3

Across the First Border

Maseno to Entebbe

I crossed the Equator at 6.10 a.m. and six hours later – helped by a strong tailwind – arrived at the Ugandan border. Those were fifty-five exhilarating miles, again through densely populated, rich farmland with many coffee plantations, a reassuring wealth of trees – sometimes mercifully shading the road for long stretches – and superb views over deep forested valleys or gentle green hills festooned with webs of winding red paths.

The listless border town of Busia was long, dull, dusty and very, very hot; by then I had lost 1,500 feet. Beyond stood a pleasingly rural border-post, shaded by ancient fig and mango trees. Only trucks – mostly petrol tankers – were entering or leaving Uganda and now all their drivers lay asleep in the roadside bush. Yet my pushing Lear into the cramped immigration office enraged a corpulent sweating officer who sat behind a rickety little table picking his teeth. Rejecting my passport he shouted ‘Take that bicycle out! You get no stamp before you take that out!’

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘it can’t be left unguarded. There are too many young men hanging about.’ When I again proffered the passport he detached a morsel from between his molars and spat it in my direction. ‘If you had a car would you want to drive it in here?’

I felt two kinds of irritation coalescing: that produced by the equatorial sun at noon and that produced by bloody-minded petty officials. Controlling myself, I pointed out that if I had a car my luggage would be locked in the boot.

‘You think Ugandans are all thieves? In what other country would you behave like this?’

‘In every other country. There are thieves everywhere.’

‘In what countries? Where else can you put a bicycle in everyone’s way? Now no one else can enter this office!’

This was a slight exaggeration but I confined myself to remarking, ‘No one else wants to enter it. And if you’d stamped the passport at once, instead of arguing, my bicycle and myself would’ve been well out of the way by now.’

Mysteriously, this logic amused him. He slapped his thigh, roared with laughter, laid aside his toothpick (it seemed to be a large fish-bone) and stamped my passport without even glancing at it. ‘You are a funny old woman!’ he chuckled then, leaning forward to shake hands.

Young Forex sharks cruise around most African border-posts, operating under the noses of customs officers – with whom they doubtless have an arrangement – and urging in a stage-whisper, ‘Change money here! From me the best rate!’ Quickly a dozen jostling youths surrounded me, waving six-inch-thick rubber-banded wads of indecipherably filthy Ugandan shillings; the rate was then 2,100 to the pound sterling. I would have liked to oblige one of those pleading youngsters but to count so many illegible notes by the roadside seemed impractical. They accepted their dismissal good-humouredly, wishing me a happy time in Uganda.

The smooth tarmac road, built with ‘Reconstruction Aid’, ran level through sun-scourged scrub, sparsely populated. Eventually a fig tree offered shade and as I lay reading five little boys gradually came closer and closer, through rustling dead maize, speculating in whispers about this bizarre phenomenon. They couldn’t conquer their timidity and were malnourished and ragged; I never saw their equivalent in rural Kenya. There the benefits of three peaceful decades, sheltering under the capitalist wing, are as evident as the settlers’ indelible markings, physical and psychological. On this first afternoon in Uganda my impressions – confirmed during the weeks ahead – were of far worse poverty and far less servility towards the mzungu.

Yet the poverty was not as extreme as I had feared, given the unpeacefulness of Uganda’s post-Independence decades. So much of the country is so fertile that since the Terror ended in 1986, when the National Resistance Army (NRA) brought down the second Obote regime, it has been able – under President Yoweri Museveni – to regain a degree of stability and prosperity.

Pre-Independence, Uganda was a tragedy waiting to happen. During the 1950s the Ganda – the people of Buganda, who speak Luganda – made up less than 18 per cent of the Protectorate’s total population yet would accept a united Uganda only if they were guaranteed its political leadership. As this could not reasonably be arranged, Buganda decided in 1960 to reclaim its pre-colonial sovereignty and declared itself a ‘separate autonomous state’. Britain said ‘Nonsense!’ – a Uganda without Buganda would have been an economic cripple – and then quickly cooked up a constitutional dog’s dinner which satisfied no one.

After a few uneasy years of Independence the first Prime Minister, Milton Obote, whose supporters were the Acholi and Langi, used the national army commanded by Idi Amin to suppress the Ganda. (Their Kabaka was exiled to Britain.) In 1971 Amin overthrew Obote, who was given asylum in Tanzania, and filled all the lucrative political posts with his own supporters, the Kakwa and Nubi. He also issued decrees of legal immunity which enabled heavily armed soldiers to terrorise the population, looting government and private property, burning crops and homes, robbing motorists at gunpoint, shooting or stealing cattle, slaughtering villagers. Extermination squads, mainly Nilotic and Sudanic, toured the army camps murdering officers and men suspected of loyalty to Obote. In 1972 the International Commission of Jurists reported: ‘There has been a total breakdown in the rule of law throughout the country.’ According to the Africa Contemporary Record, 1982-83, some 350,000 Ugandans were killed under Amin’s regime – many after tortures one can hardly bear to read about – and thousands of others went into exile. ‘Virtually the whole of the modernizing elite was either killed or fled abroad.’

