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.