The Masque Of Africa Part 2

EVERY WEEK there were two or three items in the newspaper from various parts of the country about witchcraft. there were two or three items in the newspaper from various parts of the country about witchcraft.

In one village people were reported to believe that malaria, a great killer in Uganda, was caused by witchcraft and mangoes. They had good reason for linking mangoes to the illness. Mangoes were plentiful in the rainy season; that was also when mosquitoes bred, seeking out even small acc.u.mulations of stagnant water. To others witchcraft seemed a more natural explanation. One villager said, "Malaria is caused by witchcraft or bad spirits. When I got malaria, I found out that my neighbour was responsible for it. And when he was sent away from the village, I got cured." One procedure-a visit to the witchdoctor-would have been responsible for finding out about the neighbour; another, more violent, procedure, probably involving the village, would have been necessary to send him away.

When it came to witchcraft, violence was never far away. In Easter week, in a village in the south-west, four brothers strangled their forty-two-year-old aunt. They removed her jaw and her tongue, no doubt for some private magical purpose, and then dumped the body in a nearby banana field. Not long after, dogs began to gather in the banana field. The village people became suspicious. They went to look, and found the dogs feeding on the dead woman's body, which was lying in a pool of blood. The dead woman was well known. Suspicion at once fell on the four brothers, who were believed to practise witchcraft. About twenty of the village men went to look for them. When they found them they began to beat them with sticks and anything else that came to hand.

Two of the brothers got away and went to the police. The other two brothers were killed and buried in a latrine. Four goats, five hens and two pigs belonging to the brothers were slaughtered; this was what happened to animals belonging to people who were thought to be bad. The police, when they came, arrested fifteen people. They recovered the two bodies from the latrine and took them away for a post-mortem: a strange legalistic note in this story of country wildness.

Sometimes, of course, it goes the other way: witchcraft in a setting where it doesn't fit. The story begins peacefully enough, in a village, with animals looking for pasture. A cow enters a secondary schoolyard, sees a s.h.i.+rt put out to dry, and begins to eat it. The student, whose s.h.i.+rt it is, chases the cow in the hope of getting his s.h.i.+rt back. He hits the cow with a stick. A few days later the student's leg-not the cow's-begins to swell, and he becomes paralysed. The students at the school recognise magic and witchcraft when they see it. They deal with it in the only way they know. They attack the village in a body, burn eight houses, and they try to lynch the cow-owner, an old man of seventy, whom they accuse of bewitching the paralysed student. In their rampage through the village they kill a dog, six cows, fourteen goats, three sheep and eleven chickens; they also destroy four pit-latrines, and the banana and coffee plantations of eight villagers. Three of the villagers, armed with spears and pangas, later hide in the school, to counter-attack; there-somewhat unfairly-they are arrested by the police; and the affair fizzles out.

Witchcraft is not a joke to these people. They cannot laugh at what they fear. The students at a senior secondary school in a major town, a boarding school, become very agitated when they see one morning, in the school compound, a fresh goat's head and a whole goat's skin. They see these as witchcraft fetishes. They blame the headmaster; already, they say, the food at the school is not good; and that morning when the boarders got up they found some school windows broken and the school generally in a mess. This is a clear "sign" of magic afoot. The students feel they are being threatened in an unpleasant diabolical way, and (speaking now in a code which they expect to be understood) they say some "big people" are behind it all. Later they parade through the town, st.u.r.dy young men in their school uniform, dark trousers, white s.h.i.+rt, and they declare a strike. The police, when they come, are conciliatory; they understand their country.

To live in a world ruled by witchcraft, a world liable to irrational dissolution in its details, is to be on edge, to be on a constant lookout. Add to this the eternal anxiety about politics, the fear of a land being lost; add the great population of Uganda, the constant feeling of a crowd too great for the land available, the roads, the jobs available.

The land can look so open and unused (as it did to the early explorers), but you never can tell when you are encroaching on protected wetlands that are now known to filter and cleanse water for Lake Victoria; or when, hunting antelope for food in the Mount Elgon area, a traditional hunting ground of your people, you are trespa.s.sing on land protected by the Uganda Wildlife Authority, whose guards carry guns and shoot to kill, and where, as they say, poaching is "like shaking death by the hand in the forest." There are many regions where as a herdsman you never can tell when you are occupying land reserved for cultivators, or sometimes driving your cattle over the border to Tanzania, where they are not wanted. In Kayunga you cut down trees, with others, to burn charcoal; and then, because there is now no forest cover, the hailstorms destroy houses and fields and animals, and people quite suddenly have nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat. It is so easy to make matters worse.

That feeling of being on edge can easily turn to a feeling of being torn, can turn to pain. It is of this pain, of people driven to extremity, of a world now beyond control, that many of the items in the newspaper speak every day.

