Gods and Soldiers

by Rob Spillman

  The brass bands struck up the tune:

  Happy Birthday to You

  Happy Birthday to You

  Happy Birthday, Dear Ruler

  Happy Birthday to You

  The Ruler, a staff and a fly whisk in his left hand, stood up. His dark suit was almost identical to that worn by Machokali, but on careful examination one could see that the stripes were made of tiny letters that read MIGHT IS RIGHT. Rumor had it that all his clothes were made to measure in Europe, that his London, Paris, and Rome tailors did nothing else but make his clothes. What distinguished his clothes from all imitations by all political fawns were the patches on the shoulders and elbows of his jackets, because they were made from skins of the big cats, mainly leopards, tigers, and lions. In short, no politician was allowed to wear clothes with patches made from the skin of His Mighty Cats. This special feature had inspired the children to sing how their Lord:

  Walks the earth like a leopard

  Lights the path with the eyes of a tiger

  And roars with a lion’s fury

  With his height and his custom suits, the Ruler cut quite an imposing figure, and that is why the holders of the fifth theory keep going back to how he looked that day. He had been the very picture of good health as he cleared his throat and declaimed, “I am deeply moved by the tremendous love that you have shown me today . . .” adding that before speaking further, he would like to show his appreciation of their love with an act of mercy by announcing the release of hundreds of political prisoners, among them a few authors and journalists all held without trial including one historian who had been in prison for ten years for crimes that included writing a book called People Make History, Then a Ruler Makes It His Story. The alleged literary sins of the historian still consumed the Ruler, because even now he came back to the case of the historian. Professor Materu, he called him, sarcastically referring to the fact that on his arrival in prison the professor’s long beard had been the first thing to go under a blunt knife. This terrorist of the intellect has spent ten years in jail, said the Ruler, but because of this historic occasion, I have let him out early. But Professor Materu would not be allowed to grow his beard a length more than half an inch, and if he transgressed, he would be reimprisoned. He was to report once a month to a police station to have the length of his beard measured. All the other dissidents had to swear that never again would they collect and pass on rumors as history, literature, or journalism. If they mended their ways, they would know him as Lord Generosity who rewarded the truly repentant, he said, before turning to the sole woman on the platform.

  “Dr. Yunice Immaculate Mgenzi,” he called out.

  Slowly and deliberately, the silent woman stood up; she was truly striking in poise and general appearance.

  “Do you see this woman?” he continued. “In the days of the cold war this one you now see was a revolutionary. Very radical. Her name said it all. Dr. Yunity Mgeuzi-Bila-Shaka. You see? A revolutionary without a doubt. Maoist. Alikuwa mtu ya Beijing. But in the final days of the cold war, she gave up this revolutionary foolishness, repented, and pledged faithful service to me. Did I jail her? No. I even asked Big Ben Mambo to give her a job as an information officer, and now I am happy to announce that I have appointed Dr. Yunice Immaculate Mgenzi as the next deputy to my ambassador in Washington. The first woman in the history of Aburīria to hold such a post.”

  Dr. Mgenzi acknowledged the thunderous applause from the crowd with a bow and a wave of the hand, and then sat down.

  “And now,” continued the Ruler when the applause subsided, “I want to talk about another radical who used to breathe fire and brimstone at imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, neocolonialism, the whole lot. He used to go by the name of Dr. Luminous Karamu-Mbuya-Ituīka. You see, calling on luminous pens to scrawl revolution? An agitator. A Moscow man. Educated in East Germany’s Institute of Marxist Revolutionary Journalism. There was even a time when some of our neighbors, drunk with the foolishness of African socialism, had hired his services to write radical articles calling for class struggle in Africa. As soon as it was clear that communism was a spent force, he too wisely repented and hastened to remove the word revolution from his name. What did I do? Jail him? No. I forgave him. And he has proven himself worthy of my forgiveness with his work. In the Eternal Patriot, the underground leaflet he used to edit, he used to denounce me as a creator of a nation of sheep. Now in the Daily Parrot he helps me shepherd the sheep with his literary lashes.”

