As it turned out, I needn’t have troubled myself over any other business with Stone. The following week Amin expelled him, Marina and her husband, and most of the remainder of the Embassy staff.
“I have broken the backbone of the British spy ring in Uganda,” he announced on the radio. “Any other foreign embassies with spies in their midst will be dealt with accordingly. Especially if they offer bribes. Even me, the President of Uganda, they were offering bribes to.”
In his usual contradictory spirit, he also said that he had sent yet another message to the Queen, professing his undying friendship for her and declaring his intention to pay her another visit.
“I said to the Queen of England, I hope that this time you will allow me to meet Scottish, Irish and Welsh liberation movements who are fighting against your imperial rule. I am sending this message early, so that you will have ample time to arrange for what is required for my comfortable stay in your country. For example, I hope that during my stay there will be a steady supply of essential commodities because I know that your economy is ailing in many fields. Yes, Mrs. Queen, you better believe it. I am coming to London and no one can stop me. Whether you like it or not, I am bringing two hundred and fifty Ugandan reserve forces as my bodyguards. I want to see how strong the British are and I want them to see the powerful man from the continent of Africa.”
Two things happened after the expulsions, in rapid succession. The first was that my bungalow was broken into, and my journal stolen. Nothing else was touched. This frightened me. I thought about reporting it to the police, but decided against it. I suppose I knew, in my heart, that it had something to do with Amin. Ordinary burglars would never have dared enter the heavily guarded confines of State House.
The second thing, which happened early the next evening, was that Amin called me at Mulago. I was daydreaming when the phone rang, looking at an old woman sweeping the courtyard with deliberate rhythmic strokes. She did it every evening, clearing up where the outpatients queued, so I don’t know why my gaze should have settled upon her. But it did, just as Amin’s gaze had settled upon me.
“Come immediately,” said his voice in my ear. It was harsher than usual, and my heart began to beat itself out of my chest.
“Doctor Nicholas? I have urgent medical business to discuss with you.”
Sweep sweep sweep. My eyes focused on the woman in the courtyard. “Yes … Your Excellency.”
“Very urgent. Nakasero.” The line went dead.
I did as I was told. Driving to the Lodge, my stomach turned over and over. The sweat was streaming off me, even though the cool of evening had settled, and my throat felt as if a lump of wood had been shoved down it. What did he know about Stone? The fact that I had seen Kay the evening before she had died? The journal—what had I said in it?
Night fell on the way, and the moon was soon high and bright over the swamps next to the road. Moving in the breeze, the mass of papyrus plants looked threatening and weird, their nodding, dandelionlike heads—some over ten feet high—making them seem like helmeted space creatures.
Calm down, I told myself as I entered the city, he’s asked to see you before, it doesn’t mean anything. He wouldn’t harm you. Not NG.
I drove on. When I got to Nakasero the guards showed me up to Amin’s living quarters as before. I walked through the door, and was greeted with the same familiar mess. The baseball bat, the pornographic magazines on the floor, the portrait of Lumumba, the floor-to-ceiling shelves housing the Proceedings of the Law Society of Uganda.
Dressed in military uniform—just plain khaki, not the bedazzling field marshal’s outfit—Amin was sitting in the antique chair. Next to it was the same gauzy four-poster water bed with its twisted squall of sheets and pillowcases, and the mirrored wardrobes, vanity unit and escritoire. On the desk, I noticed, the cowboy holster was resting, the embossed handle of the gun sticking out of it.
He looked up as I came in and smiled pleasantly at me. There was a copy of the Sunday Times lying open at his feet, showing a picture of him holding a baby and grinning broadly.
“Ah,” he said, “my good friend Doctor Nicholas.”
“You called, Your Excellency?” I was still sweating heavily.
He looked down at the newspaper headline: THE BUTCHER IN THE BUSH.
“Though the English hate me,” he said, “I still love and respect the Queen. I was thinking of maybe writing to her once more.”
“Is that what you called me about?” I said, relieved.
“Yes,” he said, standing up. “And also no. I did call, but you did not hear. I gave you many things, but you betrayed me.” I stared at him, speechless.
“Doctor, you have done badly because you have started to fight against me. Like an English, not a Scots. Very bad.”
My eyes flicked over to the escritoire, to the holster. But he was reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a tiny revolver of the type used by gamblers in Westerns. In his big fist, only the muzzle showed.
“This is your last day. You are to die. This is your end.”
I flinched, and then sank to my knees and began to babble. “Your Excellency, please. I have done nothing!”
The mouth of the gun was right in front of me. I could see the wrinkles in Amin’s hand.
His voice echoed above me. “So you want to leave me, do you?” Then he squatted down, his face close to mine. “What is wrong that you do not love me?” he whispered. “Why are you no longer my friend?”
