The Shadow of the Sun

There Shall Be a Holiday

I pleaded with Godwin, a journalist from Kampala, to take me to his village. It was relatively close by: fifty kilometers outside the city. For half the way, you can follow the main highway, which heads east toward Kenya along the shore of Lake Victoria. Both sides of the road teem with life — shops, bars, little hotels open day and night. It is usually bustling and noisy, with the activity not stopping altogether even at noon. On verandas, under overhangs, or beneath umbrellas sit tailors stooped over their machines, shoemakers repairing shoes and sandals, barbers cutting and styling. Women are beating manioc; others, next to them, are cooking bananas on a grill, or selling dried fish, juicy papayas, or homemade soap made out of ashes and sheep lard. Every few kilometers there is a car and bicycle repair shop, a tire-repair establishment, or a place to purchase fuel (depending on where you are, this is either an actual gas station with a pump, or simply a table with bottles or jars of gasoline awaiting the customer).

If you stop even for a moment somewhere along the way, the car is surrounded at once by a crowd of children, as well as by women selling everything and anything a traveler might need: bottles of Coca-Cola and of the local moonshine called waragi, tea biscuits and ladyfingers (in packages and individually), cooked rice and sorghum pancakes. They are the competitors of their friends farther away, who are unable to approach since they have stalls to guard — there are thieves everywhere.

These roads are also places of ecumenical diversity and tolerance. We pass an ornate mosque, whose costly construction was financed by Saudi Arabia; farther on, a considerably more humble little church; farther still, tents of the Seventh-Day Adventists, who wander across the continent warning about the coming end of the world. And this structure with the conical roof woven from rice straw? It is the temple of the highest god of the Ganda people, Katonda.

Every now and then we come to a roadblock (this can consist simply of a piece of wire or string) and a police or army guardpost. Even if you are far from the capital and, moreover, have not been listening to the radio (newspapers do not penetrate here, and there is no television), the behavior of the policemen and soldiers on guard will tell you a lot about the situation within the country. If, the minute you have come to a stop, and without so much as asking you a single question, they begin shouting and punching, it means that the country is under a dictatorship, or that there is war, but if they walk up to you, smile, extend their hands, and politely say, “You probably know that we earn very little,” it means that you are driving through a stable, democratic country, in which elections are free and human rights are observed.

The master of African roads and trails is the truck driver. Passenger cars are too weak to manage the ruts and the potholes. Half of them would get stuck somewhere along the way (especially during the rainy season), and the others, even if they had completed a route, would at the end of it be fit only for the junkyard. Whereas the truck can go almost anywhere. It has a powerful engine and wide tires, and a suspension as strong as the Brooklyn Bridge. The drivers of these vehicles understand well the treasure they possess, and therein lies their power. You can pick them out instantly in a roadside crowd by the manner in which they move. They have a positively regal bearing. Often, they do not even deign to descend from their lofty perches in the cabs — they know that everything will be brought to them. If a truck stops in a small settlement, a group of exhausted, pleading people will rush toward it — they are trying to get somewhere and do not have the means to do so. Therefore they camp by the roadside, hoping for an opportunity, for someone who will take them along for a fee. No one expects compassion. The truck drivers certainly are unfamiliar with this emotion. On the roads along which they travel, in the scorching heat and fire of the tropics, they see, day in and day out, women loaded down with packages, walking single file. If a driver had even an ounce of pity in his heart and wanted to help them, he would have to stop constantly, and would never reach his destination. That is why the relationship between the drivers and the women moving along the shoulders of the road is characterized by absolute coolness — they do not notice each other, they pass with indifference.

Godwin works until evening, therefore we cannot see this time the full spectacle that is the road east out of Kampala. It is late, nighttime already, when we set out, and the road looks completely different from how it appears by day.

Everything is plunged in the deepest darkness. The only thing visible are glowing lines of weak, wavering flames along both sides of the road — the lamps and candles in front of the vendors’ stalls. Most often, these aren’t even proper stalls, just a few measly odds and ends set directly on the ground, in the most bizarre combinations: a little pyramid of tomatoes next to a tube of toothpaste, mosquito spray next to a pack of cigarettes, a box of matches next to a metal tea can. Godwin says that earlier, in the years of dictatorship, it was preferable to camp outside near such candles than to spend time in brightly lit interiors. Seeing troops approaching, a man could instantly blow out the candle and vanish into the darkness. By the time the soldiers arrived, there wouldn’t be a soul left. A candle is good, because you can see everything, while remaining invisible yourself. Whereas in an illuminated interior, it is the other way around, and therefore more dangerous.

