Dark Star Safari

10. Old Friends in Bat Valley

Papyrus grew in thick leafy clumps, as fresh as salad, by the lakeshore just inside the Ugandan border. The tall graceful stalks swayed, the feathery heads nodded, as my bus passed by, traveling west on a back road from the border town of Busia. I had not seen papyrus growing anywhere in Kenya, even on the Kisumu edge of Lake Victoria, but as soon as I crossed into Uganda I saw rafts of the tall delicately tufted plant in the swampland by the lake. It was like further proof that Uganda is the source of the Nile. Downstream in Egypt where real papyrus no longer existed I had seen images of the lovely plant picked out in bright vegetable dye on the walls of pharaonic tombs and on the tops of columns at Karnak. Anything that linked Egypt to the heart of Africa interested me: papyrus, lotuses, crocs, hippos, crested cranes, baboons, lions, elephants and their ivory, even the images of slaves, and the river water itself.

‘How did you first come here?’ I used to ask old-timers and elderly missionaries in the sixties. Many would say, ‘Down the Nile.’

That meant: By boat and train through Egypt, train to Khartoum, paddle steamer from Khartoum to Juba, and then fifty-eight miles by road to Uganda.

I had come by ‘chicken-bus’ — the buses that were full of Africans and their produce, including trussed-up chickens and infants so swaddled they looked mummified. One chicken-bus had dropped me at the Kenyan border. Good-humored hawkers and touts, money-changers and beggars descended upon me. They followed me, running, across no man’s land, a hot stony half-mile without any shade, until they were turned back at the chain-link fence and razor wire on the Ugandan side. Something was revealed about a person’s nature by the way he tried to run — more revealing when he ran towards you than when he tried to run away.

At the Ugandan checkpoint I went through the same formalities again, a crowd shoving each other to get into a small shed, for their passports to be stamped, and outside more money-changers and beggars. I bought a newspaper and read about bomb outrages that had occurred in Kampala the previous day: ‘Election violence.’ On the next bus, on the far side, I reflected that a person who has not crossed an African border on foot has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be the edge, is the country’s central reality.

Right from the frontier Uganda seemed a tidier better-governed place than Kenya, and it was visibly greener and more fertile, palmier, more lush, with rice paddies being planted and tended, and banana trees — all sorts of bananas. Ugandans say there are sixty varieties, for they are one of the staples here. This southeastern part of Uganda was green and low-lying and swampy, the big lake seeping into the hinterland.

The roads were in better shape — and so were the houses, old and new — than the ones on the Kenyan side, more reminders that Kenya was in a run-down condition and perhaps that Uganda was on the way up. Sugar cane was still being grown in the fields here, as in the past, on estates that had always been owned by Indians. Given the world price of sugar and most other commodities, this was somewhat surprising. Certainly farmers in Africa were earning less for growing coffee, tea, cotton, sugar and tobacco — and in some places were going back to subsistence farming, letting the cash crops die and planting corn for their own use.

Late in the afternoon my bus passed the town of Jinja, where at Owen Falls Lake Victoria flows north — the Victoria Nile — to Lake Kyoga and onward to Murchison Falls and Lake Albert, into the Albert Nile. This simple progression perplexed ancient speculators such as Ptolemy and the European explorers in Africa until the expedition of 1857–8 when Burton and Speke crossed from the east coast to survey the lake region of the interior. While Burton lay ill in what is now Tabora, in Tanzania, it was Speke who traveled to the southern edge of the great lake, to get a glimpse. He had no idea of the lake’s true size, but from what he was told by Arabs, he surmised that at its northern shore was an outflow, the headwaters of the Nile. Burton challenged him on this, and denounced him for his haste, for being too impatient to navigate the lake. Speke was defensive but insecure; he had a fragile disposition anyway (he was later to kill himself). Yet his intuition was correct: the lake was later proven to be the Niles source.

This familiar landscape gave me a soothing sense of homecoming, almost nostalgia. I was still traveling in a state of contentment, wary as always, but with a feeling of relative safety. I was visible as a mzungu, of course, but an older one in second-hand clothes, wearing a cheap watch and a faded hat. My sports jacket was terribly torn: battery acid had burned large holes in it on one of my truck rides. Tatters in Africa are like camouflage, mine made me less conspicuous. But African markets were wonderful places for finding people to patch clothes: I could get the coat mended in Kampala. That simple mission made me happier. And I had the Rimbaudesque thrill that no one on earth knew where I was. I had successfully disappeared in this southeastern bush of Uganda, a place I knew fairly well. I loved bumping along in this bus alone, in a crimson Ugandan sunset that would go dark in about thirty minutes as night dropped like a blanket on the bush.

I was also excited to be here because it was a return to my youth, or young adulthood. I had last been in Uganda thirty-three years before, and had been happy. I wondered whether, with a birthday looming, at the back of my mind was my plan to return to a specific time in my life when I had been supremely happy. Then, I had been in love with a woman who loved me, and planning to be married, and in those same months seeing my first book published. I knew that I was young and appreciated, living a life I had chosen.

It was in my mind to avoid a birthday party. I was so self-conscious of my age that I often asked Africans to guess how old I was, hoping — perhaps knowing in advance — they would give me a low figure. They always did. Few people were elderly in Africa — forty was old, a man of fifty was at death’s door, sixty-year-olds were just crocks or crones. Despite my years I was healthy, and being agile and resilient I found traveling in Africa a pleasure: I did not seem old here — did not feel it, did not look it to Africans — and so it was the perfect place to be, another African fantasy, an adventure in rejuvenation.

‘You are forty something,’ Kamal guessed in Addis. The highest number I got was fifty-two. Little did they know how much they flattered my vanity. But no one was vain about longevity in Africa, because the notion of longevity hardly existed. No one lived long and so age didn’t matter, and perhaps that accounted for the casual way Africans regarded time. In Africa no one’s lifetime was long enough to accomplish anything substantial, or to see any task of value completed. Two generations in the West equaled three generations in African time, telescoped by early marriage, early child-bearing, and early death.

In southeastern Uganda I wrote in my diary, I do not want to be young again. I am happy being what I am. This contentment is very helpful on a trip as long and difficult as this.

It had taken me years to summon up the resolve to return to Africa because in all travel one’s mood is crucial. I had been happy and hopeful here. I began to see that Africa had aged the ways Africans themselves had aged — old at forty: most Kenyans and Ugandans I had met so far were too young to remember independence. I had procrastinated about returning because I had suspected that the Africa I had known had disappeared, had become anarchic and violent. This seemed to be borne out by the headlines in Uganda that week about the bombs (‘grenades’) that had gone off at Kampala’s main market. Two people had been killed, ten injured — post-election violence was the repeated explanation, the opposition being blamed. But that disruption went with the territory It was politics, as Africans said. And I was just an anonymous man in old clothes on a corner seat in a chicken-bus reading about it in the local newspaper.

What all older people know, what had taken me almost sixty years to learn, is that an aged face is misleading. I did not want to be the the classic bore, the reminiscing geezer, yet I now knew: The old are not as frail as you think, they are insulted to be regarded as feeble. They are full of ideas, hidden powers, even sexual energy. Don’t be fooled by the thin hair and battered features and the skepticism. The older traveler knows it best: in our hearts we are youthful and we are insulted to be treated as old men and burdens, for we have come to know that the years have made us more powerful and certainly streetwise. Years are not an affliction — old age is strength.

