One of the youngest tagged along and pleaded with me to take her. She mentioned a small sum of money. She was seventeen at most, wearing a glittery red dress with sequins and high heels — the sort of girl I might have met at a university party thirty-five years before, someone’s daughter, someone’s girlfriend, perhaps a high school student, spirited and pretty. This one’s English was reasonably good. ‘Let’s go dancing,’ I might have said. But I said no, and when she hung on, promising pleasure, I said I was tired, but in fact I was flustered.
‘Tomorrow then,’ she said, and reached into her expensive handbag and took out a business card. ‘Call me on my mobile phone.’
‘From an economic point of view, going into prostitution is a rational decision for an African woman,’ Michael Maren writes in The Road to Hell. ‘It’s one of the rare avenues open for her to make real money. The sex industry is one of the few points where the local economy and the expatriate economy intersect.’ In this country, people sold much more than she ever had, and did a roaring trade, as Stephen Dedalus remarked. ‘Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to buy the soul.’
My own feeling was that prostitutes were an inevitable adjunct to the aid business, camp followers in the most traditional meaning of that old expression. They traipsed after the army of foreign charities. Wherever the expatriate economy was strong in African countries — the aid-heavy economies in Addis, Nairobi, Kampala, Lilongwe and Maputo — there was prostitution, usually pretty girls dressed in a peculiarly Western fashion to attract expatriates, the bankers, the aid experts, the charity bureaucrats. There was no mystery to this. The prostitutes followed the money.
But that night in Kampala, as on many nights on my long safari, I stayed in my room and advanced my lengthening story of the young man and the older woman in summery Sicily.
Kampala in the rainy season had always been lovely, because it was a small city of wooded hills, and every street had been lined with flowering trees — tulip trees, and flamboyants, and jacarandas. Many of the trees had been cut down to widen the roads for the new high-rise buildings, and what trees remained were the roosts of scavenging, garbage-eating marabou storks. The storks also stood on the street, fussing at dumpsters or else propped on curbs or strutting in twos and threes — somewhat resembling indignant Africans themselves in these postures.
In the days that followed my arrival I left messages with some of my old African friends and colleagues and then walked around, trying to get my bearings. Kampala was no longer a city of Indian shops. The shops remained but very few were run by Indians. Some were derelict, some were managed by Africans. The city was much larger, and the new buildings tall but graceless. The older buildings had not been maintained and looked blighted, haunted relics of an earlier time. It seemed to me that the new buildings would go this way too, fall into disrepair and not crumble but remain, defaced and unusable, while still newer ones were built. This seemed a pattern in the African city, the unnecessary obsolescence of buildings. Nothing was fixed or kept in good repair, the concept of stewardship or maintenance hardly existed. In Kampala, the big elegant Grindlay’s Bank had become a horror, the National Theater had become a seedy monstrosity, the railway station was uncared for. Lacking a center, the city seemed to lack a purpose.
‘Every one of those new buildings involved a huge number of kickbacks,’ a Ugandan insider told me, asking not to be named.
Nothing is more distinctive than a movie theater, for it is a sort of architecture that advertises itself, with a big brow of a marquee and a wide entrance and long flight of steps, an open lobby, and a facade that is designed to display movie posters. In Kampala, the Odeon, the Delite, the Norman and the Neeta, where I had seen the early Bond movies, and What’s New Pussycat? and Midnight Cowboy‚ were closed. A newer multi-screen theater had taken their place but it was a flat-faced building of plastic and aluminum and was already falling into disrepair. The old Kampala movie theaters helped me get my bearings, though. Inside this big tumbledown city was a smaller more familiar one.
With so many of the trees cut down the city looked balder and uglier. Towards the university, the last half-mile of Kampala road had been lined by trees — very tall ones, dark with foliage and during the daylight hours even darker because of the bats. It was the district of Wandegeya, called Bat Valley. Bat Valley was near where I had lived. It was a location I would give to a taxi driver: ‘Drive me to Bat Valley.’ The odd place was a landmark, something that made Kampala special, and the university area a little more African, for the university was adjacent to Bat Valley.
All day long, tens of thousands of small bats hung in the branches of these trees, twittering and squealing, sometimes dropping and circling to a new branch, and these idly squabbling peeps and squeals filled the air. Newcomers mistook them for birds, and if I pointed them out they’d say, ‘Sparrows?’ and smile; but when I said, ‘Look closely,’ and they saw the huge confusion of bats, a whole tall grove of roadside trees black with them, the newcomer would wince in disgust.
At dusk, as though at a signal, the bats took off, great swirling whorls of them, like sky-darkening clouds of gnats or blowflies. Then the abandoned trees looked lacy with the last of the sun shining through the boughs as it did not do in the day. Bats this size, none of them bigger than a human hand, went into the swampier outskirts of the city in search of insects. By dawn they were back in the trees, drizzling shit and twittering like sparrows.
I walked along the road, looking up. The trees were gone. Huts, shanties and sheds had taken their place. No trees, no bats. Bat Valley was gone.
Hardly any trees, but many shacks. I kept walking, past the rotary, which was full of idle taxis and shops. Little shops run by African women were the visible economy now. Inside the gates of Makerere University was a mosque, painted green. The sloping landscaped front lawn of a university was the last place you expected to see a mosque and minaret. But there it was — a gift of Muammar Ghaddafi, I was told. Africans refused nothing. A road, a dorm, a school, a bank, a bridge, a cultural center, a dispensary — all were accepted. But acceptance did not mean the things were needed, nor that they would be used or kept in repair. Even this mosque, which was clearly an eyesore, was falling into ruin.
Makerere University had been my place of employment for four years, from 1965 to 1968. After the expatriates went home I ran the Extra Mural Department. I became a husband, a householder, and a father in Kampala — my first son was born in Mulago Hospital. I was encouraged in my writing in Uganda and began a thirty-year friendship with V S. Naipaul, who had been sent to Makerere on a fellowship from the Farfield Foundation. Innocent times: some years later the Farfield was revealed as a front for the CIA. But Uganda had been the making of me.
After a series of disruptions — the early signs of the coming of crazed, monstrous Idi Amin — I had left in a hurry. I had not been back until now, this hot afternoon, thirty-three years later. I had wanted to return, for the passage of time is marvelous, and I see something dreamlike, even prophetic, in the effects of time. Aging can be startling, too: the sapling grown into a great oak, the vast edifice made into a ruin, the ironwork — like this elegant Makerere perimeter fence — rusted and broken. Places can become haunted-looking, or can astonish you with their modernity.