Finally we turned off the main highway onto an uneven, unpaved country road. All you could see in the glow of the headlights was a narrow dirt tunnel between two walls of dense, succulent, saturated greenery. This is the Africa of the humid tropics — lush, riotously overgrown, endlessly germinating, multiplying, and seething. We traveled along this tunnel, actually an intricate and confusing labyrinth of forks and turns, until suddenly the wall of a house loomed directly in our path. This was the end of the road. Godwin stopped the car and turned off the engine. A deep silence descended. It was so late already that even the crickets were quiet, and there seemed to be no dogs in the vicinity. One could hear only the mosquitoes, angry and impatient, as if they could stand waiting for us no longer. Godwin knocked on the door. It opened, and a dozen sleepy, half-naked children spilled out. Then a tall, serious woman emerged, her gestures full of dignity and joyous welcome: Godwin’s mother. After some preliminary greetings, she gathered all the children in one room, and in the other spread out sleeping mats for us on the floor.

When I peered out the window in the morning, I felt I was in a boundless tropical garden. All around grew palm trees, banana trees, tamarind trees, coffee bushes — the house was drowning in thick, tangled growth. Tall grasses and billowing shrubs were pushing in from everywhere, so rampant that there was little room left for people. Godwin’s yard was small; I saw no road anywhere (other than the one we had arrived on), and most important, I didn’t notice any other houses, although Godwin had told me we were going to a village. In this densely jungled region of Africa, villages are laid out not along the road (which often does not even exist), but scattered over a large area, with houses at some distance from one another, joined only by paths submerged in the thickets, invisible to the untrained eye. One has to be an inhabitant of the village, or at least know it well, in order to understand the layout of these paths, their course and connections.

I set off with the children for water; getting it is their responsibility. Maybe two hundred meters from the house ran a small, barely moving stream, overgrown with burdock and bulrushes, in which slowly and with great difficulty the boys filled their buckets. Then they carried these buckets back on their heads, trying their best not to spill a single drop. They walked with great concentration, carefully balancing their slight, childish bodies.

One of the buckets is designated for morning ablutions. You wash your face in such a way as not to waste too much water. You scoop a handful from the bucket and then spread it over your face — attentively and not too energetically, so that it doesn’t run off between your fingers. A towel is unnecessary, because the sun shines fiercely from early morning and skin dries rapidly. Next, you break off a small twig from a bush and crush one end with your teeth until you have created a kind of wooden brush. Now you clean your teeth, long and meticulously. Some people do this for hours; it is a pastime for them like gum chewing is for others.

Next, because this is a double holiday (it is Sunday, and guests have arrived from the city), Godwin’s mother prepares breakfast. Normally one eats once a day in the village, in the evening; in the dry season, once every two days — if one doesn’t simply starve. For breakfast there is tea and a piece of cornmeal pancake, as well as a bowl of matoke, a dish made of boiled green bananas. The children behave like nestlings: they stare greedily at the bowl of matoke, and when their mother finally allows them to eat, they gulp everything down in a second.

All the while, we are outside in the yard. Lying in the middle, and calling immediate attention to itself, is a rectangular stone slab: it is the grave of the ancestors, the masiro. In Africa, burial customs vary greatly. Certain forest tribes just lay down their deceased in the bush, to be devoured by wild animals. Others bury corpses in specially designated places, in simple, unadorned cemeteries. There are those who bury the dead beneath the floors of inhabited houses. But most frequently they are laid to rest in close proximity to the house — in yards, in gardens, where they can be close, where we can feel their fortifying presence. Belief in the ghosts of ancestors, in their ministering power, in their vigilant attention, encouragement, and goodwill is very much alive and constitutes a source of comfort and confidence. Having them near us, we feel more secure; when we are at a loss as to what to do, they will hasten to give us advice and — what is immeasurably important — will stop us from taking a false step or the wrong road altogether. Therefore each home, each household, has two dimensions: the visible, palpable one and the hidden, mysterious, sacred one. Every person tries, if he can, to visit regularly his family home, the ground of his ancestors — there he gains strength and shores up his identity.

The yard’s second focal point, besides the ancestral grave, is the kitchen. This consists of a hole in the ground surrounded on three sides by clay walls, and in it lie three blackened stones arranged in a triangle. You place the pot on top of them, and light a wood fire beneath. It is the simplest of appliances, invented during neolithic times but still useful.

Because it was morning and the heat was still relatively tolerable, Godwin went off to greet the neighbors, having agreed earlier that I could accompany him. People here live in simple clay houses covered with corrugated tin, which by noon radiates heat like a fired-up oven. Windows are mere openings in the walls, and the doors are most often made out of plywood or tin, loosely fitted, without frames — symbolic, really, because they do not even have knobs or locks.

