5

Other Kingdoms

Kampala to Fort Portal

As I left Kampala private enterprise was on the move. The traffic (all two-wheeled) flowed against me: hundreds of cyclists bearing bundles of sugar-cane, sacks of charcoal and maize, stalks of matoke, gleaming churns of milk, jerry-cans of village beer corked with cane, wooden planks wavering perilously on either side of carriers. Along the red earth verges streamed laden women wearing long full gowns that seemed to reflect the transient glory of sunrise – indigo, coral pink, violet, dove grey, saffron. Tall plantains crowded the wayside shambas, their dark green fronds drooping raggedly against the pale blue sky. Then the market-goers dwindled as the tarred road climbed gradually into the mountains of Mubende district.

Beyond the market-centre of Busanju, thirty miles from Kampala, a tolerable dirt track undulated for forty-five miles along one side of a narrow, grassy valley. The high, steep, partially wooded hills were strewn with vast rounded boulders and on my left, in a deep cultivated ravine, a river raced noisily amidst dense trees and crimson-blossomed shrubs. High on the slopes numerous small shambas surrounded thatched huts but there were no market-centres. This was an enchanting region, cooled by a steady breeze, traffic-free and tranquil, its war-scars healed. The day’s meagre rain-ration, a brief mid-afternoon downpour, served to lay the dust but can’t have done much for growth. Two passing locals were hugely amused to see Lear and me huddled by the wayside under Joy’s sky-blue shower-curtain: yet another example of mzungu eccentricity.

Apart from an imposing new hospital, the long, one-storeyed town of Kiboga is shabby and lethargic – an extremely unlikely setting for a meeting with Sarah and James. I arrived at sunset and the dark guest-house bar seemed empty until James stood up behind the counter; he had been lighting a lamp. Like Albert in Sotik, he might have strayed from some university campus. Why was he running a mud-brick doss-house in the back of beyond? I didn’t ask. Many Ugandan lives have been painfully deformed by outside events.

Sarah arrived then from Kampala; I had passed her bus when it was receiving first-aid.

‘We saw you pedalling!’ she exclaimed. ‘Everyone else thought you must be a man but I said no, that’s a liberated European woman!’ Sarah did work on a university campus, lecturing thrice a week in Kampala where the middle three of seven children were at school. The first-born, a daughter, was on a teacher-training course in London. ‘She’s a clever girl, ‘said Sarah, ‘and a good girl. She’s coming back to work in the bush. She’s not getting a London training to become rich.’

While I devoured matoke and beef stew the juniors – two sons – crept in to sit by their elderly father, looking from me to Lear with bewildered fascination. ‘You eat nicely with your fingers,’ complimented James. My not expecting cutlery always pleased people. Speke presented King Mutesa of Buganda with (among other things) ‘one set of table knives, spoons and forks’ but most Africans still disdain implements. Several told me, ‘I don’t feel I’ve eaten if I haven’t handled the food.’ And one man remarked, ‘Spoons and forks for me are like condoms – I feel I’ve been cheated!’

Sarah described herself as ‘a feminist sociologist’ and was dedicated to raising her female neighbours’ self-esteem. ‘This is slow, hard work and you have to be stubborn not to give up when you seem to be getting nowhere. You have to remind yourself that some of their grandmothers can remember tribal raiding when the prizes were cattle, women and grain, in that order. It will take time to make them value their daughters as much as their sons, to make them see it’s their right to have a fifty-fifty say in family decisions. Most important is to encourage literacy, among the younger women. With access to information they can make up their own minds and have more confidence to argue with their husbands – not passively accepting that what the man says is true.’

James agreed. ‘When only men can read, this gives them too much extra power. Almost magic power, the way women see it. Here in the bush reading and writing is still White man’s magic.’

To be with a couple who were so clearly intellectual companions was a rare enough experience in Africa and we talked until midnight. Sarah had specialized in ‘traditional education’ and volunteered so much information that I broke a rule and took notes as we talked. In rural communities, she explained, children see little of their parents while growing up. Having been abruptly weaned (often traumatically abruptly, by our standards) at the age of about 2, their time is spent among their own age-group, supervised by that directly above. They may move to live for a few years with grandparents or an uncle; sometimes, at the age of 7 or 8, boys build their own mini-huts in a compound and live independently, fetching their own firewood, finding and cooking their own food. Girls of course must always remain under the watchful eyes of female relatives, learning by observation and imitation how to be good wives and being given a share of the daily chores. Commonly a 5-year-old is left in charge of a 2-year-old all day, taking full responsibility for its safety and appreciating the trust. Sarah chuckled and added, ‘Western mothers who did that would have their children put into care!’

In communities uninfluenced by the West, an African child’s development is dominated by his or her age-group. Education means conditioning the young to behave in ways conducive to the well-being of their group. Signs of burgeoning individuality are promptly dealt with as a serious flaw; strong one-to-one emotional ties with contemporaries (apart from siblings) are rare; the group is the focus of affection and loyalty. Close ties may unite some grandparents and grandchildren, mothers and adolescent daughters, uncles and adolescent nephews; but there is no concentrated emotional dependence on parents. Within an extended family, children have many more important adults in their lives than the average Western child and from an early age the obligation to provide mutual help of every sort is understood to be paramount.

Reading press-cuttings sent from London, Sarah and James had noticed much journalistic puzzlement about the Ugandans’ stoical reactions to bereavement. James said, ‘Some think we’re very brave, some think we’re unnaturally fatalistic, others think we’re callous – and hint maybe that’s to do with being “primitive”! Which is correct, if you like to call our traditional society more primitive than yours. The various tribal initiation ceremonies were partly endurance tests and very severe. From earliest childhood everyone was trained in all forms of self-control, not just to do with physical courage. Even now good manners mean not showing emotion, whatever stress you’re under.’