  To protect the country against malicious rumormongers, so-called historians, and novelists, and to counter their lies and distortions, the Ruler appointed him to be his official biographer, and as everyone knows his biography was really the story of the country, and the true history. “My Devoted and Trusted Historian,” roared the Ruler, “I want you to stand up that they may behold you and learn.”

  The biographer obliged, and it was then that everybody realized that the man with the leather-bound notebook and a pen the size of a water pipe was the Ruler’s official biographer. My beloved children, the Ruler now called out, turning to the multitude, I want to say, may you all be blessed for your superwonder gift to me. Not least of what made it so endearing, he said, was that it came as a complete surprise: not in his wildest dreams had he thought that Aburīria would show its gratitude by attempting something that had never been done in the history of the world. He had never expected any rewards; doing what he had done had been its own reward, and he would continue to do so out of a fatherly love. He stopped, for suddenly near the center of the multitude issued a bloodcurdling scream. A snake! A snake! came the cry taken up by others. Soon there was pandemonium. People shoved and shouted in every direction to escape a snake unseen by many. It was enough that others had; the cry was now not about one but several snakes. Unable to believe what was happening and with none wanting to be first to show fear, the Cabinet ministers cast surreptitious glances at one another, waiting for someone to make the first move.

  Part of the crowd started pushing its way toward the platform, shouting, Snake! Snake! Some police officers and soldiers were about to run away but when they saw the Ruler’s guard ready their guns to shoot into the crowd, they stood their ground. The chaos continued unabated.

  To calm things down, the police chief shot his gun into the air, but this only made matters worse and the melee turned into a riot of self-preservation as people took to their heels in every direction; after a few minutes, only the Ruler and his entourage of ministers, soldiers, and policemen were left in the park. The head of the secret police woke up from a stupor and whispered to the Ruler, This might be the beginning of a coup d’état, and within seconds the Ruler was on his way to the State House.

  DOREEN BAINGANA

  • Uganda •

  CHRISTIANITY KILLED THE CAT

  MY FATHER WAS fierce sometimes, a coward otherwise, and that is why he married my mother. One day, he was the worst sinner ever, three wives, overdrinking, you name it, and the next, he switched to his father’s religion, Christianity, but exaggerated it to the point of obsession, that is, he became born-again. When he saw the light he chased away all the family except my mother and me, and married her in his new church that week. Why her? Because it was her kiosk and garden we lived on, and because she threatened him all the way to the altar. Why him? I can’t answer that. He was already married to booze, and perhaps she was stimulated by competition. His excuse for his love for the bottle was that his father was a gifted and true medicine man from a long family of basezi, but he had not passed on his secret and powerful knowledge because the whites came and confused him into Christianity. And so my poor father, with nothing to inherit but a borrowed religion, drowned his sorrows. No son too, was his other excuse, pointing at whomever of us girls were nearby, as if it was our fault. I was as frightened and confused as my sisters were by the babble of tongues of all the church people who came to the house to help him clear out the evil of polygamy. I was jealous too, because I thought my siste
rs were packing for a long trip, until I discovered I would have my father all to myself.

  The conversion stopped his sorrowful drowning for about a month, and then he took to wading into it now and then. After school, it was I who went and secretly bought crude Waragi for him from Obama’s bar. We understood that a saint should not be seen in bars, especially a brand new one. Obama knew whose it was, but you couldn’t expect him to refuse money. I got there early enough, five o’clock, before the regular drinkers came, and he filled my plastic bottle of Orangina with the clear firewater. We would sit outside, my father and I, leaning on the far wall of the house, away from both the main road and the kitchen, me on my little bamboo stool now the shape of my small bum, he on a worn smooth wooden one. I scratched the dust with a stick while he sipped in silence, or murmured to himself, mostly about good and evil. “The demon’s got me.” “Ah, just a little won’t hurt.” “All gods may be one.” As the evening wore on, there was less murmur and more silence, and he relaxed into himself, the ropes of religion loosening off him.

