The Last King of Scotland (1998) (7 page)

I was tired even before the journey began. After walking from the Speke the next morning, and struggling with my bags through the crush of the matatu park, trying to seal off from my hearing the relentless beeping of horns and blowing of whistles while deciphering the destination calls of the touts – who tended to hang, at the acute angle of slalom skiers, by one arm out of the sliding doorways of their vans – I had finally taken a seat at the back of (to be specific) Matatu Number 8.

This number wasn’t displayed prominently, however, either at the front or the back of the vehicle. It was on a little square of torn cardboard propped against the windscreen – and I only noticed that once I was installed, having made laborious enquiries. Walking round each minibus, wherever you might have expected a number to have been, there were brightly lettered messages instead: ‘Travel Hopefully’, I remember, and ‘Go with God’. Elsewhere, “Africa Superstar Express’. Inside the van, stencilled above the driver’s head, was yet another sign: ‘No Condition is Permanent’ it said, whether warning or comfort I could not tell.

My seat, under which I had stowed my luggage, was only partly covered. The springs came through, poking up between fibrous stuffing and remnants of plastic. I moved about uncomfortably, listening to the thumps on the roof as they loaded up the cargo. I saw crates of Fanta and Coca-Cola, bundles of newly planed wood, heavy sacks of rice or grain stamped with an inky logo, a long tower (almost as long as the bus itself) of red plastic washing bowls, one inside the other, the inevitable stalks of matooke, or green banana – and so much more being passed up, that I wondered how we would ever manage to travel.

While we were waiting, I looked out of the window. On the ground nearby, ignoring the human bustle around it, a crow was picking at something, tearing at something, holding it down with its foot. I looked more closely. It was the carcass of a brown animal. I realized that it was one of the species of big rats I had seen gambolling by a wall on my way back to the Speke the evening before. Or, as I’d fancied, dancing strathspeys and reels – on account of it being Burns Night, as I’d suddenly realized: Amin’s first night of power. I say rats, but they were more like rabbits, one sitting up on its hind legs to give me a curious look as I had passed by.

Watching the beak of the crow as it tugged at the fur and the pink flesh beneath, I began to feel sick. This surprised me, since I had always had quite a strong stomach when faced with dissections. I supposed it was the difference of the dissections being scientific, the smell of formaldehyde on my hands disguising, back, then, during my practicals, the fact of the matter.

By the time the last of the freight had been humped up and the tout, who also doubled as conductor, had given his final catcall and grabbed his last fistful of grubby notes, my thighs were beginning to hurt a great deal from the metal coils in the seat. As we roared off with crashing gears and a cloud of dust and exhaust, I folded my jacket and put it underneath me. This action disturbed one of the goats, which was doubled up next to my suitcase under the seat, its shanks horribly tied with wire flex. It also caused a certain amount of merriment among my neighbours. The old woman next to me said something loudly. I caught the word ‘muzungu’ – meaning white man, I’d already worked out. A titter went around the van, everyone looking at me as if I were some kind of zoo animal.

I just grinned back awkwardly, as we bumped along the pot-holed road out of the city – grinned at the mixed bunch of merchants, mainly women, with their goods and animals (one had a live chicken squashed into a basket on her knee), farmers and crying babies. All were very poor, although I noticed that there was one passenger who seemed, by virtue of his smart blue worsted suit and the hard brown Samsonite-type case on his knees, to be more prosperous than the rest. He was reading a newspaper – with some difficulty, as the crush meant he could only open it a fraction.

There were also several serious-looking young men in ill-fitting Western clothes. One was seated directly behind me. I suspected these were civil servants returning to the country; Swanepoel had said they’d been laid off by the new regime. The one behind me, though, turned out to be a student of Food Science at Makerere University in Kampala.

“You are a doctor then, sir?” he said, having enquired after my name and the purpose of my visit to Mbarara.

I nodded.

“You will be at the clinic with Doctor Merrit?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“I am glad that you are coming there. We have a great need of doctors, so long as they do not cost too much money. Doctor Merrit is very costly. Even the African doctor there is too expensive for many of our people.”

