Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

My late-night discovery taught me one thing: I had to use as much secrecy as the despots did in plotting against me. I had to strike with the padded stealth of a leopard, hiding my tracks as well as my claws. I had to fight their fire by carefully lighting mine in such a way that when both conflagrations met, they would destroy each other without torching the house. I had to act with the stubborn mischief of a pig.

In the village, when you bought a piglet and did not want it to escape, you put it in a gunnysack, which you tied up and carried home. Even then, some piglets did escape when the sty door was left ajar or when the rope on their leg was not properly fastened. They escaped not so much to return to their original homes as to retaliate for the boredom of captivity. The escapees took revenge by eating the neighbors’ crops. Some pigs waited longer: at mating time, sows carried to pedigree pigs escaped and had to be chased around the village. When they were caught and delivered to the males, they twitched out of position, wasted prime sperm and sabotaged the birth of pedigree animals. I was ready to apply some of those pig lessons.

I was restless for days on end, unable to sleep, unable to go to the door to spy again. A wooden stiffness oppressed my chest, crushing down into my abdomen and killing my appetite. On the way home from school, I would go to the taxi park and watch the vans, the travellers and the rootless spirits adrift. I was jostled by youths of my age peddling radio batteries, underwear, exercise books, toothbrushes — anything they could lay their hands on. I was stalked by pickpockets who thought I had pocket money or grocery money with me. I was approached by a phony fortune-teller who promised to divine my future and bless me if I had money to buy his services. I saw con artists leading illiterate peasants to the wrong vans, the wrong vendors and the wrong corners and using colleagues stationed there to rip them off. I saw provocatively dressed women milling around, jiggling their buttocks, twitching their cheeks and doing all they could to catch men’s eyes. I saw women who looked lost, unwilling to ask for help, unwilling to go far in case they got more lost.

I concluded that there was a proliferation of rats in the land, because there was such a variety of rat poison and wire traps. In the village, we used to open dry batteries and mix the carbon inside with fish in order to kill the smell, then put the mixture in a mouse hole or behind coffee sacks for rats to eat and die. Here there were plenty of poison liquids, cakes and powders for killing rats. I had enough money to buy enough poison to kill that giant rat called Padlock, but it was the surviving power of rats that worried me. Rats often ignored poisoned food and jumped wire traps. What if, instead of eating the lethal food herself, Padlock passed it on to one of the shitters? I could not live with that. I probably could not live with Padlock’s death on my conscience either. There was also the police to think about. Padlock never went out, except for mass, and it would not be hard to find out that her poisoning had been a domestic affair.

I looked at the snakes, especially the gleaming cobras which danced and twitched and puffed out their necks when the gap-toothed charmers blew their flutes or whistled. The glittering magnificence of the scales and the black eyes made my chest swell with the temptation to buy one and deposit it in Padlock’s bed. The snakes were fangless and harmless, but maybe she would have a heart attack. Still, I could not see how her death would translate into more freedom or more rights for me, so I walked on.

I smelled rain in the air. The sky was darkening. Heavy clouds hovered above the broken-toothed skyline like vultures and marabou storks. They sealed off the sun, the minaret and the cathedrals on the distant hills. A cold wind bit the skin into goose bumps. The sky collapsed into walls of water, and a stampede erupted.

The deluge rolled into the bowl from the top of Nakasero Hill, sweeping in with the fury of impotent judicial courts and raking the land with the crushing power of mighty army officers. Nakivubo River flooded, regurgitating filth onto its banks, into the roads and onto the nearby shop fronts. Snakes floated in the water, as did a tortoise, a few dogs and a drunkard trapped in the webs of his intoxication. The roar of the water merged with that of the military tanks, rocket launchers and troops involved in the January 25, 1971, coup. Riding on the waves was General Idi Amin.

With the general on my side, I would crush the despots like nuts in a mortar. I saw sodden soldiers combatting the waves as they escorted a high-ranking officer. On their statue-like faces was the fatalism, resignation and utter obedience of worshippers dedicated to the gods of war. It was your head or theirs, when the chips fell. The air trembled with their deadly power, as it had once vibrated with the alfresco delivery of the baby on the asphalt.

If I could recapture the totality of such commitment, and the courage of Grandma at the moment the panga flashed, I would not need poison. I could just walk up to a soldier on patrol and inform him that Padlock and Serenity were Obote sympathizers. They would then be picked up, tossed into a jeep and carried off to the barracks. There they would have their teeth pulled and their backsides massaged with rifle butts or rhino-hide whips. There they would be made to do things outside the realm of even Uncle Kawayida’s story-spinning imagination. But if I called in soldiers, I would not be acting with the stealth of a leopard.

I could, if I wanted, join the State Research Bureau, the organization charged with keeping an eye on things, monitoring the enemies of the state, both actual and potential. I could get the Bureau’s red identity card, and no one would dare to touch me again. I could flash the card at teachers, Serenity, Padlock or anyone else who stood in my way. Armed with that card, I could strike fear into the depths of Padlock’s heart and make her know what it felt like to be at the sharp end of tyranny. There was also the possibility of claiming Lusanani, eloping with her, and daring Hajj Gimbi, or anybody else for that matter, to do something about it. The only problem was that, without Grandma to guide me, power would most likely destroy me. It would seduce me with guns, knives and white-hot threats and catapult me over the edge into vertiginous frenzy. That also would not be striking with the padded paws of a leopard. I put that alternative on hold.

The safest thing to do was to choose Amin as my bodyguard. He was a realist. He never turned the other cheek. He answered love with love, hate with hate, war with war. He was proud to the point of arrogance. Judging from how far he had come, how much he had endured on the way at the hands of the British and of his countrymen, and how patient he had been, his was a deserved pride, a fitting arrogance. This was a man who, unlike many Africans, was not afraid to voice his opinion because he did not fear reprisals, unlike me. He was reprisal itself.

At the Independence Day celebrations that year, he had demonstrated his power. Countless cymbals had ripped the air, countless tubas had farted deep into the stratosphere. He had separated the lake of vapor and sweat with the magnificence of his presence, lulling anxious hearts, soothing doubting minds and massaging parched palates with words of wisdom and the seeds of leadership. Inside him growled the whales of dominance. When he roared, his enemies shivered with the fatigue of crippling defeat. When he smiled, he was a gloomy sky cut by razors of lightning. When he rewarded his cohorts, he surpassed the multiplier of loaves and fishes by multiplying cars, mansions, high-powered jobs, money. I knew it: He was the baby I saw popping onto the asphalt. He was the baby born to rise like a mountain, flow like a thousand rivers and die a thousand deaths. My second guardian angel had materialized.