6

Feminism Rampant

Fort Portal to Kyotera

The first hour out of Fort Portal was wondrously beautiful. Ahead marched the vanguard of the Mountains of the Moon: sheer, smooth-crested and inky blue in the early light. Being only a few miles away, this mighty wall concealed the higher snowy summits. On my left, far below the road, lay a fairyland loveliness of translucent cloud – white vapour coiling through the depths with the wraiths of trees just discernible on a long ridge beyond the deep cleft. Then swiftly the sun drew those clouds across the road, enveloping me in damp chilliness, and wrapped them closely around the mountains.

By 11 a.m., after a forty-mile descent, I had lost 1,500 feet. Ahead stretched a colourless plain, reduced by drought and over-grazing to stark desiccation. The sky was cloudless, the heat threatening, the possibility of finding shade minimal. I took refuge in Kasese, a smallish town tucked into the arid foothills of the Ruwenzori and more important than it looks. A large copper mine inspired a rail link with Kampala and the place has recently become a backpackers’ base for the Ruwenzori climb or for finding transport into nearby Zaire.

I was about to go on my way, at 3 p.m., when the rain came: a standard three-hour torrent. The evening was misspent drinking reprehensible quantities of Nile beer with a group of ex-Bugala Lonely Planeteers – including Ian – just down from their Ruwenzori climb and looking predictably gaunt and pallid. This three-day forced march through swamps, ice and snow, to an altitude of 15,300 feet, with local guides but without adequate gear, does no one any good.

As I left Kasese before dawn something sinister and witch-like floated blackly through the starlight close above my throbbing head. Something silent and very large – perhaps the equatorial equivalent of pink elephants? No, only a maribou stork going to join its mate on a tree-top.

A brand-new ‘donated’ road allowed me to speed through the cloudy coolness, only pausing to photograph Lear leaning against the Equator monument, a wheel in each hemisphere. This was a flat, brown-turning-green landscape, low bush interspersed with cotton fields. To the east, for a few miles, Lake George glinted beyond a mile of golden-brown elephant grass above which kites hovered and eagles circled. In a wretched hamlet where only the flies seemed to have any vitality I paused for ‘dry’ tea – as milkless tea is oddly described by the Ugandans. From a butcher’s stall beside the filthy tea-shack came a stench of rotting offal which would have killed my appetite even had food been available.

Downhill from the hamlet an incongruous hi-tech causeway spans the Kazinga Channel linking Lake George and Lake Edward – formerly Lake Idi Amin, but the Ugandans prefer to remember their colonisers. Then for eight hot flat miles I was again on the floor of the Rift Valley, crossing the Queen Elizabeth II National Park. Only thirty years ago this area supported countless elephants, hippos, buffaloes, kobs, topis and even tree-climbing lions. I saw only gazelle and a few eland; almost everything else was slaughtered by Amin’s and Okello’s soldiers, or by the Tanzanian troops who saw ivory as legitimate loot.

Under a leafless thorn-tree I partook of elevenses – energy-generating groundnuts. In an acacia grove, no more than fifty yards away, an eland nuclear family – parents and child – had settled down for their siesta and were pleasingly unafraid. I wondered then about the genesis of this little-used road. Was its mere existence meant to stimulate efficient industrialisation throughout the region? Or did some European construction company need a big contract? Why must African roads go to extremes? Either this flawless model, with its high, harshly blue motorway signs intruding every few miles, or that Labour of Hercules from Hoima to Kyenjojo. Why cannot Africans, independent of foreign money, machines and technicians, maintain adequate earth roads?

Gloomily I viewed the massive escarpment rearing up from the edge of the plain some four miles ahead. At such moments my inefficiency as a traveller stuns me; no even partially sane cyclist would have been there, then. Every climb out of the Rift Valley is punishing and none should coincide with the equatorial noon heat.

During the next two hours only the beckoning coolness of the heights above kept me going. Here the invention of the mountain-bike seemed justified; given a donated surface and gradient I was able to pedal, very slowly, all the way up those sun-scourged matoke-clad hills. At the first wayside hamlet I stopped on seeing a bore-hole pump – already a prodigious sweat-loss had occurred. Four little girls were queuing but their elders directed them to make way for the mzungu.

Then something scary happened. A truck-bus, packed with brilliantly clad women, halted to water its engine and quickly I took out my camera. This was an act of gross stupidity; I can only plead a sun-scrambled brain. The women were obviously Muslim and brilliantly clad in celebration of Id. As they waved clenched fists and screamed at me I was surrounded by what felt like a hundred (probably twenty) infuriated men shouting and gesticulating, their eyes aflame. When one seized my arm and another tried to grab the camera I forced my way through them and fled – downhill. Uphill would not have served my purpose. A mile away I braked and hid in the matoke, marvelling at my own crassness. I was trembling slightly; one is easily unnerved, in Africa, by the potential for spontaneous mob violence. That is realism rather than racialism. And the combination of Black volatility and Islamic fanaticism is extra-frightening.

When the truck could be heard grinding upwards I continued. Back in that hamlet, two elderly Muslim women beckoned me; they spoke no English but their message was clear. They were apologising and would like me to drink tea – the cup of peace, as it were. I also apologised, sitting on the floor in the comparative cool of their grass-thatched hut, furnished only with mats. A teenage boy was recruited to interpret. ‘This womens is not liking you made go back on hill. This womens like mzungu. Say only bad men make trouble for you. Say mzungu not know camera is bad for us. Islam say no camera, pictures is bad in Koran.’