In 1982 Amnesty International found that human rights in Uganda ‘were still being violated with impunity, mainly by the army’. Then Obote was again in control (the Tanzanian army had got rid of Amin in 1979) so the Acholi and Langi were killing the Kakwa and Nubi, and of course lots more besides. One Ugandan scholar, Ali A. Mazrui, Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, sees the Terror as an unusually lethal brew of tyranny and anarchy: too much government and too little. For a generation Uganda endured not only political and economic collapse but also, as Professor Mazrui puts it, ‘a basic moral collapse among those who wielded weapons’. He traces the roots of the tragedy back to the colonial period, when Britain disarmed the warriors of the well-organised Buganda and Bunyoro kingdoms, turning them instead into civilian officials co-operating in the administration of the Protectorate along the ‘indirect rule’ lines prescribed by Lord Lugard. Simultaneously, the British were recruiting for the King’s African Rifles from among the primitive Nilotic tribes in the north. These tribes had nothing in common with the developed southern kingdoms, whose efficiently run administration astonished Speke when he first arrived at the Kampala court of the Kabaka of Buganda. As Professor Mazrui explains:

While the Baganda and the Banyoro were being demilitarized and losing their warrior tradition, the Acholi, Langi and Kakwa among other northern Ugandans underwent militarization of a new and modern kind. They were being absorbed into the colonial security forces, with guns rather than spears. This change was destined to have enormous consequences for the future of Uganda. By the time the British were leaving, the armed forces of the newly independent country were disproportionately Nilotic in composition. Although all the Nilotic tribes in Uganda together add up to only a small minority of the population, the stage was already set for a Nilotic supremacy in at least the first few decades of post-colonial Uganda … It was a case of precolonial stateless societies inheriting the post-colonial state. The Langi (Obote’s tribe), the Kakwa (Amin’s tribe) and the Acholi (Okello’s tribe) were all fundamentally stateless in their precolonial incarnations. It was their militarization during British colonial rule that prepared them – quite unwittingly – to inherit the post-colonial state. The European experience played havoc with the different traditions of Africa, casting old groups into new roles, and ‘mis-casting’ decentralized people into centralizing functions. This whole cultural disruption had a lot to do with the decay of the post-colonial state in countries like Uganda.

The five little boys were still crouching in the maize, watching my every move, when gathering clouds encouraged me to continue at three o’clock. Soon I was in broken country where green jungle covered steep slopes and baboons wandered over the road, as usual looking disgruntled and having noisy family squabbles. On the main Mbale-Kampala road the stifling smoke of pre-rains bush-burning made my eyes water. Here I observed a curious ritual. Four small boys, squatting by the roadside around two distorted doll-sized figures of mud men, were drumming rhythmically (wood on wood) and looking solemn and intent, as though engaged in a ceremony rather than a game.

I was now in Busoga, historically one of the Buganda kingdom’s tributary states and known to early explorers as ‘the backdoor of Buganda’. It was then notoriously hostile territory. Bishop James Hannington of the Church Missionary Society was murdered here in 1885, having walked from the coast in a mere eleven weeks, following Thomson’s route. Foolishly he ignored the emphatic advice given him by, among others, a friendly Chief in Kavirondo – ‘Avoid Busoga at all costs!’ By temperament he was at least as much an explorer as a bishop and Busoga, being hitherto untrodden by White feet, fatally tempted him. He and his small team of porters were murdered – hacked to death with spears – by order of the alarmingly unstable 20-year-old Mwanga, the Kabaka of Buganda. Any European who tried to use the forbidden ‘backdoor’ could only be a spy.