Jinja had once been full of Indian shops, selling cloth and kitchenware, and food, and several shops specialized in Indian sweets — syrupy globs of gulabjamun and sticky yellow laddhu. There were no Indians now; no sweet shops, no panwallahs. Some of the shops were boarded up, others were run by Africans. At the bus depot in Jinja I met a pair of young nervous Americans, backpackers wearing LL Bean shorts and Orvis hats, sticky sun cream on their noses, the girl gulping trail mix, the boy with his thumb in the Lonely Planet Guide to East Africa, looking a bit too conspicuous.

The boy said to me, ‘Don’t you think we’ll be safer staying here until things quieten down in Kampala?’

‘Then you’ll be in Jinja for years,’ I said. ‘Things have not been quiet in Kampala since 1962. Get on the bus — you’ll be fine.’

But they didn’t, they stayed. If, as they said, they weren’t leaving until Kampala settled down, they might still be in Jinja now.

When I told Africans where I had come from, and how slowly I had traveled, they said, ‘So you must be retired.’

‘No, no, no,’ I said, over-reacting, because I despised the word and equated it with surrender. ‘I’m traveling, I’m working.’

That wasn’t it, either, not business, not pleasure, not work, not retirement, but the process of life, how I chose to pass the time.

Nearer Kampala the bush was denser and the towns better defined, with clearer perimeters — regulated subdivisions rather than the straggling squatter camps that were suburbs in Kenya. There were signs in Uganda, too, that people were houseproud: the huts and bungalows were painted and fenced in, with vegetable or flower gardens. Among them were very tall native trees standing singly or in clusters, the last remnants of the old growth forests, the habitat that had supported troops of monkeys and dangling orchids. What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, there were long fluffy tracts where butterflies settled. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies.

At the edge of Kampala was a sports ground, Mandela National Stadium. In my time it would have been named Obote Stadium, or Amin Stadium, In Kenya, it would have been Moi Stadium. African politicians habitually bestowed their own names upon roads, schools and arenas; they put their faces on the currency, full faced on the notes, in lumpy profile on the coins. The political health of a country was easily assessed by looking at the money and the names of streets. In the worst places you saw the same name and face everywhere, that of the president-for-life.’

There had been an election in Uganda just the week before I arrived. The posters and banners of the different parties were still prominent on shops. I recognized some of the candidates — I personally knew two of them, for they had been ambitious ranters even in my time. The incumbent Yoweri Museveni had won, and though one of the losers, a man named Kizza Besigye, disputed the result, it was generally felt that the election had been fair. But grenades were still being lobbed into markets in different parts of the country and cars burned willy-nilly.

When I finally arrived in Kampala the news was that the loser, Besigye, who was contesting the election, had gone to Entebbe Airport for the flight to South Africa to give a lecture. He had been prevented from boarding the plane. He was told that he could not leave the country, ‘while the explosions are being investigated.’

‘I am not happy about the election,’ a Ugandan told me. ‘There was intimidation and fraud. The results were bichupali’ — a local word, not Swahili, meaning counterfeit.

‘What do you think?’

‘It was rigged. We have no work. In fact, the truth will emerge.’

Being a Ugandan, he said reedged and wuck and een fukt and troof and emudge.

Hearing this manner of speaking, the Ugandan way, made me feel at home too.

As a twenty-something I had spent many evenings drinking beer on the veranda of the Speke Hotel. I had never stayed there — my home was across town, near Bat Valley. So on my return the Speke became my home in Kampala. One of its many attractions for me now was that its phones had not been upgraded in forty years: it was impossible to call the United States — nor could anyone call me. At a better-class hotel I sent a fax to my wife to reassure her I was muddling along, and reading it she thought: Poor Paulie, all alone.

On my way back to the Speke that night I realized that I was walking through an African city in safety. This I liked: a nocturnal ramble was a novelty. I walked for an hour, all over town, even to the bombed market, and finally to an Indian restaurant. No hassles, lots of people on the street.

Many of the people were out collecting grasshoppers that had gathered under the streetlights. This I remembered from way back, the grasshopper season, when families shook bed sheets under the lamps and picked the insects out of them and popped them into jars to take home and fry. The grasshoppers arrived with the rains.

‘We like the senene,’ a young African man said. He was strolling with two other men and we stopped to talk.

‘Locusts, right?’ I said.

‘No, no,’ he said, as though I had maligned them. ‘Not locusts. They do no damage.’

‘How do you catch them in the village or in the bush?’

‘Very hard there,’ one of the other men said. ‘Not enough light.’

So this urban illumination was a splendid feature of the donor aid that had allowed Uganda to light its city streets: never mind the traffic — there were few cars on the roads at night anyway. But the modernity of city lights, a multimillion-dollar aid project, made it possible for Ugandans to harvest edible grasshoppers on the bright night streets.

‘They’re tasty, right?’

‘So tasty!’ the first African said.

‘How tasty?’

‘Better than white ants.’

This I found so funny I exploded with laughter.

He said, ‘But that is the only other food you could compare them with.’

True, they were both insects and the preparation was exactly the same. They were stripped of their wings and legs and deep fried in fat, and sold by the greasy scoopful out of big sacks in the market as a nutty delicacy.

Among the whirling grasshoppers and the grasshopper gatherers and the shoeshine boys and the strollers were a multitude of prostitutes, and they were insectile too. They lingered in the street, they stood under trees, they sat on low walls, they leaned against cars. They were most of them very young and well dressed and looked demure, even sweet, and as I approached they hissed at me, and made kissing sounds, as you would call a cat. ‘Want a date?’ ‘Want a massage?’ And some of the most innocent-looking pushed their glazed faces at me and whispered softly, ‘Want a fuck?’

One of the youngest tagged along and pleaded with me to take her. She mentioned a small sum of money. She was seventeen at most, wearing a glittery red dress with sequins and high heels — the sort of girl I might have met at a university party thirty-five years before, someone’s daughter, someone’s girlfriend, perhaps a high school student, spirited and pretty. This one’s English was reasonably good. ‘Let’s go dancing,’ I might have said. But I said no, and when she hung on, promising pleasure, I said I was tired, but in fact I was flustered.

‘Tomorrow then,’ she said, and reached into her expensive handbag and took out a business card. ‘Call me on my mobile phone.’

‘From an economic point of view, going into prostitution is a rational decision for an African woman,’ Michael Maren writes in The Road to Hell. ‘It’s one of the rare avenues open for her to make real money. The sex industry is one of the few points where the local economy and the expatriate economy intersect.’ In this country, people sold much more than she ever had, and did a roaring trade, as Stephen Dedalus remarked. ‘Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to buy the soul.’

My own feeling was that prostitutes were an inevitable adjunct to the aid business, camp followers in the most traditional meaning of that old expression. They traipsed after the army of foreign charities. Wherever the expatriate economy was strong in African countries — the aid-heavy economies in Addis, Nairobi, Kampala, Lilongwe and Maputo — there was prostitution, usually pretty girls dressed in a peculiarly Western fashion to attract expatriates, the bankers, the aid experts, the charity bureaucrats. There was no mystery to this. The prostitutes followed the money.

