‘ “Neo-colonialism.” “The proletariat.” “Imperialism.” “Black bourgeoisie.” “Blood suckers.” ’
‘They have it in Kenya,’ Chango said. ‘The African bourgeoisie inherited settler farms. They took over white hotels. Just so they could make big profits. That type of African is no good for Africa. At the bourgeois level it is a struggle for power.’
I told him that it seemed to me that Uganda was still recoverng from the anarchy of the Idi Amin years. Chango said that was partly true. He had lost his job at the university, like many others. He had gone back to his village near the eastern town of Mbale.
‘Life in Uganda was terrible under Amin,’ he said. ‘There was always shooting. For years there was a curfew from six p. m. to six a. m. If you were outside you would be shot. People were fearing. If you saw a soldier you got very worried, because a soldier could do anything to you. Many people were taken away. Me, myself, I was taken but released.’
‘How did you live?’
‘I had nothing — times were very bad. I resumed my old job as a surveyor — yes, I am a trained surveyor — but there was no work.’
‘Weren’t you safer in Mbale than you would have been in Kampala?’
‘No. One day I was in a coffee shop in Mbale and a soldier came in. People were greeting him — but I had a bad feeling. I left the place. As soon as I got home I heard shooting, from the direction of the coffee shop. What happened was this. Two men were coming down the road. The soldier said, “Watch this.” And he shot them both, for no reason. After that I went to Nairobi.’
Hearing this, it occurred to me that all this talk of ‘it was a time to forget’ and ‘look to the future’ was perhaps a mistake. University students had asked me, ‘How can we become better known writers?’ But the real question should have been, ‘What should we be writing?’ And the answer was: About those lost years. Because of the shame and humiliation and defeat, no one liked talking about the Amin years, but it seemed that the best use for someone’s writing skills would have been in compiling an oral history of those horror years.
Thelma Awori, the Liberian, was an old friend and colleague. Thelma had a horror story. Her husband, Aggrey, had been head of Ugandan Television in 1971 when Amin was in power. Soldiers came to his office and took him by force. One wanted to shoot him on the spot, but another said, ‘Not here — take him away.’ They took him outside and put him against a tree. A soldier drew a bead on him but just before the man fired, Aggrey dropped to the ground.
A soldier passing by recognized him and said to the soldiers, ‘Don’t shoot him.’ But the others insisted and a great argument ensued. ‘Let’s take him to Amin,’ one said. And so Amin decided Aggrey’s fate: he was released, he fled the country and taught at a school in Kenya until it was safe to return home. He had been unsuccessful in his run for president but he was still a member of parliament.
‘And our children are here,’ Thelma said. ‘We wanted them here. We said, “Come back and get your foot in the door. Get a decent job. Try to be part of the process.” ’
There were five children, mostly American educated like their parents — Thelma was a Radcliffe graduate, Aggrey had gone to Harvard. One of the daughters had a master’s degree from Wharton.
Thelma said, ‘She was on Wall Street. Aggrey insisted that she come hack. She was earning less money by far — and she couldn’t believe how inefficient things were here. But she says, “If I weren’t here they wouldn’t do things right.” ’
Everyone was talking openly about the country’s problems — Uganda had not changed in that respect. Uganda, even in its apparent recovery, was still a welfare case. More than half of its budget came from donor countries. AIDS had peaked in 1992 at 30 percent and through intense education had decreased: now 10 percent of the population was infected. But the disease had killed off the best part of a generation. It was a country of two million orphans.
‘I’m paid to be optimistic,’ an American diplomat said to me in Kampala shortly before I left. ‘I mean, you have to be optimistic to work in places like this. But if I weren’t being paid for that I would despair of what Africans have made of their countries — the deforestation, the disorder, AIDS — God.’
And he asked what I thought, for I had seen Before and After.
I said, ‘People I know — very smart people — want their children to stay here, not to emigrate. Speaking as a parent, that’s a good sign.’
I had nothing else to go on, but that was something: the belief that their children had a future in the country was a measure of confidence, and a way of saying that the country had a future.
In Kampala, I had begun to live a tranquil life, not as a traveler but as a resident of a place I had begun to enjoy anew. I saw old friends, I had leisurely meals, I went for walks, I went bird watching on the lakeshore. Most nights I worked, writing my long erotic story.
My sort of travel was sometimes expensive because it was improvised and always involved last-minute plans. But this residence in Kampala cost me very little, and sleeping in the same bed night after night, and writing a story, restored my energy. Some days I did nothing more than stroll, watching children playing with homemade toys, hoops made of plastic, little vehicles of twisted wire, pull toys and sometimes live insects — rhino beetles — flying on pieces of string.
One of my strolls was always to the Railway Board to find out whether a ferry was leaving. I left it to the afternoon one day. And that day the chairman’s secretary stood up at her desk and pointed to the door.
She said, ‘Go to Port Bell right now. Bring Chairman Sentongo letter. Bring you passport. Bring you cloves. The ferry leaving just now!’
11. The MV Umoja Across Lake Victoria
For three hours at the Port Bell ferry pier I watched weaver birds building nests in the papyrus stalks by the lake’s edge. I was due to sail on the ferry Kabalega. ‘Soon, soon,’ a dock official said. ‘They are welding the ship.’ A fish eagle swooped. A man casting a net came up with some tiny fish after many tries. Another hour passed. Near some sunken boats ten or twelve boys fished for tilapia with bamboo poles. This was not recreation, it was their next meal. Another hour.
I walked up and down, thinking how every book I had ever read about Africa contained long passages and sometimes many pages about enforced delay. ‘We remained in the chief’s compound for many days, awaiting his permission to return to the coast,’ is a sentence that occurs in many books of African exploration. Burton’s African travel contains shouts of complaint against delays, so does Livingstone’s and everyone else’s. Livingstone, who believed that ‘constipation is sure to bring on fever,’ ordered his men to go on long bush marches because such exertion was efficacious for their bowels. ‘[In Africa] with the change of climate there is often a peculiar condition of the bowels which makes the individual imagine all manner of things in others.’ For Livingstone delay spelled constipation. Heart of Darkness is a book of dramatic and maddening delays, even the narration is obstructive — halting and deliberately tangential. Delay is now and then a form of suspense that makes you concentrate, but much more often it is a nuisance that drives you nuts. And who wants to hear about it? This paragraph is already too long.
It sometimes seems as though Africa is a place you go to wait. Many Africans I met said the same thing, but uncomplainingly, for most lived their lives with a fatalistic patience. Outsiders see Africa as a continent delayed — economies in suspension, societies up in the air, politics and human rights put on hold, communities throttled or stopped. ‘Not yet,’ voices of authority have cautioned Africans throughout the years of colonization and independence. But African time was not the same as American time. One generation in the West was two generations in Africa, where teenagers were parents and thirty-year-olds had one foot in the grave. As African time passed I surmised that the pace of Western countries was insane, that the speed of modern technology accomplished nothing, and that because Africa was going its own way at its own pace for its own reasons, it was a refuge and a resting-place, the last territory to light out for. I surmised this, I did not always feel it; I am impatient by nature.