The Impenetrable Forest

by Thor Hanson

  In fact, life with the Ntales had settled quickly into a steady routine, and I was amazed at how quickly the wildly foreign can transform itself to normalcy. I woke at dawn every morning to a quiet knock at my door and three words from Susan, “Water is ready.” Bathing outside, I could hear the town come awake around me: roosters wailing at the dusty rose light of sunrise, radios blaring Zairian pop music, neighbors calling out greetings across the fields, and the patter of bare feet as children ran to the spring for water.

  After my yams and tea (“Always with tea,” Tom told me. “If you take yams alone they will strike you mute.”), I set off for the forty-minute hike to the training center with David Snedecker, a West Virginian forester and my closest Peace Corps neighbor in Kajansi. Dave was only a few years older than me, but his height, thinning red hair, and steel-rimmed spectacles led many Ugandans to think he was my father. Later, when my own hair grew long, they would take me for his wife. This didn’t bother Dave. He had a fine-tuned sense of the bizarre and once talked of building “the Great Wall of Uganda” to stimulate tourism in his village. When asked by a Peace Corps trainer what he missed most from home, he answered simply, “Stilts.” His humor and his willingness to accompany Tom and me on back-street pub crawls had led to a fast friendship.

  Those first, overwhelmingly alien weeks in Uganda tied all the volunteers together, forming bonds between disparate people who would never associate under normal circumstances: potheads and born-again Christians, poets and welders, Rush Limbaugh fans and lesbians. In a group that ranged from a twenty-two-year-old merchant marine to a seventy-year-old schoolteacher, bridging the cross-cultural gaps within our own American microcosm was sometimes just as great a leap as reaching out to Ugandans.

  Our hilltop classrooms overlooked rolling hills and a patchwork of small shambas, or family farms, descending to the green, papyrus-lined shores of Lake Victoria. We learned basic language skills from among Uganda’s forty dialects, as well as such Peace Corps essentials as “how to light a charcoal stove,” or “cooking a balanced meal with local ingredients.” I spent the time between classes with another fast friend, Rob Rothe, a caustic New Yorker who shared my enthusiasm for offbeat humor and ornithology. Occasionally, the two could be combined. On the first night at his homestay, Rob shared his bedroom with a family of chickens who mistook the whiteness of his skin for the pale glow of dawn. The rooster crowed directly into Rob’s face for hours, and he returned the next evening dreading another sleepless night. But when the family gathered for dinner, his homestay father smiled and grandly pulled the lid from the stewpot: “Your chicken is here.”

  Usually we confined our bird-watching to the training center porch, sitting with binoculars glued to our eyes and picking out new species from the constantly shifting flocks. Brown parrots clamored in the treetops, while dozens of white-throated bee-eaters darted and swerved, batlike, over the open fields. We saw long-crested eagles, black kites, scarlet-breasted sunbirds, and two resident kingfishers, shining blue, perched silently in the shade like sentinels.

  Walking home along the footpaths and red-dust roads was a circus parade of shouted greetings and laughter. People shook their heads and stared with looks of incredulous amusement. In the slow-to-change world of a Ugandan village, our passage was a daily spectacle whose novelty never faded. Throngs of children followed behind us in their matching green-and-blue school uniforms. The bravest among them would run alongside, touch our hands, and dash back to their friends, screaming in time to the constant singsong chorus: “Bye, muzungu! Abazungu, byee! How are you?”

  Sometimes I stopped in the market, a warren of stalls stacked high with fresh fruits, produce and fish. Susan kept a small duka there, a simple shop where she sold beans, maize flour, soap, and other household items to supplement her part-time wage at the local clay works. We didn’t talk much, but she would pull a small bench from behind the counter, and we would sit together in the shade of her papyrus mat awning, watching the people watch us.