But that night in Kampala, as on many nights on my long safari, I stayed in my room and advanced my lengthening story of the young man and the older woman in summery Sicily.

Kampala in the rainy season had always been lovely, because it was a small city of wooded hills, and every street had been lined with flowering trees — tulip trees, and flamboyants, and jacarandas. Many of the trees had been cut down to widen the roads for the new high-rise buildings, and what trees remained were the roosts of scavenging, garbage-eating marabou storks. The storks also stood on the street, fussing at dumpsters or else propped on curbs or strutting in twos and threes — somewhat resembling indignant Africans themselves in these postures.

In the days that followed my arrival I left messages with some of my old African friends and colleagues and then walked around, trying to get my bearings. Kampala was no longer a city of Indian shops. The shops remained but very few were run by Indians. Some were derelict, some were managed by Africans. The city was much larger, and the new buildings tall but graceless. The older buildings had not been maintained and looked blighted, haunted relics of an earlier time. It seemed to me that the new buildings would go this way too, fall into disrepair and not crumble but remain, defaced and unusable, while still newer ones were built. This seemed a pattern in the African city, the unnecessary obsolescence of buildings. Nothing was fixed or kept in good repair, the concept of stewardship or maintenance hardly existed. In Kampala, the big elegant Grindlay’s Bank had become a horror, the National Theater had become a seedy monstrosity, the railway station was uncared for. Lacking a center, the city seemed to lack a purpose.

‘Every one of those new buildings involved a huge number of kickbacks,’ a Ugandan insider told me, asking not to be named.

Nothing is more distinctive than a movie theater, for it is a sort of architecture that advertises itself, with a big brow of a marquee and a wide entrance and long flight of steps, an open lobby, and a facade that is designed to display movie posters. In Kampala, the Odeon, the Delite, the Norman and the Neeta, where I had seen the early Bond movies, and What’s New Pussycat? and Midnight Cowboy‚ were closed. A newer multi-screen theater had taken their place but it was a flat-faced building of plastic and aluminum and was already falling into disrepair. The old Kampala movie theaters helped me get my bearings, though. Inside this big tumbledown city was a smaller more familiar one.

With so many of the trees cut down the city looked balder and uglier. Towards the university, the last half-mile of Kampala road had been lined by trees — very tall ones, dark with foliage and during the daylight hours even darker because of the bats. It was the district of Wandegeya, called Bat Valley. Bat Valley was near where I had lived. It was a location I would give to a taxi driver: ‘Drive me to Bat Valley.’ The odd place was a landmark, something that made Kampala special, and the university area a little more African, for the university was adjacent to Bat Valley.

All day long, tens of thousands of small bats hung in the branches of these trees, twittering and squealing, sometimes dropping and circling to a new branch, and these idly squabbling peeps and squeals filled the air. Newcomers mistook them for birds, and if I pointed them out they’d say, ‘Sparrows?’ and smile; but when I said, ‘Look closely,’ and they saw the huge confusion of bats, a whole tall grove of roadside trees black with them, the newcomer would wince in disgust.

At dusk, as though at a signal, the bats took off, great swirling whorls of them, like sky-darkening clouds of gnats or blowflies. Then the abandoned trees looked lacy with the last of the sun shining through the boughs as it did not do in the day. Bats this size, none of them bigger than a human hand, went into the swampier outskirts of the city in search of insects. By dawn they were back in the trees, drizzling shit and twittering like sparrows.

I walked along the road, looking up. The trees were gone. Huts, shanties and sheds had taken their place. No trees, no bats. Bat Valley was gone.

Hardly any trees, but many shacks. I kept walking, past the rotary, which was full of idle taxis and shops. Little shops run by African women were the visible economy now. Inside the gates of Makerere University was a mosque, painted green. The sloping landscaped front lawn of a university was the last place you expected to see a mosque and minaret. But there it was — a gift of Muammar Ghaddafi, I was told. Africans refused nothing. A road, a dorm, a school, a bank, a bridge, a cultural center, a dispensary — all were accepted. But acceptance did not mean the things were needed, nor that they would be used or kept in repair. Even this mosque, which was clearly an eyesore, was falling into ruin.

Makerere University had been my place of employment for four years, from 1965 to 1968. After the expatriates went home I ran the Extra Mural Department. I became a husband, a householder, and a father in Kampala — my first son was born in Mulago Hospital. I was encouraged in my writing in Uganda and began a thirty-year friendship with V S. Naipaul, who had been sent to Makerere on a fellowship from the Farfield Foundation. Innocent times: some years later the Farfield was revealed as a front for the CIA. But Uganda had been the making of me.

After a series of disruptions — the early signs of the coming of crazed, monstrous Idi Amin — I had left in a hurry. I had not been back until now, this hot afternoon, thirty-three years later. I had wanted to return, for the passage of time is marvelous, and I see something dreamlike, even prophetic, in the effects of time. Aging can be startling, too: the sapling grown into a great oak, the vast edifice made into a ruin, the ironwork — like this elegant Makerere perimeter fence — rusted and broken. Places can become haunted-looking, or can astonish you with their modernity.

Uganda had a good reputation now, yet nothing I saw in Uganda astonished me with its newness, everything was on the wane. I did not lament this, nor was I impressed by a new hospital donated by the Swedes or the Japanese, a new school funded by the Canadians, the Baptist clinic, the flour mill that was signposted, A Gift of the American People. These were like inspired Christmas presents, the sort that stop running when the batteries die, or they break and aren’t fixed. The projects would become ruins, every one of them, because they carried with them the seeds of their destruction. And when they stopped running, no one would be sorry. That’s what happened in Africa: things fell apart.

The ruin seemed like part of the plan. It had been the idea of the British Colonial Office to establish a university here. The Makerere motto was Pro Futuro Aedificamus — we build for the future. What a nice idea! But it is a rarified humanistic notion of the West, not an African tradition. Change and decay and renewal were the African cycle: a mud hut was built; it fell down; a new one replaced it. The Uganda of the university was a country with a subsistence economy — a hand-to-mouth method, but a way of life that had enabled people to get through terrible times. When the university was closed and became a ruin under Idi Amin, when the structures of government no longer existed, and the markets were empty and the fuel was in short supply, and anarchy seized Uganda it was the traditional economy that kept Ugandans fed. As the university, a useless compound, became ruinous, Ugandans fled and saved themselves in their mud huts, in the ancient refuge of their villages.

The one-story building where I had worked, the Center for Adult Studies, was in poor shape and had not been improved in over three decades. It was being used by the Faculty of Law.

‘Most of the new buildings you see have been put up in the past ten years,’ a law lecturer told me. He was John Ntambirweke, a man in his late forties I guessed, but a big strong fellow, who was pleasantly self-possessed and opinionated. Suitably enough this man was occupying my former office. He showed me around the campus — the old neglected buildings outnumbered the bright new ones. It was obvious that after all the political turmoil in the country the university had still not recovered to the point where it had been thirty-three years before.

