Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

At that time, in my early twenties, when I started teaching, I was making in one week the money a secondary school teacher made in a year. The government paid a teacher the equivalent of about $20 a month, calculated at the government exchange rate, which was many times lower than the black market, or kibanda, rate. That salary was only enough to buy groceries for a week, which meant that teachers had to do other jobs or find supplementary income. In some schools, the parent-teacher association supplemented the salary, but not by much. I got about $30 a month. By then the business had expanded, and I was netting a profit of about $1,000 a month from it.

I was seeing a number of teenage girls at the same time. I preferred teenagers, because older women wanted children as a way of ensuring commitment, for which I was not ready. My only worry was venereal diseases, especially the mysterious new type which slimmed people to the bones before they died in pools of green diarrhea and hellish sweat. The girls floated into my life as casually as the stories they told. Some claimed to have lost all their relatives in government mop-up operations. Others said their families had split up when guerrillas entered their areas. Yet more said they had seen their parents and brothers and sisters get shot. Most claimed to have hidden in the bush while their relatives and friends got killed. I believed them all, in a guilty kind of way, and accommodated their wishes because I could afford to. Some used my money to help family members pay their rent and buy food and clothes. Others spent it on drink and personal effects. Still others claimed they sent financial help to relatives still locked in the Triangle. I enjoyed playing the role of generous benefactor on one hand and spoiled lover on the other.

In the meantime, it was getting hotter in the Luwero Triangle. The government was doing a lot of shopping. The Koreans, who had made their first appearance on Serenity’s Toshiba as trapeze artists, supplied the army with Katyusha rockets, which boomed and burned areas suspected of harboring guerrillas. The government boasted that the guerrillas were finished, and for some time nothing was heard of them. Some of the jobless boys who had planned to join them changed their minds. Aunt was scared. She told me that the brigadier was ill. I surmised that he had got shot. British helicopter gunships worked together with the Katyushas to clean the forests and grasslands of the fighters. Infantry troops were sent in afterward. A scorched-earth policy was in full swing, but I did not know which areas were affected, because the Triangle kept changing, contracting and expanding like a birth canal.

Hundreds of fighters and people accused by the government of being guerrillas — scrawny, bearded, ragged stick people — were transported into Kampala and shown at a government rally at the city square. It was claimed that their leaders had abandoned them and fled to Europe. If this was true, it concerned only one of the small guerrilla groups; the main force, including the brigadier, was still intact, hiding somewhere in the mysterious Triangle. The army kept up the pressure; the politicians were happy, the people anxious.

At about the same time, Aunt had two very narrow escapes. A man we knew to be a guerrilla came to town in broad daylight. A government spy tipped off the army, and soon plainclothesmen arrived. They were suddenly all over town. The man was surrounded in a fenced bungalow used now and then by National Reform Movement guerrillas, the largest group in the Triangle. He was ordered to come out, but he refused. He shot at the soldiers through the main gate, killing one and wounding another. The house was rocket-grenaded. Aunt had left only minutes before, with a jerry can of water on her head.

The second time, the army closed in on the market and checked everybody for identity cards. Three guerrillas were there at the time: two men and a boy. The boy panicked because he had no identity card. Aunt told the army officer in charge that the boy was her cousin. The officer asked people in the market whether they knew the boy as Aunt’s cousin. Silence. Until one of the guerrillas said that it was true. The boy was taken aside all the same. The officer wanted to know why he was so scrawny. Aunt explained that he had been on the run in the “danger zone.” “Then he is a guerrilla.” Aunt denied this vehemently, going into detail about innocent people who had been caught in the cross fire and had to flee hundreds of kilometers before coming to a safe haven. She said that this was the boy’s safe haven and that she would die for him if the need arose. “The boy can take no more.” “Of course everybody can take a little more,” the officer replied, smiling. Everybody was eyeing the officer and Aunt rather warily. Many believed that Aunt was going to bring trouble to the whole town, but the officer wanted to paint a benign picture of the army. They were not all compulsive killers. They could be reasonable. He slapped the boy on the cheek and told him to go.

Aunt was genuinely shaken for about a week. She had recruited the boy herself. She had also warned the trio not to appear that day, but they had disregarded her warning. They needed money very badly in order to transport some medicine they had stolen from a small hospital somewhere on the edge of the Triangle. Nowadays, Aunt financed a limited range of guerrilla activity with some of the money we made from Boom-boom Brewery. After the two narrow escapes, I thought she was going to take a long break. Wishful thinking. On the eighth day, she was back on duty, supplying information, helping guerrillas on their way to the city and recruits going to their appointed venues.

Newcomers from the Triangle, driven out by the Katyushas and the helicopters, reassured people that the guerrillas were still alive — their silence was a ruse — but the government spokesman continued to say that the “bandits,” as he called them, were finished. Then, as if to counter his claims, the guerrillas shot down a helicopter carrying the leading military operations officer and his entourage somewhere deep in the Triangle. The government reported the deaths almost a week later. The army was back on the run, suffering a morale crisis. The guerrillas captured some of the Katyushas and killed a good number of the Koreans who were manning them. The rest of the Korean mercenaries cleared out. The army was now on its own. The British instructors never participated in the fighting, and the army had to deal with its fears of the bush, the guerrillas and the people by itself. More military hardware continued to arrive from Britain, Belgium, the USA and Eastern Europe, but the army gained no great advantage. A string of humiliating broad-daylight attacks kept them dancing on hot coals.

For my teaching duties, I chose Sam Igat Memorial College, a newly founded secondary school crammed into two long buildings and a two-story flat. It was the brainchild of the crafty Rev. Igat. An Obote supporter, he used his political friends to persuade CARE and other relief groups to put up the long buildings as a memorial for his thirty-year-old son, who was killed during Amin’s time. The government, eager to help create schools outside the city for poor children, gave the college a grant and its blessing to get going. By virtue of its location, eight kilometers from the city center, the school had good teachers and plenty of students, but organization was its greatest problem. The good reverend did his best to meddle in the affairs of the school, in order to safeguard his position as its founder and owner. He wanted to appoint or approve headmasters and make them do what he wanted. For a long time he sabotaged the founding of a parent-teacher association because he feared that it would overpower him. Consequently, the growth of the school was blocked by the very man who claimed to love it to death. If a teacher or headmaster became very influential, the reverend would spread rumors to the effect that the individual was a child molester or an embezzler or a guerrilla supporter. The last accusation being commensurate with a death sentence, many of these individuals fled his school rather than risk the consequences.