Kahawa

AFTERWORD

Idi Amin, unfortunately, is real. So are or were his cronies (Major Farouk Minawa, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi) and his victims (Mrs. Dora Bloch, Archbishop Janani Luwum).

Africa is real, sort of. Uganda is real. The railroad, the town of Jinja, the State Research Bureau building, all the stage sets are real.

The 1977 failure of the Brazilian coffee crop and the resultant rise in worldwide coffee prices are real. The long-established practice of smuggling coffee out of Uganda, which reached some kind of manic peak in 1977, is real.

So much for reality.

The specific coffee-smuggling operation described in this novel—though similar events did take place—is an invention. The characters connected with that operation, every last one of them, are fictional, without specific real-world counterparts.