So the poor Asian people ran round madly like headless chickens, even though they’d been in Uganda for a long long time. They’d forgotten they were Asian, and the people in Asia had forgotten they had brothers who’d become Ugandan blacks. The poor Ugandan Asians went and hid in a neighbouring country, where nobody knew them.
Idi Amin Dada got more and more crazy by the day, he killed off entire villages, and if you didn’t agree with him he’d cut your head off, or your genitals. His supporters — the Americans and Israelis — started saying to themselves, ‘We’d better get out of this country, the president’s sick, he’s really crazy, we’d better stop selling him arms or one day he’s going to turn them on us. And all the English people who’d stayed in Uganda after independence thought: ‘We’ll get out now too, it looks like things are going to end badly around here, we’ve never seen anything like it on the Black continent, when this guy’s finished eating all the black flesh around here he’s going to start putting us Whites in his pot.’ And Idi Amin, who didn’t care, replied: ‘Yeah, that’s right, you feeble old ex-colonisersyou, get out of my country, I’m telling you now, I’m going to make friends with the Russians and the Libyans, they like a good deal too, and they’ll sell me lots of lovely weapons so I can go on massacring the Ugandans and the neighbouring countries that make trouble for me.’
And to really annoy the Israelis, who used to be his friends and were now his sworn enemies, Idi Amin Dada started chatting up the people in a country called Palestine. He invited the Palestinians to Uganda and said to them, ‘You can come here if you like, the Israelis are always against you Palestinians, but I, Idi Amin Dada, will give you a huge place where you can have your office, it’s a really good building, in fact it’ll be in the same building as the Israeli embassy! Which is good, because then you can take your revenge on them, and I’ll support you, all the way.’
Papa Roger explained that the Israelis are Jewish, and the Palestinians are mostly Arabs, and these two peoples have been fighting for many many years. Maman Pauline asks why, and my father replies, ‘It’s too long to explain all that now, I get confused myself, it’s all to do with politics and religion and one people killing another and lots of countries don’t recognise that Palestine’s a country, just like us.’
And I think to myself: ‘If it’s not a country just like us, then what is it? Does nobody live there? Are there no children like me, going to school? Are there no roads, no cars to hoot when there’s a traffic jam? Do they not have houses, or a flag, or music, or schools or a president?’ Well, at least Papa Roger agrees that Palestine is a country, like it or not, and that the Palestinians’ president’s name is Yasser Arafat, it’s a sort of nickname.
I’m just thinking how Yasser Arafat is a nice name, it sounds nice, when my father adds that there is a serious problem with this Palestinian guy.
‘I’m disappointed in Yasser Arafat: he agreed to be the witness at the wedding of Idi Amin Dada, killer of over three hundred thousand people, when he married a fifth wife.’
When I hear that, I start to hate his name too.
My head’s going to burst, it’s letting in things more complicated than the ones they teach Lounès at Trois-Glorieuses Secondary School. I can hear my brain beginning to boil as Papa Roger starts telling us the story of a plane that landed in the capital of Uganda, with gangsters in it, who supported the Palestinians. The Palestinian supporters had diverted the plane and were threatening to kill the poor passengers if some Palestinians in prison somewhere or other weren’t released. Idi Amin Dada was delighted to act as referee in this affair, so the whole world would think he was a good guy, with lots of white globules. He calmed everyone down, made long speeches, went to see the passengers trapped in the plane. But because the Israelis get angry about anything to do with the Palestinians, they sent their famous special forces, the scary ones, zooming into Uganda, and they set the hostages free. Papa Roger says that when the Israelis carry out an operation like that, they are very efficient and always succeed, because they train people for special missions like that, and sometimes the agents are actually women, whereas in our army they think women can’t be soldiers.
Before they left Uganda with the people they’d freed, the Israelis took the opportunity to bomb the Ugandans’ war planes. This made Idi Amin Dada very angry and he killed all the Ugandans working at the airport because he thought it was because of their stupidity that the Israelis had been able to land in his country, free the hostages and bomb the war planes. If he had no war planes, how was he going to defend his own country or attack neighbouring countries like Tanzania? He was so angry he even drove all the foreigners out of his country, and killed even more Ugandans. And because he thought no one was prepared to recognise he was the most powerful man in the world, he decided: ‘I’ll make myself a Field Marshal, I want lots of war medals pinned to my front, from my neck to the zipper of my trousers, and I want the whole world to know that I am the warrior who banished the English, so you must call me The King of Scotland, period. I want all foreigners who come to do business in my country to crawl on their hands and knees before me, like animals. Especially the English.’
~ ~ ~
Uncle René’s coming to see us today because it’s Saint Michel’s Day. I don’t actually know who this Saint Michel is, and I always wonder why my uncle chose to call me Michel. If Michel’s a saint, it must be a story in the Bible somewhere, that’s where you find all the saints and other people connected to God. On the other hand, when I look on the calendar it says Saint Michel’s Day is the twenty-ninth September, which is the day and month I was born. So Uncle René must have looked at the calendar before he said to my mother, ‘Let’s keep it simple, I’ll look at the calendar and just give him the name of the saint’s day he was born on.’
So this year on the twenty-ninth September, as usual, my uncle brought me a plastic lorry, a little spade and a little rake, so I can play at farming. He says if ever there’s a real revolution in our country, it will come from the farming community, from the peasants, the people who love the land. That’s who the communists are fighting for, not for the people sitting in offices exploiting their fellow men. You need to get children into good habits so they’ll love farming, which man has been doing since the world began.
We listen to my uncle talking about farming and telling us what Karl Marx and Engels think about it. Afterwards, he looks over at Maman Pauline. ‘Engels was right and I agree with him: until now philosophers have only interpreted the world, now it must be changed…’
I repeat what he’s just said to myself, inside my head, because I like the sound of it and my uncle says it shaking his fist like he wants to get into a fight with the enemies of Revolution. He can tell my mother and I don’t understand what he’s saying, so he leaves the house, goes out to his car and comes back two minutes later with a little book which he hands to me, even though my mother was the one he was quoting communists at.
‘Here, have this, Michel. Everything I’ve been telling you is in this book. There’s more in this book than in the bible, these are scientific truths, not just opium for fooling the masses.’
I take the book, and read the title, which begins with a difficult word to pronounce: Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. The guy who wrote it is called Friedrich Engels. Yes, I’ve seen his photo, at my uncle’s house. Now I know that Engels’ first name is Friedrich. Uncle René has always said ‘Engels’, never ‘Friedrich Engels’.