By the start of 1976, the meetings at the gas station had taken on a grimmer look. It was clear to Serenity, Hajj and Mariko, their Protestant friend, that the country was headed for stormier weather. To begin with, the State Research Bureau and other security agencies had become omnipotent, arresting whomever they wanted at any time in any place. Across the border in Tanzania, the exiled dictator Obote was making a lot of noise about his desire to topple the government that had ousted him. The exodus of Ugandans fleeing for their lives, which had begun with a brain drain as educated Ugandans quietly departed, now reached epidemic proportions as spy organizations became more paranoid and picked up more and more people suspected of helping guerrillas. Once abroad, a few of these exiles talked about the appalling situation they had left behind. Amin was not amused. Hajj Gimbi’s friends in the security forces told him of their fear that Uganda was going to be attacked, a fear vindicated when the Israelis rescued their countrymen at Entebbe Airport, hijacked by Palestinian fighters and brought to Uganda because of Amin’s sympathy with the Palestinian cause. The renewed fear of attack had become an obsession, which was exploited by pirates within the army and the security agencies for personal ends.
Nowadays my father and his friends dispersed early. One day an army jeep had stopped at nightfall and men in civilian clothes had jumped off, ordered them to lie on the ground, kicked them a few times, accused them of plotting against the government and proceeded to empty the till and demand more of the day’s takings. If Hajj Gimbi had not dropped an important name, it might have been worse, because there was no more money to take. The pirates had made do with the trio’s watches.
After the attack, Hajj Gimbi started looking for land in a rural area fifty kilometers away. He found it, bought it and started building a house there. At first, Serenity thought his friend had panicked and should not have bought land so far away from the city. Hajj disabused him: “The good times have ended. The city has become a den of killers. It is time to move back to the village.”
“Why?” Serenity asked vexedly.
“Amin’s fall is not going to be tidy. From now on, things are going to get much worse. Armed robbery is already on the increase. The soldiers are becoming more desperate. The future looks bleak.”
“Hasn’t it been like this for the past two, three years?” Serenity, anchored in suburban daydreams, asked rather obtusely.
Hajj was becoming impatient, almost angry. “What I mean is, woe to those who will be trapped in the city in Amin’s last days. Woe to families without any place to hide.”
It struck Serenity that if war broke out the following day, his family would have no safe place to go. In other words, apart from his dilapidated bachelor house in the village, the only accommodation his family had was the government-owned pagoda. Serenity felt ashamed of his myopia. He did not like rural areas, he did not like farming, and that had affected his way of seeing into the future. He was among the few people to whom the notion of land ownership did not appeal. He associated land with the bad people clan land had attracted to his father’s house, and his father’s inability to control them. He nursed a secret fear that the moment he secured land and a house, his home would be overrun by people, probably from his wife’s side. More still, he remembered the drama in his sister Tiida’s home when somebody left fly-attracting entrails and dogs’ heads near her house because of a land dispute. It was true that landowners were often dishonest and greedy, unable to resist selling the same land to a second party if the price was right, and the proliferation of guns had turned land disputes into fatal or near-fatal clashes. His worst-case scenario involved somebody hiring soldiers to shoot his children just to drive him off a piece of land. Up to that moment, he had believed that, if things got bad, he could always move to another suburb. Now he realized that he needed a quiet place far from the city where they could stay if a protracted campaign of terror or even war broke out.
The city was the seat of government, the center of power, and if it meant fighting for it to the death or bombing it flat, those caught in the cross fire would certainly perish. Serenity, who had not been too shaken up by the robbery at the gas station, found himself shivering. At the same time, he felt eternally grateful to Hajj, whom he saw more and more as the elder brother he never had. That fate had brought them together, first as neighbors, then as bosom friends, made Hajj seem like a gift from above.
It now occurred to Serenity that with the fall of Amin, he might lose his trade-union post, and maybe even his job. He started thinking very hard about the future.
