Books
A bull returns to the ring
Shiva Naipaul
The Rock of the Wind: A Return to Africa Denis Hills (Andre Deutsch £8.95)
T have learned one bitter truth, that we .1.Africans however much we educate ourselves will never be honest, loyal and true to each other, we will never value our friend's life. Our aim will be to enrich ourselves through swindling public funds and misusing our position. It is a bitter ex- perience I have had.'
This harsh and despairing denunciation was made in an essay written by one of Denis Hills's ragged, starving students in the desolate province of Acholi in northern Uganda. Two years after the fall and expul- sion of ldi Amin (whose regime, in 1975, had accused the expatriate Hills of treason and thrown him into prison — a predica- ment from which he was rescued by the per- sonal intervention of the then Prime Minister, James Callaghan) Hills was back in the old Elysian fields trying, in a somewhat disenchanted manner, to spark into new life visions of light and reason. The prospects were less than promising. Uganda's agony showed no immediate signs of coming to an end. Military barbarism had merely been replaced by pseudo- civilian anarchy — and barbarism. The degeneracy over which Idi Amin had presided — which he had bared and let loose in all its autochthonous splendour could not be expected to disappear at the first whiff of Tanzanian-inspired 'democracy'. Africans, like the rest of us, are conservative. Uganda, as a conse- quence, remained a deeply diseased society, riven by the factional strife of party and tribe and clan, its lawless citizenry sur- rendered to the voluptuous embrace of a sub-Darwinian struggle for existence in which only the most brutal, rather than the fittest, could expect to survive.
The school in which Denis Hills was teaching bordered on the brink of parody as well as of extinction. (His presence there was, strictly speaking, illegal — if, that is, one can talk of 'illegality' in a place like Uganda.) The establishment had no piped water and no electricity; the teaching staff — an itinerant crew — lived in squalid pea- sant huts; the students were fed a meagre diet of beans and maize meal. (When — ex- pecting a visit from President Obote which did not materialise — a bull was slaughtered, fierce fighting broke out bet- ween the pupils and cooks over the share- out of the spoils.) Hills's students came out of a world of darkness, scarred by tribal hatred, by hunger and greed and fear. In their essays they wrote of cattle raids by their semi-nomadic Karamojan neighbours who were armed not only with spears but with AK rifles. Laconically, they described pillage and murder — huts fired, family and clansmen burned alive. And the soldiers who were supposed to be their protectors were often no less predatory. 'They [the soldiers] shot many of the Luputuk and it was the soldiers' turn to recapture the cattle and bags of food which they kept for themselves'. No wonder that so many of them dreamed derangedly of turning 'soldier' and becoming, in their turn, looters and killers.
The 'idealistic' headmaster (Kalisto), a slightly crazed figure — an African 'Ben Gunn — lived a castaway's life beneath the 'Rock of the Wind', which, in another age, had witnessed other scenes of tribulation: it had been a staging post for the Arab trade in ivory and slaves. Kalisto, shoeless, un- washed, dressed in filthy rags, sustaining himself on maize porridge and black beans, seeking shelter in a leaking concrete shed overrun by cockroaches, was possessed by his vision of a pukka school that would have electricity, piped water and suitable accommodation for its teachers. The 'vision' was not entirely without founda- tion. Amazingly enough, the Government had actually set aside land for the project. But the local tribesfolk were hostile to Kalisto and to the idea of a new school, coveting the land it had been given. Already, offended by its emptiness, squat- ters had moved in. The Government, needing 'votes', was reluctant to intervene. Daily, the vision faded and Kalisto slipped closer to breakdown and madness. Hills watched the countryside being fired — the Acholi persisted in the primitive practices of slash-and-burn agriculture: they were, Kalisto remarked, addicted to arson. Sitting out on his bench, Hills meditated on the coming of drought and desert. Civilised standards existed only among the Italian missionaries who ran the local hospital. Un- tiringly, they treated the cases of tuber- culosis (every cow in the district a carrier), of measles, of jaundice, of venereal disease, of typhoid, of diarrhoea, of hernias, of malaria, of swollen scrota — and, in- evitably, supervised the passage of new Acholi into the world.
