“How are we going back?”
“By taxi,” he said cockily.
“Why don’t we use a government vehicle on some of these missions?”
“That would blow our cover.”
I looked outside: Mityana was a dynamic little town. New buildings were going up all the time—the whole place seemed to be one big construction site. There were bare-chested men going up scaffolds with pans of concrete, and others coming down. Concrete-making machines were spinning their fat bellies ceaselessly, and foremen’s voices agitated the air with supreme impatience. Trucks and buses were rolling in, together with overloaded pickup vans full of people and merchandise. Shoppers from Mubende and the surrounding areas poured in and out of town in hordes. Outside Mityana, level with the horizon, was Lake Wamala. The serenity of its silver-gray surface did not calm my nerves.
To come here, you had to pass through monstrous forests and open grassland for much of the way. The army had suffered big losses in these areas. How would we fare?
“Cheer up, man,” Lwendo said. “This time we couldn’t let the bastards go. Next time around, we will have our cut.”
“It is dangerous money.”
“That is what it is all about: beating the odds.”
At about three o’clock, our business was finished. We got papers from the police, who would keep the men till they were picked up by the fraud squad, and we prepared to leave. We knew that a few heads had to roll on local reconstruction committees and at the Rehab office in Kampala. We got into a taxi van and set out for Kampala.
We entered thick forests where the sun was cut off for miles by the giant canopies, and emerged at little sodden towns with fruit stands and dilapidated buildings, some of which had been used as torture chambers by the army not so long ago. We went up a hill and descended a steep slope. Halfway down, we heard a big explosion. The van rolled over and over, and we were dumped in the grass below. I felt disembodied. I had banged my head on a seat and was cut on the left arm. Lwendo was unscathed, except for pain in his chest and in his right leg. Some people had been cut by flying glass and lay in the grass whimpering, calling for their dear ones. A man kept on about his wallet till he got exhausted and shut up. Some people thrashed about; some lay dead still, with only trickles of blood and light moans to show they were alive.
I was not afraid. I had been expecting something nasty to happen, it had happened and I felt relieved. I kept wondering: Was this an accident or a setup or a warning? We got help from a truck on its way to the city. Lwendo and I refused to go to the hospital. We went for a checkup at a small private clinic run by a doctor Lwendo knew.
“It was an accident, pure and simple. If they wanted to harm us, they would have done it more easily.”
“Maybe they wanted to hide their hand,” I said.
“No, they don’t have to.”
I lay low for a few weeks, trying to make sense of the accident. Had somebody shot at us, or had a wheel simply burst? I no longer felt so adventurous. I had the option of working with Aunt, who would soon need somebody to manage her business affairs: she was planning to make cooking oil from cottonseed. The Reconstruction Bank had already approved the loan and the plan.
The accident had made Lwendo meaner, his ransoms higher. It had also made him realize that we had to stop soon, before our luck ran out. I appreciated his logic. Greed and corruption were not going to end with us. It was wiser to do our thing and check out. His girlfriend was pressuring him to settle down. The Lwendo of the Sr. Bison days had not changed, and the woman wanted to pin him down as soon as possible. A number of women had smelled the money, but he had so far not sunk his claws into any of them because of our peripatetic lifestyle. His girlfriend wanted things to remain that way.
The deal that made us involved cement and was born of an ambitious government promise to repair all roads and to bridge all rivers in the devastated areas, beginning with those that had been destroyed as an immediate result of guerrilla activity. That was how I gathered courage to go to the village of my birth. I had already heard that it had been wiped out. The guerrillas had laid an ambush on the spot where the taxi driver who was supposed to take Padlock to Ndere Hospital for my birth got trapped by the rain and the storm. They first attacked the nearest barracks, fifteen kilometers away, in order to draw attention from the spot of the big ambush.
It had become evident early on that the army’s approach was reactive; and even when they seemed to take the initiative it was in response to earlier guerrilla attacks. Carpet bombing had not worked in many places. Sweeping arrests and torture had not rooted out genuine guerrillas. The army was growing desperate and needed a big morale-boosting trophy.
