Moses Isegawa: Snakepit

“Do you mean to say that you have never thought of killing me?” he would roar. He would go on till he had forced a confession out of her and then say, “If you kill me, my soldiers will burn the whole town to the ground.”

He would take a rifle and start shooting in the back garden till the whole place smelled of gunpowder and was filled with smoke. He would enter the house and spit on the barrel to show how hot it had become. He pressured her till she reached snapping point, ready to do anything to improve the situation. Then he announced his plans to her, saying: “I saw the killer instinct in you the first time I saw you. You are going to make a perfect decoy. You are going to rise to the top of the Bureau. Everybody is going to bow down to you. The Bureau needs beauties like you. It is too full of ugly men and unsightly women. Hold your position and they will eat your shit. If you show them fear, they will make you eat theirs, and you don’t want that to happen. Every time you feel afraid, think about your father. Avenge him.” Afterwards his mood would change and he would cuddle and tickle her. Through her tears she would start laughing, grateful that the danger had passed.

After the coup of 1971 he took her to a training camp where she stayed for months and they tried to break her down and reprogramme her. They began by shaving off her hair, burning her clothes on a bonfire and giving her military fatigues. Her name was replaced by a number. They verbally abused her, the word “turd” being one of the softer varieties of insult they hurled at her. They exhausted her body and mind with tough military drills till she felt like fainting. Food was deplorable, accommodation even worse. Trainees were made to sleep in holes for days, to camp in bushes. They chanted Amin’s praise songs like mantras for hours on end, and they were made to pledge undying love and loyalty to him. At the end of the course they took the oath of obedience and allegiance at a graduation parade attended by army officers and the State Research Bureau’s bigwigs, and were let loose on the world.

If Victoria thought she would get off lightly, she was wrong. Her first assignment was to frame a woman doctor, accusing her of supplying drugs to dissidents. She knew that it was a test to see if she could do in a fellow southerner. By taking the oath she had already crossed the line, and all she had to do now was to bury her conscience, that feeble agitator, under an avalanche of rage. One evening they attacked the woman who was going to die “while attempting to escape.” She and her two children were made to lie on the floor. She was then dragged to the bedroom, made to cough up every cent and valuable item, and was shot. For Victoria there was a burst of fear, then euphoria. There was a flashback to her days of victimhood and a feeling of freedom and of being above both divine and human law. The sweetness of unreason drowned out any feelings of guilt. The woman’s body stopped twitching and groaning; silence descended like a curtain; the gun smoke drifted; the drug wore off slowly. The partial deafness Victoria felt was a salient reminder that something had happened. Now and then the blast of the guns seemed to be banging in her head like trapped thunderclaps.

The Colonel, shortly afterwards promoted to major-general, was delighted and took her back to the city. He found her a job with the Ministry of Works. As lovers, they were finished, although he still kept an eye on her. Victoria endured periods of personal hell: diarrhoea, black-outs, searing pains, flashbacks. She tried to erase it all with alcohol, in vain. She realized that the General had used her and then cut her loose. She wanted somebody to talk to but could not trust anyone. She thought about running away, but where could she hide? The General’s spies were everywhere and if caught she would most certainly be killed.

As the situation deteriorated, she pined for somebody to love. Her failure to save her father still dogged her. She wanted a man to reassure her that she was still human. She was tired of not being able to hold on to anything of value. She wanted a child although she doubted whether it would happen. Certainly not with the intellectuals, traders and bureaucrats she was sent to lure to death or destruction. The more she thought about it all, the more she believed that Bat was her godsent deliverer.

BY RISING to the heights many had expected him to attain, Bat had become a force in his family. He attracted visits from relatives who travelled to the city in search of jobs, loans, recommendations and connections. He did all he could to deal with this new popularity. He thought about investing money and using the profits to help such people and about involving his brother and sister in the scheme. But when he approached them, he met with disappointment. His sister was too busy with her nursing job to take on any other responsibility, and his brother had no interest in a regular job. He earned his living by exploding fireworks at wedding feasts and, when he felt like it, he repaired cars and nursed dreams of participating in the East African Safari Rally. Bat tried to talk to him but failed to change his mind. He felt angry with and afraid for his young brother. He finally scrapped the project, having reached the conclusion that business did not run in the family.

Not long after, he received the news that his sister had found a suitor. It struck him that she had grown up and was no longer a girl to be protected and told what to do. The news seemed to ambush him, and when she came to inform him in person, he found it hard to be genuinely cheerful. The fact that the suitor was a former clerk turned town planner left him reeling.

“Town planner?” he said, shaking his head a few times and almost whistling with sadness. “In this day and age! Most towns are just shrinking and dying. The few that are expanding are doing so without plan, spontaneously like a colony of mushrooms. What is he left to do?”

His sister, whom everybody in the family, including Bat’s parents, called Sister because from the age of five she said she would become a nursing sister in the biggest hospital in the country, calmly, almost emphatically, said, “It is his occupation.”

Bat had always assumed that she would marry among his former schoolmates, university graduates turned lawyers, doctors, heads of parastatal or private companies. There was also the Professor with his sickly wife. Maybe he would divorce and marry Sister. Bat felt that Sister owed it to herself to get a man who would look after her capably. She seemed to have thought about it too, and perversely settled for this town planner, a time-waster in Bat’s book. It is his occupation, Bat thought unhappily. Accepted, full stop. No room for argument or compromise. Take it or leave it, Big Brother. He had already lost her to this mediocre man. He suddenly felt very distant from Sister, all past warmth and affection eaten by a blaze of anger, the goodwill turned rancid.

“Where do you plan to live?” he asked for lack of something better to say in these matters of the heart, of feeling, and of little logic.

“We plan to move to the country after the wedding. The need for nurses is acute in rural areas.”

Where no sane person wants to go, Bat wanted to say, where you shouldn’t waste your talent and energy, where career chances are dim. How about living in one of the towns the bastard planned to build out of ether? I always had the perception that you were dynamic, visionary, calculating, but the evidence here is different, demoralizing. I see resignation with the missionary spirit thrown in to sweeten it up. Are you so deep under the influence of that old narcotic, love? Has it juggernauted and crushed your judgement out of shape?

At Cambridge, I wrote you a few letters telling how tough my financial situation was, how rich some students were, how I had to wash dishes to make ends meet. I had not written out of self-pity but as a warning about the dangers of poverty. Now it is evident that you took nothing to heart and don’t see marriage as an investment. You obviously have other values. You probably despise me for working with scum as I do in order to break the yoke of poverty.