Man burns 10 to death in hut: this is an item from the north, from an internally displaced persons camp. The name of the camp suggests the tensions. Within that, a family quarrel: a man settling accounts with his estranged wife. It was a gra.s.s-thatched hut; after it had been sprinkled with petrol it would have burnt fiercely. Seven of the ten people killed were children; some of them belonged to other families; shortage of s.p.a.ce had caused them to be brought to this particular hut. A photograph showed the little charred bodies in the burnt-out hut, lying together, for that little bit of last-minute comfort, and lying face down, instinctively protecting their faces. this is an item from the north, from an internally displaced persons camp. The name of the camp suggests the tensions. Within that, a family quarrel: a man settling accounts with his estranged wife. It was a gra.s.s-thatched hut; after it had been sprinkled with petrol it would have burnt fiercely. Seven of the ten people killed were children; some of them belonged to other families; shortage of s.p.a.ce had caused them to be brought to this particular hut. A photograph showed the little charred bodies in the burnt-out hut, lying together, for that little bit of last-minute comfort, and lying face down, instinctively protecting their faces.

My husband was hacked to death as I watched: this is an item from the same issue. It was a second marriage for both parties. The husband had fifteen children from his first marriage, six from his second. They were returning home from a trading centre when they were attacked by a man with a panga coming out of a banana plantation. The attacker, while he hacked and chopped, accused the husband of being a polygamist. So-in addition to possible resentment from the husband's first family-there was some Christian feeling here. After the husband was killed, the attacker turned to the woman. He chopped off one of her hands and would have done more, but he ran off when a this is an item from the same issue. It was a second marriage for both parties. The husband had fifteen children from his first marriage, six from his second. They were returning home from a trading centre when they were attacked by a man with a panga coming out of a banana plantation. The attacker, while he hacked and chopped, accused the husband of being a polygamist. So-in addition to possible resentment from the husband's first family-there was some Christian feeling here. After the husband was killed, the attacker turned to the woman. He chopped off one of her hands and would have done more, but he ran off when a boda-boda boda-boda cyclist with a bright cycle light appeared. The woman was taken to hospital and there her other hand was amputated. Without hands, she has to be fed by other people. She told the newspaper, "I do not know where I am headed with these children, and now that they are going back to school, who will feed me?" cyclist with a bright cycle light appeared. The woman was taken to hospital and there her other hand was amputated. Without hands, she has to be fed by other people. She told the newspaper, "I do not know where I am headed with these children, and now that they are going back to school, who will feed me?"

Accused of burying her son alive: again, this is from the same issue of the newspaper. A thirty-three-year-old casual labourer, a woman, working at a flower farm (of all places), is accused of burying her eighteen-month-old son in a potato garden. The child had been wrapped in a sack and his legs had been tied. The photograph of the mother shows a woman undone and helpless. A neighbour tells the paper that people so desperate should be allowed to take their unwanted children to any police station. And in the description of the buried baby-the sack, the tied legs-there is a strange echo of the witchdoctor's advice to a seeker to make an offering of something very dear to the seeker. As though the poor woman had heard of this advice and was trying to do it all by herself. again, this is from the same issue of the newspaper. A thirty-three-year-old casual labourer, a woman, working at a flower farm (of all places), is accused of burying her eighteen-month-old son in a potato garden. The child had been wrapped in a sack and his legs had been tied. The photograph of the mother shows a woman undone and helpless. A neighbour tells the paper that people so desperate should be allowed to take their unwanted children to any police station. And in the description of the buried baby-the sack, the tied legs-there is a strange echo of the witchdoctor's advice to a seeker to make an offering of something very dear to the seeker. As though the poor woman had heard of this advice and was trying to do it all by herself.

So much for the pain of the poor. But for better-off people, even people of a royal clan, there is an equivalent kind of distress.

"We had independence and we lost it. We have never recovered from the years of destruction that followed independence. Twenty years of it till 1984. Traditions are fading away by default. Are you going to Mbarara? You should go there and see the destruction with your own eyes. See the deserted palace with weeds growing there because of the politics. Once you remove cultural restraints you have chaos and anarchy. People put under this will do anything to survive." This was like the point Prince Ka.s.sim had made. "They will do anything and at the same time they want the technological advances of the world. The race for these technological luxuries has replaced culture. Our religion was not savage. It was based on the veneration of the ancestors. If your father dies you venerate him. You give a libation to the ancestors before you drink. The destruction of traditions and the lack of cultural restraint, especially for people who have been brought together by a colonial power and told to form a nation, could only bring disaster."

And from someone in the middle, an educated woman, not poor, not of a royal clan, and from quite a different part of the country, someone overtly Christian but with a love for her roots: "Modernity wants us to sweep our culture away, and that will manifest itself in a political upheaval. A conflict between Christianity and traditional religion. In the Lango tradition when there was a drought, or it was prolonged, all the elders got together and made sacrifices, and it would rain while they were there at it. My grandmother told me this. But the missionaries called it devil wors.h.i.+p. Culture does not die-today it is called witchcraft. My grandmother produced twins who died. They had to be buried in a special way, in hollow pots, and a shed had to be built over the grave, to protect and shade them. Every year my grandmother went there, to tend the shed, feed the grave, and sing and dance there. When she became a Pentecostal she had to stop that, as it was not allowed. She had to remove the shed, and she was so afraid that the twins would come and kill her living children. I talk to myself so as not to get confused. To me it's all about belief and what treats you well. In traditional religion it was not about money. It was a communal spirit and people came together for a common cause like the drought."

And gradually, from the tragedies the newspapers report, and from conversations with good people, the visitor arrives at the unsettling idea of a poor country still vulnerable-in its people, living on their nerves, and even in its landscape, which might be despoiled-after forty years of civil conflict, still waiting for an upheaval which may solve nothing.