“Please,” I said, hoarsely. “Don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.” I was trembling uncontrollably, and I felt that I might soon void myself.
Then suddenly Amin had stood up and his head was raised and he was laughing, laughing up to the ceiling. “Kill you? Why on earth should I want to kill a man like you?”
I looked up. There was something stunned and childlike in his face.
“No, I wouldn’t want to kill you, Doctor Nicholas. I thought you wanted to kill me. But I know you wouldn’t. I won’t take vengeance on silliness.”
I remained on the floor, panting like a dog, as Amin put the little gun back in his pocket. He walked over to the escritoire, and pulled open a drawer. I could see myself in the mirrors—crouched, panting, panting—and behind me the ranks of bookshelves.
“I am sorry to have frightened you,” Amin said, coming back over. “The fact is, my good friend, that I have heard from my intelligence operatives in the State Research Bureau that you have been engaged in activities against the state. According to this report …”
He waved a pink piece of paper in the air above me.
“… which was written by my good friend Major Weir, who has sadly had to go now—you have been told to give me bad drugs by the government of her Majesty the Queen.”
“I …” I croaked, confused. Weir? I thought of his limp and his turkey-wattle neck, the insistent buzz of the radio-controlled helicopter.
“There is no need to deny it. I know everything, you see. Including this I know—that you are too good a doctor, and love Idi Amin Dada too much to do this thing.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I wouldn’t do it, you know that I wouldn’t do it.”
“So,” he said, a cunning look coming into his eyes, “they did ask you, then?”
“I refused,” I said. “It is not right.”
“Good,” he said, and walked over to the escritoire and sat down.
“Good,” he repeated, reaching into the desk. “Because then I am able to forgive you this other matter.”
He held up the black notebook in which I had been writing my journal. I looked up at him in horror. I had forgotten about it while he had been threatening me with the gun, and now a new wave of fear surged through me. There was silence for a moment in the room, as he turned the pages. I feverishly ran over in my mind what was in there.
“You are a very good writer,” he said, after a while. “I can see that plain. But when I talked to you about my journey to become head of state of Uganda, I did not know you would be writing these things down in a book.”
“It’s just a journal,” I said. “Like a diary.”
“You are a very clever man,” he said. “But I do not like what you write here about my mother. Her name was Fanta, not Pepsi Cola. And what you write about my fourth wife is insulting. You should know that I am a sexual lion and that I have fathered over fifty children in Uganda and all over the world. If you continue to write things like this, you will be dead. Straight. From now on we will have radio-cassette and press button. Whenever you write, you will take the words from my mouth. Exactly. Because the mouth is the home of words.”
He turned over a few more pages. I prayed again that I had not noted in detail any connection with Kay. I didn’t think I had, but I was not in a state to remember.
And then Amin said something that threw me totally. “Now, this is very important. This fellow, Waziri, noted here. You say he was your friend?”
“Well,” I said, thinking rapidly where this was leading. “He worked at the clinic in Mbarara.”
Amin fixed his eyes on me. “He was not a good doctor—and thus I do not think he could be your friend. Because he is not my friend, and if he is not my friend, he cannot be your friend. It is true?”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Amin got to his feet, walked round the desk and pulled me up.
“Follow me,” he commanded. “I have something very important to show you.”
He walked over to the bookshelves and pushed against one of them. A dark space came where one stack of the leather volumes went in on itself. He pushed again. The stack swung in farther, revealing a long, damp passageway, dimly lit with strip lights. There were pools of water on the concrete floor, and all around a smell of dead and standing air.
Amin turned to me, his eyes gleaming avidly. “Come,” he said.
There was no question of my refusing to do as he said. I followed his burly figure as it ducked through the entrance, and went down some steps. My pace fell in with his, splashing through the water. I felt an oppressive sense of dread.
We walked on, the braid on Amin’s shoulders flashing as he passed under the lights. My heart beat painfully again (medically, I suspected I was tachycardic, running at over 100 bpm). The echoes of our footsteps sounded in the tunnel—and then another sound came.
Two sounds. The first was a thump thump thump, reminiscent of the women pounding millet back in Mbarara. With its slow relentlessness, it mocked my sore-speeding heart. The other sound was more disturbing still—a faint yet piercing scream, or howl. I’d only once heard anything like it before, when I’d come across a weasel caught in a snare in the pine woods above Fossiemuir. I felt my bowels loosen.
We entered a chamber. It had several partitioned walls and alcoves. In one of the latter was a cubicle with glass sides, and filled with electronic equipment. Shifting in the glass, the dials and LED levels flickered in the dim light.
Amin crossed to the other side of the chamber and looked through a spyhole in the wall. Then he pressed a button and a big metal door slid open.
“Kila mlango kwa ufunguo wake,” he said, grinning back at me. “Every door has its own key.”
