The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,10

Mutesa intended to burn the old man alive, to teach the Wavuma a lesson. Stanley talked him out of that, and Stanley also, to everyone’s relief, mediated a peace between the parties.

This happened in 1875. In 1884 Mutesa was dead and was being buried in the tomb at Kasubi, which he had modelled on the tomb of his father Sunna at Wamala. He was, indeed, like his father. The country had given him no other model.

So Amin and Obote have a kind of ancestry. The British colonial period, with law and without local wars, has to be seen as an interlude. But how do Africans live with their African history? Perhaps the absence of a script and written records blurs the past; perhaps the oral story gives them only myths.

I HAD GOT to know Susan. She was a poet of merit and a literature teacher at Makerere. She was less than forty and slender and delicate, with a beautiful voice. Her family history could hardly be thought about without pain. She had lost her grandfather and her father. They lived in what was known as the Luweero triangle, north of Kampala. It was a fertile, populous area, and the worst fighting of the civil war or wars had taken place there.

Her grandfather kept cows. He loved these creatures in the African pastoral way. He knew them all by name and temperament; he knew their colour, the shape of their horns. When the fighting started he had to run away. This was in the second period of Obote’s rule, after Amin had been overthrown, when the soldiers were vicious and cunning and could only think of finding people they wanted. In his hiding place the old man was worried about his cattle. They couldn’t look after themselves; they would soon start to suffer. He thought of them one by one, their needs and habits. At last the idea came to him that he could take a chance and go back to his house and be with his animals for a while. He went back. The soldiers were waiting for him. They killed him with an axe and dismembered the body. They stuffed the pieces into a termite anthill, one of the red anthills of Uganda, and that was where the broken-up body stayed while the war lasted. Afterwards the family recovered the bones and gave them a proper burial.

Her father’s fate was worse. He had been taken away before, in the Amin time, and he had never been seen again. No one knew how he had died or where he had died. Not knowing made for a special kind of pain. The subject was never closed; the mind would play always with terrible possibilities. The subject was too painful for Susan’s mother; she never talked about it.

This was not an exceptional family story, Susan said. Many people could tell stories like that. The Luweero triangle, where her family came from, had been ravaged by Obote’s soldiers.

“They launched a reign of terror that included rape and death. You can see the devastation even today. Luweero is an empty district. You can see unoccupied land. It looks like a ghost district.”

What was it like, living with terror for so long?

“I was very young. I was five then and I only remember there was no sugar. If you asked for sugar it was not there. When Amin was overthrown”—in 1979—“I was eight. But when Obote was overthrown I was twelve, and so I was aware of what was happening around me. You feel very insecure for your parents and your neighbours. You cannot get an answer because your parents who would normally give you an answer are suffering too. You start to see the government as a monster. Somebody taking over this place that God has placed you in, and is treating it with impunity. I still don’t understand why there are tyrants and why they are allowed to rule.”

Did people feel that the ancestors had let them down?

“I remember people placing their faith in God for a better tomorrow. They had the defiance of despair. That doesn’t make you fight with the enemy. You look over him”—she meant focusing on what should be there in the good time—“and you do not engage with him. I have been brought up to understand God as benevolent. God rescues you from the clutches of evil. I know some friends think we had displeased the ancestors by taking other religions or by denying the existence of the