4.

Miisi walked leisurely, his hands clasped behind him. He watched his feet come and recede, come and recede from under his kanzu. His shadow, in tow, was huge. Miisi was one with himself. A kanzu made him feel authentic: African, Ganda, a muntu. He came to the top of Katikamu Hill. On his right, the local Anglican Church was locked and deserted. In the same compound were the Church of Uganda primary and secondary schools. On his left were Katikamu SDA Church and both its primary and secondary schools. The Klezia and the Roman Catholic primary and secondary schools were further away in Kisule. The hill started to descend. Miisi walked down past the teachers’ quarters, past the rocky patch of land until he came to the huge falawo trees opposite the triangular junction. He turned into Kaleebu’s walkway.

As he got to the house, a modest concrete block, Kaleebu’s wife saw him and called out in welcome. A child ran out of the house with a folding chair and placed it under the shade of a tree for him. Then Kaleebu appeared in the doorway, dressed in a kanzu as well. There was a mixture of surprise and pleasure in his smile.

“What lies has the world been telling?” Kaleebu asked as they sat down.

“Apart from the sun?”

“Is the city roasting too?”

“This year’s sun burns right through the loins.” Miisi shook his head.

“And the president wants a fourth term.”

“Don’t start on that leech.”

“That man is like balding,” Kaleebu said. “Once it arrives it demands more and more space.”

“That is our Africa. That is what circumstances have done to us.”

“Aha, we Moslems watched as this president heaped insults on Idi Amin. We said, OK, let’s wait and see. Now we’re wondering whether it is the State House that turns every president swinish.”

One by one, the members of Kaleebu’s family came to greet Miisi. Saying that it was late and that he would lose his appetite, Miisi declined the drink he was offered. This gave him time to consider Kaleebu’s words. He knew he had to tread carefully. Kaleebu was still haunted by Amin’s regime. Like many Moslems, who formed a minority, he felt implicated whenever a Moslem committed an offense. Miisi was sympathetic. Moslems had been vilified and marginalized during colonial times. Even after independence, Christian Ugandans had taken on the same attitude as the colonialists toward Moslems. Then Idi Amin came along. His horror not only stamped and sealed the horrible beliefs held about Moslems but conjured up new nightmares for them as well. Hence, any political discussion with Kaleebu always veered toward making sense of Amin’s regime. In a way, Miisi understood Kaleebu’s feelings of persecution. When he had lived in Britain in the 70s, he felt implicated whenever he read in the papers that a black person had stolen, murdered, or raped. Now he answered, “All politicians are the same: once in power they imagine that they’re the only ones with brains.”

“What has this president done for the country, seriously?”

“At least we can sit here and criticize him.”

“But only his tribal region is prospering and he has brought back the Asians.”

“At least one region’s developing,” Miisi said evenly. “I wish Obote and Amin had developed their regions: we would have fewer problems here in the south. As for the Asians, they have given the city a face-lift. My problem with this man is that he has snuffed out our self-belief.”

“But he’s taking properties from Ugandans and giving them to Asians. How can that be right?” Kaleebu sat up.

“He’s not giving them properties; he is returning their properties,” Miisi tried to explain. “The international community will not invest in Uganda until all properties Amin confiscated from Asians have been returned.”

Kaleebu kept silent. Finally he said, “I know you’ll think that I say this because I am a Moslem and that I stand by Amin blindly, but don’t you think this president is taking us back to those old days of ‘Boy this’ and ‘Boy that’? Who doesn’t know how cruelly Asians treated us? Maybe you educated people don’t but for us who worked in their shops or homes, the idea of having them back is sickening.”

“Those days are long gone. Asians return as equals. Besides, they learned to call us ‘Boy’ from the British.”

“The problem with Amin was not that he killed people; who hasn’t? Amin’s sin was that he killed the untouchables—the educated. Where Amin killed an Archbishop, Obote killed a hundred peasants. Did the world cry out?”

“On second thought, I’ll have a glass of water,” Miisi said.

“Someone bring us a glass of water,” Kaleebu called. Then he carried on, “When the British love you, they wash the ground you tread white with praise, but let them turn against you . . .”

A child brought a glass of orange juice and Miisi was disappointed. Juice would not quench his thirst. He considered repeating his request for a glass of water but decided against it. When he put the glass down, Kaleebu carried on. “The British said that Amin killed his son Moses and ate his heart but Moses’s mother returns to Uganda and says that her son is alive in France.”

“We cannot blame the West for the way they present Africans in their media: what do you expect? Our savagery is their civilization. It justifies everything. My problem is the Africans who, knowing this, give them the opportunity. If only African buffoons realized how they drag every black person in the world down in the mud with their follies, they would reconsider.”

“Of course, Amin was a tyrant. I’ll be the first to tell you that, but how much of Amin is myth?”

“Anyone can separate myth from fact.”

“Can they? How much of that dehumanization in the media actually dehumanized Amin as a person?”

“Of course no one believes he had people’s heads in his fridge, but Namanve was real. Amin was exaggerated because that sort of thing was unexpected so soon after independence. By the time Obote II and the others set in, we were numb, save for Moslems who were feeling it for the first time.”

“My friend, you think we Moslems were the people Amin gave the shops to when he took them from the Asians?”

“I am saying that Moslems didn’t feel Amin the way we did. Non-Moslem men got circumcised and acquired Moslem names hoping it would protect them: have you forgotten?”

“I’ll tell you this, Miisi. Yes, there were people I know who prospered during Amin’s regime but there were also Moslems who were killed by Amin and there were Christians who gained from him. You don’t realize that the vast majority of Ugandans didn’t feel Amin as harshly as you did. We peasants, apart from the lack of soap, sugar, salt, and those little luxuries we could no longer afford, Amin kept away from us. I might be uneducated, but I know that embargoes were clamped on the country. Even if the fools Amin gave the factories and shops to could trade, where would they do it, with whom? However, you the elite had never known a car without petrol and, Oh the drive-in has been closed, so you imagined we all suffered the same.”

