Read The Last King of Scotland (1998) Online
Authors: Giles Foden
The Last King of Scotland (1998) (13 page)
Church bells, and the sound of the women in the village pounding millet in a pestle and mortar. Thump thump thump. I have felt lonely all weekend and done nothing. There hasn’t been much to record, except that I saw a snake in the garden. No one ever said how boring Africa can be: just the slow sweat of time.
The veranda, the valley, me. The Bacwezi valley. Waziri says that the Bacwezi were a tribe who lived here long ago – around 1350, migrants from Ethiopia or Sudan. They lost all their cattle in a plague and were then wiped out themselves in an invasion by the Luo. The latter seem to be gone from here now, leaving the Ankole with some of the Bacwezi traditions: a drum of national unity – now lost, apparently – and a belief in cattle as the centre of life. They certainly do have hundreds of cattle, the longhorn type. There is even a concrete statue of one in the middle of the roundabout in town. So strong is the identification, in fact, that at four days old every boy-child, dressed in the soft, suede-like skin of a premature calf, is placed on the back of a cow and given a miniature bow-and-arrow with which to defend it.
As well as cows, the Bacwezi used to worship fig trees, and there is a sacred grove of them somewhere near here. Waziri says that the local people think it is full of ghosts, and that he’ll take me there some time. Then he tells me that the Bacwezi themselves had actually ousted the Batembuzi, who had ruled since noo. Isuza was their last king, but he fell in love with a princess from the underworld. He followed her there and couldn’t find his way back. And yet it was his grandson, Ndahura – “the uprooter” – who founded the Bacwezi. And now the Ankole claim that dynasty as their heritage; and there are still Bacwezi cultists around today, who scatter coins and cowrie shells in the soil beneath the holy trees.
I couldn’t get to grips with it. “So really, it’s all the same tribe?”I asked him.
“Oh, no,” he said. “You’d be totally wrong if you thought that. And in fact, there are two sections of the Ankole, the Bairu and the Bahima, the one aristocrats, the one slaves…”
Or was it the other way round? So much for tribes.
My tin breakfast plate is on the table beside me, a spoon and the empty half-scoop of a pawpaw lying side by side upon it. A canoe and its paddle. I love the fruit here, but I crave a decent joint of meat. I’m still holding out against a cook-boy, which means I have to wander round the market in town once a week, haggling for produce. A trip to the butcher involves watching a fellow with a panga hack at a carcass hanging from a tree. Longhorn beef doesn’t taste like beef and the pork is too liable to tapeworms – which leaves scrawny arse of chicken or goat so tough it really needs to be chewed by Eskimos for a few months first. That’s how they soften their hides. The Nile perch is quite coarse, too, and quite far gone by the time it gets here from Lake Victoria. It’s best to curry it, Mrs M. says, but I don’t like curry.
Every now and then they kill a cow in the marketplace, roping in a soldier with a rifle to do the dirty deed. I saw this last week. He shot it through the neck. The poor dun creature standing there looking into the middle distance with mild interest. When the shot rang out it crumpled to the ground, looking amazingly human (all knees and elbows) as it did so. Like someone who has to sit down because they’ve been told some really bad news. Then they cut it up, with everyone crowding round, ready with banana leaves in which to wrap their piece.
So. Things go on. There is the view. The sun that shines. Banana plantations creeping up the hill. Their ranks of gleaming leaves going off into the distance. When I look at them, I think of the roofs of the housing schemes in Edinburgh. Here in front of me, there is the odd hut scattered about, but most people live in Mbarara and come out to tend their plots. These irregular squiggles and torn-off corners of produce – millet, cassava, maize, groundnuts – are shored up against erosion by plucky little terraces of red earth. Otherwise, when the big rains come, everything would slip down the hill: down to the marsh at the bottom of the valley, and that ditchy little spot of brown water where the Rwizi River wills itself into being from a confluence of tiny streams.
They’re not so tiny, actually, when the rains do come and throw into the gullies all of their thunderous, psycho-pompic, kitchen-sink performance. Like on my first night. The skies rattle and for anything between a few minutes and whole weeks, the land turns dark as death, barely visible. When it is over, it is as if something that needs to have been said, has been said – but you’re not sure if you believe it because the performance has been so over the top. Then the sun shines again and eagles and kites come down off the Ruwenzoris to hover for mice and bush-rats.