  From the other side of the house, I could see and smell wisps of smoke from the sigiri rising into the air, mixing with my mother’s complaining conversation with our neighbor Lidiya. Maama went on about my father being at home the whole day, doing nothing but praying and reading his Bible, just sitting there and calling it The Work of the Lord. Lidiya would take over with wails about her man who she never saw the whole day; work, work, work, he said, but who knew what he was doing? They sighed heavily, sinking comfortably into their womanly burdens, while my father and I sighed with more important weight.

  One evening, the air heavy with smoke from many houses’ suppers, my father interrupted his silence by shuffling into the house, and I heard him move their metal bed, and pull and shift around something heavy. I guessed he was rummaging in those old baskets he kept under the bed. Maama had threatened to throw them all out, but my father growled, “I’ll throw you out first,” but of course he had not. Instead, he stopped talking to her, and to me too, which I thought was unfair. He retreated into himself, and not just physically. Hunched over and brooding, he became a cold ghost at the table, one that moved from room to room in our three-room house, filling it with a bitter smell. But after a week, he suddenly smiled at her when she silently put food on the table. “For all your faults, you are a good cook,” he said, as he shaped a small white lump of posho in his thin fingers, rolling and rolling it before dipping it in the bean sauce. Our mouths formed wide white smiles, and we wouldn’t have stopped even if we had been slapped. I would have fought my mother over those smelly bags.

  Taata came back out with a tattered, gray, long hairy sack. It was a cow’s leg, the dark hoof weighing it down at the bottom, the long sack of dry old skin had most of its hair missing. He sat down and put his arm deep inside, searched around in it, and came out with crumbs that looked like soil and lint. From his coat pocket, he pulled out a pipe that seemed just as old, and sprinkled the particles into the pipe, hardly filling it. “Nothing,” he murmured. “Nothing, that’s all.” He lit the pipe as I stared; I knew he wanted me to watch. He must have smoked the skin itself. The smoke curled up and disappeared into the thin air with a faint but somehow familiar scent.

  “I’m not giving you any,” he said, not looking at me, but out at the blue-black shadows that had been trees and houses a moment ago. The dark made the known shapes mysterious. When I looked back at him, tears glinted faintly on his face, perhaps from the smoke.

  “Okay—I’ll teach you to kill, at least.”

  I was jerked out of an almost trance-like silence. “What?”

  “Don’t eat anything tomorrow. At least I was taught that.”

  “Kill what?”

  “For your size, a bird. But you have to be hungry for it.”

  I kept quiet. My father didn’t make much sense on these evenings of ours, but this was worse. I sometimes wished he wouldn’t talk at all.

  My mother came round the corner of the house. “Have you Christians drank enough? Come and eat,” she called, cheerfully.

  We could not bask in silence forever. My father got up wearily, and I got up like him, pretending weary. “Women,” we both muttered under our breath, but followed her, her huge swaying buttocks an affront to our spirit.

  The next day, Saturday, was a good day not to eat because there was no school. Mother was the fussy one. “What? Not eating? It’s fish for lunch.”

  “No. Taata said so.” He was always my way out. But today of all days, when fish was so rare, obeying him was painful.

  “What is your fool of a father up to now?”

  “He is teaching me things.” I didn’t want to get into it. “Haven’t you heard of fasting?”

  She stared at me for a long moment, her large eyes like two drills, then let it go. Perhaps she believed in my father a little bit. She brushed her hand over my head. “You still have to open your hair and wash it, wash your school uniform. Don’t think I’m doing that for you.”

  The morning was easy, but by afternoon, there was nothing I wanted to do but just sit still. I went over to the shade of the mango tree near Maama’s garden, its thick green leaves a solid shade. It was not too far from the rubbish heap that was high, huge; Taata was supposed to have burnt it up last week. I couldn’t ignore the mountain of yellow and white milk cartons, gray torn packets for posho flour, dark green and black curling wet banana peels, yellow and black ones too, some slimy orangey liquidy stuff, grayish fruit, torn bits of paper fluttering pink, blue and white, dust, old mattress stuffing of mildewed cotton, red sweet potato peels, hard brown cassava ones, mango leaves scattered all over like garnish, and on top of it all, fish bones that smelt as sweet as, as, what? As sharp as pineapple cutting your tongue pleasurably. I could only stare, smell and suffer.