I admitted then that I, too, had been puzzled on a few occasions, especially when accompanying Geraldine on her midday ward-round in the paediatric unit of a Kampala hospital. In those wards a mother – sometimes both parents – stood beside most cots: statuesque, expressionless, not urgently seeking information from the doctor about their offspring’s condition or prognosis. For me that two-hour ordeal was gruelling and confusing, as I transferred to the mothers what my own feelings would have been – while simultaneously their lack of communication with dreadfully suffering children baffled me. Even when one little boy was being given a massive injection, and became hysterical with terror as the needle approached, his mother didn’t react – just stood aside and watched, impassively, her eyes glazed, instead of holding him in her arms. Presumably a parental presence, however unresponsive, was reassuring for all these patients. But why (I had wondered, peering across this culture chasm), why were there no caresses and murmured endearments, none of the outward signs of loving sympathy that we would lavish on a sick child? These parents were of course going through hell, but by a route I didn’t recognise.

‘There’s no mystery,’ smiled Sarah. ‘It’s as James said, you were seeing our sort of self-control working. Traditionally, even when giving birth, a woman was encouraged to pretend she felt nothing. That was supposed to toughen her child, make it brave – extra-important if it turned out to be a son. It’s not polite to show affection or distress – except when someone dies. Then women must go through a sort of ritual mourning collapse, screaming and wailing and rolling on the ground – even if they’re not really distressed but delighted to be rid of some horrible husband!’

Reflectively James said, ‘I believe there couldn’t have been an AIDS epidemic in times past. People weren’t repressed, in the puritanical European way, but such emphasis on self-control kept the brakes on promiscuity. The missionaries had no idea what damage they were doing when they demolished traditional education.’

‘But they meant well,’ Sarah added hastily, perhaps imagining me to be a Christian. ‘They hated the “obscene heathen rites” of initiation ceremonies. They didn’t think that was any way to prepare young people for adult life, they sincerely believed they could do it better – otherwise they wouldn’t have been here! If anyone told them initiations were religious experiences, needed to make young men stable members of their community, they didn’t listen – that seemed like blasphemy. Yet it was true. And they haven’t been able to replace what they destroyed. Now most Black Africans grow up without either a traditional education – only shreds survive – or a worthwhile Western education.’

James opened my nightcap beer and said, ‘In a way all Africans have been messed up. I’m the third well-educated, Westernised generation and no one ever tried to squash my individuality but I still have a foot in both camps. I could be scared by things that would make you laugh if I confessed … Any African who tells you he has both feet in the Western camp is lying.’

Not far beyond Kiboga came a long descent into the old kingdom of Bunyoro which resisted the European take-over, as Buganda did not, and was penalised for its unwelcoming attitude by Britain’s annexing this area at the turn of the century. Ahead of me, as I jolted down a deteriorating track, stretched an immense, grey-brown, almost waterless expanse; from the unpeopled bush rose solitary, bare, conical hills long since deforested. Bunyoro was the scene of much fighting throughout the nineteenth century, before ever the Whites arrived. When Hoima was King Kabarega’s capital this arch-enemy of King Mutesa gained a reputation as one of the most brilliant guerrilla fighters of his day, on any continent.

For two hours Hoima is visible across this plain, sprawling high on its hills; the Bunyoro capital looks at its best from a distance – glints of tin between mighty blue gums, their girths oak-like. By mid-afternoon I was very slowly pushing Lear up a steep incline under low dark clouds. From the oppressive stillness everyone gloomily deduced ‘No rain!’ Present-day Hoima is a European creation, scattered over two shapely mountains; when well-maintained it must have been attractive. Terror-time military traffic ravaged the colonial tarmac and the pot-holes between the remaining fragments are so numerous, wide and deep that I continued to wheel Lear across a level ridge-top through the old cantonment area. Here, amidst grassy spaciousness, government offices and a scattering of bwanas’ bungalows are decaying quietly in colourful, goatful gardens. Downhill, the unlovely commercial centre occupies a broad ledge overlooking a dramatic ravine. Halfway up the opposite mountain substantial buildings, including a handsome church, peep through tall protecting trees. That looked like the best bit of Hoima but by then the heat had atrophied my exploratory instinct.

I booked into the first available guest-house, enormous and ugly, its two long rows of high-ceilinged rooms haunted, after sunset, by a forlorn little group of sex-workers. My room was much bigger than usual with two beds and a table and chair. Most of the register’s entries were in the same hand. ‘Our truck-drivers are not educated, I must write for them,’ explained Frank, the owner. Sitting in the huge foyer, open on two sides to the breeze (had there been any), I begged Frank to find me a beer. It came, warm and flat, ten minutes later. ‘We have no refrigerators,’ said Frank. ‘We are not an important town.’ The foyer had unpainted concrete walls and a dozen uncushioned easy chairs – peculiarly uncomfortable, the rough-hewn wooden bars biting into one’s buttocks.

Frank was a melancholy character, thrice married but childless. ‘It’s God’s decision, the good Lord made all my wives barren. I am keeping the last one, I can’t afford any more. The others I sent back to their villages.’

It seemed unlikely that Frank had married three barren women; but in Africa it’s always the wife’s fault. Although childlessness is not thought of as an African problem, the proportion of childless couples, made infertile by sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), is far higher than in the West. New strains of bacteria occur regularly and are resistant to all but the latest and most expensive antibiotics: the sort that never get to the Third World. Some doctors see the indiscriminate use of self-prescribed standard antibiotics – on sale in the remotest bush, having been stolen from hospitals or clinics – as one reason for Africa’s out-of-control STDs. Another reason is the lack of any treatment for the poorest – all of which helps to explain the rapid spread of AIDS, STDs having left so many extra-vulnerable to the virus.

