Return to Uganda

Denis Hills

found Kampala, when I returned there

I

in 1981 soon after Obote's re-election as president, a spectral city savagely looted by its own citizens in an act of greed, self- destruction and euphoria following the rout of Amin's army: broken windows, potholes and deserted shops; unsoaped girls; morose crowds of young men leaning against street walls and doorways; uncleared rubbish heaps taken over by marabou storks. Loutish soldiers with AK rifles sprawled outside public buildings and banks, or sped about in armed Land Rovers. In the residential villas of Kololo strips of rag were being used as curtains. In my old garden the drains had been burst by tree roots. The air strip was overgrown with wild grass. Disappointingly little has been done since then to restore basic comforts and security to this neurotic capital. The water supply has been partially overhauled. There is more money about. Shops have been roughly restocked, syndicates of Asians have come back to try and revive businesses and industry. But in Kampala and the neighbouring districts of Buganda, Obote is still lonely and unloved, encircled by enemies. Most Baganda consider it a point of honour not to cooperate with his govern- ment. Though the DP opposition party sur- vives, its members are constantly threatened and sometime (like their UPC rivals) killed. Amid thuggery, intrigue and alarming rumours the common citizen still fears for his safety.

1 found it hard, at first, to find my bear- ings again. Many of my old African ac- quaintances had left, some without trace. Daily life revolved round magendo (black marketeering), offices were frequently left unmanned (with a jacket draped over a chair) while the occupants went out to search for food, petrol, a small cash deal. To save petrol I used to walk to town in a long file of clerks and labourers. Their breath smelt of hunger. By mid-afternoon they were plodding back again before Obote's soldiers started to prowl at dusk. Last to leave the empty streets were Kam- pala's oldest residents — the fruit-bats of Bat Valley, swarming out from their blackened perches in long blundering trains to feed on pawpaws and mangoes. Only the marabou storks remained, standing like night watchmen on the British High Com- missioner's roof. Hidden in the darkness along the approach roads were gangs of marauding soldiers dozing in the grass, like grubby earthworms, at improvised road blocks. When roused they would spring out from the European cemetery waving their rifles. 'We will kill you!'

At Makerere University the clock in the tall tower had stopped, the student halls stank of choked lavatories, rubbish was dumped under hedges. At my old college in Kyambogo lecturers spent more time on magendo business than in the classroom, bartering relief food (American flour and cans of cooking oil) for Korean shirts smug- gled from Nairobi or searching the markets for a piece of dried fish. Cows and goats wandered about green lawns that had once been tended with a proprietory eye by white teachers. Trees were being chopped down for charcoal.

But a few of the white old-timers had sur- vived — one could find them at the bar of the English Club in the basement of the High Commission (as a man who had 'stir- red up trouble' for them by annoying Amin they gave me a cool welcome); and some of my former students, now promoted to headships of secondary schools, also called on me from up country, driving in Tata lor- ries (generously provided by the Indian Government to the Ministry of Education) to pick up rations and supplies for their pupils. The years had aged them. A few had the yellowing eyes of drunkards. One of them was Kalisto.

Kalisto was carrying a frayed bag of pawpaws, his soles were flapping. I used to climb mountains with him. both of us were ravaged. He was running a bush school in Kalongo, 300 miles to the north among the Acholi, at a worthless salary. I was living in a camping van. 'I want you to come and help me,' he said immediately. `I can't keep my teaching staff as there are no houses. But I have a field and you can camp in it.'

Kalisto's school stood under a massive grey hump — the Arab-named Rock of the Wind which was once a slave and ivory collecting point on the long caravan route to the dhows waiting at the coast. He lived in a clearing under the rock-face among thorn- bush noisy with hornbills. The first thing he showed me was a pile of blackened stones under an Ohm tree. `This was my first home,' he explained. `I built it in the old style with a thatched roof of solid bamboo poles. Men came in the night and set fire to it. I might have been killed.' He had replac- ed it with a tiny brick structure like a tool- shed. `This won't burn.'

