It was my Treasure Island friend who came to my rescue. He too was a Catholic. He had an aunt who had once been a fanatic devotee of St. Jude. She had traveled to his shrine on endless pilgrimages. She gave to the poor like crazy. She invited cripples to her home. She offered frenetic prayers every day, prayed on her knees till they got thick calluses, but this was her tenth year of barrenness and bitter disappointment. She had now turned furious critic of the notorious sleuth. She felt taken advantage of. I sympathized.
The first novena passed without anything happening. Padlock’s psalmic sentimentality worsened as she introduced another nine days of St. Jude’s prayers. She no longer searched in curious places morning, noon and night. The steel manna which she expected to fall from heaven lay safely buried in the garden where she walked every single day. The third novena was a plain embarrassment. The psalms had dried up. Padlock looked deflated. Serenity enjoyed the drama. At the beginning of the daily novena, he would flash his wife an indifferent look, as if to say why bother, and then turn away.
Fully convinced that not even God Almighty would retrieve the bobbin, Serenity bought black-market dollars and asked a friend to import a bobbin for him from neighboring Kenya. Ninety days after the disappearance of the old bobbin, the new one arrived. Padlock was overjoyed despite the initial embarrassment caused by the failure of her prayers.
A few women whose work never got done because of the stolen bobbin had given Padlock a piece of their mind, accusing her of not wanting to help them. They swore never to return, but now some crept back, and Padlock served them without reminding them of their harsh words. The monotonous roar of the machine massaged all the madness in her head and restored her peace of mind. Her train was back on track, and she looked cheerful, her tremendous fits of depression gone. I knew that she was still dangerous, waiting for the thief to go on a spending spree and land himself in her lethal trap. Not me. The bobbin remained buried, like gold bullion awaiting the arrival of a pirate ship.
I was thirteen and it was approaching time to change schools. I didn’t want to go to a Catholic school. I wanted to know what plans Serenity, the despot in charge of education, had in store for me. I could not ask him directly, because despotic secrets were never divulged that way. The only way was to spy on him. I asked my faithful shitters to shadow him and listen to his conversations while he watched television and generally do everything they could to get the information I needed. I waited for weeks, asking them every other day what they had heard. There was not much to tell. One day Serenity began to talk about schools just before news time, but the news reader cut him short. Weeks passed. Finally a loyal shitter clinched it for me. He overheard the despots discussing the issue in the Command Post one afternoon.
“It would straighten him out,” Padlock said.
“They offer very good education. On the other hand, you can’t imagine how bad government schools have become. Pupils go to school with knives, some with guns, and threaten both teachers and headmasters. The children of soldiers have really messed up our schools. Mugezi needs a quieter environment.”
“My parents would love to have a grandson who is a priest. He can end up a parish priest, rector of a seminary or even a bishop,” Padlock said.
“The church is very rich,” Serenity declared. “A clever priest can become very rich indeed.”
“You are only thinking about money,” Padlock rebuked.
“I do not want my children to suffer. They should be able to drive big cars, live in big houses and have what I could not give them.”
“They have to survive these times first.”
I was restless for days. I visited the taxi bowl every day for a whole week, losing myself, my blues and my impotent anger in the tumultuous waves of activity there. I dreamed of an earthquake to end it all. I listened to hear if the ground was quaking, preparing us for the next apocalyptic explosion, but alas, only the steady grind of the vehicles and the eternal calls of the van boys, the snake charmers and the hawkers filled my head like an infernal ache.
What use was a priest? And those ludicrous cassocks! Celibacy was definitely not for me. I had already decided to marry three wives in the future. With the earnings of a lawyer, I was sure that I could easily give my trio a comfortable life. The Church, in my estimation, needed ball-less people like the shitters, not me, who was ready to follow General Amin’s calls for self-advancement. Amin did not like the Church, and accused the clergy of meddling in politics, as they had done in the past, while doing nothing about the corruption inside the Church.