10.

I HADN'T HADN'T thought in 1966 of going to look for the source of the Nile. No one among the people I knew talked of that. They talked about the game parks and fis.h.i.+ng in the western lakes; they talked about the politics of the country; they talked about their colleagues; they talked about doing long drives. I hadn't myself read Speke at that time, and so I hadn't been touched by the romance of the great river, though we crossed the river at Jinja on our way to Nairobi, a regular outing, and crossed it again when we drove back to Kampala. In Stanley I read that "jinja" meant the stones, the falls, which occurred just after Lake Victoria poured into the Nile. thought in 1966 of going to look for the source of the Nile. No one among the people I knew talked of that. They talked about the game parks and fis.h.i.+ng in the western lakes; they talked about the politics of the country; they talked about their colleagues; they talked about doing long drives. I hadn't myself read Speke at that time, and so I hadn't been touched by the romance of the great river, though we crossed the river at Jinja on our way to Nairobi, a regular outing, and crossed it again when we drove back to Kampala. In Stanley I read that "jinja" meant the stones, the falls, which occurred just after Lake Victoria poured into the Nile.

And now I was to see that this pouring into the Nile, seen from the Busoga side, was one of the majestic things in Nature: a great smooth sheet of water of immense force, not muddy like the Congo or the Mississippi, but fresh-looking, grey-green, dotted with mysterious small green islands, and between high green banks, dividing and coming to life over the stones. Speke, when he first saw it, the object of his dreams, sat on the bank on the Buganda side and "saw the day out" considering the play of water. It has that effect still, of encouraging the visitor simply to look, sending the mind back over the centuries, perhaps even over the millennia, when what we see now already existed (though a speeded-up camera would show islands and vegetation disappearing and reappearing); and sending the mind also on an unimaginable four-thousand-mile journey north to the Mediterranean.

Speke saw thousands of "pa.s.senger fish" flying at the stones, and many rhinoceros and crocodiles in the river. They are not there now. Speke was himself a great killer with the gun, with a jaunty Victorian sporting vocabulary to match; and many thousands of sportsmen would have followed where he led. Even at that first sight of the stones, while his master was content to sit and stare, Speke's well-trained a.s.sistant, Bombay, shot and killed a sleeping crocodile.

In the next century a dam was built at Jinja. River dams alter river life and alter the aspect of things; and what we see now at the stones wouldn't be quite what Speke saw. Another dam is planned for lower down the river; when that is done the visitor would no longer see what we see now.

ON ONE of the islands of Lake Victoria a world wildlife or conservation body has set up a small chimpanzee sanctuary-forty-two animals, whose parents had been killed and eaten by Africans, who are great relishers of what they call "bush meat" and, given guns and left to themselves, would easily eat their way through the continent's wildlife. of the islands of Lake Victoria a world wildlife or conservation body has set up a small chimpanzee sanctuary-forty-two animals, whose parents had been killed and eaten by Africans, who are great relishers of what they call "bush meat" and, given guns and left to themselves, would easily eat their way through the continent's wildlife.

The conservation people do boat trips to the sanctuary from Entebbe. It seemed to me a trouble-free way of being on the lake where a hundred and fifty years ago Mutesa I, with some boats of his navy, liked to go picnicking with his court and harem.

The gardens or grounds of the conservation body grow lush and green almost to the water's edge. It should be idyllic, but in the early morning the lake flies, feathery and brown, swarm over the lake. After what must be a life in the air, a short life, they are looking for places to settle down, and they do so on hair and clothes. For some inches below the boat-jetty cobwebs hang down pale-brown and heavy, like decorative swags, with their load of trapped flies-Africa prolific in life and death. The boat, starting up and moving on, cuts through another cloud of lake flies, which fall twice as fast on faces and clothes, and settle where there is no wind to blow them away, especially on the floor of the boat.

Then, mercifully, the fly-cloud is no more. The water is choppy, dark-green, and you soon start to see fis.h.i.+ng dugouts. There are two men to a boat, which sit so low in the water that the fishermen (who might be showing off a little) appear to be skimming the water with their bodies, and you find it easier to believe the newspaper item that five thousand people drown every year in the lake.

The romantic lake islands begin to appear, forest and parkland, their colours softened by the haze. What seems near is farther away than you think. Much white smoke comes from behind an island, from a fisherman's settlement which is slowly but surely polluting the lake, making it a carrier of typhoid and cholera. It would have been like that in Mutesa's time, but there is no mention of it in Speke, who has trouble describing an asthmatic attack he suffered over many weeks.

It was an hour and a half to the island of chimpanzees. Immediate order: mown gra.s.s, neatly thatched huts, paths and signs, with the brilliant yellow weaver birds busy about their extraordinary nests. Twice a day the chimpanzees are fed. The launches from the mainland arrive in time for this.

A pebbly red path led up to the fence that marked off the chimpanzee and forest area from the rest of the island. A tremendous racket from somewhere in the bush told us that the feeding had begun. There was no meat for the chimpanzees, only cut fruit thrown from a platform. This was fought over with mighty blows that when they landed on a chimpanzee seemed to strike hollow ground. The cries of beaters and beaten were overlaid with a continual squealing, relish indistinguishable from pain.

