Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

My association with Cane had its origin in my letter-writing days. I had helped him write a few letters to girls he desired. Two had fallen into his net, but he never paid me. He just promised to be of use much later. Cane was big, tall, dark, with a conspiratorial charm that left you convinced, or pretending to be convinced, even if you nursed serious reservations. We, his classmates, both admired and feared him because he was a northerner, born somewhere in the harsh northern Ugandan plains, abandoned by his father, a soldier, at a tender age and raised by his mother, who had followed the great asphalt road south to Kampala. Like Uncle Kawayida’s mother, she sold food and anything else she could lay her hands on in order to support herself and her son. What a strapping young man he was! Cane bubbled with the angry confidence born of hatred and too much familiarity with society’s underbelly. He had an opinion on practically everything. He used to say to the majority of us, who were from the central region, “It was not the British who messed up this country; it was your sycophantic forebears, your greedy chiefs and your king who finally sold the country to Obote.” Reared on loyalty, most of us were surprised that he was openly criticizing his fellow northerner Obote. “And those who sold to Obote might as well have sold to Amin. So please don’t moan when things go bad. Take your punishment like real men.” Unable to figure out what side he was on, we usually kept quiet.

For a long time Cane disorganized Grandpa’s political dissertations in my head and almost dislodged them. That I had memorized most of them without really understanding them was an additional problem. I could not analyze them. As soon as I tried to take them apart, they crumbled like rotten paper, but by and by I asked myself the right questions: Did Cane mean that if our chiefs had not been divided — Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, pagans — they would have stopped the spread of British colonial rule and imperialism? Did we, at the turn of the century, have military superiority over British forces in the East African region? What about Captain Lugard’s machine guns? No, Cane was wrong; the British would have come in anyway. The chiefs were minor players in the drama. I would have liked to ask Grandpa some of Cane’s questions, and taken Cane’s side just to tease the old man, but I was not allowed to visit him.

Cane was also our sex educator. He introduced us to the world of pornographic magazines. He had an uncle in the army who smuggled them into the country from Kenya. For the first time in my life, I knew what those white nuns looked like without their habits — some models resembled them so much that I at first thought they were sisters or the same people. Most models were not pale, but gold-brownish like sponge cakes. Others resembled mulattos or half-caste children born of Indian and African parents. We had many questions to ask Cane. How did the magazine makers collect all those beauties? None of them was obese or ugly or unattractive in any way, so how did they get them to pose naked, bums in the air like grasshoppers, glistening pink lips beckoning, brown assholes peeping? Were these people for real, or were we seeing dolls? How unfortunate that Grandpa was old: he should have seen this.

I was privileged to examine the magazines as much as I wanted. Other, less fortunate voyeurs had to pay, in cash or kind. Cane also brought booklets with titles like All You Need to Know About Sex and The Complete Sex Handbook. Cane loved to watch our reactions as I read passages, surrounded by a group of eager faces. There were intriguing words like “penis,” “sperm,” “semen,” “vulva,” “vagina,” which Cane made us recite, but which he refused to explain. He was also not good at answering questions. Everyone wanted to know the difference between a vulva and a vagina, sperm and semen, but he refused to elucidate.

It was Cane who told me why Padlock had knocked me out on the red-ink-patch day. “Mothers pretend that they don’t bleed, those fakers,” he said, laughing. I was too angry to laugh. “And you should hear the childish, sniveling noises they make when they are being fucked.” He guffawed and slapped me on the shoulder in the process.

When we went back to the group, he said, “All your mothers get fucked every night, except when they are bleeding. Your fathers pour their … in your mothers’ …” He made us fill in the missing words. Somebody wanted to know how fathers poured their … in our mothers’ … Somebody suggested that they used spoons or funnels. Cane almost slapped him; he couldn’t believe that we were so ignorant.

Cane was not afraid of teachers, and he took special pleasure in teasing female teachers who acted tough with pupils. In fact, that was how he got the name Cane, because he used to tell them, “Cane me, bitch.” The first woman to fall for it caned him till she started sweating and wet patches appeared in her armpits and between her breasts. She finally gave up. Cane liked lying on the floor for the strokes, and when he got up, he usually had a big erection. He would stand there with arms akimbo, his penis pushing against his fly like a big impatient rat. Female teachers soon learned their lesson. Nowadays, they referred him to the headmaster or to their male colleagues.

I met Cane on the way to school and introduced my problem. He patted me on the back and said it was nothing. In class he tore a precious page out of a porno magazine on which a golden-haired, blue-eyed girl was sitting on a chair, legs apart. He tore a blank page from an exercise book, folded it in two and sketched the head of the biology teacher, accentuating her hairdo, her nose and her lips. He pasted the sketch over the head of the girl. He glued the picture onto the blackboard.

The teacher found the class rumbling with juicy murmurs, which died down as soon as she appeared. She entered the room, put her bag on her chair, surveyed the blackboard and got a massive attack of nerves. “Wh-wh-who?”

“I did,” Cane said from the back, double-bass booming.

“Why?”

“Isn’t it funny, mistress?”

“Remove this dirt from my blackboard, and get out of my class. Stay out for the rest of the month.”

“I prefer to be caned, mistress,” Cane said very calmly.

We almost burst out laughing; our hero was going to show her a full-blooded erection, our erection, our riposte. Oh, the gutsy sensation of it!

“I said get out.”

“Please, mistress, cane me, cane me, please.”

“Out, out, out!” she screamed.

“Cane me, cane me, bitch.”

We roared, striking our desks with excitement. Tears flowed from the corners of our eyes. Cane was our avenger. How we loved the humiliation of this big-breasted bully! Normally, she didn’t hesitate to use the cane and to make you fetch ten buckets of water and pour it in the grass in front of the classroom, but Cane was untouchable.

In his own good time, Cane sauntered to the front, looked the teacher over, collected his picture and left. The dramatic effect of it! However, misgiving was ticking in my breast: Was this what I was supposed to do with Padlock? Cane was swarmed at lunchtime, but he ignored his admirers. He beckoned me and my Treasure Island friend, whom everyone called Island, to follow him. As the school compound quivered with noise and color and the sun hovered above us all like a ball of fire and brimstone, we cut across the football field. Two terraces lower was “the ring,” the sand patch where long-jumpers practiced and our fighters grappled in no-holds-barred confrontations. We were swallowed by the cassava trees and elephant grass. Whipped by the dry wind, the bushes crackled and rustled, their sharp blades tickling, cutting and licking our bare limbs. In the valley, giant trees in eternal competition with school buildings shot more than twenty meters into the air, their canopies reminiscent of the papyrus reeds in the swamps of Mpande Hill.