I had no plans to exchange one dictatorship for another. As a lawyer, I would run into dictators, but I would have the power to fight them, hit them hard and exact my own revenge. If I had learned anything from my years with the despots, it was that it was good to be an expensive victim, but even better to be one’s own judge and executioner.
The despotic decision to send me to the seminary was vindicated by the government’s announcement of the impending state visit of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Suddenly, Padlock talked about her fear that Uganda was about to be Islamized, all the churches closed, the clergy and nuns imprisoned or killed or forced to convert to Islam along with their followers, and that polygamy would become the order of the day. The Islamization rumor was as sinister as the old anti-Communist one spread by the Church in the fifties, to the effect that Communists were going to take power, close the churches, kill the clergy, marry off the nuns and enforce wife-swapping and common ownership of property.
“First he expelled missionaries, then the British, the Israelis, the Indians, and now he is ready to bring in the Arabs, those old slavers who call us infidels. Gaddafi will be spending his weekends here, making sure that the forced conversions go through. Faisal is coming to make Amin speed up the plans.”
In Padlock’s view, all the Arabs were old slavers, and all the Israelis were the people whose exploits she read about in the Bible. On the same level with the Israelis were the very white peoples, who were blessed by the Book. In her mind, the white races could do no wrong as long as they fulfilled what God commissioned them to do: to go out, conquer the world and save it from the threat of Islam. All the darker races had to do was to accept the deal, offering their labor and resources in return. For that reason, she saw nothing wrong with the old missionary tactics of sugarcoated invasion, fomentation of religious wars and political interference.
Serenity, on the other hand, held more intelligent views about the situation. To start with, he did not confuse the current Arabs with the East African slave traders; nor did he confuse the Israelis with the Biblical people, for whom he did not care much anyway. As for the white races, he admired their technology and wanted some of their power, but he did not adore them or hold them as God’s chosen people. He found the concept of a chosen people rather absurd. He knew too well what had happened in the two world wars. The mindless slaughter in the trenches of World War I reminded him of colonial slaughters in the Third World. The cold-blooded genocide of World War II had given him a more skeptical view of the white races. On a personal level, he had never got over the shock of his uncle returning home from the war with his leg blown off. The man used to visit twice a year and make him wash the stump and dress it in bandages. Serenity would not eat meat for days. He would be haunted by the sight and the softness of the stump. The fact that the man did not talk made Serenity afraid of him. What was he thinking? Why didn’t he talk anymore? What did he see when the day ended and people’s conversations were replayed in his head? He was the person who had made Serenity abhor violence. Whenever Serenity felt like exploding, he would remember his uncle and desist. In his adulthood, Serenity’s fear of the white races increased. He believed that they could easily blow up the African continent if it suited them. At one time he had wanted to correct his wife’s view of whites, but he had given up. Like God, Padlock was politically inaccessible.
“Nobody is being forced to convert,” Serenity said after what seemed like a lifeti
me.
“They are being bought,” she replied, thinking about Dr. Ssali, her husband’s brother-in-law. “They are being given cars, jobs, businesses, promotions, anything to make them convert.”
“People choose what they think is best for them,” Serenity concluded.
Disappointed, Padlock resumed her lookout for those who wolfed their food, or blew onto it instead of patiently waiting for it to cool like decent people, or ate the meat or fish first, or slurped or munched or let soup crawl through the gaps in their fingers. Thank God, everything was in order.
My conclusion was that Padlock was stepping up her anti-Islamic campaign in order to wean me from Lusanani, which proved a noble but doomed endeavor. Lusanani was my partner in crime. She had already shown signs that she would do practically anything for me, which was more than I could say about Padlock. I was hatching a vague plan to keep myself out of the seminary, and although I did not know what role Lusanani was going to play in it, I was sure that she would figure in the final draft.
