What all older people know, what had taken me almost sixty years to learn, is that an aged face is misleading. I did not want to be the the classic bore, the reminiscing geezer, yet I now knew: The old are not as frail as you think, they are insulted to be regarded as feeble. They are full of ideas, hidden powers, even sexual energy. Don’t be fooled by the thin hair and battered features and the skepticism. The older traveler knows it best: in our hearts we are youthful and we are insulted to be treated as old men and burdens, for we have come to know that the years have made us more powerful and certainly streetwise. Years are not an affliction — old age is strength.
Jinja had once been full of Indian shops, selling cloth and kitchenware, and food, and several shops specialized in Indian sweets — syrupy globs of gulabjamun and sticky yellow laddhu. There were no Indians now; no sweet shops, no panwallahs. Some of the shops were boarded up, others were run by Africans. At the bus depot in Jinja I met a pair of young nervous Americans, backpackers wearing LL Bean shorts and Orvis hats, sticky sun cream on their noses, the girl gulping trail mix, the boy with his thumb in the Lonely Planet Guide to East Africa, looking a bit too conspicuous.
The boy said to me, ‘Don’t you think we’ll be safer staying here until things quieten down in Kampala?’
‘Then you’ll be in Jinja for years,’ I said. ‘Things have not been quiet in Kampala since 1962. Get on the bus — you’ll be fine.’
But they didn’t, they stayed. If, as they said, they weren’t leaving until Kampala settled down, they might still be in Jinja now.
When I told Africans where I had come from, and how slowly I had traveled, they said, ‘So you must be retired.’
‘No, no, no,’ I said, over-reacting, because I despised the word and equated it with surrender. ‘I’m traveling, I’m working.’
That wasn’t it, either, not business, not pleasure, not work, not retirement, but the process of life, how I chose to pass the time.
Nearer Kampala the bush was denser and the towns better defined, with clearer perimeters — regulated subdivisions rather than the straggling squatter camps that were suburbs in Kenya. There were signs in Uganda, too, that people were houseproud: the huts and bungalows were painted and fenced in, with vegetable or flower gardens. Among them were very tall native trees standing singly or in clusters, the last remnants of the old growth forests, the habitat that had supported troops of monkeys and dangling orchids. What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, there were long fluffy tracts where butterflies settled. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies.
At the edge of Kampala was a sports ground, Mandela National Stadium. In my time it would have been named Obote Stadium, or Amin Stadium, In Kenya, it would have been Moi Stadium. African politicians habitually bestowed their own names upon roads, schools and arenas; they put their faces on the currency, full faced on the notes, in lumpy profile on the coins. The political health of a country was easily assessed by looking at the money and the names of streets. In the worst places you saw the same name and face everywhere, that of the president-for-life.’
There had been an election in Uganda just the week before I arrived. The posters and banners of the different parties were still prominent on shops. I recognized some of the candidates — I personally knew two of them, for they had been ambitious ranters even in my time. The incumbent Yoweri Museveni had won, and though one of the losers, a man named Kizza Besigye, disputed the result, it was generally felt that the election had been fair. But grenades were still being lobbed into markets in different parts of the country and cars burned willy-nilly.
When I finally arrived in Kampala the news was that the loser, Besigye, who was contesting the election, had gone to Entebbe Airport for the flight to South Africa to give a lecture. He had been prevented from boarding the plane. He was told that he could not leave the country, ‘while the explosions are being investigated.’
‘I am not happy about the election,’ a Ugandan told me. ‘There was intimidation and fraud. The results were bichupali’ — a local word, not Swahili, meaning counterfeit.
‘What do you think?’
‘It was rigged. We have no work. In fact, the truth will emerge.’
Being a Ugandan, he said reedged and wuck and een fukt and troof and emudge.
Hearing this manner of speaking, the Ugandan way, made me feel at home too.
As a twenty-something I had spent many evenings drinking beer on the veranda of the Speke Hotel. I had never stayed there — my home was across town, near Bat Valley. So on my return the Speke became my home in Kampala. One of its many attractions for me now was that its phones had not been upgraded in forty years: it was impossible to call the United States — nor could anyone call me. At a better-class hotel I sent a fax to my wife to reassure her I was muddling along, and reading it she thought: Poor Paulie, all alone.
On my way back to the Speke that night I realized that I was walking through an African city in safety. This I liked: a nocturnal ramble was a novelty. I walked for an hour, all over town, even to the bombed market, and finally to an Indian restaurant. No hassles, lots of people on the street.
Many of the people were out collecting grasshoppers that had gathered under the streetlights. This I remembered from way back, the grasshopper season, when families shook bed sheets under the lamps and picked the insects out of them and popped them into jars to take home and fry. The grasshoppers arrived with the rains.
‘We like the senene,’ a young African man said. He was strolling with two other men and we stopped to talk.
‘Locusts, right?’ I said.
‘No, no,’ he said, as though I had maligned them. ‘Not locusts. They do no damage.’
‘How do you catch them in the village or in the bush?’
‘Very hard there,’ one of the other men said. ‘Not enough light.’
So this urban illumination was a splendid feature of the donor aid that had allowed Uganda to light its city streets: never mind the traffic — there were few cars on the roads at night anyway. But the modernity of city lights, a multimillion-dollar aid project, made it possible for Ugandans to harvest edible grasshoppers on the bright night streets.
‘They’re tasty, right?’
‘So tasty!’ the first African said.
‘How tasty?’
‘Better than white ants.’
This I found so funny I exploded with laughter.
He said, ‘But that is the only other food you could compare them with.’
True, they were both insects and the preparation was exactly the same. They were stripped of their wings and legs and deep fried in fat, and sold by the greasy scoopful out of big sacks in the market as a nutty delicacy.
Among the whirling grasshoppers and the grasshopper gatherers and the shoeshine boys and the strollers were a multitude of prostitutes, and they were insectile too. They lingered in the street, they stood under trees, they sat on low walls, they leaned against cars. They were most of them very young and well dressed and looked demure, even sweet, and as I approached they hissed at me, and made kissing sounds, as you would call a cat. ‘Want a date?’ ‘Want a massage?’ And some of the most innocent-looking pushed their glazed faces at me and whispered softly, ‘Want a fuck?’