I stayed in Kalisto's camp until the end of the year, sleeping under a wild fig tree. In the day-time baboons came out of the thickets to raid the neighbours' plots they were driven off by dogs and stones. Vervet monkeys scrambled in the trees for berries, their tails hanging through the foliage like strips of biltong; they had blue testicles the colour of my Indian blanket. After dark, rock hyraxes whistled in their caves under the escarpment. At dawn 1 sometimes startled a reed buck.

The school was little more than a row of dusty classrooms with broken windows, not enough desks and no electricity. Many of its 120 mixed pupils were barefoot. The lucky ones slept on rope beds (no mattresses), others on the floor. They were fed on posho (porridge) and beans. The adjacent Verona Fathers' Mission station, which had a hospital and a midwifery teaching centre, let the school use its bore-hole and provided exercise books, ball-point pens and lantern oil.

As my classes had few books we concen- trated on discussions. The two subjects that most interested them were cattle-raiding and soldiers. Acholi villages were being at- tacked at night by bands of armed Karamo- jong who emptied the kraals and drove the stolen cattle back across the Labwor border to their own manyattas. Such raids have been going on for years, and the Acholi naturally hate and despise the Karamojong. When, not long ago, these 'naked savages and thieves' were struck down by drought and starvation, the Acholi did not ap- preciate Western relief efforts to save their lives (`Let them perish').

Many of Obote's soldiers (and police) are Acholi and here in their homeland area they are admired as well as feared by their fellow tribesmen. It is the Acholi, Langi and other northern tribal fragments who have reinherited the military and political power since Amin fled and are now busy at the old game of 'hammering' the Baganda and their Bantu neighbours in the south.

The Ugandan army has indeed built up a terrifying reputation for sacking villages under the pretext of hunting 'bandits' (guerrillas) and for looting, rape, and using road blocks to waylay and strip travellers. My classes were in two minds about soldiers. The girls complained bitterly of their conduct; others — generally youths who had little chance of passing their exams and few prospects even if they did so were eagerly awaiting an opportunity to join up. Armed with a gun, they boasted, they would soon return to their homes with a lorryload of furniture and fill their fathers' grain bins with tins of bully beef.

Explaining the Ugandan soldier's over- bearing and lawless behaviour, one pupil wrote in his compsition: 'A soldier thinks his own death may come at any moment, and is trained to be cruel. If he is ordered to kill his mother he will do so.' Another wrote: 'Before a soldier joins up he may be an ordinary decent and kind man. But once in uniform he starts looting. He loots ex- pensive things like TV sets, radios and cassettes, sofa sets, cattle and — the big prize — a car. With his plunder he can get prostitutes and drink, and his brutality in- creases. When he comes home on leave his family welcome him as a hero. Yes, people in this world are stupid.'

Kalongo's military post was a small one and the few soldiers to be seen were hanging round the mission hospital nursing injuries received in road accidents. The mission in any case kept its gates closed to soldiers carrying weapons and to their vehicles. 'If we let them in, ' said Brother Guido, "they would empty our petrol store and take the workshop tools.'

The six Italian doctors at the mission hospital were overworked, gentle and pa- tient, the nuns immaculate and always busy. They dealt efficiently with the com- mon ailments — malaria, enteritis, tuber- culosis, eye damage, leprosy, gonorrhoea and swollen scrotums. Father Ambrogio, the parish priest, held two services every Sunday and preached to his packed con- gregations not in the crude pidgin used by Graham Greene to transcribe a Belgian father's sermon to lepers in A Burnt-Out Case, but in fluent Lwo, with much em- phasis (as he told me) on forgiveness'. ('The Acholi are a vindictive people'.) A young Spanish curate visited native catechists on a small motor-cycle, taking Mass under a tree.

Seeing them at work in the dust and glare, among the smell of faeces and greasy

sewage — the Verona Fathers don't have the English scoutmaster's attitude to field hygiene — one felt that these missionaries were heroes. Strengthened by implicit obedience to a single body of rules laid down by Rome, they are free of the sec- tarian disputes that fragment the Protestant churches all over Africa.

