Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

The most remarkable change regarded security: one could sleep at night without fear of getting killed by robbers, raiders, soldiers or unknown people. One could travel and stay out late. The roadblocks were tough but fair; there was no stealing or raping going on. The people gained confidence in the new government, and their expectations rose. At first, sleeping peacefully at night was enough. Now they found out that you cannot sleep peacefully on an empty stomach or without knowing what has happened to your home, your people, your history. Those who had come from the Triangle wanted to go back; those who had people there wanted to know what had happened to them. They all made excursions to their ghost towns and came back depressed. Their old homes had no roofs or windows or doors, and the dead lay where they had fallen. The shrines of their gods had been desecrated, and there was a big lacuna between the past they knew and the present that faced them.

The task of reconstruction was enormous. The government promised to help devastated areas, but the help did not come quickly enough. People with money decided to go it alone. They bought building materials, transported them to the Triangle on rickety pickup vans and rebuilt their houses. Most waited, going there only to do a little work like digging and clearing the yards.

I sponsored Jo’s journeys to the Triangle but refused to accompany her. After each visit, she would come back feeling sad. Her former school lay in ruins. She wanted to be part of the restoration process, but the government was finding it hard to provide the necessary materials. It bothered her a lot that so much had been destroyed. She could hardly understand or let it go. She would go on endless tirades about why it should not have happened, going back to Obote II, Amin, Obote I, up to the colonial government and its local agents. She blamed all Ugandans, all colonialists, all arms manufacturers and dealers and dumpers. She blamed the hatred and the indifference and the inequality that made all this possible, until I either ran out of the house or shouted at her to stop. The tirades helped her to jettison her frustration, but they ended up getting on my nerves and making me ponder things I preferred to leave frozen.

Aunt was still waiting for her reward. She frequently went to the city to meet the brigadier, who was organizing the guerrilla forces into a regular army. He had promised to help her set up a business by recommending her for a low-interest loan from the bank. He asked her to marry him. She said that she would think about it; she had never thought about marriage after her adolescent fiasco with the veterinary officer. He gave her a ring. She at first wore it shyly, and her friends made jokes about it, but she took it in her stride. To start with, she was given the task of organizing women. She set up clubs and held meetings. She worked very hard, and she was as happy as I had ever seen her.

All this time, I had been wondering where Lwendo was. It was months since the takeover. I went to the city and inquired at the cathedral whether he was still in the seminary. He had been expelled. When? At around the time when the country was cut in two. A month later, a military jeep came to SIMC while I was away, and a soldier asked to see me. He refused to leave a message. A week later, Lwendo came. He was clad in military fatigues. He was a second lieutenant now. We embraced. He had learned my whereabouts from a former schoolmate. There was so much catching up to do. The underlying question was, was it curiosity that had impelled Lwendo to come, or was there something else? It was more than curiosity. He wanted me to join him. In what capacity? As semi-spy, semi-ombudsman. I was shocked. It did not make much sense. I had left the seminary to escape dictatorship, and I was not going to get involved with military or security agency dictators. He reassured me that we would be working for an individual, a big boss in government whose task was to fight corruption. I detected clericalism, and sure enough, the man was an ex-priest. It was the reason he had been put in charge of rehabilitation and reconstruction: Catholics still had a reputation for honesty. But what about me, and my former mate Lwendo? I could detect the danger: What would the people whose corrupt plans we would be sabotaging do? Would they try to bribe us or attempt to pop us off? I rejected his offer. I had a good income. What reason had I to get involved in such dangerous stuff? I changed the subject of conversation. I wanted to hear his personal story.

Lwendo was an orphan. He never knew his real parents. He had been brought up by a kind Catholic couple with a big family as one of their children. It was while he was in the seminary that he discovered that his benefactors were not his real parents. By then, they had mapped out his life for him: he had to become a priest, help the needy and repay God for what He had done for him. Lwendo had never liked the idea: his childhood dream had been to join the air force and fly planes. His benefactors could not entertain such un-Catholic vanity. His misbehavior in the seminary had been geared by his resentment of the choice his benefactors had made for him, and the feeling that he had no way out.

After my departure, he had soldiered on. By the time guerrilla activity started, he was in the major seminary, but the regimen was harder than he had anticipated. He quickly got fed up with the place and the staff. He started playing truant and flirting with girls when he went out for pastoral work. He opposed priests in the open. He asked sharp questions about the existence of God and gave political speeches. To work everybody up properly, he supported the Uganda People’s Congress and the actions of the Obote II government in the Luwero Triangle. When asked about the killings, he quoted the old Biblical line: “All authority comes from God.” He also referred to the time of the Crusades, when the Church waged genocidal wars. The conclusion many priests drew was that he had no vocation. Others defended him, seeing his attitude as residual adolescent rebellion, which would wear off. He was warned to change his ways and pay respect to the fathers and stop political agitation. He refused. They set spies on him. He was caught returning late to campus one evening. He was expelled.

At that point, Lwendo had two options: to go home, across Lake Victoria, or to stay in the liberated areas. Home: Where was his home? Would his benefactors receive him well? If so, what was he going to do in the troubled city? He had no job, no money, no immediate prospects. The theological education he had garnered could only land him on the sidelines of teacherdom or in some function related to religion, which he was not ready to countenance. Above all, the stories that trickled into the liberated areas from the city, with a dose of good old exaggeration, said that people were dying like flies at the hands of desperate government soldiers. Having tasted the relative peace and order reigning in the liberated areas, he was not ready to face whatever lay on the other side.

He decided to stay and join the guerrillas. Already he knew the ex-priest called Major Padre or simply Padre by all, who was a prominent personality in the guerrilla movement in that area. He had visited the seminary twice, trying to sell guerrilla ideology to the priests and seminarians. In what to many seemed like a strange ideological turnaround, Lwendo had been the only seminarian to express interest in his message and to hail the guerrillas for fighting the murderous regime. The ex-priest had given him a faded visiting card, the only one he gave away on both occasions, because the others were uninterested. Not one to hold back, Lwendo used the card as his talisman, and boasted to fellow seminarians that he was the only one with vision.