My food quest took me through four long, straight, wide streets lined with newish one-or two-storeyed shops, some abandoned when half-built, the rest closed becuase it was Sunday. The detritus of construction work, sporting a stubble of drought-resistant weeds, lay piled between riven pavements and shop entrances. The electricity poles seemed to be lurching home from a drunken orgy; their tangled wires drooped low; no one could remember when electricity had last been available. By then the clouds had settled, immobile, above Hoima, forming a dark lid beneath which the heat felt like a sticky substance, impeding progress. The few visible locals were mostly young, male, not entirely sober and potentially hostile. But it is unfair to judge a town by its Sabbath persona; Hoima may be much more agreeable on weekdays. I didn’t, however, feel any irresistible urge to test that hypothesis.

In a small airless restaurant, smelling of singed feathers and stale urine, I was the only customer. My mountain of matoke was enlivened by the leg of a geriatric hen who had died of malnutrition. Matoke looks and feels rather like mashed parsnip but is less strongly flavoured: the critical say flavourless. For the mzungu it is suitable only as an evening meal; it immobilises one, physically and mentally, for the several hours it takes to digest. According to some historians the Baganda, though powerful, rich and well-organised, failed to realise their pre-colonial expansionist ambitions because they couldn’t function beyond matoke-growing regions. I know not how nutritionists rate this food, but most of the people whose staple diet it is have fine physiques.

Opposite me sat the restaurant owner, talking animatedly. A handsome and pleasingly assertive woman (it always pleases when African women assert themselves), she urged me to take 10-year-old Luke, her first-born, to Ireland and there educate him. She spoke in earnest; mzungus are scarce in Hoima and she meant to make the most of her opportunity. In times past missionaries sometimes sponsored promising students and I was the next best thing. She had seen to it that Luke spoke adequate English. ‘My family all had good mission educations so we know English is important. Now the missions can’t give good educations, they use African teachers, I think because young people in the West have lost religion. In Ireland my son would be a good student, clever and obedient.’

These constant demands on the mzungu become wearing, even irritating, at the end of a long hot day. They betray both a worrying dependency on the revered yet resented West and a total incomprehension of Western realities. (Our incomprehension of African realities is no less extreme but doesn’t matter – to us.) Unawareness of how the White half lives is illustrated daily by the letter-writing obsession: ‘Give me your address, here is my address, we will write letters when you go home.’ That seems to be a pathetically important fantasy and feebly one goes along with it instead of saying, ‘I write books, I don’t have time to write to my closest friends never mind to acquaintances all over the world.’ Demands for sponsorship (on behalf of sons or brothers, never daughters or sisters) are easier to deal with bluntly: ‘I’m an ordinary citizen, not rich, not representing an organisation, not able to sponsor anyone.’ Such bluntness can draw reproving stares or sullen mutterings – because of course I’m rich, otherwise I couldn’t be travelling through Africa, even by bicycle. And see how different and expensive-looking that bicycle is! An African touring Europe for months would have to be either personally rich or sufficiently well-connected to help others if he or she wished to help …

As compensation for not educating Luke, who longed to see a mountain-bike, I invited him to my room and we were accompanied by an assortment of his siblings. Then I spent an hour in the foyer with the unemployed sex-workers. The only English-speaker was proud to interpret; her father, killed during the Terror, had been a local doctor. All five girls assured me they had been driven to prostitution by sheer poverty and I believed them. None saw AIDS as a problem; it was just another disease. They wouldn’t even consider asking men to use condoms; there was too much competition in Hoima, you couldn’t afford to deter clients. I dutifully ‘gave information’ and preached the condom gospel. An hour was enough. Lying dripping on my bed in an oven-hot room I was glad to escape into The State and Agriculture in Africa where I learned that in Tanzania:

In an attempt to eliminate the middleman so that farmers can realise more from their farm produce, the government in 1962 established the National Agricultural Products Board (NAPB). The Board was given the responsibility of controlling and regulating the price of maize and later maize flour, paddy and rice. In 1973 the activities of the NAPB were taken over by the National Milling Corporation (NMC). As from July 1984, NMC has been buyer of last resort and deals more with the enlargement of the Strategic Grain Reserve (SGR).

As escapist literature, this fell far short of my Nancy Mitford Omnibus.

Soon a gale sprang up and the tin roof quivered and rattled; but still it didn’t rain. The noise was remarkable; I expected a section of the ceiling to sail away at any moment. Happily The State and Agriculture in Africa acted like double dose of sleeping pills.

The track from Hoima to Kyenjojo (only theoretically a road) crosses a magnificent remoteness of high jungly mountains overlooking a smooth carpet of forest, far below, reaching greenly to the western horizon. This was Uganda as I had imagined it: a hidden Paradise of luxuriant unfamiliar vegetation exhaling tropical fragrances – pungent, or acrid, or delicate – the silence broken only by bird-calls, or the whisper of little streams in damp shadowy valleys, or the swishing of foliage as monkeys (including many colobus) fled into their own impenetrable world. Flat summits allowed views over vast spaces, the low distant hills a subdued yet glowing blue, the nearer slopes occasionally mottled with patches of cultivation beside grey huts set in circles of bare red earth. But this region is sparsely populated, because of the Terror as well as the terrain. Its hamlets still bore the marks of arson and shelling and several isolated shambas had been abandoned, the dwellings burned, the rich soil lying fallow.

