Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

Up to this point in time we had got used to the idea that politics was a disease that afflicted only Grandpa in the family. The general impression was that he provoked trouble and punishment in order to atone for mistakes he had made as a chief. On Independence Day, October 9, 1962, he got into trouble with some pro-government hooligans and escaped with a shallow stab wound and a broken tooth. In 1966, when the constitution was suspended and a state of emergency was declared, he got into trouble once again. This time it was in a distant village where soldiers had beaten up people for violating the curfew. For his criticism, he was immersed in a cattle dip. Weeks later, he was invited to the same village to mediate between the soldiers and the villagers. Grandma told him not to go. He went anyway. This time he was shot on the way back, the bullet lodged in his leg for the rest of his life.

It was thus a total turnaround when politics seemed to come down hard on Grandma. On the night of January 25, 1971, General Idi Amin, helped by his British and Israeli friends, seized power in a military coup. He overthrew his former benefactor, Milton Obote, the prime minister who had led the country to independence and had gone on to suspend the constitution. General Amin gave eighteen reasons for the coup, among them corruption, detention without trial, lack of freedom of speech and economic mismanagement of the country.

There was dancing, singing and all manner of jubilation in the villages. I personally did not know what to make of it. For some obscure reason, I slept at Grandpa’s that night. A fire woke us up. Fierce ululation led us to Grandma’s compound in a rush. The house had turned into a dugout canoe trapped in a furious sea of pink, blue and red flame. It tottered horribly and wobbled groggily as the waves surged. Doors and windows collapsed with spectacular fatigue, only to be gobbled up by the swirling waves. The iron sheets twisted, as if in terrible pain, and furled into grotesque funnels. Beams undermined by flame broke off and brought the remains of the roof down. Women, mouths agape, hands on the sides of their heads, looked on, shredded screams cascading down their parched lips. Men, paralyzed, dumbfounded, stared impotently. A mangled mass of words boiled inside me, clogging my mouth, condemning me to the asphyxiated grief of a defeated mastiff. Grandma, submerged, twisted, gnarled, grappled with death after forty years of midwifery.

I could think of only one person who could have done this: the man who had tried to chop off Grandma’s head. The coup provided a perfect alibi. A hot yellow stream ran down my leg: I had pissed my pants for the second time in my life.

My life had turned upside down.

THE SEETHING, kidney-shaped bowl functioning as the taxi park had originally been a volcanic hill. During the last active phase two things happened: the hill shattered, creating this valley, and the surrounding valleys were transformed into the seven round-topped hills at the core of the city of Kampala.

As I stood on the rim of the bowl, sniffing dirty whiffs from the notorious Owino Market and exhaust fumes from countless vehicles, Uncle Kawayida’s stories seemed to burst out of the dramatic confines of his imagery into the polychromatic chaos that washed the bowl like a caustic solution. The corroded asphalt, damaged by a million feet and a million tires, vibrated with its eternal burden of travellers, loafers, hawkers, snake charmers and all manner of other nebulous figures, calling to mind the bowl’s early swampy days, before the water was drained or diverted, the vegetation was cut or burned and the animals were displaced or exterminated.

The volcanic fire dormant below and the solar fire blazing from above, the relentless surge of vehicles and all the souls on parade here, turned this vessel of cobwebbed fantasies, this cocoon of termite-ridden ambitions, this lapper of blood and chewer of flesh, into the most fascinating spot in the whole city. My chest swelled when I stood in this brewery of motion, dreams and chaos. I could not help trembling with the electricity of great things to come. I knew that both wonderful and dismal memories were trapped inside the asphalt. Like devil mushrooms, they popped up to give a hint of the past and a taste of the future. Just by looking at the crowd of marauders, van boys, lechers, beggars and other nameless souls adrift here, I felt I was privy to the secrets of things to come. Every visit felt like the first time. It made the air quiver with possibilities.

I witnessed my first live birth here, in the metallic morning air, as the sun rose to pound the bowl into another day of spectacular madness. Suddenly a woman appeared, ejected from the bowels of an anonymous van. The exhaust fumes blew her garments round her midriff, exposing the swollen cavern from which baby after baby dropped. It seemed as though all of the fifty-something babies I had left in the villages had followed me here, to reveal themselves to me in one blinding extravaganza, torment me with their sanitary demands and harass me with the ineluctable power of their presence.

For a moment, the woman was screaming so hard that the whole bowl froze in an eerie silence, and she was racked by so many pangs that her face had the ash-gray serenity of coma. The silence was ripped open by the cry for a midwife or a doctor, somebody who knew what to do. I didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t move. I was trapped by the ballast of a past career as a midwife-assistant, and the fate of a life running in reverse. It was then that a wall of muscle and a forest of legs sealed the images of the alfresco birth from my eyes. I saw blood flowing under and around feet, dodging outcrops, filling depressions and getting picked up by tires and soles for transportation to destinations unknown.

The skyline, gawking with architectural indigence, towered over the bowl like a row of stained, gap-toothed jawbones. The buildings resembled cracked, time-whipped relics from a decayed epoch. The dust-caked walls, the grime-laden windows, the rust-streaked roofs and the prematurely aged ambience fostered disillusionment in my soul. The sheer drabness of shape and the utter paucity of any structural fantasy made me reserve my loyalties for the swamps, villages and hills of my birth. I got the irrepressible feeling that a gang of demented architects, doubly laden with cerebral malaria and tropical torpor, had saddled the city with these monstrosities.

A distance away, sweltering in its diaphanous illusions, stood Nakivubo Stadium, scene of many radio-broadcast football matches. It presented the bowl with its dirty backside, dripping streaks of stale piss and blobs of graffiti. The pylon-borne stadium lights, clustered like the suckers of a giant octopus, overlooked the filthy Nakivubo River, whose cement-corseted waters were the dumping ground of dead dogs and cats.

Towering over the stadium was the Muslim Supreme Council Mosque. Perched on Old Kampala Hill and encased in a fading beige veneer, the mosque was redeemed by its old Arabic grandeur, but doomed by a front view dominated by aging residential estates, home to poor Indians.

On the next hill, Lubaga Catholic Cathedral stood, shrouded in tall, gracious trees and bombastic history, its phallic twin towers flirting with the nippled dome of Namirembe Protestant Cathedral. The old rivalry dated back to 1877 and 1879, when the first Protestant and Catholic missionaries arrived in Uganda. It was a rivalry redolent with the blood spilled in unnecessary religious and political wars. In their search for allies, both factions had periodically turned to pagans and Muslims for support. This part of the city, with its places of worship, its hospitals and schools, was called the Religious Wing.