A fetid smell heaved into me. On the other side was the entrance to another corridor, where two bright red fire extinguishers hung like sentinels. They brushed Amin’s thighs as he passed through in front of me. The noises were suddenly very loud: whimpers, moans, outright yells from the very throat of pain. A row of barred doors stretched down one side of the corridor, the walls of which were smudged and crumbling. The stench, the heat, the sounds—alone they would have been horrific, together they were almost unbearable.
I blenched, and I blench from the page as I write—those sights I glimpsed as Amin led me past those cells—it takes … an almost physical effort to realize them, so deeply have I hidden them in my mind. So deeply have I hidden—
In the first cell, a man was threshing about in a barrel of water, his wrists tied clumsily to the sides with rope. In the second, a man was curled up on the concrete floor. Two soldiers were striking him with thick leather straps. In the corner of the third lay the corpse of a boy, his leg shattered, a sledgehammer leaning against the wall beside him. There was blood everywhere and fragments of bone, scattered about like chips of chalk in the puddles.
In the fourth cell were three women. They stood there naked and shivering, huddled together as a soldier walked round them, prodding them with a baton. It was a desperate sight, filling me with feelings of outrage and revulsion—but I was too scared to do anything.
I was transfixed for a moment, and then flung myself against the wall opposite the windows. I crouched on the floor. Amin reached down and gripped me hard by the upper arm.
“Come on,” he said, “don’t linger here, it is not natural. I want you to see the medical wing. There is a doctor there I’d like you to meet. He is a friend of yours.”
He led me beyond the cells, into a room full of beds. They were fully made up, and spotlessly clean. If it hadn’t been for the overpowering smell of rotten flesh that pervaded the whole building, you would have thought you were in a new, or recently overhauled hospital.
All the beds were empty except one, which was surrounded by a group of soldiers—maybe about ten, perhaps more.
“Is this your friend?” Amin said to me. “Is this man your colleague?”
The man on the bed was Waziri.
His head was bent down where a rope, also tied to his ankles, pulled at it. He looked up at me, as best he could with the fiber rope pressing into the flesh of his neck, his eyes full of terror. For a second, it was as if he was trying to speak: but his mouth was stuffed with a piece of rough plastic. The hard tough plastic of a fertilizer bag had been bent over several times and forced between his teeth.
Waziri moaned through the gag, spittle and blood running from the side of his mouth. I began to feel unsteady on my feet.
“This man,” Amin said, clapping me on the shoulder, “has done bad. He has associated himself with counterstate guerrillas from Tanzania and Rwanda under the leadership of Obote. He has been fighting me in the Ruwenzoris, operating out of Kabale. You have done bad also to be his friend.”
“I have done nothing,” I whispered, backing away from the hellish scene.
But I couldn’t. The soldiers were crowding behind me, pressing into me.
“You should know this, doctor,” Amin said. “When two men fight, one wins. You must not be disobeying me.”
Then he pointed at Waziri on the bed and said just one word. The word was “kalasi.”
One of the soldiers produced a knife with a white bone handle. It looked like an ordinary kitchen bread knife. I glanced at Amin; his face was as fixed and solid as that of a statue, his eyes locked on the man on the bed.
Waziri, seeing the knife, started blinking feverishly. With his neck and ankles still trussed, he tried to roll back into himself like a hedgehog. But by then the soldiers were already on him, pushing past me, pushing past Amin even and crowding round the bed. They dragged him onto the floor. One put a boot on his head. Our eyes met at that exact moment, and Waziri’s blinked again, and then all was obscured by the mass of camouflage swooping over him. I heard a gurgling sound and then I caught a glimpse of his bare torso—that, and the long, hideous blade shuttling back and forth.
When I came to, I was in one of the cells, lying on a truckle-bed. I looked at the concrete floor and breeze block walls. There were smears of brown everywhere: blood or feces, it was impossible to tell.
I didn’t know how long I had been in there. They had taken my watch from me. There was no natural light, just a bare bulb. The mattress was solid as a board and smelt strongly of urine, so I took it off and lay directly on the springs.
Shortly after I had done this, the door clanged open and a soldier came in. He had those ritual, one-eleven scars on his face—similar to Major Mabuse’s, but longer—and was carrying a tin plate of matooke. He shouted at me angrily in Swahili when he saw the mattress on the floor, and then switched into English.
“You filthy British,” he said. “You come here to take our sisters and then you throw our beds on the floor. Pick or you die!”
I struggled up from the bed and made a halfhearted attempt to lift the mattress onto it. The soldier let out a burst of Swahili, then squatted down and slid the plate of matooke across the floor. As he closed the heavy door behind him, I took one look at the steaming grey mash and started to retch.