Those ninety miles took two days; on Day One I had to walk twenty miles, on Day Two twenty-five. The manufacturers of mountain-bikes would have us believe that these can be pedalled across any sort of surface. Not so. Even an aristocratic Dawes Ascent is quite often defeated by African roads. Normally I enjoy walking as much as cycling but ‘walking’ hardly describes the pushing of a laden Lear up near-vertical hills through slithery mud or skiddy deep gravel, or dragging him over rocky outcrops and four-foot-deep erosion channels. (Luckily the local mud was not adhesive, as in Kenya.) These gradients were incomparable; on mountains that in more effete countries would be furnished with several hairpin bends the track went straight up and down. Freewheeling on such slopes and surfaces was impossible and on arrival in Kyenjojo the brake-muscles in my thighs were throbbing. Traffic, however, was not a problem. On Day One I met two vehicles, on Day Two three. All were overladen truck-buses travelling at about twelve miles an hour. Astonished excitement caused the passengers around the edges almost to fall off when they saw me.

At noon on Day One I stopped for a Pepsi where three kennel-size dukas occupied a ledge above the track. On a bench outside sat three plump teenage girls attending to each other’s coiffeurs – nitpicking, that is. Understandably the Pepsi cost 450 shillings instead of 300 shillings as in Kampala. Six men came running from their compounds to meet the mzungu – and, if possible, batten off her. Did my government pay for my journey? No? A pity! If it did I could afford to buy Pepsis all round. The aid-workers who passed now and then always bought Pepsis for everyone and gave money, and sweets from Europe, to the children. Did I have any sweets from Europe in my luggage? No? A pity!

The most fluent English-speaker asked my religion, then was puzzled. ‘If you are not a Christian, how can you have two names? I don’t understand!’ Discarding that enigma, he continued, ‘I have fifteen children from one wife’ – and then looked at me, almost defiantly, as though challenging some White plot to make the Black race dwindle away. ‘Is it true in Europe it’s good to have no children? For us this is the greatest misfortune! And it happens more often, we think because of the slim disease. Here it is very bad, I have lost many friends in three years. Now we say how they died, before we said it was something else. Does your government have a cure?’

A worn-looking woman appeared then, from behind the dukas, and muttered something in his ear. Turning back to me he said, ‘This person needs money for her son’s school fees – you can give?’ Pretending not to hear, I stood up, shook hands with everyone and went on my way feeling callous and mean. That woman’s eyes were pools of sorrow.

Approaching Mabale village, towards sunset, the jungle was replaced by prosperous-looking shambas covering every slope. Here the track, though precipitous as ever, permitted cautious cycling. As Monday is Mabale’s market-day, a stream of colourful figures poured towards me down the opposite hill. The pedestrians carried little – many attend their weekly market just for the craic – but the scores of cyclists, going at full speed, were improbably laden. Young wives rode side-saddle on carriers, clutching infants to their bosoms or, in a few cases, wearing infants on their backs and clutching toddlers on their laps. Possibly a sexagenarian cyclist, who has already broken an interesting variety of bones, tends to be over-cautious. Yet most observers would surely have deemed those young men under-cautious. However, I found this daredevilry so exciting that I paused at the base of one hill to watch the performers hurtling down that near-precipice with dependants on carriers and unwieldy loads balanced on cross-bars. To us degenerate Westerners the Africans’ physical self-confidence is both enviable and thrilling. Studying these cyclists with a cyclist’s eye, I could appreciate their reckless skill as they sped between large stones and deep holes that might have killed a family if not avoided. How could they not think of the consequences should they make the slightest error of judgement? Interesting, too, were the young wives’ expressions; clearly they relished every moment of these Wall of Death experiences.

Mabale is draped over a ridge-top and as I pushed Lear up the last lap I noticed that many of the pedestrians, including some women, were reeking of home-distilled banana spirits; had a match been lit in their vicinity they might well have exploded. Several men stopped to demand drunkenly, ‘Give money!’ I wouldn’t care to have met those particular characters on a deserted stretch of road.

Uganda’s rains, I was learning, are very localised. Although it had been blessedly overcast and coolish all day I had met only one shower, whereas Mabale had received a three-hour downpour and the ‘main street’ was a river as I sloshed upwards. My lodging enquiries stimulated unhelpfulness; the adults stared, then turned away, their expressions indicating that they would prefer not to get involved. But dozens of small boys pursued me yelling ‘Give money! Give money!’ At last an elderly woman pointed to a duka, said ‘Sleep!’ and hastened away. I would never have guessed; there was no sign.

My host and hostess were friendly enough, though joyless and incurious. The young wife led me to a back entrance suitable for Lear and across a small smelly yard through ankle-deep muddy brown water. Six tiny windowless cells led off this yard; mine looked like the original home of the bed-bug – filthy smeared walls, a grass roof-ceiling, an ancient wooden bed, grubby bedding, no light. But one can’t judge by appearance and I slept undisturbed.

I spent the last half-hour of daylight surveying the remnants of the market. Women still sat damply at their little stalls – there were scores, all under low grass ‘umbrellas’ – hoping for more trade before darkness; heavy rain is bad for business. As my doss-house provided no meals I hungrily bought a dozen buns which looked good but were menacingly sour and mysteriously tough – made of God knows what, God knows when. As I carried them away in a plantain-leaf parcel young men followed me, pointing at the parcel and jeering. I then wandered up and down the village street, peering into dukas in search of more food (there wasn’t any) and hoping to meet an English-speaker; but none came my way. Generally the mzungu was regarded with – with what? I wasn’t sure: not hostility, exactly, but a mixture of derision and suspicion. Most of the adult males were at some stage of intoxication, from mild to footless – perhaps a market-day phenomenon. No doubt when friends come from the bush everyone waxes convivial. The adolescents, male and female, sniggered as I passed and occasionally shouted, ‘Where from?’ or ‘Where to?’. But when I stopped to answer they ran away, laughing as they skidded through the mud.

