1.

BUKESA, KAMPALA

Monday, January 5, 2004

It is already ten o’ clock but the police have not arrived in Bwaise to collect Kamu’s body. Idlers, like sightseers, come, stare, and then leave. They form a semicircle a few meters away from the corpse. Sprinkles of dust—thrown by passers-by, mostly strangers mumbling, I’ve not walked past you stranger; I’ve buried you—are strewn on Kamu’s feet and on his trousers.

The idlers are subdued. Some have their hands folded at the chest, some at the back, some bite their nails but mostly they shake their heads, sigh, and suck their teeth in disbelief. A teenager standing by, out of sheer idleness rather than necessity, spits on the side and everyone turns on him, “You do not spit for the dead! Not even when they smell.” And there is indignation at such a lack of decorum.

The air in Bwaise has turned. Once Kamu died and the LCs disappeared, horror and disbelief arrived. Is a human slayable just like that? And the whole notion of taking a human life became so heavy that Bwaise stared incredulous as if some other place had done it. How do you go to bed at night and sleep when you’ve killed a whole human, hmm? The world died a long time ago . . . Everyone hates himself. People are not human anymore and all the buntu is gone.

The women in the market, even some who had waved their hands saying that they were fed up with thieves, now click their tongues at how quickly it had all happened. At one moment the LCs were leading him down the road right, right here, the next he was wuu, dead. They have already sprinkled dust on Kamu saying: Kamu, you know I’ve buried you, to absolve themselves from guilt. The same women now whisper the names of the killers and their whispers drift everywhere like smoke on wind. By midday, everyone interested will know who hit Kamu where, with what, and whose blow made him swallow his last breath.

At that ten o’ clock, Kanani Kintu and his wife Faisi stepped out of their house to go sowing. Kanani stood below the veranda while Faisi tugged at the front door—the rains had made the wood swell and it was hard to open or close. Kanani faced a dilemma. He could offer to help Faisi at the risk of being brushed off impatiently, or he could look on, holding the padlock and the keys, while his wife struggled.

Just then, Faisi stepped back and wrenched with both hands. The door slammed with such force that the roof rattled. She wedged the bolt into the staple and motioned with her hand at Kanani. He passed on the padlock. She slipped it through the latch and pressed it. Kanani passed on the keys, this time unbidden. Faisi selected a key, stuck it into the lock and snapped it twice. Then she unzipped her handbag and tossed the keys in. She drew up the zip to close it but it got stuck along the way: the edge of the Bible stuck out. Kanani was about to offer to carry the Bible when Faisi pushed the book deeper into her handbag and the zip sailed past. She slipped her right hand through the straps, pulled them up her right shoulder, and cradled the bag between her arm and ribs. Faisi looked up and stepped off the verandah. Kanani followed.

Faisi was already in mode and Kanani knew not to disturb. He would not say that the Holy Spirit was upon her—only the brazen new churches from America made such claims—but once in mode Faisi was under Holy Guidance. Faisi was six foot two, slender and straight. She was not the kind of wife who, contrite about her lofty stature, shrunk to enhance her husband. Faisi walked tall even though Kanani was only five foot six and skinny. Now walking behind her, he wondered how, at the age of sixty-five, Faisi’s backside could still be so pert. Suddenly, she stopped and he bumped into her. She removed the Bible from her handbag and Kanani gestured for her to pass it on. The straps on Faisi’s handbag were frail. The patent leather, once tight, smooth, and shiny, had crumbled and flaked off. Kanani smiled: a lesser woman would have discarded the handbag a long time ago, but not Faisi.

When the two came to Makerere Road, Kanani asked, “Should we wait here for a taxi or should we walk?” But Faisi was already walking toward Naakulabye Town center. “Disciples worked in more hostile conditions,” Kanani muttered to himself as he hurried to catch up.

It was a steep walk to Naakulabye. While Faisi looked straight ahead, Kanani noticed that the smell of garbage welcomed them into the town. The overflowing skip in the open yard of the market was as much a landmark of Naakulabye as the ancient muvule tree at the market’s edge. When they came to Total Petro Station at the top of the road, women selling matooke across the road called, “Come, customer: take a look. Today’s food is—”

“Leave those two alone,” a woman interrupted. “They’re the Awakened couple from that old house near Kiyindi.”