Mariko looked with smug amusement at his two scheming friends: his family owned large tracts of land in several rural areas and one or two in the city. He volunteered to give free accommodation to Serenity’s family in case war broke out. Concealing his irritation, Serenity smiled at him.
Serenity asked the man who had helped Hajj find a clean piece of land to do the same for him. The era of the magical delivery notes had ended: army officers had taken over the management of state factories, most of which had been decimated by mismanagement and corruption, and it had become virtually impossible to fool them. Serenity, who had no death wish, had quickly adapted to the times. He discovered a safer way to make money: by saving on trade-union purchases like gas, he amassed a small fortune. The incompetence of his new boss played into his hands, although, with characteristic restraint, he took only what he could account for. After getting the land, he commissioned a house plan, bribed somebody in the land office to get it quickly approved and within two months of the purchase, the builders had started working. After the house had reached window level, Serenity realized how wonderful it was to own the roof over one’s head.
The year ended well, and the new one started rather quietly. Nothing special happened, and the friends hoped 1977 might be better than 1976 had been. Till Hajj brought some very disturbing news.
“One of the big Christian leaders is in trouble,” he said one afternoon.
“The Catholic archbishop, you mean?” Serenity asked. Not long after the honeymoon of Amin’s coup, the Catholic primate had become Amin’s most outspoken enemy and critic. He had criticized the killing of priests, one of whom had been the editor of a Catholic journal; the expulsion of missionaries; the rape of nuns; the kidnapping and killing of prominent Catholics; the killing of people in general; the breakdown of order; and abuses of power by the army and the security agencies. There had been rumors of attempts on his life, house searches and other forms of persecution, but so far the campaign had remained at that, and it had not stopped him from talking.
“I do not know for sure,” Hajj admitted.
“Surely it can’t be the Anglican archbishop,” Mariko said uneasily. The Anglican Church had taken a middle-of-the-road course and had not been very openly critical of Amin’s government. Although prominent Protestants had also disappeared, it had not been particularly bad in a bad situation. The Protestants had always tended to be pragmatic in their politics, and it was that pragmatism that had won their party, the Uganda People’s Congress, power at Independence. A large number of Ugandan exiles in Tanzania were Protestant, and therefore linked to the UPC, but there was no direct contact between the exiles and the Protestant religious leaders.
“Recently there has been much noise from Tanzania, and the impression is that the exiles led by Obote and the Protestant faction are up to something,” Hajj explained.
“Exile always means that somebody is up to something, doesn’t it?” Mariko, feeling the need for desperate reassurance, said wearily.
“I am talking about infiltration. There are rumors that guerrillas are already inside the country. Some of their leaders slip in and out of Uganda and boast about their escapades on Radio Tanzania. What this means is that there are collaborators who have not yet been unearthed.”
“I don’t want to think about it,” Mariko said irritably.
“Nobody wants to think about it,” Serenity said.
Politics and religion were ha
nd in glove: theoretically, every Muslim was behind Amin, every Catholic behind the banned Democratic Party and every Protestant behind the hibernating UPC. As a result, religious leaders had the patina of demigods, controlling people’s minds and souls. It also meant that antagonizing or harming a religious leader would bring the wrath of his followers on your head.
“The Anglican archbishop is untouchable. He is archbishop not only of Uganda but also of Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire. He is an international figure. Amin dare not touch him.”
“He is also an Acholi, and Acholis and Langis have not done well, since the Obote connection makes them possible allies on a tribal basis,” said Serenity, now getting the hang of it.
“All this saddens me a great deal,” Mariko said.
“This is not about religion,” Hajj explained. “It is about politics. Many Christians think that the Muslims have been immune to Amin’s interference and are therefore safe. Nobody is safe. Look, Amin created the Muslim Supreme Council to control Muslim affairs, and he has not hesitated to depose council leaders when it suited him. Some even lost their lives. So if he plans to interfere with the Christian churches, it is because he sees it as the only solution to his political problems. Remember, it is coming on a hundred years since the advent of Christianity in this country. This very year, the Protestant Church is going to celebrate its centenary. Amin and his henchmen must be worried to death about the implications, both local and foreign, of such a big event.”