I was beginning to identify as ‘demoralised’ the feel of rural Uganda. (Jinja, Kampala and Entebbe are different: the yeast of hope is discernible.) Since crossing the border I had been aware of disquieting vibes and from Kampala onwards these became increasingly apparent. It is hard to articulate such traveller’s reactions. An atmosphere of gaiety or depression, triumph or fear, is easily enough described. Demoralisation is different: something under the surface, without tangible manifestations yet palpable when one is there, on the spot.

Every weekday, throughout Uganda, between 7 and 8 a.m., I passed hundreds of schoolchildren – yes, hundreds, however apparently remote the area – thronging brightly towards their primary schools. (Many were in their mid- or late teens; the Terror disrupted Uganda’s educational system – such as it is.) Each group wore identical immaculately laundered uniforms: pink, green, maroon, yellow, scarlet, orange. They made a memorable picture, seen on glowing red roads – or coming through plantations of coffee, matoke, maize – or descending broad sloping pastures from distant shambas – or glimpsed kaleidoscopically amidst dense drab bush like flitting tropical birds. But this impractical adherence to a colonial tradition bothered me. These uniforms are expensive: for girls a skirt or gym-tunic and blouse, for boys shorts and shirts. Repeatedly parents complained that even if they could somehow scrape together the fees, there would then be nothing over to buy uniforms. Thus the poorest are tethered to poverty, however intelligent their offspring. Yet most teachers support this tradition; they spoke to me as though well-turned-out pupils exalted their own status and compensated for the lack of books and equipment. Many of these children, having contrived to meet archaic ‘grammar-school’ sartorial requirements, spend the day in deskless schools where the cracked blackboard is only useful while the term’s meagre chalk-ration lasts and teachers frequently go AWOL to supplement their equally meagre pay.

Slowly coasting down from Mabale (hereabouts the surface was cycleable, with care) I saw the comparatively fortunate making their way to school while the ragged rest were already working in the shambas – boys and girls, aged no more than 6 or 7, expertly wielding child-sized hoes. Then I wondered if this inequality mattered; in rural Africa, education’s main benefit may be the postponement of hard labour.

The weather was being kind. Again, a procession of high, broken, slow-moving clouds protected me all day; yet the rain held off until I was within a mile of Kyenjojo. Here the landscape had changed to a blue-green panorama of low, rounded, wooded hills and shallow valleys dominated by plantains – in whose leaves everything is wrapped, from school lunches to prayer-books. Then suddenly a wild wind arose and away to the west I could see the advancing deluge, a hastening greyness of blinding horizontal rain, loud on the maize leaves before it reached me. I arrived in Kyenjojo, on the main Kampala-Fort Portal road, soaked through and chilled; that unforgettable track had taken me to 5,500 feet.

Kyenjojo is merely a row of colonnaded dukas, with a dilapidated health-centre across the road, a small minaretless mosque and an abandoned tea-packaging factory. Beneath the colonnade dozens were sheltering as water cascaded off the tin roofs and surged over the street from flooded gutters. Everyone was damp and looked relieved. In this region real hunger had followed the failure of the previous rains: not a famine but literally a tightening of belts. Another failure would have been catastrophic. Although coming from a blessed land where rain is taken for granted, I shared in the general jubilation.

Ali’s duka had beer-crates piled outside. Inside, I sat on the sharp edge of a box full of plastic plates and shivered as I drank. Ali – tall, handsome, welcoming – wore a thick sweater and viewed my thin sodden shirt sympathetically. ‘You have no hot clothes? You will get a sickness – here is very cold in the rains.’

‘I like it,’ I reassured him. ‘It’s better to be chilled than fried!’

Kyenjojo’s population seemed to be half Muslim, judging by the visible inhabitants – old men with narrow faces, wispy beards and embroidered skullcaps, young women carefully scarved, children protected by Islamic amulets, old women with hennaed palms wearing long black gowns. Ali said, ‘In this town we have no problems, we don’t listen to outsiders making trouble. We like to live in peace. Muslim and Christian – why should we fight? One is born one way, one is born another way, it’s not important …’

An attentive crowd had gathered around the door to listen to our exchanges. Their view of my journey was typical: ‘No African could do this!’ How often I heard that comment – with increasing irritation. When I argued the point most people conceded that maybe Africans could do it, physically, given such a fine bicycle, but they would be afraid to travel alone, in unknown countries, cut off from all relatives and friends.

‘You have an accident, what happens?’ challenged Ali, as though playing a trump card. ‘Or you get a fever alone in the bush, who helps?’

Someone by the door added, ‘You die, who buries you?’

‘If I’m dead,’ I retorted, ‘that’s not my problem.’ To Ali I replied, ‘When we have less drastic misfortunes, we cope as best we can. But we don’t worry about them before they happen.’

‘Why don’t you fear wild animals?’ asked someone else by the door. ‘You have a gun?’ He poked Lear’s panniers, then was reprimanded by Ali for doing so. That was another widespread obsession; there being no wild animals left, in most areas, has not yet exorcised inherited fears. I said that I did not have a gun, my plan being to avoid wild animals’ territory. Then I switched the conversation to bicycles.