I missed the trees. Why was it that I remembered the trees more clearly than the buidings? As we passed by the crumbling main building and the cracked windows of the library I asked John Ntambirweke about the recent election.

‘An election is not the only indicator of democracy,’ he said, at the wheel of his car, negotiating the obstacles in this battered ivory tower. ‘Democracy means much more — after all, the Romans had elections. Was Rome a democracy? We need a wider definition. We need more Institutions, not one thing but many, so that people can be free.’

‘They are free, aren’t they? But they’re hungry.’

‘The people here need to be granted some political space,’ he said.

That seemed an appropriate term for Africans who were always lumped together.

‘What I really object to is an intelligent man like Nsibambi, the prime minister, explaining in so many words that we require a one-party system. That we Africans are not clever enough or mature enough to think for ourselves. That we are somehow less than other people — inferior to people who have a real opposition.’

‘There were several opposition parties fighting the election,’ I said, ‘They lost, right?’

‘The election doesn’t prove anything.’

‘Some African countries don’t even have them,’ I said.

‘We need them, but we need more than that,’ he said. ‘I am really Disappointed with the level of political debate in this country.’

‘Haven’t people in Uganda been saying that since 1962? I used to hear it all the time.’

‘It’s worse now,’ he said. ‘We are treated as though we are unworthy, not capable of making choices and distinctions. It’s insulting!’

‘What do people in Uganda say when you mention these things? Or maybe you don’t mention these things?’

‘I do — all the time. I write them. I say them on the radio. I was saying them last Thursday on the radio just after the election. These days we are free to say anything.’

‘That’s great,’ I said.

‘But it doesn’t do any good,’ he said. ‘They will just say, “Oh, there he goes again — that’s John, complaining as usual.” ’

‘That’s better than being locked up, which was the traditional response here.’

‘No one is going to lock me up for saying these things,’ he said, but with an air of resignation at how ineffectual his opinions were.

He told me that for shooting his mouth off he had had to flee to Kenya after the fall of Amin, when Obote regained power. Realizing that his life was in danger he had gone to Canada to study and teach. He returned to Uganda with the new regime as a consultant in legal affairs and as an adviser to the revived East African Community, an association for the development of trade and communications.

He had traveled to most of the countries in Africa. His opinions on other African countries were trenchant, too.

‘Kenya is another story,’ he said. ‘They had white settlers who were tough and who were determined to dominate. But here we just had a few — those tea planters around Fort Portal. They were nobodies. I’ve been looking at the records. If a white district commissioner offended one of our kings in some way he could be immediately transferred. The white officials had to learn how to get along with Ugandan chiefs and kings. This policy lasted until independence. We were not colonized in Uganda. This was a protectorate. Our kings continued into independence.’

‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘but if the chiefs and kings had that much power, then maybe that’s a Ugandan problem — authority figures become very bossy.’

‘Maybe. But it wasn’t the case in Kenya. And there’s the racial thing,’ he said. ‘I travel a lot with other Africans. And I notice that Kenyans, Zimbabweans, and Zambians have a strange way of dealing with white people. They behave oddly when they’re around them.’

‘Really?’

He laughed and said, ‘Yes. When we’re traveling in Britain or America, these other Africans detect slights — or they imagine reactions that I don’t see. They are very uneasy around white people, but this is not the case among Ugandans.’

I told him I was glad to hear him say that, because it was how I had felt about Uganda; it was one of the reasons I had liked living there. People looked me straight in the eye. But racism crept into the political rhetoric and at last I was just a mzungu from Wazungu-land, someone to blame, and at last I had found Africa an easy place to leave.

John and I had come to the end of the Makerere campus tour. In spite of some new buildings it looked a ghostly and ruined place. Music blared from the dorm windows, many of which were broken. My old house had become a horror of rotted window sashes and splintered doors and scorched walls. The campus roads were full of potholes. The library — always a good gauge of the health of a university — was in very poor shape, unmaintained, with few users in sight and many empty shelves.

I said, ‘The prime minister you mentioned, Apolo Nsibambi, was a friend of mine — we taught together.’

‘He lives near here, because his wife is in the university administration.’

After John Ntambirweke dropped me I went to Apolo’s house — a stucco bungalow with a well-tended flower garden. I rang the bell, and the door was answered by a woman housekeeper who told me the master was not at home. I left a Remember me? note and asked him to call me.

I sent similar notes and left messages with other old friends, who were now political advisers, commissars, consultants, and members of parliament. Several had been presidential candidates, and the wife of one of them had been a colleague. Everyone knew them. In Africa everyone my age knew everyone else.

I went back to the library and looked around: what few books remained on the shelves were dusty and torn. I guessed the books had been stolen. There were no new books. What had been the best library in East Africa was now just a shell. The trees around it had been cut down. Only the fact that the buildings had been well made so many years ago had kept them from falling down altogether, but anyone could see that the campus was a disgrace.

Descending the grassy hill towards Faculty Housing I remembered how just here, one hot noon in 1966, by a shaggy-bark eucalyptus tree, I was taking a walk with Vidia Naipaul, who said he hated living here. He became ugly-faced with fury. He said, ‘The weak and oppressed. They’re terrible, man. They’ve got to be kicked.’ He kicked a stone, very hard. ‘That’s the only thing Africans understand!’

Naipaul was usually ranting in Uganda, but he wasn’t confidently angry, he was afraid, for the source of his rage was insecurity. Africans looked at him and saw a Muhindi an Indian. As time passed, Naipaul became more narrowly Indian in his attitudes and prejudices. Subsequently, everything he wrote about Africa was informed by the fear that he had known as an isolated Hindu child in black Trinidad. The childhood fear he brought to Africa became terror in his Ugandan months, horror on his Congo trip, and as a face-saver he made his timid emotions into contempt when he wrote about Africa. In a Free State and A Bend in the River are veiled attacks on Africans and Africa by an outsider who feels weak. Rigid with a Trinidadian Indian’s fear of the bush, he never understood that the bush is benign. Africa frightened him so badly he cursed it, wishing it ill until the curse became a dismissive mantra that ignorant readers could applaud: ‘Africa has no future.’

Leaving Makerere later that day in a taxi, I asked the driver who he had voted for in the recent election. He laughed and said, ‘These elections are held mainly to impress donor countries — to prove that we are doing the right thing. But it was a rigged election, and we voters are not impressed.’

I asked someone in the know about this. He said it was true, that in order to run for election a candidate had to give money to voters, the equivalent of about a dollar each would do, but the most successful candidates gave out pots and pans, lengths of cloth, and shirts (‘not T-shirts’). Mobilizers wanted free bikes. All elections in Uganda involve giving out money and gifts.’

I had time on my hands. I got a tailor under a tree to mend my tattered canvas sports jacket. The result was wonderful, a mass of beautifully stitched patches, and a new green lining. As a favor to a friend, I gave a talk to about thirty university students from the English faculty, many of whom having written poems and stories said they wanted a career as full-time writers.