Apart from petrol tankers, the local traffic was mainly two-wheeled. Most cyclists carried improbable loads: a passenger or two, huge jerry-cans of water or home-brewed alcohol, long sacks of charcoal, formidably heavy bunches of matoke (green bananas) reaching almost to the ground on both sides, pyramids of firewood, unidentifiable cloth-wrapped bundles, hens in wicker coops and, on one carrier, a sleek chestnut kid curled up in a shallow wooden box and apparently enjoying his excursion. As the land became more fertile, untidily thatched square or round mud huts huddled in unfenced compounds amidst unkempt shambas. In the few drab, destitute townships rusty tin roofs were balanced, often precariously, on disintegrating grey shacks. Busoga’s almost bare shelves made Kenya’s rural dukas seem like Harrods. Only the women brightened this landscape, all wearing spotless ankle-length dresses with exaggeratedly puffed-up shoulders and wide sashes tied in a big bow above their conspicuous buttocks, or, occasionally, tied diagonally across their equally conspicuous bosoms. As they walked gracefully by the roadside this shimmering flow of contrasting colours – rose-pink, deep yellow, pale green, crimson, royal blue – made a glorious mobile pattern in the dappled shade of mango, fig and blue-gum trees. By comparison, Kenyan women seem dowdy and shapeless in their shoddy mass-produced Western garments. I later learned that this Ugandan fashion was instigated by missionaries in the 1890s and designed by a Goan tailor.

At dusk I arrived in Bugiri, a candlelit village – and candles were scarce. The one tiny lodging-house stocked no beer but an obliging young woman offered to fetch my evening fix from elsewhere. No washing water appeared and I requested none, visualising the distance that young woman might have to walk to fetch it – probably, given the drought, all the way to Lake Victoria, through some five miles of bush and swamp.

News of the mzungu’s arrival spread fast and soon a self-proclaimed smuggler hurried in, avid for Kenyan shillings. I only had sterling; resigning myself to being cheated I changed a five-pound note, enough to get me to a Jinja bank – where I felt suitably guilty, on realising that the smuggler had given me a little more than the official rate. In a corner of the yard food was being cooked over a tin of charcoal; supper consisted of a small dish of soggy rice and a giant bone to which adhered a few fragments of fat and gristle. As I ate, an elderly man entered, sat in the corner by the door, beyond the candlelight, and used the smuggler as his interpreter.

Was it true that Europeans and Americans were also dying of AIDS and had no cure? When I confirmed that this was indeed true the smuggler translated, ‘He doesn’t believe you, he believes Western doctors have cures for their own people.’ (This misapprehension is widespread in Africa.) ‘He asks if you can get him some of that medicine. Last year his first-born died, now another son is dying in Kampala. The dying boy won’t come home, he saw how much his brother’s slow death made his mother sad. A sister cares for him.’

That was a harrowing encounter, the first of many such; villagers frequently mistook the grey-haired mzungu for a touring AIDS expert.

Again I had difficulty fitting Lear into my room, one of a row of eight mud-brick cells. Inexplicably, no mosquitoes attended me despite ill-fitting shutters on the unglazed window.

I breakfasted at eight, two hours beyond Bugiri, in a hoteli facing many half-built red-brick dwellings, abandoned by families fleeing from warfare. A friendly young man provided weak but real coffee and scraps of cold omelette sandwiched in a stale, kerosene-flavoured bun. Above a showcase displaying two more stale buns hung an anti-AIDS poster, handwritten in the local language and illustrated with clumsy drawings. I enquired about its provenance. ‘My father made it,’ said the young man. ‘He is a minister of God and tries to warn and teach people. Here most of us can’t read posters from Kampala in English so we must translate.’

The wide smooth road switchbacked on through miles of sugarcane, maize, arid bush and papyrus swamp, in which glistened an evil black sludge instead of the normal quota of water. Each climb seemed longer and steeper than the last. At 11.15 I diagnosed imminent heat-stroke and retreated into the thin bush – too thin to give full protection. Significantly, I couldn’t read. For four hours I lay in a strange stupor, no more than semi-conscious yet not sleeping and feeling oddly content.

Continuing at 3.30, I could keep going for less than an hour. Heavily sweating fellow-cyclists, of whom there were many, assured me that I was not being unduly feeble; they too were wilting. ‘And we were born here!’ said one. ‘And you live always in the snow in Ireland! So our terrible heat can kill you – we hear stories how Europeans drop dead in the sun, like they were shot!’

I smiled and nodded, too dehydrated to rectify this faulty image of Ireland. Alarmingly I had ceased to sweat, despite having drunk six litres of water since dawn. In the next township I stopped for another hour and drank six more litres to the giggling wonderment of the girl who drew it from a tar-barrel at the back of her half-built hoteli. (I had given up purifying my intake and after four months of drinking whatever came my way, with no ill-effects, I wonder if the contamination of Africa’s water supplies, about which we hear so much, is not perhaps exaggerated?) As my body absorbed the liquid I could feel myself coming out of that curious semi-comatose state. The final thirty miles to Jinja, over some punishing hills, were accomplished non-stop.