The chimpanzees might have been orphans, but in the sanctuary old ideas of size and authority ruled. The leading male ran back and forth the length of the viewing platform and beyond, thumping males not as big as he was. Only the very small, close to infancy, and strangely melancholy, were allowed to eat quietly, long, jointed fingers fixed round their pieces of fruit. One or two chimpanzees were made to perform little tricks for the visitors, using sticks or twigs to drag within reach pieces of fruit that had been deliberately thrown outside the wire-mesh fence, so that we could see the trick.

Gradually the feeding was over, and there again the bigger animals led the way, being the first to lope back to the forest, moving swiftly on arms and legs.

One couldn't help remembering that in times of national emergency, it was the zoos and the animals that were the first to suffer. Just a little weakening of the central authority here, and all the elaborate support of the chimpanzee sanctuary would wither away. The chimpanzees had skills, as we had been told; they were close to human beings; but against guns they, like all the world's animals, were helpless. Fifteen minutes or less with a gun could reduce these animals to the African bush meat their parents had become. The paths of the sanctuary, maintained now with so much trouble, would become overgrown; the neat gra.s.s roofs of the huts would slip and collapse. When Speke and Stanley had come this way the forest and forest life would have seemed eternal; but now, like everything in Uganda, it felt frail.

We returned by another route, going round an island where there was a fisherman's settlement of about a thousand. So one of our boatmen said; but the settlement, with the dun-coloured shacks tight one against the other, looked like a very full mainland slum, and I thought there might have been more people there. This was where the thick white smoke of the morning had come from. On the way out we had seen a few fishermen's settlements, and some had looked romantic, picture-book places, with dark dugouts drawn up on pale beaches. But this big settlement that mimicked a mainland slum would have had no electricity and no water except what came from the lake.

Soon in one part of the sky there appeared the thin brown tornadolike whirls of the lake flies that had troubled us in the morning. Before we could get back to Entebbe five or more of these light-coloured whirls defined themselves against the pale lower sky, thin, rising high, wavering, constantly changing shape: like emanations of lake water.

11.

THE B BAGANDA people had great skills as builders of Roman-straight roads and majestic gra.s.s-roofed huts that didn't leak even in the rainy season. They had a detailed social organisation; every clan was like a guild, with its special duties. Wors.h.i.+pping their Kabaka, they were ruled by the idea of loyalty and obedience. These qualities, taken together, made them a great fighting force, and gave the Baganda their empire, which lasted some centuries. people had great skills as builders of Roman-straight roads and majestic gra.s.s-roofed huts that didn't leak even in the rainy season. They had a detailed social organisation; every clan was like a guild, with its special duties. Wors.h.i.+pping their Kabaka, they were ruled by the idea of loyalty and obedience. These qualities, taken together, made them a great fighting force, and gave the Baganda their empire, which lasted some centuries.

Their history, however, has no dates and no records, because the Baganda people had no script and no writing, They have only a limited oral literature, which is a poor subst.i.tute for a written text that can be consulted down the centuries. Strangely, the absence of a script doesn't seem to trouble academic or nationalist people; it isn't a subject that is talked about.

I found only one man who had thought about this deficiency of the Ugandan or central African kingdoms. He was a middle-aged melancholic and he was from a neighbouring kingdom (or kingdom area). He was pa.s.sionate about the kingdoms, believing in the power of the imprisoned and irreplaceable royal drum of his area, with its particular heartbeat. He grieved for the recent past. The terrible Milton Obote had imprisoned the royal drum and sixty-two items of its regalia in 1967; and though the kingdoms had been technically restored, nothing had been the same again; and the drum had still not been recovered. The drum still had power, but it suffered in its imprisonment. Like a wounded patriot, the melancholy man exaggerated the pain to come: he lived with the vision of all this part of Africa being swept away by some new political force. He pointed to the demure woman, a relative, who was with him. He said, "In a few years you wouldn't see her here." He wasn't saying that the woman would migrate; he meant only that in a short while people of the royal clan, to which his relative belonged, people known for their fine and distinctive features, would be squeezed out.

I took him back to the question of the absence of a script and writing.

He said, "Script? They didn't know the wheel."

This was news to me. But then, reviewing everything I had read about old Uganda, I felt that what I had heard was right; though it was hard to imagine everything being manhandled or loaded on to donkeys on those straight Baganda roads.

He thought that the geographical isolation of Uganda in central Africa, beside lakes the outside world didn't know, would have gone some way to explaining why there was no script. And I felt he was right. The Baganda had their own language; it would have been reasonably easy, given the stimulus of literate neighbours, for a script to be devised to match the sounds of the language. In the neighbouring kingdom of Bunyoro Speke found people writing Arabic: some people felt the need for a script and writing.

To be without writing, as the Baganda were, was to have no effective way of recording the extraordinary things they achieved. Much of the past, the thirty-seven kings of which they boast, is effectively lost, and can be talked of only as myth. The loss continues. In a literate age, of newspapers and television and radio, the value of oral history steadily shrinks.

The Baganda built roads like the Romans, very straight, up hill and down dale, filling the awkward depressions with the stalks of tall papyrus, which grow on this water-logged land in profusion, as they did in ancient Egypt. But the Baganda have lived for so long with the sight of their old roads that they take them for granted; there are some who even say that the roads were built by the British. And what must have been refined tools or systems for aligning and grading those roads have been forgotten.