Then on and up, the Rift Valley no longer visible, all around a jumble of green red-streaked mountains, occasionally parting to reveal dark volcanic lakes. On a high pass there suddenly appeared, far below, an apparent infinity of forest, the trees so tightly packed one fancied one could cycle across their mass. Then steeply down and up, down and up all the way to Bushenyi, only sixty miles from Kasese though it felt further. In this dreary little town one night would be enough, I reckoned; but I was wrong.

Bushenyi’s only source of Nile was a standard main-road duka selling bags of coarse salt, bars of toilet soap, Sportsman cigarettes, white loaves and buns (nutritionless but hygienically wrapped in cellophane), two-ounce packets of (probably stale) biscuits, plastic pots of margarine and tinned fish in a foul sauce – inedible, I had long since discovered. Most of these goods came from Kenya; Uganda hadn’t yet got its manufacturing act together. A refrigerator behind the counter held beer and ‘sodas’ and a courteous youth, wearing a Persil-white cotton shirt, was in charge.

However, that standard duka contained two extraordinary phenomena. I noticed Jill first, a Western-dressed, copper-skinned woman in her thirties: tall, well-built, handsome, with an oval face, Nilotic features and great poise. She was reclining in a low chair by the doorway, drinking beer and smoking. This was sensational; most respectable Ugandan women don’t publicly drink alcohol (at least in rural areas) and even Ugandan prostitutes don’t smoke. Jill greeted me warmly in perfect English and I sat on a high stool beside her. As we talked she puzzled me increasingly; her sophisticated conversation and air of natural authority didn’t match her humble job in the local post office. I scented a mystery and was curious. But, although she and I spent much time together over the next few days, my curiosity was only satisfied, by an odd little coincidence, after I had left Bushenyi.

Then that duka’s second extraordinary phenomenon caught my eye. On the wall above Jill’s head was displayed a page from an exercise book, inscribed in printed letters:

THE WOMEN OF AFRICA DO NOT WISH TO DOMINATE THE
MEN. THEY WISH TO BE TREATED AS EQUALS WITH THE
VALUE OF THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO SOCIETY RECOGNISED.

Jill chuckled. ‘You didn’t expect to see that in Bushenyi! In this shop you have fallen among feminists. Helen wrote it out and put it up and she means it. She’s gone to the shamba but you’ll meet her in a minute.’

Helen owned the duka and was mother to Patrick, the charmer behind the counter, and eight others. She soon arrived, in appearance a typical Ankole woman: very black, short of stature, hugely fat – hereabouts a sign of beauty. Her English was not as correct as Jill’s but it was passionately fluent. Since girlhood she had been a latent feminist; AIDS had sent her into action. The arrival of a liberated female Irish cyclist delighted her. She helped herself to a Pepsi from the fridge and declaimed, ‘Equality for African women isn’t no more only a nice idea, it’s to save lives. Women with risky husbands have to say “No!” But they can’t, on their own. They’re scared, they don’t want divorce. OK, so we get together. A husband living risky comes home and sees not only his scared wife, waiting to obey. He sees a group of women, all with the same problem, all saying the same thing! This is a revolution. It’s bigger than our political revolutions, it’s men made to hear women. Our men have gone weak since all the life changed. Before they were important, now there’s no warriors, no hunters, just lying around drinking. Then hunting girls to prove they’re still men! But for us nothing’s changed – work and more work, from before dawn till after dark. Our only change is a bad one – more children, when men only have one wife. You understand all I say? You see how is the revolution – men have gone so weak they’re frightened of women in groups! They can’t say we’re silly, Ankole has funerals every day – and Rakai district is even worse than here. Now for us it’s children first. Mothers want to live for their children. Risky husbands come second.’

Jill wondered, ‘Did we need AIDS to make this revolution possible? How heartless I sound! But only a catastrophe would have stirred, up ordinary women. Taboos don’t go easily in the bush. Then I’m scared, looking over all of Africa. How long will it take the revolution to spread? How many Helens are there?’

Three men arrived then and sat on a bench opposite Jill and me. They were regulars: a doctor, a senior civil servant and an agricultural officer who complained angrily that imported pesticides did as much damage to their illiterate Ugandan users as to the pests.

There followed one of the most improbable evenings of my journey – Nathan would have been horrified. I have, I suppose, led a sheltered life; certainly I have never elsewhere participated in such an explicit discussion of the sexual act – and alternatives. All this was in relation to contraceptive methods and ‘safe sex’ between partners, one of whom is HIV +. When the embarrassed adolescent Patrick tried to slope off his mother restrained him – ‘You stay and listen, you need to know!’ Jill remained impressively in control of the debate – three women versus three men. Normally there would have been a male take-over, a polite but decisive extinction of the female viewpoint. As a local woman Helen couldn’t have held the fort – nor could I, as an inexplicable oddity who had drifted in from the decadent and predatory West. Jill, however, cowed those three intelligent and well-informed but deeply sexist men. She was one quiet, gracious, logical woman and she left them sounding incoherent, self-contradictory and prejudiced to the point of cruelty. Of course Helen and I did our bit, said our say. But the victory was Jill’s.

As light relief, during the last round of Niles, we considered the recent pronouncement of a government minister who had calculated that the average man needs eight condoms a night. The minister had promised that packs of five, with instructions in Luganda and English, would be provided at the subsidised price of 200 shillings. If the minister’s estimate of his compatriots’ virility were correct, a responsible man on the average monthly wage of 3,000 shillings would soon go heavily into debt. We concluded that the minister in question must be impotent and given to fantasising about potency.