“I’m sure they try not to be,” I said, “any doctor does – but it’s the same problem everywhere, I’m afraid. In my country there are terrible arguments going on about who should pay for medical care. And in America, you have to have insurance to get anywhere at all.”

I watched his expression as he absorbed this information. A furrow went across his high brow. I wondered – twisted awkwardly backwards to look at him, with his black plastic spectacles perched on his nose and his limp-collared white shirt – whether I had said something out of place.

“Sir, I do not think you have been in Uganda very long,” he said. “Even wealthy families here suffer from many deaths in a single year. When I listen to the BBC World Service or go to read the newspaper in the British Council in Kampala, I am amazed, sir. They make so much fuss in Britain when just one person is killed. In Uganda we are the world champions of death by comparison, but I never hear a single mention of this. I never see or hear a single report in all my life.”

I made a kind of sympathetic gesture with my mouth, unsure of what was expected of me at this point. “I’m sorry,” I said eventually. “I’m sure I’ll be confronted with the worst of it all pretty soon.”

“My family are from Mbarara,” he informed me then. “So I know that place. I am shifting there to see them. My name is Boniface Malumba. You must call me Bonney. Because I know some white people who never use first names, if they ever speak to us one bit.”

He sank back into his seat – as uncomfortable as mine, so far as I could tell.

“That’s very rude,” I said, confused, “I won’t do that.” I wish you’d leave me alone, I thought to myself.

Then he grinned sheepishly. “Doctor Garrigan, I am sorry for my words. It is not your fault. You are good man, I can see. You are welcome at my father’s house in Mbarara. I will send word for you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “That would be lovely.”

I turned back round, glad to be relieved of the double burden of having to conduct a conversation like that while twisted round on those torturous springs. The old woman next to me, who had a turban on her head, appeared to be the proprietor of the goat beneath the seat. It was getting restive. She gave the poor creature a kick, then smiled at me with toothless gums.

My thighs were still hurting as we carried on into the countryside, in spite of the folded jacket. We passed clumps of banana plantations by the side of the road and open lorries going in the opposite direction, most of them piled high with the waxy fruit – it’s eaten green, in a savoury dish, not yellow like at home – and belching out clouds of black exhaust. There were boys with bananas, too, the large bunches of forty or fifty balanced precariously on the back of their old-fashioned bicycles.

The towns along the way had intriguing names – Mpigi, Buwama, Lukaya, Masaka, Mbirizi, Lyantonde – but were all run down and rather dull, most of them simply a string of single-storey shops and houses along the road. Only Masaka was of any substance. We stopped there for a break and I grabbed some beef and rice at the Tropic-o” – Paradise Restaurant, where – on a crude poster of a dusky pirate clutching a struggling girl – “mouthwatering food’ was advertised. It wasn’t.

Near Sanga, the next village along from Lyantonde, the main incident of interest on my trip took place. There was a blast on the horn and we came to a juddering, wheezing halt – you could actually hear the driver pumping on the brakes. The goat-kicking woman tugged at my sleeve and pointed, saying something I did not understand.

Looking ahead, over the other passengers, I saw a pile of branches in the road and farther along a lorry slewed across it. The branches, I realized, were the Ugandan equivalent of traffic cones, or a danger triangle.

I leant over to get a better view. It was not a banana but a tea lorry, with the name of one of the main trading companies, James Finlay, emblazoned across the door of the cab, which had swung open. All across the tarmac in front were sacks of tea, some of them split open so that the black powder spilled out. Only it didn’t look as if the powder had spilled out, but as if the tarmac had crumbled and was climbing into the bags.

Next to the road a man, who must have been the driver, was sitting on the ground with his head in his hands. I could also see a number of soldiers, a couple of them perched on the sacks of tea, drinking beer out of bottles, and more next to a canvas bivouac under a mango tree.

The chatter in the bus fell silent. One of the soldiers had climbed in. He was wearing a shabby green uniform and a crumpled forage cap, and he carried an automatic rifle. It looked heavy, with at least three curving magazines of ammunition, one stuck in, the others taped on, side by side, ready to be flipped up. I was also intrigued to see, as he walked down the aisle, that on his feet he wore a pair of pink fluffy slippers.

