Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

The third scratch jolted her: it was very sharp, as if it had been made with a long thorn or a large needle. In a bid not to interrupt her thoughts, she did the natural thing; she lifted her left foot and used the heel to rub hard and kill the red ant without having to look at it. Her heel, however, landed on a thick, soft, rotten-potato-like thing. She jumped in the air and saw the viper’s tail swing like a thick, dirty rope. The arrowhead attached to her foot was magnified by fear to the size of a pumpkin. Jesus, Joseph and Mary: What was happening? She screamed and fled the garden. The snake still clung to her foot. She could feel the poison entering her bloodstream. The whole leg already felt heavy. Regaining her wits, she stopped, retraced her steps and reached for the hoe. She battered the viper and in the process almost chopped off her big toe. She could see her husband trudging toward her and the neighbors approaching. Who would look after her husband when she was gone? She had to live. The energetic neighbors got to her first. They pulled the viper off her leg, calmed her down and helped her as best they could.

On the way to the hospital, with the furious sounds of battering, crushing, marauding winds in her ears, she succumbed to the poison.

Her husband didn’t attend her burial. Her death released the chained winds of a ten-year-old malarial storm which surged in the very core of his being with diabolical intensity. The winds sent him vomiting, sweating and laboring for each breath. After only two days he was given the last sacraments by his son. After administering the last rites, Mbale returned home to lead his mother’s burial. As the first mourners returned home, news came that the old man had died.

I didn’t attend either burial: I left the dead to bury themselves, because of exams. Besides, I had to help Fr. Kaanders collect seminary books from the already restless boys. It was a hectic, hunger-ridden, truancy-bitten week. We got help from some volunteers, but the progress we made was slow. We checked each book for both the seminary stamp and the serial number. There were many lost books, but there was hardly much I could do about it. Kaanders kept dozing and drooling into the books he was working on. During the few moments of free time I had, I forged my own expulsion letter, signed and stamped it with the seminary stamp we kept for library purposes. I also recommended myself to the best schools I knew.

Lwendo could not understand why in the world I was quitting. The next time we met, he was a lieutenant in the army. A guerrilla war had been waged and won, and the guerrilla forces he had belatedly joined following his own expulsion had become the nation’s armed forces.

THE SEVENTIES were dominated by self-made men who, defying their limited backgrounds, rose to vertiginous heights of power before dashing their chariots into the abyss. Names that came to mind were Richard Nixon, Chairman Mao, Emperor Bokassa and Elvis Presley. They reminded me of yellow moths which flew long distances in the dark to come and dance round Grandpa’s hurricane lamp. Bewitched by the luminescence, most would circle the glass, avoiding direct contact and keeping away from the lethal ventilators above. The intrepid ones, however, could not resist the ultimate temptation, to explore further. They got sucked into the ventilators and were roasted to death. Others eventually were scalded by the hot glass, and more collapsed with fatigue. The apparent connection between luminescence and death puzzled me for years.

My childhood was undergoing a death of sorts, sloughing into adulthood, the carcass of blind precocity disintegrating in the new light. I was moving in a new direction. My eyes were opening to the world, taking in vistas they had hitherto been blind to. My flirtation with General Amin had ended, killed by the murderous light of truth. I felt I had more or less outgrown the fight with Serenity and Padlock. I realized that I had all along dammed my disgust with the way the affairs of the country were being conducted just to keep fighting in my corner. This peeling away of old skin hurt. I felt sore, lost, trapped. The way to the future seemed bleak. I experienced alternating feelings of jubilation and desolation. I shuddered to think about the task of redefining myself. I shuddered at the thought of confronting the world within and without. For a long time I thought I was chasing a mirage.

During school holidays, I always got the impression that at the seminary we were living inside either a charmed circle or a blind corral. The world outside was a harsh, formless, convoluted chaos in which success was for the fittest. The rules of engagement had to be worked out by intelligent observation and intuition, the very tools we were discouraged from developing. After being told what to do and when to do it for months, we returned with a sick feeling of detachment and debility to the real world of ruthless survivors. The fathers called the world “a den of lions,” and it must have been so in many ways; but along with the fear, it contained the genuine excitement of exploration. This was the only place where we could get to the bottom of our feelings and thoughts, because the type of acting demanded was different from the cut-and-dried roles offered at the seminary. This was the school of hard knocks, but buried under the heaps of chaff were precious grains of wheat, without which the bread of life could not be made.

I always spent my school holidays with Aunt Lwandeka. It was to her house that the tyrants had dispatched me after the incident of feigned sex with Lusanani. Like many students, I looked forward to the holidays. The ordeal of collecting hundreds of library books at the end of each school term meant that I always arrived home burned by exhaustion. I would spend the first few days in sweet bewilderment, trying to find my feet, fighting to regain my strength. In a way, I was like a tourist who came with the season and left as soon as his appetites had been sated. I enjoyed the anonymity of living in a shrinking industrial town with a past larger than its present. I enjoyed watching people who were totally different from the seminary crowd, and I was fascinated by their stories. I relished the feeling that I was temporarily part of this doomed crowd, savoring the ways of Sodom and Gomorrah with no real danger of perishing with the lot. Images from Uncle Kawayida’s descriptions of town life careered through my mind again. I would refresh them with news of Amin’s latest capers, fluctuating prices, stories of bribery, murder, military mayhem, rape, betrayal, bravery, love … and try to work them into a composite whole. At such times, I gorged like a bear preparing for the arrival of winter.

It was during these school holidays that I realized how powerful the poison of the hydra at the heart of the seminary system was. All the work the fathers put in at the seminary, telling us how special our call was and how different we were from the sinners in the world, paid off now. It was hard to really feel part of what was going on around us. Reality was a Pandora’s box of conflicting loyalties. Amin’s capers became things happening in a cartoon film. The people found dead in forests became characters playing dead. The scarcity of essential commodities and the general hardship became transient phenomena that would vanish as soon as the picture was over. The stoicism needed to endure attained a heroic luster. The air of creeping doom acquired apocalyptic echoes. It became the last turn of the screw, foreshadowing the arrival of the savior. Self-preserving as this refracted view of the world was, it exacted a heavy tax on its espousers. I was neither the first nor the last seminarian to groan under the tremendous burden.