LITMIR.BIZ

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turned and was writing on the blackboard, someone made a rude noise. ‘Who was that?’ I asked.

      ‘That black boy at the back,’ answered Margaret from the front row.

      ‘But you’re all black,’ I said, somewhat mystified.

      ‘Ah, sir,’ said Margaret, ‘but some, sir, are much blacker than others. That boy comes from the north.’

      The scales fell from my eyes. I, who had grown up in such charmed Anglo-Saxon circumstances, almost oblivious to black people, suddenly saw them as the rainbow coalition that they are: creamy cappuccino from the south-west of the country, blue-black Nilotic from the Upper West Nile region, nut-brown from the east. My new world was taking shape before my very eyes. The children at Kamuli College, precisely because they required money to attend the place, came from all over the country. The school reflected the tribal make-up of the entire nation, providing a living insight into the way the colonialists had arbitrarily decided the shape of the borders of Uganda.

      Having at first wondered how on earth I could escape the place, within a few weeks I was trying to find out how I could stay longer. This was despite the remnants of empire and war that still percolated through every aspect of the teaching. The school followed the imperially imposed Oxford & Cambridge Examination Board’s ‘O’ level curriculum. Thus I was saddled with teaching George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

      ‘What is Communism, sir?’ asked one child.

      ‘What’s a carthorse, sir?’ chimed another.

      The fact was that neither Orwell’s farm itself, nor the allegory it was intended to conjure, meant anything at all to my students. Trying both to teach the physical reality of an English farm to Africans and to interpret the book’s ideological subtext was a challenge indeed.

      Presumably I can thank the anachronistic imperial backbone instilled in me at school for the speed with which homesickness gave way to an enthusiasm for the whole adventure. Namasagali was beginning to get into my soul. The short evenings would find me down at the little dock on the Nile, where I would sit on the base of the rusting old crane watching the water go by bearing great chunks of papyrus. But it was not of Empire that I mused, despite the ‘made in England’ sign on the arm of the crane. It was of the half-naked children playing between the tracks that led to the dock-side and their circumstances that I thought. They had no shoes or socks. These children from the village further up the river were too poor to attend school at all; some had distended bellies, some had evident eye diseases. Over the months I lived at Namasagali I became friendly with their families, taking John, our houseboy, with me to translate. It rapidly dawned on me that the students at Kamuli College, poor by my standards, were rich beyond the dreams of the villagers, whose lives ebbed and flowed with the seasons. There was poverty here that I’d never begun to imagine.

      Two months into my stint at Namasagali I found myself at the wheel of the school minibus, slithering along the rain-soaked road heading out towards Kampala. I was taking six of the school’s best boxers to a nationwide tournament.

      Big Daddy, when I first saw him, was vast – huge in body, face, and personality. ‘I’m the referee today,’ he boomed as we neared the ring. Major General Idi Amin Dada was already head of the Ugandan army. My first encounter with a man who was to become synonymous with summary execution, massacre and wholesale deportation was relatively benign. In truth he seemed nicer than the then President, Milton Apollo Obote, who had ruled the country since independence. Amin was a former heavyweight champion of the Ugandan army, and it was clear that he loved boxing. He would dash across the ring after a bout and demonstrate, fortunately in only shadow terms, how it would have ended had he been one of the boxers rather than just the referee. He seemed to have a huge sense of humour, beaming at all times. He noticed me because, as he told me, ‘I’m not used to meeting white men as tall as you. Your mother must have eaten much paw-paw.’ Yet on the long journey through the night back to Namasagali, we all confessed to a lurking fear of the man. Too big and boisterous for comfort, we thought.

      Father Grimes, despite his bantam appearance, loved boxing too, and his having that in common with Amin was later to spare the lives of many in the school. ‘Amin was only a Sergeant Major in the First King’s East African Rifles, you know,’ Grimes told me. ‘The British sent him to Sandhurst for four months and he came back virtually a General.’

      The British, seeing the writing on the colonial walls, realised by 1962 that Uganda would have to join the queue of their colonised neighbours to become independent. In common with so many African armies, Uganda’s had been left with few if any indigenous officers. A panicky last-minute course was put on in distant Surrey to convert Africans from the ranks straight to the higher echelons of the officer class. Almost overnight, one absurd, larger-than-life Sergeant Major was larded with ribbons and braid and elevated to a rank that no black man had enjoyed before him. Harmless enough in the boxing ring, perhaps, but what if such a man ever came to run the country? We would know the answer within three short years.

      In the school holidays we met up with other British and American volunteers and set about seeing more of Uganda and the surrounding countries. We hitched or bussed to Nairobi, Mombasa and Dar es Salaam. We camped on beaches, wandered amongst the wildlife and watched the Masai tribespeople crossing mud roads ahead of us. They were intoxicating times in which it still felt utterly safe to be a foreigner in East Africa. It would have been inconceivable to imagine that within three decades this sweltering, peaceful place would become a battleground for al Qaida.

      Among our group was Diana Villiers, whose father was running one of Harold Wilson’s new-fangled economic power levers – the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation. As so often with the British top drawer, my father had taught her father at Eton. Diana, like me, was headed in due course for an encounter with the new world disorder, but on another continent. Our next meeting would find us both in very different circumstances, with her married to the man running America’s Contra war against Nicaragua. But for now we were both at a point of transition, in Africa amid the passage to independence, and party to the massive afterburn of imperialism and colonisation. To me, surprisingly in 1968, it still felt comfortable.

      ‘Mr Jon,’ cried my houseboy, ‘I’m going to get married.’

      ‘My goodness, John,’ I replied, ‘I didn’t even know you had a girlfriend.’

      ‘Oh yes, sir, and I want you to be a best man at the ceremony.’

      John’s wife-to-be, Elizabeth, came all the way from Kamuli town, at the other end of the murum road; she had a large family, and looked gorgeous on the day. Generations of the bride and groom’s families ran in and out of the open side walls of the church. Jesus wrestled with local tribal custom throughout the wedding ceremony. Long after I returned to England, I became a godfather to John and Elizabeth’s first child by mail. But their marriage, the villagers, the school itself, were all for me a part of coming to terms with a world that a few months earlier I had not even dreamt existed.

      Father Grimes ruled by missionary example and rod of iron, or rather of bamboo, which he wielded with great ferocity and regularity. I had upwards of 150 workbooks to mark each week. Hired to teach English, I ended up with both biology and technology added to my workload. In both subjects I would have to swot the night before to keep one step ahead of my pupils. I was constantly outsmarted by some of the brighter kids. Whatever happened to Noah Omolo, who wrote so lyrically and who, had he been tutored, could have made it into any top-flight Western university?

      ‘I want to come with you when you go, sir,’ he said to me once. ‘I will be your servant, and look after you for the rest of your life, and your wife and children too.’ Noah was to prove one of the very few Ugandans I would meet again.

      Or Margaret Nsubaga: ‘Dance with me when you leave, sir.’ Adding, ‘Come live with me in Uganda.’

      Or Praxedes Namaganda, who came for a few weeks’ teaching practice from Makerere University. We kissed on the banks of the Nile, but she was a good Catholic, and anyway the relationship was not to survive the unpredictabilities of the postal service.

      On Saturday nights I had to organise the enormous disco

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