Abyssinian Chronicles

by Moses Isegawa

  Within seven days, we were on our way. I did not tell Aunt Lwandeka where I was going. She assumed that we were going to some Devastatated Area on some survey. We rode on a Ministry of Rehabilitation truck, which was part of a convoy taking supplies to the north. We had an army escort of four young boys around seventeen years of age. They were armed with AK-47 rifles, which reminded me of my nocturnal encounter with the Infernal Trinity. This was the first time in years that I had associated the attack directly with those ubiquitous guns. I looked at the curved magazines, the tapering muzzles and the shiny wooden bits and imagined the power that came from tickling the trigger. It wasn’t that glamorous. The price was indeed too high. As I looked at these boys who were the age of my SIMC students, I wondered how many people they had killed, and what their future would be like. Did they think about the people they shot? Would they think about them as they grew older? What effect would it have on their lives? Would they become compulsive killers? Here they were, escorting us, looking as though they could piss on a land mine and disarm it. I estimated that at the time they entered the bush, they must have been no older than thirteen. They had grown up in the bush. How were they adjusting to barracks life? They loved the power they had. I could see the swagger. They had been promised things, but what would happen if those promises were not fulfilled? I was more afraid of these kid soldiers than of their adult counterparts. The older soldiers seemed corruptible, a bit more cognizant of the problems of life: you could negotiate if you had something to offer them. These kids seemed addicted to obeying orders.

  I remembered the time I was the age they were when they joined the guerrillas, the time I was having so much trouble with Padlock and Serenity and their despotism. If I had had the chance, or if the circumstances had been right for joining the army, I would have become a soldier. Where would I be now? Rattling in my cupboard would have been a few actual skeletons. I felt lucky that things had not come to that. I might have killed many Padlocks in proxy while the real Padlock was eating and breathing and raising her shitters in the pagoda. Maybe I would have doubled back and tortured her to death, consuming each gasp of blood-soaked breath with gusto. Well …

  There was not much talk on our truck, or on the others for that matter. Lwendo, particularly, wanted to maintain his distance from the kid soldiers. He always warned me to keep away from soldiers.

  “It is not worth it. When the chips fall, a friend will shoot you if ordered to.”

  The other people on the truck also preferred to entertain their own thoughts. The boys, too, were afraid of the north and were trying to reassure themselves that the fear was in their minds. We were inside the former Luwero Triangle, speeding along the famous Gulu Road. I had never been this far before, and I was excited in a strange way. We stopped several times to piss, and to buy bananas, roasted corn on the cob, sweet potatoes and banana juice from peddlers along the road.

  At Masindi, which was approximately at the latitude across the middle of the country where the old southern kingdoms came in contact with northern peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I started feeling that we were on foreign territory. I felt like a southern raider going north on some sinister mission. At the turn of the century, our grandfathers had come this far to help spread British colonial rule. Now we were on our way to see if the north and the south could live together after all that had happened. Lango District, a plains region, was just a river away. Its most famous son, Milton Obote, was seeking refuge in some foreign country, well away from the troubles he had caused the area and all of Uganda. Almost thirty years ago, he had left these harsh plains, crossed to the south like a true raider and, manipulating a political system riddled with faults, arrogance and ignorance, captured the biggest booty: leadership of Uganda. Now he had hung up his guns and his boots, leaving his people to their own devices. I tried to see what he had done for them. There was not much evidence of anything.

  The ubiquitous green of the south had gone, giving way to open, dry land of short, sparse grass, puny trees and endless skies. It was hot and harsh here, and just looking at the dry, bare soil made me thirstier. The sun pounded down directly from the sky, without anything to catch it, and concentrated its fury on the land and the people. Winds picked up the dust and spun it in the sky in seemingly playful whirlwinds. This was tough country, where food and water and life had to be fought for every inch of the way.

  We had some scary moments when one truck in the convoy broke down. While the problem was being fixed, everyone was on edge, as though brigands were going to surface from the earth and mow us down. The boy soldiers no longer looked so confident. I could see my friend Lwendo sweating hard under his armpits and looking this way and that, as though the place were haunted by vampires.

  We finally arrived at Lira Town. It felt as if we had just been airdropped there. The town seemed to have mushroomed from the ground, isolated, open on all sides. It was just like any other African town: the frugal facilities, the smallness of the building structures under the open skies, the cheerful disorder. From here Kampala, with all its defects, looked like paradise. As in any war zone, there was a considerable army presence, and we were warned never to go out at night. The soldiers tried to look relaxed, their paranoid tendencies on a tight leash. The feeling of nakedness and exposure was overwhelming. After our forests and tall vegetation, this place made you feel prey to unknown forces. That feeling was increased by the presence of displaced persons in the town. Seeing their searching faces and tired expressions made you more aware that danger was lurking out there, waiting for the right moment to snap or to explode.

  Part of the convoy continued deep into Acholi District, with Gulu its final destination. We watched it take off the following morning, and felt lucky that we were staying behind.