One day the guerrillas shot at army trucks near Mpande Hill and disappeared into the bushes. They did it several times and sent radio messages to the effect that they had taken over a triangular piece of land between the barracks, Mpande Hill and Ndere Parish. The army, believing they had intercepted crucial information, planned a major offensive to sweep the area clean.
On the scheduled day, the army sent six trucks full of soldiers headed by an APC and machine-gun-mounted jeeps. This was during the reign of the Katyushas. When the vehicles were stretched out a full kilometer in the swamp, with Mpande Hill looming inaccessibly in the air, all hell broke loose. Those at both ends were taken out in big fireballs, trapping the rest on the road and proving the strategy of travelling close together catastrophic. Rocket-propelled grenades blew up vehicle after vehicle, and the surviving soldiers were locked in a gun-fight that poured walls of lead and fire all around them. In all, the army lost two hundred fifteen soldiers on that lethal spot, and many others were wounded. Casualties among the guerrillas were minimal: they withdrew in time and escaped through the swamps into the village and the nearby forests.
A few hours later, as burned-out army trucks lay on their sides in the road or swam in the swamps and bodies swelled in the sun or floated in the water, tangled in the papyrus reeds, helicopter gunships arrived in force. Katyusha rocket launchers were mounted on the two hills, and the counter-attack began. By then, though, the guerrillas had already escaped, having had no intention of getting involved into a protracted battle with the better-equipped army. Almost all the local people had fled as well. The choppers and the Katyushas blasted everything anyway: shells landed in the forest, in the water, in the valleys, on houses, everywhere. The temperature of the water in the swamps went up, killing fish, frogs, horseflies, mosquitoes; burning papyrus reeds to a sick yellow color, and inducing a hippopotamus clan at the extreme end of the river to migrate. If it had not been for the inaccuracy of the bombs, no house would have been left standing within a radius of ten kilometers.
A few days later, as the forest smoldered and the houses lay in ruins, the army sent in mop-up operations to look for stray guerrillas who might have survived the blitz but been unable to get away. A few old men and women who had refused to flee, believing that their age might save them, had their elbows tied behind them in the triangular kandooya configuration. They had nothing to say, no information to give, and were killed. Those wounded in the fighting were brought to rooftops and pushed off. Anyone who could be fucked was fucked and killed. Any remaining scraps of doors, windows and iron sheets were looted. Thus the village of my birth was consigned to the caustic dust of oblivion.
The looting reached its peak at Ndere Parish. The soldiers would have stripped the church tower bare, but they did not want to share the fate of its builder, the late Fr. Roulex Lule, by falling down and cracking their skulls. So they pumped a number of rocket-propelled grenades into it until it folded and crumpled like paper. They blew the remaining roof off the church and picked the fathers’ house and the school buildings clean. During the weeks of occupation, they broke up desks and chairs for cooking fires. Lovers of barbecue, they looked for animals to roast. This was around the time that their colleagues barbecued Fr. Lageau’s German dog after attacking and looting the seminary of my secondary
school days.
On what would have been the last day of the operation, a local priest who had hidden in the forest was captured. He was arrested, together with a catechist, and the pair was hanged by the legs on the smoldering rafters of the fathers’ house. Saliva and blood and brains trickled out of their heads until they died, and birds pecked out their eyes.
Rain always followed severe bombardment. Rains poisoned with the wrath of the dead fell, and the swamps swelled, flooding and submerging the surrounding areas. They undermined house foundations and made the ruins rot and crumble. They carried the ooze to the bottom of Mpande Hill in swirling waves and washed away the history of the village. Thunder and lightning struck and, coupled with the relentless rain, broke open burial sites, filled them with water and destroyed what remained of that legacy. Elephant grass eventually took over, growing over courtyards, graveyards, everywhere.
