The Impenetrable Forest

by Thor Hanson

  We loaded our luggage into Peace Corps vans and drove away from the training center, entering a storybook African landscape of lush green hillsides sprinkled with mud-brick houses. Rusted tin roofs and fields of red-berried coffee trees wavered in the heat, and great crowds of people walked before us on the narrow, rutted roads. Brightly dressed women balanced hoes and heavy bundles on their heads, while men sped past on bicycles or pushed wooden wheelbarrows overflowing with strange goods and produce: pineapples, passion fruit, long poles of sugarcane, charcoal stuffed in burlap sacks, goat hides, huge clay pots, and teetering piles of firewood. I drank in the scene like a voyeur glimpsing some forbidden world of vibrant colors, reeling noise, and bewildering vitality, while throngs of children ran alongside the van, laughing, waving, and shouting “Abazungu, abazungu! How are you fine!”

  We passed through the center of Kajansi town, a dense cluster of dusty painted buildings and shops fronting the busy Entebbe highway. Houses were packed around the trading centers and scattered among the fields with no discernable plan. Expensive homes with high-walled compounds stood directly next to unkempt mud-brick shacks. Cows, chickens, and goats ran wild through the town, and any spare patch of land supported crops: maize, cassava, papaya, passion fruit vines, and the tall, broad-leaved stems of bananas, everywhere bananas.

  The van lurched down a narrow side street and stopped in front of Tom’s house, a fine brick-and-tile structure shaded by jackfruit trees and sandwiched between a grove of banana stems and two small potato fields. He shouldered my backpack as the van honked and pulled away, and we turned to walk up the path.

  “Sam!” he called out. “Susan!”

  A rangy, narrow-shouldered youth in blue Adidas shorts careened around the side of the house and dropped to his knees, eyes downcast. Tom handed him my bag without an introduction as the front door opened and a broad-faced woman in a bright orange dress hurried out into the sunlight. She too dropped to the ground before us and looked away, mumbling a greeting in Luganda.

  Tom answered her, then said in a loud, stately voice, “Susan, this is our American guest, Thor.” The letters r and l are interchangeable in most Ugandan dialects, so my name came out something like Tall. Susan murmured a new greeting, ending in Tall, and held out her hand in my direction. I reached over to shake it, and she rose gracefully to her feet with a swish of satiny fabric, then disappeared back into the house.

  “And that one is Sam,” Tom added as the boy hefted my luggage and followed Susan inside. I waved to him, and his wary face was transformed by a wide, white-toothed grin.

  “Hooo!” a voice called out from behind us. “You have brought our visitor!” We turned to find a heavyset woman advancing across the lawn from the neighboring house. She wore a dress even fancier than Susan’s, brilliant green and purple with a wide sash, and shoulders that puffed up in tiny wings.

  “This is Florence,” Tom told me, “my sister. She stays in the house just there.”

  “Yes,” Florence said, huffing a bit from exertion, “Sister and neighbor both.” She bunched her skirt in one hand, and I was afraid she too was going to kneel, but she stopped with a half curtsy, averted her eyes, and muttered a quick Luganda greeting before stepping forward to shake my hand with a warm smile.

  “You will call me Aunt Florence,” she stated firmly. “Already, you are a part of the family.”

  Florence ushered us both into the sitting room, where we took our places side by side in the big red chairs, and proceeded to hold court for a seemingly endless procession of friends and relations. People stopped by from all over the neighborhood to get a look at Tom’s new muzungu, the Luganda word for any non-African visitor.

  Each arrival involved a complex, multilingual series of greetings, handshakes, and genuflecting children, with a fresh round of beverages from Susan. She carried in trays of Sprite and Fanta, always kneeling to serve the male guests. When she came around to me I took a bottle of Sprite and smiled warmly but couldn’t help thinking, Please get up. It’s just a soda.

  I held my tongue, however, trying to keep my mind open wider than the proverbial skies of Africa. I’d been told in advance to expect this ritual. Women and children in the Baganda tribe would typically drop to the ground as a formal greeting to men or elders. White visitors, men and women alike, might also be shown that symbol of respect, particularly in the more traditional families. As Susan backed away I made a mental note to find out how long such formalities might last. If I was really going to live with her for the next few months, it would be nice to make eye contact once in a while.

