The Magic of Saida (33 page)

When Kamal left for Uganda with Shamim in July to begin a new academic year, it was inconceivable to him, to anyone around him, that he would not return to walk his beloved streets for thirty-five years. He left still a boy; he returned at the brink of old age.

A brief historical digression, at a time when history itself has been deemed irrelevant. (I have in mind, of course, the recent ban on the teaching of history by our minister of education.)

We were near the end of the first decade of independence. The Cold War was at its height; the blacks of southern Africa were yet to win freedom. And as our three countries found their voices to test their own recent freedom, political life turned shrill and nerve-racking, with real and imagined dangers. Tanzania was allied with Communist China. Kenya, the neighbour and potential partner in an East African federation, was America’s friend and therefore busy chasing communists. Uganda had followed Tanzania in its ideology. The Chinese sent a trade mission to Tanzania and cheap Chinese imitations of workable quality had flooded the market. The Cubans and the Russians had aided the revolution in Zanzibar a few years before and were allies. Che Guevara passed through Dar es Salaam, in disguise some said. White South Africa was the enemy, as was Portugal, which still ruled Mozambique, the neighbour to our south. The white minority in Rhodesia had unilaterally declared
independence from Britain, which became an enemy because of its equivocation and because it sold arms to South Africa. The streets of Dar es Salaam therefore often throbbed with demonstrations in which emotions ran high.

Still, the sometimes runaway rhetoric and loud assertions, and the political and social experimentation, were a sign of our hope, our claim to our future. This was East Africa, not Congo. It functioned. The railways ran, the post office delivered, the high courts sat. We ran the marathons. We never thought we could slip so easily into breakdown, repression. We were not made for government overthrows.

We were deluded.

One morning in January in the second year of med school, as Kamal emerged from residence on his way to breakfast, there seemed to be something distinctly different about the campus. A group of guys stood around a crackling radio in someone’s hands; down the road a similar cluster was deep in discussion. Elsewhere seemed quiet and lifeless. There were no cars on the road. Kamal’s first thought was that the American president, or some Kennedy, had been assassinated; perhaps the old man of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, had died. There were always rumours of those sorts. As he came into the dining room, which was more raucous than usual, and stood in line for his eggs, someone told him the news: there had been a coup in the country. What country? This country, Uganda—the army has taken over the government! General Idi Amin has spoken on the radio!

There came stories of celebration in Kampala streets, a show of arms by the military; the chubby giant Idi Amin was cheered when he took a tour of the city on the back of an open Land Rover. The deposed president, Milton Obote, who had been at a Commonwealth conference in Singapore, protesting British treachery, became an exile. Classes were cancelled at Makerere that day, but Kamal had hospital rounds in the afternoon assisting a professor; Shamim was upcountry with a psychiatry class under an American doctor, visiting Jinja, where the entire fourth form of a school, consisting of eighty girls, had had a fainting fit.

The coup, the coming of the “Second Republic,” seemed like a
good thing after the socialist rhetoric and corruption of the previous regime. The British and the Americans immediately recognized Amin’s new government. Every issue of the national newspaper, the
Argus
, contained paeans in praise of Amin, beginning with “Happy Days Are Here Again!” Delegations of women, priests, elders, and others arrived from all over the country to the State House to pay homage to this saviour who promised peace and love to the nation. Schoolchildren came out for him holding up flags. All prayed for his long life. There was something of the common man about General Amin, something more African and unpretentious compared to the stiff, suited Obote. A man of humble background, who had risen through the ranks in the colonial army, this bluff heavyweight boxer and accordion player was so evidently a man of the people; he talked as straight as he punched, and he possessed a sense of humour.