For the moment, I was very excited by King Faisal’s impending visit. My admiration for my godfather soared. He had got rid of all the foreigners, plus a few foolhardy missionaries, and had turned to the Arab world for sponsorship. Good thinking. I had seen snatches of his visits to the Arab leaders on television. It all looked good. Now I was eager to see King Faisal.
School routine had changed. Every morning we did gymnastics and athletics, sang the national anthem, recited poems and practiced dances and a march-past with the school band.
The city was shivering under the great visitor’s spell: shop buildings were pasted with paper flags of Uganda and Saudi Arabia. Many other buildings flew proper flags. All the shops had received a face-lift, and roads were undergoing major repairs. General Amin appeared daily on television and was seen making speeches, supervising road repairs, opening new schools and hospitals and launching multifarious functions. He flagged off a motor safari rally and joined the race in his Citroën Maserati. He was indomitable, indefatigable and as indispensable as air.
Soldiers decked out in new uniforms, new boots and new guns appeared on the streets. On our way to and from school, we passed them, as stationary as trees, as committed as suicide bombers. I felt proud to go past them. They were there for my own good, and for the good of the country. I only had to open my mouth and they, like faithful mastiffs, would come puffing and panting to my aid. They made me feel kind and generous; after all, I had only to summon them and the despots would be in dire trouble.
On the day the great man arrived, we stood on the roadside with two flags in our hands: the green one of Saudi Arabia and the black, yellow and red one of Uganda. Amin, like a bear on a crane, towered over the king, who swayed dizzily in the morning air. A mild sun was shining, creating a sweet haze which touched thousands of years back into the pages of the Bible and thrust onto our asphalt the phenomenon of Elijah going to heaven on a chariot of fire. Every one of us seemed to be saying “Father, Father, don’t abandon me” as the chariot swept by. All we got in reply was Amin’s schoolboy grin and the king’s stationary hand trapped in a salute or a wave. The king’s face did not move; if it did, the gesture was swallowed by a mass of crisscrossing wrinkles. A quaint haze of power emanated from the thin old man. I thought of Abraham. He looked at the world with the sublime dignity of somebody totally at peace with life and death.
The king never stopped at our school; obviously we were not important enough to detain life and death on wheels. Personally, I was not disappointed. I felt that I had been touched by the sweep of his garment. I was no longer afraid of death in the real sense. It seemed to have entered and inhabited me. If this man wanted to Islamize Uganda, he could do it. Gaddafi, on the other hand, had not done it, possibly because he was too jumpy, like somebody with too much to prove, somebody with too many balls in the air. This man looked out of the strange eyes of eternity, had nothing to prove, and every word he uttered reverberated with the weight of the centuries and the powers of heaven and hell. I was captivated, because that was what I wanted to be. That was the power I was seeking in life. I wanted to extract some people from the jaws of death, and to condemn others to the bowels of hell. I dreamed about King Faisal for weeks. Harmless dreams in which nothing much happened.
Serenity and his cronies kept abreast of the changes in the country. They ruminated on them for hours on end, searching for the best way into the future.
“I am going to open a shop for my wives,” Hajj declared. “Come join me. My bank will finance the deal. There are many schemes to help entrepreneurs. It is a matter of presenting a viable plan, and the bank releases the cash. Let us join forces before it is too late.”
“I am not the business type,” Serenity confessed. “The mere sight of goods on display sends cold shivers down my spine.” His old prejudices were still alive and kicking. He could never get the fear of shops and shopkeepers out of his system.
“The trouble with you Catholics is that you are natural-born followers,” Hajj commented as they watched the evening traffic, some of it bearing Saudi Arabian stickers. “You are always looking for somebody to follow, to obey, to work for. You are bred to fear leadership and power and to play it safe. We Muslims are natural-born hustlers, always looking for an edge, a chink to squeeze through. This is a government for doers; those who dither will be left inside a burning house.” Pearls before swine; Serenity was unimpressed.
“People do not change their ways overnight.”