I wanted to go to the bush. The day I planned to take a bus to the western province, to Kabila, to see the chimps in the primate reserve, there was trouble thereabouts. A news item appeared saying that an attack from the bush in a small town near Kabila had left eleven people dead (‘hacked to death’) and fifty cars torched. The government claimed that the opposition might have had a hand in it, but most people felt that it was a group calling itself the African Defense Force, an anti-government organization. A few days later, a van-load of students on a game viewing drive at Murchison Falls Park were fired upon by another anti-government group, the Lord’s Resistance Army — ten students were killed. This sort of thing seemed to be fairly common, armed men appearing from the bush and committing acts of mayhem. So I didn’t go.

I stayed in Kampala, looking for the past. Even with grenades being lobbed occasionally into the central market the city still seemed quiet. ‘The economy is improving — it’s back to where it was in 1970,’ an economist told me. That was round about the time I had left. What kept Uganda together to a large extent was church-going and, in general, religious tolerance. There was a large Muslim population — minarets spiking up everywhere, and muezzins wailing. The Church of Uganda was Anglican, with a well-attended red-brick cathedral on one of Kampala’s hills. Its bells were audible every Sunday. One of Uganda’s kings, Mtesa the First, had disapproved of his subjects becoming Catholic converts and made a bonfire of a number of them. This martyrdom and their subsequent sainthood had given Ugandan Catholicism a tremendous boost, even before the pope visited.

‘We must preach harmony and reconciliation,’ a priest was saying one Sunday in his sermon, amplified on the sidewalk. He talked about the election, how winners ‘were jubilating, even as others were mourning.’ He finished movingly with, ‘Love one another.’

It was a mild evening, and all the strollers were within earshot. Some of the strollers were urchins and prostitutes and schoolgirls hustling for money. Some were selling newspapers. Others were hawking sunglasses and cigarette lighters. It was impossible to tell whether any of these people understood what was being said.

Why were there so many prostitutes in this part of town? In the past they had just hung around bars and nightclubs. But these women and girls were on the street, lounging on low walls, leaning against trees. There was shade here, it was quiet, and there were three hotels in the area. I guessed that there were customers here, the aid people, the visiting bureaucrats, the foreigners. But the women also solicited passing cars driven by Africans. In my day, not many Africans owned cars, so these hookers were one of the features of the new economy.

Some prostitutes sat in the veranda café of my hotel, sizing up any man who passed by, with that lingering gaze and familiar smile that is common to prostitutes and car salesmen — the lock of eye-contact. They even had the same pitch, ‘What can I do for you’ which meant, ‘What can you do for me?’

What these women wanted was a drink, so that they would not seem so conspicuous. By buying them beer, I got acquainted with three of them who always sat together speaking Swahili — Clementine from the Congo, Angelique from Rwanda, Fifi from Burundi.

Fifi had arrived in Kampala from Bujumbura only the week before. ‘Because there was trouble,’ she explained. ‘There’s a lot of fighting in Burundi right now.’

She had taken three buses and had come via Kigali in Rwanda.

‘Rwanda is — ha!’ Angelique threw up her hands in despair.

‘But it was worse before?’ I said. I was thinking of the gruesome descriptions of massacre in the book We Wish to Inform You that We Will All Be Killed Tomorrow with Our Families. Even if you didn’t agree with the author’s historical premise that Belgian colonialism had imposed tribal distinctions and a class system in the Watusi and Bahutu society, the book was excellent, if upsetting, reportage.

‘Much worse before,’ she said. ‘I mean, my family was killed.’

She was the youngest of the three, hardly more than seventeen. The eldest was Clementine, from Bukavu province in the Congo. Her ambition was to go to America.

‘Ku fanya nini?’ I said, ‘To do what?’ I asked in Swahili because it was a delicate question, given the sort of work she usually did.

‘Ku fanya une salon de coiffure,’ she said, and explained, ‘I can do hair well. Look at Angelique’s hair. So pretty!’

Swahili, not French, was their common language. Their English was fine but embarrassed questions they asked in Swahili.

‘Mimi na sakia njaa,’ Fifi said to me, pouting a little: she was hungry.

I bought them fried potatoes, three plates of them, and it was obvious that what they really wanted was not a chance to perform oral sex on a strange man, or ten dollars for a massage, or a quickie in the back seat of an African bureaucrat’s car, but a big plate of French fries and a beer. And perhaps a ticket to America. Anyway, they were ravenously hungry and did not hide it.

‘So you’re traveling?’ Clementine asked.

I said yes, that I had just come from Kenya.

‘We hear that Nairobi is very dangerous.’

This from a Congolese who had lived in one of the most anarchic parts of the Eastern Congo, and traveled through the massacres of Rwanda. I mentioned this.

‘Yes, but there are good places, too,’ Clementine said. ‘Let’s all go to the Congo together and we’ll show you the good places.’

We planned the Congo trip. I would hire a Land-Rover and buy some food and cases of beer. We would need presents to give away to people. Good shoes, raincoats, maybe some medicine, and money of course — American dollars would be best. We would head southwest, cross through Rwanda into the border town of Goma, and then just wander through the Congo, wherever the roads took us.

‘The roads are very bad, but we don’t care!’ Angelique said.

‘We will give you massages for nothing — three girls, all together. How you like that?’ Clementine said.

‘I like it very much.’

‘We go now?’ she said, pointing upstairs.

‘Wewe napenda wazee?’ I said. You like old men?

She said, ‘You’re not old. Maybe — what? — forty or so?’

That was another welcome touch. I was fascinated by them — by their travel, their resilience, even their glamor. These girls in tight satin dresses and upswept hairdos and stiletto heels came from dark and dangerous villages in the dead center of Africa and had reinvented themselves as sex goddesses. But I was not interested in anything more than their stories. Though the rule in Uganda was ‘no condom, no sex’ they were following a risky profession in an AIDS-ridden city, competing with hundreds, perhaps thousands of other women. I had to admire their resourcefulness. Now and then I heard of American or European women’s groups who went to Nairobi and Kampala to encourage prostitutes to get off the streets, to retrain them, ‘empower’ them, the agents of virtue explained. The prostitutes I met would have laughed at such a proposition.

‘So?’ Clementine was smiling. ‘We go to your room?’

But I went to my room alone, and scribbled.

For my onward journey, I was trying to arrange passage on a boat across Lake Victoria. In my comings and goings I often bumped into Clementine, Angelique and Fifi at the hotel, and I usually stopped to buy them a drink or some food. I even asked them what work they liked doing, what they wanted for themselves. Hairdressing loomed large in their ambitions, but mostly they wanted money.

Clementine said, ‘I want just one man — someone to look after me. If he is good to me I will be good to him. What about you?’

Yet, as always, I slept alone in my narrow bed.

Repeated trips to the offices of the Board of East African Railways had convinced me that if I persevered I might get a berth on a ferry. There were several ferries a week from Port Bell in Uganda to Mwanza, the port town at the opposite side of the lake, in Tanzania. But for the past three months, passengers had been forbidden to ride on the ferries across Lake Victoria.

‘Why is that so?’

‘Ebola virus,’ the secretary to the chairman told me. ‘There was an outbreak in Uganda two months ago and so the Tanzanians took steps.’

