Paul Theroux - Sir Vidia's Shadow - A Friendship Across Five Continents

Watching Vidia, the little girl seemed to understand that she was being insulted. Her large eyes had darkened with anger, and as she looked up at the man maligning her, Pat came out of the shop and said, “Hello. What a sweet little girl. What’s your name?”

“Nadira.”

I might have misheard. She spoke just as we were stepping off the verandah into the sunshine, but at the sound of her sharp voice, like the squawk of a mechanical toy, the three of us glanced back — Pat smiling, Vidia frowning in contempt. I was shaking my head, thinking, Wahindi!

Time is so strange in its logic and revelation. The little girl would go to Pakistan, and after thirty years passed (and Pat lay dying in a spruced-up cottage that was at that Nairobi moment tumbledown and lived in by a pair of elderly Wiltshire peasants) Vidia would meet the girl again, now grown up and divorced, never guessing where he had first seen her — nor would she — and fall in love.

How were we to know that little girl being fanned on the Nairobi verandah by her African ayah would be the future Lady Naipaul?

Back at the Kaptagat Arms, Vidia resumed his novel. He was also reading a Victorian account of travels in West Africa in which he came across the expression “our sable brethren.” He began using the expression, building sentences with his other favorite phrases: “For some little time, our sable brethren…”

Before I left for Uganda he asked me, “So what are our sable brethren up to in Kampy, eh?”

There were rumors of trouble in Uganda, though nothing to do with Indians. I said, “People say there’s going to be a showdown between Obote and the Kabaka.”

“One will watch from here,” he said. “Eh, Patsy? Latterly, one has begun to think that one’s returning to Uganda would be completely foolish. Anyway, we were thinking of spending some little time in Tanganyika.”

The country had changed its name to Tanzania five years before, at independence, but Vidia went on using its colonial name, as he did Ghana’s, always calling Ghana the Gold Coast. When he saw that using these names enraged Africans he did it even more, teasing them. He pretended not to know the new names, and when he was angrily corrected, he said “Really” and expressed effusive thanks.

From Dar es Salaam he reported “extensive buggery” and asked for news.

The news was bad in Uganda. This was in late May 1966, during the confrontation between the prime minister and the Kabaka — King Freddy. One Sunday four of the king’s important chiefs were arrested on charges of sedition. Because they were so closely linked to the king, the chiefs’ subjects, their villagers, became a mob and stoned the police. Early the next morning the Uganda Special Forces, commanded by Idi Amin, launched an attack on the Kabaka’s palace at Lubiri.

All day there was fighting — the sound of cannon fire and automatic rifles firing in stuttering enfilade, raking the bamboo pickets of the stockade. From my office desk at Makerere I could see smoke rising from Lubiri. The shooting was continuous. In late afternoon there were still gunshots, and much darker smoke — the fires had taken hold.

“The Kabaka is holding them off with a machine gun,” my colleague Kwesiga said.

No one knew what was happening, though.

“Whose side are you on?” I asked him.

Kwesiga was of the Chiga tribe from the Rwanda border, a despised people who practiced wife inheritance — passing the widow on to the dead husband’s brother — which was based on a curious marriage ceremony that involved the bride’s urinating on the clasped hands of the groom and all his brothers. One of the wedding-night rituals required the bride to fight the husband, and should he prove weak — for she was expected to struggle hard — his elder brother was allowed to take charge, and subdue and ravish the woman while the groom looked on. Kwesiga was being summoned to take his recently widowed sister-in-law as one of his wives.

“I am an emotional socialist,” he said. “But Freddy is a good king.”

In the evening the explosions were louder — mortars, perhaps. And flames were visible where during the day there had been smoke. At last the palace was captured, but when Amin and his men rushed inside, the Kabaka was not there. The clumsy siege of this wood and bamboo palace had taken an entire day and had not accomplished its objective. The Kabaka had escaped to Burundi — dressed as a bar girl, one rumor went.

That was the first night of a curfew. It was illegal to be out of the house from seven in the evening until six in the morning. It was still light at seven, so confinement in bright daylight seemed strange. The enforced captivity and severe censorship also produced many rumors, often conflicting and violent-sounding: stories of arson and beatings and killings, the murder of Indians, cannibal tales and incidents of vandalism, humiliation of expatriates at roadblocks. The Uganda Army was said to be wild — furious that they had failed to capture the king. When darkness came, the gunfire started. I collected rumors in my specially begun curfew notebook.

Besides King Freddy, Kabaka of Buganda, there were three other kings. Sir William Wilberforce Nadiope, a fat little man noted for his bizarre robes and blustery speech, was Kyabazinga of Busoga. The Omukama of Toro was a twenty-year-old Mutoro named Patrick, whose sister Princess Elizabeth was a Vogue model. The Omugabe of Ankole was a cattle owner. When the Kabaka fell, the other kings caved in and went quietly, and the government commandeered their palaces — though “palace” was a misnomer for what were actually comically lopsided houses.

The curfew was a period of intense confusion and fear. There was widespread drunkenness too, which added to the atmosphere of insanity. People boasted of their boozing. No one worked. The urgency about drinking was marked, because the bars closed at six P.M. in order to allow people time to get home. Food was scarce because the trucks from the coast were held up at the Ugandan frontier. Matches became unobtainable, no one knew why. There was much petty crime: robberies, looting, a settling of scores. People traveled in convoys if they were headed upcountry. Mail was suspended for a week. The distant gunfire continued, pok-pok-pok , until dawn.

The curfew was for me an extraordinary event; it was also the perfect excuse. I did no teaching. I got on with my novel. I spent the day collecting rumors — always violent, always of massacres. Indi ans often figured in them. My curfew notebook thickened and I considered writing a book like Camus’s The Plague , describing the deterioration of a city during a siege and curfew.

I realized that in time of war or anarchy people lived out their fantasies. There were many fights, but just as many love affairs. Scores were settled because the police were not a presence — the army was in charge, but its roadblocks were used for intimidation and robbery and, if the rumors were true, killings. Roadblocks were always manned by the most thuggish and rapacious soldiers. Most were from the far north, from a minority tribe noted for its ferocity.

I carried my curfew notebook to the Staff Club. Each rumor had a date, a time, a place.

“What is the point of that?” one colleague asked.

I said, “I want to calculate how many miles an hour a rumor travels.”

The breakdown of order had its excitements. People became reckless and slightly crazed. A Muganda man committed suicide after an atrocity in his village. His friends and family were summoned over the radio.

“He has hanged himself,” the announcer said.

My own fantasies took the form of being a real writer and writing all day. I had two books on the burner: my novel and this detailed curfew journal. In the late afternoon I hurried into town and got drunk as quickly as I could. I was energized by the tumult and the noise, which would, I knew, stop dead at seven, when we had to be indoors.