‘Who do you want to meet? What do you want? What can I do for you?’ he said. ‘I must go to parliament. You see how busy my day is!’
I said, ‘Do you remember the story you told me about being in Chicago when you were a student — how the police stopped you and called you a nigger?’
He laughed and said, ‘Oh, yes. The Chicago police were quite racist in the sixties. It’s a lively city. I get back there occasionally.’
Then he was off to parliament and I was off to the Railway Board.
‘No ferry tonight. Maybe tomorrow.’
There was none the next day, which gave me time to see several more of my old friends. Like Apolo, they were pillars of society, still married to the same spouse after thirty-odd years. The four of them had produced twenty-four children. They were plumper, grayer, and like Apolo they were great talkers. In African terms they had defied the odds, for all were around sixty, the age of a respected elder in Africa. They had survived and flourished in a country that had known regicide, two revolutions, a coup d’état, AIDS and Idi Amin. My old friends were people of accomplishment. The one woman, Thelma Awori, was a former ambassador married to a presidential candidate who had come third in the recent election; another friend, Jassy Kwesiga, was running a think-tank; a third was a presidential adviser, who had refused an ambassadorial post on the grounds, ‘I am not good ambassador material — I told the president, and it’s true.’ That was Chango Machyo, who had been a Maoist in the 1960s and was still a radical, the scourge of ‘imperialists,’ ‘neo-colonialists,’ and ‘the black bourgeoisie.’
‘You mentioned my tribe in one of your books,’ Jassy Kwesiga said, as a form of greeting.
Yes, the Bachiga of southwest Uganda and their curious marriage rite which included the groom’s brothers and the bride in the Urine Ceremony. I could not hear the name of the tribe without thinking of the piddle-widdle of this messy rite.
Kwesiga had spent several decades as a university lecturer. His wife was a university dean, his children were successful, he was fat and happy. We reminisced about our lives as young men in Uganda in the 1960s, when our haunts had been the White Nile Club, the Gardenia, the Susanna Club, the New Life, and City Bar. Like many others, he was nostalgic for the earlier more orderly time, when the country was still intact, before any political violence, before AIDS, an age of innocence.
‘The sixties were wonderful,’ he said. ‘We were the elite without realizing it. The seventies were a disaster with Idi Amin. People disappeared — for so many reasons. It is a period to forget. Things are improving. Democracy is a process. The process is democratization. Democratic growth has its own momentum. What are you writing, bwana?’
‘Nothing yet — just traveling.’
‘People on the outside just write bad news — the disasters, Ebola virus, AIDS, bombs. And they ask the wrong questions.’
‘What should they ask?’
‘The question should be, “How did anyone survive?” ’
‘I think I know the answer,’ I said. ‘Because it’s a subsistence economy and survival is something that Africans have learned.’
‘Yes. Years and years of just getting by,’ he said, in a tone of regret, almost sorrow, and in that same tone he went on. ‘I’ve traveled, too, you know. I went to Beijing some years ago. I thought I was going to a city where people were poor and miserable. It was amazing. I was on the thirty-third floor of a hotel that was beautiful — and the city was incredible. How did this happen?’
He was remembering our colleague Chango Machyo and his office copies of Peking Review and China Reconstructs. We lived vicariously through Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution this way, the whole of socialist Africa did. The Chinese in those magazines planted rice, harvested beans and made pig iron. Their motto was: Serve the people. They wore cloth slippers and faded blue jackets and looked like geeks. Now they were a billion grinning plutocrats in neckties.
He meant: Why can’t Africans do the same?
I said, ‘Do you want to live in China?’
‘Never,’ he said.
‘Then maybe what you see in Uganda is more or less what you asked for.’
In a reversal of fortune, the now prosperous People’s Republic was investing in Uganda’s peasantry, because of Uganda’s large cotton crop. A Chinese factory had recently opened in the northern town of Lira, for milling the cotton and making clothes to sell locally and for export. More joint ventures were planned. What China had failed to accomplish in East Africa through Maoism it might yet succeed in through venture capitalism.
A sign of Kwesiga’s confidence in the country was that he had encouraged his five children to live and work in Uganda — some had married, none had left the country. My friend Chango Machyo, the Maoist, had nine children. All of them were still working in Uganda. The proof of your political faith was the way you guided your children. A loving parent did not willingly sacrifice children to muddled thinking or a doomed economy.
Thelma was a Liberian, American educated, married to a Ugandan, who had lived and worked in Uganda for thirty-five years. I knew the others by their tribal affiliation. Apolo was a Muganda, Kwesiga a Muchiga, Chango a Musamia.
Chango’s office was in the presidential office compound on Kololo Hill, a number of mud-spattered stucco buildings behind a tall fence. His title was National Political Commissar, a vague position, but since Chango had always been an ideologue the president must have found him a useful mentor. He looked battered and ill, and a little unsteady. He apologized, saying that he had malaria that week and felt dizzy. I said we could meet another day.
‘No. It’s good to see you after so long. What do you think of the country now?’
‘More people. Fewer trees.’
‘That’s right. And no Indians.’
‘Is that good?’
‘Very good. They were exploiting us and sucking our blood.’
Even malaria had no effect on his Maoist rhetoric. We talked about the president, Yoweri Museveni.
Chango said, ‘Don’t you remember him? He was one of our students at Ntare, when we gave those weekend courses.’
Ntare was a school near the rural town of Mbarara. In the sixties, we younger lecturers in the Extra-Mural Department of Adult Studies went to these country areas and organized classes in English and Political Science. As for Mbarara, all I remembered was a mass of students of the pastoral Banyankole tribe, taking notes in the classrooms, their cattle lowing and browsing under the windows.
‘I didn’t remember him either,’ Chango said. ‘But he remembered me. Times were so bad under Amin I went to Nairobi. Museveni was there. He saw me. “Mr Machyo!” I said, “Eh, eh, what are you doing?” He was a soldier. He was named after his father’s battalion, the Seventh. He said he had a plan. He had trained with the FRELIMO in Mozambique. I went to Dar es Salaam with him, but I missed my family. Then, after Amin, after the anarchy, after the guerrilla war against Obote, when Museveni took over in 1986, he sent for me. He made me Minister of Water, and then Minister of Rehabilitation — we gave out blankets. Later I became National Political Commissar.’
‘You were always a political commissar.’
‘Yes, I haven’t changed. I am still saying the same things.’