Abyssinian Chronicles (48 page)

During the last quarter of 1978, that diabolical mathematical invention, the triangle, made its first appearance on our historical scene. A few years later, it was to return with enough fire and brimstone in its hold to torch the entire country. The first, the Kagera Triangle, was a seven-hundred-square-kilometer tract of land on the Uganda-Tanzania border. It was captured by Amin’s soldiers in a matter of hours. In a blitz that rolled like magma from a fuming volcanic crater, tanks, Mig fighters and foot soldiers poured fire onto Tanzanian border forces and unsuspecting villagers and captured the Triangle in an extravaganza of killing, looting and burning. The quick of foot and wit evaded the hoofs and the marmorean horns of these buffaloes and fled; those who dithered perished. In this original triangle, as in its mirror reflection years later, the buffaloes of aggression claimed that they were looking for anti-government elements hidden in the forests, in the bushes, on the hills and along the rivers. Guerrilla Radio condemned the attack and the annexation in squeaky susurrations that reached us from behind the cupboards where we hid to listen.

Safe in my aunt’s house, I could feel excitement rising like a fever, waking all the specters of past wars I had discovered in the dusty shelves of the seminary library. I could hear crackling fires as houses burned, plaintive cries as people begged for their lives, clopping hoofs as cattle were driven onto army trucks and clattering aluminum and silver as household goods crashed into green army sacks.

A gush of bombastic government diarrhea akin to Amin’s honeymoon broadcasts smothered the implications of the annexation in cheap-thrill yarns intended to confound. The lies were diaphanous, but a balm to the weary. It was not easy to dismiss these boasts, because
this was the staple food on which Amin had subsisted for the past eight years.

Things, however, continued to move from bad to worse. Prices escalated as hoarding and black-marketeering hit a new peak. The country’s imports rotted in Kenyan ports, where they had been impounded for months, some for years. The little gas there was went to the army, leaving the country’s transport system paralyzed. Food could no longer be moved from the villages to the city. As a result, Aunt Lwandeka started preparing the hated posho—better-quality stuff than the seminary hog feed, but posho all the same. As it became almost impossible for people to go to work, poverty settled firmly in homes and tormented large families with incurable hunger, reducing most to one meager meal a day. Quite a few people got shot while stealing food from shops or government depots. War was at its worst now, coursing through arid alimentary canals, sapping energy, fertilizing vengeance and breeding scapegoats and collective guilt.

As worries stampeded through people’s heads, trucks loaded with goods looted from the Triangle coursed by, dirty and overburdened, on their way to the north. Army officers and men who had been bent on mutiny now appeased their hunger with curse-laden booty that had intimations of doom charted all over it.

Weeks went by, and the number of trucks trekking to the north decreased. Guerrilla Radio informed us that the buffaloes of aggression had turned tail, bringing the primordial beast of war onto Ugandan territory. The marauders in the Triangle were being mauled. The cacophony of blood-soaked words that were exchanged by the leaders of the two countries heightened the sense of danger. The national tragedy that had begun eight years before, under the master director, Idi Amin, had come to an end.

Uncle Kawayida sent us a Christmas message in a hurriedly written letter: war had started at the border, and Tanzanian forces and Ugandan guerrillas had pushed deep inside the country. He, however, assured us that civilians were well treated in the “liberated” areas, and that the only real danger was from Amin’s fleeing soldiers.

Schools were closed, and the remaining foreigners left the country, including Fr. Gilles Lageau, who bequeathed his big dog to the seminary. Trucks loaded with stained furniture, frightened goats, chickens in wicker baskets, gawky women, sad-faced children and
groggy elders trekked north in a cloud of fear, despair, malice and dust as soldiers and their families escaped. Where was Cane in all this? Was he in the army now? Had he fled? Did he take his porno with him? All this reminded me of the Indian exodus back in 1972. In those days, gap-toothed schoolchildren stood along the roads and sang songs praising General Amin, reciting the crimes of the Indian community, especially monopolization of the country’s economy. Now there was no singing, except the groans of the overloaded vehicles, but the message was clear.