Jolting along Jinja’s main street through a pink haze (traffic dust tinted by a flaring sunset), I reproved Uganda’s second city for not maintaining its streets to match the excellent motor-road. In the rambling Lake View Hotel my £2 room had a bath – alas! sans water. This welcoming Muslim establishment was teetotal, a snag dealt with by giving one of the staff 2,000 shillings and telling him that if he brought me two beers (costing 1,000 shillings) I wouldn’t expect any change. In the humid restaurant I supped off more soggy rice and an extraordinarily nasty fish stew. Then I fell into bed and had an unique experience.

Switching off the light, I was resigned to the inevitable; one learns to live – even to sleep – with mosquitoes. Moments later the fleas became apparent; several fleas, simultaneously settling down to their evening meal. I resigned myself to those, too. Given their way, fleas soon become replete and desist; to interrupt them merely wastes energy and prolongs the agony. And anyway the mosquitoes were going to give me an itchy night. Then something else made itself felt, something unfamiliar and dreadfully numerous. Switching on the light, I found the bed swarming with mites – creatures much too small to be lice, so minuscule that one could see them only because they were moving. I looked at my naked body; they were swarming on it, too. Then another movement caught my eye: truly this room was an insect game-park. Down the wall from the wooden ceiling scores of red-brown bedbugs, the size and shape of a little fingernail, had been marching – until the light went on. Bedbugs are allergic to light and now they were in disarray, scuttling to and fro instead of proceeding in an orderly fashion to their destination. Experienced travellers maintain that bedbugs and fleas cannot coexist; this fallacy I am now in a position to disprove. Having rid myself of the mites (that took time) I slept in the bath with the light on. Only the mosquitoes followed me.

In Jinja the source of the Nile must be saluted and I had booked into that insect game-park for two nights. However, my Nile pilgrimage was delayed by numerous lengthy social encounters beginning with an eager-looking young man, met in the bank, who said he had seen me arriving the previous evening. His office-boy job in a sugar factory bored him so please could he interview me? He wanted to become a journalist and if he could write something really exciting about a brave old European mama cycling alone through Africa maybe that would be the turning-point in his life. Few of us can resist the possibility, however remote, of being the turning-point in someone else’s life. We therefore settled down in a corner of the bank where my answers to his questions were carefully inscribed on the back of several Foreign Exchange Permit forms provided by a genial bank clerk. The young man’s questions were excellent; many professional journalists could learn from him. But his grammar was so original that I doubt if I served my turning-point function.

After that I sought a second breakfast; at dawn the hotel menu had been restricted to weak tea and a flaccid left-over chapatti. Not far from the bank a clean and pleasant little café provided a three-egg omelette, fresh bread, strong coffee and good company.

James, the café owner, was a tall, blacker-than-usual young man with a pot belly. His year-old daughter roved the floor as we talked and his beautiful wife, expecting her second at any moment, was carrying beer crates from a truck parked outside.

A retired teacher asked my occupation, then frowned. Travel writers ignorant of local languages, he opined politely but firmly, often give misleading impressions. ‘Only about 20 per cent of Ugandans can hold a conversation in English. And no African can express African thoughts and feelings in any European language – not even people as fluent as I am. That’s one reason why so many donors go astray, wasting billions of dollars – or turning our politicians into billionaires. Most expats plan on a false basis.’

James was standing by the door, watching his wife woman-handling another load of crates. He turned and beckoned me to join him. ‘Look!’ he said, pointing across the street. ‘See those people? They’re waiting for the AIDS clinic to open. Go and talk to them, they’ll give you something real to write about. Even if you can’t talk to them, you can understand their problem – OK?’

I shook my head. ‘Not OK! I’m not a journalist looking for a story, I’d prefer not to intrude.’

Impatiently the teacher said, ‘So you’ll only write about “the Pearl of Africa”? A pretty picture for your readers? But isn’t it dishonest to censor out AIDS? It’ll spoil the pretty picture, but it’s affecting most Ugandans, directly or indirectly.’

A young man who had been listening, saying nothing, now laughed derisively. ‘She’s afraid she’ll get infected if she goes near those people – she only wants to know about funny native customs.’ He looked at me angrily and added, ‘In the past four months, three of my friends have died.’

‘She’s not afraid,’ said the teacher sharply. ‘She’s an educated woman. Or if she is afraid it’s of seeing suffering, not of the virus.’

Thus challenged, I crossed the street as the clinic door opened. A queue of forty or so – three-quarters of them men – edged into a large room with three small rooms opening off it. No notice was taken of my arrival; evidently Jinja had had its fill of ‘interested’ foreigners. The staff – a young male doctor and two older nurses – all wore starched white coats. One small room was for testing; another for giving the news of test results; the third for dispensing to those with full-blown AIDS whatever alleviating medicines were available.

Eventually Dr Mulumba acknowledged my presence. ‘You represent which organisation?’

