the hotel, but no bulbs.) The soldiers stole the peasants’ crops, cattle, chickens. One constantly heard them shouting,
“Chakula! Chakula!”
(in Swahili, food, eat). Only copious amounts of food— a side of beef, an entire bunch of bananas, a large bowl of beans—would appease them and then for only a brief moment.

Amin was in the habit of visiting garrisons scattered across the country. On such occasions, a rally would be organized in the square. The marshal would speak. He liked to speak for hours on end. As a surprise, he would bring with him some notable person, a civilian or a military man, whom he suspected of treason, of conspiracy, of a coup attempt. The accused, bound with ropes, earlier already roughed up and scared out of his wits, was hauled to the dais. The crowd, excited by the sight, would fall into a trance and start to howl. “What shall I do with him?” Amin would try to make himself heard above the din. And the throng would shout: “Kill him! Kill him!”

The troops were in constant battle readiness. Amin, who had earlier given himself the title Conqueror of the British Empire, decided that he would liberate those among his brethren still languishing in the chains of colonial slavery. He began a series of onerous and costly military maneuvers. His troops practiced liberating the Republic of South Africa. Battalions attacked “Pretoria” and “Johannesburg,” the artillery strafed enemy positions in “Port Elizabeth” and “Durban.” Amin observed the hostilities through a pair of binoculars from the terrace of a villa dubbed the Command Post. Irritated by the slowness of the battalion from Jinja to capture “Cape Town,” he would jump into a car and, agitated, in a lather, drive from one command point to the other, berating the officers, inciting the rank and file to battle. The shells plunged into Lake Victoria, sending up plumes of water and terrifying the fishermen.