In about 1870 Mutesa I was fighting a war against one of his neighbours. For this war he built or caused to be built a road along part of the lake. Stanley saw this military road two years later. It still existed as a road. Very little gra.s.s had grown over it, which was quite remarkable in a fertile area, which had heavy rains in the rainy season.

PATRICK E EDWARDS was the Trinidad amba.s.sador. He was an African expert, having served in Nigeria for some years. He was interested in my travel and did what he could to help. He thought I should move out of Kampala and have a look at some of the other kingdoms beside Buganda. He wrote an official letter to the kingdom of Busoga (which Kabaka Sunna had spectacularly punished in the 1850s). After some time there was a reply. The officials were concerned to an extraordinary degree about their expenses when I came to see them, and specified what these might be: meals, travel, hotel charges. I felt that in one bound, because of Patrick's letter, we had gone back a hundred and fifty years to the arbitrary world of the tribal was the Trinidad amba.s.sador. He was an African expert, having served in Nigeria for some years. He was interested in my travel and did what he could to help. He thought I should move out of Kampala and have a look at some of the other kingdoms beside Buganda. He wrote an official letter to the kingdom of Busoga (which Kabaka Sunna had spectacularly punished in the 1850s). After some time there was a reply. The officials were concerned to an extraordinary degree about their expenses when I came to see them, and specified what these might be: meals, travel, hotel charges. I felt that in one bound, because of Patrick's letter, we had gone back a hundred and fifty years to the arbitrary world of the tribal hongo hongo, which could at any time be doubled for the traveller and then doubled again, before the drum of satisfaction could be beaten, to free the traveller. I decided to stay away from Busoga.

PATRICK THOUGHT we should persevere, and try with the more famous and beautiful kingdom of Toro in the west. In the Serena Hotel, where we were staying, there was as it happened a man who, in addition to his hotel duties in the human resources department, was head of protocol for the kingdom of Toro. Patrick made his usual correct approaches to this man, whose name was James, and in due course we heard from James that the Queen Mother of Toro was going to be in the hotel in a couple of days. we should persevere, and try with the more famous and beautiful kingdom of Toro in the west. In the Serena Hotel, where we were staying, there was as it happened a man who, in addition to his hotel duties in the human resources department, was head of protocol for the kingdom of Toro. Patrick made his usual correct approaches to this man, whose name was James, and in due course we heard from James that the Queen Mother of Toro was going to be in the hotel in a couple of days.

On the afternoon of the appointed day we sat in the Bambara lounge on the first floor of the hotel, waiting for the Queen Mother. In a far corner of the lounge were three big women, of brown complexion. They were there when we arrived. They made a distinguished group. One of the three was noticeably handsome and vivacious. She was wearing a shade of powder red that suited her complexion. I suspected that she was the Queen Mother, but we couldn't presume without an introduction. That was made only when James, the protocol man of the court, came.

The Queen Mother and her companions then left their corner and came to where we were sitting. The women with the Queen Mother were her sisters, and I imagine they were her official chaperones.

The Queen Mother said of one sister, when she introduced her, that she was a born-again Christian. That meant she was part of the Pentecostal crop of Uganda, where there were hundreds of Pentecostal churches, extravagantly named, and matched in their number only by the private junior and secondary schools, whose signboards ("Day and Boarding") appeared in unlikely places, like the boards of the churches, a kind of private enterprise gone mad: an unlikely, twisted fulfilment of Mutesa's wish in 1875 for British missionaries.

"Do you want to be saved?" the Queen Mother asked ironically.

But the irony had no effect on her born-again sister who, in an undertone, immediately began to talk to us about the need for Jesus.

With equal irony the Queen Mother said that the other sister was married to an old man, leaving us to work out what that meant.

The Queen Mother told her own story easily. She had clearly done it many times before. Her husband had been in the foreign service of Uganda. He had served in Latin America; and she, in her jolly way, spoke some Spanish phrases she still remembered. "Como esta? Todo va "Como esta? Todo va bien?" bien?" ("How are you? Everything all right?") They were a happy couple, although he was older than she. They had three children, two girls and a boy. One of the girls became very ill with leukaemia. They took this girl to the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. For three years, while the girl was in hospital, the family stayed in London. At some stage her father, the diplomat, had to go back to Uganda to deal with various matters. While he was there he died of a heart attack; shortly after, the girl with leukaemia also died. So, at the age of twenty-seven, the Queen Mother became a widow and regent. ("How are you? Everything all right?") They were a happy couple, although he was older than she. They had three children, two girls and a boy. One of the girls became very ill with leukaemia. They took this girl to the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. For three years, while the girl was in hospital, the family stayed in London. At some stage her father, the diplomat, had to go back to Uganda to deal with various matters. While he was there he died of a heart attack; shortly after, the girl with leukaemia also died. So, at the age of twenty-seven, the Queen Mother became a widow and regent.