  More often, I would run into Tom’s spies—kids he posted in the street to interrupt my homeward route. “Uncle Tom wants to see you in the back!” they would cry, tugging my hand and leading me through the alleyways to Annette’s place, the local pub where Tom met his friends every evening for drinks and conversation. The “bar” consisted of two wooden benches and a low table in the dirt courtyard beside Annette’s home. Scores of such establishments dotted the back streets of Kajansi, but Tom referred to Annette’s as his “club.” While ostensibly open to all, each bar had its own loyal clientele, and unaccompanied newcomers were often excluded or driven off with verbal abuse.

  Tom chose to drink at Annette’s because, in addition to banana booze, she brewed the town’s best munanasi, a delicious pineapple wine that quickly replaced waragi as the sane consumer’s local beverage of choice. There were evenings, however, when heady drinks and bizarre dialogue appealed far less than a good night’s sleep, and I tried skulking home unnoticed or paying off the scouts—“Here’s a thousand shillings, kid; you never saw me.” But there was no such thing as an unobtrusive muzungu in Kajansi, and I rarely made it home without stopping by to greet Tom and the munanasi regulars: DK, Vincent, Joseph, Chris, Michael, John Kennedy, and Sanyosenyo. We sat together in the dusty yard at sunset, sipping cups of wine and discussing their favorite topics, from world politics and AIDS to country music and, for reasons I never discerned, the city of Chicago.

  I’d been there only once, a two-day layover on my way to Uganda. But I was American, and I’d seen The Blues Brothers. This made me the local authority.

  “They say that in Chicago there are more of your American blacks than all the people in Uganda. Is it true?”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s that many, but—”

  “And trains running through the sky?”

  “Yes, the transportation is good, but I haven’t—”

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

  In all of this I could find no behavior screaming out for my arrest, so Tom’s sudden decision to visit the police came as a surprise. When I asked the Ugandans on our training staff, they told me that some neighborhoods liked to have a record of all visitors to the area. It stemmed from a village custom where strangers were required to make a blood bond with the local chief. They said not to worry. And then they wished me luck.

  Historically, good luck and Ugandan police stations haven’t exactly gone hand in hand. As former Amin cabinet minister Henry Kyemba put it, “In Uganda, people who leave rooms escorted by policemen seldom come back.” Police and soldiers arrested, tortured, and executed hundreds of thousands of people during the 1970s and early 1980s. Blame for the decades of chaos falls largely on two men, Milton Obote and Idi Amin Dada. Known as the “Gold Dust Twins” for their early involvement in arms and bullion smuggling, Obote and Amin led Uganda to ruin as two of the most notorious despots in postcolonial Africa.

  Both rulers relied on the army to stay in power, and under the guise of internal security, government soldiers operated unchecked by any laws save their own whims, or the caprice of their commanders. Looting and robbery were daily occurrences throughout the country, and unspeakable murders became commonplace as the army developed brutal killing methods to save on ammunition and instill terror in the populace. Prisoners were crushed by the dozens under moving tanks, burned alive, or forced to bludgeon one another to death with sledgehammers. No one was safe from persecution. In one famous case, Amin had the Anglican archbishop and two cabinet ministers dragged away from a public event and shot, and then staged a ludicrous car accident to explain their deaths.

  “We would not go outside the house for a week,” Tom told me about the worst years of Amin’s regime. “People disappeared every day.”

  So many vanished, in fact, that a lucrative new industry sprang up in Kampala, body finding. Entrepreneurs and off-duty soldiers would comb the prisons and mass grave sites, hired by families to find the remains of murdered friends and loved on
es. The fees varied, depending on the status of the victim, from several hundred dollars to more than two thousand for high government officials and important political prisoners.

  Memories of those years still haunt the Ugandan collective conscience, manifesting themselves in a great concern for security. In all the cities and major towns, thick iron grates cover every window, and many homes lie within high-walled compounds, guarded at night by dogs or watchmen. Communities contribute to train and equip local security forces, men and women from the area who volunteer to patrol the streets at night.