Bushenyi feels like a mistake. Someone somewhere sometime thought a town here would be a good idea, to service the dense population of the lavishly fertile surrounding countryside; but then came the Terror and Bushenyi was aborted. Shoddy buildings line the steep main-road section; even shoddier buildings, including my guest-house, line a rough track far below the main road. Many constructions are in that half-built-then-abandoned category which I find peculiarly dispiriting. Most dukas are lock-up shops, their owners living on distant shambas. Two petrol stations confront, respectively, Helen’s duka and a large church with shattered windows which seems not to have been opened for years. The headquarters of the Regional Electricity Board is a neat semi-detached dwelling rather like an Irish council house. And then there is the nearby Rukararwe Rural Development Centre, which kept me in Bushenyi for three days.

Some Africans suffer from an exasperating mental inflexibility. On my way to the Centre, early next morning, I noticed Bushenyi’s little milk depot and rejoiced, fresh milk being my No. 2 addiction (the attentive reader will by now have discerned No. 1). Scores of cyclists were delivering anything from a giant metal churn to a two-litre cooking-oil container. The ‘incharge’ was a tall earnest-looking young man wearing a peaked cap and a long cotton coat, spotlessly white and impeccably ironed. His eyes popped with horror when I tried to buy a litre. ‘This is not pasteurised, I cannot sell, you cannot drink! This has so many bacteria, microbes, viruses, parasites – you get very sick from it, you …’

I interrupted. ‘For a month I’ve been drinking unpasteurised milk, buying it on the road whenever I could. You’ve done your duty by warning me, if I don’t mind the risk why not sell?’

The young man rolled his eyes and in agonised tones demanded, ‘Why you’re trying to make me do this bad thing? My job is to teach and protect people! When they see a mzungu drinking this dirty milk they think that’s OK and I’m crazy …’

‘But they won’t see me drinking it, I’ll take it to my room and drink it secretly – I promise.’

‘Then you get sick,’ said the young man. ‘You get very, very sick and it is my fault and I lose my job!’

The Rukararwe Rural Development Centre is a pioneering self-help project started by a local women’s group in 1985 in defiance of the Terror, then going through its last ghastly convulsions. Six other groups joined; local farmers donated ten hectares of medium-quality land; Christian Aid in Britain and a similar NGO in Germany provided modest funding – and away went Rukararwe. Soon the local schools became enthusiastically involved, many pupils persuading conservative parents to join. Each weekend seminars are held and outsiders come to learn from Rukararwe how much can be achieved with the minimum of funding augmented by the maximum of hard work and good management.

The tree-planting group replaces those indigenous trees felled during the past few decades to extend grazing lands (now being washed away) and previously replaced only with blue gums – a dirty word in Rukararwe. Another group runs training courses for youths (over 200 at a time) who have failed to find work in the cities and returned home eager to be self-reliant, to learn how to do something new and profitable on the family shamba: for example, growing pineapples and passion-fruit for the Kampala market and ‘civilising’ forest honey for sale to expatriates at high prices. A third group looks after pregnant teenagers, providing board and lodging for one year and training in a craft. A document has to be signed by the girls’ parents stating that they understand their daughters will not be earning. ‘Otherwise,’ said Janet, who runs this group, ‘parents would expect them to contribute to the family budget though they’re living free here.’ In Ankole an ‘early’ pregnancy reduces the bride-price but is no bar to marriage if the girl’s parents are willing to bring up the baby.

Each group has its own elaborately structured committee and an overall co-ordinating committee occupies a handsome office-hut. The African addiction to bureaucracy alarms me. Committees must have two or three vice-chairpersons, a sub-treasurer, an assistant accountant, an under-secretary – every conceivable sort of titled officer. Irresistibly one is reminded of children playing ‘houses’. Happily this addiction has not yet impaired Rukararwe’s functioning, though Jill thought the Centre might achieve even more if it held fewer committee meetings.

I walked the three miles to Rukararwe across flower-bright expanses of gently curving pastureland under a sky mobile with high, billowing, silver clouds. There is a pastoral tranquillity about this rolling, generously fertile landscape, studded with groves of blue gums and pines and gleaming freshly green after a rainy night. Everywhere, in the near distance, rise low grassy mountains beribboned by little red paths linking groups of plantain-roofed huts that look from afar like untidy haystacks. Some long wide slopes are heavily cloaked in matoke. As one cycles past these plantations they seem just that; on foot I discovered, concealed within each, numerous tiny scattered huts, dwarfed by their dense surrounding ‘jungle’.

The Centre is neatly spread over a wide hillside, all its buildings thatched and constructed of local materials. Janet guided me round – then Carol breathlessly overtook us, eager to show me her project, an enormous nursery where the cherished seedlings of indigenous trees are given individual attention.

In the kitchen two new types of fuel-conserving stove were being tested: mud and brick, lined with tin. Rukararwe emphasises economy and frugality – rare virtues in any African project, the general tendency being to imitate our ‘conspicuous spending’. All the spinning-wheels and looms, the potters’ and chair-makers’ and blacksmiths’ equipment were made on the spot. Glazing for the pots was obtained from cowdung and ash, or cowdung and rust; I thought that last the ultimate in frugality and scarce forebore to cheer. In the staff canteen-hut a pleasant surprise awaited me – the only unsweetened tea I drank in Africa, sugar being an unnecessary luxury and bad for the teeth.