Her son was now sixteen. In two weeks or so he was going to open the parliament at Toro. It was going to be a splendid three-day occasion. Prince Ka.s.sim had spoken of this as part of the culture and discipline of the old ways; it was moving in Toro, he said, to see distinguished old men reverencing the boy king. And the Queen Mother now told us a little more about her son. He loved animals. He allowed no one to kick a dog or kill a cat. She was hoping to send him to England to be educated. She invited us all to come to Toro for the opening of the parliament. And Patrick, returning courtesy for courtesy, invited the Queen Mother to come to Trinidad for the carnival in the coming year.

James, the protocol man, seemed delighted that the meeting in the Bambara lounge had gone so well. He was as squashed in appearance, and dry and formal, as the Queen Mother was full of bounce. He said later, in his delight, "The royal family of Toro are big and handsome and light-skinned."

It was strange hearing this from him. He himself was very dark.

I HAD BEGUN HAD BEGUN to feel that I had done what I could do in Uganda, and I was planning to move on. But now, after the Queen Mother's invitation, I thought I should hang around until the opening of the Toro parliament. to feel that I had done what I could do in Uganda, and I was planning to move on. But now, after the Queen Mother's invitation, I thought I should hang around until the opening of the Toro parliament.

I had a few memories of the kingdom from 1966. The main town was Fort Portal, named after an early British surveyor of the protectorate. In 1966 it had a kind of expatriate life. There were tea planters. Unwillingly one day I went fis.h.i.+ng with one of them in Lake Albert, to the west, and quickly made a mess of things, fouling up line and fly on an underwater snag and amusing no one. The best known bar was The Gum Pot. The ruler was the Omukama, and his palace was at the top of a hill. There were stories about him (or, possibly, his father). When he had drunk too much his majordomo would keep visitors away, saying, "The Omukama is tired." One year, in a decorating mood, he laid a coat of green paint on the stones beside the hill road to the palace.

The days pa.s.sed. No word came from James about the arrangements that had been made for us. Patrick, with his ideas of diplomatic etiquette, didn't press. On the Sat.u.r.day when the boy-king was to open the parliament Patrick telephoned James in the morning, and we were told that there were many guests and we couldn't be fitted in. The ceremonial weekend pa.s.sed. James said, "You know these royal people. They don't care."

On the days that followed-perhaps Patrick had delivered a diplomatic rebuke-James became more and more agitated. We had been let down; he felt responsible and very much wanted to make it up to us. He wanted us to go to Toro. He even wanted us to spend the night there. He became quite frantic. He said he had planned everything, and he was so full of remorse for his royals we thought it would be churlish, for his sake, not to go to Toro.

At the last minute, however, some good fairy made us decide not to spend the night there, but to drive back to Kampala. Patrick, always correct, put on a formal grey suit for what could be thought of as his visit to royalty; and we went in his amba.s.sador's car, with his Trinidad standard unfurled.

It was a four-hour drive to Fort Portal. At least half of that was on the straight royal roads of Buganda which, when they went up a hill, seemed to disappear into the sky at the top of the hill. But these Buganda roads were in a poor way, in spite of the editorial in the paper that morning which said that the people of Uganda were "hood-winked" into believing that the roads were not good; and speed-breakers across the road in every peopled area shook up the bones.

We came in time to the British-built roads of Toro: not straight, always curving, laid down in cuttings in the red soil which often shut out the view. But for some reason-perhaps the population was spa.r.s.er and there was less heavy traffic-these roads were in much better shape than the Buganda ones; and we were able to travel at speed. The stone markers on the roadside were engraved every four kilometres with the distance to Fort Portal. That distance seemed to melt away, and the landscape all around was wonderful: parkland between mountain ranges.

James, on the telephone from Kampala, guided us through the small town. We came to the hill with the palace. As we climbed I looked for the roadside stones that might have been painted green by an eccentric omukama before 1966. I couldn't see them. The stones might have been removed as being too disfigured, or the story might have been false. On every side the view was grand: we looked down to wide parkland, pale gra.s.s, darker trees, and the roofs of the small colonial town of Fort Portal.

The hill was isolated; every view was grand. It occurred to me that this hill would always have been the seat of a king or chief; it would have had a history. If Africans hadn't built with the perishable products of the forest, it would have been worth excavating.

We came to a gravel area between the palace and a small, featureless modern building. When we got out of the car we were welcomed by a small team of smiling, busy men who darted about and took photographs of us and managed to make a lot of noise. They must have been the palace officials James had talked about. So, rea.s.suringly, James had kept his word.

We were led to a small room in the palace where there were copies of family photographs on two big boards. Immediately, then, not giving us time to rest after our long drive, a red-eyed official in a long gown and with a heavy-handled stick began to harangue us about Toro and the royal family. He didn't simply point at the photographs; he used the heavy handle of the stick to knock hard at various photographs on the boards. He generated a lot of noise and he had a strong accent. I couldn't follow what he was saying, but I felt he had already begun to repeat himself.

There was a photograph at the top of one board of the old palace: a large rectangular thatched building. When the British came to Uganda Africans became ashamed of their round huts; as soon as they could they began building rectangular concrete houses. So what had happened here on the royal hill in Toro was a curious reversal of what had become standard practice in Uganda. The old palace was rectangular; the new palace was circular. It had been built like that for the sake of the all-round view; but it was also like a rejection of the old colonial idea of modernity. The new palace, with its various political messages, had in fact been built by Brother Leader Ghaddafi as part of the Libyan expansion in Africa. The new round palace had concrete uprights and its drains were exposed. This exposing of the drains was the Libyan style; the grand new mosque in Kampala had a similar feature.