Perhaps Kalisto's gravest handicap in his efforts to improve his school was the hostility of local peasants. Despite the in- junctions of the government authority in Kitgum some 25 families were squatting on school land and sabotaging his attempt to build staff houses by knocking down the freshly laid bricks at night. 'We don't need a school,' they insisted. 'We want the land for our crops and cattle and for our sons. Schooling for girls? Their job is to carry water and earn bridewealth.'

The Acholi method of farming is to slash and burn the bush, fell trees and woodland, plant their food crops and overgraze the soil with cattle, then move elsewhere, leav- ing a charred and arid waste behind them. In Kalongo only the borassus palms had survived, their globes of yellow fruit en- circled with necklaces of weavers' nests; the Rock of the Wind too, though in a reserved forest area, was being rapidly denuded by fire and axe.

It was Ojong, spokesman of the squatters — a muscular, truculent fellow who used to prowl round Kalisto's clearing half-naked with a heavy panga and bow and arrow who started the trouble that led to my leav- ing Kalongo. Hoping to embarrass Kalisto he informed the Ministry of Education that Kalisto's white teacher had a secret wireless transmitter and was photographing military installations. Recalled to Kampala to explain my presence in his school, Kalisto returned with hanging head (on the journey back he had been ambushed near Karuma Falls and lost his money) and told me, 'You had better go. Soldiers are coming to bar- rass you and we don't want that Amin business again.'

I went with regret, picking my way through gusting bush fires, leaving the dusty classrooms, the baboons, the rattle of gourds and rhythmic chanting from the witchdoctor's compound, and drove across country into Kenya. The first thing I did there was to buy cheese. I hadn't tasted cheese for a long time.

When I went back to Uganda a few months later the immigration police, as I had expected, were not happy to see me. My file, they warned me, was missing; and I was made to renew my visitor's permit every week. "You are a writer,' an African friend explained to me, 'and writers are feared.' Kampala was still poor, dirty unrepaired and overrun by soldiers. There were ambushes at Mukono and bodies dumped along the Jinja and Masaka roads. When I drove to Budo College to give a talk to the staff and senior pupils, militiamen were clambering over lorries like monkeys, emptying sacks of food into basins. My host at Budo apologised for the sticks of roasted cassava (no salt) which was all he could spare for supper. It was a lively audience and it asked some embarrassing questions about how guerrillas had operated in Rhodesia.

In the morning, though, when I looked down into the green valley below Budo and saw the honey-coloured huts half-hidden by gardens, the smoke of cooking-fires and the red lanes cut like tunnels through waving banana fronds, I felt that in spite of its passing toubles the rich Buganda landscape would never change.

While I was in Kampala one of Africa's best known poets Okot p'Bitek (an Acholi) died of convulsions. For years Bitek had been a scourge of the establishment, lam- basting white 'parasites', native politicians in blanket-suits, Christian clergymen with their 'hunchback God', and wigs. But on the news of his death his sleights and clown- ing were appropriately forgiven. A memorial service was held for him in Makerere's Anglican chapel, where he lay in an open coffin wearing, as in life, his em- broidered, open West African shirt.

I also went — perhaps for the last time to visit the cathedral and churchyard on Namirembe Hill. Here is Bishop James Han- nington's tomb — he was slashed and cut to death on a hill overlooking Jinja and only a few fragments of his corpse were recovered. The tombstone has this message: 'Martyred in Busoga 29 October 1885. His last words were reported to be "Tell the Kabaka I die for Uganda".'

Under the damp mango trees in the Euro- pean cemetery in the town below there is another grave with this inscription: "Hugh Ostler Crighton, 1948. The Old Man of Kikagati, Ankole, who lies buried here in the land he loved'.

Both messages convey feelings of devo- tion and love that any old-timer living out his life in this equatorial landscape of beauty and turbulence would understand and probably share.