Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

I was becoming more convinced that the afterbirth of war was in ways worse than the actual fighting itself, and that winning the peace was harder than winning the war. Now the guns were silent and the howling of ghosts had taken over, interspersed with the sighs of the survivors, most of whom could not wait to reclaim their land; but the gaps in the silence were punctuated with a sense of anti-climax, a certain lack of direction.

Luwero and Nakaseke were sister towns bound together by the guerrilla war and past history. To get to the latter, you had to pass by the former. At the beginning of the war, both had housed thousands of people and had been fertilized by hinterlands of tens of thousands who brought money and goods. Luwero, the survivor, was showing signs of life with a growing population; Nakaseke, the unlucky sister, was yet to get over the rape, pillage and scars of the fierce fighting she had witnessed. Luwero struck you as a surprise, for, having seen stalls of skulls along the main road, you almost expected to find a mountain of them at the town gates, yet there were none. Nakaseke, on the other hand, struck the imagination as a tragedy, for it emerged from the rich forests, marshes and sprawling grasslands with the halo of a martyr. Her returnees fended for themselves, building temporary structures near the old town or moving into the surrounding villages to await government help and a hard road to recovery.

“What a lucky bastard I am!” Lwendo exclaimed. “I can’t imagine the hardship those who fought in these sodden areas experienced.”

We had travelled from Luwero on an old Toyota pickup van loaded to twice its capacity, and we were bumped black and blue. I didn’t want to think about what these people had gone through, because I didn’t want to think of the village of my birth. I was a tourist here. I had come to check a few documents, after which I would leave as soon as possible. The leaders of the people trying to dig this town from the ashes had stayed here throughout the war and had witnessed the grimmest skirmishes, but said little of their experiences.

“Bygones are bygones,” one told Lwendo, who had been trying to get details out of them.

They led us on a tour of the town, showing us where the soldiers had camped on different occasions, where they used to torture people, and where they had positioned their guns on the day they bombed the town for the final time.

“We were like traffic wardens observing and sometimes directing very dangerous traffic,” the leader said.

“It’s unfair,” Lwendo said later. “The war zone should have been called the Nakaseke instead of the Luwero Triangle.”

“Some people have all the luck,” I replied.

The drama of war had ended, leaving behind the harrowing task of putting it into words for later use. Our job finished, Lwendo and I could not wait to return to Kampala. The dead of Nakaseke would have to keep themselves company a little longer. As I watched the towns along the main road flying past, their stalls of skulls, gaping roofs and hidden histories a blur, I was excited. The city was where I belonged.

I was happy that the first mission had gone well, but when I considered what we were going to be paid for it, I became sad: people working so hard and dealing with so much responsibility and temptation deserved more. Officially, they were paying us a hundred dollars a month, a tenth of my brewery earnings. I kept seeing huge bales of new blankets, glittering bolts of virgin iron sheets, warehouses full of cement. I knew that I was back to where I had started: we were going to either convert these to money, or malinger.

It took me a few days to get over my Triangle experience. When I saw the one Triangle girl I intended to keep on seeing, I felt she had edited her story a great deal. She had probably seen more death and destruction than she admitted. I wanted to penetrate her mind and get to her secret. Had Jo told me everything? No, she had not. Her daughter had probably died in the fighting or in flight, dropped in a river, claimed by fever or crushed by stampeding feet. It was also possible that Jo had no daughter, and it was the death of many girls in her area that had impregnated her with the fantasy. We all walked around with skeletons rattling in our cupboard-like souls, editing carefully what we revealed, depending on whom we were talking to. We always second-guessed our audience and told them what they wanted to hear, or what would cause the least damage or best enhance our image.

The first deliveries went well. We went back to Nakaseke and found the goods there. The people were happy. They thanked us as if we had supplied them from our own private stock. Some had already begun repairing their houses. The sound of hammers falling on wood, the chatter of excited builders and the glowing eyes of expectant women touched something in us. People were back in their old ways: doing things for and by themselves. The general feeling was that the dead had not died for nothing, the living had much to look forward to and the children had a future.

Things started changing around the fifth mission. First we travelled to Kakiri, a small town on Hoima Road, and to a few other places, surveying both the damage and the needs. That went well, and the journey was less arduous. In a few weeks’ time, we understood that the goods had been delivered: bales and bales of blankets and truckfuls of cement. At the Ministry of Rehabilitation, we were shown the papers. When we returned to Kakiri and the other places, though, cooperation was slim. All signs were that only part of the goods had been delivered. Someone in this little hollowed-out town knew something but did not want to talk. We had to go back to the source. In Kampala, we managed to get reliable records in duplicate. We went to Radio Uganda, and our contact filled in the gaps. He was always a step ahead. I kept wondering which spy organization he was part of.

It transpired that a truckful of goods had been sold to the Kibanda Boys, our own version of the mafia. They had begun with currency speculation in the early eighties. Now they had taken over business operations in Kikuubo, a strip of old Indian shops and warehouses between the bus park and Luwum Street, and were moving from strength to strength.

Kikuubo was crawling with people, traders and customers jostling one another in the narrow street in which Tata trucks were being unloaded. Lines of naked-torsoed young men were being loaded with bags of cement, sugar and salt, bolts of cloth and iron sheets and taking them inside warehouses behind grubby-looking shops. Looks misled: this was serious business. Instead of expanding Indian shops, the Mafia had chosen to use the warehouses and garages as shop fronts. It saved money, and considering how brisk business was, it was obviously a smart idea. Facilities were bad — hardly any toilets existed — but then traders and customers came here to make money, not calls.

Our target was, in City Council terms, an illegal structure: a garage converted into a shop front. We asked for Oyota, and a big, fat man in shorts appeared, eating corn on the cob. Lwendo had brought a gun with him. He had not allowed me to handle it. The only thing I knew was that it was heavy and loaded. The man invited us to the back of the shop, a dark little cubicle we found piled with money: heaps of local currency and stacks of American dollars. Lwendo swallowed hard. My palms itched.

“We would like to search your warehouse, sir,” Lwendo said.

“No one is allowed to do that.”

“We have a search warrant.”

“What are you looking for?”

“That’s our business,” Lwendo said nonchalantly.

“You cannot just walk into my shop and ask to see my stock. I can call security, or one of the chiefs running this area.”