It was as the days passed and “politics was suspended” by decree and the army “requested” the general to stay in power for the next five years that whispers about kidnappings and brutal murders by the soldiers slowly began to spread, and it was realized—but not by the
Argus
—that this African nationalist was not the messiah he had seemed. One night a short, sharp scream was heard in the middle of the night from one of the residences down the road from Kamal’s, followed by the sound of Land Rovers grinding away. In the morning the news got around that a law professor had been taken away, the one who had protested about violations of the constitution and human rights. Soon after, a frightened Dr. Omama, gynecology professor, was escorted out of the faculty in broad daylight, to work, it was said, for the State Research Bureau, the torture factory. Thus the sanctity of the university had been violated. A satanic spirit had descended upon the city and the country, and possessed it. The
Argus
’s euphoria, however, continued unabated.

Meanwhile, Tanzania, which had refused to recognize the legitimacy of Idi Amin’s republic, and moreover had offered exile to former president Obote, had been declared an enemy of Uganda. The Tanzanian students at Makerere, including Kamal and Shamim, asked to be transferred to Dar es Salaam and, as the rhetoric heated up, awaited a response from their government.

•  •  •

One Friday evening Kamal and Shamim were returning from the main Kampala Shamsi prayer house. Prayer meetings at the university had ceased, and Shamim was one of the devout who insisted on going all the way to the city to pray. During these uncertain times special prayers were on offer every night for the well-being of the community, the nation, and Idi Amin. That evening there was no other student returning from the khano with them; perhaps those few who had come had stayed in the city. The night was thick and dark, with little traffic on the road. As the bus groaned up to the top of Makerere Hill Road, it was stopped at an army checkpoint.

Two soldiers in berets climbed up, ambled casually down the aisle, looking left and right, checking out the nervous passengers. Coming upon the Asian girl, pretty and fair at that, and dressed up, their faces lit up. They stopped.

“We are university students,” Kamal said. That often carried weight. They ignored him, both pairs of eyes fixed upon the girl. Both men were tall and armed with pistols. Despite the cheerful looks beaming down from their round, Ugandan faces, the menace in the air was electric. The bus had turned quiet.

“Madam—you must come out of the bus.”

“Why?” Shamim said, then looked at Kamal and stood up.

“I am with her,” Kamal said proprietorially and followed her behind the two men.

“What are you doing with an Asian girl?” one of the soldiers asked Kamal as he got off the bus. “Africans not good enough for you? Are you her servant?”

“My father was Asian,” he muttered. “We are Tanzanian students.”

“So your Asian father likes Africans. That is good. African is good, the best. Now you, madam …”

The two soldiers hustled them behind the bus where it was quiet. The entire area was wooded and deeply dark. The odd car came up the hill, briefly lighting the tarmac and throwing down shadows, and was pulled over then let go at the roadblock farther up where several jeeps were parked and at least half a dozen soldiers stood around.

The soldiers were in good humour with Shamim, in the manner African men adopted with Asian girls who took themselves too seriously while being very evidently nervous. These two, joined briefly
by an inquisitive third with a red bob on his beret, would have dearly wished this girl to be of the Madhvanis, the Velshis, the Mehtas, any of the wealthy Uganda Indian families they could have extorted from. I am a Tanzanian, Shamim kept insisting, finally thrusting her driver’s licence at them.

That meant she was as wealthy and spoiled as she looked. Anything could have been possible that night. The few other passengers who had got off the bus were back inside; the soldiers stepped aside and conferred among themselves. There was the crackling of a radio somewhere. By this time her purse had been searched and the money removed without fuss; her neck chain had been requested for inspection—“Gold? Hmm”—and pocketed.

“Say the Nandé-ali,” Shamim whispered to him, “and we will be saved.”

“I don’t know it!”

“Say any prayer!”

The two soldiers came over and one grabbed her hand. “Come for search, madam.”

Kamal took a step forward, to what purpose he had no idea, but he had to; the gallantry and folly of the male. But the third soldier, who had returned to the scene, quickly moved up to block his way and gave him a violent push. Kamal recovered to find a pistol pointed at him. A nightmare come alive. The sheer size and strength of the man, the menace in his eyes sent a chill through Kamal. At that moment Shamim gave a blood-curdling scream. Which is what perhaps saved them, for a car or two had been stopped farther up the road, though again anything was possible. Even after her scream she was pulled away, but they brought her back very shortly. It did not occur to the soldiers that their two detainees had no relatives in town to raise a cry for them.

