Separate Worlds

Tuesday, May 9th 2006

Three Mormons congregated at the only café on the deserted main street of Jinja.

The angel Moroni had appeared one day to Joseph Smith, the founding Prophet of the Mormons, and handed him a set of golden plates, which glittered with words inscribed by God in ancient Egyptian. Smith translated the words in this “Golden Bible” into the Book of Mormon. Moroni was to reappear later and take the plates away from Joseph Smith. The three missionaries in the café quickly mumbled a prayer to the overflowing plates and glasses of pineapple juice on the table, and then dug into the ham-burgers. Their shirts were white, starched and stiff – the eldest of the three was a plump man moving on to fat, his name tag read: “Elder Aaron ________”. Elder Aaron left in a Toyota pickup. The two younger men left on bicycles. The servile waiter frowned as he cleared their plates, they hadn’t left a tip.

The town centre was a dusty grid of single storied buildings, whitewashed and engraved with hindu numerals indicating the date of construction. In the awning of one of the buildings dated 1931, rows of tailors pedaled away on old Remington and Singer sewing machines. The tailor was a drawn man with an infinite forehead, the expanse of which made him look unsettled and infirm. He had a hopeless smile and when he chuckled, it was borrowed laughter from a happier past. His wife and younger son worked behind in the shop. As we stepped inside, a dog slunk out, its teeth crunching a bone. The walls of the shop were bare, except for a portrait (clipped from a magazine) of Princess Diana and a yellowing photocopy of a degree certificate. He had worked for an Indian ‘tailor master’, who had sold out and gone.

The tailor spoke proudly of his son, who had been to a fashion school in Nairobi. The elder had gone to Kampala and taken a degree in the sciences. They had not heard from him since. The pleats on th e tailor’s brow reappeared: ‘He had a degree, and we had none.’

I saw them later -- him stooping and plodding through puddles of rain-water in his gum-boots, the wife and son, a few paces behind under an umbrella. They sang in choir, but with low voices, a gospel song which I didn’t understand.

I rented a moto-taxi to take me to Bujagali, 4 kilometers away. The driver was called Okello and was from Buwayo a small village not far from the Kenyan border, “I belong there”, he said to me. We stopped briefly at a cattle-dip to let a herd of long horned Zebu oxen cross the road. As we waited, Okello told me he hated Jinja “Always rushing, hectic, too much hurry-hurry and fast-fast”.

Afterwards, I searched for this hectic Jinja that he spoke off, and couldn’t find it.

Jinja lived in a state of dispirited torpor, a ghost town of aborted projects and boarded up factories. The agricultural trade fair ground was a field of waving grass, vegetable patches and grazing cattle – the big government paper mill had a rusted lock on its gate and a yawning security guard – there were warehouses for sugar, but their roofs had caved in – the air-field was without a wind-sock and children played soccer on the runway.

In Bujagali, a few kilometers downstream after the hydroelectric dam, the Nile broke out into raging rapids. Here, screaming white-water rafters toppled over through Grade-5 rapids. A man in a ragged t-shirt wandered about on the shore holding a plastic jerry-can. For a few dollars, he would jump into the river and navigate the rapids using the jerry-can as a life raft. A crippled man performed convoluted acrobatics on a pole. The few tourists in floppy hats and spindly white legs clapped in great excitement.

In the calm pools after the rapids, a thorny island stood in the middle of the river. Bujagali is named after the Naomba Bujagali, the spirit Guardian of the Basoga tribe. During certain times of the year, the Bujagali floated down on a papyrus raft to the islands where the spirit shrines were said to reside. He was the 39^th Bujagali, and when he grew old, he would divine a successor by dreaming of his exact appearance and location – that chosen man woul d become the next Bujagali.

Someone showed me the Bujagali’s house, it was a big brick and plaster mansion, with a prefabricated outhouse, all of it surrounded by a brittle fence of cypress and clematis. Unfortunately, the Bujagali wasn’t around, he had gone to Kampala for “consultations”.

“You will have to go to Kampala to meet him…” the watchman said, his ear glued to a blaring transistor radio.

“How will I know who he is?” I shouted.

“Can’t miss him, he looks like Lucky Dube”

-----------------

I walked on a track along the river for about an hour, until I reached a hotel. It was built not far from the runway, perhaps in the hope that one day it would attract package tourists bussed in by charter flights, which had never happened, instead, the hotel saw a steady stream of seminarians from Kampala. The board outside announced one such event – a conference on water conservation. There was a swimming pool and a bar, perched above the swirling whiskey brown waters of the Nile. It was empty and silent, except for the dissonant sound of applause from the conference area inside the hotel.

I settled down poolside with a whisky and my notebook. A while later two women appeared in bathrobes. They undressed and stretched out self consciously in stringy costumes. The taller woman was pallid, like someone suffering from solar deprivation syndrome – maybe she came from a place with feeble sunlight. The shorter woman was prettier, and her skin was glossy, tanned to a uniform sun-bed bronze. They had the lean bodies of people who worked out three times a week and followed programmed diets. And so, they ordered a Caesar salad, and spoke of supermarkets, dog food and beautiful vacations spent at a beach resort in Sardinia. They eyed me nervously, casting glances in my direction, wishing I would go away. I ordered another whisky, and continued to write.

I was reminded of the story of a melancholic Sardinian who I had met once in Malindi.

He was from Oliena in the province of Nuoro a place steeped in folk-lore and bullet riddled road-signs.

It was an area noted in the past for banditry and blood feuds between families. The Sardinian had met a girl from neighboring Orogosolo, and they had fallen love. They had to meet secretly, because their families didn’t approve, and Orogsolo was traditionally Oliena’s bitter rival. One summer, unknown to their families, they drove to the coast for a beach holiday, in search of la vita bella – the beautiful life.

It was a particularly hot summer, which made the grapes sweeter, and the wines stronger. They drank and partied, the girl sunbathed all morning, and basked all afternoon, and then they partied all night. One evening, the Sardinian found the girl unconscious, passed out in the bathtub. The doctor arrived, pronounced her dead, and diagnosed “heat stroke and dehydration”. The Sardinian was distraught. The family from Orogosolo wanted his head, in Oliena his family’s honor was at stake. On a misty Sunday morning, just as his mamma was leaving for mass, an innocuous package arrived – a wicker basket-case full of fresh vegetables. In it was a piece of paper, with a black spot and a single phrase which said “with regards, from Orogosolo”. It was a hex, a sign that a hit had been ordered on the Sardinian’s head. Mamma panicked, he was immediately shipped off to faraway Malindi on the Kenyan seaside, where a distant uncle ran a discotheque. Africa, it seemed, was far enough to be safe.

The Sardinian was portly and balding now, an unwilling immigrant, brutalized by the transplant overseas. His neck, a deflated bagpipe with folds of skin, which inflated slightly and wheezed when he spoke. “I don’t belong here” he gasped, waving his arms around his dismal gelateria, “but, we can only be in one place at a time…” He never went back.

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