Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

Closer to home, I opened my eyes and thought I was dreaming. The majestic greedy road, which had eaten the fleeing northerners and Amin’s henchmen, was clogged with people bearing the weight of fridges, squeaky beds, greasy motor parts, new and used tires, rusty and new iron sheets, slabs of clear and stained glass, hissing sofas, bales of cloth, boxes of medicines, cartons of laboratory mercury, gigantic office typewriters, hairy sacks of rice, sugar and salt, greasy tins of cooking and motor oil and more. Men with bare torsos were pushing thirsty cars and vans and motorcycles, some with crushed tires, creaking under mammoth loads. Full-scale looting was on: the first purgative phase.

Here and there, people crushed by ill-gotten loads sprawled in the roadside grass, panting, heaving, perspiring, farting and begging for water in razor-sharp, staccato gasps. Next to the gaspers, smartly dressed hustlers with bulging neck veins haggled with prospective buyers, eager to make quick sales and return to the city for more booty before the liberators put a stop to the looting bonanza. The liberators, bunched in little groups or spread out at ineffectual roadblocks, watched with cynical smiles as government property trickled or flooded past their posts. There was a perverse logic to the bonanza: since these people were the current non-existent government, they were just taking home what belonged to them, property formerly used to oppress them. As long as they were busy, they could give the liberators no trouble. There was also the issue of cooperation: allowed to loot, even the worst elements could be relied upon to report the remnants of Amin’s henchmen who, the liberators feared, might hit them from the back.

It seemed as if troublemakers knew that this would be the last time soldiers with loaded guns would look on as shops and government offices were emptied. As a result, they grabbed this chance with both hands.

The shock waves of liberation were ripping through the city. Banner-carriers, with caustic words flying and flapping in the toxic air, marched, declaring support for the yet-to-come coalition government. They hurled abuse at Idi Amin, and demanded food, essential commodities, peace and democracy. Flag-wavers, bellies growling with hunger or looted rotten foods, demanded capitalism, free education, better housing and Amin’s trial. Students, balled fists punching the air, circled the city in long, multi-colored lines, a cacophony of hopes, dreams and demands cascading from peeling, parched lips. Criminals, eyes needle-sharp, limbs snake-nimble, prowled, seeking to get whatever they could in the confusion. Traders, red-eyed and loudmouthed, demanded an immediate stop to the looting and a return of the looted goods or compensation from the government.

Buildings hit during the skirmishes smoldered morosely, pouring thick columns of toxic smoke into the saturated atmosphere. Shop fronts battered by trucks and tractors gaped sadly like desecrated tombs. Lakes of glass shards, not unlike greenish-blue frozen water, flooded pavements, trailing into gutters and splashing into roads. Trails of sugar, salt, fertilizer, oil, forlornly advertised the routes chosen by the more vigorous looters. The sky was filled with flying paper, which the ghostly winds coming off the dead and the dying twisted in the air as though teasing onlookers with classified and unclassified information.

Here and there, in gutters, alleys, roadsides, doorways, both stale and fresh corpses oozed red-yellow fluid, faces rigid, mouths battered by untold secrets. I saw neat wounds caused by very sharp objects; I saw independent body parts liberated by bombs, heavy objects and bullets; I saw blobs of flesh and bits of bone and large patches of blood shaped like the world’s lakes and continents.

Through the relentless heat, the sun-sharpened fetid stenches of decomposing flesh, garbage and emotion, I somehow made it to the taxi park, the orifice from which all the mayhem seemed to gush with apocalyptic ruthlessness. Bullets, like giant popcorn, exploded as the outnumbered liberators tried to appear to be doing something about the chaos without actually tarnishing their good image and reducing the immense credit they had amassed with the people. I now and then caught a snatch of their singsong Kiswahili as they endeavored to break up fights.

I stood on the rim of the bowl. I felt overwhelmed and afraid for my safety. The earthquakes I had dreamed of when I first came to the city, and Grandpa’s predicted national explosions, seemed to be rocking the bowl from all sides. A mighty stench from the notorious Owino Market bearing the putrescence, the intoxications and delusions, of both past and present blew over the taxi park and stirred more madness and confusion. The gawky skeletons of architectural decrepitude that formed the gap-toothed city skyline seemed to tilt and fall over like uprooted teeth, the roots obscenely exposed. The grime-laden windows, the rust-streaked roofs and the dust-caked walls seemed to mix and gush down the hill like discolored gore pouring out of rotting body cavities. The filthy Nakivubo River seemed to be running with blood and tears and refuse that rained down from the mosque, the Catholic and the Protestant cathedrals, the high and low courts and the residences of dislodged army generals.

I was prodded by passersby and found myself descending the steps into the center of the bowl, where there were hardly any vans. It was open court there, with privatized justice and insane retribution on offer. Two very tall, very dark men dressed in the paraphernalia of the State Research Bureau — platform shoes, bell-bottom trousers and reflective sunglasses — stared at the jury from behind silver goggles. Somebody flipped them off, calling for respect of court as the goggles got crushed.

“I know you. You were a member of the State Research. You took my father away from me. You and your colleagues bashed his head and dumped him in Namanve Forest. Do you remember that?” a large woman shouted.

“Kill them, kill them, kiiill theeem,” the crowd roared avidly.

“Amin is gone. You and your friends are going to pay the price,” someone hollered.

“Pay, pay, paaaay.” The word was passed round.

The verdict was unanimous. The Bureau, a mountain of killings and torturings on its doorstep, was not a name to generate mercy, even among the levelheaded. The most lethal weapon at this time of chaos was to accuse somebody of collaboration with the Bureau or with some other Aminist security agency. “Guilty” platformed feet were swiftly swept off the asphalt, with hard objects meeting the pair midair and striking with the vengeance of three thousand and ten days of woe. By the time the two men hit the ground, they were half-dead. The circle, like a giant sphincter, closed to a fleshy dot, and the duo were flattened like the chapatis the Indians had introduced here.

“The bastards did not even beg for mercy,” somebody said as he went past me. With the tension dissipated, I squeezed my way to another spot.

Portraits of Amin, defaced but discernible, lay stamped into the asphalt. Effigies with limbs torn off smoldered pungently in gasoline bonfires. Near the spot where I first saw a live birth, a crowd of onlookers was watching smoke rise from piles of tires. I could faintly make out four human figures, constricted and twisted in death. The story was that they had been caught trying to get into a van. They had denied being Amin’s henchmen, but on examination showed telltale shoulder weals caused by rifle straps. They were almost instantly necklaced with tires and set alight.

My attention, and the attention of almost everyone in the bowl, was attracted by the blaring of a bullhorn. The man with the horn was being followed by a group of emaciated, ragged, ecstatic, skeletal men and women, freshly vomited from the torture chambers on Nakasero Hill, just beyond the High Court. The skeletons were dancing and waving twigs as measly tears ran down from their protruding eyes. They were cheered as they marched through the bowl. Vendors, impressed by their escape, gave them buns, drinks, anything they had, free of charge. Others gave them money for the fare home. Many of these people were dazed, staring glassily as though they could not believe their luck. They walked as though they were still shackled and intoxicated by the stink of incarceration, and the vomit, the blood, the excreta and the violence of torture chambers and detention centers. They walked with the full weight of freedom on their shoulders, and for some it seemed too much to bear.