  The local people, many of whom were struggling to lead their lives, scared Lwendo. The displaced people, in their search for redemption and peace of mind, made him jumpy. He imagined them pulling triggers at him, but they had no guns, not even spears or pangas. He saw, hiding among them, rebels and rebel sympathizers who would tip their friends off to come and slaughter us. It evidently did not pay for a soldier to have a brain: Lwendo’s worked overtime, plaguing his days and nights with soldierly nightmares. Local rehabilitation officials spoke English, shared information about places where help was needed and were friendly, reassuring. It was in the people’s interests to keep up good relations with Rehabilitation officers, because they needed all the help they could get. I trusted them; Lwendo did not. At night he told me a little about the trenches he had slept in. “The trench would turn into a large cunt in which we swam with fire burning in our loins.”

  “What would you do then?” I said, curious. He gave his combat stories in such measly doses.

  “Fuck anything with a cunt,” he said and burst into a hard, loud laugh.

  “Anything!”

  “I tell you, those are moments of madness, of crazed urges,” he said, biting his lower lip meaningfully. “The ugliest female would look like a wet-dream goddess. I think some people could even fuck dogs.”

  At this we both laughed. I slapped him on the back, and he returned the favor.

  “Those are flashes of states civilians will never know. The disintegration of consciousness into component parts and the reassembling of the parts in split-second intervals!”

  “Did it make you feel special?”

  “I felt I had been to hell and back all in one bittersweet moment. Time travel or some other magic. I felt special, a cut above every civilian.”

  “And how about when—”

  “Oh, it made the actual shooting pale in significance. Here you were, waiting, fearing, and then the moment comes. It is a sort of anti-climax, and you want it repeated: the terrible fear, the loin fire, the climactic anti-climactic shooting, the target falling. Punching is more satisfactory, physically speaking. The thing I remember most is the gun smoke and the explosions.”

  Aha, I wanted to say. Should I
ask him how many people he had shot? And where? He saw me looking at him stealthily, and knew I was evaluating him, marking him up or down on my scale, maybe comparing his words with those of others I had heard before. He smiled, and burst out laughing. I thought he was going to volunteer and give me the numbers, but he did not, and I failed to find a way to ask without being too invasive. I was also protecting myself. I did not want to look at him when he became angry and think, He killed so many people, what if he snapped and popped me too?

  The return journey was less scary, the landscape more familiar. Lwendo had already made his decision: he was going to resign. He only had to bribe an army doctor to discharge him. He had a history of stomach trouble and piles. The former would become an ulcer, the latter bleeding sores in need of surgery.

  Since the end of the guerrilla war, a mysterious disease which slimmed people to the bones had started killing in big numbers. Judging by the sneaky way it operated—recurrent fevers, rashes, blisters—it looked like witchcraft. Many people went to the Vicar and to other witch doctors for consultation. It had started in southwestern Uganda, in the remote Rakai District, about fifty kilometers from Masaka. The theory was that this witchcraft was punishment meted out by Tanzanian smugglers who had been cheated by their Ugandan counterparts in the seventies and eighties when smuggling was rife in those marshy areas. Business being the pigsty it was, and for lack of a better explanation, many people bought the theory. But then, what about those people dying in the city?

  Not long after, the disease got a medical name—AIDS—but remained Slim to us. It gave a completely new slant to the theory that war is always followed by other disasters. World War I had its Spanish flu. This was our meaner, more devastating version of it. It slowly ground the most productive people to dust and burdened old people with the millstone of raising orphaned grandchildren. It struck at the heart of the social fabric and stretched to breaking point the tenuous bonds of extended family. It made towns quake with the fevers of arrested development, and the villages sob with the woes of unfulfilled potential. It made cities retch with the talons of unassuageable pain, and the villages writhe with the stench of green-black diarrhea.

  At first most Slim victims were strangers, but inexorably disaster came nearer to home, and a string of calamities struck Uncle Kawayida’s household with apocalyptic vehemence. We were all stunned, especially yours truly, who admired the man for conjuring banal things into the wonderful stories of my village days.

  It was strange that his trials and tribulations seemed linked with the departure and return of Indians: his fortune had come when they left; his fall began when they returned.

  Uncle Kawayida was the first of Grandpa’s offspring to own a car. He had always had a business instinct. When he was a boy, he used to sell bananas, sugarcane, pancakes and boiled eggs at school. Whenever there was a school day or a district inter-school football competition or other athletic meeting, he would bring his mother’s cooking gear and help her with the preparations and the sale at rush hours. It was this early exposure that gave him the edge. When Amin came to power, he realized that times had changed. He sold his motorcycle—the blue-bellied eagle—borrowed money from a friend and raised enough cash to buy a piece of land in Masaka. By the time the hammer fell and the Indian exodus became a reality, he was going around town looking for the best business prospects for a man of his capabilities.

