The safest thing to do was to choose Amin as my bodyguard. He was a realist. He never turned the other cheek. He answered love with love, hate with hate, war with war. He was proud to the point of arrogance. Judging from how far he had come, how much he had endured on the way at the hands of the British and of his countrymen, and how patient he had been, his was a deserved pride, a fitting arrogance. This was a man who, unlike many Africans, was not afraid to voice his opinion because he did not fear reprisals, unlike me. He was reprisal itself.
At the Independence Day celebrations that year, he had demonstrated his power. Countless cymbals had ripped the air, countless tubas had farted deep into the stratosphere. He had separated the lake of vapor and sweat with the magnificence of his presence, lulling anxious hearts, soothing doubting minds and massaging parched palates with words of wisdom and the seeds of leadership. Inside him growled the whales of dominance. When he roared, his enemies shivered with the fatigue of crippling defeat. When he smiled, he was a gloomy sky cut by razors of lightning. When he rewarded his cohorts, he surpassed the multiplier of loaves and fishes by multiplying cars, mansions, high-powered jobs, money. I knew it: He was the baby I saw popping onto the asphalt. He was the baby born to rise like a mountain, flow like a thousand rivers and die a thousand deaths. My second guardian angel had materialized.
I rushed home with a snap in every step.
BOOK THREE. AMIN, THE GODFATHER
BY THE AGE OF SEVEN, I had already become Grandpa’s principal audience. I listened to his political discourse and memorized the main points without understanding them; then, at the end, he made me defend the British, the Indian and the African sides of the national argument in question-and-answer sessions. I was his future lawyer, possibly a future politician too, since many lawyers turned to politics: his ideal mini-double. By this time, after many years of contemplation, Grandpa had come to the conclusion that the modern state was a powder keg which would go off in a series of major explosions. It was a house built on the treacherous sands of inequality, strife and exploitation. He secretly lived for the day when it would all blow up, for he truly believed that only then would a new order be born out of the rubble.
The city sat at the heart of Grandpa’s dissertation. When he was a young man, Kampala was divided between the Europeans and the Indians. Africans came from the villages to work there, mostly in minor functions, and returned to their villages. Life was segregated, courtesy of official British policy. The British had first used Indian soldiers to defeat the central part of the country, and when it came to conquering the rest, Protestant chiefs from this region headed armies which fought to spread the tentacles of British colonial rule. As in the case of the Indian administrators, bureaucrats and traders imported to administer the area Indian soldiers had helped to conquer, the local Protestant chiefs were given administrative powers in the regions they had conquered, thus planting the seeds of modern tribal strife.
For Grandpa, the shock of being barred from law school brought into focus the racial inequality at the heart of the colonial system, and he decided to fight back. He campaigned and became a subcounty chief in the forties and a county chief in the fifties. These positions gave him a better view of how the system worked, and he learned how to fight it from the inside. The British were safely at the top, insulated from the Africans by the Indians, and the Indians enjoyed the middleman’s role without soiling their fingers. During the forties, Grandpa did two things he detested: he collected taxes to fuel the administrative machinery and gathered conscripts for the World War II effort — young men sent off to die in theaters of war whose names they could hardly pronounce. His only brother by the same mother volunteered; he was eager to go and kill white people, especially British soldiers, because they had stripped and whipped him for loitering near the British Club. Grandpa tried to stop him, asking him to stay behind and fight for change locally, but in vain.
During the war, Grandpa supported Germany. Actually, to him, the war was a European affair he had no interest in. He regarded it as a bizarre game of football, the British and German teams resuming where they had left off in 1918. Because he disliked the British team, especially their colonial rule, he settled for their biggest rival. News from the front line took an agonizingly long time coming, and when it did, it was mostly brief, bad and insufficient. Thousands of young men “returned in envelopes,” meaning they died on the front and their families were notified by mail. Many young men returned that way, in soiled pieces of paper passed from hand to hand. He expected to receive his brother’s envelope too, but it did not come. The war finally ended and the veterans came home, without any news arriving of his brother.
In the meantime, he backed the raging economic boycotts. It was his way of dealing with his brother’s loss. He also felt he owed it to the conscripts who had returned in envelopes. During the boycotts, however, his brother resurfaced. His leg had been blown off by a land mine in Burma. He never said anything about his war experiences, for he had lost the power of speech. He spent his days locked away in the miasmas of his mind.
The biggest achievement of the boycotts was to lessen the Indian stranglehold on trade and put some coffee mills and cotton ginneries in African hands. Yet ruin came hot on the heels of success: somebody accused Grandpa of anti-government activities, including sabotaging the war effort. He was impeached, and his efforts to return to office ended in a crushing defeat at the hands of a Protestant chief. More ruin followed, and his life crumbled round his ears. As the boycotts raged through the fifties, he fought to pick up the pieces of his life, without much success. To begin with, his favorite wife was taken by another man, and not long afterward she died. Serenity, Tiida and Nakatu became orphans. Grandpa’s household fell apart: relatives, wives and friends left, and had it not been for Grandma, it would have collapsed totally.
The sixties were ushered in on the back of mounting political pressure. The British Empire was disintegrating from the center, and there was unrest in its constituent parts. The British were on their way out. Locally, they were escaping the flames of the house they had set on fire. Grandpa did not like that. He would have liked them to stay and pay for the sins of dividing the people and heightening intertribal strife, for the economic exploitation of the country and for creating a recipe for future disaster. Protestants had the upper hand in national politics; the northern peoples controlled the army, police and prison services; and the central and southern peoples were peasant farmers and bureaucrats. There were far too many fault lines along which seismic activity could erupt.
By that time Grandpa was more a watcher of than a participant in both national and local politics. He talked at a few small meetings, espousing non-partisan political views, which sounded strange to political neophytes who had been promised opportunities if they voted for this or that party. The local elite had entered the political arena in the process. The Indians, however, stayed out of it, content with their 90 percent control of trade and their royal role as the geese that lay the golden eggs. After sixty-eight years of British rule, for much of which Africans had been more spectators than participants in the political and economic life of their country, Grandpa could see no ground for optimism. He could only see powder kegs smoking, waiting to go off.
Pre-Independence partisan violence, manifested in the cutting of banana and coffee trees belonging to members of rival parties, made Grandpa sure that the house built on divisions and exploitation was going to be undermined by the same, and sooner rather than later. When he was attacked by mastiffs angered by his criticism of the victorious Protestant, northerner-led Uganda People’s Congress party, he saw the wound he suffered as a vindication of his theories. It was the conviction that he was right which fueled his quick recoveries, fired his intransigence and empowered his stoicism. The explosion was near, and so was the construction of a new house in which everyone would have a stake. The old house built on British supremacy, Indian collaboration and African tribal strife did not belong to anyone. Nobody felt safe in it. It was a house to be used and abused for petty gain. It was a house to be pulled down, because of the piratical cancer at its heart. At the time he was telling me these things, I thought he had made up some of them.