‘Only rich people own good bicycles,’ said Ali. All East Africa’s bicycles come from India or China and in Uganda cost the equivalent of £45 each: a prohibitive sum when the average wage is £1.50 a month. About one-third of the bicycle population is crippled, without pedals or brakes or saddles, or with ingeniously homemade handlebars welded to antique frames. Yet one sees many ragged and barefooted men transporting loads on sound bicycles. Those poor cyclists, Ali explained, were not bicycle owners but the servants of rich men. At the end of the day’s work they would have to walk home.

When the rain had dwindled to a drizzle I found lodgings behind the dukas, up the rushing torrent of a laneway. In my 50p cell a defective oil candle filled my nostrils with blackness in the brief time it took to change. The elderly proprietress was small, bony, ill-tempered and suspicious; she made a fuss about being paid at once, though I had no small change and was leaving Lear as hostage. In a minuscule hoteli I ate hugely: 95 per cent matoke, 5 per cent rubbery beef. That night I dreamed I was eating ripe Stilton and my own homemade bread – which may not have been a coincidence.

Beyond Kyenjojo a wide straight dirt road undulated gently between low grassy embankments or clumps of fubsy Christmas-tree conifers. The first light revealed the shape but not the colour of a wide humpy landscape, bare and uninhabited, its scattering of isolated trees so often plundered for firewood that they had lost their figures. The eastern sky was clear and faintly blue below a thin length of cloud – raw silk fringed with silver. Then the road rose to a hilltop and what I saw was unreal, magical: a long snowy ridge, the highest of a series of ridges filling the south-western horizon.

To me these were the Mountains of the Moon, rather than the Ruwenzori; in childhood that lilting phrase seemed to contain all the inaccessibility and wonder of Africa. And now there those gleaming mountains were, aloof beyond many miles of green hilly lushness, withdrawn from and contradicting all that lay about them. I stopped and sat and looked.

Then on and steeply up towards Fort Portal, through miles of tea-gardens. Pre-Terror, a chatty fellow-cyclist boasted, this was one of ‘the biggest tea estates in the world’ – perhaps an overstatement but it didn’t look like one. However, the estate had to be deserted during the Terror and has been only partially reclaimed. On my right all was restored to productive trimness; on my left overgrown tea bushes were locked in deadly combat with the native vegetation. The workers’ quarters – long dreary lines of tin-roofed mud huts – stood out against the sky on a high ridge-top, above the company-provided school. There were a number of unusually fair-skinned young adults among the local population.

In India, Fort Portal would be described as a hill-station. It faintly echoes Simla, with many little roads twisting around wooded hills, and stolid churches guarding the graves of those who died young that the Empire might expand, and well-proportioned government offices with crumbling façades in shrub-filled grounds and architecturally frolicsome villas poised above shack-filled chasms. Yet the echo is very faint. Britain and India coalesced as Britain and Africa did not – could not. Simla in independent India is still Simla, changed but affectionately valued as one more tiny piece of India’s immense and ancient cultural mosaic. Fort Portal now is a battered, slovenly symbol of failed paternalism.

English-speakers rarely use cheap lodgings so I chose a moderately expensive hotel: £3.75 per night. Luckily I felt no craving for extra comfort; my bathroom was waterless and the electricity generator had ‘lost a piece’. A tall young woman with weight-lifter’s biceps carried ten gallons of water up two flights of stairs and was not out of breath when she carefully lowered it from her head into the bath. I used nine gallons in an effort to destink the lavatory; in this important respect cheap lodgings are preferable to malfunctioning up-market hotels – one’s cell is always far from the latrine.

Evidently this hotel once cherished dreams of an expanding tourist industry. Above the receptionist’s small table – its drawer containing the room keys – hung wan posters urging guests to ‘See the Pygmies!’ and giving obsolete advice about transport to the Semliki Valley and Toro Game Reserve. The beaming young receptionist, bouncy and broad-faced, had grimly straightened hair and an ominously flawed complexion; skin-lightening creams and soaps, on sale in most villages, add another serious health hazard to African daily life. Eva supposed I wanted to see the pygmies; on the morrow she could arrange transport. Firmly I disabused her. Pygmies are human, too.

On another wall flapped two new anti-AIDS posters, in English and Luganda. ‘Do You Want Your Children To Be AIDS Orphans?’ And: ‘One Partner Only – So We Kill AIDS! More Than One Partner, AIDS Kills Us!’ Two youngish women sat chatting under the posters and watched me jotting down the slogans. As they made room for me to join them one stated flatly, ‘No Ugandan child will reach the age of 60.’

I demurred: this was over-reacting, surely?

‘You think? OK, I’m too pessimistic, but that’s how I feel. My mother had fifteen kids, I’ve stopped at two. I told my husband, “Enough! Why have more to die of AIDS?” He’s left me now but I don’t care. He’s a government agricultural inspector, always on the move. You know what that means! I couldn’t trust him, he was a risk. For sex I can choose educated men who’ll make it safe, not looking for more children from me.’

The other young woman said sombrely, ‘Three of my friends have gone in one year.’

It was notable that while the loss of friends was freely mentioned, few admitted to having lost relatives, at least in conversation with the mzungu. Yet the Ugandans were said to be over the shame hump, AIDS having bereaved so many. Such generalisations are of course absurd. There must be as many subtly differing responses to the epidemic as there are Ugandans.

The hotel’s long, low-ceilinged bar-cum-restaurant was a restful study in red brick and natural brown wood. Between the arched windows and alcoves hung dim photographs of jolly colonial officers in shorts being matey with smug-looking chiefs in tribal attire. As I mused over these imperial alliances the barman asked, ‘You like our pictures? The British brought us civilisation. Now most Ugandans are Christian. Are you Catholic or Protestant?’

