Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

The drought came, turned the grass from green to gold, terrorized our water supply and made the smuggling in of foodstuffs a little easier. As we trekked the one kilometer down to the seminary well with our buckets, basins and jerry cans, the experts slipped into the bushes to meet waiting vendors. Some smuggled the contraband home inside their water containers. Others hid the stuff in secret places and fetched it during supper time or night study. That was how the unlucky ones fell into Fr. Mindi’s net.

There were two expulsions, one from Sing-Sing, one from Mecca. They were accompanied by a plethora of curses aimed at Fr. Mindi. There were idle threats to beat him up and set fire to the garage in order to punish the whole staff. Nothing of the kind happened, despite the genuine belief that all our suffering was the main responsibility of Fr. Mindi, the seminary bursar, embezzler and torturer.

Since the finances of the seminary were a mystery to me, my main concern was to discourage Fr. Mindi from spying and persecuting black-market food traffickers. If he stopped getting in our way, well, I felt we could let him do his own thing, but the man was like a demon, driven with the blind insistence of a psychopath. The only way to deal with him was on his own terms.

For a librarian, stalking a priest was as simple as pie. The library was at the end of the office block. I could always go along the offices and see which priest was in or out. I was free to go to the fathers’ residences, even those behind the offices, in fictitious pursuit of Fr. Kaanders. I knew for sure that Mindi’s favorite spying hour was from nine to ten in the evening, when every seminarian had to be in class for the night study. It was actually the safest time to tackle him, with little chance of unexpected intervention.

There was a network of paths through the football fields behind Sing-Sing which led to idle, overgrown seminary land, all the way down the valley, into the forest, up to the main road and the villages beyond. The main road was one kilometer away; one part of it led to Jinja Diocese, the theater of Kaanders’ old nightmares, the other to Kampala Archdiocese, under whose wing the seminary was. Fr. Mindi had worked in the archdiocese for six years before getting posted here. He had had less trouble from archdiocesan polygamists, who, unlike their die-hard counterparts in Jinja Diocese, kept quiet about their second or third wives. His scourge had been bold women who, fired by his good looks and his football prowess, openly solicited him.

Now, in the midst of the drought, Mindi was always out, enjoying the cool night air while waiting for his prey. These nocturnal walks reminded him of parish work, which had entailed waking up at night to go and give last sacraments to dying parishioners. Fr. Mindi was fiercely proud of his profession, and he firmly believed that priesthood was the noblest profession on earth. He had more or less worked out the next ten years of his career. He envisaged four more years here, after which he would return to the parish, grow maize and beans to sell and make enough money to live a comfortable life independent of parish funds. In his spare time, he would coach the parish football team and drive it slowly to the top of the interparish league. He regularly fantasized about his shambas, watching the maize grow and the bean leaves turn from green to gold. He dreamed of bumper crops and rich financial rewards.

His current thoughts, however, were rudely interrupted by sounds emanating from the other side of the pine fence, a stone’s throw away from the acacia trees. He heard a hiss and wondered whether it was a snake. The second hiss was human, deliberate, insolent. This was something new: truants always ran away from him and never drew his attention. Who could this person be? The night watchman, whom he had chastised for letting his car get vandalized? Yes, he had even threatened the man with dismissal if he did not stop sleeping instead of keeping watch. The next sound was a dog whistle. Somebody was whistling at him as though he were a dog! He was nobody’s dog. Not here, not even in Italy. He stopped and weighed the temptation to jump over the fence and tackle this bastard from the air in one lithe move. Much to his surprise, the whistler shook a pine tree to make his position clear. Having decided to jump, Fr. Mindi moved closer. He raised his head above the fence to see what was really going on, and to make sure there was a safe landing. He sensed the obnoxious stench too late.

“Oh, my God!” he said as the two-day-old parcel burst open in his face. A wet slapping sound suffocated the second and longer exclamation. A soggy mass covered his face, then dripped down his throat, the front of his shirt and on to his trousers. Instinctively, his hand went to his face and got messed up. He plucked pine needles and frantically rubbed his face and clothes. He ran wildly to the back of the chapel and all the way to the refectory, but the aluminum water tanks were empty. He careered downhill to the piggery and used the drinking water in the pig troughs to wash. The stench would not go away. He tried to vomit, but only strings of bile dropped from his mouth. He went up the hill again and finally sneaked into his bedroom via the back door. The stench filled the room. He sprayed himself and the room with deodorant and went about cleaning the mess properly.

Fr. Mindi wasn’t the first dictator to be blinded by his own sense of unquestionable power into making the wrong diagnosis of a critical situation. He could not break through the membrane of despotic outrage to come to the root of the problem. He believed that the attack was an act of hate, which was wrong. It was a lesson in not striking out in anger. The attack had been coldly calculated and executed, the way proper punishment should be, but swollen with his sense of power and self-righteousness, Mindi could not see that. His priestly oils kept his vision glazed and served to infuse him with paranoia. He firmly believed that a mad seminarian was out to kill him. He remembered the shock of his father’s poisoning. His body had turned soot-black in death. Fr. Mindi could now see it floating in front of his eyes, black shit oozing out of its rear. The idea came to him that death by poisoning might be a hereditary curse cast onto his family by some unknown individual. If so, he was next in line. This really shook him up. He was not ready to die so miserably. He suddenly felt very exposed, very unsafe. For the first time since his return from Rome and his ordination, he felt that he could not win. How was he supposed to fight this faceless enemy? How was he supposed to tell his fellow brothers in the priesthood what had happened to him? And what would they make of it? Were they training psychos or diocesan priests?

Fr. Mindi reported in sick for a few days, and ultimately left the campus for a week. There were rumors that he had an ulcer; later ones claimed that he had asked for a transfer. He returned to the seminary looking sick, hardly able to drum up even a brittle arrogance. He hated the boys. He hated the seminary. He hated his secret tormentor. Boys remarked that he had stopped spying and prowling. Another rumor circulated that he had purchased three huge dogs to bolster the security of the seminary. The most interesting part of all this was that nobody knew why the bursar-cum-discipline master had decided to neglect his responsibilities. The whole turnaround was so unexpected that nobody dared celebrate openly. There was a feeling that his withdrawal was a trick, a ruse to draw rule-breakers out, but why had the bursar taken to travelling so much? Why was he staying in his office most of the time when he was around? Why was he no longer attending communal mass? The boys smelled a rat.

Censorship was firmly in place. Our letters were opened and read before we received them. When we wrote letters, we put them in unsealed envelopes for the rector to read before he sealed and posted them. We were allowed to write letters only on the weekend, and it was against the rules to post them ourselves.