I would have liked to see more of the palace, but we were not able to do so. When I asked where we might rest we were led to the smaller, rectangular building on the other side of the gravelled area. In the drawing-room area there was an old leopard skin, mark of kings.h.i.+p-(poor leopard, doomed to extinction)-thrown over an upholstered chair. I imagined the young king sat there and discussed affairs of state with various people. There was another small room with two plain divan beds set against two walls, their heads at an angle one to the other. This was where we were supposed to rest. The lavatory had no seat; through a big hole in the ceiling we could see the beams and rafters of the roof. This was where James's arrangements petered out; it was clear now that no amount of telephoning could improve matters.

We dragged some chairs out to the wide verandah, and the warm air from the gravelled yard and from the road below came at us. Patrick telephoned James and said without complaint that Toro was beautiful, so beautiful he was hoping to be allowed to buy a piece of land. James, missing the irony, told us that if we wanted lunch we should go to the Mountains of the Moon hotel in the town. We decided to forget the palace officials-we had some idea that they might have laid on lunch for us-and make a run for this hotel. We heard later that the officials were hoping to come with us.

In the Mountains of the Moon, new to me, we sat in the s.p.a.cious back verandah, at the edge of the bright green lawn. A pretty little kitten, three or four months old, wailed piteously for food. I wished I could have taken him away with me. I went and talked to a waitress. She told me that the kitten was the last of a litter; they had got rid of the others. The kitten lived in a drain pipe in a concrete gutter; when it was there it was perfectly hidden. It was alone in the world; it kept alive-perhaps for not much longer-by its instinct. Hunger alone had made it come up to the back verandah. The waitress brought a saucer of milk. This little bit of nourishment comforted it; it stopped crying, and a little later I saw it in the hotel garden, not far from its drain-pipe home, licking its paws.

It was not far from here, in the kingdom of Unyoro, to the west of Buganda, that Speke, near the end of his journey, bought a little kitten from an Unyoro man. He doesn't say why he bought it, but it could only have been to keep the creature alive for a few more days. The Unyoro man wanted to eat the kitten; it was good eating, he said. He begged Speke to give the kitten back to him if it looked likely to die. It is a strange episode in his book, just four lines long; and he doesn't say how it ended.

There had been some talk from James of the palace officials taking us to see places and people connected with the traditional African religion. But since our arrival my interest in this part of the programme had gone down and down. And it was just as well, because when we went back from the Mountains of the Moon to the palace the red-eyed official, talking of the religious things we wanted to see, said they had sent away all their cars; and since we couldn't all fit in Patrick's amba.s.sador's car, they would have to go ahead of us on a boda-boda boda-boda motorbike. That would cost three thousand s.h.i.+llings. It was only a pound, but in Ugandan s.h.i.+llings it sounded a fearful amount; and I dreaded to think, if we showed ourselves indifferent to money at this stage, how much we would have to pay later to have an audience with a local diviner. motorbike. That would cost three thousand s.h.i.+llings. It was only a pound, but in Ugandan s.h.i.+llings it sounded a fearful amount; and I dreaded to think, if we showed ourselves indifferent to money at this stage, how much we would have to pay later to have an audience with a local diviner.

I said we were leaving out that part of the programme. They didn't seem to mind. But they wanted us to sign the visitors' book. They especially wanted Patrick to sign it, since he was the important man among us. And, since he was important, they wanted him to sign by himself on a whole page.

They then took Patrick off to the small room in the palace where there were the two boards of photographs. He came out after a while with what looked like a framed souvenir photograph: it had been taken of him in the morning with a lot of noise and busyness. Patrick thanked them. They said there was a charge. Seven thousand s.h.i.+llings. A little over two pounds. Patrick gave them 20,000 s.h.i.+llings. He was expecting change, but they said he had misunderstood. The charge wasn't 7,000 s.h.i.+llings; it was 74,000 s.h.i.+llings. Twenty-four pounds and 50 pence sterling; or 37 U.S. dollars. Patrick, too stunned to argue, or to think about pounds and dollars, paid. He awakened to outrage only after we had left, and for a long time he could think only of what was in effect the hongo hongo he had been made to pay. he had been made to pay.

All the way back to Kampala, along the curving roads of Toro and the straight roads of Buganda, there were schoolchildren in uniform coming out at the end of a school day, walking home to simple dwellings in the fierce sun. It was just after three, the deadest time of the tropical day: the heat at its worst in all the green, the freshness of the morning long burnt away, together with whatever optimism the new day might have brought. The light and the heat cast a gloomy clarity on what we were driving through: small houses, small fields, small people, and it seemed that nothing more uplifting was being offered to the children we could see on the road. Uganda was Uganda. Education and school uniforms, giving an illusion of possibility, was easy; much harder was the creation of a proper economy. There would be no jobs for most of the children we could see-some dawdling on the way home now, killing time in spite of the heat.

The latest employment news, presented in the newspapers as good news, was that, even with all the suicide bombers and mayhem, there were six thousand Ugandans working as security guards in Iraq. There was also a report of a call for Ugandan English teachers from North Korea.

CHAPTER 2.