By the time we went to investigate the need for aqueducts to control the mighty Mpande swamp, the village was no more, its memory a dark ooze seeping from the sides of the two hills. Grandpa’s house and the burial grounds were gone. So were Serenity’s house, Stefano’s grand one and the nominal restaurants, casinos and supermarkets of the youthful village. My favorite jackfruit tree was no more, cut to bits by the bombs. There were hardly any returnees.
Aunt Tiida and Nakatu came to salvage the tattered memories of their birthplace and early life but, horrified by the transience of what they had believed to be eternal, fled to the safety of their homes. Serenity came to see for himself what the cycles of history and war had done, and what he could do about it. He too fled, with palms over his eyes: the realization of the vengeful dreams of his youth horrified him. The house of his nightmares was gone. Clan land and its exploiters were gone. His very own bachelor house, with its conquests and less savory memories, had also been obliterated. On his way out, he went to the place where the Fiddler used to live. The remains of the house were invisible, and he could only vaguely make out where his childhood refuge had been. Now he understood why the city and the towns were so swollen with people who, despite the terrible conditions, did not seem eager to respond to government calls to return to their areas. Many members of his trade union fell into the same category.
This time it was much easier to steal a truck or two filled with the cement intended for the aqueducts. The Reconstruction Committee in charge was weak because of the thinness of the population of returnees. Literacy among the committee members was low, and the honorable members got lost in the maze of mathematical calculations required. The records at the Rehab warehouse showed that ten trucks had been delivered. On the ground, only five had been received. Aqueducts were being built in Mpande swamp with less concrete than was required. The pirating pattern was the same, except that those involved in the syndicate had become greedier. I was outraged, and Lwendo appreciated my frustration. “No mercy this time,” I told him. “If we get them, we bury them deep.” He at first agreed, but then realized that this could be our last chance. He did not tell me directly. A few days later, he said, “Don’t get carried away. Don’t let feelings get in the way.”
“What do you mean by that? My village got wiped out. Do you want me to sit back and watch?”
“That is not what I was saying.”
“What the hell were you saying, then?”
“That this could be our lucky break. You know well that we can’t keep on doing the same thing forever. This is our last time. The destruction of the village and the disappearance of the cement are omens. You are the village. It lives in you. The cement will never be recovered, and the criminals will probably walk once arrested. Better take the cash and go than let some policeman or detective blow it away on booze or pussy.”
“No, not this time.”
“Yes, this time.”
Acting on a tip from our Radio Uganda man, who this time wanted to be paid much more—he claimed he was getting threatening letters, dead rats, headless geckos and such garbage on his front door and wanted to clear out—Lwendo got a jeep and a rifle, and we went to Jinja Road, behind the Radio Uganda building.
The house was a fabulous bungalow, hidden by a fence, facing a sprawling golf course and Kololo Hill. Our man was at home: a small, well-dressed, intelligent man who had made his money in the early eighties by speculating on the dollar. It was striking how ordinary these white-collar criminals looked. He might have been a staff member of Sam Igat Memorial College. He looked almost underfed, but he owned warehouses in Kikuubo and had business connections in London and Dubai.
He gave us what we wanted without much argument. It looked almost too easy.
After taking the money, we had to lie low. In the meantime, I took stock of my situation. I did not want to go back to SIMC, whatever happened. I could sit back and do Aunt Lwandeka’s books while making up my mind about the future. I could travel: Where? Abroad: there were many young people leaving for Britain, Sweden, the United States and Germany to try their luck at odd jobs in the hope of earning enough money to build houses and buy cars. The trick was to ask for political asylum, since that was the only way they could secure the right to stay in the West. I had no plans to join their ranks. I couldn’t bear the humiliation of the camps, especially because I could avoid it. Maybe I would go as a tourist.
