The man was unusual, but so were the circumstances in which he came. The era of white missionaries had ended. They had started the Church in Uganda almost one hundred years ago. Before disappearing, they had cultivated a local Church and a local clergy in most dioceses, except Jinja Diocese, where the die-hard polygamist culture held sway and stopped people from sending their offspring into the barren heartlands of priesthood and nunhood. The indigenous Church they started expanded very quickly. By the time they started leaving or dying, the Church had an indigenous archbishop, later a cardinal, many bishops and the full administrative cadre that manned the Catholic Church. The missionary element eventually dwindled, depleted by death and the demise of the Church in Europe. There was, in fact, a genuine fear among conservative missionaries that black people might one day rise and lead some of the formerly purely white missionary organizations, because most of the work done now was in Africa and vocations in Europe were almost gone.
At the moment, some of those organizations had their own local seminaries. The diocesan seminaries were all under the leadership of indigenous priests, with the help of a white missionary here and there. Whenever a white missionary left, he was generally not replaced, because there was no one to replace him with. A white missionary replacing an indigenous priest was a rare occurrence. However, Lageau was anything but ordinary.
Lageau’s instant heroism was rooted in the fact that we, the seminarians, the downtrodden, believed that this new and energetic white man was going to offer a direct challenge to the black priests and, with his enormous zest, pull them toward a total revision of the administrative, financial and liturgical system. There was a lot of speculation as to Lageau’s motives for coming here. Some thought he had been sent as punishment for some big mistake, for, they reasoned, nobody could willingly leave the beautiful plains of Quebec for our little hill. Others said that Lageau had requested the transfer himself because he needed a challenge. As a corporate raider, he needed a sagging company to transform into a soaring eagle in order to soothe his ego. The third theory was that Lageau was an ombudsman sent by Rome and other financiers to investigate corruption inside the diocese and in the seminary system before making recommendations for change. There were also those who said Lageau was a cowboy in search of adventure, and that as soon as he got bored he would move on. The little we knew was that he had worked in parts of Asia and Latin America and was now in Africa. Whatever the truth was, Lageau had moved onto the scene in a big way and had become the dominant force in our little universe.
At long last we heard from official channels that Fr. Lageau had come to handle the seminary’s purse strings. There was singing and dancing in our streets, and especially in the open spaces between the beds in the dorms. Armpits ran with sweat as adolescent anticipation of fabulous meals got everyone excited. No more rotten beans. No more maggoty maize meals. No more half-cooked rice on Sundays. Come in, matooke—plantain — and meat. Come in, sweet potatoes and fish. Come in, fantastic meals all week long. What wouldn’t this rich North American do in this cheap-priced land of ours!
Food was the most important element in our secluded environment. We ate to live and to void our bodies of redundant desires. We went to bed with food on our minds and awoke the same way. How we envied the priests their daily treat and their Sunday banquets! The nuns cooked for the priests with all their hearts and all their throttled sex drives. They indulged the priests as they would a super-lover, somebody they wished to drive to new levels of erotic madness by baiting him with condimented recipes that inflamed every zone of his body. In those days, priesthood was equated with good food. It was something worth suffering for. It was at table that one realized how words were divorced from reality: there was a lot of talk around the theme of equality, but those sweet words disappeared in a miasma of pig food when the bell rang for our lunch. I, for one, wasn’t too badly off, not after blackmailing my way into priestly leftovers, but the contrast was staggering nonetheless, especially on those days when I didn’t get any.
At times I felt I was living within the covers of certain books. I was glad I had not been selfish. I could have sat back, munched my morsels and done nothing about the Mindi menace, but I had done all I could, as if I were one of those worst hit by the food crisis. No wonder I walked around with the feeling that the whole seminary owed me: after all, it had been my parcels that had, in part, brought about the arrival of the French Canadian millionaire who was going to revolutionize everything as we knew it. I had the feeling that good things always came wrapped in mysterious parcels.
Fr. Kaanders was very excited by the arrival of Fr. Lageau. The macho man in him peeped through his old liver-spotted skin, and his dull eyes lit up. He now walked with a twitch in his step and pulled his trousers up to his belly button in an almost showy fashion. The arrival of Fr. Lageau energized him. It gave him a feeling of being young again and of going into battle to tackle ancient problems. With a young man at his side, he would not be alone in his whiteness. He would have someone to drink a glass of wine with and talk to about the other side of the world.
Fr. Gilles Lageau looked very much like Sean Connery portraying James Bond. Beside him Kaanders resembled a panhandler soliciting pin money from a hunky Californian windsurfer. Straw-haired, arthritic, incontinent and bad-toothed, Kaanders could hardly keep up with the flashy North American. It became clear from the beginning that if any kind of relationship was going to exist between the two, it would be up to Kaanders to sustain it. We watched the two white men with almost anthropological fascination. The contradictions of the Western world held us spellbound, at least for some time.
Both priestly and seminarian narcissism generally found an outlet in a keen interest in material goods. The cars, the clothes and the furniture the staff had were analyzed to the last atom for information pertaining to quality, manufacturer, cost and durability. Lageau increased this activity. He boasted about his golden Rado watch (“the champion of chronometers”), which, putatively, lost only one second in ten years. Such Western reliability! Such Western precision! Wags spent time calculating the mountains of foodstuffs the watch alone could buy for the two hundred boys on campus. Others tried to figure out where Lageau bought his short-sleeved pastel shirts and the pastel trousers he wore. A boy helping in his office finally divulged the secret that Lageau wore French clothes, exclusively. Much was made of the expensive belts, checked socks and genuine leather open-toed sandals he wore in class. There were bets as to whether he possessed a cassock or not, for he and Kaanders never wore those cumbersome things, not even when the bishop visited.
The sudden appearance of this flamboyant man in the midst of poverty-stricken souls struck a blow for the rich: we developed a finely tuned idealization of them, accompanied by a deliberate transfusion of generosity into their veins and a conscious defeatist effort to justify or overlook their shortcomings. Few thought it strange that a man in his forties was openly boasting about his watch, coming as he was from a region where such watches were common; we felt that such little faults were the fleas on an otherwise powerful dog.