  In Kajansi, people rarely walked anywhere outside of their immediate neighborhood after dark, and never alone. Returning from Annette’s place with Tom, we always moved as a group and went far out of the way to escort any lone individuals to their houses. Ugandans traditionally give their visitors a “push,” accompanying them for the first part of their journey home, and saying farewell somewhere along the path. This practice has simply been expanded for the hours after dark, ensuring that people are ushered home safely, all the way to their front door.

  Once inside, families shuttered their homes tightly for the night. The doors at Tom’s house were bolted, padlocked, and barred with thick ironwood timbers. Even so, we locked our individual bedrooms, and forgetting to do so was cause for serious reprimand. As a final precaution, a sort of home security ace in the hole, the Ntales kept a rabid-looking, wild-eyed dog named Fox. I never saw more of the animal than a frenzied blur of teeth and drool lunging at the slats of his wooden cage, but Tom told me that Fox was something like a German shepherd. He also told me I should never try to touch him. At night, the dog was set free to attack anyone or anything that intruded into the yard. “Fox is loose,” Tom would say as he bolted the back door, and none of us would leave the house until dawn.

  Discipline in the armed forces had improved dramatically since Yoweri Musevini’s government took over in 1986, and public safety was no longer considered a major problem outside the troubled northern regions. The Ntale family’s security measures seemed impregnable to me, and I thought it was surely a case of overkill until I was awakened late one night by a cacophony of high-pitched ululating screams. Scrambling out of my mosquito net, I clung to the barred window frame and peered outside. The banshee wails were definitely coming from a neighboring house, but I could see nothing clearly in the dim light of a sickle moon. Had someone died? Was there a fire? Or was this something completely normal, a tradition I had yet to learn about?

  I heard Tom in the corridor and went out to find him unbolting the back door. He was carrying a rusty-looking revolver, and he looked at me sternly. “Bandits have attacked the neighbors. Stay inside.”

  No problem. I returned to my room and had no trouble remembering to lock the door. I didn’t know what kind of burglars attacked a well-secured, occupied home, and I didn’t want to find out. But Tom was gone for over an hour, and as the noise gradually died down, I wondered if I shouldn’t be doing something to help. I almost went next door to investigate, until the voice of reason pointed out that the sudden appearance of a frightened muzungu in pajamas probably wouldn’t have a positive, calming effect on the situation.

  The next morning Tom told me how the thieves had used a tree trunk to batter down the front door and quickly made off with everything of value in the sitting room. The family’s alarm cries had driven them off, and the neighborhood watch gave chase, but the half dozen bandits, armed with spears, bows and arrows, and a gun, had disappeared through the fields.

  “Probably retrenched soldiers,” he said, stirring sugar into his tea. “They will never catch them.” The robbery fueled village gossip for weeks. Most people agreed with Tom, but there was another popular theory involving a disgruntled brother-in-law from Jinja. Everyone concurred that whoever it was would never be caught, and as far as I know they’re still looking.

  I later described the scene to my language tutor and learned a new verb, kuteerateera, “to beat an alarm.” The original meaning had to do with pounding out rhythms on huge drums as a warning of danger to neighboring villages. Wailing screams were the modern equivalent, an effective way to alert the community and rally support.

  “It’s good when you hear kuteerateera,” he told me. During the bad times, when government soldiers abducted people in the night, families didn’t bother crying out because they knew their neighbors would be too afraid to help.

  Amin’s flamboyance and complete disregard for international opinion cemented Uganda’s reputation as a center of despotism and human rights violations in Africa. His reign of terror during the 1970s is viewed as the darkest period of Uganda’s history, but equal atrocities under Obote and intervening periods of anarchy prolonged the country’s suffering. From the mid-1960s until the current government took power in 1986, Ugandans lived in a virtual police state, with no hope of economic or social stability. As industry and government services collapsed from mismanagement and corruption, many of the country’s best-educated people either fled into exile or returned to the villages, relying on subsistence agriculture and waiting for the next coup to bring a new regime to power. Any review of those chaotic decades reveals the world of Ugandan politics as a constant struggle for control among myriad ethnic and religious factions. Successive governments fought only to keep themselves in power, preventing the country from ever developing a strong sense of national unity.