I explained myself rather incoherently, wishing I were anywhere else.

The doctor smiled. ‘Just relax and talk to people, if they want to talk. Say what you feel. Then they can say what they feel. It’s good for them to talk to outsiders. Don’t be frightened if some get very angry – with themselves or their families or partners or you as a European. After we close I want to talk to you myself, about Irish bishops.’

I can think of more relaxing situations. True, many were eager to communicate with a mzungu, sometimes more by looks than words. And it was easy enough to cope with the anger, the men’s blaming of women, even the occasional outbursts of semi-hysteria. But the quiet bewildered despair was devastating, as was the terrified tension among many queuing for the test, who noted that only two came out of the ‘results’ room looking relieved. Others, however, confidently claimed to be ‘clean’; the test was a mere formality to reassure a parent or partner. More and more arrived. One young man told me, ‘At first people were too ashamed to come here. Now in the cities everyone knows someone … It’s got like malaria, not a disgrace.’

Afterwards the doctor and I sat drinking tea out of a mega-thermos; the nurses had hurried away to prepare their husbands’ lunches. One commented, ‘We’d like to talk to you, too. But African women can never sit around!’

Dr Mulumba was understandably baffled by the Irish approach to AIDS. ‘In Time I read about Irish bishops not letting the government give people condoms – they’d prefer people to give each other AIDS! Is this true?’

At the end of my long dissection of that lamentable controversy Dr Mulumba observed, ‘So you are a Protestant, not a Catholic.’ Like most Africans with whom this subject came up, he refused to believe that I have no religion. Refilling our cups he said reflectively, ‘AIDS is unlike all other diseases. When healthy people hear they’re positive they don’t react like sick people told they’re dying. It’s like being sentenced to death for a crime you didn’t commit. That’s why some men – and women – say “I’m not going alone!” and deliberately infect others.’

I stared at him, too appalled to comment. He seemed to find my reaction surprising. ‘Isn’t it the same in the West?’

‘Maybe it is – I don’t know, I’ve never heard of this before. To me it’s very shocking, unless the person was already mentally ill.’

‘I can understand it,’ the doctor said calmly. ‘They feel an injustice and having revenge makes life seem more balanced. What shocks me is some men now going for school girls only – men never tested. They’re so afraid of infection they look for virgins. In this clinic we’ve three girls, aged 12 to 13, infected by their teacher. He threatened to throw them out of school if they didn’t. And virgins always get infected because of the bleeding. Now that man’s dying and nobody’s sorry. Of course his wife’s positive too. She’s gone back to her family in Masaka with the four children.’

I looked at my watch and invented an appointment. Dr Mulumba may have had lots more to say but I didn’t want to hear it.

The noon heat deflected me from the source of the Nile to a source of beer. In a small Western-style bar genuine-looking bottles of whisky, gin, vodka and brandy lined the shelves but were so expensive that only tourists (of whom there are few in Jinja) could afford them. In a rear room a clergyman was giving scripture lessons to a dozen little girls. At the bar counter larger girls were working on three young Asian businessmen from Leicester. These, I soon discovered, hoped to retrieve family properties in Busoga, their parents having been expelled in 1972. The Museveni regime, they said, was encouraging Asians to return and help put Uganda’s economy together again, an irony they savoured. For generations Asians have been arousing jealous resentment throughout East Africa; only when a country finds itself bereft of their entrepreneurial energy are they appreciated. However, many confiscated properties were used to buy support for Uganda’s military tyrants and their recovery, after twenty years of anarchy, is beset by every sort of difficulty: administrative and moral, economic and social, political and philosophical. Those three young men were pessimistic. They foretold that the Asians who answered Museveni’s call would belong not to the rich exiled families but to the poorer segments of the Asian communities in Kenya and Tanzania, people hoping it would be easier to succeed in the new Uganda, free of competition.

This up-market bar cared for its image; an old crippled beggar who sidled in, his bloodshot eyes fixed pleadingly on the mzungu, was promptly ejected. The sleek bureaucrat sitting beside me, studying a thick FAO ‘Comprehensive Plan’, looked approving and remarked, ‘We’ve no social security here, as in your countries.’ He leaned towards me then and murmured, ‘For one pound sterling 3,000 shillings? Tomorrow I’m colgating to Kisumu.’ (In Uganda ‘to colgate’ means to cross the border, either licitly or illicitly, to buy coveted items of Western origin now manufactured in Kenya.) When I shook my head he looked resigned and asked, ‘Where in Uganda are you visiting?’ On my mentioning Karamoja his reaction was so extreme that everyone else in the bar turned to stare at us.