  We began each visit with several minutes of smiling silence. Sometimes the group would talk to one another quietly or ask Tom a question in Luganda, but their gaze never wandered from my face. I stared back, glassy-eyed with a blank grin, feeling the passage of time. Two years began to seem much longer than it had when I filled out the Peace Corps application. I heard the word muzungu a lot and found myself wondering vaguely what they were saying while they appraised me:

  “He sure is white, Tom.”

  “Yes, yes. The man is very white.”

  “From America?”

  “Yes. And white.”

  Invariably, someone would call me out of my daze with a carefully phrased question:

  “By the way, how do you find Uganda?”

  “Very good,” I would say, and, “You have a beautiful country.”

  “Thank you, please,” they answered, and then, “How is Clinton?”

  “The president?”

  “Yes, yes. Bill Clinton.” They pronounced the last name as two distinct words: Clinn-Tun.

  “Well, just fine. He’s just fine, I think.”

  “OK. You are very welcome.”

  With that, the floodgate would open to an interrogation about my family, my hometown, what crops we grew, airplanes, London, the journey from America. Slowly by slowly, the afternoon passed in a sea of dark faces and stilted English.

  Seventy years as a British protectorate showed itself in more ways than Tom’s taste for interior decorating. Names, too, bespoke an inter-continental cultural juxtaposition: Nakibinge Matilda, Emma Magezi, David Rwandigito, Emmanuel Kayiwa, and Millie Nassolo. American pop culture had made its mark as well, with perhaps even more peculiar results. I met an insurance salesman named Commander JJ, a spice merchant called Splash Bobson, and later, a retinue of others: Happy James, Night Justice, Peace Marley, and a friendly young carrot farmer from Kabale, Lucky Dick.

  As darkness settled in, the stream of visitors quickly tapered off, and Tom and I found ourselves alone. He asked questions about America, and we talked about the Peace Corps, but the conversation was stiff and awkward until it finally brought us around to the topic of banana whiskey. Tom’s sudden change in demeanor may have been a product of alcohol, but it seemed to have less to do with intoxication than with simple presence of drink. Be it waragi, banana beer, or pineapple wine, Tom always relaxed visibly when all the people around him had full glasses, and in the months ahead, we would have some of our best conversations at the local pub.

  “This one is my brother’s third child at the baptism,” he said, pointing to a faded snapshot. “I am the one here, behind, with the choir.” We were halfway through the second photo album, and I was beginning to feel I’d recognize most of Tom’s family on sight—at least if they were wearing graduation gowns, wedding dresses, or choir robes. Austere, formal poses in a potato field dominated the layout, making the whole family look like hard-luck Dakota farmers in a documentary on the Homestead Act.

  “And here is Elvis.”

  “What?” For a wild instant I thought my interior decorator theory had been right on the mark.

  “My eldest son, Elvis Ntale,” Tom clarified. “He is studying at Makerere University. You see the books, there.”

  “Ah, yes, Elvis. You named him for the singer?”

  “Yes, wonderful American music!” He clapped his hands and hummed something unrecognizable. “I also lo
ve Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers.”

  I told Tom that the first record I ever owned was Elvis’s Golden Greats. He said he knew it, and we each named our favorite songs, amazed and gladdened that music would cross a cultural gulf to be the first bond in our friendship.

  We continued looking through the snapshots, a ritual for visitors in any Ugandan household. Few people own cameras, but “snaps” are incredibly popular, and families often hire a photographer for special occasions. Later, my own camera would garner me far more party invitations than my conversational wit, and I was thankful I didn’t get stationed in eastern Uganda, where circumcision ceremonies are the photographic subject of choice.

  By the time we finished three picture books, waragi and lingering jet lag were tilting the room at strange angles, and my eyelids sank into a heavy, drunken squint. But Tom was just getting started.

  “We will watch the television,” he announced. “For you it will be just like the States.” He left the room, shouting, “Susan!” and returned momentarily carrying a large, surprisingly modern color TV.