‘I must leave early today’, said Janet, ‘to go to my father’s brother in Mbarara. Last night he lost his fourth son, aged 35. I didn’t know he was ill, he got malaria and that was enough – it often is, when people are HIV +, even if they’ve seemed fine for years. He’s left three children and an HIV + widow. In three years my uncle has lost all his sons. His three daughters are married in Kampala and Masaka. He and my aunt are like parents for me – they brought me up, I was an orphan.’ She looked grieved as she spoke, yet had spent a jolly morning with me, to all appearances happy and relaxed.

That evening in the source of Nile Helen presided behind the counter and the regulars were joined by Miriam and Carol, from Rukararwe, and by a shifting population of young men who had heard about the cyclist weirdo and wanted to suss her out.

Stephen – tall, rather flashily dressed, an ‘electrical technician’ – started an illuminating debate. Aged 22, he longed to marry. But alas! none of the possible brides was going for less than five cows and his father said times were hard and he couldn’t afford more than two so his son must wait.

‘Wait!’ exclaimed Stephen bitterly. ‘How can I wait for a woman? Now I must have girls who could infect me. This is a crazy thing! We should marry, like in the West, only for sex, not for cows!’

Miriam, the Rukararwe medical officer, turned towards me. ‘This is a very hard problem. When our President Museveni came to power he was honest about AIDS, not hiding the crisis like they do in Kenya. He made a special strong appeal to young people not to have more than one partner, then he begged parents to bring down bride-prices. But most families won’t.’

Stephen pointed to the Health Ministry anti-AIDS poster above the refrigerator – LOVE CAREFULLY! STICK TO ONE PARTNER! He demanded, ‘Why no poster telling parents how to behave?’ Then he glared at me. ‘You, madame, what do you think?’

‘I think the notion of buying a wife, with all that that implies for women’s status, is barbarous. The system must be scrapped as stage one in the campaign for equality.’ I glanced at Helen, confident of her support – but, disconcertingly, I didn’t get it.

‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘You think a woman feels bad if she’s exchanged for cows or money. But if there’s no exchange she feels worth nothing. I cost my husband ten cows. I had good education from Irish nuns in Mbarara, I speak English and can run a business. My father spent money on me, why give me away for nothing? Our families keep accounts of what girls cost to feed and clothe and educate, that way they can show a daughter is valuable to a young man’s family. You want a healthy, educated bride – OK, you pay for it!’

Jill, who had been watching my face, cautioned Helen. ‘Our liberated friend can’t cope with all this – she thought you too were liberated and now you’ve gone bush!’

Stephen raised his voice as though addressing a public meeting. ‘I only want my own woman, I’m not crazy, I know all about AIDS. With a wife I wouldn’t live risky. In the West you get a wife free, why must Africans pay to make women feel better? A wife costs money, you have to keep her. Her family would have to keep her if she didn’t marry. Why must I pay to get her so she costs her family no more?’

Jill began to look sorry for me. ‘We’re getting our cross-cultural lines in such a tangle we’d better talk about something else.’

‘That’s bad thinking,’ said Helen. ‘People who want to understand must listen. It’s crazy if our friend goes home saying Western Women’s Lib is OK for African women’s problems. She’s so shocked by bride-price she can’t see we must feel valued or we can’t look for equality. If my husband got me free, like Stephen wants, I couldn’t start a revolution. Stephen sounds right to Dervla, saying he should get a free bride. But he talks mixed up, knowing only a little about the West and nothing about Women’s Lib. Here a free bride’s a slave – no worth, no status, no respect. Everyone knows my bride-price was ten cows. When I talk revolution they listen, with respect.’

Jill asked me, ‘Have you got the message? For us Women’s Lib has to start from where we’re at, not where you’re at!’

During the following, Sunday, afternoon sheets of rain fell for three and a half hours, giving Helen’s regulars a good excuse for more than one pre-prandial Nile. Then out of the storm came Mr Bongyereirwe, a Kampala construction engineer whose jeep was, he hoped, being mended across the road. He introduced himself to me as the son of a Makerere professor of law and the grandson of a Baganda chief, which didn’t seem to impress anyone. He had spent two postgraduate years in the US, where his wife also studied; she was now teaching mathematics at a missionary college. ‘We have two daughters and one son, then I told my wife to have a ligation – it is very anti-social to overpopulate the world. This causes many ecological problems.’

Mr Bongyereirwe’s comprehension of the West had not been much extended by his postgraduate years; he directed all his conversation to me, ignoring my friends. And he firmly believed AIDS to be the result of American biological warfare experiments in Zaire. ‘Then some GIs got accidentally infected and took the virus to San Francisco where it spread among those men with dirty habits.’

When I sought Mr Bongyereirwe’s views on the bride-price system he replied, ‘I am an educated man, I require no price for my daughters, but I will give permission only for marriages to rich husbands, with good prospects. Among the uneducated it is different, marriage customs are too important to change quickly. At least one hundred guests are common at a poor family’s wedding and tons of food, and nowadays money, have to be collected from neighbours. I expected change in the cities, but no – it’s worse, more guests invited, more resources squandered.’

All the regulars grinned when Jill intervened. ‘But are those resources squandered? What you call the uneducated don’t have much fun – maybe they deserve a feast and a celebration now and then?’