‘No, no! A permit is impossible, the people are naked murdering savages! Men and boys all have two or three of the latest weapons – from Zaire, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia – so many that for three US dollars they can buy the best! Then they shoot everything that moves, the aid agencies have ordered armour-plated vehicles for driving through on humanitarian missions! Also they are pagans and sometimes need bits of outsiders. Lately a young Baganda priest was taken off his motor-bike into the bush and beheaded. I can’t tell a lady what else they did. They’re not thieves, they left his bike on the road, taking his head and other bits for their dirty religious ceremonies. No, no! Karamoja is not for tourists!’

All this sounded like the wildest exaggeration but was confirmed (and expanded upon) in Kampala, not by twitchy urban bureaucrats but by tough unfussy Irish nuns who had lived in the region for thirty years and spoke the language. One day (and it had better be soon) some authority will have to halt the flow of post-Cold War weaponry to every remote corner of the globe.

Sauntering back to the hotel, along wide arcaded streets, I paused by a pharmacy window to read a large, closely printed English-language poster. It explained every form of contraceptive, clearly stating all the pros and cons. Then the pharmacist came to the door – a tall, slim, elderly man – and said gloomily, ‘Only foreigners stop to look at that.’ He invited me in for a cup of tea and I asked if Uganda’s pro-condom campaign was having an effect. To which he replied, ‘In Africa the cultural barrier to condom use will almost certainly prove permanently insuperable.’

Squinting sideways, I could see the title of the book he was reading: Adam Bede. I was about to question him on Africa’s cultural barrier, as distinct from the universal barrier of male selfishness, when we were joined by Dr Kivu, an old friend of his whose grandfather and father had also been doctors in Jinja’ – But my grandfather was a medicine man, you’d say a witch-doctor!’

Dr Kivu had a message for the mzungu. ‘In this one district, between 1900 and 1905, more than a quarter of a million died of sleeping-sickness. Africa has these plagues, they come and go. But now AIDS is fashionable in the West, so you people make it into a big drama. For us it’s just one more calamity – we have them all the time. Wars, droughts, famines, locusts, human and cattle epidemics, crop disease … We must always be fatalistic, playing it cool as you’d say. But the West tries to make us panic about AIDS. You send teams of every sort of specialist, set up schemes for ‘AIDS orphans’, make TV films, write books and reports and theses, organise academic conferences and seminars and workshops, interview people on their death-beds, photo relatives looking at wasting bodies, conduct surveys, establish research institutes … Is this really helping us? Or is it another gravy-train for Westerners? Think about that!’ The doctor put down his tea-cup, shook hands and departed.

I looked at the pharmacist. ‘Do you agree with your friend?’ He was so long silent that I expected an evasive reply. Then he said, ‘I agree about the West behaving parasitically. But I do not agree that this epidemic can be equated with previous plagues. That notion is scientifically unsound. Nevertheless, it may be that without a cure being discovered, or any effective mass-immunisation, Africans will develop a natural immunity. It is too soon to make definite statements or predictions, as yet we know little about this virus. Possibly a percentage of HIV + will enjoy a normal life-span, while remaining a hazard to others. Decades must pass before that can be established.’

By now my main interest was focused on the pharmacist’s use of English. He smiled when I asked where he had studied the language. ‘I didn’t study it, I was born in Cambridge.’ Hopefully I waited for an explanation of this unusual event – unusual given his age and present occupation. But no further information was vouchsafed, as he himself might have put it.

My mid-afternoon walk to the Nile took me through the run-down city centre to a suburban area of once-handsome colonial and ex-Asian bungalows in spacious gardens shaded by blossoming trees; now very extended families have taken these over, with predictable results. In a more salubrious quarter, similar dwellings, well-maintained, overlook a golf course and sports ground. Then suddenly the scene before me was recognisable, though 130 years had passed since John Hanning Speke described it, on becoming the first European to see the White Nile at its source.

Most beautiful was the scene, nothing could surpass it! It was the very perfection of the kind of effect aimed at in a highly-kept park; with a magnificent stream from 600 to 700 yards wide, dotted with islets and rocks, the former occupied by fishermen’s huts, the latter by terns and crocodiles basking in the sun, flowing between fine high grassy banks, with rich trees and plantains in the background … Though beautiful, the scene was not exactly what I expected, for the broad surface of the lake was shut out from view by a spur of hill … The expedition had now performed its functions, old Father Nile without any doubt rises in the Victoria Nyanza.