  “Tonight there should be enough power,” Tom informed me as he plugged the set into an outlet behind the couch. A single dam where the river Nile tumbles out of Lake Victoria generates the bulk of Uganda’s electrical power. Unfortunately, that bulk is barely enough to supply Kampala, let alone the outlying towns. Whole sections of the power grid are shut down on a regular schedule, and even when the power is on, it’s often not strong enough to run most appliances.

  Still, having appliances to run was very unusual, even in the city. With electricity, a cassette player, and a TV, the Ntale family ranked solidly in the upper half of Uganda’s small middle class. Water still came in buckets from the spring, and a car was out of the question, but in a country where most people survived hand to mouth on subsistence agriculture, Tom lived in luxury. He worked as an accountant for the Ministry of Works and Transport, taking draft payroll checks and vouchers from his office in Entebbe to the government bank in downtown Kampala.

  “I am a senior accountant,” he told me once with a laugh. “That means I don’t have to do anything.”

  Florence and Susan followed Tom into the room and helped themselves to cups of waragi, while Sam rolled out a straw mat and sat cross-legged on the floor. He was the houseboy, I learned, the son of a distant cousin.

  “From Mbarara district,” Tom explained. “If you get a kid from the neighborhood they refuse to work hard and then just run back home.”

  With the aerial twisted up against the ceiling, Tom fiddled with dials and muttered under his breath, searching for the signal of Uganda’s one, government-run TV station.

  Suddenly an animated urban landscape swam into view, and an eerily familiar voice swelled out of the crackling speaker: “Hey, hey, hey, it’s Faaaat Albert!”

  I gaped at the screen.

  “Ah, Fat Albert,” Tom said with satisfaction. “One of your good American blacks.”

  I couldn’t hide my disbelief, but I don’t think anyone noticed. It was probably the same expression I’d had pasted across my face all day. As the evening wore on I found myself glancing around the room, stunned by the sheer oddity of the situation: drunk on fiery banana booze, watching politically incorrect cartoons from the 1970s in the sitting room of my new Ugandan family. I wanted desperately to communicate this with someone, to roll my eyes and wink at the hidden camera. But the Ntales didn’t find the scene at all unusual. Susan still hadn’t looked at me, Sam and Aunt Florence were glued to the screen, and whenever I turned to Tom, he only smiled and refilled my glass. Just when I thought I’d reached the pinnacle of cross-cultural whiplash, Uganda TV rolled into the second feature: Big Time Wrestling.

  This, apparently, was everyone’s favorite. Florence clapped her hands and shouted “Hoo!” every time someone took a full body blow or got flung through the ropes. Even Susan was laughing, and Sam looked on happily with his sheepish, toothy grin. Tom wanted me to demonstrate some moves, and was actually sliding the coffee table aside to make room, when I finally convinced him that not all Americans knew how to wrestle.

  “Is it?” he asked, looking incredulous and disappointed. My fledgling grasp of Ugandan English had already identified this phrase as equivalent to the American “Really?” or even closer, “No shit?”

  “These people must have very special training,” I told him, improvising, as he glanced from me back to the sweaty men on the screen. I wasn’t sure I could stand up too well at that point, let alone try to grapple my host into a full nelson. “They’re professionals.”

  This seemed to mollify him, and when a government report on coffee prices replaced the World Wrestling Federation, we finally moved into the adjoining room for dinner. It was past ten o’clock, an average time for supper in the Baganda tribe. Some families didn’t dine until close to midnight, and for many volunteers, growing used to a strange new diet was far less challenging than actually staying awake to eat it.

  Florence excused herself and disappeared next door, while I took a seat at the table with Tom and Susan. Sam kneeled beside me with a pitcher of warm water, rinsing my hands and catching the runoff in a shallow bucket. When everyone had washed, Susan wordlessly handed Sam a bowl of food, and he crouched down to eat on the floor at our feet. I was glad that Susan at least was eating with Tom and me. In some families, only the men have table privileges.

  Tom mumbled a quiet grace and began dishing up heaps of steaming yellow paste from a bowl in the center of the table.

