Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

Fr. Mindi was the most hated man in the seminary. Boys called him the Grim Reaper, and they prayed for him to get into a car accident and live the rest of his life in a wheelchair. They prayed for him to become blind, to get cancer and to be afflicted with every purulent disease on earth. The feeling was that as soon as he left, things would improve dramatically, for it was believed that he was deliberately keeping the situation bad. Nobody could understand why the food remained terrible when there was land, and possibly money to develop it. We had come to believe his philosophy was that bad food made good seminarians and ultimately good priests.

“He should die,” boys often said, especially when they watched him dribbling the ball at the football field. He could move with beguiling swiftness. He was the patron of Vatican dorm, and thanks to his participation and coaching, they won most annual inter-house competitions. Whenever they won, Fr. Mindi would allow two pigs to be roasted and would give us abundant food for one weekend.

“No, no, noo,” others replied. “He should live and suffer forever and ever.”

“What should we do about it?”

There was general agreement that the man should be left in the hands of the gods, who should see fit when to break his leg or inflict a car accident or subject him to armed attack.

Fr. Mindi penetrated my thought patterns. I tended to think of him as a brother to that constipated gorgon Padlock. Both had had a religious call. Both had responded to it. One had dropped out to become a real parent, while the other remained behind to become a symbolic one. Both believed that the harsher, the meaner and the more mysterious you played it, the better your children turned out.

It eventually struck me how limited Fr. Mindi really was. Padlock, in her nunly, peasant-girl constrictions, was more like a sore-infested buffalo hardly able to keep thousands of egrets and ticks off its festering back. Mindi, on the other hand, was bloated with theology, philosophy, Latin, Italian, Church history and all manner of other clerical and secular learning garnered from both local and foreign seminaries. The four years he had spent at Urban University in Rome had sharpened the edge of his conservative Catholicism, reinforced his harsher traits and dulled his empathic and self-analytical capabilities.

Yet, this was a man we were supposed to call Father and emulate and put on a pedestal. If scholarships to foreign universities and all that learning resulted in this barren role-playing and regurgitation, what was the use of it? This was a man programmed to obey, and to be obeyed. This was a man who had suffered and was now making others suffer so that they in turn would make others suffer. This was Mindi’s version of one hundred percent priestly compensation on earth and one hundred percent reward in the life to come. His material things, especially his car, were part of this package, this compensation scheme for having responded to the priestly call and given up the family life the damned enjoyed. He bragged about it, thinking that he was encouraging us to persevere. His dream was not different from my lawyerly one, taking into account the power he enjoyed and the rumors about him and Sr. Bison. It was only the oil of holiness and of predestination which he poured on his that put me off. My aim was to rub off that oily sheen and expose the dull, grainy core underneath.

I was back to my old sleepless ways. It felt scary to be up in the small hours of morning, but there was an exciting edge to it, a marauder’s adrenaline rushes, that made it worthwhile. I left Sing-Sing at around two o’clock. Dorobo, the newly hired night watchman, very tall, very strong, soot-black, lethal with his giant bow and arrow, was out doing his rounds, or sleeping. It was the image of his huge bow that etched itself in my mind like a diamond half-moon and followed me around as I moved from shadow to shadow. I praised the Lord that we Africans never idolized dogs: How awesome would this man have been with a huge German shepherd at his side? But there was not a single dog on campus.

The seminary stood on top of a hill, arranged around the chapel, accessible from all sides. It was easy to move from Sing-Sing, at the extreme end of the compound, to the chapel because of the protection accorded by the trees and a pine-tree fence for most of the way. I found Dorobo behind the chapel, crammed into a nook, roaring in his illegal sleep. My destination was to the left of the chapel, ten meters away. It was a long, slant-roofed building used partly to store tools and partly as a garage for the fathers’ cars.

I crossed the gravel-strewn stretch to the tool area and opened the side door with a key used by the student in charge. I found myself inside the long, cold building with heaps of scythes, hoes, pangas, rakes, defunct lawnmowers and chain saws reeking of dust, oil and neglect. I picked up a blunt panga and weighed it in my hand, remembering the maniac who had threatened to decapitate Grandma. I set it down again, careful not to let other implements slide and make noise. I proceeded to the connecting door.

The hinges squeaked, making me afraid that Dorobo might hear me. I got inside the garage, and was confronted with the smell of cars: a tangy combination of oil, steel and rubber trapped in a confined space. There was Mindi’s blue Peugeot, Kaanders’ white Volkswagen, the rector’s beige Renault and an old grayish car left behind by a priest friend of the rector’s. In the far corner was a huge, full-bellied motorcycle on its flipper-like kickstand, seemingly leaning against the wall, a pool of oil under it.

It took me a few minutes of sweaty-palmed poking and fumbling to get into Fr. Mindi’s car. I imagined Aunt Tiida, dressed to kill, watching Dr. Ssali trying to get into their Peugeot and fussing with camouflaged pleasure as their neighbors looked on from behind parted curtains.

The stench of tobacco, however, brought me back to my senses. I was inside the car of a chain-smoker. I thought of pouring salt in Fr. Mindi’s engine and wrecking it for good, but that seemed uncalled for. I was not here on a rampage, but a courtesy call. I was principally here to send a modest message to the big man, something a touch above the average seminarian’s idle fantasy revenge. I had eaten a few pawpaws, bought from a truant, and combined with our weevilled beans, the stench they gave my excrement was overpowering. I held my nose as I opened the plastic bag. I had delved into Uncle Kawayida’s archives and pulled out a football hooligan’s weapon: shit. I used a trowel to smear the seats, the roof, the floor, the steering wheel, the gear shift, the dashboard and all the carpets. I locked the stench inside the car and worked on the door handles. I left the offensive plastic bag on the bonnet.

By now the whole garage was alive with stink-hammers. I hurried out of the contaminated air, closed the connecting door as carefully as possible and tiptoed around the heaps of scythes, pangas, hoes.… I was aware of the precariousness of my position: somebody could smell me from a mile off. I made my way to the bathrooms, cleaning myself along the way with odoriferous pine needles plucked from the fence.

I had visualized a more sophisticated aftermath to my painting job. The staff members were typically very equivocal about the attack. “Somebody vandalized Fr. Mindi’s car.” “Somebody did terrible damage to a certain staff member’s property.” “Somebody acted very disrespectfully and uncharitably toward our bursar,” they said. The details finally leaked out via the boys who were made to clean up the mess. Fr. Mindi had found them talking during silence time and had charged them with the horrible task of scrubbing, washing, wiping and drying his desecrated status symbol.