Read The Last King of Scotland (1998) Online
Authors: Giles Foden
I was fascinated by all that side of it, the shapes as much as what they meant: the smear on the slide of
Trypanosoma brucei
– “Tryp the light fantastic,” Ivor trilled every time it was mentioned, fluttering his fingers – like a raindrop on inky paper; the squashed mulberry look of gonorrheal cells in urethral discharge. Diplococci.
The snake-bite cases were a fright. The patients sat there with their swollen feet and calves – usually the bites were from when they’d been tending the matooke plantations – and, in a clay pot or old maize-oil can on their knees, the snake itself. We’d check it against the description in the Fitzsimons snake-bite pamphlet and select the right anti-venom.
One time a snake-bite case came in, the snake wasn’t dead. It escaped from its pot. Everyone ran out of outpatients screaming. But Waziri knocked it senseless with the tyre-iron from the Land Rover. He brought it out hooked over the curl of the iron and tossed the black-and-yellow thing at me for a joke. It landed at my feet. “That’s not very funny,” I said. “It might not have been dead.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, grinning broadly, “I knew it was.” Then we all crowded round, looking at it where it lay in the dust like a withered piece of rubber hose.
There was less midwifery than you’d expect; most of them gave birth in the villages, having worked in the fields up until the last minute. This resulted in a considerable number of cases of vaginal fistula, where the foetus had rubbed a hole in the tissues. Even the Cubans threw up their hands then, and we had to send those cases up to Kampala. The journey did for a lot of them, making the hole bigger.
“A snowball’s chance in hell,” Merrit said as we watched one of the worst ones – she could only have been fourteen – set off down the track.
∗
On my way out of the compound one morning, I bumped into Sara. Oh, all right, I engineered the bumping – why is it I seem to fall in love with women the moment I clap eyes on them? It is an inadequacy (another!), not a gift.
Climbing the hill together, we stopped for a moment to look at the army barracks on the edge of town. Squatting in the parade ground, in the shadow of the redbrick building, one little group of men looked as if they were checking their guns or something (we could just make out blankets spread on the ground, with dark bits on them). Another group was loading kit into a phalanx of jeeps. We could hear their voices, rising up faintly like shreds of ash from a bonfire.
“There’ll be a big troop movement this afternoon,” Sara said firmly. “Come on. We’ll be late for work.”
During the week that followed, an increasing number of patients with bullet wounds and blade lacerations presented at the clinic. Mostly farmers, but some soldiers too.
“They’re getting restless,” Ivor said gleefully one evening, slinging an empty blood bag into the over-full bin.
Wrinkled, sucked out like a dried tomato, the bag landed on top of a scrump of white paper: obsolete fever curves torn off the clipboards, and old drug requisition forms. As Ivor went off to lock up, I stared at it like a dumb animal – lethargic, disengaged – and wondered what I was doing there. All the staff had gone home except for us and the night sister.
I heard Ivor’s rich, Christmas-pudding voice behind me. “We’re running out of blood again, you know. You’d think there were vampires here. Come and see this old girl.”
I walked down the dim ward, eyes following me from the stark metal beds, and joined him where he was leaning over the latest case of wounds. The woman groaned as he pulled back the sheet to point out the passage of the bullet: through her breast, from the side, and then down into her hand, shattering a knuckle.
“The breast is fine but the hand is done for. She says the soldiers accused her of feeding the Obote guerrillas from over the border.”
We said good-night to the sister and went out into the car-park. Bats were swooping around under the trees. It was so quiet you could hear their wings.
On the way down the hill, Ivor placed his hand softly in the small of my back. I edged away and carried on talking, pretending it hadn’t happened, and then it was just as if nothing had. I liked old Ivor, he brightened the place up, but I didn’t much fancy being one of his laddies.
“He’s got
another
new cook-boy,” as Mrs Merrit said from time to time in shock-horror tones. “It can’t be right. Somebody’ll complain to the police one day and then we’ll have trouble on our hands.”
