Swahili, not French, was their common language. Their English was fine but embarrassed questions they asked in Swahili.
‘Mimi na sakia njaa,’ Fifi said to me, pouting a little: she was hungry.
I bought them fried potatoes, three plates of them, and it was obvious that what they really wanted was not a chance to perform oral sex on a strange man, or ten dollars for a massage, or a quickie in the back seat of an African bureaucrat’s car, but a big plate of French fries and a beer. And perhaps a ticket to America. Anyway, they were ravenously hungry and did not hide it.
‘So you’re traveling?’ Clementine asked.
I said yes, that I had just come from Kenya.
‘We hear that Nairobi is very dangerous.’
This from a Congolese who had lived in one of the most anarchic parts of the Eastern Congo, and traveled through the massacres of Rwanda. I mentioned this.
‘Yes, but there are good places, too,’ Clementine said. ‘Let’s all go to the Congo together and we’ll show you the good places.’
We planned the Congo trip. I would hire a Land-Rover and buy some food and cases of beer. We would need presents to give away to people. Good shoes, raincoats, maybe some medicine, and money of course — American dollars would be best. We would head southwest, cross through Rwanda into the border town of Goma, and then just wander through the Congo, wherever the roads took us.
‘The roads are very bad, but we don’t care!’ Angelique said.
‘We will give you massages for nothing — three girls, all together. How you like that?’ Clementine said.
‘I like it very much.’
‘We go now?’ she said, pointing upstairs.
‘Wewe napenda wazee?’ I said. You like old men?
She said, ‘You’re not old. Maybe — what? — forty or so?’
That was another welcome touch. I was fascinated by them — by their travel, their resilience, even their glamor. These girls in tight satin dresses and upswept hairdos and stiletto heels came from dark and dangerous villages in the dead center of Africa and had reinvented themselves as sex goddesses. But I was not interested in anything more than their stories. Though the rule in Uganda was ‘no condom, no sex’ they were following a risky profession in an AIDS-ridden city, competing with hundreds, perhaps thousands of other women. I had to admire their resourcefulness. Now and then I heard of American or European women’s groups who went to Nairobi and Kampala to encourage prostitutes to get off the streets, to retrain them, ‘empower’ them, the agents of virtue explained. The prostitutes I met would have laughed at such a proposition.
‘So?’ Clementine was smiling. ‘We go to your room?’
But I went to my room alone, and scribbled.
For my onward journey, I was trying to arrange passage on a boat across Lake Victoria. In my comings and goings I often bumped into Clementine, Angelique and Fifi at the hotel, and I usually stopped to buy them a drink or some food. I even asked them what work they liked doing, what they wanted for themselves. Hairdressing loomed large in their ambitions, but mostly they wanted money.
Clementine said, ‘I want just one man — someone to look after me. If he is good to me I will be good to him. What about you?’
Yet, as always, I slept alone in my narrow bed.
Repeated trips to the offices of the Board of East African Railways had convinced me that if I persevered I might get a berth on a ferry. There were several ferries a week from Port Bell in Uganda to Mwanza, the port town at the opposite side of the lake, in Tanzania. But for the past three months, passengers had been forbidden to ride on the ferries across Lake Victoria.
‘Why is that so?’
‘Ebola virus,’ the secretary to the chairman told me. ‘There was an outbreak in Uganda two months ago and so the Tanzanians took steps.’
There had also been a tragic ferry sinking. In 1996, the MV Bukoba went down in the southern end of the lake, and more than 1000 passengers drowned. Because of the liability and the high cost of insurance very few passengers were carried across the lake these days. This was all news to me, but where had it been reported? The sinking of the Bukoba was one of those African catastrophes that hardly rated a mention in the world press.
‘Maybe I should write a letter?’
I asked for paper and sat in the office writing a florid pleading letter to the chairman. After two more visits a letter from the chairman was awaiting me stating that if I accepted the liability (Ebola virus? A sinking?) an exception would be made in my case. I could ride on one of the ferries. They would let me know which one I might take. This was somewhat indefinite but having secured permission I felt I had achieved a victory.
‘How will I know when a ferry is leaving?’
‘You must come here every day to check.’
‘The prime minister left a message for you, Mister Thorax,’ the desk clerk said one day. This was Apolo Nsibambi, my old friend and colleague, who had risen in the world. I called him back and he said I should come to his office the next day. He said it was a waste of his time to give me directions.
‘The prime minister’s office! Everyone knows where the prime minister’s office is! Ask any taxi driver!’
The same bluster — he hadn’t changed. From the beginning, when he joined my department as a lecturer in 1966 I had found him interesting. He had just come from Chicago where he had earned a Ph.D. in political science. On first meeting him I asked him how he had liked Chicago. He said, ‘Immensely.’ Some months later he said he had had several run-ins with the Chicago police, what is now known as racial profiling.
‘Each time it was the same. I would be walking home late at night after studying at the library and a police car would pull up to the curb and a white policeman would say, “Get over here, nigger. Where are you going?” ’
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘I said, “Officer, I am not a nigger. Do not call me a nigger. I am Ugandan, an African. I am a student here and I am doing nothing wrong.” ’ And then his voice becoming shrill, ‘I am not a nigger!’
Saying that he was an African usually worked, one policeman had even apologized, saying, ‘Sorry, we didn’t know you were an African — we thought you were a nigger.’
Apolo was more than a Ugandan; he was something of an aristocrat, from a distinguished family. One of his grandmothers had been a princess, and so he was related to the king, the Kabaka. The Kingdom of Buganda, ruled by the Kabakas, was centuries old and still powerful. The Kabaka known as King Freddy was overthrown in 1966 — from our offices at the Adult Studies Center we could see smoke rising from the siege, Idi Amin and his men firing on the palace. That week, the man who would be king, Ronald Mutebi — the present Kabaka hid at Apolo’s house for safety.
‘I decided to be a commoner,’ Apolo said. ‘My children are commoners — free to marry whom they like.’
The Eton of Uganda is King’s College, Budo. Apolo’s grandfather had been head prefect at King’s, his father had been head prefect, Apolo himself had been head prefect. His father, Semyoni — a version of Simeon — had been a major landowner. In a mood of religious fervor in 1922, somewhat in the spirit of Tolstoy in old age, Semyoni divested himself of his land, abandoned political belief and started a religious revival called the Balokole Movement.
Apolo called them ‘spiritual purists,’ explaining ‘they believed in putting things right, and repentance, and being “saved.” They were not fundamentalists. It was a movement within the Church of Uganda.’
The first time I had met Apolo’s father he had been lying on a sofa, suffering a spell of illness, and from this supine position his first words to me were, ‘Are you saved?’ I told him I didn’t know. That made him laugh. He said sharply, ‘Then the answer is no. If you don’t know it means you are not saved!’