Jill was sitting behind the counter, hitherto unnoticed by Mr Bongyereirwe. His reaction to her challenge fascinated me. ‘Madame,’ he said sharply, ‘you are too far from home!’ At which point a shout from the petrol-station mechanic summoned him. His departure occasioned no dismay. Helen muttered, ‘Bad types became chiefs under the British!’

As the rain eased off we watched a fine Friesian cow, with European-sized udders, being driven up a grassy slope opposite the dukas. Jossy, the agricultural officer, looked upset. ‘There’s a good cow, only four years old, going to be killed this evening. Her owner had sudden bad money luck and couldn’t sell her for milk. We’ve a local surplus, but beef’s scarce.’

‘Another distribution problem!’ exclaimed Jill impatiently. ‘In towns not far from here people pay 600 shillings for a half-litre of Kenyan Long-life – disgusting stuff!’

A new white Samurai stopped for petrol, its job description writ large below the appropriate logo.

FAO/UNFPA

UGA /88/PO8

INTEGRATION OF FAMILY LIFE

EDUCATION IN AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION

For a moment we all stared, my companions’ expressions a study – irritated, sceptical, scornful, angry.

‘Why’, wondered the doctor, ‘do expat vehicles always look fresh from the shop?’

I asked, ‘What does that inscription mean?’

Jill smiled sourly. ‘It means teaching extension workers how to encourage peasants to use condoms. It also means a whole new FAO/UNFPA Project, a sub-department with lots more well-paid jobs for the boys – and girls.’

Helen added, ‘It’s good for extension workers too, they sell those condoms in Mbarara. Only the UN believes Ankole farmers will use them. And why should they change their ways, just because some youngster on a motor-bike says so?’

Suddenly the doctor flared up, banged his fist on the counter and shouted, ‘Why do they make our tragedy their industry?’

The question was rhetorical but Jill responded, ‘There’s a serious job shortage in the West.’

Every Monday, from villages within a radius of thirty miles or so, traditional healers come in turn to Rukararwe to hold joint clinics with a modern doctor in a specially built hut; the two doctors, until recently natural enemies, sit side by side. It took four years to persuade the medicine men to reveal their secrets; now their income is up and they are happy, though still on guard. Only modern doctors of integrity co-operate in such ventures, people who disdain to profiteer on the Western medical drugs market. The diagnoses are made after scientific tests, then the medicine man prescribes his cure should it seem appropriate. A research project was being efficiently organised to prove which traditional cure really works for what; it would of course be beyond Rukararwe’s resources to discover why a particular cure works.

At 7.30 a.m. a few dozen patients were already waiting outside the clinic hut and bicycles stood around on the grass. Some were cycle-taxis but most patients had walked and looked alarmingly exhausted. As yet there was no sign of the doctors, or of Miriam, the middle-aged London-trained nurse who assisted with the testing. I sat on the grass near an adjacent hut, from which the traditional cures are dispensed, and observed that entrance to this sanctum was being closely controlled.

An hour later, when the medicine man debarred me from the clinic-hut, Miriam was greatly discomfited; she had urged me to be there that morning, confident that I could sit in on the session. I, however, was pleased. Rukararwe’s most valuable feature is its African-ness, only slightly diluted by Western interference. For all the medicine man knew, I might be a potential meddler and his exclusion order seemed prudent.

Jill’s comment was interesting: ‘Not all of Africa has moved into the age of literacy. Knowledge in the West is public property, freely available in books. Our traditional minds work another way – and a medicine man’s knowledge has gone from father to son, in total secrecy, hidden like an object sensitive to light. We’ve myths about knowledge being stolen, run away with as if it was a jewel! I don’t mean running away with medicine or charms, but with knowledge itself. The bush doctors’ secrets gave them such power they scared everyone, and got very rich. Those men working here have been clever enough to compromise. Diagnosis is their weakness, all guesswork when it isn’t something obvious, and they realise they can do better by collaborating with doctors who have the “magic” to get the diagnosis right. Then their cures can be more acceptable than expensive imported drugs. I’d guess this medicine man feared you were spying. We’re all afraid of that. Once our team has proved A, B and C can cure X, Y and Z it’s likely the transnational gangsters will move in. Herbal medicines, scientifically developed in Africa, by Africans, for Africans, would wreck their profits unless they took over the marketing. But in my lifetime we’ve learned a lot, we’re no longer so easily fooled by fancy packaging and mumbo-jumbo leaflets in scientific jargon. It’s a big step forward to have those teams working in the bush. Villagers seeing a modern doctor approving of herbal medicines don’t feel it’s “primitive” to use them. They can believe their own medicine is as good or better “magic” than the White man’s – and cheaper, so they don’t have to borrow, or get sicker while saving up for a cure.’

In Bushenyi’s only restaurant – small, fly-blown, concrete-walled – Jill and I ate our Last Supper (matoke and beef) by candlelight, the electricity having failed during a melodramatic afternoon thunderstorm. (Stephen, we were assured, was fixing it.) Our conversation wasn’t flowing as usual and Jill looked pensive – then abruptly said, ‘I’ve a warning for you, please don’t laugh at me! It’s about your way of answering questions. You’re too honest, explaining you’ve never married, have no religion and so on. Amongst the elite, used to mixing with Whites, that’s fine – but it’s different in the bush. You don’t realise how upset some people can be when you talk like that. They’re not used to travelling the world, making allowances for new attitudes. When you give these honest answers – well, forgive me, you’re really being a cultural imperialist. You don’t mean it, I know, but you can upset even people like Helen. Maybe you think it’s educational for African peasants to see how the other half lives, but you’re ignoring their religious feelings, offending their whole sense of what’s right. It’s almost as if an African in London was asked his favourite food and said, “People!” No, don’t laugh, I’m serious. Here we’re deeply religious and spiritual, not necessarily as Christians but as Africans. Not marrying is a sort of blasphemy, against all the laws of God and Nature. Then when you say you’ve no religion you could be seen as not only shocking but dangerous. Especially as you travel around alone, without fear, on a bicycle, at the age of 60. Do you notice most people ask your age? That’s why I’m worried about the rest of your journey. Not so much around here but in remote bits of Tanzania, Zambia and so on, where the bush people, to be blunt, can still react in primitive ways. You know what I’m saying?’

