Kwesiga was of the Chiga tribe from the Rwanda border, a despised people who practiced wife inheritance — passing the widow on to the dead husband’s brother — which was based on a curious marriage ceremony that involved the bride’s urinating on the clasped hands of the groom and all his brothers. One of the wedding-night rituals required the bride to fight the husband, and should he prove weak — for she was expected to struggle hard — his elder brother was allowed to take charge, and subdue and ravish the woman while the groom looked on. Kwesiga was being summoned to take his recently widowed sister-in-law as one of his wives.
“I am an emotional socialist,” he said. “But Freddy is a good king.”
In the evening the explosions were louder — mortars, perhaps. And flames were visible where during the day there had been smoke. At last the palace was captured, but when Amin and his men rushed inside, the Kabaka was not there. The clumsy siege of this wood and bamboo palace had taken an entire day and had not accomplished its objective. The Kabaka had escaped to Burundi — dressed as a bar girl, one rumor went.
That was the first night of a curfew. It was illegal to be out of the house from seven in the evening until six in the morning. It was still light at seven, so confinement in bright daylight seemed strange. The enforced captivity and severe censorship also produced many rumors, often conflicting and violent-sounding: stories of arson and beatings and killings, the murder of Indians, cannibal tales and incidents of vandalism, humiliation of expatriates at roadblocks. The Uganda Army was said to be wild — furious that they had failed to capture the king. When darkness came, the gunfire started. I collected rumors in my specially begun curfew notebook.
Besides King Freddy, Kabaka of Buganda, there were three other kings. Sir William Wilberforce Nadiope, a fat little man noted for his bizarre robes and blustery speech, was Kyabazinga of Busoga. The Omukama of Toro was a twenty-year-old Mutoro named Patrick, whose sister Princess Elizabeth was a Vogue model. The Omugabe of Ankole was a cattle owner. When the Kabaka fell, the other kings caved in and went quietly, and the government commandeered their palaces — though “palace” was a misnomer for what were actually comically lopsided houses.
The curfew was a period of intense confusion and fear. There was widespread drunkenness too, which added to the atmosphere of insanity. People boasted of their boozing. No one worked. The urgency about drinking was marked, because the bars closed at six P.M. in order to allow people time to get home. Food was scarce because the trucks from the coast were held up at the Ugandan frontier. Matches became unobtainable, no one knew why. There was much petty crime: robberies, looting, a settling of scores. People traveled in convoys if they were headed upcountry. Mail was suspended for a week. The distant gunfire continued, pok-pok-pok, until dawn.
The curfew was for me an extraordinary event; it was also the perfect excuse. I did no teaching. I got on with my novel. I spent the day collecting rumors — always violent, always of massacres. Indi ans often figured in them. My curfew notebook thickened and I considered writing a book like Camus’s The Plague, describing the deterioration of a city during a siege and curfew.
I realized that in time of war or anarchy people lived out their fantasies. There were many fights, but just as many love affairs. Scores were settled because the police were not a presence — the army was in charge, but its roadblocks were used for intimidation and robbery and, if the rumors were true, killings. Roadblocks were always manned by the most thuggish and rapacious soldiers. Most were from the far north, from a minority tribe noted for its ferocity.
I carried my curfew notebook to the Staff Club. Each rumor had a date, a time, a place.
“What is the point of that?” one colleague asked.
I said, “I want to calculate how many miles an hour a rumor travels.”
The breakdown of order had its excitements. People became reckless and slightly crazed. A Muganda man committed suicide after an atrocity in his village. His friends and family were summoned over the radio.
“He has hanged himself,” the announcer said.
My own fantasies took the form of being a real writer and writing all day. I had two books on the burner: my novel and this detailed curfew journal. In the late afternoon I hurried into town and got drunk as quickly as I could. I was energized by the tumult and the noise, which would, I knew, stop dead at seven, when we had to be indoors.
“Can you come home with me?” I asked when I saw a woman I liked.
Sometimes, without my asking, a woman would say, “Take me home with you,” because it was more pleasant to be stuck in a large house than in a small hut in a turbulent township.
Boredom was the cause of all sorts of unruly behavior, and the streets were always littered with broken glass. I enjoyed the drama, the release from the routine, and found it a period of stimulating turmoil.
One day, hurrying home with a woman in my car, worrying about beating the curfew, I took a side road and a bat crashed against my windshield. It was a large fruit bat, and my thought was that it could have broken the windshield. I stopped the car, and before I knew what I was doing I began stomping on the bat, killing the injured creature. The woman in the car was screaming, “Let’s go!” The curfew was changing me, too.
Vidia was shocked by it. The curfew seemed to confirm his fears of African anarchy — casual violence and a climate of fear. From a distance it must have looked awful. He wrote from the Kaptagat Arms saying that he was just about through with his novel and that as soon as the curfew was over, and law and order was restored, he would return to Kampala.
And, “May I use your spare room?”
I was just a young man in Africa, trying to make my life. He was one of the strangest men I had ever met, and absolutely the most difficult. He was almost unlovable. He was contradictory, he quizzed me incessantly, he challenged everything I said, he demanded attention, he could be petty, he uttered heresies about Africa, he fussed, he mocked, he made his innocent wife cry, he had impossible standards, he was self-important, he was obsessive on the subject of his health. He hated children, music, and dogs. But he was also brilliant, and passionate in his convictions, and to be with him, as a friend or fellow writer, I had always to be at my best.
I said, “Of course.”
4. On Safari in Rwanda
THE EVENING before we left for Rwanda, Vidia asked, “What would you normally be doing tonight?”
I said, “Going to the Gardenia.”
It was what I usually did before I left for the bush. I explained that it was a bar where strangers were welcome, and there were always women around.
He said, “I want to see it.”
To tell him the Gardenia was a brothel would have made it seem more efficient, more of a business than it was; to describe it as a pickup joint would have misrepresented it as sleazy. It was an African bar, outwardly a hangout but in its complexity and character a sorority of rebellious women. Far from having the sexual ambiguity and low self-esteem of cringing, pimp-bullied Western prostitutes, these African women were as liberated as men. They were not castrators. The Gardenia was a sisterhood of laughing adventuresses and cat-eyed princesses.
Young and old, they had left their villages, because African villages were full of restrictions on women. Fleeing bad marriages, ditching boyfriends and family quarrels, escaping blood feuds and hoeing and child rearing and agonizing circumcisions in mud huts, they had come to Kampala for its freedom. Most came from upcountry districts, but some were from the coast and from as far away as Somalia and the Congo. At the Gardenia every woman’s face was different. These women were not coquettes; there was no wooing involved — they wanted to dance — and as for sex, they were more direct than most men. If they wanted it, they said so, and if not, they did not waste your time. I went there to be happy; always I left in a good mood. If I happened to be going on safari, it was the best farewell.