by Graham Mort
We’d got stopped at a roadblock on the way back to Kampala: boy soldiers in camouflage fatigues and maroon berets looking through all the boxes of rock samples in the back of the truck. The corporal looked about eighteen and the kid who swung open my door had his worn-out AK47 slung and pointing at my thigh. They wanted me to unpack my theodolite. Christ knows why, but they were good-natured enough. James chatted away in the corporal’s own language. It turned out he was a westerner, too. We gave them a crate of warm beer – something small – and after shaking hands they let us bounce back to Kampala past the tea and sugar cane plantations spaced out along that fucked-up road. Back to running water and flushing toilets and clean sheets. McKenzie had got bitten by mosquitoes all over his arms and he sat behind me in the truck scratching away and hissing through his front teeth. I caught James’ eye once or twice and could have sworn he was smiling as he drove, humming gospel songs. McKenzie was new to Africa, all freckles and ginger hair and blue-eyed naivety. But I’d worked with worse. I’d worked with Armstrong for almost six months and he was an arsehole. Pure and simple. I wondered where Armstrong was now. Last thing I heard he was checking out an irrigation scheme in Zambia, but who knows? I liked to think that worse things might have come his way.
I got up and took a shower. There was a trickle of warm brown water and I washed the soap off carefully. There was no shortage of cold water and it cleared my head to have that sheet of ice gushing over my face. Africa could be dangerous in unexpected ways. Once I’d slipped in the shower and shot out like a greased pig. There was more chance of dying from a broken electrical socket when shaving or in a shagged-out taxi after a few beers than being eaten by wildlife.
No shave today. I dried myself off, pulled on some clean clothes and dropped last night’s shirt into the laundry basket. It stank of sweat, mosquito repellent, smoke and dope. Swigging water and remembering to take a malaria tablet, I checked the fridge. A row of Bell’s lager bottles gloated. The pain in my head pulsed. I swung the door shut and pulled on some shoes. Yesterday evening we’d stashed the gear at the company compound, drawn some cash – a satisfying wad of Ugandan currency in ten thousand shilling notes – then cleaned up at the guesthouse where we were staying this visit. I hated the Sheraton and the tourists who frequented it. There was something down to earth and unpretentious about Makerere University and its accommodation. I liked the staff too; they were attentive without being obsequious. It was James’ idea to go to Al’s, which, for a born-again Christian, was pretty cool. After a steak and a couple of beers and a quick spray of Jungle Formula we were ready for the night – which turned out to be more than ready for us.
I went down the corridor towards breakfast. CNN news was on the television in the dining room. The usual stuff: an earthquake, a financial crisis, diplomacy in the Middle East. I took bacon, sausages, and two pale yellow eggs from the tureens. Then plenty of strong coffee. A sign above the picture of President Museveni advertised Bell lager with the stylized rays of a rising sun lighting up one customer’s happy face. The idea seemed to be that you woke up feeling good. The waiter, Moses, took my plate.
– More, sah?
I shook my head. No way. He’d worked here for years and never seemed to find anything better. I nodded to Sister Agnes who was talking the hind leg off the guy from Colorado. He had a grey moustache and the sagging features of a Bassett hound. She was in full rig. I got up quickly before she caught my eye. Having breakfast with her was like sitting down with the headmistress to talk through your school report.
McKenzie would be spark-out half the morning, so I decided to walk through Wandegeya and into town. I picked up my bush hat, stuffed a roll of bank notes into my pocket, and took a bottle of water from the fridge. The power had failed again and the water was at blood heat. I walked out of the compound. Past the acacia trees at the entrance. Past the guard with his ancient bolt-action rifle. Past the mosque where a row of slippers was lined up at the entrance. Then down the red dirt track that ran beside the road into town. The air was sickly with diesel fumes and charcoal smoke from the braziers where women roasted maize cobs and sold them to the students on their way to Saturday classes at the university. They came in a steady stream in freshly pressed clothes, smart and eager to learn.
