by Giles Foden
Inside the ministry, I climbed several flights of stairs and went from desk to desk until I could find someone to help me. In the end I had to wait for half an hour outside an office on the top floor, while one of the secretaries, a tall girl with shiny ringlets and bright lipstick, made my representations. As I waited, most of the staff were hanging out of the windows, looking down at the crowds and talking excitedly. I watched them watching, my thighs getting sweaty on the plastic chair to which the secretary had consigned me.
Finally she came out, clutching a clipboard. I stood up.
‘I am sorry,’ she said, ‘Mr Wasswa is away.’
I noticed that her lips were chapped.
‘Well, what should I do? I’m due in Mbarara tomorrow. How am I meant to get there?’
‘It will be possible to make the journey. By bus is the best way. You must find Doctor Merrit. He is the man you will be working with in Mbarara. This is his phone number. I also have a file here of papers for you to take away, papers to show you are the real thing. And here is one also that you will sign for me.’
It was a disclaimer, stating that if any patient made allegations against me that were upheld in the courts, the Ministry of Health could not be held responsible. I took it from her and signed, balancing awkwardly as I leant the clipboard on one knee.
‘Is it possible to have an advance on my salary?’ I said, handing it back to her. ‘I’ve only brought about 300 English pounds with me.’
‘In Uganda 300 English is much money. I only get what is 10 pounds a month, and that is not enough; sometimes I have to go without breakfast and lunch to survive.’ She looked at me accusingly.
I didn’t know what to say.
‘It would need the Minister’s signature,’ she continued, ‘and is not possible anyway. Unfortunately, Minister Wasswa was on the plane with – former Prime Minister Obote. We do not know if he will be coming back.’
I left the minister-less Ministry in slightly sour temper. Carrying my accreditation papers under my arm, I tramped off through the now thinning crowds to the Embassy. I discovered it to be a grand, white building with tall radio aerials on the roof. A pair of sunburned British soldiers were in the gatehouse.
I peered through the wire-net partition. ‘I’ve just arrived here. I have to see someone about my job.’
‘What job would that be, sir?’ said one of the soldiers. He had a ginger moustache, and a Geordie accent to boot. The sound of it was a comfort.
‘I’m going to be a doctor, somewhere called Mbarara.’
‘You’ll be wanting to see Nigel Stone, sir. If you just wait a minute, I’ll ring up for you. Can I please see your passport, sir? I know you sound British, and you look British, but we get some funny types trying it on here.’
Stone was looking out of his window when I entered the room, his back to me. A teleprinter was chattering away in the corner. I coughed.
‘Ah, Doctor Garrigan,’ he said, turning and coming across to shake my hand over his desk. He had wispy fair hair and a forehead so shiny it looked like he polished it each morning.
‘I’m glad you’ve come. Take a seat. We usually keep tabs on British nationals coming into the country, and I’d wondered what had become of you. As you’ve probably gathered, things are a bit hectic round here. There have been a few changes. We’re actually advising people to stay in their houses, but it’s safe as … well, safe as the bush’ – he gave a little laugh – ‘where you’re bound, so you might as well head off. All the trouble’s been in the city really, you see.’
‘You think I ought to just go, then?’ I said.
‘Absolutely. I think things will calm down very quickly. We’re actually quite glad Amin has stepped in. Obote had some pretty odd ideas about how to run a country and Amin, well, he’s one of our own. If not too bright. We think we’ll be able to help him out. And vice versa.’
There was a knock at the door. A thin man in army uniform came in, walking with a limp. The ageing skin around his throat and cheeks drooped lugubriously, like a turkey’s wattles.
‘Stone,’ he said, ignoring me, ‘my boys haven’t turned up. A little coup and they’re cowering under their beds.’
The man had a distinct Edinburgh accent. He sat down in the armchair in the corner of Stone’s room, dangling his good leg over the arm. ‘I mean, how can I be expected to train such a bunch?’
