Moses Isegawa: Snakepit

Amin initiated Ashes into the difficulties he faced when making movies: the rehearsals, the repeated takes, wearing a wooden jaw, three-hour make-up sessions, the bickering and infighting of the supporting cast. He talked about Hollywood parties, the whores, the tubs of champagne; and he confessed that that was where he picked up his coke habit. Before Hollywood he had been a fan of marijuana. Now he could not imagine life without the magic powder. They watched his commercials for high-powered rifles and explosive bullets. He boasted about his ten wives, his fifty known children, the contributions he had made to the country’s development.

“Uganda will miss me dearly, as dearly as I miss Dr. Ali.”

Ashes talked about his youth in Newcastle, the endless fog, the chilly docks, the dirty factories, the pain of not knowing his real father, the shame of hearing his mother fucked by an impostor, the emptiness of school life, the beauty of the first fire he set, and the resultant fire fetish, the excitement of London’s pre-war underworld, the seductive gangsters’ wives and whores, one of whom took his virginity, his first kill, the war, and the thrill of landing in Africa. These were two men fantasizing, rewriting and reliving their history as it came out of their mouths, ruminating on their dreams, not people balancing on the razor edge of a country spinning out of control. They both agreed that paradise must resemble these intense moments of historical improvisation.

At the end of the holiday the Marshal realized that the country had drooled long enough with anticipation; it was time to reward it with the balm his resurrection would release. He left the island in his missile-proof helicopter. As it soared in the air, Ashes felt it in his bones that his time had come. It was a matter of waiting for the right hour. That night he heard the Marshal addressing the nation on the radio, refuting rumours that he was dead, or had been dead. He said that he had been to Saudi Arabia visiting the Holy Places, making sacrifices, praying to Allah to extend his rule for another fifty, only fifty years, during which rams would be fucking lionesses, and everybody would be driving around in an eight-door Boomerang. Ashes could not control his laughter. “He should have been a jazz musician. Such improvisation!”

GENERAL BAZOOKA WAS currently obsessed with one project: killing Reptile before the government fell. He knew a lot about his movements, how he now and then participated in hunting down and burning smugglers. With luck and diligence he hoped to lure him into the trap, or even to meet him at one of his famed bonfires.

At the beginning of the year the General detailed a group of his men to acquire boats and look for every opportunity to kill Ashes and his men. He had detailed others to seek employment with him and some had succeeded. With this two-pronged attack, he was guaranteed success sooner rather than later. It was now six months though, and Ashes was still alive. He was running out of patience. After Victoria’s trial, with his wife’s condition remaining diabolically unchanged, he had little to entertain him, apart from the parties. He further stood to lose his right little toe if he failed to get rid of Ashes within a month. A friendly general had challenged him at a party saying that he would never get the chance to finish off the reptile. General Bazooka had insisted that with his new plan it would take five months, at the latest seven. As a demonstration of confidence, the two men had exchanged toes. If Ashes died, the other general would cut off his own toe; if not, Bazooka would snip off his.

General Bazooka’s men first posed as smugglers, then they discovered that their plan worked best if they provided security to smugglers operating in Ugandan waters. They staked their claim and sank boats which refused to pay upfront. From then on everybody did what they said. If they gave the order that nobody operate for a week, the lake stayed clean for that duration. That way they gained control over the waters, the ports, the islands, and waited for the chance to strike. They started provoking patrol boats, hiding on desert islands and shooting at them from the rocks with bazookas and machine-guns. Using powerful radios, they intercepted incoming messages, gave conflicting orders and lured patrol boats into traps.

Ashes resisted taking the bait. The territory under supervision was so vast, so treacherous, that he wanted to avoid costly confrontations. He still preferred to surprise smugglers, kill most of the men, capture the rest, sink the boats, and burn the captives as a lesson. Under pressure from their boss, General Bazooka’s men decided to heat the water by sinking patrol boats with their crews. They started sending insulting messages to the Anti-Smuggling Unit, calling them cold-blooded murderers, cannibals, soiled sanitary napkins, gorillas, pigs’ asses, and boasting how they were going to capture and roast every one of them.

Ashes responded by sending a helicopter to comb the lake and the shores. Soon after, two fishing villages frequently used by smugglers were bombed flat by helicopter gunships. That did not deter Bazooka’s men. His chief advisor told them to spread rumours that the CIA was behind the recent acts of provocation. The CIA was a very feared entity in these parts. The presence of American warships in the Indian Ocean was enough to sow fear in anybody’s heart. Ashes did not believe that the Americans were interested in Amin or in Uganda. He was still afraid that some crazy CIA boss might send his men to capture him just to kill boredom or to win a bet made in a brothel. After all, he was visible, white, outrageous. There was also the possibility that Interpol might ask the CIA to capture him for crimes committed over the years. Shaming him would shake Amin, and nowadays humiliating the Marshal had become a big pastime abroad.

Ashes proceeded with caution. His men were also becoming harder to motivate because, lacking information and analytical capabilities, they believed the CIA rumours and did not want to fight against Americans. He started going out with them more often in order to reassure them. However, his hand was forced when the Marshal got wind of the situation and asked what he planned to do about it.

“All-out war,” he replied, lamenting the fact that Uganda had no battleships to grind the smugglers’ hideouts to rubble.

The heart of the coffee-smuggling operations lay to the north and north-east of Lake Victoria. In that area the waters were full of islands, big and small, populated and bare, and the shores were rich with ports and potential landing facilities, bays, creeks. Some shores were massive, chopped, mean-faced boulders strewn with papyrus; some gentle sands and mud-flats alive with little fishes, leeches, and canoes. Sometimes forest crept near to the water, forming a thatched wall of trees easy to hide in. Sometimes one could move from the water and walk in short grass for miles. It was this variety, this unpredictability, this unevenness of surface, that made effective patrolling an impossible task. It would have taken a whole army to do a proper job. Ashes called himself “Admiral of the Victoria,” but with the Kenyan government encouraging smugglers who, at the peak, also operated overland, he knew that his real power was limited.

At the beginning of his career he had chosen the most obvious option: patrolling the more popular waterways and stationing his men on the islands more frequented by smugglers. But his men had started taking bribes, and the smugglers had worked out alternative routes. More infuriating still, there were Kenyan islands two kilometres from Ugandan waters. The Kenyans would place gunboats just over the border and escort Ugandan smugglers to safety.

On the day the final battle was fought, Ashes had ten gunboats at his command. His plan was to attack with the boats and call in the helicopter to cream off the smugglers who tried to slip through the gaps. It would be nice to watch the helicopter toying with them, giving them a few metres here and there, and then taking them out in spectacular fireballs which would light up the night. The confrontation took place fifty kilometres from his island, in a waterway between two barren islands.