I had a lot of time on my hands. I climbed my favorite jackfruit tree and studied Mpande Hill. It seemed to float in the wind, drifting past stationary clouds and carrying with it a lake of papyrus reeds that resembled pale green umbrellas. This hill was our Golgotha. Two or three bike riders had died on its slopes. I remembered breathtaking downhill dashes by the area’s tough guys, two hundred meters of the steepest ride one could get. The only time I participated, riding pillion, it was a five-bike race. We stood at the top, the front wheels in a line, the riders’ faces masks of concentration, the valley below a yellowish-green mess, the spectators dwarfs on a giant plain. I sat on a gunnysack folded in four. My underthighs were already chafed. The rider’s bare waist was slippery, and I held on to it and fixed my eyes on his back. I kept wondering how he would brake with his bare heels — all race bikes had no brakes as a rule. We shot downhill at a blinding pace, pebbles pouring into the ravine. The hillside tilted. The trees and papyrus reeds rushed at us. The wind wailed horribly, whipping and cutting my skin. Two riders shot past us in a ghostly blur. We went faster. Oh, the thrill! The front tire wobbled as it hit a stone, and displaced gravel poured in golden rivulets down the roadside into the valley. The rider bent forward to exert more force, opening my face to the wind. Tears and snot and saliva flew in thin threads. I ate an insect or two and spat into the wind. The front wheel skidded, filling my mind with broken limbs, torn guts, endless days in the hospital, countless injections, overflowing bedpans and blood-soaked bandages — the phantoms of my fear. I was now sitting in empty space, the carrier gone, my hands on the wet pants of the rider, a shredded scream in my sore throat. He was fighting to avert disaster, every muscle taut and soaked. We went sideways, cutting across the road, floating on air. In a daredevil overtake move, a rival drew abreast of us. I felt a sharp kick to my leg as he went past. Helped by the momentum of the kick, my rider got the wheel back onto the road. We came in last. His back was running with vomit. He didn’t complain. Some boys did worse: they wet and shat themselves. His left heel was raw, skinless; the right one was angry red. He limped.
“Thank me for saving your foot,” the man who had kicked me said. “The spokes were just about to chew it off, and I guess we would never have retrieved it.”
“His Grandpa would have killed you,” they said to my rider as he stoically tended his heels.
“I would not have waited,” he said, grimacing. “I would have taken the boy straight to the hospital and fled the area.”
Everybody laughed. I didn’t. My legs still felt independent of my body.
I never told Grandpa about the ride. Why weren’t the young smugglers in the new village organizing such races? Scaring villagers did not seem that much of a thrill to me.
Uganda was in a state of siege, writhing like a dying moth on the floor. The bugles of defeat were poised, waiting to blow the walls down. The inside of the country was like a grenade whose pin had already been drawn. There was an explosive feeling in the air. Catastrophe or catharsis?
To the north, in Sudan, the Khartoum-based Muslim government was busy fighting the Juba-based Christian-animist rebels in a war that had little prospect of ending. Bombs and guns devastated the land while circumcision razor blades terrorized virgin vulvas. Now and then, Sudanese refugees camped at our border. It seemed about time to return the favor. To the northeast, in the Horn of Clitoris- and Labialessness, the Ethiopian Ogaden war was going through its surges and ebbs, breathing violent drafts over harsh desert tracts and scalding both combatants and non-combatants, many of whom fled to neighboring countries, Uganda inclusive. To the east, in Kenya, Uganda’s goods were embargoed and piled sky high in the harbors. Smuggling operations based there, aimed at bringing down Amin’s regime by crippling the coffee-based economy, were reaching an odious climax. To the south, in Tanzania, the refuge of General Amin’s predecessor, Milton Obote, anti-Amin guerrillas were gathering, whipping themselves into attacking form and making brave incursions into Uganda. They were rehearsing for the final showdown. Using Radio Tanzania, their leaders called upon the Ugandans to get rid of Amin.
By the start of 1976, the meetings at the gas station had taken on a grimmer look. It was clear to Serenity, Hajj and Mariko, their Protestant friend, that the country was headed for stormier weather. To begin with, the State Research Bureau and other security agencies had become omnipotent, arresting whomever they wanted at any time in any place. Across the border in Tanzania, the exiled dictator Obote was making a lot of noise about his desire to topple the government that had ousted him. The exodus of Ugandans fleeing for their lives, which had begun with a brain drain as educated Ugandans quietly departed, now reached epidemic proportions as spy organizations became more paranoid and picked up more and more people suspected of helping guerrillas. Once abroad, a few of these exiles talked about the appalling situation they had left behind. Amin was not amused. Hajj Gimbi’s friends in the security forces told him of their fear that Uganda was going to be attacked, a fear vindicated when the Israelis rescued their countrymen at Entebbe Airport, hijacked by Palestinian fighters and brought to Uganda because of Amin’s sympathy with the Palestinian cause. The renewed fear of attack had become an obsession, which was exploited by pirates within the army and the security agencies for personal ends.
Nowadays my father and his friends dispersed early. One day an army jeep had stopped at nightfall and men in civilian clothes had jumped off, ordered them to lie on the ground, kicked them a few times, accused them of plotting against the government and proceeded to empty the till and demand more of the day’s takings. If Hajj Gimbi had not dropped an important name, it might have been worse, because there was no more money to take. The pirates had made do with the trio’s watches.
After the attack, Hajj Gimbi started looking for land in a rural area fifty kilometers away. He found it, bought it and started building a house there. At first, Serenity thought his friend had panicked and should not have bought land so far away from the city. Hajj disabused him: “The good times have ended. The city has become a den of killers. It is time to move back to the village.”
“Why?” Serenity asked vexedly.
“Amin’s fall is not going to be tidy. From now on, things are going to get much worse. Armed robbery is already on the increase. The soldiers are becoming more desperate. The future looks bleak.”
“Hasn’t it been like this for the past two, three years?” Serenity, anchored in suburban daydreams, asked rather obtusely.
Hajj was becoming impatient, almost angry. “What I mean is, woe to those who will be trapped in the city in Amin’s last days. Woe to families without any place to hide.”
It struck Serenity that if war broke out the following day, his family would have no safe place to go. In other words, apart from his dilapidated bachelor house in the village, the only accommodation his family had was the government-owned pagoda. Serenity felt ashamed of his myopia. He did not like rural areas, he did not like farming, and that had affected his way of seeing into the future. He was among the few people to whom the notion of land ownership did not appeal. He associated land with the bad people clan land had attracted to his father’s house, and his father’s inability to control them. He nursed a secret fear that the moment he secured land and a house, his home would be overrun by people, probably from his wife’s side. More still, he remembered the drama in his sister Tiida’s home when somebody left fly-attracting entrails and dogs’ heads near her house because of a land dispute. It was true that landowners were often dishonest and greedy, unable to resist selling the same land to a second party if the price was right, and the proliferation of guns had turned land disputes into fatal or near-fatal clashes. His worst-case scenario involved somebody hiring soldiers to shoot his children just to drive him off a piece of land. Up to that moment, he had believed that, if things got bad, he could always move to another suburb. Now he realized that he needed a quiet place far from the city where they could stay if a protracted campaign of terror or even war broke out.