  Over forty distinct ethnic groups live within the boundaries of modern-day Uganda, a land area roughly the size of Germany. Many tribes had developed highly organized kingdoms before the Berlin Conference of 1885 split Africa arbitrarily among the European powers. Long-held enmities and prejudices still ran strong and deep in the new Uganda, particularly between the Nilotic pastoralists in the north, who held sway in the army, and the Bantu-speaking peoples of the south and west, who had gained greater economic and political influence under British rule. The colonial government exacerbated these rivalries by giving greater autonomy and influence to the powerful Baganda tribe and their traditional king, the kabaka. The British also favored Anglican converts over Catholics and Muslims, creating a new and powerful religious division among the people.

  As independence approached in 1962, newly formed political parties quickly divided the population along old lines. Candidates campaigning for Uganda’s first elections rallied support among their home tribe, while the retiring colonials used their influence to ensure a pro-British outcome. Finally, a coalition of Protestant and Bagandan parties won the majority of seats in Parliament, placing the new country in the hands of Prime Minister Milton Obote, with the kabaka, Edward Mutesa II, in the largely ceremonial position of president.

  In spite of underlying political tensions, Uganda embarked upon self-government as one of the continent’s most promising young nations. The country boasted excellent roads and infrastructure, as well as a growing industrial base, verdant agricultural land, and among the best social services in the sub-Saharan region. Makerere University in Kampala was regarded as the finest institute of higher learning in East Africa, and several prominent African leaders studied there, including Julius Nyerere of neighboring Tanzania. The breathtaking scenery and wildlife of “the pearl of Africa” attracted thousands of tourists to Ugandan game parks every year, and the international community held high hopes for the fledgling nation.

  Ugandans remember the first years of independence with nostalgia and a touch of regret. “You should have been here in the ’60s,” Aunt Florence told me once. We were sipping munanasi on her porch while the sun set in a burgundy stain over Kajansi. “The economy was good and people had money to spend,” she went on, and shook her head. “We were jolly, jolly indeed. You would have loved it.”

  The days of hope and jollity were short lived. Omens of conflict surfaced as early as the first Independence Day celebrations in Kampala, where crowds of Anglicans waved Obote banners, while the Bagandans cheered only their kabaka. Factions that had united with autonomy from Britain as their only co
mmon goal began vying for power, and the coalition government soon showed signs of strain. Within three years, communication between Obote, Mutesa, and army commander Shaban Opolot had broken down completely, as each accused the other of assassination plots and planned coups d’état. Finally, in 1966, Obote seized control of the government with a series of sweeping reforms. He arrested five cabinet ministers suspected of plotting against him, suspended the constitution, and ordered an attack on the kabaka’s palace with the help of his old smuggling partner in the armed forces, Col. Idi Amin. Kabaka Mutesa fled into exile, Opolot was arrested, and Uganda’s brief career as a democratic nation came to an abrupt end.

  Over the next four years, Obote consolidated his power with measures that set the precedent for two decades of totalitarian rule in Uganda. He rewrote the constitution, giving himself absolute authority in the role of president. Declaring a state of emergency in the Baganda homeland, and later the whole country, allowed him to suspend civil liberties and detain hundreds of opposition leaders without trial. Political parties were banned, and all elections postponed indefinitely. He used political appointments and army promotions to control different factions within the government, and rampant corruption crippled the economy, as those in favor took full advantage of their positions. With his popularity waning throughout the country, Obote had to rely more and more on Amin to maintain control by force. But just as Obote had learned to manipulate the strings of government, Amin had increased his own influence and power as commander of the armed forces. The two began disagreeing openly in late 1970, and it came as no surprise when Amin staged a coup the following year, toppling Obote’s regime and bringing the country finally under the direct control of the military.