‘Doctor Garrigan,’ said Stone, ‘this is Major Weir, he’s our Intelligence Officer, he’s training the new Ugandan Army Intelligence Corps. The doctor’s heading out to Mbarara, Major, where he’s joining Doctor Merrit’s clinic. He’s a fellow Scot.’
‘Is that a fact?’ said Weir. There was, I thought, something slightly frightening about him. He disturbed me, and I couldn’t tell why.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Fossiemuir.’ His name, that’s what it was, it struck a chord with me – I think it was an old folk-tale that my father liked to tell, something to do with a bonfire, a monkey and a walking stick. I couldn’t remember what it was.
‘Know it well. Good luck, anyhow. You’re just the sort of fellow we want out here. You’ll be aware that all the great things in this country have been achieved by Scots – Speke, Grant and the rest of them. Yes, Uganda was built out of the mills and girders of Scotland.’
‘Well,’ I said, with a half-embarrassed laugh, ‘I suppose we had to get out from under the feet of the English.’
Weir stood up and gave me a strange look, ash-grey hair melting into ash-grey eyes. ‘Indeed,’ he said slowly, as if he was thinking of something else, and then, declamatory, and to my amazement: ‘“What rhubarb, cyme or what purgative drug, would scour these English hence!” … Macbeth,’ he explained, and turned to go abruptly. ‘Let me know if any of my mugs show up,’ he said to Stone. ‘I’m going to fly my kite on the lawn.’
Stone grinned at me apologetically as Weir closed the door. ‘Interesting chap, Weir. Decorated in the war. Very talented pilot. He transferred from the RAF to Intelligence after he was shot down – you saw the limp?’
‘What did he mean – about flying his kite?’
Stone looked at the window, and then said, cryptically, ‘Oh, you’ll see. Now,’ he continued briskly, sitting down at his desk, ‘let’s get you signed up. We don’t want you being left behind in Mbarara if the balloon goes up. Let’s start with the basics.’
He opened a leather-bound book and picked up a fountain pen. ‘Next of kin?’
‘George and Jeanie Garrigan, Tarr House, Fossiemuir, West Fife.’
‘Fossiemuir? Is that with a y or an i? I’m not up on Scottish names, I’m afraid.’
I spelled it out, and he wrote it down. I noticed a small bald crown on the top of his head as he bent over the ledger. The pinkness of the skin and the yellowy hair around it – eggs and bacon, I thought.
He looked up as I was studying him, raising his blond eyebrows as if he had divined my thoughts. ‘How much money have you brought with you? We’ve had terrible problems recently, repatriating folks – hippies, mean-wells, so on – who’ve thought that just because it’s Africa they can wander about without a bean in their pockets. I know it won’t apply to you, but it’s a question we usually ask.’
I told him about my £300.
‘And how are you planning on getting to Mbarara?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I thought I’d get a bus. I’ve heard about these – well, I’ve read in a guidebook about these – matatus, the vans that go all over the country.’
‘Death-traps,’ he said with a sigh. ‘It’s a shame we don’t have an Embassy car going down, else we could give you a lift. Ah, well, I suppose you’ll get there in one piece.’
I must have looked a bit shocked when Stone said this.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he added quickly. ‘I’ve put the wind up you now. It’s just that the accident rate on East African roads is phenomenal. I remember once – on the Mbarara road, as it happens – a tanker coming towards us skidded and came down the hil
l totally at right angles. We had to pull off into the scrub. We nearly hit a tree-stump. The tanker turned over and blew up. The driver was killed – we went up to look when the flames died down. Everything was charred.’
He closed his book, as if signalling that the conversation was over. I got up to go, gathering the papers I had brought with me from the Ministry.
‘Doctor Garrigan,’ said Stone, ‘just one more thing.’
‘Yes,’ I said, halting my upwards, paper-gathering motion to settle down on the seat again.
‘Do you mind if I tell you a bit about my work here?’
‘Go ahead,’ I said, surprised.
‘You’ll appreciate the exigencies of our role at the Embassy: keeping an eye on the interests of Her Majesty’s Government in such a place as this is, how shall I put it? … delicate. Sometimes those who you thought were your friends turn out not to be.’
