Abyssinian Chronicles (14 page)

Up to this point in time we had got used to the idea that politics was a disease that afflicted only Grandpa in the family. The general impression was that he provoked trouble and punishment in order to atone for mistakes he had made as a chief. On Independence Day, October 9, 1962, he got into trouble with some pro-government hooligans and escaped with a shallow stab wound and a broken tooth. In 1966, when the constitution was suspended and a state of emergency was declared, he got into trouble once again. This time it was in a distant village where soldiers had beaten up people for violating the curfew. For his criticism, he was immersed in a cattle dip. Weeks later, he was invited to the same village to mediate between the soldiers and the villagers. Grandma told him not to go. He went anyway. This time he was shot on the way back, the bullet lodged in his leg for the rest of his life.

It was thus a total turnaround when politics seemed to come
down hard on Grandma. On the night of January 25, 1971, General Idi Amin, helped by his British and Israeli friends, seized power in a military coup. He overthrew his former benefactor, Milton Obote, the prime minister who had led the country to independence and had gone on to suspend the constitution. General Amin gave eighteen reasons for the coup, among them corruption, detention without trial, lack of freedom of speech and economic mismanagement of the country.

There was dancing, singing and all manner of jubilation in the villages. I personally did not know what to make of it. For some obscure reason, I slept at Grandpa’s that night. A fire woke us up. Fierce ululation led us to Grandma’s compound in a rush. The house had turned into a dugout canoe trapped in a furious sea of pink, blue and red flame. It tottered horribly and wobbled groggily as the waves surged. Doors and windows collapsed with spectacular fatigue, only to be gobbled up by the swirling waves. The iron sheets twisted, as if in terrible pain, and furled into grotesque funnels. Beams undermined by flame broke off and brought the remains of the roof down. Women, mouths agape, hands on the sides of their heads, looked on, shredded screams cascading down their parched lips. Men, paralyzed, dumbfounded, stared impotently. A mangled mass of words boiled inside me, clogging my mouth, condemning me to the asphyxiated grief of a defeated mastiff. Grandma, submerged, twisted, gnarled, grappled with death after forty years of midwifery.

I could think of only one person who could have done this: the man who had tried to chop off Grandma’s head. The coup provided a perfect alibi. A hot yellow stream ran down my leg: I had pissed my pants for the second time in my life.

My life had turned upside down.

T
HE SEETHING,
kidney-shaped bowl functioning as the taxi park had originally been a volcanic hill. During the last active phase two things happened: the hill shattered, creating this valley, and the surrounding valleys were transformed into the seven round-topped hills at the core of the city of Kampala.

As I stood on the rim of the bowl, sniffing dirty whiffs from the notorious Owino Market and exhaust fumes from countless vehicles, Uncle Kawayida’s stories seemed to burst out of the dramatic confines of his imagery into the polychromatic chaos that washed the bowl like a caustic solution. The corroded asphalt, damaged by a million feet and a million tires, vibrated with its eternal burden of travellers, loafers, hawkers, snake charmers and all manner of other nebulous figures, calling to mind the bowl’s early swampy days, before the water was
drained or diverted, the vegetation was cut or burned and the animals were displaced or exterminated.

The volcanic fire dormant below and the solar fire blazing from above, the relentless surge of vehicles and all the souls on parade here, turned this vessel of cobwebbed fantasies, this cocoon of termite-ridden ambitions, this lapper of blood and chewer of flesh, into the most fascinating spot in the whole city. My chest swelled when I stood in this brewery of motion, dreams and chaos. I could not help trembling with the electricity of great things to come. I knew that both wonderful and dismal memories were trapped inside the asphalt. Like devil mushrooms, they popped up to give a hint of the past and a taste of the future. Just by looking at the crowd of marauders, van boys, lechers, beggars and other nameless souls adrift here, I felt I was privy to the secrets of things to come. Every visit felt like the first time. It made the air quiver with possibilities.