There had also been a tragic ferry sinking. In 1996, the MV Bukoba went down in the southern end of the lake, and more than 1000 passengers drowned. Because of the liability and the high cost of insurance very few passengers were carried across the lake these days. This was all news to me, but where had it been reported? The sinking of the Bukoba was one of those African catastrophes that hardly rated a mention in the world press.

‘Maybe I should write a letter?’

I asked for paper and sat in the office writing a florid pleading letter to the chairman. After two more visits a letter from the chairman was awaiting me stating that if I accepted the liability (Ebola virus? A sinking?) an exception would be made in my case. I could ride on one of the ferries. They would let me know which one I might take. This was somewhat indefinite but having secured permission I felt I had achieved a victory.

‘How will I know when a ferry is leaving?’

‘You must come here every day to check.’

‘The prime minister left a message for you, Mister Thorax,’ the desk clerk said one day. This was Apolo Nsibambi, my old friend and colleague, who had risen in the world. I called him back and he said I should come to his office the next day. He said it was a waste of his time to give me directions.

‘The prime minister’s office! Everyone knows where the prime minister’s office is! Ask any taxi driver!’

The same bluster — he hadn’t changed. From the beginning, when he joined my department as a lecturer in 1966 I had found him interesting. He had just come from Chicago where he had earned a Ph.D. in political science. On first meeting him I asked him how he had liked Chicago. He said, ‘Immensely.’ Some months later he said he had had several run-ins with the Chicago police, what is now known as racial profiling.

‘Each time it was the same. I would be walking home late at night after studying at the library and a police car would pull up to the curb and a white policeman would say, “Get over here, nigger. Where are you going?” ’

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

‘I said, “Officer, I am not a nigger. Do not call me a nigger. I am Ugandan, an African. I am a student here and I am doing nothing wrong.” ’ And then his voice becoming shrill, ‘I am not a nigger!’

Saying that he was an African usually worked, one policeman had even apologized, saying, ‘Sorry, we didn’t know you were an African — we thought you were a nigger.’

Apolo was more than a Ugandan; he was something of an aristocrat, from a distinguished family. One of his grandmothers had been a princess, and so he was related to the king, the Kabaka. The Kingdom of Buganda, ruled by the Kabakas, was centuries old and still powerful. The Kabaka known as King Freddy was overthrown in 1966 — from our offices at the Adult Studies Center we could see smoke rising from the siege, Idi Amin and his men firing on the palace. That week, the man who would be king, Ronald Mutebi — the present Kabaka hid at Apolo’s house for safety.

‘I decided to be a commoner,’ Apolo said. ‘My children are commoners — free to marry whom they like.’

The Eton of Uganda is King’s College, Budo. Apolo’s grandfather had been head prefect at King’s, his father had been head prefect, Apolo himself had been head prefect. His father, Semyoni — a version of Simeon — had been a major landowner. In a mood of religious fervor in 1922, somewhat in the spirit of Tolstoy in old age, Semyoni divested himself of his land, abandoned political belief and started a religious revival called the Balokole Movement.

Apolo called them ‘spiritual purists,’ explaining ‘they believed in putting things right, and repentance, and being “saved.” They were not fundamentalists. It was a movement within the Church of Uganda.’

The first time I had met Apolo’s father he had been lying on a sofa, suffering a spell of illness, and from this supine position his first words to me were, ‘Are you saved?’ I told him I didn’t know. That made him laugh. He said sharply, ‘Then the answer is no. If you don’t know it means you are not saved!’

Apolo, my age exactly, had gotten married the same year as I had; we had gone to each other’s wedding, and were in all respects contemporaries. I left, he stayed. Idi Amin took over: nine years of horror. Apolo fathered four children. The eighties was a decade of adjustment — Apolo had been a university lecturer; in the nineties he had become a government minister — Public Services and Education — and now he was prime minister. He was as well known for his reforms as he was for his patrician ways. ‘I saw him in New York last year,’ a mutual friend told me. ‘He had a man to carry his briefcase. I asked him why. He said, “Because I am premier.” ’

He was also a famous tease, and his affectation of pomposity made him much more devastating as a needler. On seeing me after thirty years his first words were, ‘Ah, Paul. You are in deep trouble in Uganda. You made love to my cousin! Why didn’t you marry her? You were vibrant! I shall fine you ten thousand shillings for not marrying her.’ He made a gesture suggesting gross indecency. ‘You used to do this to her.’

‘I never knew your cousin, Apolo.’

‘You also did this to her,’ he said, flailing his arms and contorting his body. This was an odd sight, for he was full-figured, in a pin-striped suit and natty tie and affecting a plummy accent.

‘Never,’ I said.

‘You did. She was quite fond of Europeans, actually.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘You know her name. It will appear on the charge sheet when I fine you the money. Ah, you were so busy in that area.’

‘What area?’

‘The ladies,’ he said, and at that moment he was buzzed and he took the call and immediately began abusing the person at the other end, in the same plummy voice, saying, ‘Tell me why this man wrote a stupid letter to me … But you are in charge of this man … What I resent is that I am regarded as a bulldozer — please let me finish. I despise him, and in fact we had a clash before … I want action — I don’t want to hear that I am doing your work for you.’

There were eight trays on his desk labeled, Very Urgent, Urgent, Normal, Ministers, Chief Justice, Speaker, Vice President, President. Each tray was filled with memos and papers. Very Urgent was overflowing.

Apolo was still shouting into the phone. ‘He deliberately distorted what I said. Why does he personalize the debate? I had said, “You are a good man, but you are autocratic and over-bearing.” He said I am the same! Impossible! The idiot wrote “grieved.” But I didn’t say that. I said, “Aggrieved.” … No, no, no! Why not say, “Those people have created a culture of defeat”?’

‘I am a technocratic premier,’ he said to me, after he slammed the phone down. ‘What does that mean? It means — write this down, Paul — I have no electoral pressure.’

He saw that I was taking notes while he had been denouncing the person at the other end of the phone. He had always been something of a monologuer, and I think he took to the idea that his words were being recorded, if only in a notebook on my knee.

‘Under our constitution, if you are president or minister you are ex-officio MP under Article Seventy-seven.’

I must have stopped writing — anyway, was this interesting? — because he said, ‘Paul, write that down, “Article Seventy-seven.” And consider the pressure on an MP. Pressure from constituents. Making payments for them.’

‘What sort of payments?’

‘Buying coffins for them, paying school fees, what and what! They demand one’s time. They invade one’s house!’

He was pacing now like a statesman, in front of his enormous desk and the large map of Uganda and all those trays, Very Urgent, Urgent and so forth, his right hand grasping one lapel, his other gesturing.

‘As I see it, Paul, the crisis of governance is that ministers are overloaded and laboring under excessive pressure, parliamentary business, constituency work and cabinet affairs. One of the functions that has suffered in parliament is attendance. We sometimes don’t have a quorum.’

His phone buzzed again. Another call being returned from a newspaper.

‘Your reporter distorted what I said. I said the candidate “conceded.” I did not thank them for conceding. Then I open the paper today and what do I see on page five? “The prime minister commended those who accepted defeat.” I did not. Your reporter made several other mistakes, relating to the constitution.’