Recently, a bird of prey dropped something from its beak on to the lawn: I’m not sure if it was an eagle or a kite – or for that matter whether the creature I picked up by its tail was a mouse or a bush-rat. I swung it over the fence. Every now and then a troop of vervet monkeys shows up too (I heard some on the roof the other night, which frightened the life out of me) and there is a family of banded mongooses that dash around looking for snakes. They look like ferrets, except plumper, and rather beautifully striped with grey and brown. I hope they get that snake I saw.
Things are getting a bit out of hand on the garden front, but it’ll be a few years yet before it returns to the wild. The previous occupant of the bungalow – like Merrit, a Medical Officer from the colonial administration who had decided to ‘stay on’ – was a keen gardener. Steps from the veranda lead down into the overspilling flower-beds: frangipani, bird of paradise, elephant grass, roses, African marigolds – they grow like weeds here – succulent cacti, too, pagoda flower, prickly pear, poinsettia and shrimp plant.
Mrs M. has taken me round, showing me what they are, but they’re soon enough only words to me. Some of them are not indigenous, she told me proudly. “Old Saunders – he died in his sleep, you know – actually introduced species to the country, sending to Kew for packets of seeds.”
So that was how my ordinary life went. And then something happened: Amin came. They put up bunting – banana leaves – round the stadium that day. A Saturday. I went down there with Sara. We couldn’t see very much because of the crowds, except for his big helicopter coming down in the middle of the pitch.
There was a tremendous roar when he stepped up to the podium, the bulk of his large body hidden beneath traditional robes. This was the first time I actually saw him, and it was an impressive sight. He had this aura that is difficult to describe, and it had much more to do with the rhythms of his voice than the furs, hides and feathers of his head-dress.
“It is astonishing he is so popular,” Sara said. She was holding me by the arm, the swell of the crowd was pushing us so much.
“I have come,” Amin said into the microphone, “to talk to you about the god. Because it is he who has been helping you people in Mbarara to make yourselves the best citizens of Uganda. Yes, I am very proud of you.”
The crowd wailed with happiness.
“But,” Amin continued, “better worlds than this are possible. To make them happen, you must believe in the god very strongly. Even if you are Christian, Moslem, or whatever you are. Because his rule is a rule beyond what has happened, beyond all that you can think of. Just because you cannot think of him, or what it would be like to shake his hand, it does not mean that he is not there.”
“Quite a philosopher,” I said to Sara.
“You think so?” she said, seriously. “Don’t be fooled.”
“You always take things literally,” I teased her.
“Who do you think made this world?” shouted Amin. “Who do you think made me? It must be the god. That is why you must work very hard. If you do not, and the god wishes it, the sun will not rise tomorrow.”
“They should try this back home,” I said. “It would work wonders with the unemployment figures.”
“Don’t be silly,” Sara said. I noticed that she was writing things down in a notebook.
“So,” Amin continued, “you must do your duty in the fields and the factories. You must be with the god for that reason. Now, let me say this. I have been receiving some complaints about the state of affairs in Uganda. Wananchi have been complaining about searches and seizures. Well, let me tell you, anything that is done in my name, it is the right thing. Any bad thing done, it is by those who are disobeying me. I cannot be everywhere at one time, I cannot make myself invisible.”
“Why are you writing it down?” I said to Sara.
“Just out of interest,” she said, looking up at me quickly. How could I have been so thick-headed, I wonder now, so impervious?
Amin’s voice echoed round the stadium. “I have all power in Uganda, it is true, because the people support me. But I am not the highest power. I lift my hand, I let it fall – in government, I do this. But it is your own self you should be guarding. At the same time, as an ordinary Ugandan, I myself know all that you are. I live inside each one of you, knowing your hopes and your dreams.”
I stared at him up there on the podium, just as the hundreds of others around me did. Without question, there was something fascinating about him; a quality of naked, visceral attraction that commanded the attention, mustering assent, overcoming resistance – fostering the loss of oneself, or so it felt, in the very modulations of his voice.