“For the first time in the history of this country, Muslims are in control, and a Muslim man is calling upon his Catholic brother to join hands and walk into prosperity.”
“I want to fight in my own field. I have my sights on the Trade Union of Postal Workers. I want to be the chairman or treasurer of the accounts branch. That is my ambition,” Serenity confided for the first time.
“Should I put in a word for you?” Hajj asked, a conspiratorial smile on his face.
“If you can,” Serenity said reluctantly. “A man with many mouths to feed needs all the help he can get.”
“I know the right people who can nudge the right ribs. Remember, Amin is here to stay. Those who believe that he is here now and gone tomorrow will regret it.”
Thoracic locusts attacked Serenity’s insides with a vengeance. His wife’s paranoid lamentations donged in his ears. What would his benefactors ask in return? Conversion to Islam? Or recruitment into the State Research Bureau? Security organs were infiltrating the civil service; Serenity wanted no part in the game. He wanted to ask Hajj about the benefactors, but he failed to find the right words to carry the message without insinuating that Hajj might be involved with the wrong people.
“I will inform you when I am ready,” he said vaguely, keeping the door open without committing himself.
“Nobody will ask you to do anything dangerous. I help you just because you are my friend and my neighbor, the person I can trust with my life.” Serenity had not fooled him; Hajj had sensed the caution.
“I am very grateful for the offer. When the elections are ready, I will inform you.”
“Take your time, but don’t wait too long.”
I still had one big pressing problem on my mind: how to avoid going to the seminary. Twice I asked Serenity for permission to go to the village to see Grandpa. My plan was to involve the old man, with the hope that he would nip the ridiculous idea in the bud. On both occasions, however, Serenity sent me to Padlock, who made me kneel in front of her for ten minutes before giving me a cold refusal. I was stuck, and angry too. I had money, from selling the stolen bobbin, but I could not declare my financial position. My box of tricks was empty: Cane, a Dummy A look-alike, had warned me never to use the same trick twice. But what was I supposed to do? I decided to turn to him for help.
My association with Cane had its origin in my letter-writing days. I had helped him write a few letters to girls he desired. Two had fallen into his net, but he never paid me. He just promised to be of use m
uch later. Cane was big, tall, dark, with a conspiratorial charm that left you convinced, or pretending to be convinced, even if you nursed serious reservations. We, his classmates, both admired and feared him because he was a northerner, born somewhere in the harsh northern Ugandan plains, abandoned by his father, a soldier, at a tender age and raised by his mother, who had followed the great asphalt road south to Kampala. Like Uncle Kawayida’s mother, she sold food and anything else she could lay her hands on in order to support herself and her son. What a strapping young man he was! Cane bubbled with the angry confidence born of hatred and too much familiarity with society’s underbelly. He had an opinion on practically everything. He used to say to the majority of us, who were from the central region, “It was not the British who messed up this country; it was your sycophantic forebears, your greedy chiefs and your king who finally sold the country to Obote.” Reared on loyalty, most of us were surprised that he was openly criticizing his fellow northerner Obote. “And those who sold to Obote might as well have sold to Amin. So please don’t moan when things go bad. Take your punishment like real men.” Unable to figure out what side he was on, we usually kept quiet.
For a long time Cane disorganized Grandpa’s political dissertations in my head and almost dislodged them. That I had memorized most of them without really understanding them was an additional problem. I could not analyze them. As soon as I tried to take them apart, they crumbled like rotten paper, but by and by I asked myself the right questions: Did Cane mean that if our chiefs had not been divided—Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, pagans—they would have stopped the spread of British colonial rule and imperialism? Did we, at the turn of the century, have military superiority over British forces in the East African region? What about Captain Lugard’s machine guns? No, Cane was wrong; the British would have come in anyway. The chiefs were minor players in the drama. I would have liked to ask Grandpa some of Cane’s questions, and taken Cane’s side just to tease the old man, but I was not allowed to visit him.
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 22