  “Matoke,” he identified. “The green bananas, steamed.” There was rice too, and peeled sweet potatoes, beans, peanut sauce, some kind of pale, chalky root, and a bitter vegetable stew. I piled food onto my plate until I had some of everything, then paused, glancing casually around the table for cutlery.

  Tom spotted my look and shook his head. “Here, we use the Ugandan spoon,” he said, holding up his hand.

  “Oh, no problem,” I assured him, immediately digging in to the mass of food. Unfortunately, for the drunk muzungu raised on knife and fork, nimbly transferring grains of soggy rice and peanut soup from plate to mouth was a problem. In fact, it was out of the question. A battleground of food shrapnel soon surrounded my plate and littered the floor beneath me. The meal progressed in silence, and I began to worry that my food mess constituted some unspeakable faux pas.

  As if he’d read my mind, Tom stopped chewing and said, “In Ankole, Toro—some places they eat and talk. But not the Baganda. We are serious. When we eat, we eat.”

  And eat we did. Tom methodically devoured three huge servings, and any inroads I made into my own plate were quickly filled with another sweet potato or a ladle of beans. Matoke, the pasty banana substance, seemed to have good absorption powers, and I ate more, hoping it would have a retroactive effect on the waragi sloshing around in my stomach.

  “But you haven’t eaten anything,” Tom said, dismayed, when I turned down a fourth helping of beans. I’d weighed the potential consequences of refusing more food or becoming physically ill at the table, and decided to go with the former. “Muzungus don’t know how to eat,” Tom concluded with a shake of his head. “I have heard about this.”

  We sat in silence for a moment while Sam and Susan cleared the table, then he turned to me questioningly. “More television?”

  “No thank you, Tom. I think I need to sleep.” It seemed best to retire before Tom found another bottle of waragi.

  “Yes,” he said. “We will all sleep.”

  He led me down the corridor and pushed open the door to one of three rooms. With the kids away at school, I would have a bedroom to myself for the duration of my stay.

  “For you we found a special bulb,” he announced, groping for the switch. Suddenly a lurid, whorehouse glow flooded out into the hallway, and I peered inside to see a single, blood-red light bulb dangling from the ceiling of my new room.

  “Perfect,” I lied.

  “You will be fine here, I think.”

 
“Yes, yes. Thank you, Tom,” I assured him, and called into the shadows down the hall, “Thanks for everything, Susan. Good night.”

  “No, no,” Tom interjected. “You will speak Luganda. For Susan you say, ‘Sula bulungi, nyabo.’ ”

  “Sooben lunger…” I replied.

  “Good, good.” Tom chuckled and handed me something shiny. “The key to your room. Always keep it locked. There are thieves.”

  With that he moved off down the hall, and I shut the door on my first day with the Ntales. In the glimmer of my special red lantern, I quickly surveyed the room. A loose sheet of orange-and-green linoleum covered part of the floor, and on it sat my backpack, a small wooden chest, a footstool, and most importantly, a sturdy wooden bed. I staggered over and collapsed into a slumber that bordered on coma, and if I dreamed of home, the vision was gone by morning.

  2

  The Gold Dust Twins

  I myself consider myself the most powerful figure in the world and that is why I don’t let any superpower in the world control me.… God is on my side. Even the most powerful witchcraft cannot hurt me.

  —His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, 1975

  “We must take you to the police.”

  I paused with a bite of cold yams halfway to my mouth. “The police?”

  “Yes, and the Resistance Council. We will go to both of them this afternoon when you return.”

  I chewed the yams, swallowed, and took a sip of tea, wondering silently what aspect of my behavior warranted calling in the authorities. Things, I thought, had been going fairly well. From our initial conversations about music and wrestling, Tom and I had developed an easy rapport, particularly after several evening tours of the local waragi bars. I’d learned to say “good morning, sir” in Luganda and to sing a song called, “I’m So Very Happy.” A small negotiation secured me a regular-colored light bulb for my bedroom, and I’d even mastered the one-handed rice and gravy scoop. When I’d taken ill with fever and had to spend a night at the training center, Tom had hiked there twice to visit, genuinely worried. I was still waiting to sustain a conversation with Susan, but she’d stopped kneeling every time I greeted her, and I took this as a good sign.