The track was uneven, rutted with rainwater. Open storm drains were clogged with rubbish beside the road. I saw a dead lizard curled in the dust. The kind that were supposed to cast a spell on pregnant women. I stubbed my foot and scuffed the toe of my shoe. They were pretty shot anyway. My dad always used to say that he couldn’t afford cheap shoes. When he died I found boxes of them stored in the pantry at home, never worn. Grensons, Loakes, Crockett & Jones, Cheaney’s. He must have combed every charity shop in town. Some were brand new and all were two sizes too small for me. Towards the end he’d developed bunions. His big toes had crossed over and he’d only been able to wear trainers. When I went to see him in the hospital his feet were yellow and twisted like roots.
It was about that time when things in the UK had gone wrong for me. I’d been made redundant when my firm downsized, so I’d gone freelance. First a pipeline in Cameroon, then Kampala, Nairobi, Llilongwe, Accra, Harare, Joburg, Kano and Lagos. I had this dream, that somewhere in one of the marketplaces – maybe in Kano or Nakasero – I’d find an old man making shoes by hand. He’d be a product of empire, crafting the finest veldtschoen from buffalo hide for army officers who sought him out from their retirement homes in the UK. Each would have his own last, carefully numbered, and the shoemaker would store them in the shady back room of his shop, even after the ex-colonials had died out, one by one. Every year he’d send a few pairs of hand-stitched shoes to the UK and a cheque or bank order would come back by return.
My dad was a wrought-iron worker and could make anything out of metal. He used to belt us and his hands were as hard as ingots. You learned never to let him come up behind you. Once he smacked my brother’s head so hard that it hit the plasterboard partition between our bedrooms and cracked it. He got another smack for that. In those days most men had a trade and in our row of terraced houses we had a joiner, a painter and decorator, an electrician, a mechanic, and a violinist. And my father, of course. Together they could have built the Ark and entertained the animals.
My father liked to walk when he had no work – which was most of the time as he got older and more cantankerous. He’d stump angrily into Manchester and back, placing small ads in newsagents, saving on bus fares. He liked those metal pieces nailed to the heels of his shoes – segs – so he rapped his way down the pavements. When we were little, my dad was the creak of leather. You heard him before you saw him. Luckily. Once he had a pair of shoes repaired and the leather wore through in a few weeks. I asked for bullhide on these not bullshit, he told the cobbler, slamming them down on the counter. He had a nice turn of phrase when it suited him. For a man of five foot two, he was the most intimidating person I ever met. But then, he was my dad. Enough said.
I waited at the only working traffic lights in the city. The sun was melting the sky. An amputee went by on a hand-operated tricycle, his face shiny with sweat. This was my fourth visit to Uganda – a six-week stint in Kampala, with occasional visits ‘up country’ – as the Brits call it. Up country can be pretty much anywhere, even down country. I never really figured that out. McKenzie was the geologist and would be with me for this last two weeks of the survey. The heat was blistering now, the sky almost white with heat. A few black kites soared in thermals above the shantytown to my right. I passed a group of boda-boda riders straddling their Chinese motorcycles and hoping for a fare. Then down Kampala Road, slackening my pace a little. I’d had to learn to walk slowly. Heat shivered on the tarmac like white spirit evaporating. There was a dead dog at the kerbside, bloated with heat. The stench was a stifling muzzle of decay, sickening. A few years ago the same road had been strewn with human bodies.
I walked past the area they called Bat Valley where thousands of fruit bats rooste
d at night. I’d watched them earlier in the week from the guesthouse terrace, flying in their thousands, flapping into a yellow tropical storm. I passed a half-built hotel clad in bamboo scaffolding that never seemed to get any bigger. Then a Shell garage where security guards in blue tracksuits and baseball caps lounged in the shade with cheap, pump-action shotguns. I saw a woman with dust in her hair, blinded by cataracts, sprawled under a blanket, too weak even to beg. I put a few coins into her hand and she stared through me as if I didn’t exist.
The sun was really bending my head. Usually I made a point of never getting drunk in Africa. For obvious reasons. One was to avoid doing something stupid. The other was feeling like shit. But that would pass. Hangovers do. There were worse things here and you didn’t have to look far to find them. I bought some more water from a boy lugging a box of Rwenzori Spring and walked on past the tennis courts where two Brits were playing a feeble game of doubles with a couple of local girls. They didn’t look as if they knew one end of the racquet from another. I bent down to tie a lace and saw the leather was cracking on my shoes. I had an idea that this visit I’d find what I was looking for.