Three hundred miles to the south, Kam- pala too was decaying, its roads cratered with pot-holes, its air mephitic from the mounds of rat-infested rubbish heaped everywhere, its buildings peeling and falling down. Marauding soldiery raised road- blocks, harassing and pillaging. Others raced through the streets on Land-Rovers,
cradling rocket launchers. Factories were shuttered and the shelves in the shops were bare: the arrival of a consignment of soap could lead to a riot. At night gun-fire echoed through the deserted town and, in the morning, bodies would be found. Makerere — once reputed the finest univer- sity in Black Africa — had virtually ceased to function. The ornamental trees were be- ing cut down; cattle and goats roamed the lawns of the campus, cropping the grass; food had to be cooked on wood and char- coal, electrical appliances long since broken down or looted; blocked lavatories stank in derelict halls of residence; 'teaching' was spasmodic, lecturers moonlighting so as to be able to pay black market prices. Uganda had returned to the bush.
'In our naivete,' Hills reflects, looking at Makerere, 'we believed that through educa- tion we were producing black mandarins who... were "building for the future". In- stead, with little protest... we allowed politicians and blackguards to take over our handiwork'. And elsewhere: 'But is educa- tion the answer if it produces pious nannies and squabblers who dare not stand up to their unspeakable leaders?' Unsettling questions are posed only to be evaded. Rather than answer them, he resorts to vacuous clichés about the African's 'inex- haustible vitality', 'human warmth', 'tolerance', 'indestructible cheerfulness' and so on. He cannot quite bring himself to affirm the conclusions towards which his own generally compelling narrative is in- veigling him. Because, in the end, Hills re- mains an unreconstructed expatriate; in the end, despite all the disenchantment, he turns out to be something of a recidivist. There is a touch of the old lag in Denis Hills. 'Ever since I had been locked up like a goat by Amin's military police, then sent packing with my old African blanket and shaving pot, I had felt an obstinate urge to return to Uganda ...' That old African blanket! That shaving pot! They give the game away. The man's got the green hills of Black Africa in his bones and is impelled to return to the scene of the crime. So it was that in the last months of 1980 he set off from Johannesburg in a second- hand Volkswagen camping van, with the modest sum of £800. It was, nevertheless, a brave decision. The result is this journal. 10 Botswana he stays with a fellow expatriate from the good Kampala days who jogs maniacally and meaninglessly through the desert scrub. Zimbabwe manages to main: tain the external legacies of white rule. verges are neat, roads are smooth, but it awaits tribal chaos. Hills worries that his Transvaal number plate will cause problems at the Zambian border. He need not have fretted: the African's innate tolerance over- rode Zambia's 'front-line' status. In Malawi he unwittingly spends a night near a cemetery where dogs forage in the roughly dug graves. Eyerywhere he sees the car' casses of wrecked lorries; nearly everywhere there is a desperate shortage of food. Men are falling apart. But Hills is entranced hy,. the wheeling constellations, by the flutter of
exotic birds through the thorn trees. He is where he wants to be, where — perhaps he belongs. In him there comes alive the new symbiosis developing between black and white.
'What indeed he writes] is it like to land at Heathrow from Bongo... ?' He recoils from the silent, shuffling queues at ticket counters, the blackened brick of Victorian tenements ' ... the grey light on grey pavements, the grimy rain'. He dislikes the businessmen from Birmingham' who have invaded the stone cottages of the Cotswolds. He mourns the sale of his aunt's house in Leamington to a Punjabi 'who keeps a fish shop near the railway bridge'. Where are the agricultural labourers? Gone to council houses! Where are the church congregations? Where are all the pieties of pastoralism? Shall he end his days in the `leafy Midlands' — or shall he betake himself to the Rock of the Wind where ba- boons drop in for breakfast and Kalisto is slowly going mad? Hills is a recognisable type. Tired, familiar voices echo through these pages. His ancestry can be traced back to those English of another generation who discovered in the primal spaciousness of East Africa a scope and fulfilment not allowed by the cramped conditions at home. Hills is their direct descendant; an adventurer in Africa's promiscuous darkness.
Copyright © Shiva Naipaul 1984
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