∗
I became quite friendly with Waziri. We went out on our first vaccination safari together after a month or two. East Ankole: Ruhama, Rwampara, Isingiro, Kashari, Nyabusozi, Mitoma, Kiruhura. On rough roads, with the Ruwenzoris stretched high above us, it was quite a trip – we even crossed a river – and the Land Rover bumped about so much that I had to hold on to my seat. Waziri’s sun-glasses case skittered about on the dashboard as we negotiated rocks and pot-holes, tree-stumps and the odd stray goat.
“The steering needs correcting,” he said, when we stopped for petrol: from a jerrycan on the roof. I walked to the edge of the road for a pee while he filled up.
The sound of me going, together with the glug-glug of the petrol behind, made it feel like we were by a brook. As my bladder relaxed, I stared out into the various landscape: dust, marsh, mountain, forest, farmland – smooth green carpets of tea, cotton bushes, grazing for cows – and a clutch of different diseases for each locale.
On my way back to the Land Rover, one of the largest butterflies I had ever seen alighted on my shirt. It was easily as big as my hand. I watched its blue and red wings slowly opening and closing on my chest. It was very beautiful indeed, but seen close up, with its antennae searching the air just below my breast pocket, it was also slightly threatening.
“Ekwihuguhugu,” said Waziri, softly.
“What?” I whispered. It sounded like ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’.
“The butterfly. In Kinyankole-Luchiga, the mountain dialect, we call them Ekwihuguhugu. It means: this one is very fragile. They are the biggest butterflies in the world.”
I looked down at the insect and said the word. It flew off then, as if I had uttered an occult command, flapping over the eroded red earth at the side of the road and disappearing into the bush.
“It was probably attracted by the smell of your urine,” Waziri said, as we got into the Land Rover. “Or the petrol. We don’t usually see them this far down off the mountains.”
We drove from village to village, spraying the huts with their wobbly roofs: you had to spray the cone at the top especially or else the insects could still breed up there, thus becoming immune. Mosquitoes and mbwa – the small black fly
Simulium damnosum
– were what we were after. The dog fly, it used to be called. Its bite produces a worm which swells up the blood vessels, causing ulcers and, in the worst cases, blindness. The larvae live in river weed.
And then we inoculated: TB, polio, cholera, smallpox, the empty vials chinking as I threw each one into an old biscuit tin.
Though I knew that they were not, to my stranger’s eye each village seemed the same. The chickens would scatter as we drove in and the women look up from their mats of drying millet, or the matooke they were steaming on charcoal grates. Everyone would gather round. A hubbub. We’d set up our white trestle table and lay out the syringes. They’d all queue up – excited, mistrustful or just plain scared. I’d rub the arms. Sometimes people would wince more from the coldness of the alcohol on the cotton wool than they would from the needle.
Afterwards, Waziri would read the riot act in Kinyankole, the smoke from the matooke grates swirling behind him. This was how it went:
On the penultimate day of the tour, night fell before we could get to Butogota, a village in the Bwindi district. It started to rain, bringing the smell of tropical vegetation into the cab. On the way we passed a track on the right and a wooden sign with ‘Bwindi Impenetrable Forest’ written on it, flashing up wet in the headlights. I couldn’t believe it, but it was for real.
“Your explorers called it that, not us,” Waziri said. “Bwindi just means dark. Bwindi dark, omushana light. The pygmies live inside, what’s left of them. It’s not a nice place. You must never go there, Nicholas. It is full of army as well now, anyway.”
So was everywhere. The following night, as we got back to Mbarara, we nearly ran into a road-block that had just a single hurricane lamp as illumination. And I do mean nearly ran into it: stopping just short of the spiky mat laid out to burst the tyres.
“Simama hapi!” a voice shouted. A figure emerged, rising up from the bushes on the side of the road as if from the wings of a theatre.
“What’s that mean?” I whispered to Waziri.
“Stop there.”
As he replied, the tip of a rifle appeared on the window sill. I could smell beer on the soldier’s breath when he leaned in, his camouflage hat pulled down tight. He said something. Waziri replied, quite short with him, I thought, and then there was silence for a few seconds, with the soldier just leaning there over his gun and looking at us. Eventually Waziri flung a 200-shilling note at him and we drove off, skirting the mat.