Later, as I dined, that AIDS conversation in the foyer had a sequel. I was sharing a table with the only other guest, a senior army officer. Nathan was unusually well-informed about distant political problems, including Northern Ireland. When I remarked on his understanding of that conflict he replied, ‘I’ve followed it quite closely, these sectarian tensions interest me as a Baganda. Years ago an English friend sent me a good book about the details – A Place Apart was the title, the author I’ve forgotten. Do you know it?’

I hesitated, then decided it would be unfair to dissemble. After that Nathan said, ‘Now we must talk frankly if you are going to write about Uganda. Earlier, sitting in here, I heard you out there talking to those women about AIDS and I was ashamed. That woman talking about choosing men … Such vulgarity is new, a result of AIDS. People are being encouraged to discuss sex – before, it was completely taboo. Husbands and wives would not discuss it together yet now we have women shameless in public … Maybe you think this is good, I know how things are in the West. To me it is a tragedy, our culture being eroded – I wouldn’t like you to think this is normal behaviour in Uganda.’

I defended the young woman. ‘Her standards may not be yours or mine, but she’s confronting the AIDS threat as it must be confronted. No taboo will restrain her from discussing sex, in detail, with her children. She knows that’s essential, to protect them. And she also knows it’s essential for African women to become more assertive – immediately. Are you sure your real worry is cultural erosion? Could it be more to do with men losing control of their women?’

Nathan looked startled, then transferred his attention to his plate, deftly rolling a ball of matoke while changing the subject to cattle. His father owned 200, his father-in-law 700 – ‘which is too many’. Cows on good pasture can yield five litres a day but it costs so much to keep herds tick-free that milk production, at 100 shillings a litre, doesn’t pay. In a modern economy, Nathan argued, the ‘cattle fixation’ of so many African tribes should be penalised. Some families, when it comes to buying medicines, give priority to bovine patients. ‘It’s cheaper’, Nathan noted dryly, ‘to replace a baby than a cow.’

Fort Portal is named to honour Sir Gerald Portal, the Consul in Zanzibar who in 1892 was persuaded by Frederick Lugard that a British withdrawal from Uganda, which had just been ordered by Gladstone, ‘must inevitably result in a massacre of Christians such as the history of this century cannot show’. For this exaggeration Lugard had reasons unconnected with protecting Christians, but he knew which button to press in relation to British public opinion; it was only six years since Mwanga’s creation of martyrs. Once Portal and Lord Rosebery had succeeded in postponing a decision on withdrawal, until 30 September 1893, Lugard returned to England to lead a ‘Keep Uganda’ crusade and argued eloquently:

It is well to realise that it is for our advantage – and not alone at the dictates of duty – that we have undertaken responsibilities in East Africa. It is in order to foster the growth of the trade of this country, and to find an outlet for our manufactures and our surplus energy, that our farseeing statesmen and our commercial men advocate colonial expansion. There are some who say we have no right in Africa at all, that it ‘belongs to the natives’. I hold that our right is the necessity that is upon us to provide for our ever-growing population – either by opening new fields of emigration, or by providing work and employment which the development of overseas extension entails – and to stimulate trade by finding new markets, since we know what misery trade depression brings at home.

At the end of November 1892 Gerald Portal was appointed as Commissioner to Uganda and his pro-expansionist report was a major factor in the government’s decision to take over the territory from the wobbly Imperial British East Africa Company which had been in charge since 1888. The IBEA resembled the British East India Company in design but not in wealth or efficiency. It had nevertheless been controlling Uganda for four years – though not making money for its shareholders – and in Lord Rosebery’s view, ‘As a rather one-horse company has been able to administer Uganda I suppose the Empire will be equal to it.’

Fort Portal’s most conspicuous edifice is unfortunate. Standing on the highest of the surrounding hills, it dominates the town and looks like a ruined concrete water-tower. In fact it is a ruined concrete palace which must have looked equally ugly, in a different way, before it was shelled and burned during the Terror. I had asked Nathan whose palace it was and who attacked it. In reply he went into some detail about its having been designed by a British architect and built by a British company, then suddenly he switched to another subject. I was by then getting used to these Ugandan evasions.

The palace hilltop grants a superb view of the Mountains of the Moon – and many lesser mountains in every other direction. The circular ruin, roofless and scorched, is small as palaces go and prompts thoughts about our deprived descendants. A stone ruin is a thing of beauty; a concrete ruin, with jagged bits of rusty metal sticking out at all angles, seems the apotheosis of ugliness. Another sort of ugliness covers every accessible interior wall – graphic graffiti, much of it obscene, all of it violent. Guns and penises are frequently equated. The artistic skill in evidence might, I reflected, have been better deployed.

Not far from the foot of the palace hill is the Toro Babies’ Home, founded long ago to care for motherless babies who were given back to their remarried fathers at the age of 3 or so. Now, after three years, there is often no father to reclaim them and the home, designed and equipped to care for thirty, was caring for sixty in April 1992. The staff seemed to be coping heroically but the matron – she combined hard-headed efficiency with soft-hearted imaginativeness – admitted to being at her wit’s end. What to do with 4- and 5-year-olds who have nowhere to go? Under the impact of AIDS the extended family support system is collapsing, especially in towns. A common pattern, the matron explained, is for husbands to infect their wives who develop AIDS first, probably as a result of malnourishment during pregnancy, and die in childbirth or soon after. Infants then taken to the Home sometimes themselves develop AIDS and die at about the same time as their fathers; but more than 50 per cent are uninfected.