The man we squeezed was no fool. He used his friends in high places to blow the whistle on us, and the padre finally got the news. He called Lwendo to his office one day and, like a father to an erring son, expressed deep disappointment. He said he had had very high hopes for Lwendo and could not understand why he had fallen prey to the hydras of bribery and corruption. Lwendo, like a prodigal son, kept his head down, as though offering his neck for decapitation. The padre, a man of not too many words who knew the temptation of money, said he would not lock him up. Instead, he was going to send him to work as a Rehabilitation officer in the north. In other words, Lwendo was being flung from the Garden of Eden into the fires of the harsh world outside. Already thinking of his escape, he accepted his punishment with a bowed head.
It was indeed Eden that he was being banished from. Living in the south, it was easy to forget the fighting raging in the north. True, big parts of the north had been conquered by the new government, but guerrilla-style fighting was still going on. A hard core of Obote fighters could not accept the fact that an army from the south had taken over power in the north. They tried to stir up the people, and when they failed, they attacked villages and terrorized the locals. Knowing the terrain well, they could move quickly, do damage and disappear before government forces could do something about it. It was ironic that after fighting a guerrilla war against northerner-dominated governments, the southerners were now involved in a similar predicament. And as the northerners had been scared to death in our forests and swamps, the southerners did not know what the dusty, harsh plains would reveal next time they searched for the elusive fighters; but unlike Obote soldiers, they were not allowed to torture civilians. Soldiers who were caught raping and pillaging got shot by firing squads, which made international human rights organizations holler. However, the government remained firm, and when a soldier raped or committed acts akin to those Obote soldiers had perpetrated in the Luwero Triangle, the death penalty remained a very likely punishment.
Lwendo trembled when he considered the dangers of working in a virtual war zone. His luck had held during the guerrilla war: Would it hold in the north, a region he did not know and feared like hell? He feared getting ambushed more than anything else. Lwendo also imagined himself in a Rehab Ministry van or truck, flying in the air on the wings of a land mine and losing his limbs. The thought of becoming handicapped for the rest of his life almost made him lose his mind.
As a government representative, he would have to bend over backward to oblige the people, because the government wanted the northern people behind it in order to avoid looking like a southerner-dominated force of occupation.
Lwendo told me of his banishment and asked me for advic
e. I didn’t think he needed advice. He only wanted to hear his voice reflected in mine.
“Did you agree to go?” I asked.
“A soldier has to obey.”
“But you don’t have to. Drop out of the army.”
“That is what I am thinking about, but in the meantime, I have to act as though I am committed to going north.”
“Scary, eh!” I tried to make a joke of the situation.
“I would not want to be one of our boys fighting there. The army is extra strict on them in order to avoid vengeful atrocities on innocent civilians. I thought I had escaped all that mess, and now this bastard orders me to fly straight into that hell!”
I shook my head sadly.
“I would like you to do something for me,” he said, looking me in the eye. He had not shaved for a week, and he looked scruffy. I am being asked to pay for the money we made, I thought sickly.
“Yes?” I said none too cheerfully.
“I would like you to accompany me to the north on a scouting mission.”
“Are you mad? Do you want me to get killed?” The possibility loomed large of our vehicle rolling over a land mine that had been idly lying around for years. There were attacks by former Obote army brigands, meaner than ever because of the defeat and the hard times they had fallen on. I went over the map of northern Uganda in my mind. It was one thing to know the names of towns, the cash crops produced and what people did and fed on, but it was terra incognita in real terms. Beyond Lake Kyoga and the Nile River, every spot seemed to be full of brigands and hardened Obote fighters. “Do you want me to die?” I demanded.
Lwendo laughed hard, strangely. He was enjoying this bit, or he was just afraid that I would let him down. “Why are you so afraid of death?”
“I have eluded death all these years. Why do I have to go looking for it in the north?”
“That is putting it a bit too strongly. Most of the north has been pacified, except for some pockets of resistance. As it was here in the eighties, the fighting is confined to only a few areas. Elsewhere life is more or less normal.” He was saying this to reassure himself, not me. I convinced myself that I had no choice. I wasn’t feeling too loyal. I was just under a curious spell. I wanted to see part of the north for myself, and the truth was that I did not fear death, only the pain that might precede it.
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 48
