Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

Finally, Fr. Mindi told us officially. He dressed his anger in curse-laden threats, ultimately announcing that if the culprit did not give himself up within three days, something was going to happen to him. I was in familiar territory, hardly able to believe how similar dictatorial thought patterns were. This man with an ego as large as a cirrhotic liver expected the culprit to crumble under its holy smells. If this was what that Urban University conservatism had come to, then I didn’t envy him all the lasagna he had eaten in Italy. His experience with truants should have warned him that not all miscreants were in awe of his university curses covered in Bolognese sauce.

Fr. Mindi paid us a second visit, this time at the refectory. “What sort of a seminarian can do such a thing? What did he come here for? Does he want to become a priest? How did he enter the system? It is in your interests to denounce this character. I am sure he said something to somebody, criminals often do. Please, let me know. If this sort of behavior is left unpunished, we are all in big danger. This is the kind of person to set the whole place on fire.” I wasn’t turned on; neither were the majority of the boys, who felt that Mindi deserved every dose of pain he got.

The rector, as somber as a judge with piles, asked us after a day to surrender the culprit. Like Mindi, he believed that somebody had heard something or seen something or smelled something. He hinted that somebody might have a grudge against the bursar, but that the manner in which he had expressed himself was beastly and unworthy of somebody destined for the altar. He laid on the syrup: “Come and talk to us if you have a problem. We are here for you. Without you we would not be here. This is a family, and if one family member hurts, the whole family suffers. Remember, one rotten orange can corrupt the whole basket. If you know anything, tell your spiritual director, or slip a piece of paper under my door. Don’t let anyone see you. I assure you: nobody will be penalized for giving us the necessary information. And if anyone threatens you, trying to keep your mouth shut, come directly to me and he will be dealt with.” I had heard all this in my former life. It left me cold.

Four days after the attack, amidst a cloud of speculation, Fr. Mindi announced, rather triumphantly, that he had caught the culprits. The staff was divided. Mindi wanted three bully boys expelled with immediate effect. Others wanted the boys punished but given a chance to continue with their education. The skeptics questioned the manner of the discovery, because they found it too plausible: somebody commits a crime, names are anonymously given on a piece of paper and heads roll.

Lwendo and his classmates were in an uproar. They went around saying that a Bushman was responsible for betraying the trio to the staff. There were threats against the Bushman and vows to squeeze them till they squealed, but when one of the trio was expelled and the other two were suspended for a fortnight, the furor died down.

So much for justice. I never succeeded in finding out who the smart Bushman was who had punished the bullies by saddling them with responsibility for the crime. I didn’t mind either. My neighbor in the dorm said that I often laughed in my sleep.

Books took over. It was bound to happen anyway. Life was too regimented and too boring. Sports were dull, picking up their only blast of annual excitement during inter-house competitions. The dominance of church activities and liturgy was generally asphyxiating. As others caved in to total submission or to sporadic fits of bravado, I turned to books. I was intrigued by the secret universe under the dust-laden covers and thrilled by the endless morsels one could extract from the most unlikely volumes. Between some very dull covers were the most spectacular wars, adventures, murders, love affairs and characters, whole terrae incognitae to explore.

Given the faking, the pretense and the fear that stool pigeons were lurking everywhere, collecting news, marking every critical word one said, books offered a reliable escape route into a safer reality crammed with fantasy and ideas.

As in most dictatorships, secular books were unpopular in the seminary; they were considered subversive. Good seminarians distrusted such books, because they contained demons that made you critical of the good fathers and of Mother Church. They made you rebellious and arrogant, deaf to your vocation. They gave you a mind of your own and made you ask the wrong questions.

I remembered World War II and the men Grandpa had conscripted. I spent days looking through war records to see if the local contribution had been recorded. All I learned was that Africans had died in that war. There was nothing specific about the Ugandan contribution to the effort. The slaughter of tens of millions of people in Europe just nineteen years after the end of World War I, plus the deaths of the twenty million who had succumbed to the Spanish flu soon after, apparently did not include blacks and seemed another of the whitewashed versions of modern civilization sold to us here. It was as lopsided as the gloss the Church put on the carnage of the Crusades, and on all the other Church wars right up to our own Religious Wars at the turn of the century.

Fr. Kaanders gradually began to make sense to me. He had spent a good part of his youth fighting polygamy to uphold standards he believed were universal and crucial, and had ended up almost dead from exhaustion and sleeping sickness. It was while in the grip of death that he had realized the forlornness of his attempts, the stupidity of his sacrifice and the impracticability of putting the clock forward thousands of hours. Wisely, he decided to freeze the clock and let time take care of itself. I would do the same. I would embrace death in a timeless hold, look it in the face and turn it into an ally. I was delighted. I ruminated on my discovery for days.

It was on one such woolgathering day that Fr. Mindi caught me reading during prayer time. In fact, the bell had just rung. The boys had just started marching to the chapel, and I think he was smarting to get somebody. I hadn’t moved quickly enough or shown any sign that I would. He had already put the painting job behind him and had reverted to spying and stalking around the compound with a vengeance, as if to say he would not be forced to change by a bunch of snotty boys. Now he stood before me, the cassock making him look taller than he really was.

At the end of the morning I went to his office for my punishment. Music was playing in his cozy little office, the pop sound fluttering in the background like butterflies on a windowpane. I thought about Sr. Bison and wondered whether this was the music he played as she made her maddening fucking sounds. All the furniture was in good order, covered with clean cloths to avoid staining. I lay down to take my punishment. The hairy carpet tickled my fingers and took me back to the infernal carpet at the pagoda.

I got my three on “government meat.” The memory of my painting job anesthetized me totally. I was struck by the fact that this man had learned nothing. He was knowledge itself, thus ineducable. I thanked him for punishing me with a docile, contrite look on my face. His eyes lit up.

“Good boy. You are very quiet, very humble, and you never cause trouble. I am sure that one day you will make a very good priest.” I could hardly believe what was coming out of the mouth of this Urban University alumnus, but I politely said, “Thank you, Father.”

The main topic of conversation among us was still food: it was becoming worse. The posho was half-cooked, or simply bad, made as it was from wormy maize flour bought in bulk and stored for too long. The beans were weevilled and hardly responded to the cajoling of boiler fire. They remained hard and indigestible, and made us fart like hippos. The staff constantly complained about ill-mannered boys who farted in church, in class and in the hallways. Served them right. Truancy increased, and the price of black-market pawpaws, sugarcane and pancakes skyrocketed.