Someone arriving here from the city is considered a great gentleman, a Croesus, a lord. Although the city is not far away, it nevertheless belongs to another, better world, a planet of plenty. Both sides, those from the city and those from the country, understand this, which is why the person from the city knows he cannot arrive here empty-handed. Consequently, preparations for a trip to the countryside cost people from the city much time and money. When my friend in Kampala purchases anything, he immediately explains, “I have to take this to the country.” He walks the streets, inspects the merchandise, and deliberates: “This would be good for a present, when I go to the country.”

Presents, presents. This is a culture of constant gift-giving. But because Godwin did not have time to shop, he gave his neighbors twists of Ugandan shillings, slipping them discreetly into their pockets.

First we visited Stone Singevenda and his wife, Victa. Stone is twenty-six years old and works on construction projects, although he has been unable to find a job for some time. Victa works: she cultivates a little field of manioc, from which they live. Victa gives birth every year. They have been married four years and have four children, with a fifth on the way. It is the custom here to offer a guest something, but Victa and Stone do not give us anything — they have nothing to give.

It is different with their neighbor, Simon; he straightaway sets a plate of peanuts before us. But Simon is a wealthy man: he has a bicycle, and thanks to this he has a job. Simon is a bicycle trader. There are few major roads in the country. Trucks are scarce. Millions of people inhabit villages to which no roads lead and which trucks cannot reach. These people have it the hardest, and are the poorest. They live far from the marketplace, too far to carry there on their heads the few bulbs of cassava or yams, the bunch of green bananas or sack of sorghum — the vegetables and fruit native to this region. Because they cannot sell them, they have no money, and therefore they cannot buy anything — the desperate, closed circle of poverty. But, suddenly, Simon appears with his bicycle. He has fitted it out with myriad devices — trunks, bags, clips, brackets. The contraption serves more for transport than for riding. On this bike, for a slight fee (slight, for we are here always in the realm of a subsistence economy), Simon (and there are thousands like him in these parts) carries produce to the market for the village women (women, because this kind of small trade is their bailiwick). Simon says that the farther one goes from a major road, from the truck and the market, the greater the poverty. “And because people from Europe spend their time here only in the cities,” Simon observes, “and drive along the major roads, they cannot even imagine what our Africa looks like.”

One of Simon’s neighbors is Apollo — a man of indeterminate age, skinny and taciturn. He stands in front of his house pressing his shirt on a board. He has a charcoal-heated iron, enormous, rusted, and old. His shirt is older still. To describe it one must resort to the vocabulary of art critics, capricious postmodernists, scholars of suprematism, of abstract expressionism. It is a masterpiece of patchwork, of collage and pop art, a testament to the heights of imagination attained by those hardworking tailors whose little shops we passed driving here along the road from Kampala. For this shirt has had its holes patched so many times, there are so many bits and pieces of the most varied fabrics, colors, and textures sewn onto it, that it is no longer possible to ascertain the color and material of that original, primary, ancestral shirt, the one that had set into motion the long process of alterations and transfigurations, the effect of which now lies before Apollo on his ironing board.

The Buganda take enormous care with their grooming and their attire. In contrast to their fellow countrymen the Karimojong, who disdain clothing, the Buganda dress neatly and carefully, covering their arms down to the wrists, and their legs down to the ankles.

Apollo says that things are good because the civil war has ended, but bad because the price of coffee has fallen (it’s the 1990s) and they grow coffee here; it is the main source of livelihood. No one wants to buy it, no one comes for it. The coffee goes to waste, the bushes grow wild, and the people have no money. He sighs, and carefully guides the iron among the patches and seams, like a sailor navigating his boat between treacherous reefs.

As we stand talking, a cow emerges from a thicket of banana trees, followed by several playful little shepherds, then a stooped old man — Lule Kabbogozza. In 1942, Lule fought in Burma — he refers to this as the only event in his life. The rest of it was spent in this village. Now he laments the same as the others: “What do I eat?” he asks. “Cassava. Day and night cassava.” But he has a sunny disposition, and gestures toward the cow with a smile. At the beginning of the year several families get together, save their pennies, and purchase a cow at market. The cow grazes in the countryside, there is plenty of grass. When Christmas comes, it is slaughtered. Everyone gathers for the occasion. They make certain that everything is equitably divided. They offer most of the blood as a sacrifice to the ancestors (there is no more precious offering than cow’s blood). The rest of the beast they immediately roast and cook. It is the one and only time in the year when the village eats meat. Later they will buy another cow, and in a year’s time there will be another feast.

If I find myself somewhere nearby, I am told, I will be welcome. There will be pombe (banana beer), there will be waragi. And I will get as much meat as I want!