I turned off the main drag to the market at Nakasero, teeming with Saturday shoppers and piled with cheap household goods: bolts of cloth, clothing, electrical plugs and sockets, pots and pans, plastic ware, knives, fruit and vegetables. The food was piled up neatly in pyramids – oranges, peppers, pineapples, watermelons, eggplant, cassava, passion fruit, tomatoes and Irish potatoes. Then an open-air butchers where goat meat darkened in the sun. Then a whole area dedicated to plumbing and tiling, its chrome and enamel gleaming. Coils of copper and plastic piping. Baths and toilets and bidets lined up against the pavement. Bidets? It was hard to find a bath plug in most hotels. The marketplace was pure sensory overload. A press of humanity from all over Uganda and beyond. A daze of sweat and heat and talk. Muslim. Christian. Poverty-stricken. Laughing. Proud. Abject. Above all, on the move. It was Babel. It was Kampala. It was the pulse of Africa. The pressure of life; the pull of death.
Beggars reached out from where they lay, twisted legs on the stained earth. There were skips piled with rotting vegetables, marabou storks picking over the rubbish. A stench of decay and diesel fuel. Charcoal sellers laboured, grey with dust. I passed a group of women cooking matoke and beef stew in huge aluminium pans. They were laughing, eyeing me up as I went past. Mzungu. The only white man walking in the market. Mzungu. Sometimes they called it out as a joke. Hey, Mzungu! At the heart of the market was the bus station, glittering with glass and steel under hoardings advertising Guinness and Nokia where hundreds of mini-bus taxis – matatu – gathered like a migratory herd. Their touts were busy doing business, soliciting passengers, heaving their bags into place. From here to anywhere.
Beyond Nakasero and the bus station lay Owino market, equally vast and equally hot and tumultuous, where you could buy anything from clothing to crockery, baskets to bicycle parts. There were sacks of maize meal and rice, bunches of plantain, sugar cane, soap, woven mats, baskets, tools, tapes of Congolese music, leather belts and cheap shoes. There were cheap shoes everywhere. Clever imitations of Reebok trainers and Italian style shoes with pointed toes and plastic soles. In Owino the light was so bright it was like walking into polished blades. There wasn’t a stitched or welted shoe anywhere, not even above the markets in the commercial district around the Crane Bank, where our office was. Where men in smart suits mingled with the crowds and street hawkers. Where the same man lay asleep every day on the pavement – barefoot, drunk, drugged or dying from Aids – his skin gleaming like oiled wood.
All the time I was in Nakasero I thought about the mill town of my childhood. The factories were still there but King Cotton had died, as all dictators do in the end. The mills were mostly empty hulks staring into algae-infested lodges. The cradle of industry. That was the cliché they’d fed us at school. Now the factories were rented out to engineering outfits or catalogue sales companies that went bankrupt after a couple of years. Or they lay empty, giant nurseries for the rats that took to the town’s sewers and culverts at night.
All through my childhood the chimneys came down, one by one. A red brick forest became a clearing. It was strange to think of that in the centre of Kampala. Well, maybe not so strange, here in the old empire where the Nile rose a few miles away and flowed north to water the plains of Egypt. I remembered old Mrs Stead, our next-door neighbour, speaking lovingly of the Sea Island and Egyptian staples that she’d spun with my grandfather. Purple veins stood out on her crippled hands.
It was only a brief flare of synapses, a blush of memory in the chemical brain, to connect Nakasero or Owino market in Kampala to Tommyfield market in Oldham, or the little market behind the swimming baths in Chadderton, or the famous market in Bury where you could buy black puddings and yards of worsted or cotton cloth.
After their retirement my parents had loved to take a day-trip to Skipton or Halifax, wandering through the markets in search of bargains, buying a nice piece of rolled brisket and having fish and chips for lunch. Every so often my father would return home with a pair of shoes, a bargain from the Age Concern or Oxfam shop. Those shoes had the scent of death and decay about them, a coolness to the touch as if body heat had just evaporated. Once he bought a mobile phone, a year or two after my mother had died in Crumpsall hospital, but he’d never learned to use it. Another gadget – like the TV remote – he never got the hang of. A problem he attributed to things that were fucking rubbish, rather than to himself.