I don’t remember much else … I’ve blocked it out. They only kept me there for a single night, I worked out later. I was delirious with fear for most of it. At one point, however, I remember hearing muffled rifle fire from outside; at another, whispered voices from the cell next door, to which two men had just been consigned. I listened to them talking:
“You have heard what happened to Felix Aswa?”
“No. How did it go with him? I was for running to my house when I heard the shooting in our quarter … Then they got me and took me into a car secretly.”
“They did not act secretly with him. They just grabbed him and shot him. And then they cut off his head with a panga. In broad daylight.”
“His head?”
“Yes, and then they took the head and made it drink from a cup. And they called the wife of Felix and said, Look, here is the head of your husband taking tea.”
“That is how it is in our country now.”
“And then they took the head to places unknown.”
I was about to call out to them when I heard the key sound in the lock of my own cell. The door opened and the soldier who had brought me the food entered.
“You, muzungu. Come with me. We are going to give you these.” He touched his cheek.
I looked up at him, not understanding. Then he patted the one-eleven scars on his cheek again, and smiled. The breath went out of my lungs. He came over and pulled me up by the arm. I struggled and shouted as he dragged me out into the corridor.
He stopped and smiled again, and then started laughing, pushing me in the ribs.
“Yee ssebo! It’s OK, it’s OK. I am joking. Eh, you, muzungu. Now, take off your clothes!”
I did as he said, trembling, and then he thrust me into a shower room. Still not sure whether he was joking about the scarification, I slumped against the wall under the cold water for something like twenty minutes.
When I came out, Wasswa was standing there, with a towel and some new clothes over his arm. I was so relieved to see his familiar face that at first I couldn’t speak.
“Are you OK, doctor?” he said, handing me the towel. “You have been a very foolish man to write about President Amin in that way and to plan subversive activities with Britain against Uganda.”
“Why have I been kept like this?” I mumbled. “I have done nothing.”
“You are very lucky that President Amin has given you clemency. He wants to see you right away.”
Once I had dressed, we went back into the corridor. I caught a glimpse through the bars of the two men I had heard speaking, one old, wearing traditional clothes, the other middle-aged, in a suit and tie. They looked up at me, surprised, as we passed.
“Please,” the younger one shouted, “help us. My name is Edward Epunau. I am an honest businessman.”
I stopped in my tracks, wanting to go back.
“Come on,” said Wasswa. “There is nothing you can do.”
“Help us!”
Wasswa took my arm. We walked up the corridor, past the other cells. I tried to ignore the now more muted sounds of their inmates, keeping my eyes firmly on the floor. I couldn’t bear to see those things again. We went between the two fire extinguishers.
The Minister pressed a concealed button. Part of the wall slid away, to reveal the chamber through which I had passed the previous night. In a corner I could see the glass cubicle, where the steaming electronics hissed and warbled like something living. I also noticed, stupefied as I was, that the door was plaster on the cell side—you wouldn’t have known it was there—and metal on the chamber side.
We walked up the second passageway. At the end, Wasswa pressed another button. I heard motion on the other side. The door swung open.
Amin was wearing an electric-blue safari suit with matching sombrero. He hugged me. In the mirrors I could see his wide shoulders in front of me, and the red-hide Proceedings of the Law Society of Uganda swinging shut behind. Their gold lettering glittered in the light.
“Ah, my good friend Doctor Nicholas. It is very nice to see you again, yes?”
“Yes, Your Excellency,” I said, in a careful monotone, trying to reacquaint myself with the nurserylike atmosphere of his bedroom. The toys and board games on the floor. The portrait of Lumumba. The television showing a boxing match.
“Now, first you must have some breakfast,” Amin said, grinning. “Then you can go home and you will be strong to do work tomorrow. I myself will be busy also. For there are many things happening in Uganda at this time.”
We went down to the dining room and I ate surprisingly heartily, speaking carefully when Amin asked me questions. I was, I realized, lucky to have escaped with my life and I was determined now to get out of this situation and take the next plane home. As I left, I felt faint from having eaten too much and too quickly.
“One more thing,” Amin said, as I was at the door. “As proof of your loyalty I want you to renounce your British citizenship and take up Ugandan citizenship immediately. Then I will know you are truly my friend. Wasswa has drawn up the papers and contacted London.”
I looked back at him, the beast, and wished that I had done as Stone had asked. Walking down the steps outside the Lodge to the van, I felt physically wrecked. My bones were aching, and the sunlight made me blink. I got into the van and drove home like a zombie.
Back in the bungalow later that day, I pulled myself together. I packed quickly. I just knew I had to get out. I took only a few changes of clothes, my passport, some traveler’s checks I’d taped to the bottom of a drawer for safekeeping—and my journal. The latter Amin had returned to me during the meal, enjoining me once again to write in future exactly what he told me.
“Come back soon and I will tell you all of my life story,” he had said. “It is very exciting. Because, as you know, I am the hero of all Africa.”