“Exiles and other forces using the chance to destabilize the country, eh?” Serenity suggested.
“Yes,” Hajj replied grimly, his beard swaying morosely.
“The hands of our religious leaders are clean,” Mariko said, vexed, almost shouting at his friends.
“You remember the Islamization rumor, don’t you?” Hajj said.
“Yes, it was said that Amin was going to declare this a Muslim country,” Mariko replied, looking suspiciously at his Muslim friend as though he were a government spy trying to trap him.
“That rumor had unexpected repercussions,” Hajj continued. “It drove more Christians to church. This being the centenary year, the churches will burst at the seams. In two years’ time, it will be the Catholic centenary. All this mounting excitement is leading to sleepless nights in high places.”
The three friends did not have long to wait. News came that the Anglican archbishop’s residence had been searched for weapons. As tensions rose, especially among the Protestants, government radio admitted that the search had taken place. The Anglican Church fought back by writing a strong letter to Amin, washing the Church clean of involvement in anti-government activities and mourning the growing insecurity in the country.
As things started to cool down, it was announced that the Anglican archbishop, together with two cabinet ministers from Obote’s home region, had been arrested for stockpiling arms, with the malevolent intention of killing President Amin and creating disorder.
“My worst fears have come true,” Hajj Gimbi declared. “This is just going to worsen Christian-Muslim relations. All Muslims are going to be painted with the same brush. I don’t trust the people handling this affair.”
“But what does he want to achieve by this?” Mariko, burning with the genuine anger of the apolitical, asked. He was a mild Protestant who regularly went to church, obeyed the law, helped the needy and hoped that the sum total of his good deeds guaranteed his safety.
“He wants to intimidate the Church and keep people on tenterhooks,” Serenity suggested.
“If there are snakes in your house, or if you think there are, you smoke it. Your household may have to stay outside for hours, but you do what you have to do,” Hajj said, raising his palms in the air. “I am afraid that is how our leaders think.”
The trio watched the television appearance of the three detainees on Serenity’s stinking Toshiba. There seemed to be hundreds of soldiers everywhere. On display were the neat piles of arms the plotters had intended to use. The meeting took place on the lawn of a famous hotel, which some people said was also partly a torture chamber. The arms displayed had been found near the archbishop’s house. Other collaborators had been arrested, but the three men were the lynchpins. A letter written by Obote, implicating them in the plot, was read. At the end of the meeting, the soldiers said they wanted the three men dead, and indeed they died in a car crash while trying to overpower the army officer who was driving them. Of the four people in the vehicle, only the driver survived the crash, escaping with minor injuries.
Serenity and his friends, like the majority of people, read between the lines, but they still felt very sad. This was history writing itself in front of their eyes. It was a nasty experience. These were some of the saddest days in the history of the country; worse things had occurred, but it was the small happenings that exposed the extent of the rot.
Aunt Lwandeka was demoralized for a day or two. It was not that the country had lost its political virginity—that had happened long ago—but that it was tottering on the brink of brinks and everyone seemed to have an idea of what was going to happen next. The general lesson was very clear: if it could happen to the big fish, it could happen to the small fish anytime, anywhere.
The three friends did not have any more words to say about the incident. They just sat and played cards or talked about other things. Hajj and Serenity drove the builders harder than before, and it was not very long before their houses were completed and they moved their families away from the eye of the storm.
The move from the city to the village was Padlock’s dream come true. She had hated the city, its noise, its profanity and its disorder from the beginning. She had had a love-hate relationship with the pagoda. She felt that the house, like Serenity’s bachelor bed, was tainted, this time by the pagan spirit of the Indians who had been there first. Over the years, she hankered for something pure, something virgin, something she could fill with her own spirit. The violence of the city, the kidnappings, the rapes and the insecurity had disgusted her village sensibilities. The absence of punishment for offenders almost drove her mad with outrage. In her book, crime always meant punishment, and yet here was a situation where sin was being tolerated with impunity, even rewarded.