Now here I was in Owino, a sweaty mzungu among thousands of Africans, wandering towards Nakasero in my bush hat and cargo pants, thinking about the dark little cobbler’s shop I’d visited as a child.
Where I grew up there were four spinning mills, built at the turn of the century when cotton really was king, and money was still spewing from the frames and looms for the mill owners. My grandfather had been employed in King’s Mill as a mule spinner until he’d lost three fingers from one hand and worked out his days on the roads for the Corporation. He died six months before retirement, leaving a sweet-jar full of sixpences he’d saved. He didn’t even live long enough to see his son buy his first car – a Morris Seven with a second-hand prop-shaft and differential. We had some old photographs of my dad with his mother on the front in Morecambe – a stout woman in a beret leaning on the bonnet and licking an ice cream in the wind.
The cobbler’s shop was below the mills. Below the fishmonger’s and the corner-shop butcher’s and the Co-op where we bought ammunition for our peashooters, where my father had begun work just before his fourteenth birthday. In the window was a pair of clogs and on their soles a pair of flamenco dancers had been picked out in nails and hand-painted. I remembered how the woman wore a crimson frock and the man tight black trousers. The clogs had brass toecaps and were made of oiled leather.
As a child my father had worn shoes rather than clogs, a fact he’d always been proud of, as if it marked him out as special. The other kids had clogged seven bells out of him and, despite the shoes, labour had stuck to him all his life. The cobbler’s shop had a doorbell that jangled over your head on a metal spring, bringing Carson limping from the back room in his grey apron. He’d lost a leg at Monte Casino. The shop counter was dark mahogany and the shop smelled of tanned leather, neat’s-foot oil, Dubbin, heelball and brown paper. All the accoutrements of the cobbler’s trade. Bullhide not bullshit, my father had said right there at the counter, with a light in his eyes that was the blue flash of thunder. I’d always wondered what Carson’s artificial leg was made of. As far as my father was concerned, he had a job where he sat on his arse all day.
– Sah?
You’re right that it makes no sense – harking back to a mill town in the 1960s when I was walking through an African marketplace in the twenty-first century and mixing it all up together. As if Carson might limp from one of the shop doorways or leap up from one of the treadle-operated Singer sewing machines that were everywhere. Jus
t like the machine my mother had used to make our clothes when we were children.
– Sah?
A meat fly landed on my arm and I brushed it away. Maybe it was those black enamelled machines with their gold lettering that had sent me back, recalled my mother sewing clothes for the neighbours, or pinning up my father’s trousers as he stood on a chair and ranted. My mother who could make any garment with her hands. My father who could shape even the most recalcitrant piece of metal. The cobbler who turned over a freshly repaired shoe in his hand to show the new leather gleaming. Good for a few more miles. It made no sense, admittedly, but then maybe that’s all the sense there is. To be everywhere and anywhere at the same time. Somewhere and nowhere. To be outside yourself.
– Sah?
The man’s voice – a soft, insinuating voice – startled me. When I did look up I saw a small Ugandan man in a ragged tee shirt and khaki pants. He looked about thirty, but it was hard to tell. He had a wispy beard and his skin was paler than that of most Africans. His eyes were the lightest brown eyes I’d ever seen, like honey poured over almonds. Beautiful eyes that slanted down with slightly hooded lids.
– Shoe, sah?
He was holding out a pair of refurbished casual shoes. You saw them all over Kampala. Dead men’s shoes re-cycled. They were made of tan-coloured leather and had plastic soles and had been polished until even the scuffmarks gleamed. They were shit. You needed good shoes in Kampala where the roads were broken and gave way to red dirt and pot-holed tracks. I shook my head. The man held the shoes closer, as if I hadn’t looked at them properly.
– Good shoes. Try them. Try them, sah?
A marabou stork flew over the market and its shadow crossed the man’s face. Darkening those amazing eyes for a moment. His arms were sinewy and the veins stood out on his hands.
– Not for me, thanks.
– Not for you? No shoe? They your size. See?