“That is why we must work together, and stop corruption,” he said. “Constant dipping empties the gourd of honey, and if we want Uganda to continue as a paradise, we must build hives – hives and factories and farms. We must act. For he who desires but does not act breeds pestilence. And we do not want that in Uganda. Do we?”
The crowd roared.
“Otherwise,” he continued, “we will be under the power of the white man again. Or his African servants. Two wrongs do not make a right. That is why we must know the causes of civil strife in Uganda and pull them out straight. Like doctors, we must proceed from a knowledge of the causes of illness. Myself, I know that events are going to happen. They have to happen. But I don’t know how. I am only a human being, like all of you. That is why I must ask you to be the doctors of Uganda in your everyday lives. It is necessary. We must continue to heal our country from the illness of Obote and imperialism.”
Sara looked about us. “We better go,” she whispered, “we could be attacked.”
“Do you really think so?” I thought she was being a touch over-dramatic.
“Come
on
,” Sara said, forcefully.
We pushed through the crowd, whose eyes were fixed on Amin, his every word, so it seemed, corresponding to some need in themselves. As we walked up to the compound, with the loudspeaker noise of Amin’s speech and the cheers of the crowd fading away, Sara was silent, replying to me in monosyllables when I spoke to her. I myself was excited by it all, but she declined when I asked her in for coffee.
“I have work to do,” she said.
“But it’s Saturday.”
“My own things.”
∗
On the Monday morning following Amin’s visit, I saw Merrit next to the big pile beyond the clinic boundary. I went over to see what he was up to. He was standing in front of a small but particularly foul-smelling bonfire, with a little bag at his feet.
“What are you doing?,” I asked, looking more closely. There were bottles and vials popping in the heat, their shiny metal caps twisting with a slow, agonized turn. “I thought you only burned once a year.”
“It’s the charity groups. They send us out-of-date medicaments. Absolutely useless. If I don’t burn them thoroughly, the patients steal them from the rubbish pit and sell them in the market. See this” – he reached into the bag and pulled out a handful of capsules, half-red half-yellow – “tetracycline: useless if you don’t have a proper course. Do more harm than good.”
∗
Waziri and I went into town for lunch later in the week. Barbecued chicken at the Riheka Guest House (“All-in-one 24 hr Pub for Comfort and Leisure”), with chips and a salad roughly chopped.
“You shouldn’t have gone,” he said, when I told him about Amin’s speech.
“Why not?”
“You’re just giving him credence. If whites turn up, they will all think he is even better than they already think him.”
For all that, he still wanted to know what Amin had said. And when I told him the bit about the wananchi being the ‘doctors of Uganda’, he told me an interesting story. His grandfather had told it to him, he said. An anti-doctor religion apparently took hold here in the 1920
s
. Because the European doctors couldn’t cure all the diseases they were presented with, and because the Bible didn’t mention modern treatments, a militant Christian cult evolved around the refusal of Western medicine.
“They used to smash the bottles – it’s understandable, really. They’d been offered all these things, all these explanations, and yet there were still some other things – plague, the sleeping sickness, leprosy – that weren’t being explained. Not then, anyway. You have to remember that this wasn’t long after a time when every muzungu was perceived as a musawo, a doctor, whether they were a soldier, a merchant, a civil servant. Whatever. You fellows were all miracle-workers in those days, Nicholas.”
“So they went back to the Bible?”
“Correct, and often it was only the Old Testament. Some even became Jews. I’m not joking. They trusted the white word but not the white man. They trusted that the Supreme Being, he who dispensed justice and punishment through illness and healing, would take up their case. Katonda omu ainza byonna. God omnipotent, in other words. The strange thing was, this was a European god, really. Before, I mean the African deity, he had just created – and then slipped away quietly. Now he was a kind of consultant, on call.”
I laughed.
“I’m serious,” he continued. “That sense, of them being protected by one God, it had really come from the muzungu in the first place…All those missionaries, thinking it was their chosen mission to educate us. Spreading the light. Omushana, except only in English.”
He shook his head. “That’s what happened to me, that’s why I became a doctor. A true son of the White Fathers.”
