Abyssinian Chronicles (63 page)

“What do you mean by that? My village got wiped out. Do you want me to sit back and watch?”

“That is not what I was saying.”

“What the hell were you saying, then?”

“That this could be our lucky break. You know well that we can’t keep on doing the same thing forever. This is our last time. The destruction of the village and the disappearance of the cement are omens. You are the village. It lives in you. The cement will never be recovered, and the criminals will probably walk once arrested. Better take the cash and go than let some policeman or detective blow it away on booze or pussy.”

“No, not this time.”

“Yes, this time.”

Acting on a tip from our Radio Uganda man, who this time wanted to be paid much more—he claimed he was getting threatening letters, dead rats, headless geckos and such garbage on his front door and wanted to clear out—Lwendo got a jeep and a rifle, and we went to Jinja Road, behind the Radio Uganda building.

The house was a fabulous bungalow, hidden by a fence, facing a sprawling golf course and Kololo Hill. Our man was at home: a small, well-dressed, intelligent man who had made his money in the early eighties by speculating on the dollar. It was striking how ordinary these white-collar criminals looked. He might have been a staff member of Sam Igat Memorial College. He looked almost underfed, but he owned warehouses in Kikuubo and had business connections in London and Dubai.

He gave us what we wanted without much argument. It looked almost too easy.

After taking the money, we had to lie low. In the meantime, I took stock of my situation. I did not want to go back to SIMC, whatever happened. I could sit back and do Aunt Lwandeka’s books while making up my mind about the future. I could travel: Where? Abroad: there were many young people leaving for Britain, Sweden, the United States and Germany to try their luck at odd jobs in the hope of earning enough money to build houses and buy cars. The trick was to ask for political asylum, since that was the only way they could secure the right to stay in the West. I had no plans to join their ranks. I couldn’t bear the humiliation of the camps, especially because I could avoid it. Maybe I would go as a tourist.

The man we squeezed was no fool. He used his friends in high places to blow the whistle on us, and the padre finally got the news. He called Lwendo to his office one day and, like a father to an erring son, expressed deep disappointment. He said he had had very high hopes for Lwendo and could not understand why he had fallen prey to the hydras of bribery and corruption. Lwendo, like a prodigal son, kept his head down, as though offering his neck for decapitation. The padre, a man of not too many words who knew the temptation of money, said he would not lock him up. Instead, he was going to send him to work as a Rehabilitation officer in the north. In other words, Lwendo was being
flung from the Garden of Eden into the fires of the harsh world outside. Already thinking of his escape, he accepted his punishment with a bowed head.

It was indeed Eden that he was being banished from. Living in the south, it was easy to forget the fighting raging in the north. True, big parts of the north had been conquered by the new government, but guerrilla-style fighting was still going on. A hard core of Obote fighters could not accept the fact that an army from the south had taken over power in the north. They tried to stir up the people, and when they failed, they attacked villages and terrorized the locals. Knowing the terrain well, they could move quickly, do damage and disappear before government forces could do something about it. It was ironic that after fighting a guerrilla war against northerner-dominated governments, the southerners were now involved in a similar predicament. And as the northerners had been scared to death in our forests and swamps, the southerners did not know what the dusty, harsh plains would reveal next time they searched for the elusive fighters; but unlike Obote soldiers, they were not allowed to torture civilians. Soldiers who were caught raping and pillaging got shot by firing squads, which made international human rights organizations holler. However, the government remained firm, and when a soldier raped or committed acts akin to those Obote soldiers had perpetrated in the Luwero Triangle, the death penalty remained a very likely punishment.

Lwendo trembled when he considered the dangers of working in a virtual war zone. His luck had held during the guerrilla war: Would it hold in the north, a region he did not know and feared like hell? He feared getting ambushed more than anything else. Lwendo also imagined himself in a Rehab Ministry van or truck, flying in the air on the wings of a land mine and losing his limbs. The thought of becoming handicapped for the rest of his life almost made him lose his mind.