My arrival was unexpected and before anyone noticed me I had glimpsed teenage girls mothering the orphans, 5-year-olds carrying infants, toddlers playing on the veranda with homemade wooden toys. The atmosphere was affectionate, not institutional. But it was also desperate. The chaplain came to the matron’s office and demanded, ‘Why so much studying AIDS in Uganda, so much research and so little support.’ He stressed that the staff were ‘devout Christians’; if brought up as ‘pagans’ they would feel no obligation to help anyone outside their own clan. Very likely this is true. In other countries other Africans, not necessarily ‘devout Christians’, made the same observation.

A shy neatly dressed girl, who spoke no English, showed me around the Home. Despite Fort Portal’s acute water shortage the cooking vessels and bowls were spotless, every child wore clean clothes, every cot was well-tended – even those occupied by toddlers dying of AIDS, with all that that implies. In Africa it isn’t easy sensibly to dispose of ‘surplus wealth’ but beyond doubt the Toro Babies’ Home, as run by that matron, was a worthy cause. (A change of staff could of course quickly lead to unworthiness; this is what makes donating so chancy.)

From the Home a grassy path leads uphill, between soaring blue gums and pines, to the Church of Uganda cathedral, an elegantly simple building of mellow brick completed some sixty years ago. Wandering among the graves (many vandalised), I again pondered the value of White intervention in Africa. My misgivings were strengthened in the Bishop’s Palace, a rambling bungalow half-smothered by bougainvillaea and jacaranda. Here a worried white-haired clergyman took up where the Home’s chaplain had left off. He deplored various ill-judged Western projects to help AIDS victims’ families, particularly the funding of orphans’ schooling. This, he said, involved providing fees, books, uniforms and a weekly food allowance. It seems such projects can provoke serious dissension. Many orphans, had their parents been alive, could never have gone to school – so why should they now be given a privileged status? How could schooling compensate for the loss of parents? The system might even make life harder for them if they lost the support of their envious age-group, which they needed more than schooling. Some children, with both parents alive and well, were leaving home – egged on by their families – and presenting themselves elsewhere as ‘orphans’. Would it not make more sense to fund the expansion of refuges like the Toro Babies’ Home? A Ugandan-run institution could be more effective because those in charge were aware of all the cultural nuances. It was hard to disagree with that angry old man.

Later, in Fort Portal’s astonishingly well-stocked public library, an angry young man voiced even stronger views. Having acknowledged Britain’s annual contribution of £4,000 worth of books, he got his teeth into the exploitative West. ‘Rich countries have organisations to help poor countries, OK? They need money to keep going and give wages and run four-wheel-drives, OK? They make publicity about something like AIDS in Uganda and that’s good for getting money, OK?’ (I clenched my fists; one more ‘OK?’ might goad me into hitting him over the head with a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.)‘So they make projects that sound good if you know nothing about Uganda, OK? Then they send their people out to nice jobs and want us to say “Thanks” – but I say “Go home!”’

Dining again with Nathan, I repeated that diatribe. He chuckled and said, ‘Didn’t he have a point? If you weren’t so irritated by his OKs you might have seen it!’

Nathan’s mission in Fort Portal, he now confided, was a delicate one. A week before, two soldiers from the local Muhote barracks had been attacked in a neighbouring village; one died of his injuries on the spot, the other was not expected to recover. When law-abiding villagers reported this incident to the barracks they were arrested and beaten up by the dead man’s comrades. Next day the District Administrator directed the army commander to hand over the imprisoned civilians to the police. The major complied, whereupon all the soldiers attacked the village, firing indiscriminately. Many families fled to Fort Portal police station and camped there until the troops withdrew. The police who escorted them home found two corpses in the bush, severely bludgeoned and slashed and minus tongues and eyes. The following day the army commander told a public meeting, convened in the local school by the DA, that his men had mutinied before leaving the barracks to attack the village. They had also wanted to raid Fort Portal town centre but he had restrained them; Nathan didn’t reveal how this had been achieved.

Nathan was then sent from Jinja to sort it all out. This was how Amin’s army, Obote’s army, Okello’s army behaved; it is how Museveni’s army is alleged not to behave. Nathan’s task was to discover the motive for the original attack on the soldiers – had they provoked it or not? And why had the mutinous troops had access to their weapons while off duty? An unenviable task, I reckoned, but no better man for it were a cover-up to be avoided.

This little local difficulty prompted me to consult Nathan on a matter of dress. In Jinja Peter had warned me that my jungle trousers were dangerously inappropriate for Uganda. These were a bargain buy in Belfast, drab green and vaguely military-looking, made of some tough material with the thigh-pockets convenient for a cyclist’s maps. Anxiously Peter had foretold, ‘In the bush they will think you are a foreign mercenary! For that they could kill you. Our village people are very frightened of soldiers – even if they don’t kill you they won’t be friendly, they’ll be uneasy. They won’t believe you’re a woman. No Ugandan woman cycles, we don’t think it’s nice.’

At the time I laughed; the notion of my being mistaken for a mercenary (paid by whom?) seemed too absurd. But one should never laugh at local advice. Those trousers did provoke suspicion and on more than one occasion verbal aggression. Repeatedly I was asked, ‘Are you a soldier from Europe or America?’ Or, ‘Why has your army sent you to Uganda?’ Or, ‘Why do you pretend to be a tourist when we can see you are a soldier?’

To that last I replied, ‘If I were pretending, would I be wearing what you call army uniform?’ But logic doesn’t get you far in the bush where people tend to seize hold of an idea and not let go, however irrational and bizarre it may be.

Now Nathan agreed emphatically with Peter and suggested my wearing a bosom-revealing blouse instead of a loose shirt. While in Uganda I acted on this suggestion and there were no more awkward confrontations.