Feeling chastened but bewildered, I shook my head.

Jill smiled. ‘To you a big area of the African soul is invisible – Whites can see it only after a lifetime here, speaking some of our languages. So I’ll talk plainly. It’s possible some villagers could see you as a powerful, very frightening witch, and both Blacks and Whites have occasionally been killed for that reason. Someone panics – and it’s all over for the stranger.’

I made an incredulous, protesting noise.

‘Don’t sound like that! I’m not being alarmist. It’s fashionable to pretend the belief in witchcraft has almost died out, but truly it’s as widespread as ever and even more feared. Traditional religion provided all sorts of safeguards against it, Christianity doesn’t – so people feel extra twitchy. In Bushenyi I’m probably the only person who doesn’t believe in witchcraft. It’s part of everyday life for all sorts – government ministers, university professors, clergymen, diplomats, international football teams – maybe modified, in some cases, but still very real. It’s the villagers’ fear I want to impress on you. Everywhere you’ll be asked these questions and your answers could be misinterpreted. Please be cautious, say your husband’s dead, say you’re some sort of Christian – a Jehovah’s Witness, a Christian Scientist, anything you fancy. It’s the “no religion” concept that upsets them.’

This was the most outré local advice I have ever been given; but I didn’t entirely ignore it. Curiously, it was only as we walked to my guest-house by starlight that Jill told me her husband had died three years previously, aged 32, leaving her with a daughter now aged 6 who lived with the maternal grandparents. The cause of death was not specified.

For centuries Ankole was a two-tribe territory, divided between the pastoralist Bahima and the agriculturalist Bairu, the latter in the majority but always ruled by the cattle-rich minority. My seventy-five-mile ride from Bushenyi to Lyantonde took me down from the lush Bairu hills to the stricken aridity of over-grazed Bahima pastures, as shattering a contrast as one could find in any day’s cycling. Beyond war-scarred Mbarara – Ankole’s capital, where there was nothing to detain me – the sun came out with noontide ferocity and for mile after mile I was pedalling through apparently uninhabited hilly bush. The too-numerous skinny cattle – each accompanied by an escort of egrets – looked sorry for themselves as they plodded towards some distant source of water, their immense horns seeming too heavy to be comfortably supported. The emaciated yearlings had clearly suffered most from the recent drought yet all wore glossy coats, perhaps because of their weekly (sometimes twice-weekly) anti-tick dipping. I paused to watch a few of these ceremonies through my binoculars – herds being driven into a tin-roofed tank with much cruelty. Jossy, the Bushenyi agricultural officer, had told me that the water shortage causes some of these dips to be repeatedly re-used, fresh chemicals being added weekly, which seriously endangers the animals’ health.

Jossy, a middle-aged man, felt angered by the fate of this area. He remembered how it was in his youth – with abundant edible wild fruits, rich pasturage, a variety of wildlife, ample stands of mature, spreading trees. Today no trees remain and there wasn’t even a rabbit to be seen as I crossed the Lake Mburu Game Reserve. Those trees were vital to reduce wind erosion, a major consideration here; all afternoon a strong cross-wind saved me from heat-stroke. Yet they were sacrificed to branch-fencing – which needs to be renewed every few months – for kraals and grazing areas. Now 200 cows are being grazed (or not grazed) on an acreage scarcely adequate for fifty and the herders’ reckless firing of the bush destroys both valuable vegetation and the soil’s nutrients. Most of the seasonal swamps – and therefore their useful permanent swamp vegetation – have vanished, as have the valley dams excavated by the British in 1956 on behalf of the cattle. The rainfall has been decreasing annually, regardless of good or bad rainy seasons elsewhere, from 875-1,000 mm in 1970 to 500-750 mm in 1990. Here, as throughout Uganda, the two main threats to the environment, apart from the bovine population explosion, are brick-bakers and charcoal-burners. The former, Jossy had said vehemently, should be made to plant four times the number of trees they fell and the latter should be put out of business by the provision of cheap countrywide electricity. Electricity is so much more expensive than charcoal that even in towns like Bushenyi which are – more or less – electrified, few can afford to use it.

This ravaged Bahima territory extends far to the north-west of the main road and still supplies, every day, some 15,000 litres of milk and 20,000 kilos of beef to Kampala and other towns. Jossy, however, foretold that within a decade it would be reduced to true desert – a famine area, appealing to the West for emergency aid. Yet even now, he was confident, it could be rescued; he had a long list of practical remedies but these needed the Ministry of Lands, Water and Mineral Resources, the Ministry of Agriculture, Animals and Fisheries, and the Ministry of Environmental Protection to swing into unified action. ‘This is not a natural disaster,’ Jossy had fumed. ‘It is a man-made disaster and man can unmake it. The remedies don’t need big money, they don’t need hard currency or expats or machinery. They do need education about the environment and then responsible behaviour. Look at the Rukararwe tree-planting, with voluntary labour – it costs very little and in a few years will have given health to the country all around. If the will is there the damage can be undone. But the Bahima are like all cattle-people – stubborn and jeering at advice. Even when some of their cattle and children are already dying …’ (Jossy was a Bairu.) ‘And the ministries only make long speeches about the crisis – they do nothing, though this is our President’s homeland!’

