Abyssinian Chronicles Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR MOSES ISEGAWA’S

  ABYSSINIAN CHRONICLES

  “Epic, sprawling, brimming with life—and death, Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles blasts open the tidy borders of the conventional first novel and redraws the literary map to reveal a whole new world.… Eloquent, harrowing, and compulsively readable.”

  —Francine Prose, Elle

  “The first richly imaginative treatment of contemporary Uganda in fiction.… It is in parts haunting, and grippingly good.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  “There are few first novelists who write with the assurance and authority of Isegawa. This is a young writer who will command attention from the literary world for many years to come.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “As Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was for modern India, Abyssinian Chronicles will likely prove to be a breakthrough book for Uganda.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Isegawa’s style is an intriguing and at times baffling mixture of exuberance on the one hand, and, on the other, a hard, journalistic realism, which dramatises its scornful insights in language rarely less than elegant.”

  —The Independent (London)

  “Black Americans should read Isegawa not only as a great storyteller in the African tradition but as a great textbook writer of the struggle for personal freedom in the face of a society fractured by the slavery of colonialism. All Americans should read him—frankly, for the same reason.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Overall, one of the most impressive works of fiction to have ever come out of Africa. A spectacular debut performance.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  “Bewitching.… Abyssinian Chronicles is, in every sense, a big book, exploding with big themes and a rich cast of colourful characters.… A funny, gripping, angry epic.”

  —The Observer (London)

  “Very few novels have its exuberance; still fewer hit their marks with Isegawa’s assurance and poise.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “One of the most sensitive and encompassing portraits of a modern African society to date. At this novel’s conclusion, the lingering question concerns what more its gifted author might have to tell us.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  MOSES ISEGAWA

  ABYSSINIAN CHRONICLES

  Moses Isegawa was born in Kampala, Uganda. In 1990, he left Uganda for the Netherlands and is now a Dutch citizen. This is his first novel.

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, NOVEMBER 2001

  Copyright © 2000 by Moses Isegawa

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the Netherlands as Abessijnse kronieken by Uitgeverij De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, in 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Moses Isegawa. Copyright Nederlandse Vertaling © 1998 by Ria Loohuizen. This English language edition first published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Isegawa, Moses, [date]

  [Abessijnse kronieken. English]

  Abyssinian chronicles / by Moses Isegawa.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78780-4

  1. Uganda—Fiction. I. Title.

  PT5881.19.S24 A2413 2000

  839.3’1364—dc21

  99-089888

  Author photo © Jerry Bauer

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  _______

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  List of Main Characters

  List of African Words

  Book One

  … 1971: VILLAGE DAYS

  Book Two

  THE CITY

  Book Three

  AMIN, THE GODFATHER

  Book Four

  SEMINARY YEARS

  Book Five

  NINETEEN SEVENTY-NINE

  Book Six

  TRIANGULAR REVELATIONS

  Book Seven

  GHETTOBLASTER

  Acknowledgement

  MAIN CHARACTERS

  ___________

  Mugezi: narrator and principal character

  Serenity: Mugezi’s father (also called Sere or Mpanama)

  Padlock: Mugezi’s mother (real name Nakkazi, also called Virgin or Sr. Peter)

  Grandpa: Serenity’s father

  Grandma: Grandpa’s sister, Serenity’s aunt

  Tiida: Serenity’s eldest sister (also called Miss Sunlight Soap)

  Dr. Saif Ssali: Tiida’s husband

  Nakatu: Serenity’s other sister

  Hajj Ali: Nakatu’s second husband

  Kawayida: Serenity’s half-brother

  Lwandeka: Padlock’s youngest sister

  Kasawo: Padlock’s other sister

  Mbale: Padlock’s eldest brother

  Kasiko: Serenity’s concubine

  Nakibuka: Padlock’s aunt, Serenity’s mistress

  Hajj Gimbi: Serenity and Padlock’s neighbor in Kampala

  Lusanani: Hajj Gimbi’s youngest wife, Mugezi’s lover in Kampala

  Loverboy: client of Padlock’s (real name Mbaziira)

