Moses Isegawa: Snakepit

Victoria came from a well-to-do family of textile importers. Her mother and father used to work together. They had been good parents, ever generous and attentive to her needs. Sunday used to be the highlight of the week. Everybody in the family would dress smartly and head for church, where her parents had special seats at the front, since they were pillars in the local Protestant community. Her father’s family was well read: there was a doctor and a judge. Her aunts had married powerful men. At school she had suffered from a lack of motivation; it seemed as if there was little to struggle for. Her looks proved to be another distraction, as she believed that she was better than everybody else. She found it hard to apply herself to the duty at hand when her looks fetched her so much attention. Discipline became a problem and it was easy to cheat. Her father urged her to work harder, and she lived with the fear that he would find out that she cheated. In between, she dreamed of wealth, a house in the hills, and holidays abroad.

Then an incident to do with her parents’ business turned her life upside down. Customs officials found a box of rifles in a container of imported fabric. Her parents knew nothing about the guns. Her father was arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned. Expensive lawyers failed to secure his release and the business suffered. Letters of credit were withdrawn. Her mother was threatened and she finally closed the business, with the belief that they would reopen as soon as her husband was freed, since he knew no failure. He never got out and the family had to move. Victoria was devastated. She fell into the company of bold but aimless girls, who went out with older men who drove Boomerangs and Euphorias, and had money to spare and appetites to satisfy. One such man took her virginity. She enjoyed the money but hated the wrinkles and the paunches and her self-hatred grew.

In the midst of her pain and confusion, she met Colonel Bazooka. She waved down his Boomerang one day and was surprised to see a soldier in a crisp, medal-festooned uniform. She was struck by the lean, disciplined, affluent air he had, and she could see that he was different from other men she knew. He was a northerner to begin with, a creature of people’s fears and prejudices.

He liked her youth, her looks, her boldness and her spoiled manner. She was a southern dream. He was used to picking these girls up, but there was something about this one, a connection they made somewhere in the gut or the brain. Under her brittle shield of boldness was aimlessness, a yearning to be led and moulded. The defencelessness, the emptiness, and the loss showed behind the eyes. The head of the Armed Robbery Cracking Unit never failed to read the signs. He had a highly developed sixth sense, which was the very reason why he was still alive. The affair went on for months, and the more he feigned disinterest, the more she surrendered to him. Her mother finally found out about them. Ground to a pulp by worry, she handled it in the way she knew best. She issued an ultimatum. Drop the soldier or cease to be part of the family, she said.

“How could you do this to us? How could you do that to your father? A soldier! A northerner! Have you no sense of who you are?”

Victoria replied that there was no longer any family since her father’s disappearance. She further made the naïve mistake of betraying her mother to her lover, and the head of the Armed Robbery Cracking Unit exploded with anger.

“Who does she think she is? Doesn’t she know who the boss is in this city?”

“Don’t take any notice of her, please,” she begged, down on her knees.

“Your people are living too far back in the past. We, the military, are the new royalty, the kings and princes. We do what we want. Your people should get that into their thick heads. The very same people who sold out to the British and let their king and their chiefs lead them to oblivion, but still have the nerve to feel superior! I will teach them a lesson.”

“Please don’t do anything to her, I beg you.”

“Are you telling me what to do? You! Are you like the rest of your family?”

“No, I am not. I just don’t want anything to happen to them,” she said with tears streaming down her face.

“Get out of my sight before I cuff you,” he roared, his eyes popping out of his head.

Something did eventually happen to Victoria’s family. They were attacked by men in civilian clothes driving an unmarked Euphoria. They were beaten, stripped of every penny, made to beg for their lives and warned to leave the city as soon as possible. They disappeared in the maze of villages in the countryside and never returned.

Colonel Bazooka took Victoria and there she was, confused as children of privilege are when deserted by fortune, defenceless in a hostile world without a road map or course of action. He found it thrilling to roll brats like her in the gutters that they believed destiny had spared them from and set apart for the others. He had done it time and again and it still felt good. At this juncture he revealed that he was happily married to a tribes-woman with whom he had three beautiful children. She was deeply hurt as, no matter what she did, a good Protestant girl eventually got married to a man in a monogamous relationship, as concubinage was both sinful and sacrilegious. Her confusion and guilt came out in the urge to compete, to be what he wanted her to be, in the hope that she would supplant the first wife, whom she imagined to be old and worn out. What she did not know was that there was no competition. Wife Number One was unassailable. Queen to all latecomers, she got first priority in everything.

For a time they lived in a senior army quarter. On weekends they would go out to drink, as he enjoyed showing her off. During the week she kept house, which she did badly due to lack of experience. The food got burned and she cut her fingers and she did not know how long to cook the meat or how to wash clothes properly. He realized that violence would not achieve anything and he hired help.

He had a plan worked out for her. If she conceived, he would keep her as a second wife to bear him children with some southern blood in them. If she remained barren, he would enroll her in the State Research Bureau and use her as a decoy. He would only have to anger her to unleash the beast inside. A beautiful decoy would do wonders trapping rampant southern subversives.

To start with, he began to reveal to her what he did. He told her about army operations to curb robbery. He told her the number of people he had killed, how interrogation and extraction of information proceeded. He frightened the hell out of her because till then she had a black-and-white picture of good and evil wherein she believed deep down that bad people were totally bad and good people totally good.

After a year without her conceiving, his patience ran out. He had risen higher and was now in charge of the South-western Region, and his sense of power had reached mammoth proportions. He took her to different towns, and she saw how both civilians and soldiers respected and feared him. There was something mesmerizing about his demeanour. He was like a god, an apparition, a natural phenomenon. He enjoyed the adulation, and in his good moments he said that she had brought him good luck. In his bad moments, however, he accused her of being barren. He asked her if she was doing it intentionally so as not to have a child with a northerner.

“I need a child before I die. I have many enemies. I want to make sure that when the moment comes, I have a successor. There are big plans ahead with very bad odds. I don’t want them to proceed before you are pregnant.”

The gynaecologist found nothing wrong with her. The Colonel started having violent outbursts, wearing her down to a frazzle. He made her confess to earlier affairs and said that her earlier looseness made her barren. He started using military tactics to intimidate and control her. He would ask for tea and then smash the cup against the wall saying it had been dirty. He tinkered with guns, putting the barrel in his mouth and firing empty chambers. She would plead and cry and beg, but he would ignore her and continue firing away. When she was almost out of her mind, he would open the clip and drop the only bullet on the floor. Sometimes he asked her to pull the trigger when the gun was in his mouth.