“Goatfuckers,” Waziri said, shaking his head.
To calm our nerves, we went for a drink in the Changalulu, one of the bars in town. We got quite drunk, or I did at least. I was upbeat, in spite of the road-block incident.
“I really feel like things are coming good for me here,” I confided to him. “It’s like I’m in the real Africa.”
He laughed. “You muzungu are always saying things like that, as if there’s some kind of secret to be discovered. We had one man here looking for the site of King Solomon’s Mines. The idiot thought it was up in the Ruwenzoris. I told him he’d find it in a maize patch if he looked hard enough.”
“The alien corn,” I said. “You know the Bible story.”
“Of course. I went to the mission school. We all did. Well, those who went to school.”
He drained his glass and stood up, his tall ascetic frame a shadow against the wall. “Want another?”
I looked round the bar as he went to get them. A woman in a red bandanna was wiping tables. It was getting late and there was just one other customer, a soldier, quite high-ranking, I could see from his peaked cap and brass pips. He was staring moodily into his glass. I noticed that he had fierce-looking ritual scars on each cheek.
“So, you want to see the real Africa, my friend?” Waziri plonked the beer down in front of me. There was a slight mocking tone in his voice. “You should go down to the hotel some time. Every third Tuesday they do the devil dance or the witch sniffing or whatever you want to call it there. For the tourists.”
He scratched his head. “Though God knows, there’s not many of those nowadays. It’s fun, though. The usual thing: the dancers moving their knees up and dropping shells and powders in the dirt.”
“Do they really believe it all?”
“Who, the tourists or the dancers?” He raised his eyebrow.
The officer got up to leave, giving us a hard look as he passed.
“That’s Major Mabuse,” Waziri said, turning to watch him go. “He was just a taxi-driver before the coup. A nasty piece of work.”
“They all seem to be.”
“Not all,” he said, after a pause. “Well,” he continued. “Amin is the nastiest, I’ll grant you that. You know he’s coming here next month? There’s going to be a reception at the football stadium.”
“Will you go?”
“Of course not. I wouldn’t be associated with that monster in any way whatsoever.”
We sat in silence for another moment and then I asked him more about the dancing. “Is it just like a custom or something to believe in properly?”
He nodded, or half-nodded. “Properly.”
“Really? In this day and age, even here?”
“Here is my country, Nicholas. Well, they do in a way and not in others. When it suits, like any belief. Sometimes it’s useful, though: for explaining the inexplicable. And the frightening aspect of it is like a form of psychotherapy. Shock treatment. In that way, it’s the show of the thing that’s interesting. It all depends, I’ve come to this conclusion, on the rustling of the dried leaf skirts. It’s like a form of vagueness that lets you imagine things, only you hear it. And obviously the masks as well. They have a big lion one that is very wonderful.”
“And tom-toms?”
“Naturally. And beans in gourds and a big blue cockerel whose blood you throw down in the dust, whatever you want. They whip the bad spirits out of the place and the tourists all stand there clicking it with the cameras and then the man in the lion mask comes round for the collection. You know it is Nestor, the night watchman from our place?”
“No! I wouldn’t have thought he has the energy to leap around.”
“He does when he gets the fever in him and there’s some young girl bouncing about. Then his legs spring like a young goat. But he helps people, too. They go to him and he rubs the stuff- the magic substance, the muti – on their bodies. And sometimes it works, too. Not often, but now and then.”
T
he boy I had talked to when I first arrived, the one with the T-shirt and the wire toy car, was waiting for me outside the clinic one evening. He handed me a folded note: “Dear Doctor Garrigan, this is my brother Gugu. I believe you have met him. I am writing to ask if you can come for lunch on Sunday. Yours sincerely, Bon-ney Malumba.”
So at the weekend off I went to the Malumbas’. Boniface, smart in a pair of bell-bottom trousers, greeted me in the hall.
“My long-lost friend Doctor Nicholas.”
Gugu scampered about between us. Mrs Malumba, a portly matron in a long gown with tufted sleeves, offered to wash my feet, but I declined, of course. It was quite a swish house, by local standards. They even had a television, a small black-and-white one with a V-shaped aerial on top.