Obote’s overthrow on January 25, 1971, had turned my world upside down, robbed me of Grandma and sent my childhood in an unexpected direction. Eight years later, I watched the anniversary celebrations with cynical interest. January 25, 1979, was as mean, morose and menacing as the face of a pedigree bulldog. Everybody, soldier and civilian, was on edge, as though chilled by the trumpets of defeat. I looked closely at the soldiers, the men who had charmed me on the day Amin divided Lake Albert in two and who had generally made me feel protected. They looked haggard, harassed, as if they had been fed on poisoned food for a month. I knew that among them were men who had committed the most horrendous crimes, torturing, mutilating and killing people. How was the chaff going to be separated from the grain?

I now saw Amin as a ghostly specter who had come to destabilize and pollute the nation by accentuating the evil within. My uninformed view was that the seeds sown were going to germinate, and that the worst was yet to come. Optimists said the opposite. The only thing most people agreed on was the desire for Amin’s head on a platter.

I thought of the Spanish flu that had killed almost twenty million people in Europe in 1918, well after the war was over. I could see Amin survivors being tortured by some violent epidemic, say cholera. Aunt thought otherwise. She was a die-hard optimist. For her, the fall of Amin seemed to mean everything, the end to our problems. I started suspecting that the brigadier had given her assurances of a good future.

As a taste of things to come, Aunt Lwandeka’s guerrilla colleagues attacked power lines and immersed the city and many other areas in a blackout. They reminded me of the power saboteur at the seminary. City houses became death traps in which people choked on
putrid toilet fumes. The water shortage exacerbated the trial and made the city uninhabitable. Fights erupted at water taps, boreholes, anyplace where some water could be drawn.

Explosions rocked the city’s foundations one evening. The same night, soldiers banged on our door around nine o’clock. I had put the children to bed and was just waiting to switch on Guerrilla Radio. Harsh soldierly voices ordered me to open up. I did so immediately. Two very tall soldiers stormed into the house. One rushed into the sleeping rooms. The house was filled with the stink of sweat, dirty boots and bad breath. I was asked where my father was, and I explained that he was dead. I showed them my identity card. My heart was beating wildly as I remembered the picture of the brigadier in the Good News Bible under Aunt’s mattress. I held my breath as one soldier ripped Aunt’s sheets from her bed. He poked the mattress, but instead of lifting the front part, he went for the foot of the bed. Finding nothing, they got bored and stormed out. I felt as if it was my charisma that had averted disaster. Others were not so lucky. I heard screams as people were beaten up in a bid to make them surrender all the money in the house. A few houses away, two men with no identity cards were picked up, prodded with rifle barrels, hit with rifle butts and thrown onto a jeep. Operation Hidden Guerrilla moved on with the crunching of boots, the kicking of locked doors and the barking of nervous soldiers.

Where the hell was Aunt now? I was beside myself with rage. Why was she still risking her neck for the guerrillas? What if the soldiers had found that bloody brigadier’s picture?

Aunt must have divined my rage even before she entered the house. She flashed me her girlish smile, apologized and calmed the storm. NRM guerrillas were all over the city, she said. But none had been apprehended, because they all had proper documents.

The texture of the nights changed when Guerrilla Radio stopped. How we had come to depend on it! At first the broadcasts became choked with claptrap. Then they simply died away. The advance of the beast of war now became a matter of conjecture and scrappy rumors. I resisted taking Aunt’s stories at face value, because I suspected that she was administering reassurance therapy to the nanny of her children. Large numbers of trucks packed to the rafters with dirty soldiers
brought the message home better. Officers zoomed past in jeeps with very long aerials and spears mounted on the radiators, as though directed at enemies in the sky. One day I thought I recognized Dr. Ssali and Aunt Tiida’s Peugeot at the tail of a fleet of cars laden with army officers. People put their cars on blocks and hid the wheels in dark places. In my mind, Aunt Tiida was the kind of woman to veto such action. I could not see her caving in to the desecration of their gorgeous machine, but maybe I was wrong. Had she not stood by her man in his darkest days? Miss Sunlight Soap had her unpredictable side too. In a similar situation, Padlock would have had the wheels removed in a jiffy. How she would celebrate if Tiida’s car got repossessed by the Devil or his agents!