The source of the Nile has been only slightly developed as a tourist attraction; for most of the past thirty years Uganda was in no position to attract tourists. From the level crest of a high ridge a carefully tended public park marks the spot. Acres of mown grass – in March a thirsty brown – slope steeply down to the swift clear river. There are neat cacti hedges and weedless flowerbeds making ponds of deep pink or blue or scarlet under a wealth of shapely trees. Halfway down I paused to read the inscription on an uninspired, rather functional stone monument, four feet high:

THIS SPOT

MARKS THE PLACE FROM WHERE

THE NILE STARTS ITS LONG JOURNEY

TO THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA THROUGH

CENTRAL AND NORTHERN UGANDA

SUDAN AND EGYPT

For a moment I reacted Eurocentrically, feeling sad that poor Speke wasn’t mentioned. But of course old Father Nile didn’t begin his long journey only when a mzungu ‘discovered’ him doing so. And yet no African knew, in 1862, that here was the source of the White Nile. Indeed, none of the lakeside tribes met by Speke on his way north even knew the extent of Victoria Nyanza. So perhaps, after all he had suffered physically to reach this spot – and was yet to suffer emotionally, because of the controversy with Burton – he does deserve a mention on that monument.

There was no one in sight, a most unusual circumstance near any African town. Relishing this solitude I descended to river level and found a safe swimming spot – the water deep enough to slow the current. (Hereabouts crocodiles are now scarce; and this wasn’t the sort of environment that much appeals to the bilharzia snail.) Black and white kingfishers dived repeatedly as I swam, herons waded nearby and overhead a fish eagle hovered, high up. The sky had half clouded over and when I emerged a strong east wind soon dried me. I sat opposite a rocky islet, some thirty yards offshore, which supported an ancient tree, its roots coiling like serpents among black boulders, its cascading outer branches almost touching the waters, its dense foliage home to a colony of large, raucous ungainly birds.

On the far side rose that high jungly ridge where Speke stood when first he saw the river and had his long-held hunch confirmed. Patches of matoke grew where the gradient allowed and at intervals slender fingers of rock stretched into the water, forming miniature bays in which a few fishermen were now visible, mending their nets or counting the day’s catch. Exactly a quarter of a century earlier, on 20 February 1967, I had gazed at the source of the Blue Nile, where it flows out of Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands. Then Ethiopia was still an empire, Uganda’s long agony had just begun and I remember wondering, that day, if I would ever see the source of the other Nile.

Introspection set in and I was comparing my 35-year-old self with my 60-year-old self when Peter arrived, in open pursuit of the mzungu. ‘From my home near the golf course I saw you passing and thought maybe you could help me. You met my friend in the bank this morning, he said you are a writer.’ Peter had just finished a novel, ‘an important story which will interest people in the UK’.

As it is the duty of old writers to be attentive to young writers I made an encouraging noise. ‘Why is it important?’

Peter beamed and sat beside me. ‘It is about AIDS. That makes it important. The whole world likes to read about AIDS in Uganda – OK?’ He looked at me hopefully. ‘You are interested? You can help?’

‘I’m interested, yes, but it’s not easy to help. Tell me more.’

The novel was autobiographical. Peter’s elder brother had died of AIDS. His 19-year-old sister was dying of AIDS. Two of his cousins were HIV +. He had been tested twice and was ‘clean’. In September he planned to marry and had told his friends of his resolve to remain celibate until then, his fiancee being strictly controlled by her parents. ‘But no one will believe me! My friends laugh at me! They tell me it is impossible not to have sex for six months and if I did I couldn’t have good sex with my wife because I’d be damaged. You understand now why my novel is important? It explains why we have this terrible killer disease. And it is true and real, not from my imagination but from my experience. So how will you help me?’

It seemed a long shot, but I gave Peter my publisher’s address and a scribbled note to enclose with the typescript.

‘Typescript?’ he repeated. ‘My book must be typed?’

‘I’m afraid so, nowadays. Otherwise it won’t be read.’

‘But that is too much money! Where can I get so much?’

We calculated; it wasn’t very much in sterling. Peter however refused to be subsidised. ‘No, no! I beg only for advice, never for money. I will work more to earn those shillings. My job is in a lawyer’s office so I can work overtime. Too many Africans beg from the West. It’s better to be independent.’

Just after sunset came a wondrous moment when the Nile shimmered a clear translucent blue and tall palms stood black against a silver-blue sky, their drooping fronds restless in the wind. Then the water changed to a sombre metallic grey-blue – and Peter insisted on escorting me back to my hotel. ‘It is too dangerous in our towns after dark, we have too many very poor, very young soldiers with guns.’

