I sent similar notes and left messages with other old friends, who were now political advisers, commissars, consultants, and members of parliament. Several had been presidential candidates, and the wife of one of them had been a colleague. Everyone knew them. In Africa everyone my age knew everyone else.
I went back to the library and looked around: what few books remained on the shelves were dusty and torn. I guessed the books had been stolen. There were no new books. What had been the best library in East Africa was now just a shell. The trees around it had been cut down. Only the fact that the buildings had been well made so many years ago had kept them from falling down altogether, but anyone could see that the campus was a disgrace.
Descending the grassy hill towards Faculty Housing I remembered how just here, one hot noon in 1966, by a shaggy-bark eucalyptus tree, I was taking a walk with Vidia Naipaul, who said he hated living here. He became ugly-faced with fury. He said, ‘The weak and oppressed. They’re terrible, man. They’ve got to be kicked.’ He kicked a stone, very hard. ‘That’s the only thing Africans understand!’
Naipaul was usually ranting in Uganda, but he wasn’t confidently angry, he was afraid, for the source of his rage was insecurity. Africans looked at him and saw a Muhindi an Indian. As time passed, Naipaul became more narrowly Indian in his attitudes and prejudices. Subsequently, everything he wrote about Africa was informed by the fear that he had known as an isolated Hindu child in black Trinidad. The childhood fear he brought to Africa became terror in his Ugandan months, horror on his Congo trip, and as a face-saver he made his timid emotions into contempt when he wrote about Africa. In a Free State and A Bend in the River are veiled attacks on Africans and Africa by an outsider who feels weak. Rigid with a Trinidadian Indian’s fear of the bush, he never understood that the bush is benign. Africa frightened him so badly he cursed it, wishing it ill until the curse became a dismissive mantra that ignorant readers could applaud: ‘Africa has no future.’
Leaving Makerere later that day in a taxi, I asked the driver who he had voted for in the recent election. He laughed and said, ‘These elections are held mainly to impress donor countries — to prove that we are doing the right thing. But it was a rigged election, and we voters are not impressed.’
I asked someone in the know about this. He said it was true, that in order to run for election a candidate had to give money to voters, the equivalent of about a dollar each would do, but the most successful candidates gave out pots and pans, lengths of cloth, and shirts (‘not T-shirts’). Mobilizers wanted free bikes. All elections in Uganda involve giving out money and gifts.’
I had time on my hands. I got a tailor under a tree to mend my tattered canvas sports jacket. The result was wonderful, a mass of beautifully stitched patches, and a new green lining. As a favor to a friend, I gave a talk to about thirty university students from the English faculty, many of whom having written poems and stories said they wanted a career as full-time writers.
I wanted to go to the bush. The day I planned to take a bus to the western province, to Kabila, to see the chimps in the primate reserve, there was trouble thereabouts. A news item appeared saying that an attack from the bush in a small town near Kabila had left eleven people dead (‘hacked to death’) and fifty cars torched. The government claimed that the opposition might have had a hand in it, but most people felt that it was a group calling itself the African Defense Force, an anti-government organization. A few days later, a van-load of students on a game viewing drive at Murchison Falls Park were fired upon by another anti-government group, the Lord’s Resistance Army — ten students were killed. This sort of thing seemed to be fairly common, armed men appearing from the bush and committing acts of mayhem. So I didn’t go.
I stayed in Kampala, looking for the past. Even with grenades being lobbed occasionally into the central market the city still seemed quiet. ‘The economy is improving — it’s back to where it was in 1970,’ an economist told me. That was round about the time I had left. What kept Uganda together to a large extent was church-going and, in general, religious tolerance. There was a large Muslim population — minarets spiking up everywhere, and muezzins wailing. The Church of Uganda was Anglican, with a well-attended red-brick cathedral on one of Kampala’s hills. Its bells were audible every Sunday. One of Uganda’s kings, Mtesa the First, had disapproved of his subjects becoming Catholic converts and made a bonfire of a number of them. This martyrdom and their subsequent sainthood had given Ugandan Catholicism a tremendous boost, even before the pope visited.
‘We must preach harmony and reconciliation,’ a priest was saying one Sunday in his sermon, amplified on the sidewalk. He talked about the election, how winners ‘were jubilating, even as others were mourning.’ He finished movingly with, ‘Love one another.’
It was a mild evening, and all the strollers were within earshot. Some of the strollers were urchins and prostitutes and schoolgirls hustling for money. Some were selling newspapers. Others were hawking sunglasses and cigarette lighters. It was impossible to tell whether any of these people understood what was being said.
Why were there so many prostitutes in this part of town? In the past they had just hung around bars and nightclubs. But these women and girls were on the street, lounging on low walls, leaning against trees. There was shade here, it was quiet, and there were three hotels in the area. I guessed that there were customers here, the aid people, the visiting bureaucrats, the foreigners. But the women also solicited passing cars driven by Africans. In my day, not many Africans owned cars, so these hookers were one of the features of the new economy.
Some prostitutes sat in the veranda café of my hotel, sizing up any man who passed by, with that lingering gaze and familiar smile that is common to prostitutes and car salesmen — the lock of eye-contact. They even had the same pitch, ‘What can I do for you’ which meant, ‘What can you do for me?’
What these women wanted was a drink, so that they would not seem so conspicuous. By buying them beer, I got acquainted with three of them who always sat together speaking Swahili — Clementine from the Congo, Angelique from Rwanda, Fifi from Burundi.
Fifi had arrived in Kampala from Bujumbura only the week before. ‘Because there was trouble,’ she explained. ‘There’s a lot of fighting in Burundi right now.’
She had taken three buses and had come via Kigali in Rwanda.
‘Rwanda is — ha!’ Angelique threw up her hands in despair.
‘But it was worse before?’ I said. I was thinking of the gruesome descriptions of massacre in the book We Wish to Inform You that We Will All Be Killed Tomorrow with Our Families. Even if you didn’t agree with the author’s historical premise that Belgian colonialism had imposed tribal distinctions and a class system in the Watusi and Bahutu society, the book was excellent, if upsetting, reportage.
‘Much worse before,’ she said. ‘I mean, my family was killed.’
She was the youngest of the three, hardly more than seventeen. The eldest was Clementine, from Bukavu province in the Congo. Her ambition was to go to America.
‘Ku fanya nini?’ I said, ‘To do what?’ I asked in Swahili because it was a delicate question, given the sort of work she usually did.
‘Ku fanya une salon de coiffure,’ she said, and explained, ‘I can do hair well. Look at Angelique’s hair. So pretty!’