  Cane: Mugezi’s friend in primary school

  Lwendo: Mugezi’s friend at the seminary

  Fr. Kaanders: librarian at the seminary

  Fr. Mindi: treasurer at the seminary

  Fr. Lageau: Fr. Mindi’s successor

  Jo Nakabiri: Mugezi’s lover in Kampala

  Eva and Magdelein: Mugezi’s lovers in Holland

  AFRICAN WORDS

  ___________

  boubou: a kind of wide garment for a man (West Africa)

  busuti: a kind of woman’s garment (central Uganda)

  kandooya: torture method whereby one’s elbows are tied together behind one’s back

  Katonda wange!: My God!

  kibanda: black market

  Kibanda Boys: Kampala mafia

  mamba: poisonous snake

  matooke: plantain

  mpanama: hydrocele

  mtuba: an African tree

  muko: brother-in-law

  muteego: AIDS

  nagana: a tropical cattle disease

  panga: large cleaver

  posho: corn bread

  shamba: plantation

  BOOK ONE

  … 1971: VILLAGE DAYS

  THREE FINAL IMAGES flashed across Serenity’s mind as he disappeared into the jaws of the colossal crocodile: a rotting buffalo with rivers of maggots and armies of flies emanating from its cavities; the aunt of his missing wife, who was also his longtime lover; and the mysterious woman who had cured his childhood obsession with tall women. The few survivors of my father’s childhood years remembered that up until the age of seven, he would run up to every tall woman he saw passing by and, in a gentle voice trembling with unspeakable expectation, say, “Welcome home, Ma. You were gone so long I was afraid you would never return.” Taken by surprise, the woman would smile, pat him on the head, and watch him wring his hands before letting him know that he had once again made a mistake. The women in his father’s homestead, assisted by some of the villagers, tried to frighten him into quitting by saying that one day he would run into a ghost disguised as a tall woman, which would take him away and hide him in a very deep hole in the grou
nd. They could have tried milking water from a stone with better results. Serenity, a wooden expression on his face, just carried on running up to tall women and getting disappointed by them.

  Until one hot afternoon in 1940 when he ran up to a woman who neither smiled nor patted him on the head; without even looking at him, she took him by the shoulders and pushed him away. This mysterious curer of his obsession won herself an eternal place in his heart. He never ran up to tall women again, and he would not talk about it, not even when Grandma, his only paternal aunt, promised to buy him sweets. He coiled into his inner cocoon, from whose depths he rejected all efforts at consolation. A smooth, self-contained indifference descended on his face so totally that he won himself the name Serenity, shortened to “Sere.”

  Serenity’s mother, the woman who in his mind had metamorphosed into all those strange tall women, had abandoned him when he was three, ostensibly to go to the distant shops beyond Mpande Hill where big purchases were made. She never returned. She also left behind two girls, both older than Serenity, who adjusted to her absence with great equanimity and could not bear his obsession with tall women.

  In an ideal situation, Serenity should have come first—everyone wanted a son for the up-and-coming subcounty chief Grandpa was at the time—but girls kept arriving, two dying soon after birth in circumstances reeking of maternal desperation. By the time Serenity was born, his mother had decided to leave. Everyone expected her to have another son as a backup, for an only son was a candle in a storm. The pressure reached a new peak when it became known that she was pregnant again. Speculation was rife: Would it be a boy or a girl, would it live or die, was it Grandpa’s or did it belong to the man she was deeply in love with? Before anybody could find out the truth, she left. But her luck did not hold—three months into her new life, her uterus burst, and she bled to death on the way to the hospital, her life emptying into the backseat of a rotten Morris Minor.