As a government representative, he would have to bend over backward to oblige the people, because the government wanted the northern people behind it in order to avoid looking like a southerner-dominated force of occupation.

Lwendo told me of his banishment and asked me for advice. I didn’t think he needed advice. He only wanted to hear his voice reflected in mine.

“Did you agree to go?” I asked.

“A soldier has to obey.”

“But you don’t have to. Drop out of the army.”

“That is what I am thinking about, but in the meantime, I have to act as though I am committed to going north.”

“Scary, eh!” I tried to make a joke of the situation.

“I would not want to be one of our boys fighting there. The army is extra strict on them in order to avoid vengeful atrocities on innocent civilians. I thought I had escaped all that mess, and now this bastard orders me to fly straight into that hell!”

I shook my head sadly.

“I would like you to do something for me,” he said, looking me in the eye. He had not shaved for a week, and he looked scruffy. I am being asked to pay for the money we made, I thought sickly.

“Yes?” I said none too cheerfully.

“I would like you to accompany me to the north on a scouting mission.”

“Are you mad? Do you want me to get killed?” The possibility loomed large of our vehicle rolling over a land mine that had been idly lying around for years. There were attacks by former Obote army brigands, meaner than ever because of the defeat and the hard times they had fallen on. I went over the map of northern Uganda in my mind. It was one thing to know the names of towns, the cash crops produced and what people did and fed on, but it was terra incognita in real terms. Beyond Lake Kyoga and the Nile River, every spot seemed to be full of brigands and hardened Obote fighters. “Do you want me to die?” I demanded.

Lwendo laughed hard, strangely. He was enjoying this bit, or he was just afraid that I would let him down. “Why are you so afraid of death?”

“I have eluded death all these years. Why do I have to go looking for it in the north?”

“That is putting it a bit too strongly. Most of the north has been pacified, except for some pockets of resistance. As it was here in the eighties, the fighting is confined to only a few areas. Elsewhere life is more or less normal.” He was saying this to reassure himself, not me. I convinced myself that I had no choice. I wasn’t feeling too loyal. I was just under a curious spell. I wanted to see part of the north for
myself, and the truth was that I did not fear death, only the pain that might precede it.

Within seven days, we were on our way. I did not tell Aunt Lwandeka where I was going. She assumed that we were going to some Devastatated Area on some survey. We rode on a Ministry of Rehabilitation truck, which was part of a convoy taking supplies to the north. We had an army escort of four young boys around seventeen years of age. They were armed with AK-47 rifles, which reminded me of my nocturnal encounter with the Infernal Trinity. This was the first time in years that I had associated the attack directly with those ubiquitous guns. I looked at the curved magazines, the tapering muzzles and the shiny wooden bits and imagined the power that came from tickling the trigger. It wasn’t that glamorous. The price was indeed too high. As I looked at these boys who were the age of my SIMC students, I wondered how many people they had killed, and what their future would be like. Did they think about the people they shot? Would they think about them as they grew older? What effect would it have on their lives? Would they become compulsive killers? Here they were, escorting us, looking as though they could piss on a land mine and disarm it. I estimated that at the time they entered the bush, they must have been no older than thirteen. They had grown up in the bush. How were they adjusting to barracks life? They loved the power they had. I could see the swagger. They had been promised things, but what would happen if those promises were not fulfilled? I was more afraid of these kid soldiers than of their adult counterparts. The older soldiers seemed corruptible, a bit more cognizant of the problems of life: you could negotiate if you had something to offer them. These kids seemed addicted to obeying orders.

I remembered the time I was the age they were when they joined the guerrillas, the time I was having so much trouble with Padlock and Serenity and their despotism. If I had had the chance, or if the circumstances had been right for joining the army, I would have become a soldier. Where would I be now? Rattling in my cupboard would have been a few actual skeletons. I felt lucky that things had not come to that. I might have killed many Padlocks in proxy while the real Padlock was eating and breathing and raising her shitters in the pagoda. Maybe I would have doubled back and tortured her to death, consuming each gasp of blood-soaked breath with gusto. Well …

There was not much talk on our truck, or on the others for that matter. Lwendo, particularly, wanted to maintain his distance from the kid soldiers. He always warned me to keep away from soldiers.