Apolo listed the mistakes and then hung up, nodding approvingly that I had been taking notes — I felt that in note taking I had been making him self-conscious and verbose. But perhaps not, since he had always been verbose.

‘They are mesmerized by my understanding of the constitution,’ he said. ‘My wife says “Apolo is unelectable.” It’s probably true! If people are foolish I tell them they are foolish.’

I wrote this down, and the phone rang again — another ministry, Apolo shouting the other person down.

‘My response to the Ministry of Health is, do they really need nine billion shillings to buy drugs? If so, why did we name the department “Microfinance”? What I am saying to you is that the emperor is naked in some respects … Yes, I whispered to him about that … Please listen to me. We have a saying, “When you wrestle someone to the ground you don’t then bite him.” ’

Before he could talk to me again, there was another call, from someone in his own party.

‘This proves what I have always said,’ Apolo crowed after listening for a few seconds. ‘Traditionally the Muganda looks to the chief to tell him how to vote. For the first time, democratization has reached the countryside. This is good, because Buganda has been lagging behind. They must be accountable! Unless we fulfil Article Two-forty-six we will perish!’

He hung up and turned to me again.

‘You see? I am a technocratic premier,’ he said. ‘I run the state in a specialized manner.’

‘Apolo,’ I said, ‘people say that this is turning into a one-party system. What do you say to that?’

‘Ours is not a one-party system, but a movement, unique in Africa,’ he replied. ‘In a one-party system you sack the man who does not toe the party line. In a movement you try to find a consensus.’

‘How do you manage that?’

‘Ha! The elites here are very poor at bargaining. The British concluded that in the 1950s and I can confirm it.’

‘In Buganda?’ I said, thinking of the kingdom not the country.

‘You-you-you-ganda,’ he said. ‘Do you remember Obote’s way of running the country?’

‘Obote was selfish and single-minded,’ I said.

‘I like your statement. Yes. He was that. Museveni has much more confidence. He listens. As for the multi-party system, Article Seventy-four states that during the fourth term of parliament — Paul, it is very important for you to quote our constitution. Please write this. Clause Three states that in three years this must take place. But the issue is not to be too legalistic. Better to bargain politically and attain a sustainable consensus.’

He was still pacing, monologuing, stabbing his finger at the map of Uganda. He took more calls. He sipped a can of Coke. His aunt had died in France. He arranged for the body to be transported to Uganda.

‘Yes, we will identify it. Yes, we will have a funeral on the twenty-eighth. Yes, we will cry.’ And he hung up.

Like everyone else, he said that the Idi Amin years were the worst he had known. ‘Too horrible for words,’ he said. ‘The soldiers took my derelict car. They seemed to be very pleased when they saw that a university professor was living in such reduced circumstances.’

He teased his secretaries, he took another call, he drank two Cokes, he waved his copy of the Ugandan Constitution, which he had had a hand in drafting. It was as annotated and thumbed as a sacred text. We talked about the need for political parties, and moral authority, the necessity for public debate. It was the same sort of conversation we had had in the Makerere Staff Club over bottles of Bell Beer in 1966.

‘Who do you want to meet? What do you want? What can I do for you?’ he said. ‘I must go to parliament. You see how busy my day is!’

I said, ‘Do you remember the story you told me about being in Chicago when you were a student — how the police stopped you and called you a nigger?’

He laughed and said, ‘Oh, yes. The Chicago police were quite racist in the sixties. It’s a lively city. I get back there occasionally.’

Then he was off to parliament and I was off to the Railway Board.

‘No ferry tonight. Maybe tomorrow.’

There was none the next day, which gave me time to see several more of my old friends. Like Apolo, they were pillars of society, still married to the same spouse after thirty-odd years. The four of them had produced twenty-four children. They were plumper, grayer, and like Apolo they were great talkers. In African terms they had defied the odds, for all were around sixty, the age of a respected elder in Africa. They had survived and flourished in a country that had known regicide, two revolutions, a coup d’état, AIDS and Idi Amin. My old friends were people of accomplishment. The one woman, Thelma Awori, was a former ambassador married to a presidential candidate who had come third in the recent election; another friend, Jassy Kwesiga, was running a think-tank; a third was a presidential adviser, who had refused an ambassadorial post on the grounds, ‘I am not good ambassador material — I told the president, and it’s true.’ That was Chango Machyo, who had been a Maoist in the 1960s and was still a radical, the scourge of ‘imperialists,’ ‘neo-colonialists,’ and ‘the black bourgeoisie.’

‘You mentioned my tribe in one of your books,’ Jassy Kwesiga said, as a form of greeting.

Yes, the Bachiga of southwest Uganda and their curious marriage rite which included the groom’s brothers and the bride in the Urine Ceremony. I could not hear the name of the tribe without thinking of the piddle-widdle of this messy rite.

Kwesiga had spent several decades as a university lecturer. His wife was a university dean, his children were successful, he was fat and happy. We reminisced about our lives as young men in Uganda in the 1960s, when our haunts had been the White Nile Club, the Gardenia, the Susanna Club, the New Life, and City Bar. Like many others, he was nostalgic for the earlier more orderly time, when the country was still intact, before any political violence, before AIDS, an age of innocence.

‘The sixties were wonderful,’ he said. ‘We were the elite without realizing it. The seventies were a disaster with Idi Amin. People disappeared — for so many reasons. It is a period to forget. Things are improving. Democracy is a process. The process is democratization. Democratic growth has its own momentum. What are you writing, bwana?’

‘Nothing yet — just traveling.’

‘People on the outside just write bad news — the disasters, Ebola virus, AIDS, bombs. And they ask the wrong questions.’

‘What should they ask?’

‘The question should be, “How did anyone survive?” ’

‘I think I know the answer,’ I said. ‘Because it’s a subsistence economy and survival is something that Africans have learned.’

‘Yes. Years and years of just getting by,’ he said, in a tone of regret, almost sorrow, and in that same tone he went on. ‘I’ve traveled, too, you know. I went to Beijing some years ago. I thought I was going to a city where people were poor and miserable. It was amazing. I was on the thirty-third floor of a hotel that was beautiful — and the city was incredible. How did this happen?’

He was remembering our colleague Chango Machyo and his office copies of Peking Review and China Reconstructs. We lived vicariously through Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution this way, the whole of socialist Africa did. The Chinese in those magazines planted rice, harvested beans and made pig iron. Their motto was: Serve the people. They wore cloth slippers and faded blue jackets and looked like geeks. Now they were a billion grinning plutocrats in neckties.

He meant: Why can’t Africans do the same?

I said, ‘Do you want to live in China?’

‘Never,’ he said.

‘Then maybe what you see in Uganda is more or less what you asked for.’

In a reversal of fortune, the now prosperous People’s Republic was investing in Uganda’s peasantry, because of Uganda’s large cotton crop. A Chinese factory had recently opened in the northern town of Lira, for milling the cotton and making clothes to sell locally and for export. More joint ventures were planned. What China had failed to accomplish in East Africa through Maoism it might yet succeed in through venture capitalism.

