Moses Isegawa - Snakepit

The scene played itself in his head through the wailings, the eulogies, the rituals of saying goodbye. The first shovelful of dirt to hit the coffin sounded like an old prison gate banging closed: how long would his incarceration last?

The family was reminded that it was an exceptional occurrence to lower the coffin when the culprits were already apprehended. There was a growing feeling that they could be the few who would benefit from the justice living a weak existence in an age of gun rule. This became the focus tempering much of their grief because, deep down, people were optimists, who wanted mistakes corrected, things back to running as they remembered them in the past. They waited for the court case as if it were unquestionable that the verdict would be in their favour. They could not allow anybody to crush that with pessimism; that would be like breaking open Babit’s grave and throwing her body out of the coffin. Bat promised to hire the best lawyers money could buy and to give the killers the sentence they deserved.

What Babit’s family did not know was that General Bazooka had been briefed about the case and had vowed to leave no stone unturned in the effort to free “a hard-working Bureau agent falsely accused of the murder of a common prostitute.” It was just as well that they remained uninformed. In a country where there was no open prostitution, the word “prostitute” would have hurt too much, most especially because Babit had known only one man in her life.

BAT FOUND HIMSELF in a crater of despair he could not climb out of. His friends visited often, but because they knew him well, they knew when to stay and when to leave. With other sympathizers it was different. They kept streaming in from the village of his birth, from Babit’s and Mafuta’s families, and they kept the place buzzing even when he craved solitude, a moment of contemplation. People he had done favours for, lent money to, recommended for jobs, came to pay their respects. On one level the attention was good; on another it was counterproductive because grief is an individual emotion. But he still entertained his guests, men who now held him in high regard because of his education, and the fact that he had come back from the dead after being presumed six months in the morgue. He had become their man, their beacon. They could count on him to understand their problems.

They brought him chickens, multicoloured birds with legs tied together with banana fibre. They brought him goats, which had survived the roadblocks and the cooking pans of hungry soldiers. They brought him long-fingered cooking bananas because they had heard that they were his favourite food. They brought him sacks of beans, groundnuts, maize, millet. His home became a food depot, an abattoir, a chaotic holiday camp. In their goodness, their enthusiasm, they just made things worse. He would see them following him around, listen to their questions about the lawyers: Why had he not hired Saudi or Libyan lawyers who were most likely to exert influence because of their nationality? Why had he not hired people to take care of the killer? Why had he not removed his daughter from the hands of a murderess? When was he going to remarry?

In his present state of mind he could not concentrate on anything. He asked for a leave and devised ways of dodging his guests. He hid at the Professor’s a few times. He spent nights at the Kalandas’ and in the few still-functioning hotels. He spent long periods talking with his sister. They had become closer than ever now. She listened to his words, his silences, his mumblings. He listened to her stories, her indirect words of advice. They talked about the coming trial, the lawyers, the prospects. She cooked his favourite food, and they ate it with some degree of enjoyment. She devised a system whereby she spent a week per month with him. But he grew tired of waiting for her arrival and he acknowledged his growing dependence on her — a dependence that seemed to be eroding her relationship with her possessive husband. Although he still did not like Mafuta, he knew that he had no right to deprive him of his family life. He put a stop to his sister’s visits.

One day he received a letter of condolence from Damon, which was also an invitation to go to London. They could go out and tour the country, revisit the past or do something new. He remembered the nights at the Grand Empire, the posh nights, his proposal to Babit. There was something very appealing and something very repellent about it at the same time. He wanted to retrace his time there with Babit, but he realized that nostalgia would be the death of him. A mourner who returned to the sites of happier times was either reconciled or devastated. He knew that London without Babit was no longer his London and would crush him just like it had done others before him. He decided to go to America for a month.

BAT’S FIRST STOP was an expensive hotel in New York. He liked the seclusion, the anonymity, and the newness of it all. He liked the aggressive thrust of the buildings, the dire extremity of a crowded skyline. He liked the freedom he had from the encumbrances of familiarity, for here he was a speck in this city of millions, a mote flying in the wind. In the bosom of the great city, he sipped his whisky, praying for peace of mind. He settled down and turned on the television, seeking refuge in the deluge of images and sounds.

It was not long before he met Marshal Amin, who had made a grand entrance into Hollywood, and into the world of comic strips. During his stint in Tinseltown the Marshal had made two hit movies, now available on cable, both portraying his mentor, Il Duce Benito Mussolini. The bulk, the shaven head, the jutting jaw, the heavy make-up, the fact that a black giant was portraying a white runt, made for wonderful comedy. Of course, Amin had had to lose weight, shaving off much of the bulky stomach in high-tech gyms and by inserting laxative pills in his rectum. To hide the scandalous height difference, he was filmed from the waist up. In the first epic, The Rise of Il Duce: Il Duce’s Triumph, he dealt with the problems young Mussolini experienced on the way up. The pains of growing up on the fringes, his height, his criminality, the rigours of army life, the unfulfilled dreams, the sexual frustrations, the boiling urge to shine, then the coup and the string of victories in Bulgaria, Greece, Abyssinia, and the emergence of Italy as a major power. In the second hit, Il Duce’s Blues, Amin dealt with his mentor’s turbulent career as empire-builder and chronicled the way Europe and America conspired to bring his reign to an end. He showed his mentor’s bravery at the front, the fighting methods he initiated but which were credited to Englishmen or Americans, his selfless tours of military hospitals comforting the wounded soldiers with his golden tenor saxophone and the artificial limbs he distributed, his unrecognized efforts to dethrone Hitler, his bitterness at not being universally recognized as a genius statesman. Then there was the demonization by the press, the wives who kept committing suicide, the failure of Fascism to become a household name like Nazism or Stalinism, and his heroic end. The two films had made Amin’s name and were already classics, towering achievements for somebody who did not make his acting debut till he was thirty-nine. As a result, he had become Africa’s first truly famous film star.

Bat also discovered that here Amin had tried his luck as a sex therapist and small-time political spin doctor, with little success. Too many competitors. He had sent President Nixon advice to gag, lock up, or torture the criminals involved in the Watergate adventure. If they still wanted to fawn for the cameras, he advised gangland executions of culprits and their entire families. The financial invoice he sent Nixon was never honoured. Nixon had other plans, and when he fell, Amin sent him a telegram congratulating him upon his impeachment and the golfing time at his disposal. He offered his services to President Ford, warning him to take a much harder line and avoid the pitfalls of his predecessor.