Roadblocks increased, but Amin’s soldiers were oddly subdued. There was no wind in their sails. Randomly selected travellers were stripped in search of telltale rifle-belt welts on their shoulders. The rest suffered the piracy of losing armies: ransoms. Roadblocks started moving, as though by magic, from place to place—here in the morning, gone in the afternoon, back late in the evening. At times it felt like I was watching a game.

The flow of traffic to the north choked to a trickle and dried up. Within a fortnight the road was dead, oppressed by the vacancy of the grave. I thought of Grandpa and the explosions he had foreseen. I wanted to be at his side, but the lacuna between us widened by the hour, resounding with bombs. In what seemed to be the climax, there was continuous fighting for two weeks, two days, two nightmares. As bombs exploded and empty stomachs growled, the city center, the National Radio and the Parliament Building were finally overrun. Amin’s government had fallen. It was April 11, 1979.

There was sporadic shooting in our suburb as remnants of Amin’s forces covered their retreat. The front line dissolved in the distance with the formlessness of a bad dream. The “liberators” arrived and moved on, pushing their enemies farther and farther away toward the north and the east. Behind them a Pandora’s box of old conflicts opened up. It was the afterbirth that really showed me the realities of war.

Amin, the man who had come in a haze of mystery, disappeared in the mists of rumor and the vapors of war to unknown foreign
borders, howling, ranting and raving, with no one the wiser as to his future. His legacy, though, had just begun to take root and flower.

The village sealed between Mpande Hill and Ndere Hill was gored and kicked as the buffaloes of aggression thundered to their northern havens. Soldiers from the nearest barracks swooped down on the new part of the village, as though in the mood to resurrect old carousals. They grabbed and made off with the women in bell-bottoms who had come with the phony wealth, the joyriding Honda Civic and the racing motorcycles. The remaining youths were swallowed by the swamps and the forest, where they joined the inhabitants of the old village, who had taken no chances. The soldiers could be heard firing randomly at empty houses as they retreated. At Ndere Parish a crowd from the villages had taken refuge under the protection of the cross. Amin’s soldiers rampaged to the fathers’ house, took money and valuables and grabbed a van and a few girls. They exacted ransom from the displaced people and in the process broke somebody’s arm. The soldiers wanted more and more money. The priest interceded on behalf of the people, and for some reason the thugs relented. As always, they shot into the air as they departed. They spied madman Santo as they drove away. He seemed to be writing in the air with his index finger, oblivious to everything. He was moving back and forth between two classroom blocks. They hailed him to stop. He did not hear them, or if he did, he ignored them. A soldier let off a burst of rifle fire with a laugh. The bullets spared Santo, and the thug did not bother to try again. Santo disappeared behind the classrooms, waiting for his favorite hour to write
KYRIE ELEISON, KYRIE ELEISON, CHRISTE ELEISON
on the blackboards. Nowadays, he wrote and erased his own words.

Martial music underscored the change of government. Now and then, the extravaganza was interrupted by the announcer, who promised the listeners peace and security. The masses were waking up, rising to the new day with the force of a huge bull. Bottled optimisms burst forth and mixed with vertiginous hopes in blinding kaleidoscopes of emotion. Statements like “Never again will we be ruled by the gun” and “We have paid the final price, and now peace is ours forever” swished in the air.

Our liberators, a mixture of Tanzanian soldiers and Ugandan exiles, eyed the masses calmly. They dispensed the type of superior kindness
one reserves for degenerates. The people mobbed them nonetheless. The shameless way the men and especially the women almost salivated over them! I felt lucky that I had been protected from the brunt of the past eight years and could afford to watch with amusement. The liberators, speaking smooth, polished, singsong Kiswahili, were hugged, dry-kissed, lifted shoulder-high and showered with immeasurable gratitude. There was frenetic dancing and singing everywhere, up crowded streets and down stinking, piss-sodden alleys. This was the purest expression of joy I had ever seen, free from religious bias or political pollution, the joy of King David dancing before the Ark of the Convenant. Euphoria, like a potent drugged wind, blew over the people, including yours truly, to a degree. It intoxicated them with the magic of what could be, should be, had to be, and thrust them deep inside the colorful pages of their most secret fantasies. It left them panting with a level of expectation unknown in the last eight years.