A sign of Kwesiga’s confidence in the country was that he had encouraged his five children to live and work in Uganda — some had married, none had left the country. My friend Chango Machyo, the Maoist, had nine children. All of them were still working in Uganda. The proof of your political faith was the way you guided your children. A loving parent did not willingly sacrifice children to muddled thinking or a doomed economy.

Thelma was a Liberian, American educated, married to a Ugandan, who had lived and worked in Uganda for thirty-five years. I knew the others by their tribal affiliation. Apolo was a Muganda, Kwesiga a Muchiga, Chango a Musamia.

Chango’s office was in the presidential office compound on Kololo Hill, a number of mud-spattered stucco buildings behind a tall fence. His title was National Political Commissar, a vague position, but since Chango had always been an ideologue the president must have found him a useful mentor. He looked battered and ill, and a little unsteady. He apologized, saying that he had malaria that week and felt dizzy. I said we could meet another day.

‘No. It’s good to see you after so long. What do you think of the country now?’

‘More people. Fewer trees.’

‘That’s right. And no Indians.’

‘Is that good?’

‘Very good. They were exploiting us and sucking our blood.’

Even malaria had no effect on his Maoist rhetoric. We talked about the president, Yoweri Museveni.

Chango said, ‘Don’t you remember him? He was one of our students at Ntare, when we gave those weekend courses.’

Ntare was a school near the rural town of Mbarara. In the sixties, we younger lecturers in the Extra-Mural Department of Adult Studies went to these country areas and organized classes in English and Political Science. As for Mbarara, all I remembered was a mass of students of the pastoral Banyankole tribe, taking notes in the classrooms, their cattle lowing and browsing under the windows.

‘I didn’t remember him either,’ Chango said. ‘But he remembered me. Times were so bad under Amin I went to Nairobi. Museveni was there. He saw me. “Mr Machyo!” I said, “Eh, eh, what are you doing?” He was a soldier. He was named after his father’s battalion, the Seventh. He said he had a plan. He had trained with the FRELIMO in Mozambique. I went to Dar es Salaam with him, but I missed my family. Then, after Amin, after the anarchy, after the guerrilla war against Obote, when Museveni took over in 1986, he sent for me. He made me Minister of Water, and then Minister of Rehabilitation — we gave out blankets. Later I became National Political Commissar.’

‘You were always a political commissar.’

‘Yes, I haven’t changed. I am still saying the same things.’

‘ “Neo-colonialism.” “The proletariat.” “Imperialism.” “Black bourgeoisie.” “Blood suckers.” ’

‘They have it in Kenya,’ Chango said. ‘The African bourgeoisie inherited settler farms. They took over white hotels. Just so they could make big profits. That type of African is no good for Africa. At the bourgeois level it is a struggle for power.’

I told him that it seemed to me that Uganda was still recoverng from the anarchy of the Idi Amin years. Chango said that was partly true. He had lost his job at the university, like many others. He had gone back to his village near the eastern town of Mbale.

‘Life in Uganda was terrible under Amin,’ he said. ‘There was always shooting. For years there was a curfew from six p. m. to six a. m. If you were outside you would be shot. People were fearing. If you saw a soldier you got very worried, because a soldier could do anything to you. Many people were taken away. Me, myself, I was taken but released.’

‘How did you live?’

‘I had nothing — times were very bad. I resumed my old job as a surveyor — yes, I am a trained surveyor — but there was no work.’

‘Weren’t you safer in Mbale than you would have been in Kampala?’

‘No. One day I was in a coffee shop in Mbale and a soldier came in. People were greeting him — but I had a bad feeling. I left the place. As soon as I got home I heard shooting, from the direction of the coffee shop. What happened was this. Two men were coming down the road. The soldier said, “Watch this.” And he shot them both, for no reason. After that I went to Nairobi.’

Hearing this, it occurred to me that all this talk of ‘it was a time to forget’ and ‘look to the future’ was perhaps a mistake. University students had asked me, ‘How can we become better known writers?’ But the real question should have been, ‘What should we be writing?’ And the answer was: About those lost years. Because of the shame and humiliation and defeat, no one liked talking about the Amin years, but it seemed that the best use for someone’s writing skills would have been in compiling an oral history of those horror years.

Thelma Awori, the Liberian, was an old friend and colleague. Thelma had a horror story. Her husband, Aggrey, had been head of Ugandan Television in 1971 when Amin was in power. Soldiers came to his office and took him by force. One wanted to shoot him on the spot, but another said, ‘Not here — take him away.’ They took him outside and put him against a tree. A soldier drew a bead on him but just before the man fired, Aggrey dropped to the ground.

A soldier passing by recognized him and said to the soldiers, ‘Don’t shoot him.’ But the others insisted and a great argument ensued. ‘Let’s take him to Amin,’ one said. And so Amin decided Aggrey’s fate: he was released, he fled the country and taught at a school in Kenya until it was safe to return home. He had been unsuccessful in his run for president but he was still a member of parliament.

‘And our children are here,’ Thelma said. ‘We wanted them here. We said, “Come back and get your foot in the door. Get a decent job. Try to be part of the process.” ’

There were five children, mostly American educated like their parents — Thelma was a Radcliffe graduate, Aggrey had gone to Harvard. One of the daughters had a master’s degree from Wharton.

Thelma said, ‘She was on Wall Street. Aggrey insisted that she come hack. She was earning less money by far — and she couldn’t believe how inefficient things were here. But she says, “If I weren’t here they wouldn’t do things right.” ’

Everyone was talking openly about the country’s problems — Uganda had not changed in that respect. Uganda, even in its apparent recovery, was still a welfare case. More than half of its budget came from donor countries. AIDS had peaked in 1992 at 30 percent and through intense education had decreased: now 10 percent of the population was infected. But the disease had killed off the best part of a generation. It was a country of two million orphans.

‘I’m paid to be optimistic,’ an American diplomat said to me in Kampala shortly before I left. ‘I mean, you have to be optimistic to work in places like this. But if I weren’t being paid for that I would despair of what Africans have made of their countries — the deforestation, the disorder, AIDS — God.’

And he asked what I thought, for I had seen Before and After.

I said, ‘People I know — very smart people — want their children to stay here, not to emigrate. Speaking as a parent, that’s a good sign.’

I had nothing else to go on, but that was something: the belief that their children had a future in the country was a measure of confidence, and a way of saying that the country had a future.

In Kampala, I had begun to live a tranquil life, not as a traveler but as a resident of a place I had begun to enjoy anew. I saw old friends, I had leisurely meals, I went for walks, I went bird watching on the lakeshore. Most nights I worked, writing my long erotic story.

My sort of travel was sometimes expensive because it was improvised and always involved last-minute plans. But this residence in Kampala cost me very little, and sleeping in the same bed night after night, and writing a story, restored my energy. Some days I did nothing more than stroll, watching children playing with homemade toys, hoops made of plastic, little vehicles of twisted wire, pull toys and sometimes live insects — rhino beetles — flying on pieces of string.

One of my strolls was always to the Railway Board to find out whether a ferry was leaving. I left it to the afternoon one day. And that day the chairman’s secretary stood up at her desk and pointed to the door.

She said, ‘Go to Port Bell right now. Bring Chairman Sentongo letter. Bring you passport. Bring you cloves. The ferry leaving just now!’