He paused.
‘Obote, for example. I was here for the Colonial Office, you know – before this, my very first job – and I saw the Independence, the Uhuru, ceremony. The flag-raising, the teas on the lawn, the band playing the new national anthem, the freshly promoted African soldiers marching past. You know the sort of thing. Amin was one of the soldiers, by the way, he escorted the passing of the Royal Colour. It was the Duke and Duchess of Kent who were there. I stood behind them in the box, listening to the legal rigmarole and the prayers from the Archbishop and the Moslem cleric.’
The teleprinter gave a sudden chirrup and spewed out reams of paper. The connecting sheets, folding awkwardly along their perforations, settled in a rough white nest on the carpet and the machine returned to its poised silence.
‘Anyway, Obote let us down. He started consorting with the Chinese – Mao’s very influential in Southern Africa, you know – and all sorts, and he made a pig’s ear of things on the tribal front. And I have to say, we didn’t see it coming. So now we want to be extra vigilant: you never know what Africa’s going to throw at you.’
I wondered where this little lecture was going. Stone was becoming quite demonstrative, moving his arms and hands as he spoke.
‘What I’m driving at,’ he continued, as if in answer to my thought, ‘is that we need reliable Brits to keep their eyes and ears open down in the country.’
‘You mean, be a spy?’ I said, incredulously.
‘No, no, not at all. Let me put it like this: I have to file reports to London, and I have to put something in them. Up here in Kampala, we sometimes don’t see the wood for the trees. That’s what happened with Obote. Now out where you are, almost up in the trees – I’m joking – a body might get a feel for what’s afoot earlier than we would. That’s all it comes down to.’
He leaned forward, his hair flopping down as he did so. ‘Grass roots, that what African politics is, you see. As you’re down there, it wouldn’t be any bother to keep a weather eye out for anything untoward now, would it? Just on a casual basis.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose not, but I don’t really know what you mean. What sort of things am I meant to be watching out for?’
‘Nothing in particular, just drop in to see me when you’re next up here. Let me know the lie of the land. I’ll buy you lunch.’
As he stood up – the interview really was concluded this time – I heard a strange whirring noise. At first I thought it was the teleprinter again. But it came from outside.
‘Ah,’ said Stone, turning his head towards the window, ‘that’ll be Major Weir’s magnificent flying machine. Come and have a look.’
I followed him over to the glass. The whirring noise got louder. Through the louvres, and the steel mesh of the mosquito net, I could see suspended – almost directly in front of us – something I’d never seen before but had often wished, as a boy, to possess: a radio-controlled model helicopter.
It hovered there for a moment – bulbous and tubular, its rotor a blur – before dipping off to one side, out of view, in a florid movement that reminded me of a servant giving a bow.
‘There’s Weir,’ said Stone, pointing.
Down on the lawn, with a semi-circle of uniformed British soldiers and African servants in white tunics behind him, stood the Major. A squat box was in his hands, with a tall aerial shooting up out of it, and there was a jumble of equipment at his feet on the grass.
We stood and watched in silence for a few minutes, until the machine swooped back into view below us and Weir, fiddling with his control levers, brought it gently down on the grass. The audience clapped and cheered. Weir handed his transmitter to one of the soldiers and limped a few paces towards the model. Once the rotor had stopped spinning, he went down on one knee to check it, and then stood up with the helicopter held out gingerly in front of him.
‘It’s his little joke,’ said Stone, as we walked to the door. ‘Every time he flies it, he sends it up here to buzz my window. It’s just a toy, but it’s astonishing all the same. He built the thing himself.’
5
Filled with silky-haired goats, chickens and what must have been nearly thirty human bodies – in a space meant for about ten – the matatu didn’t feel like a vehicle at all. With its windscreen cracked and browned, several of the door-handles sheared off, one of the wheel arches missing and a general weariness distributed throughout the whole structure, on to which various bits of wood and steel plate had been tacked, it seemed less like a machine than an ancient artefact, something to worship or view at an exhibition.
