Where the hell was Aunt now? I was beside myself with rage. Why was she still risking her neck for the guerrillas? What if the soldiers had found that bloody brigadier’s picture?
Aunt must have divined my rage even before she entered the house. She flashed me her girlish smile, apologized and calmed the storm. NRM guerrillas were all over the city, she said. But none had been apprehended, because they all had proper documents.
The texture of the nights changed when Guerrilla Radio stopped. How we had come to depend on it! At first the broadcasts became choked with claptrap. Then they simply died away. The advance of the beast of war now became a matter of conjecture and scrappy rumors. I resisted taking Aunt’s stories at face value, because I suspected that she was administering reassurance therapy to the nanny of her children. Large numbers of trucks packed to the rafters with dirty soldiers brought the message home better. Officers zoomed past in jeeps with very long aerials and spears mounted on the radiators, as though directed at enemies in the sky. One day I thought I recognized Dr. Ssali and Aunt Tiida’s Peugeot at the tail of a fleet of cars laden with army officers. People put their cars on blocks and hid the wheels in dark places. In my mind, Aunt Tiida was the kind of woman to veto such action. I could not see her caving in to the desecration of their gorgeous machine, but maybe I was wrong. Had she not stood by her man in his darkest days? Miss Sunlight Soap had her unpredictable side too. In a similar situation, Padlock would have had the wheels removed in a jiffy. How she would celebrate if Tiida’s car got repossessed by the Devil or his agents!
Roadblocks increased, but Amin’s soldiers were oddly subdued. There was no wind in their sails. Randomly selected travellers were stripped in search of telltale rifle-belt welts on their shoulders. The rest suffered the piracy of losing armies: ransoms. Roadblocks started moving, as though by magic, from place to place — here in the morning, gone in the afternoon, back late in the evening. At times it felt like I was watching a game.
The flow of traffic to the north choked to a trickle and dried up. Within a fortnight the road was dead, oppressed by the vacancy of the grave. I thought of Grandpa and the explosions he had foreseen. I wanted to be at his side, but the lacuna between us widened by the hour, resounding with bombs. In what seemed to be the climax, there was continuous fighting for two weeks, two days, two nightmares. As bombs exploded and empty stomachs growled, the city center, the National Radio and the Parliament Building were finally overrun. Amin’s government had fallen. It was April 11, 1979.
There was sporadic shooting in our suburb as remnants of Amin’s forces covered their retreat. The front line dissolved in the distance with the formlessness of a bad dream. The “liberators” arrived and moved on, pushing their enemies farther and farther away toward the north and the east. Behind them a Pandora’s box of old conflicts opened up. It was the afterbirth that really showed me the realities of war.
Amin, the man who had come in a haze of mystery, disappeared in the mists of rumor and the vapors of war to unknown foreign borders, howling, ranting and raving, with no one the wiser as to his future. His legacy, though, had just begun to take root and flower.
The village sealed between Mpande Hill and Ndere Hill was gored and kicked as the buffaloes of aggression thundered to their northern havens. Soldiers from the nearest barracks swooped down on the new part of the village, as though in the mood to resurrect old carousals. They grabbed and made off with the women in bell-bottoms who had come with the phony wealth, the joyriding Honda Civic and the racing motorcycles. The remaining youths were swallowed by the swamps and the forest, where they joined the inhabitants of the old village, who had taken no chances. The soldiers could be heard firing randomly at empty houses as they retreated. At Ndere Parish a crowd from the villages had taken refuge under the protection of the cross. Amin’s soldiers rampaged to the fathers’ house, took money and valuables and grabbed a van and a few girls. They exacted ransom from the displaced people and in the process broke somebody’s arm. The soldiers wanted more and more money. The priest interceded on behalf of the people, and for some reason the thugs relented. As always, they shot into the air as they departed. They spied madman Santo as they drove away. He seemed to be writing in the air with his index finger, oblivious to everything. He was moving back and forth between two classroom blocks. They hailed him to stop. He did not hear them, or if he did, he ignored them. A soldier let off a burst of rifle fire with a laugh. The bullets spared Santo, and the thug did not bother to try again. Santo disappeared behind the classrooms, waiting for his favorite hour to write KYRIE ELEISON, KYRIE ELEISON, CHRISTE ELEISON on the blackboards. Nowadays, he wrote and erased his own words.
Martial music underscored the change of government. Now and then, the extravaganza was interrupted by the announcer, who promised the listeners peace and security. The masses were waking up, rising to the new day with the force of a huge bull. Bottled optimisms burst forth and mixed with vertiginous hopes in blinding kaleidoscopes of emotion. Statements like “Never again will we be ruled by the gun” and “We have paid the final price, and now peace is ours forever” swished in the air.
Our liberators, a mixture of Tanzanian soldiers and Ugandan exiles, eyed the masses calmly. They dispensed the type of superior kindness one reserves for degenerates. The people mobbed them nonetheless. The shameless way the men and especially the women almost salivated over them! I felt lucky that I had been protected from the brunt of the past eight years and could afford to watch with amusement. The liberators, speaking smooth, polished, singsong Kiswahili, were hugged, dry-kissed, lifted shoulder-high and showered with immeasurable gratitude. There was frenetic dancing and singing everywhere, up crowded streets and down stinking, piss-sodden alleys. This was the purest expression of joy I had ever seen, free from religious bias or political pollution, the joy of King David dancing before the Ark of the Convenant. Euphoria, like a potent drugged wind, blew over the people, including yours truly, to a degree. It intoxicated them with the magic of what could be, should be, had to be, and thrust them deep inside the colorful pages of their most secret fantasies. It left them panting with a level of expectation unknown in the last eight years.
In the sea of jubilation, one saw floating islands of masked anxiety: the very dark, sometimes tribally scar-faced, northern-born civilians. They were doing their best to look cheerful in the hope that they would not remind their southern counterparts of their tormentors, the killers on the run. One could see them praying not to be lacerated by the flashing pangas of revenge. Each jubilating hand had the potential to vivisect, each hailing mouth had the power to condemn someone to death. For the moment, the joy of the masses was too intense to be sullied by such base sentiments, and vengeance remained sealed in the kaleidoscopic casket of euphoria.
I felt weak in the knees. Aunt was jumping up and down. I held her very tight and felt her body quaking with feverish joy. Tears of happiness flowed down her face and tickled my neck. The energy from the crowd seemed to sweep me up in the sky. I suddenly felt part of the monster, moved by its shouts, intoxicated by its cheers, tears and laughter. I was now sure that war had left the gun-mounted hills, the soldier-infested valleys and the cordite-stained skies and was coursing through us all. I did not know when I let go of Aunt. I remembered being offered free liquor by a group of men who urged me to drink, drink, drink. It was some sort of competition. Drums were throbbing, accompanying lewd songs. The lights made me feel very intoxicated. I became dizzy, went out and puked against the wall. A vendor who bought Aunt’s liquor wholesale invited me in. I knew she liked me, but she was no spring chicken. She cleaned my face, my clothes and my shoes. She had fine knees, which gleamed like polished and varnished wood. I looked at her fingers. Aunt said that one could tell a woman’s age by her fingers; I could not, and thought she had said that because she herself had smooth, beautiful fingers. As the vendor woman maneuvered me onto the sofa I was overwhelmed by her beautiful knees. I grabbed her with all my power and came in my pants. Her curse was the last thing I heard.