The last hour was coolish, with a strikingly complicated skyscape to the north-west – shifting layers of many-hued clouds above the brown eroded hills. All day I had been on the Africa Highway, which carries more truck traffic than I had had to endure since leaving Kampala. The little town of Lyantonde, its tin roofs visible for miles before I arrived, is a long-established truckers’ stop and singularly depressing.

At sunset colossal articulated trucks lined the long main street – a dusty (or muddy) deeply rutted track. The countless lodgings had names like Sweet Dreams, Happiness House, Heavenly End. Lyantonde is in Rakai district, reputedly Africa’s most AIDS-stricken region. (That reputation is no longer deserved; I was to come upon several other equally stricken regions.) Yet sex-workers swarmed; by now I could identify them at a glance – always comely, well-groomed, well-dressed, well-manicured, never having the ‘cheap’ aura that we might associate with prostitutes who service truck-drivers. African men are quite obsessional about the cleanliness of their sexual partners; a not uncommon cause of divorce is the ‘dirty, smelly wife’ who, poor thing, may have neither the energy nor the surplus water to keep herself squeaky clean.

I chose Jane’s Paradise Garden which seemed otherwise unpatronised. The drab little bar was decorated only by Museveni’s photograph. In one corner Abel sat alone, a frail elderly Presbyterian teacher drinking a soda and looking unhappy. ‘This is not my town,’ he said defensively. ‘It’s a bad place but I’m sent here by God. My town is Kabale, very high in the mountains, near the Rwandan border.’

It was coincidence time. ‘Kabale!’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s where one of my new friends comes from’, and I told him about my days in Bushenyi.

Abel smiled slightly. ‘I think your new friend is called Jill?’

‘Yes – you know her?’

‘Everyone in Kabale knows this family. They are not Ugandan, they are Watutsi from Rwanda – thousands came as refugees in 1960. They are very clever and arrogant and proud. You have heard of them? They ruled for centuries though only 10 per cent of the population! They never worked, the Hutu were their slaves. But that was always Hutu land, the Watutsi came from somewhere far up in the north. That’s why they had to run away in the end, when the Hutu killed more than 100,000. Now there’s more killing in Rwanda and more refugees coming to us. We’ve too much killing in Africa. Why don’t we talk instead, like Christians? Christ said we should turn the other cheek. I think he meant we should listen to one another instead of killing.’

I agreed that this was an excellent idea but pointed out that Africans are not alone in failing to implement it.

Lyantonde’s poverty was extreme. The hordes of unwashed, ragged small boys who gathered around Lear outside Jane’s Paradise Garden were pitifully malnourished, their hair rusty, their faces and limbs pocked with open sores. The skinny teenage bar-boy and his apathetic friends – a trio who just hung about, scarcely talking – seemed charmless to the brink of ill-manners. Pre-AIDS Lyantonde, I heard later, was notoriously STD-infected with a tragically high percentage of congenital syphilitics.

There was no running water in the town but the rains had assured plenty of self-service washing water; one fetched it in a basin from one of two large tar-barrels now filled daily from the roof gutters. I had often wondered why so few township tin-roofed homes were equipped with gutters and barrels, a significant labour-saving device during one-third of the year. In Bushenyi I asked and the answer shamed me. Having built a one- or two-roomed shack, there was nothing left over to buy guttering and barrels. The unpoor can be very unimaginative.

Abel advised me to eat in a bright tidy little restaurant across the street from Jane’s Paradise Garden. I chose matoke and beef instead of rice and stewed chicken; no one (not even myself) cooks rice as badly as the Africans. The proprietress – a fatly handsome fortyish woman with three chins – sat opposite me, threatening the small table’s equilibrium as she leaned her vast bulk on it. She bewailed the fact that the slim disease was ruining business. Half the town’s sex-workers had moved out, including her own two daughters. These were AIDS widows in their twenties, they had to go into the business to support toddlers. Too many truck-drivers were bypassing Lyantonde, all because of bad publicity about Rakai. My mind boggled. There wasn’t room for one more truck on the street, sex-workers adorned every doorway – what must Lyantonde have been like pre-AIDS? But it slightly cheered me to hear that some truck-drivers at least were apprehensive.

I dressed before dawn, by my own candlelight; the room was vibrating as scores of trucks revved up outside. Unrefined diesel fumes almost asphyxiated me as I pushed Lear past the drivers and their passengers who stood around making largely fanciful arrangements to meet again – a feature of such junctions. Several wore T-shirts portraying Saddam Hussein with adulatory slogans, a common phenomenon all along my route. This bias evidently sprang from the realisation that everything the US did in Iraq was done out of ruthless self-interest and virtually everything they said about the conflict was untrue.