I was tired even before the journey began. After walking from the Speke the next morning, and struggling with my bags through the crush of the matatu park, trying to seal off from my hearing the relentless beeping of horns and blowing of whistles while deciphering the destination calls of the touts – who tended to hang, at the acute angle of slalom skiers, by one arm out of the sliding doorways of their vans – I had finally taken a seat at the back of (to be specific) Matatu Number 8.
This number wasn’t displayed prominently, however, either at the front or the back of the vehicle. It was on a little square of torn cardboard propped against the windscreen – and I only noticed that once I was installed, having made laborious enquiries. Walking round each minibus, wherever you might have expected a number to have been, there were brightly lettered messages instead: ‘Travel Hopefully’, I remember, and ‘Go with God’. Elsewhere, ‘Africa Superstar Express’. Inside the van, stencilled above the driver’s head, was yet another sign: ‘No Condition is Permanent’ it said, whether warning or comfort I could not tell.
My seat, under which I had stowed my luggage, was only partly covered. The springs came through, poking up between fibrous stuffing and remnants of plastic. I moved about uncomfortably, listening to the thumps on the roof as they loaded up the cargo. I saw crates of Fanta and Coca-Cola, bundles of newly planed wood, heavy sacks of rice or grain stamped with an inky logo, a long tower (almost as long as the bus itself) of red plastic washing bowls, one inside the other, the inevitable stalks of matooke, or green banana – and so much more being passed up, that I wondered how we would ever manage to travel.
While we were waiting, I looked out of the window. On the ground nearby, ignoring the human bustle around it, a crow was picking at something, tearing at something, holding it down with its foot. I looked more closely. It was the carcass of a brown animal. I realized that it was one of the species of big rats I had seen gambolling by a wall on my way back to the Speke the evening before. Or, as I’d fancied, dancing strathspeys and reels – on account of it being Burns Night, as I’d suddenly realized: Amin’s first night of power. I say rats, but they were more like rabbits, one sitting up on its hind legs to give me a curious look as I had passed by.
Watching the beak of the crow as it tugged at the fur and the pink flesh beneath, I began to feel sick. This surprised me, since I had always had quite a strong stomach when faced with dissections. I supposed it was the difference of the dissections being scientific, the smell of formaldehyde on my hands disguising, back the
n, during my practicals, the fact of the matter.
By the time the last of the freight had been humped up and the tout, who also doubled as conductor, had given his final catcall and grabbed his last fistful of grubby notes, my thighs were beginning to hurt a great deal from the metal coils in the seat. As we roared off with crashing gears and a cloud of dust and exhaust, I folded my jacket and put it underneath me. This action disturbed one of the goats, which was doubled up next to my suitcase under the seat, its shanks horribly tied with wire flex. It also caused a certain amount of merriment among my neighbours. The old woman next to me said something loudly. I caught the word ‘muzungu’ – meaning white man, I’d already worked out. A titter went around the van, everyone looking at me as if I were some kind of zoo animal.
I just grinned back awkwardly, as we bumped along the potholed road out of the city – grinned at the mixed bunch of merchants, mainly women, with their goods and animals (one had a live chicken squashed into a basket on her knee), farmers and crying babies. All were very poor, although I noticed that there was one passenger who seemed, by virtue of his smart blue worsted suit and the hard brown Samsonite-type case on his knees, to be more prosperous than the rest. He was reading a newspaper – with some difficulty, as the crush meant he could only open it a fraction.
There were also several serious-looking young men in ill-fitting Western clothes. One was seated directly behind me. I suspected these were civil servants returning to the country; Swanepoel had said they’d been laid off by the new regime. The one behind me, though, turned out to be a student of Food Science at Makerere University in Kampala.
‘You are a doctor then, sir?’ he said, having enquired after my name and the purpose of my visit to Mbarara.
I nodded.
‘You will be at the clinic with Doctor Merrit?’ he asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘I am glad that you are coming there. We have a great need of doctors, so long as they do not cost too much money. Doctor Merrit is very costly. Even the African doctor there is too expensive for many of our people.’