That scream became a legend, as did Kamal’s hopeless act of gallantry, for the story would get repeated many times in their future home and among friends.

When the bus dropped them off they ran to her room, barely able to speak; she fell into her bed, shaking and in tears, clinging to him; and they found themselves lying down together like that for the night. He never asked her exactly what happened when they
pulled her away, but she looked unhurt. She would tease him at having got into her bed so conveniently, and he would remind her that she had clung to him and fallen asleep. He didn’t tell her that she looked attractive and helpless and he had kissed her on both eyes. They would often return at times of stress to this terrifying night that ended in an embrace that glued them together.

A few weeks after that experience General Idi Amin announced his instructions from God: the Asians of Uganda were bloodsuckers, throw them all out. He gave them three months to leave the country.

“I confess that there were moments when I secretly admired Idi Amin—when I thought he couldn’t be all bad, that he spoke for the common African, and the excesses belonged to those who were under him. After all, soldiers everywhere are capable of excesses.”

Kamal had a point, and I recalled as a young man at university in Dar es Salaam my own reactions to Amin. There was something to Uganda’s general that brought on a smile of approval, that made you want to believe and cheer. Here was an African who was utterly natural, who didn’t have to assume English manners—like the Kenyan politicians in their pinstripes. Our own president was not a mimic but a scholar who had translated
Macbeth
into Swahili—laudable and exemplary, but compare that to Amin, who could jump off his jeep and join the guys in a football game. And yet he could talk back with utter insouciance to anybody in the world, including the British prime minister: if Britain was so concerned about Uganda’s Asians, why was it so reluctant to take them, even when they held British passports?

Yes, I admitted to him, in Dar too some of us had cheered the general initially.

It was the Golo in him who sent up the partial cheer for Idi Amin. It was the half-caste who had identified with the house servants (“boys”), flinched at their abuse and humiliations, and suffered his own share of them in school. It was the boy who had cried for his African mother and his special friend in Kilwa. He recalled his horror and shame when he saw a young African woman coming out of his uncle’s back room. He had been reminded of his mother—and
wept at night because he was nothing but a half-caste bastard. He could not say all this to Shamim, of course, but he tried to explain to her why the crowds cheered Amin when he told the Asians to go.

“Are you saying you support the expulsion of Asians?”

“Of course not. I am just telling you why people support it.”

She gave him a sharp look. They were sitting at an outdoor chai shop on campus, and right then they should have seen the gulf between them and backed off from each other.

But there was this other side of him that saw through the cynical reverse racism that was at work. The Asians had overnight become “aliens” and “foreigners,” objects of hate and derision. Every day the
Argus
carried new vilifications of them, its language disturbingly Orwellian. When Idi Amin, speaking to Makerere students at city centre, denounced the “economic saboteurs” and the “engineers of corruption,” there were loud cheers of support. Kamal was among the thousands who went to hear him; from where he stood, he saw the general at a distance, a chubby toy soldier, his voice booming over the loudspeakers, promising an economic revolution once this virus infecting the nation was gone. It looked much too easy, pointing fingers at a minority of a different colour too frightened to defend itself. He recalled that terrifying night when he and Shamim had been accosted by the soldiers, how easily they had palmed her money and her gold chain. Corruption? Who received the bribes but those Africans in power?

Many years later, after Rwanda, he would wonder, was a genocide conceivable in Uganda under slightly altered circumstances? Perhaps the Asians were protected from that fate by the fact of who they were.

He did not cheer Idi Amin that morning—though he was careful not to appear too obvious—and left thinking of his Indian great-grandfather Punja, who had made Africa his home and called himself “Sawahil,” and was hanged by the Germans for supporting a resistance.
Punja was a lion
. Mzee Omari had affirmed that. And Idi Amin had served as a soldier for the British, hunting Mau Mau in Kenya. Nothing was straightforward.