Leaving the Africa Highway, I pedalled into Rakai’s magnificent mountains and over the next seventy miles met only two vehicles. For an hour or so there was a homeliness about the weather; in Ireland this sort of fine, warm, drifting rain is described as ‘A grand soft day, thanks be to God!’ A few children were on their way to school – for once, un-uniformed. One little boy, unaware of my presence, stood on the red embankment leading down from his hut very carefully wrapping a thin, tattered book in a brown plantain leaf, tied with tough grass. Putting his satchel on his head he descended to the road where, on seeing me, he genuflected. Most children in rural areas greeted me thus – I hope (and believe) merely because I’m an elder, not because I’m a mzungu. Here I saw my most comical bicycle load: four hens and four cocks secured to a long plank laid across a carrier, all looking perfectly composed as the cyclist bounded downhill at speed.

A Martian dropped into Rakai would be puzzled. Why so many fertile but weed-infested shambas, so many derelict huts, so many forlorn-looking elders, so many devitalised, aimless children crouching in groups under the plantains?

For miles the track switchbacked – mostly ascending – through flat-topped, cattle-grooved, red-brown mountains. I thought, ‘What a nuisance is ecological awareness!’ Aesthetically those mountains, austere in colour and contour, were extremely pleasing under a deep blue sky. Then came a long serious climb on a surface so rough that it constituted another Labour of Hercules.

That high pass overlooked an immense expanse of long blue table-top mountains, deep green valleys and sheer red cliffs rising from narrow glens full of tangled vegetation. An unpeopled landscape, it seemed, until my binoculars revealed many tiny isolated homesteads. Here the wind blew cold; the clouds had returned and were playing with the sun. Then as I nut-munched, a transforming blue light suffused the whole scene giving it the look of a stage-set, a mighty theatre awaiting some eerie drama. But of course the drama has already started … All I seek as my traveller’s reward was about me: silence, solitude, space – so beautiful and peaceful and satisfying for the mzungu, yet for the inhabitants of those distant homesteads not any more a good place to dwell.

The gradual descent took me past a few destitute-looking Muslim hamlets and below the track lay wave after wave of smooth deforested ridges, separated by inaccessible grassy clefts. In a big T-junction village of ragged unsmiling people I could buy only two cups of weak black tea and two warm maize buns. The track then ran level for twenty miles, through matoke, forest or scrub. In the bush new emerald-bright grass was spangled with carmine flowers, scarcely two inches tall, and under umbrella acacias grew giant orange mushrooms, a foot high. Back in inhabited country – the noon sun brutal in a cloudless sky – there was much more up-and-down with repeated glimpses of Lake Kijanebalola in the near distance: a long, coolly shimmering expanse, its low reedy banks sustaining a wealth of water-birds.

On the map Rakai is a town; in reality it is an impoverished scattered village in a superb setting of wooded hills and cultivated valleys. At 2.30 my most unerring instinct led me to the only and improbable source of Nile: a dressmaker’s duka. While I drank, the heavily pregnant dressmaker dressmade and told me this would be her tenth and she hadn’t wanted it because the Irish nuns in Masaka – all doctors – warned she might die if she had another but they wouldn’t give her the Pill because of her blood-pressure. ‘Isn’t it wrong’, she said, looking up from her work, ‘that in Africa the most popular birth-control way must be the most dangerous for women? We must take the Pill because we can do it secretly. If we had love and trust with our husbands we could get something safer. My husband only laughed when I told him what the nuns warned about the blood-pressure and anaemia. He said, “If you can have nine you can have ten and double figures are better!” Look at me now!’ – she pulled up her skirt to display gruesomely swollen legs. The nuns, it seemed to me, had not been exaggerating. ‘If I die giving him his tenth can he look after them all? He’ll get another wife but she won’t be a good one – she’ll be a bad one that couldn’t find anybody else. Good girls don’t want a man with the other wife’s nine kids. Or maybe ten …’ She looked down at her belly. ‘Maybe this baby will live, only I’ll die. From the nuns in Masaka I went to the Family Planning Clinic but they won’t give advice unless both partners are present.’ (This bit of Western nonsense renders such clinics virtually useless in Africa, except perhaps among the educated elite who need them least.) As we talked a pathetic figure shambled past, an old bent man in torn shirt and trousers with an odd expression: half-frantic, half-cowed. ‘The BBC put him on the radio,’ remarked my companion. ‘The slim disease took all his family, six sons and three daughters. And their wives or husbands are dead or dying. His grandchildren die too. He lost his mind when the little ones started to die.’

Another twenty miles – cruelly hot on a worsening road – took me down to more over-grazed bush. Beyond a mature forest of British-planted blue gums lay the old village of Kyotera where the rains had come too late for the maize and a new crop was going in. The dismal main-road township of Kyotera has been visited by many afflictions: the Tanzanian army, AIDS and, most recently, renewed fighting in nearby Rwanda. This turmoil had stopped all trading and brought much extra hardship to the whole region, including Mbarara.

Within the past four years most Kyotera businesses have changed hands once or twice following their owners’ deaths. Outsiders were turning down good jobs in this district, the implication again being that celibacy is impossible and marital fidelity not much easier. Yet in Masaka I had met a young Bairu woman doctor who admitted to having recently married an untested husband: securing a husband and children had to be given priority. Such encounters (not unusual) always deepened my gloom. When the medical profession refuses to take AIDS seriously, what hope is there for the masses?

In the ramshackle compound of Kyotera’s Catholic Mission an Irish NGO, Concern, has its fittingly modest base, almost devoid of expatriate luxuries. A four-person team, including two volunteer workers, had recently set up a ‘participatory approach’ programme to help AIDS victims and their families and here Irish hospitality struck again. My last few days in Uganda were spent participating, as an interested observer, in Concern’s various projects.