“Do the Awakened still exist?”

That is true testimony, Kanani thought to himself; the world knew that he and his wife walked in the Lord.

By the time Kanani and Faisi came to the center of Naakulabye, the sun was severe. Kanani saw the unsightly tenants of the paved town circle and shook his head. Two fat cows, urban in bearing, occupied the space where flowers once grew. One cow lay on the ground chewing the cud, the other stood swishing its tail languidly, oblivious to the traffic circling around it.

“Africans . . .” Kanani hissed.

He remembered the neat paved walkways, manicured hedges, blooming plants, and the dustless streets of colonial Naakulabye and despaired. As a child in the 30s, Kanani had seen Kampala City take shape in the magical hands of the British. When it came to carving out landscape, the white man was a wizard. First, the mpala antelopes, which the ba kabaka had hunted for generations, were banished from the hills. Then the hills were measured and marked, then dug and demarcated into Streets, Roads, Lanes, Places, Squares, and Mews. The roads were tarred and paved smoother than mats. Trees and plants of agreeable species were planted at the roadside at precise intervals, then flowers of all colors. Suddenly, there were palm trees in Kampala. Streetlights sprang up between the trees and lit up in the night. Kampala’s hilltops were enhanced with beautiful structures. Namirembe and Lubaga were crested with magnificent cathedrals, Kikaya was crowned with a beautiful Baha’i Temple, Nakasero with the tall Apollo Hotel, Kololo with a huge TV mast, Makerere with majestic university structures, and Lubiri with a modern royal palace. There was hope then. There were systems. There was order. Uganda was on its way to civilization.

Then independence came.

Kanani was pessimistic right from the start. Ugandans related to the land and to the hills, but not to the art drawn on them by the British. The land was theirs but the city belonged to the British. Kanani had watched, wary, as one by one, Europeans packed and left their city behind. Excited Ugandans, dizzy with euphoria, took their places. He remembered Rev Mackenzie, the senior accountant at Namirembe Cathedral at the time. Kanani was his assistant. He was in Mackenzie’s office helping him pack his books in boxes when Mackenzie exploded, “You’re a good person, Canaan.” British people pronounced Kanani’s name properly. “No doubt you’ll do a good job. But mark my words: these buffoons are going to destroy your country.”

Not even Mackenzie’s pessimism prepared Kanani for the ineptitude and later, the sheer greed that consumed the city after independence. Through the decades, Mackenzie’s words had come to pass like a prophecy. Luckily, churches were unaffected—right from the start churches had belonged not to Europeans but to God. For Kanani, that dry and dusty town circle in the middle of Naakulabye occupied by fat urbanite cows was emblematic of independent Uganda.

A taxi van bound for the city center came along and Kanani and Faisi boarded. As soon as he sat down, Kanani closed his eyes in prayer. But instead of prayers, images of his twins, Job and Ruth, floated past. Then Paulo Kalema, his grandson, came into view. The image of Paulo’s face was close and large. It stayed immovable, blocking Kanani’s prayer. He opened his eyes, blinked a few times and closed them again. He started to pray again but the images returned. Kanani was troubled. When prayer did not sit properly in his mind, it did not reach heaven. He ignored the images and mumbled on but Paulo’s picture widened and darkened. No matter how fast Kanani prayed, Paulo’s image remained a thick dark shadow he could not see past. Kanani gave up praying.

Lately, the fact that Paulo insisted on using Kalema as his surname had begun to bother Kanani. The coincidence of the name was too close to the curse. Yet Kanani’s father and even his grandfather had been confident that if the family remained steadfast in the Church and kept their faith they would be safe. Sometimes though, especially at moments like this when his prayer had been blocked by the wandering of his mind, Kanani wondered whether they were. He found solace in the fact that both his father and grandfather had told him that the curse was specific: mental illness, sudden death, and suicide. He had not seen signs of mental illness in his family, and the twins, whatever their faults, were not suicidal. He pushed the thought out of his mind. The curse was nothing but the work of the Devil and Jesus had trounced all evil at Golgotha.