I witnessed my first live birth here, in the metallic morning air, as the sun rose to pound the bowl into another day of spectacular madness. Suddenly a woman appeared, ejected from the bowels of an anonymous van. The exhaust fumes blew her garments round her midriff, exposing the swollen cavern from which baby after baby dropped. It seemed as though all of the fifty-something babies I had left in the villages had followed me here, to reveal themselves to me in one blinding extravaganza, torment me with their sanitary demands and harass me with the ineluctable power of their presence.

For a moment, the woman was screaming so hard that the whole bowl froze in an eerie silence, and she was racked by so many pangs that her face had the ash-gray serenity of coma. The silence was ripped open by the cry for a midwife or a doctor, somebody who knew what to do. I didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t move. I was trapped by the ballast of a past career as a midwife-assistant, and the fate of a life running in reverse. It was then that a wall of muscle and a forest of legs sealed the images of the alfresco birth from my eyes. I saw blood flowing under and around feet, dodging outcrops, filling depressions and getting picked up by tires and soles for transportation to destinations unknown.

The skyline, gawking with architectural indigence, towered over the bowl like a row of stained, gap-toothed jawbones. The buildings resembled
cracked, time-whipped relics from a decayed epoch. The dust-caked walls, the grime-laden windows, the rust-streaked roofs and the prematurely aged ambience fostered disillusionment in my soul. The sheer drabness of shape and the utter paucity of any structural fantasy made me reserve my loyalties for the swamps, villages and hills of my birth. I got the irrepressible feeling that a gang of demented architects, doubly laden with cerebral malaria and tropical torpor, had saddled the city with these monstrosities.

A distance away, sweltering in its diaphanous illusions, stood Nakivubo Stadium, scene of many radio-broadcast football matches. It presented the bowl with its dirty backside, dripping streaks of stale piss and blobs of graffiti. The pylon-borne stadium lights, clustered like the suckers of a giant octopus, overlooked the filthy Nakivubo River, whose cement-corseted waters were the dumping ground of dead dogs and cats.

Towering over the stadium was the Muslim Supreme Council Mosque. Perched on Old Kampala Hill and encased in a fading beige veneer, the mosque was redeemed by its old Arabic grandeur, but doomed by a front view dominated by aging residential estates, home to poor Indians.

On the next hill, Lubaga Catholic Cathedral stood, shrouded in tall, gracious trees and bombastic history, its phallic twin towers flirting with the nippled dome of Namirembe Protestant Cathedral. The old rivalry dated back to 1877 and 1879, when the first Protestant and Catholic missionaries arrived in Uganda. It was a rivalry redolent with the blood spilled in unnecessary religious and political wars. In their search for allies, both factions had periodically turned to pagans and Muslims for support. This part of the city, with its places of worship, its hospitals and schools, was called the Religious Wing.

Rising out of the bowl and swelling northward was Nakasero Hill. Lashed by asphalt and boxlike buildings, this was the home of wholesalers and retailers fighting to prosper in the doomed air of commercial asphyxiation. The cubbyhole shops were grouped like a bunch of cargo containers vomited by a shipwreck, pounded by the iron sun, harassed by poison rain and eroded from the inside by the semi-volitional mode of disintegration favored by stranded pirates. On a higher terrace, overlooking the shops, were the High Court, a bunch of lesser courts and a police station, arranged in pompous, tree-lined
lanes dotted with the residences of army officers, whose jeeps farted onto the windows and the file cabinets of these overseers of justice. The majestic tension from this hill seemed to seep into the bowl. I would stand on the rim and try to listen for brewing earthquakes.

For the moment, though, I would hear only the crazed cries of the van boys, the raspy whispers of toothless fortune-tellers and the monotonous chants of snake charmers. Finally, my attention would be drawn away by the needle-sharp call of the muezzin, the iron wail of sirens or the roar of army jeeps headed for Nakasero Hill. Overpowering the fading sirens would be the indomitable crack of the fault lines on which these hills stood in their self-important configurations. I would will them to shift and bury the hills, overturn the valleys and kick up a monstrous mushroom cloud. I wanted Serenity, Padlock and their current dictatorship, whose caustic fumes had brought me here, to go the way of the animals which used to roam these valleys.