Sacred Places.

I HAD BEEN HAD BEEN told-by someone who said he wanted to warn me about Lagos airport-that Nigerians liked to travel with lots of luggage. I took this to mean that there would be trouble collecting luggage in Lagos. But we had luggage trouble even before we left London. Someone had checked in with his luggage and had then disappeared. We waited a while and then the pilot said that the absent pa.s.senger had checked in nineteen pieces of luggage. I thought I had misheard. But the Nigerian pa.s.sengers didn't turn a hair; and later, in Nigeria, I understood why. Why fret about nineteen pieces when at that moment there was a Nigerian bigwig travelling the world with thirty-seven suitcases, and doing so on a diplomatic pa.s.sport to which he was not ent.i.tled? told-by someone who said he wanted to warn me about Lagos airport-that Nigerians liked to travel with lots of luggage. I took this to mean that there would be trouble collecting luggage in Lagos. But we had luggage trouble even before we left London. Someone had checked in with his luggage and had then disappeared. We waited a while and then the pilot said that the absent pa.s.senger had checked in nineteen pieces of luggage. I thought I had misheard. But the Nigerian pa.s.sengers didn't turn a hair; and later, in Nigeria, I understood why. Why fret about nineteen pieces when at that moment there was a Nigerian bigwig travelling the world with thirty-seven suitcases, and doing so on a diplomatic pa.s.sport to which he was not ent.i.tled?

Nigerians have their own idea of status. They make sport with things that other people might take seriously; and a diplomatic pa.s.sport, with its many immunities, was one of the toys that had come to them with independence and statehood. To possess a toy like that, almost a fetish, sorted the men from the boys, and important people jostled with one another for the enn.o.blement. A man with thirty-seven suitcases would make enough of a show, you might think. But in Nigerian eyes such a man would make much more of a show, would put the seal on his grandeur, if at Immigration, in full view of the waiting crowd, he could saunter through the diplomatic channel.

We were waiting that morning or afternoon in London in the parked plane, and the man who had abandoned his nineteen pieces didn't show up. At length the pilot said that those nineteen pieces would have to be taken off the plane. This would take time; we were a full flight; many more than those nineteen pieces would have to be taken off before we could come upon the unclaimed suitcases. At the end they were found and taken off. We were now two and a half hours past our scheduled departure. For all this time we had been idle in the aeroplane, looking at the airport buildings and the busy life of the tarmac.

It was horrible when we got to Lagos. Beyond the immigration and customs hall, deceptively brisk and soon quite clear, there was chaos. Three flights had come in, close to one another; and there was only one unloading facility. Down the aluminium chute, from time to time, came the swollen black suitcases of Nigeria, like fragments of cooling lava. Unexpectedly conservative in style, those suitcases, done in a kind of fabric, and oddly similar.

In the dim light people lined the carousel and some stood against the wall. Others stood as near as they could get to the debouching point, almost amid the dangerous tumble of fat suitcases, like people who believed in magic, and thought that to be near the source was to be halfway to success. More important people walked up and down with the a.s.sistants (in suits or fine Nigerian clothes) who had come to the airport to welcome them, and were now, instead, like everybody else, only looking for luggage. After the style of business cla.s.s and first cla.s.s, all were equal here. The unloading and reloading of our own plane had made a mess of the original order in which things had been stowed.

I was standing against a wall behind a Nigerian family who had boarded the plane in London and were still full of beans. They had a couple of trolleys, but so far no suitcases. From time to time, for no reason I could see, the teen-age daughter, setting her face, gave her much smaller younger brother a good hard kick or lashed out at him with a vicious cuff. The blows would have hurt, but the boy made no attempt to hit back; instead, like a puppy or kitten with a short memory, he went to the girl again and was again kicked and cuffed.

While I was watching this piece of Nigerian family life I was accosted by a man in a dark suit and a coloured tie. He seemed to suggest that he was a driver and was waiting for me. He seemed so good and correct and logical in all the noise and hopelessness around me that I forgot all that I had been tutored about Lagos airport. After that introduction I looked, while I waited, for the man with the suit and the jaunty tie; he became my anchor in the rocking, jumping crowd. Sometimes (no doubt for some pressing private reason) he melted into the scrum around the carousel, and then I was frantic until I had a glimpse of the red tie again.

When in the fullness of time he guided me to a car (my two little pieces of luggage now found) I was happy to go.

The airport building had been chaotic inside. Outside was full of menace: raw concrete beams overhead, raw concrete pillars in front, and a kind of canopy that offered no protection. It was raining. The road, though s.h.i.+ny in the rain, was not well lighted. After the fug of the luggage hall every drop of rain, slanting in below the teasing canopy, felt cold and seemed to sting. There were beggars coming out of the dark now, around a corner, from nowhere that one could see: spectral at first, these figures, and then very real and st.u.r.dy. They all offered to help, and every one seemed a threat. The women beggars, at this time of night, were especially disturbing.

Here, without understanding how it had happened I lost the man in the suit. Here, left alone with a man who said he was my driver, I heard that the man in the suit was not himself a driver; he organised drivers at the airport for people like me.

This man at least knew where I was going, and I allowed myself to go with him.

It was a slow, long journey to the other end of the sleeping town. The driver appeared uncertain about the route.