Kahawa

PROLOGUE

Each ant emerged from the skull bearing an infinitesimal portion of brain. The double thread of ants shuttling between corpse and nest crossed at a diagonal the human trail beside which the murdered woman had been thrown. As a shadow crossed the morning sun, a dozen ants became crushed beneath the leathery bare feet of six men plodding down the trail from the Nawambwa road toward the lake, each bearing a sixty-kilogram sack of coffee on his head, none of the scrawny men weighing much more than sixty kilos himself. The surviving ants continued their portage, undisturbed. So did the men.

Farther downslope, the trail ended in a tangle of foliage at the edge of Macdonald Bay, with Lake Victoria visible beyond Bwagwe Point. The six men dropped their coffee sacks and sprawled beside them for a short rest, using the sacks as pillows. Two smoked cigarettes; three chewed sugarcane stalks; one scratched insect bites around his missing toe.

A helicopter flap-flapped by, very loudly, and the men became utterly still, looking up through the screen of leaves and branches as the big olive-green chopper went by, like a bus wearing a beanie. It was the same sort as the large helicopters used by the Americans to deliver troops to battle in Vietnam, but the markings showed it belonged to the Army of Uganda. Three black men in American-style combat uniforms crouched in the broad doorway in the chopper’s side, peering down at the lake.

The six coffee smugglers, invisible beside the trail, watched and listened without reaction until the helicopter chuff-chuffed away across the sky, westward toward Buvuma Island. Then they all talked at once, with nervous enthusiasm, agreeing the helicopter had been a good omen. Having just searched this area, it was unlikely to return for some time. And how lucky they themselves hadn’t arrived twenty minutes earlier; by now, they would have been visible and helpless on the open water.

Since luck was with them, they should seize the moment. Their two canoes were dragged out of hiding—the rifles safe within, the ancient, untrustworthy outboard motors still attached at the rear of each boat—and were pushed into the water. The sacks of coffee were loaded, the men arranged themselves three in each canoe, and they proceeded slowly out across the bay, southward, the motors stinking, the low morning sun in the eastern sky stretching their shadows across the calm water.

Forty minutes later they had progressed fifteen miles, heading east now toward the narrow strait between the mainland and Sigulu Island and thence to Berkeley Bay. The border between Uganda and Kenya—a line seen only on maps—bisected Berkeley Bay, and not far beyond lay the tiny, unimportant town of Port Victoria, their intended landfall. A much shorter route for smuggling lay directly across Berkeley Bay from Majanji or Lugala on the Uganda side, but the shore there was heavily patrolled this year. And because so many floodlight-bearing helicopters prowled the border at night, the risky daytime passage had become safer.

All six men heard the chuff-chuff at once, over the nasal sputter of the outboard motors, and looking over their shoulders they saw the giant thing sailing toward them through the sky, like something on wires attached to God’s fingers. There was no escape this time; they’d been seen, the helicopter was floating in a circle around them, its open doorway filled with pointing men.

It was guns they were pointing, and then firing. The smugglers had been prepared for arrest, for some brutality, possibly for torture, but they had not been prepared to become target practice in a great bathtub. Two of them dragged old Enfield rifles up from the canoe bottoms and returned the fire.

The soldiers, not expecting armed resistance, had flown too low and too close, the better to score hits on their fish in the barrel. Instead of which, two men in the helicopter doorway staggered back into the darkness within, and a third dropped like a full sack out into the air, falling beside his rifle down into the water. The helicopter, as though God had been startled at His play, jerked upward into the sky and tore away northwestward, toward land.

The men in the canoes were now terrified. The helicopter would soon be back, possibly with others. There wasn’t time to reach that invisible line in the water and the dubious safety of Kenya. To their left was the shoreline of Uganda, low dark folds of hills, but they were in great fear of returning there. Directly ahead mounded Sigulu Island, ten miles long and a mile or two wide and covered with thick brush, but the soldiers would expect them to hide there and would have hours and hours of daylight for the search. To the right, a cluster of tiny brushy islands lay like suede buttons on the water; after a quick conference the six agreed to make for one of these. They ripped open the sacks and dumped the coffee into the lake, both to lighten the boats and to make it possible to deny that they were the coffee smugglers; but they kept the sacks, because they were poor men and thrifty.

They chose an island at random, pulled the canoes well up from the water’s edge, and covered both their boats and themselves with layers of brush. But they were men who had never been in the sky, and were unaware of the clear lines the canoes had made in the mud and the brush, arrow shafts leading from the water directly to their hearts. When the helicopter did return within the hour and, after only the slightest hesitation, landed on the island of their hiding place, they could only believe it was devilry.

The officer in the helicopter was extremely angry. When the six men were found and lined up in front of him, he beat their faces with his fists and lashed their arms with a piece of brush. They had killed one of his men and wounded two others; it was a personal humiliation, an official disgrace, a blow to his hopes for military advancement. It was a blot on his copybook.

The six men denied that they were smugglers, which only enraged the officer more. He kicked their legs with his U.S. Army boots, while a uniformed man with an expressionless white face watched from the helicopter doorway. And when the empty coffee sacks were found, the officer turned cold and dangerous in his fury. He ordered the six men to lie on the ground on their bellies. He ordered his soldiers to pour gasoline onto the coffee sacks, and to spread one sack on each prone man. Then he personally set the fires. The flames in sunlight seemed to dance in midair, lightly, inoffensively, while the tan burlap darkened to match the stenciled black Swahili word Kahawa.

The men writhed and screamed beneath their burning blankets, and the rancid smoke rose into the clear sky as the white man in the helicopter doorway lit his cigar.

The soldiers broke up the canoes with small hatchets, and then boarded the helicopter and were flown away, through the drifting smoke.

This occurred early in March of 1977. It was reported in the London Times on April 5.