“Surely you must have suffered?”

“We suffered the war from Tanzania and persecution afterwards because we were Moslems.”

“Surely—”

“No, Miisi, you are the educated one. Tell me, what was wrong with Amin? He was human. What made him do what he did?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Don’t tell me you believe he was a monster like the Europeans said?”

“I’ve never thought it through.”

“I’ll tell you why you’ve never thought it through my friend: because Amin was Moslem.”

“That is not fair.”

“Consider this. Amin came from the smallest and most despised tribe, the Kakwa. He was a northerner. He was uneducated. He was Moslem. I mean, you Christians had adopted the Europeans’ view that all Moslems were imbeciles—only good as shopkeepers, drivers, or butchers. It never occurred to you that to forcefully baptize our children when they went to mission schools kept us away from Western education. Did you know that it was Amin who introduced schools for Moslems: that he even went to OIC to ask for an Islamic university so that we could have an education acceptable to us?”

“I am sure he did some good somewhere, but—”

“I’ll use your rationale, Miisi. As a president, Amin was first surrounded not only by Christians and the educated, but by southerners, especially us, the arrogant Ganda, who looked down on everyone. Not to mention the Western media that presented him as a cannibal. Is it possible that Amin lashed out to frighten people as much as he was frightened?”

Miisi rubbed his hands up and down his face as if removing something sticky. Kaleebu stopped, ashamed of his outburst. He knew that in Uganda to say anything positive about Idi Amin was blasphemous. He dropped the Idi Amin subject and turned to Obote. “Obote avoided the educated because you people scream so loud that they hear you across the seas,” Kaleebu smiled. “Instead, he terrorized us peasants and there were no embargoes this time, were there?”

“You see,” Misirayimu started, “this is exactly what happens when a society is gripped with the notion of an almighty God. What would stop their leaders from emulating Him? Can you criticize your God? Can God be held accountable? God-fearing people tend to ape their deity in their own perverted way.”

“Ah, there you stray, my friend. When it comes to questioning Allah, we part company.”

“This ‘God’ is unashamedly bent on annihilating other gods: is it surprising that the people who believe in him are intolerant themselves?”

“In this conversation,” Kaleebu was shaking his head, “I have hit the wall, my friend. I can’t go any further.”

“Kaleebu, I listened when you sounded me out on Amin. You made sense. Why can’t you listen to me?”

“My friend, I talked about Amin, a man. You’re talking about God.”

Miisi dropped his head. The evening had become cold. Darkness was falling. Mosquitoes swung above Kaleebu’s head. “Time is in a hurry these days,” he sighed after a pause.

“It is because we are getting old,” Kaleebu laughed, visibly relieved that Miisi had dropped the blasphemous talk.

Miisi drank up his juice and said that he should go home. Kaleebu mumbled something about the night falling like a stone and Miisi said that it was a great metaphor for old age. Presently, he bid Kaleebu goodnight and called his wife to say he was leaving. She said that supper was almost ready, the way the Ganda do even though they would be shocked if you accepted the invitation. Miisi said that he would stay for supper another time.

When he stood up, his shadow sprung up, a giant walking ahead of him. The moon was out early. The two men walked in silence through the darkened coffee shamba until they came to the road. When he turned, Miisi’s shadow veered and walked by his side, half its size. Kaleebu bid Miisi goodnight.

Miisi was chastising himself for letting the conversation get out of hand. He had come to find out what it was exactly people had against homosexuality but ended up talking about Idi Amin. He should have never mentioned God. He wondered whether he would ever gather the courage to raise the homosexual issue.

“I’ve seen you there.”

Miisi looked up and saw Nyago waving at him.

“Oh, I hadn’t seen you.”

“Because darkness is on the black man’s side,” Nyago laughed.

“And by God he has paid for it.”

“Come on and join me.” Nyago invited. “I’m having a late cup of tea, on my own. Such is the lot of men like me.”

“Eh eh, I am going to miss that cup of tea. Where’s your wife?” Miisi teased.

“What would I do with my wife?”

“Have tea conversation with her.”

“Do you talk to your wife? I mean real conversation?”

“It depends on the woman.”

“Maybe women in the city but a peasant’s wife: what does she know beyond breastfeeding? Besides,” Nyago whispered, “When you talk to her as an equal she gets ideas. Next, she’ll be ordering you around. And she’ll do it when you are in the company of other men, to show off.”

Miisi laughed uncomfortably and started walking home. He claimed that time was moving faster than him, that he should have been home already, that he would return another day for that cup of tea and Nyago expressed pretend disappointment.

When he arrived home, Miisi went straight upstairs to his bedroom. He reached for his pen and paper to prepare an article for his column. It was a wasted evening: his ideas on sexuality were getting nowhere. He wrote in English:

Homophobia: A Result of Fear Imagined or Real

He did not like the title. It did not question the Ugandan notion that homosexuality was a Western export. Nonetheless, Miisi knew that whichever way he presented the idea, religion rather than logic would dictate the readers’ response. He wrote:

Homophobia: Cultural Amnesia or Christian Erasure?

He liked the internal rhyme, but how does one translate it into Luganda? He decided to put his thoughts in note form:

Old gripes—this is who we/they are, right/wrong, normal/abnormal, natural/unnatural, ancestors’ words as gospel truth—are loosening.

Nothing is above questionable anymore, no truths(?)

What this has revealed is stunning.

The world is more exciting to live in now than decades ago!(?)

He yawned and decided to leave it at that. He might have better ideas tomorrow.