“It is not worth it. When the chips fall, a friend will shoot you if ordered to.”

The other people on the truck also preferred to entertain their own thoughts. The boys, too, were afraid of the north and were trying to reassure themselves that the fear was in their minds. We were inside the former Luwero Triangle, speeding along the famous Gulu Road. I had never been this far before, and I was excited in a strange way. We stopped several times to piss, and to buy bananas, roasted corn on the cob, sweet potatoes and banana juice from peddlers along the road.

At Masindi, which was approximately at the latitude across the middle of the country where the old southern kingdoms came in contact with northern peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I started feeling that we were on foreign territory. I felt like a southern raider going north on some sinister mission. At the turn of the century, our grandfathers had come this far to help spread British colonial rule. Now we were on our way to see if the north and the south could live together after all that had happened. Lango District, a plains region, was just a river away. Its most famous son, Milton Obote, was seeking refuge in some foreign country, well away from the troubles he had caused the area and all of Uganda. Almost thirty years ago, he had left these harsh plains, crossed to the south like a true raider and, manipulating a political system riddled with faults, arrogance and ignorance, captured the biggest booty: leadership of Uganda. Now he had hung up his guns and his boots, leaving his people to their own devices. I tried to see what he had done for them. There was not much evidence of anything.

The ubiquitous green of the south had gone, giving way to open, dry land of short, sparse grass, puny trees and endless skies. It was hot and harsh here, and just looking at the dry, bare soil made me thirstier. The sun pounded down directly from the sky, without anything to catch it, and concentrated its fury on the land and the people. Winds picked up the dust and spun it in the sky in seemingly playful whirlwinds. This was tough country, where food and water and life had to be fought for every inch of the way.

We had some scary moments when one truck in the convoy broke down. While the problem was being fixed, everyone was on edge, as
though brigands were going to surface from the earth and mow us down. The boy soldiers no longer looked so confident. I could see my friend Lwendo sweating hard under his armpits and looking this way and that, as though the place were haunted by vampires.

We finally arrived at Lira Town. It felt as if we had just been airdropped there. The town seemed to have mushroomed from the ground, isolated, open on all sides. It was just like any other African town: the frugal facilities, the smallness of the building structures under the open skies, the cheerful disorder. From here Kampala, with all its defects, looked like paradise. As in any war zone, there was a considerable army presence, and we were warned never to go out at night. The soldiers tried to look relaxed, their paranoid tendencies on a tight leash. The feeling of nakedness and exposure was overwhelming. After our forests and tall vegetation, this place made you feel prey to unknown forces. That feeling was increased by the presence of displaced persons in the town. Seeing their searching faces and tired expressions made you more aware that danger was lurking out there, waiting for the right moment to snap or to explode.

Part of the convoy continued deep into Acholi District, with Gulu its final destination. We watched it take off the following morning, and felt lucky that we were staying behind.

The local people, many of whom were struggling to lead their lives, scared Lwendo. The displaced people, in their search for redemption and peace of mind, made him jumpy. He imagined them pulling triggers at him, but they had no guns, not even spears or pangas. He saw, hiding among them, rebels and rebel sympathizers who would tip their friends off to come and slaughter us. It evidently did not pay for a soldier to have a brain: Lwendo’s worked overtime, plaguing his days and nights with soldierly nightmares. Local rehabilitation officials spoke English, shared information about places where help was needed and were friendly, reassuring. It was in the people’s interests to keep up good relations with Rehabilitation officers, because they needed all the help they could get. I trusted them; Lwendo did not. At night he told me a little about the trenches he had slept in. “The trench would turn into a large cunt in which we swam with fire burning in our loins.”