By their own standards, the two dictators had done well. They had moved from the rural obscurity of Serenity’s village house to the red-roofed pretension of a big Indian bungalow. The front windows were covered in wire net because Indians lived in mortal fear of burglary. The front door, which was rarely used, stood on top of twelve wide steps that lent the edifice the look of a dismal pagoda.

The living room was cluttered with sofas, baby things and other objects which made the air prickly with the dust that nestled on them like ticks on a cow. It was not hard to see that the house had contracted, pressured as it was by the number of people occupying it, by the inevitable expansion of a very Catholic family.

The open backyard formed part of an extended yard, which compressed lives, histories and religions into the shared burden of structural intimacy. I was gripped by the sensation that it was a prison of sorts, with too many regulations and too many pretensions exacerbated by a dictatorial administration that believed in incarceration as a superior form of discipline and upbringing.

For Serenity, living here was a form of upward mobility, because these were formerly segregated areas. In those days this part of Kampala was called Mini Bombay. Serenity had, for some time, luxuriated in his dream of having three children and saving money to buy himself a car and all the other trappings of a secure life, but his dream
had been hijacked by the hydra of Catholicism, which he had first met in his wife’s parental home. The tortures of the crucified Christ on his inlaws’ wall, now safely preserved from the vagaries of a leaking roof, had entered his life. Hydra breath had scorched the thin veneer of his dream, and he was now on his way to having as many children as the Indian civil servant he had replaced in this pagoda. He now had six children, courtesy of twin births, and his head was awash with worries. A man bewildered by the speed at which things had careened out of control, he both feared the future and mistrusted the present.

Serenity preferred to delegate power to his enforcer, Padlock, and shield himself from drab domestic work. He was a man who loved to do things by remote control, as though he were conserving his energy for a holy task. Normally, he preferred not to know what his enforcer did in order to keep his dictatorship going. At the back of his mind he held the notion that his enforcer deserved as much trouble as she got for having insisted on breeding so many children. He kept thinking about a magic escape route out of his current predicament, but he felt too proud to give up and walk away. He was rational enough to remember that it took two to have a big family. He kept trying to trace where and when he had lost control and let Padlock win. It dawned on him that Padlock had waged a very determined campaign, rejecting any form of compromise or discussion. The pressures of adjusting to the city had played into her hands, and before he realized it, he had lost both the contraception battle and the war. The result was his trademark wrinkled forehead, which lent him a scowling, comical look—a look fit for a tormented despot.

Padlock was a changed woman. She had become more confident and assertive because she no longer had to look over her shoulder when enforcing rules in her house. Her mien demanded respect while bearing not a trace of apology. The draconian disciplinarian in her had fully emerged and was grounded in her new status by a new ritual: Padlock had to be greeted on bended knee by all her children. Early every morning, I had to slip into her bedroom, which she shared with Serenity, go down on my knees and mouth a greeting. The alternative was to go out and look for her in the courtyard, where she always seemed to be, press my knees on the chipped cement and speak the loathsome greeting. The thought of calling this woman “mother”
made me sick. It made me want to throw up on her feet. Her insistence on making me lie every day by calling her something I never believed in introduced me to fiction and to the delusions of power. It also intensified our clashes.

Looking down at the squirrel grovelling at her sandaled feet, she would or would not return the proffered greeting. Her internal system was wont to reject my offering, which meant that I had to try again till I got it right. Meanwhile, she would be towering in the morning air, her hair looking like a tea cozy.

“I didn’t hear you,” she would say, looking above as though asking for heavenly intervention.

To a man bursting with impatience to get off his knees and elude the pitying looks hurled by passing strangers, her manner was maddening. It was not that her ears were faulty; no, she had actually heard the greeting, but her dictatorial sensibilities had not been appeased by my tone of voice. The right tone had to embody total acknowledgment of her power, servile gratitude for every little thing she had ever done for you, and unequivocal submission to her will. The right tone of voice got you a reply and permission to stand up. All this was easy for my brothers and sisters, raised in the city, but for me, the free-spirited villager who had never knelt for anybody and who had been knelt to by quite a few grateful mothers, this status was hard to accept. It cost Padlock a number of guava switches to beat me into submission.