By the time I joined this highest institution of learning, the pressure on its capacity was asphyxiating. The residential houses had swollen, burst and overflowed into the puny annexes where six students shared a room. Top A-levels alone did not guarantee one a place in the most coveted faculties. Over the years, competition had risen to a murderous level. Political influence and bribery moved things faster, but you had to know whom to contact, and that did not always guarantee positive results either. Like the majority of hopefuls, I could only count on the gods and on the selection committee’s favor. Both let me down.
The radio had summoned thousands of us to the campus, and we swarmed the main hall like locusts, perusing endless selection lists. My heart went to my mouth as my eyes combed the coveted Law List. Historical precedent paralyzed my limbs: the first lawyer in the family! It was not to be. My name was not on the list. There was, of course, the lame recourse of the damned: appeal. It did not work: so many explanations, so many justifications, so many technicalities.
My first reaction was to consider giving up education altogether. And do what then? I was kidding myself. I had to keep sharpening my intellect. I was finally dumped in the social sciences section, that no-man’s-land between the real sciences and the humanities.
I was doomed to become a teacher. Like Serenity! And have to take rear-guard action to work my way into better jobs. I was disgusted with myself, with life, with everything. I knew one thing for sure: I was not going to be a committed teacher. I was going to be a sort of nanny for secondary school children. I would need a lousy day school with a laissez-faire policy. There were quite a few of those around the city. The government encouraged the opening of day secondary schools in order to give more primary school leavers the opportunity to pursue secondary education near their homes. Gone were the days when secondary education was chiefly a boarding school affair. I already had a school in mind.
Having set my priorities, I concentrated on making money and fighting my private wars. I still had the legacy of the Infernal Trinity to deal with. As a non-resident student, popping in only for lectures and use of the library, I had both time and freedom. Above all, education was not a hard course, at least not for me. I went to the campus as little as possible. I kept out of campus politics and wrangles over cramped accommodation, bad food, books and the excesses of a big student body.
The Obote II regime wasn’t having things its way. The party and its leader had achieved a first by returning to office by the ballot box after an ouster, but it was a tainted victory whose genuineness was questioned by many sections of society. The same people who were terrorizing the new government now sympathized with the guerrillas. At the time the guerrillas went to the bush, there was a famine in northern Uganda. World Food Programme and Red Cross trucks trekked north via the famous road. I saw them going in flag-waving convoys. The government did its best to keep news of the famine low-key, a situation helped by the activities of the guerrillas in the south.
The day belonged to the government and the army, the night to the guerrillas and their sympathizers. At night, the guerrillas moved from their hiding places and attacked army barracks, detachments and roadblocks, and on occasion, police stations too. The aim was to capture arms and other supplies. Soldiers lived in perpetual fear of attack and ambush. The army, composed mainly of northerners and easterners courtesy of Obote II government policy, found itself fighting in strange and hostile circumstances. The troops were drawn into lethal campaigns in ominous valleys and on isolated hills, in gigantic swamps, endless grasslands and dank forests, and they had a hard time hitting mobile targets. The mathematical configuration of death, the triangle, which had first appeared in 1978, returned to haunt us. Ours was now called the Luwero Triangle, hundreds of square kilometers of land locked between the three lakes: Victoria in the south, Kyoga in the north and Albert in the far west. The core of the Triangle was a sparsely populated grassland area of massive papyrus swamps, huge marshes and thick forests. The uncanny quality of this triangle was that it contracted and expanded at will as guerrillas moved from place to place attacking or fleeing government forces. This magical quality was helped by the fact that the Triangle was near enough to the heartland, allowing easy access to the city, the seat of government and the big army barracks, while also offering a gateway to both northern and western Uganda. Thus, sometimes the Triangle stretched precariously to within a few kilometers of the city center, and sometimes it contracted devilishly to its wet core, hundreds of kilometers away. The village locked between Mpande Hill and Ndere Hill was among the many areas on the periphery of the notorious Triangle.
The army made some very basic errors that alienated the people within the Triangle. As the soldiers became frustrated with the little success they were having, they began taking it out on civilians, accusing them of harboring guerrillas. Some of those accused did not sympathize with the guerrillas, but the soldiers never believed anything they said. In this way, many people were driven into the arms of the guerrillas, swelling their ranks. The rest were displaced and either moved from town to town until they found a peaceful one, went to live with relatives outside the Triangle or chanced it in the city, where peace still reigned.
The population of our little town started burgeoning. Every day, every week, people at various stages of exhaustion and emaciation arrived with little parcels wrapped in stained tablecloths, bedsheets or rotting bags. They bore the additional weight of countless tales of bravery, survival and atrocity. Many had experienced horrors firsthand; others had moved before horrors could happen to them. The character of our town was changing. Joblessness and food prices increased. The old factories, which had been abandoned by the Indians and were now rotting in the sun, got an unexpected puff of life as some souls tried to find shelter behind them. Housing prices shot up, and I flirted with the idea of building shacks and renting them — people would rent practically anything. Houses without plan or approval from the town council went up. Council officials would come, pretend to threaten them with demolition and walk away with their cut of the action. Landowners hired people to make mud bricks and erect fragile structures thatched with papyrus carpets and plastic sheeting, which newcomers rented even before the doors and windows were installed. Many such structures had no toilet facilities, but it did not matter.
By the time I started attending lectures at the university, I had taken over all of my aunt’s brewing responsibilities. She no longer found the time to do it, as her guerrilla activities had escalated. She gave the guerrillas so much of her time and attention that it sometimes seemed as if they were going to emerge from the Triangle the next day and overthrow the government. At first, Aunt was reluctant to allow me to take charge of the brewery, because she did not want to antagonize Padlock, who was still making noises in the distance like a disgruntled volcano. Accidents happened. Cooking drums burst and killed brewers. Most were careless accidents, but Aunt did not want to tempt fate. I assured her that working at the brewery was what I wanted. I felt I had a pact with death. Death was a demon locked in the Triangle, where it would remain. The Infernal Trinity had imbued me with a crass bravado bordering on a death wish. I channelled it all into the brewery. People loaded with untold woes would drink practically anything. There were hardly any more complaints about bad brews. Many retailers bought our stuff and diluted it with large quantities of water, and still they sold it. Boom-boom Brewery, as I baptized the enterprise, was well on its way.
The brewing process was simplicity itself. My job was to buy fifty-kilo sacks of jaggery, deposit some of the sticky brown-sugar mess in a hundred-liter drum of water, throw in the fermenting soap, cover the drum and wait for seven to ten days, occasionally stirring to aid dissolution. When the sugar solution was ready, I would transfer it to the brewing drum, which had to be in excellent condition in order to avoid accidents. I would screw on the cover and affix two winding copper tubes to the other end, fastening them with long strips of rubber to make sure that no steam escaped when the cooking started. The copper tubes would be immersed in a pool to cool them and aid condensation. The brewing drum would then be fired till the solution boiled and gave off steam, which condensed into hard liquor.