  He knew that he could work very hard, especially if he was doing something he loved. He was looking for a simple business that demanded local input, a local market and quick returns. He looked at the Indian shops and the few African shops in between, and realized that he did not like being cooped up in a shop with dead merchandise, worried to death about the month’s profits. During his travels as a meter reader, he had explored the surrounding areas extensively. He had been greatly impressed by the swampy settlements of Rakai, especially by Kyotera town, which he imagined to be the upgraded version of the village between Mpande and Ndere hills. On selected weekends, he would ride to Kyotera with friends from the area to drink and to watch the long-distance truck drivers who stopped there on their way to Tanzania, Rwanda and Zambia. Sometimes he caught them on their way back, headed for Kenya, the great road taking them to Masaka, Kampala, Jinja, Tororo, Malaba and Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast. Most of the drivers were either Somalis or Ethiopians, thin, tough men who seemed oblivious to distance or time. They were like safari ants, going back and forth. At Kyotera they camped, cooking, washing, repairing their vehicles, before continuing on their great journeys. Goods, legal and illegal, exchanged hands across the borders, Ugandans selling to Tanzanians and vice versa.

  Isolated in the swamps, Kyotera town had given Uncle Kawayida a sense of connection with the big world. Several times he thought about settling there and joining the cross-border trade of the seventies and early eighties. One could take a chance on gold or diamonds from Zaire. One could deal in fish or clothes or shoes or jewelry. At the time, though, the idea of striking out on his own had scared him.

  One late afternoon, while he was on his way home, he heard turkeys croaking and preening inside a closed compound. It struck him: poultry farming was what he was looking for. During the shopping frenzy that saw the Indians off, Uncle Kawayida bought a secondhand pickup van which the desperate owner had decided to set on fire. His friends jeered at him, saying the van would collapse carrying only two turkeys. He laughed. Using his land as collateral, he borrowed some money and hired a place which he filled with feed before going on the hunt for turkeys.

  At the end of his efforts, he had little money left, but enough resources to keep the birds going for a year. He installed troughs and lights, and the birds ate day and night. During office hours, his wife took over. When he returned home, he cleaned the troughs, stirred the sawdust to cover the droppings, refilled the troughs and proudly watched his birds.

  By the time the euphoria induced by the departing Indians had subsided and people had begun jostling for the shops, he was selling his birds to hotels around town. By the time most traders had settled into their new businesses, he was already experimenting with growth formula to make the birds grow faster and heavier. Soon the first batch of broiler chicks arrived.

  That was the start of his prosperity. He expanded his broiler and turkey operations. The walls vibrated with the calls of frustrated turkeys which could not skip the fence to go and terrorize the women who passed outside their house. The pens filled with the tolerable stench of chicken shit, and at peak hours the rafters and the iron sheets rattled with the calls of chickens competing with one another for feed. The market for chickens and turkeys, contrary to prediction, expanded because very few individuals had taken the risk of investing in poultry farming when the old farms collapsed.

  The journeys to buy supplies and sell birds liberated another trait in Uncle. He felt oppressed by the need to multiply and spread himself around. A single child, he felt he was one of a kind, threatened with extinction, impelled to reproduce himself. As though intent on imitating his late father-in-law, he went after beautiful women in town with the fever of obsession. Uncle’s reproductive rate, however, left much to be desired. It led some to say that his wife had bewitched him. They overlooked the strong possibility that he was dealing with worldly-wise women who knew the secrets of drinking azure blue, taking overdoses of aspirin or inserting bicycle spokes up birth canals to induce termination of pregnancy. They may also have been experts at tying their cervical necks, eating pills or going to the likes of the Vicar for traditional birth-regulating herbs. Uncle Kawayida never looked into that; he was an eternal optimist in that sense. Each time he hoped to win. For all his troubles, he produced only three bastard children, all girls. His wife had four girls already.

  Uncle’s wife had grown up around children and did not find it hard to do a good job raising all those girls. She sometimes cried because she could not have a son. She envied Padlock for having so much of what she craved: sons. She could not help ideal
izing sons in her daydreams, but much as she called upon all her gods, sons evaded her yearning womb.

  At one time she became consumed with the fear that one of her sisters was going to give her husband a son. How could she trust any of those girls? She thought about putting spies on them, but could not trust her would-be spies. She was her own best spy. She invited her two suspect sisters to stay with her in order to calm her mind with the reassurance that under her watchful eye, they would not commit the ultimate outrage. A son from an outsider was more acceptable; a son from either Naaka or Naaki would give her a heart attack. The girls, unaware of things, could not believe their luck. How generous and nice their half-sister had become!

  Barren women and women seeking to influence the sex of their next child receive and take a lot of advice. Uncle Kawayida’s wife was advised that the key might be in the diet. She took up eating in the hope that her body’s constitution would change favorably and aid her in her quest for a son. She went to bed with food on her mind, and woke up with food steaming in her thoughts. As a consequence, she started expanding. Her body swelled like the turkeys they sold. Her head grew smaller, and her legs labored under the new burden of her weight. Her ankles swelled. She started wheezing and sweating profusely at all times, and especially during the act of trying to make a baby boy. She employed a housegirl and, left with less to do and so much to eat, swelled even more. At first people said it was money, well-being, but eventually they realized that it was a disease, a burden.