  As time passed, Serenity crawled deeper into his cocoon, avoiding his aunts, his cousins, and his mother’s replacements, who he felt hated him for being the heir apparent to his father’s estate and the miles of fertile clan land it included. The birth of Uncle Kawayida, his half-brother by a Muslim woman his father was seeing on the side, did not lessen Serenity’s estrangement. Kawayida, due to the circumstances of his birth, posed little threat to Serenity’s position, and thus attitudes remained unchanged. To escape the phantoms which galloped in his head and the contaminated air in his father’s compound, Serenity roamed the surrounding villages. He spent a lot of time at the home of the Fiddler, a man with large feet, a large laugh and sharp onion breath who serenaded Grandpa on the weekends when he was home.

  Serenity could not get over the way the Fiddler walked with legs wide apart. It would have been very impolite to ask the man why he walked that way, and Serenity feared that if he asked his children, they would tell their father, who in turn would report him to his father for punishment. Consequently, he turned to his aunt with the question “Why does the Fiddler have breasts between his legs?”

  “Who said the Fiddler had breasts between his legs?”

  “Have you never noticed the way he walks?”

  “How does he walk?”

  “With legs spread wide apart as if he were carrying two jackfruits under his tunic.” He then gave a demonstration, very exaggerated, of the way the man walked.

  “It is very funny, but I have never noticed it,” Grandma said, humoring him the way adults did to get out of a sticky situation.

  “How could you not have noticed? He has large breasts between his legs.”

  “The Fiddler has no breasts between his legs. He is ill. He has got mpanama.”

  Serenity’s sisters somehow got wind of the duckwalk and could not resist telling their village peers and schoolmates about the Fiddler, his breasts, and the little clown who portrayed him in silly mimicries. As a result, Serenity got the nickname Mpanama, a ghastly sounding word used out of adult hearing that dropped from gleeful lips with the wet slap of dung hitting hard ground from the rear of a half-constipated cow. Once again he was cured of an obsession, though he continued with his visits to the poor man’s home, faintly hoping to catch him pissing or, better still, squatting on the latrine, for he really wanted to see if the Fiddler’s breasts were as large and smooth as those of the women in his father’s homestead.

  Apart from his secret fantasy, Serenity also wanted to learn how to play the fiddle. He could not get over the one-stringed moans, groans, sighs, screams, grunts and other peculiar sounds the Fiddler conjured, squeezed and rubbed out of the little instrument. The Fiddler’s visits formed the high point of his week, and the music was the only thing he listened to with pleasure uncoerced or influenced by adults or peers. He wanted to learn how to hold the instrument proudly against his shoulder and tune the string with a knot of wax. His aim was to charm strange women into his magic circle and keep them rooted there for as long as he wanted. In school he was known for his beautiful pencil drawings of fiddles. His wish never came true.

  Grandpa, a Catholic, was unseated and replaced by a Protestant rival in a contest marred by religious sectarianism. As the fifties ended, his power gone and the heart taken out of his life, Grandpa’s homestead shrivelled as relatives, friends and hangers-on left one by one or in little groups. The women dropped out of his life, and the Fiddler took his talent elsewhere. By the time I was the age Serenity was when he ran up to strange tall women, Grandpa was living alone, sharing his house with the occasional visitor, relative or woman, a few rats, spiders and the odd snake that sloughed behind his heaps of coffee sacks.

  Grandma, his only surviving sister, was also living alone, three football fields away. Serenity’s bachelor house, a trim little thing standing on land donated by both Grandpa and Grandma, separated the two homesteads. It was a sleepy little house, now and then kicked from the slumber of disintegration, swept and cleaned to accommodate a visitor, or just to limit the damage wreaked by termites and other destroyers. It only came alive when Serenity’s sisters or Uncle Kawayida visited and hurricane lamps washed it with golden beams. The voices and laughter made the rafters quiver, and the smoke from the open fire wound long spectacular threads round the roof and touched off distant memories.

