She was not wrong. After her twelfth child, Padlock had given up even the little sex she used to have, and felt that she was better than all the people around who smeared themselves with devil snot. Secure inside the armor of die-hard Catholicism, she climbed up onto a pedestal, from which she looked down on those wallowing in sins of the flesh. Now firmly installed on her puritanical throne, she felt it was her duty to judge the sinners in the hope that they would cling to the tentacles of her verdict and personal example and pull themselves up from the cesspit of their doomed lives. As Kasawo retold her woeful tale, divulging details of her ensnarement, violation and abandonment; as she recounted her struggle to get up and crawl out of the dungeon of defilement; as she gave details of how she lay half-dead in the path, Padlock felt sublime delight coursing through her. At her feet lay the body of a sinner stripped naked, crawling out of the sty of sin into the path of salvation.
“Sister, why do you persist in sin? Why don’t you heed God’s warnings to our family?
“God began by sending you your first man, Pangaman, sweetening his lugubrious evil character and making him say sweet things in your naive ears. This man inflated your little ego and led you onto the bumpy path of rebellion and self-destruction. You rebelled against our parents. You drank alcohol. You became unruly. You flaunted the clothes he ensnared you with. You bragged about the sexual sins you committed with him.
“Despite all that, God did not abandon you: He gave you another chance, but you ignored Him. You went on and had other men, sinned as never before, and completely forgot Him. You built a new life for yourself, disowned Pangaman’s son, acquired a new name and lived in safety. To make sure that Pangaman would not pursue you, you befriended Amin’s soldiers and created an artificial security wall around you. It worked as long as God allowed it to stand. God let you walk unmolested through ranks of killers, rapers and robbers, and you felt inviolable. God gave you access to goods and money, and you felt ten feet tall. You watched as women cried and lived in fear of Amin’s henchmen. You wondered why they did not wise up and befriend soldiers to protect them and punish anybody who touched them. God gave you another chance: He spared you the filthy hands of Amin’s henchmen but put the sting in the tail of liberation. He sent you the seven brothers. He struck you with the very stick you thought you could not live without. He drenched you with the very waters you believed to be the elixir of life. He struck you down and let strange men piss down your throat. You now retch at the mere thought of it, why? You pissed down God’s throat too and wiped your bottom on His plans for you. The violation was the last sign, the last warning before the death of the firstborn. There will be no more locusts and no more storms and no more violators. This is your last chance to repent and turn to God.”
Out of frustration, Kasawo asked her sister what she had done about Nakibuka.
Padlock winced for a split second, then bounced back. She had committed that whore into God’s hands. Nakibuka too would get her warnings and her just punishment for defecating on holy matrimony. Everybody got amply warned, Lwandeka too. Up to the time of her arrest, she believed that she was Babylon: big, important, impregnable. God sent Amin’s henchmen to wake her up from the complacency of sin. God would not hesitate to do the same thing again if she refused to change. She knew the rules from the start: a woman who had carnal knowledge of more than one man was a whore, and whores who don’t repent in time get stoned to death.
Kasawo was in tears now. Padlock smelled victory and pressed her advantage.
“You are moaning about your violation because of your apostasy. You are crying about how Amin did this and did that, and didn’t do this and that, and shouldn’t have acted this or that way. A nation of moaners and whiners. A nation of foolish, ungodly people who cry when God raises His big stick, Idi Amin, to hit evil, disobedience, greed, selfishness and vice out of its fibers in preparation for justice, virtue and salvation. Just like you, this nation did not heed the voice of the prophets and the warnings from God’s mouth.
“The white man, thinking that he was God, came, subjugated the land, imposed his laws and way of life on the people, and sat back to relax and enjoy the fruits of his iniquity. He had Indian assistants to help him milk the resources of the nation. Together they shared the milk and honey God gave this nation. They made laws to protect themselves from the wrath of the people. They built bigger and bigger castles. They built higher and higher monuments. They amassed deadlier and deadlier weapons. They flaunted their political, economic and social power. Until God decided that enough was enough. He stirred the formerly docile people. He turned the white man’s black collaborators into his worst enemies. He cut the white man with his own sword. He crushed his huge empire in His fist. White men started looking over their shoulders as they drove through the city, as they walked their dogs, as they went to their godless temples. The white man was no longer absolute master. The white man was no longer in control. The white man had been defeated by Jesus’ words: he who gets much will have much demanded of him. He finally turned tail and absconded like a thief in the night.
“The Indian, imprisoned in his greed, did not heed God’s warning. In 1971, God raised a new sword, flashing with a new wrath. A year later, the Indian was bleeding, whimpering, wallowing in his sorrows. God took away his home, his security, his peace of mind. God turned his former ally, the white man, against him. Suddenly nobody wanted him. He was kicked from border to border like a dirty ball. The black man rejoiced: God had judged in his favor. Instead of learning a lesson and turning to God, the black man took everything for granted. He took over the booty left by the Indians. Muslims and Christians took to eating, drinking, fornicating and indulging the flesh like the white man and the Indian before them. Castles built on sand never survive big storms. The house built on godlessness was shaken by internal storms, and by the wrath of God’s sword, Idi Amin, and it fell on its occupants. From within the ruins, people cried out for salvation, and God heard them. In 1979, the sword was dislodged. But as soon as the sword stopped flashing, the people reverted to their old ways. The nation had not repented or learned from the past. Kasawo, you and the nation have not learned and have not repented and will once again be put to the test.
“Don’t cry, Kasawo; don’t cry, nation. God tests those He loves the most. Look back and you will see that St. Bartholomew was skinned alive, St. Lawrence grilled, St. John boiled in oil, St. Erasmus disembowelled, the Uganda Martyrs wrapped in reeds and burned alive. All of them were God’s beloved, yet He did not spare them. Today’s people act as though they were the first and will be the last to taste the bitter chalice of God’s test. Why don’t you, Kasawo, and all of those whiners out there look at the Holy Land, a land I walked with my humble feet and touched with my humble fingers? I found it in flames, and I left it aflame. During Jesus’ time, the stones groaned and wailed under the feet of Roman soldiers and the air trembled with the deadly clangor of Roman swords. Nowadays, the ways and byways of the Holy Land lament under the steel soles of modern soldiery. The Holy Land is, true to history, still a battleground in many ways. Did God test this nation more than the birthplace of His only son?