  This thin stray cat that was a dirty white all over, that always hung around our neighborhood, crept up and over the rubbish heap. It jerked to a stop and turned to me, its red eyes sharp and unblinking. I had held this cat before when it was a scrawny slip of a kitten. It used to wander into our kitchen to steal scraps, and I had the job of chasing it away. But it would claw into the weaving of my mother’s faded blue and green sisal mat and cling fast. I tugged at it by its thin neck, feeling sinewy muscle and fur only, no bone, as it squealed and squirmed in my hands. Finally, its tiny claws tore out of the mat, and it hung limp in my hand. I would rush out and fling it away as forcefully and fiercely and as far away as I could, out into the garden, where it landed so gracefully, like water flung and forming a pattern in the air before landing. The kitten would shake itself and skip away, leaving me jealous. And it would always return.

  Now grown, the cat dismissed me quickly, and continued its slow crawl over the refuse, bones under the thin patchy fur moving gracefully, menacingly. It found the fish bones, picked and played with them with small teeth, dropping precious bits of whitish-gray skin and flesh. My fish. The wish to grab that small skeleton from the cat’s claws was as sharp as the need to pee. Like when you have diarrhea and you are running to the toilet, holding it, holding it. The smell of near rot intensified, wafts of it killing me, like moonflowers whose scent whispered at you at dusk, then disappeared with faint promises. The cat took its time cracking the soft bones. My stomach lurched loudly. Did it hear it? The cat shot its small head up and glared at me, its red eyes flaring for one long moment, tiny pieces of flesh hanging from its mouth. I could easily have shouted it away, thrown a stone at it, anything, if I had not seen a person in its eyes. I mean a demon. I swear. It snarled a laugh, tempting me, just like Jesus was tempted. Then it gobbled up the rest of the carcass, sending only more smells my way, before it crawled over and away from the heap, satisfied. But it didn’t go away. I kept my eyes on it as it sat a little distance from me and licked itself clean, its long pink tongue working out and in quickly, like a pale darting flame. It yawned, showing me its tiny yellow fangs, pink eyes still leering, and there we sat, staring at each other, it,
languid; I, mad and afraid.

  Hunger crawled through my whole body, stomach, arms and legs, like how that cat had swarmed over the heap of refuse. But hunger made my mind stark and clear, emptied it of all but one idea: I would kill this cat, not shoot some silly bird. It was a demon that sensed the saint in me. My father’s drunken murmurs of good and evil begun to make sense.

  I told him so later that evening as we sat by our wall. His eyes widened and he looked at me strangely. Was he scared, or pleased? I couldn’t tell.

  “You? A cat?”

  “Yes. It ate my fish.”

  My father just kept on staring at me.

  “It isn’t afraid of me. It thinks I am weak.” Then I whispered, half-hoping he wouldn’t hear. “That cat is a demon.”

  My father turned away from me, as if to hide a grin that had sprung out of his severe, squarish face. The smile turned into chuckles that came out in short painful spurts, and he held his chest as if to stop them, but couldn’t. I had pleased him, I think. Now he was coughing, so I got up and rubbed his back over his frayed brown coat as he bent over, weak, but warm. He said I could eat that night.

  My father said we used to get poison from snakes, but there are hardly any snakes left; they had all been killed or are hiding in the forest. So the next day we went up the main road to Auntie Sukuma’s store. Everyone called her Auntie; who wouldn’t want to be related to someone whose store had everything under the sun, including black sticky sweets that tasted of shoe polish mixed with bananas. They were from China. If I had a chance to move there, I would eat only sweets. Taata did not waste time with long greetings, like most people, but Auntie was used to this.

  “Rat poison?”

  “How are you, Namuli?” She looked only at me.