  The exodus of wives, relatives, friends and hangers-on had left a big howling lacuna which wrapped the homestead in webs of glorious nostalgia. The fifties and sixties were spanned by that nostalgia and provided us with stories pickled, polished and garnished by memory. Every migrant soul was now a compact little ghost captured in words, invoked from the lacuna by the oracle of Grandpa and Grandma and made to inject doses of old life into our present truncated existence. The hegemony of lacuna’d ghosts in their stories was broken only when the characters, like resurrected souls, braved the dangerous slopes of Mpande Hill and the treacherous papyrus swamps to come and state their case in person. The Fiddler never returned, but was most prevalent because he was immortalized by the poor rendition of his songs Grandpa showered on his homestead as he shaved, as he toured his coffee plantation—the shamba—to supervise work, as he reminisced in the shade and as he wondered how to get a young girl with an old soul to see him through his last days.

  Late in the sixties, no one’s visit was awaited more eagerly than Uncle Kawayida’s: the man was a wizard, a gold mine full of fascinating and sometimes horrifying tales, a fantastic storyteller endowed with a rare patience who answered my often tedious questions with a cheerful, reassuring face. When he stayed away too long, I became restless and worked out the days and months he was most likely to come. On such days I would climb into the branches of my favorite tree, the tallest jackfruit in the three homesteads, and fix my eyes on the distant Mpande (“Manhood”) Hill. If I was lucky, I would see his motorbike, a blue-bellied eagle encased in silver flashes, glide down the notoriously steep slope and disappear into the umbrella-shaped greenery of the papyrus swamp below. With “Uncle Kawayida, Uncle Kawayida!” on my tongue, I woul
d speed down the tree—dry, sharp sticks pricking my skin, the sweet hypnotic smell of jackfruit in my nose—and rush into Grandma’s courtyard to break the good news.

  Uncle Kawayida was a meter reader for the Ugandan National Energy Board. His job was to visit people’s homes and take readings used to calculate the monthly energy bills customers had to pay. Courtesy of his travels and, I believe, of his large imagination, he told stories of women who used sugared promises to try to bribe him into under-reading their meters, and of men who tried to impede his work by accusing him of flirting with their wives. He amazed us with stories of people living in congested urban squalor, ten to a little house, with parents fucking in the vicinity of children who cleverly feigned sleep. He spoke of women who committed garage abortions by slipping stiff leaf stalks or bike spokes up the condemned birth canals of unfaithful wives or sneaky daughters, an occasional fatal or near-fatal hemorrhage the price for puncturing the wrong things. He told tales of men who beat their wives with electric cables, sticks, boots or fists and afterward ordered them to serve their dinner or to fuck them, and of women who drank and fought like men, cracked open men’s heads with beer bottles and subsequently emptied their pockets. In those places were wild children who did not go to school and got into a life of crime: stealing, robbing, mugging, sometimes even killing people. In the same places lived rich people’s children who went to school in big cars, laughed at teachers and wrote love letters in class. There were also people who could hardly make ends meet, who ate one meager meal a day after doing backbreaking work. In that world roamed fantastic football hooligans who fought their rivals in epic battles in which rocks, piss bottles, shit parcels, clubs and even bullets were exchanged to the point where police had to intervene with tear gas or bullets. There were men and women, devout churchgoing Catholics and Protestants, who worshipped the Devil and offered blood sacrifices during nocturnal orgies; and people of different religious denominations who deposited featherless, headless hens, dead lizards, frog entrails and other ritual garbage in other people’s yards, outside shopfronts or at road junctions. He once told us of a skinless lamb left to roam the streets encumbered with unknown curses and armies of greedy flies. I remembered the story of a man who kept three sisters: he started with the one he had married, progressed to her next younger sister and ended up with their youngest sister, who needed accommodation near a reputable school. As with all his stories, the last one was open-ended, game to all kinds of endings and interpretations.