The soldier said something loudly and people began to reach into their bags and the folds of their clothing, bringing out tattered identity papers. I dug around for my passport. When it came to my turn, I handed it to him meekly, keeping an eye on the end of the gun which, hung over his shoulder with the ungainly bundle of magazines banging into his hip, swung dangerously near my nose.

The soldier flicked through the pages of my passport, looked at me, closed it, and then opened it again, flicking through once more. I glanced up at him expectantly, but he obviously didn’t speak English. Then he beckoned to me to come with him, waving the passport like a reproach.

I turned round and looked anxiously at Boniface. He said something to the soldier but the soldier just snapped at him and began to pull at my clothes.

I stood up. “What does he want?” I asked Boniface.

Boniface made the money sign with his thumb and forefinger. “He wants shillings,” he whispered. “You will have to give him some. If you don’t, he will be troublesome.”

I turned to face the soldier, raising my palms in a gesture of surrender, as if he was pointing the gun at me – which he was, more or less – and nodding stupidly. Don’t be frightened, I told myself. I reached down and fumbled in the inside pocket of the folded jacket on the seat, trying to extract a 200-shilling note without showing my wallet. When I managed to get something, it turned out to be 500 shillings.

The soldier tucked it into one of the pouches on his belt, without a word, and moved along up the bus as if the encounter had not taken place. Everyone else had got their money ready by now, from the civil-servant types to the poorest-looking old women. They were all so calm (even the babies seemed to have gone quiet) and apparently inured to the procedure that he might as well have been making the collection at church.

Except for one. When the soldier came alongside the prosperous-looking man with the blue suit, he leant over him and slammed his hand down on the brown case, barking an order in Swahili – meaning, I supposed, that the man should open it.

I was surprised to hear the man reply in English. “I am a Kenyan diplomat doing government business in Uganda,” he said, as if he were making a statement in court. “You have no right to make me open this case. I can show you my passport, I can show you my papers.”

The soldier’s face turned ugly – he let off a barrage of abuse at the Kenyan and then went to the front of the bus, shouting.

“It is not good,” whispered Boniface.

Two more soldiers climbed aboard. They approached the Kenyan and started to pull the case off his knee. The man bent over, hugging the case as if it were a child.

“You have no right to do this,” he protested. “What you are doing is wrong. My visas and my permits are in order.”

The soldiers kept saying something, kept repeating a word over and over again.

“They are saying,” Boniface explained, “that he is a spy.”

One of the new soldiers (this one was wearing no shoes at all, and a pair of trousers so ragged they were indecent) swung his gun round. Hard. The ugly sight sticking up at the end tore into the Kenyan’s cheek. The original soldier wrenched the case away, as the others started slapping the man about his bloodied face.

The man moaned. The long noise of it came down the bus as the soldiers clattered off with the case. I watched them walk towards their fellows under the mango tree, one of them hefting the case up on to his head.

People began to talk again, and the driver started up the engine. As we skirted the sacks of tea and the lorry, which hadn’t moved – the driver was still sitting there with his head in his hands – Boniface tapped me on the shoulder.

“You see how we have to suffer in Africa,” he said, “you see how we have a life that is very hard.”

“Yes,” I said, nonplussed, “yes.”

Feeling guilty, I reached under the seat, where my bag was (the goat, having stopped thrashing about, had sunk into a near catatonic state), and rummaged around. I stood up and pushed through with my plastic first-aid box to where the Kenyan was sitting. He was just looking straight ahead. Blood was running down his cheek, falling on to his shirt in thick globules.

The wound was nastier than I had imagined. A flap of skin hung down, raw, where the sight had caught him. I could see at once that it would need stitching. “Excuse me,” I said. “I am a doctor. I can treat your wound.”

I leaned over him. Several of the other passengers had got up and were crowding behind me, intrigued at what the muzungu was doing. The Kenyan, as if snapping out of a trance, lifted one of his hands. He turned round to face me, the blood streaming down.