Ravening clouds of minute lake-flies tormented me on the road out of Jinja. I had to keep my eyes three-quarters closed, which was no bad thing as I crossed the Nile by a hideous hydro-electric dam that has obliterated the Owen Falls and supplies most of Uganda with electricity. (‘But this is better’, I reminded myself, ‘than a nuclear power station on the lake shore.’) The Owen Falls dam was completed in 1954; it took six years to build and cost £22,000,000. Industry developed in Jinja post-dam and, as many Ugandans are quick to point out, the wealthy classes benefited most; few others can afford electricity. Now this dam to a certain extent controls the Nile’s flow, as does the Aswan dam. In the late nineteenth century control of the Nile was a major political issue and fear of some foreign nation seizing the source caused Lord Salisbury to change his mind about the desirability of Britain ‘protecting’ Uganda. This shows a certain vagueness about geography and engineering on the part of the noble lord; at that date the notion of the Nile’s source being controlled to dominate the passage to India was absurd. Yet the geopolitics of the era were so eccentric (or do I mean neurotic?) that Uganda’s strategic importance was imagined to be immense. In theory, whoever ruled Uganda controlled the Nile flow, and therefore dominated Egypt also – and whoever dominated Egypt controlled the Suez Canal, the passage to India. When the Kaiser sought British support against France and Russia in 1889, Lord Salisbury demanded that Germany first renounce all claims to Uganda. A deal was done in 1890, when Britain swapped Heligoland (three square miles of Europe) in exchange for Germany’s not disputing British expansion into Zanzibar, Equatoria and Uganda (100,000 square miles of Africa). Given the fate of Tanzania, during its brief period under German rule, it has to be said that Uganda was lucky in 1890.

Beyond the dam stretched a magnificent Forest Reserve, green, shady and cool, the towering trees teeming with noisy multicoloured birds and four species of gambolling monkeys. Then came open, symmetrically hilly country, a pleasant enough though too predictable landscape. Slopes clothed in sugar-cane and matoke have their limitations, aesthetically. Thus far, the ‘Pearl of Africa’ was proving a trifle disappointing; modern Uganda’s most ‘developed’ region belies the early travellers’ descriptions. Remarkably, the seventy miles to Entebbe were without one level stretch and the heavy traffic, as homicidal as Kenya’s, prevented my enjoying the steep downhills.

Until recently, much-feared military road-blocks were common on all Uganda’s main routes. By 1992 these had become mere token reminders that the country was still ruled by its army, in so far as President Museveni depended on military support. Every twenty miles or so I passed three or four unarmed adolescent soldiers, wearing shabby uncoordinated uniforms and lounging under trees dallying with local lassies. Sometimes a small sign stood in the middle of the road saying: ROAD BLOCK or STOP! These simply added one more hazard to Ugandan motoring as drivers swerved sickeningly to avoid them. I, however, always stopped, hoping to get into conversation with the soldiers. Unfortunately none spoke English but they greeted me with friendly grins and waves, a few even exerting themselves to come forward and shake hands and gaze enviously at Lear. They were of an age to belong to what is facetiously known as ‘Museveni’s kindergarten’; countless ‘Terror orphans’ were adopted by the National Resistance Army and came to revere Museveni as ‘Father’. They soon learned how to fire guns bigger than themselves and now some Ugandans worry about their being brutalised by exposure to the fighting in Karamoja – if not already brutalised by witnessing the atrocities of the ‘lumpen militariat’ (Ali Mazrui’s phrase).

Kampala is conspicuous from afar, its several flat-topped hills cluttered with old ramshackle commercial buildings, new high-rise status symbols, the mosques of various sects and a Hindu temple. But for the moment I was bypassing Kampala; at Entebbe good friends awaited me – the Parkinsons, first met in Cameroon and now stationed in Uganda.

Even around its capital cities Africa is curiously allergic to signposts and by the time I had found my way through the industrialised suburbs and shantytowns it was 5.20. When I stopped for a quick Coca-Cola two elderly men worried about my safety; it is dangerous, they warned, to travel after dark. ‘That is a very fine bicycle, you will certainly be robbed and maybe killed!’ Beside me on the counter lay a new pro-condoms poster, just delivered by a health-worker. The duka-owner was scornful. ‘I won’t put it up, we get condoms not good enough for Western countries, dumped by Americans and Germans.’

Lear moved slowly over the last twenty hilly miles, through a perilous torrent of rush-hour traffic. Again the heat had taken its toll; clearly I was a write-off as a cyclist until the cooling rains came and it would make sense to remain with the Parkinsons while awaiting that relief. When darkness fell I donned my luminous vest though the traffic had almost ceased. On Entebbe’s maze of unlit streets there was nobody around of whom to ask directions; during the Terror Ugandans developed the habit of retreating indoors at dusk. Then at last I was rescued by a kind askari who deserted his post outside the posh Victoria Hotel and leaped on his bicycle to lead me through impenetrable blackness to the secluded EC compound – so secluded that without guidance I might not have found it before dawn.