For years she had lived in fear of being raped. She had a feeling that the soldiers would do it one day. Consequently, she tensed up when she saw those tall, dark figures walking or driving by. Her head swam whenever they stopped a vehicle she was travelling in. She felt asphyxiated. One time, she almost jumped out of a taxi van when a soldier popped his head inside to take a closer look. She happened to be sitting near the door. The man never noticed her and never asked her to show her identity card. He concentrated on other passengers. Yet she felt terrified. She broke into a sweat, her eyes reddened and her lungs strained for air. The feeling of beleaguerment had worsened after the pilgrimage. She feared that her holiness was about to be obliterated. She feared that her name was about to be erased from the book of saints. She feared that a group of soldiers would do terrible things to her, decapitate her and drag her defiled body through the streets. She feared the effect the deed would have on her children. At the height of her fear, ambivalence insinuated itself into her thoughts. The dropping-eagle syndrome recurred. She started feeling purged. She started feeling bad about getting purged. The purges made her afraid that the Devil was winning. When the fear came without concomitant purges, she felt driven close to the edge. When the soldiers ignored her, as they always did, she wondered if they were not standing in the way of destiny. When they seemed to notice her, she quaked and asked that the cup pass from her. She suffered in silence.
All this confusion left her hankering for a place in a village: a virginal place she could impose her will on, a peaceful place where she could pray and meditate. She thought of herself as a desert plant, a cactus which defied the desolation, and when she moved into the new house, she felt that her very deep roots had sunk into the foundation and permeated the land. Virtue would triumph over
decay, the cactus would prosper in desert sand even if the water had to be sucked from tens of kilometers away. The local priest could not come to bless the house; he deputized the catechist, who sprinkled the house and the compound and the garden with the water she had brought from Lourdes in a plastic bottle made in the shape of the Virgin Mary. The meter-long rosary hanging in the sitting room was her talisman against evil, the leather-bound Bible her sword and shield against the enemy. She felt that she had entered the house she had been born to live in.
The size of the little town suited her purposes well. It was a small, one-street, one-market, one-dispensary trading center serving a small population. Nobody stood out, or at least not by much. The children went to a good school four kilometers away. The teachers kept their pupils under constant observation and were quick to report if the latter misbehaved. Padlock could not have asked for more. The Catholic subparish church was one kilometer away, and the priest visited once a month to hear confessions and to say holy mass. The catechist, a hardworking man of Rwandan origin, treated her family with respect and Christian love. Padlock liked the man and was generous to his six children. She made them dresses and shirts at no cost from remnant pieces of cloth. Whenever the priest visited, Padlock got a place in front of the altar. It made her feel that the priest was talking directly and exclusively to her. She watched everything he did. She listened carefully to every song the choir sang. It was her show. She contributed to the big meal cooked for the priest on such occasions. She liked being consulted by the catechist on various matters. She liked her new position in life. She had finally found her center, and she had no plans to relinquish it.
Serenity, on the other hand, was a townsman and remained behind in Kampala during the week. He vacated the pagoda and moved into a smaller house with one bedroom, a sitting room, a kitchen and a bathroom. It was linked to two other houses of the same type, all wrapped inside a fence. His neighbors were people in their forties and fifties, looking for peace amidst the turmoil of the city. Now Serenity could enjoy the anonymity of the city with the convenience of being at the center of things. In the evening he read his books and listened to the radio, mostly BBC or Voice of America. During the day, he dealt with trade-union affairs at the office or at meeting places in town. He never invited colleagues home: it was his own private space. He usually ate at a small restaurant in town, and only prepared himself tea when he returned home in the evening. Nakibuka came for a few days each week and served him carefully prepared meals, as though she were courting him. On the weekend he would board a bus to visit Padlock and the children, taking them commodities they needed. Serenity fulfilled the duties of a provider with guilt-laden efficiency, floating between the world of the married and the unmarried and bouncing between wife and lover with somnolent ease.
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 36
