But the Acolytes arrived too late; the prisoner had been moved. General Bazooka had taken him to an unknown location. This turn of events put Ashes in a very foul mood. He hated this kind of game when he was not the one initiating play.
GENERAL BAZOOKA MADE HIMSELF as elusive as possible. He travelled in unmarked cars, singly or with two men. He stayed most of the time at Kasubi with his wife and children. The first week as a full-time husband and dad was interesting. He drank a lot and slept a lot. He kept an eye on things when he was awake; he barked at servants and looked at his children’s exercise books. He was happy to learn that his favourite son did not like school and did not perform well. He talked to him about the importance of the army and the chances he stood as the son of a general. He showed him different guns, told him heroic stories and made him promise to enlist as soon as he finished primary school. Secondary school he could do in the army. The boy was very happy to hear that his father was on his side. The other children were less enthusiastic, but he believed he would get them eventually. He visited his wife’s shop. He found the business of waiting for customers and drinking tea or beer tedious, to say the least. He fled to the city, driving around, dropping in on friends.
After a week small things started making him lose his temper. One morning he shot at a housegirl because she did not move quickly enough when he ordered her to bring a fresh spoon to stir his coffee. His wife intervened and reprimanded him. He took offence. It had just been a warning shot, he said, and no big deal. He felt walled in. Deflated by his helplessness in the face of Ashes. He decided to go north, by road, to see what was going on up there. He needed the inspiration and a break from all the madness. He hoped to come back renewed, combative, sharp.
The first part of the journey was very exciting. He was travelling through familiar territory. It felt very reassuring to see soldiers at roadblocks taking care of business. They reminded him of his days as a hunter of armed robbers. At one roadblock, however, he caught soldiers taking bribes. He stripped them naked, made them roll in mud and jump up and down while singing his favourite nursery rhyme: “Humpty-Dumpty.” The fun part was saying the lines and hearing the miscreants repeat them after him. Afterwards he made a little speech excusing himself to the civilians, who would go away praising this big officer who came from nowhere and saved them from the rapacious soldiers at the roadblock. He left the place feeling good and eager to see what lay ahead.
But the farther he drove north, the more it dawned on him that, outside the city and the towns, government was a very thin concept. To begin with, people did not recognize him at all. He stopped several times to buy things, taking the trouble to enter the small dusty shops with old rusty roofs, but nobody called his name. The goods he wanted were almost always unavailable, except on black market, which was not for soldiers with medals dangling on their chests. He got irritated by these empty shops whose shelves were yawning except for empty cigarette cartons stuffed in for decoration. There was no cooking oil, no paraffin, no food, nothing.
“Nothing!” he yelled at the tenth shop. “Then what the Devil are you doing opening an empty shop? How long have you been here?”
“Since 1971,” the man said dolorously, his eyes as sad as his clothes. “Each year the prices kept going up till we could not afford the stock any more.”
“Are you blaming the government for this?”
“The government is doing a very good job. It is the factories; they closed down.”
The General found himself tongue-tied, and he stormed out to save face.
At the next trading centre, with a line of flat-faced shops with porches, he could bear it no longer. As soon as he heard the same dirge, he rushed into the back of the empty shop, kicking aside jerrycans and boxes. Miraculously, he found there bags of sugar, salt, tins of cooking oil, cartons of beans. .
“Hoarding! You are sabotaging the government by hoarding goods and keeping the prices up,” he shouted at the top of his voice, as if he wanted the whole country to hear.
The man, wearing a faded blue shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows, old-fashioned stove-pipe trousers and bathroom sandals, said nothing; neither did he look impressed.
General Bazooka wanted to call the people of the town together and cane the man in public before selling his stock at government prices. But when he asked the man who he was, he turned out to be the father of a friendly general. In fact, the shop was registered in the general’s name. General Bazooka was mortified. He ordered his men to take a few kilos of whatever they wanted and marched back to his jeep. Yes, he was in the north, this huge sweeping area peopled by so many tribes lumped together under the term “northerner.” He felt detached from the terminology and from the people. The connection seemed to have broken when he left for the south. The language of his dreams and ambitions did not flourish in this soil. The shallowness of his solidarity with these people shocked him. He was irritated by the stifling heat, the thinning vegetation, the luxuries of the city he had left behind.
“It is a bloody desert out here,” he told his men. They shook their heads, as if to say he had been corrupted by the south, for they were glad to be back, to travel through the land of their fondest memories.
The farther he went, the more convinced he became that the journey was a mistake. I should have gone to visit my mother instead of coming here, he said to himself. He could get no coherent picture here, only fragments. The whole country seemed about to fall to pieces. To the north-east, the Karamojong were busy with their cattle-herding, raiding neighbouring tribes as far as the Kenyan border. If these guys wanted cattle, they took the war all the way down to the east, laying waste hundreds of kilometres if necessary. For many of them Kenya was just an extension of Uganda, and they crossed over the border, firing their guns and arrows till they got cattle or defeat.
Guns proliferated in the region, making cattle-rustling a lethal explosion of internecine warfare. The gun had risen to become a symbol of manhood, an integral part of the culture. Many soldiers had sold their guns for cash in this region. He felt angry that this had been allowed to happen. The result was that most parts of Karamoja were no-go areas. The people did what they wanted. Police, army, the taxman; nobody dared go there. The place was the toughest spot in the country.
The more he neared his home area, the place where he was born, the more impatient he grew. He regretted having left his helicopter behind. He had seen enough on the ground for a lifetime. This place would have looked better from the air, less challenging, flattened to blandness by the science of flight. I would not have had to see those haggard cows, he thought, at least not in detail. I came here on holiday, not on a fault-finding mission. I am not a fucking vet or the Minister of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry. Where did those little black pigs come from? They are so small they look like rabbits. The pathetic goats look no better. They seem to be blaming people for keeping them alive.
He got on the radio; he wanted his Mirage Avenger sent immediately. There was no connection. He tried to call the nearest barracks, seventy kilometres away, and also failed. He suddenly felt stranded. What the hell was going on if a general was not assured of a working radio? What if something happened to his family? It looked like a trap which might have been set by Reptile.
In the West Nile District, he felt calm again. He was among his tribesmen. He realized how little the government had done for the area despite the promises made almost every day: there was no electricity; there were few schools and hospitals; there was a dearth of drinking water. The most visible change was that young people wore bell-bottom trousers and silver sunglasses, and dreamed of going south to work for the State Research Bureau.