The whole mass seemed to be taking place inside a submarine, away from solid ground and reality. Normally, during these early morning masses, many boys were not aware of what took place till communion. Everything ran on automatic pilot, because the structure of the mass was the same; but now everyone was awake, as though receiving messages from tiny transmitters hidden inside the altar. In a way, everyone was struck by Lageau’s courage and self-righteousness. Your average white man, faced with two hundred glum black faces, would not call them monkeys so arbitrarily without a gun at his waist. Your average colonialist would have thought twice about going this far without a detachment of sharpshooters behind him. But this unarmed, boy-faced man was rubbing shit in our faces with absolute impunity! This was the tough guy many of us wanted to be: clean-shaven, soft-spoken and average-looking, but endowed with balls of steel. I felt like cheering. This guy was delivering blows to the faces of priests I had wanted to slap a few times! Yes, yes, this was great. I could feel the heat spreading in my chest.
Lageau reminded me of Jesus cursing the Pharisees, calling them adorned graves filled with rotting flesh and terrible stenches. Yes, this man was some reincarnation of Jesus. He seemed transformed, too. Soft golden light fell on his gold-wire spectacles and burst into twinkling stars that multiplied when he moved his head. At the moment, he was the quintessential personification of power and glory. When his hand slashed the air, his Rado burst into liquid arcs of gold that negotiated the air like lithe surfers on colorless waves. When light fell inside his mouth, tongues of gold flashed from each gold tooth like distant suns. This was fantastic stuff. I was hooked. I could feel my knees go rubbery, because I realized I was in the presence of somebody special. I felt attracted to this man’s sense of power and who he was.
In Fr. Lageau I saw the might of the Catholic Empire, advancing, conquering, subjugating, manipulating, dictating, ruling. I experienced the awe the lowly faithful felt when faced with the gods of the empire. This man also gave off intimations of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund hegemony. He personified cast-iron rules forged in golden rooms, immortalized in gold-edged books with thick golden pens in faraway gold-sprinkled cities. He had that rigid, straight-backed, take-it-or-leave-it attitude of the almighty when they had their man on the ropes. This man, encased in gold, towered over raggedy-ass, snot-nosed republics and used or abused at will. He twirled his golden burden on his gold-ringed finger and commanded them to catch and service it. With a few slashes of the golden pen in the golden room on the gold-edged page, he could double, triple or quadruple somebody’s burden or if, for whatever reason, he decided to reward a minion, he could halve or quarter the load. This was real power as I dreamed of it. This was real power as I wanted to have it in my hands. This was the ideal power which shielded one from the ghastly sight of dying babies, emaciated adults and stinking geriatrics. This was the ideal power that let one go to bed at night smelling roses and wake up in the morning unbothered by anything.
I was on my knees. I was sure that many boys believed I was praying. Far from it: I was worshipping power in its glorious isolation, juggernauting down the hill like the winds that had devastated Mbale’s village. I wanted to stay here for the rest of the term, for the rest of the year, maybe for the rest of my life.
It was the sound of boys singing the last hymn that woke me. Or was it the sight of boys vacating the church? Everything seemed topsy-turvy. I became aware that I was locked in dreamy isolation from the herd. Snot was creeping ticklishly down my nostrils. My mouth was parched from exposure. I slowly regained my wits. Exorcised by my increasing consciousness, the demons of power retreated. I started asking questions.
Wasn’t arbitrary use of power on the weak the reason I hated Padlock? Hadn’t Lageau done exactly the same thing? If so, why was I so hypnotized? Wasn’t I worshipping color, some semblance I did not know? Beyond the power of his heredity, what had this man ever created? Had he ever carved his name in diamond by writing a wonderful book? Had he ever expanded somebody’s moment by composing a song? Had he ever invented a machine or some mathematical formula to increase the world’s knowledge or to relieve its pangs or its wastefulness? Not to my knowledge. He was just a masquerade. As Padlock had not created the uterus, Lageau had not invented money — or knowledge or power, for that matter. Like most of us, he was a scavenger, a user of other people’s remains. His excessive show of arrogance was the guilt-ridden chicanery of an inheritor. Maybe he had money, maybe he could buy a town, maybe he could own half the land in Uganda, but he was a mere cog in the money wheel, a mere spoke in the power hub, and as for his color and his nuclear-arms-secured prerogatives, what had he added to them? Nothing. Like many intelligent people, he had fallen into the trap of defending an old perspective, exploiting the weakness of others; he had not discovered a new way of thinking. In other words, he was merely regurgitating hundreds of years of philosophical, social and political vomit.
I felt very disappointed, and weary too. Lageau, like many people I could no longer learn from, had lost his allure. One day I would be greater than him, just as I would be greater than Serenity, his Padlock and other little despots. I felt nauseated, as though all the fish glue I had inhaled in the past week had been rejected by my system in one stabbing jolt. Despite his missionary education, Lageau had missed one chapter in cultural anthropology. To us, the monkey represented cleverness, curiosity and the sort of intelligence he boasted — it defended its own standpoint. As a matter of fact, among the fifty-two totemic clans, the monkey figured prominently. Girls of the monkey clan were known for their alertness, nerve, quick wit and loving care. Lusanani, the gobbler of my virginity, belonged to the monkey clan. The superficial disdain for monkeys, with its origin in the missionary-colonial era, was ludicrous, simply laughable. It was the hollow cry of uprooted people dancing to strange tunes and breaking their legs. All these white people believed they were scoring a point with the monkey thing, but they were not: they were just scratching their own assholes.
This man standing in church displaying his ignorance was scratching his behind, smelling his finger and screwing up his nose. Monkey business. This man baring his shallowness at the altar was nothing original; he was mimicking his forebears, the agents of the holy armadillo who had waged wars and poisoned our politics with religion. Hadn’t General Amin, time and again, charged that the Catholic Church was built on murder, terror, senseless war, genocide and robbery? This fresh slaughter of the innocent and the not-so-innocent was an old tool, and it shocked only the dim-witted among us. For a church that glorified pain and torture and raised the cross as its banner, this was insignificant. If, like Fr. Mindi, Lageau believed that he was showing us something to emulate, he had fallen far too short of the Church’s high psychopathic standards. It all just breathed the quaint air of the principle on which Lageau had stood to call us monkeys. I wasn’t turned on anymore; I was just irritated.