Bodies Under The Coffee Trees

INTO AFRICA

River runs fast and tumultuous.  Before my eyes it breaks up in a white water, dashed against, over, around great slabs of rock.  At a safe distance you feel its threat.   You know the grandeur.  

This is the savage Nile. Far lower Nile.  The Nile without flocks of egret-like feluccas.  No tourists come to see this in their thousands to clamber over ruins of what we don’t understand.  

To my mind the river might be trying to wash away the sins abounding here, in Uganda– from  the country’s six-year Bush War, its war with neighboring Tanzania, the decade of Caligula-like madness during the reign of Idi Amin.  Plagues descended upon it of a mythic, biblical, Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza that killed perhaps one in 10 of the population in the decades after independence from Britain, in violence, disease and hunger. 

Now in 1994, the mad Lord’s Army roams and burns the north in feral abandon, an ongoing war of years that is hell on earth.   So far in addition to their rampage of murder and rape these fanatic Christian crusaders have abducted 15,000 children from villages, taken their minds, armed them with Kalashnikovs, forced them innocence-lost into their “Army of God.”  I am kept safely away from that.   

Uganda’s beauty, many regard it as the most beautiful country in Africa, has been disfigured by such atrocities and suffering.  I suppose that at  the moment this is why Apollo is telling  me when asked about it all,  ”Hee-hee. Oh yes I have seen many many bodies under the coffee trees.  They say blood is good for our coffee.” 

The rapids spit in my face even here on the stone shelf I share with Apollo. Apollo Kamagishu is not a god.  Better, he‘s a jovial middle manager for the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA). I am his assignment.

Apollo has brought me to the headwaters of the Nile.  To where a mother of civilization is birthed.  Nile.  The thought of where I’m standing is humbling.  A moment of awe for me.  I’m silenced in the roar of its ancient sacred water.

The Nile is speaking incessantly, writhed here close to its emergence from Lake Victoria.  We are near to the town of Jinja once the center of the country’s industry until Idi expelled all the Indians.  The place is called the Bijagali falls.  All my life I’ve read of this headwater, seen it in films.  David Livingstone, John Hanning Speke,  Richard Burton, Henry Morton Stanley, my one-time heroes—standing above the Nile’s white water I can understand those fanatic 19thcentury explorers devil driven to be its ‘discoverer’.

This is the first of a few business tours I am to make to Uganda. At the beginning I know nothing of this exotic, perfumed place. I too am here to discover an Africa both mythic and visceral. Isn’t this the headwaters of humanity?  One of my own headwaters.  

Apollo is a thorough guide. He is also a field specialist for the UCDA  and too my very own body guard.  He is short, average build, probably about ten years my junior.  His face is a full moon black as a black hole, with a button nose. He’s impassive and ever pleasant.  He looks sedated.   

Hair’s cut too short to comb, skin scrubbed to a shine, spectacles too large for his skull.  He could easily be one the horde of school boys I’ve seen in their blazers and short pants frolicking home from class in the shade of palms, banana, acacia trees. Apollo has a jaunty soccer ball of a tummy that makes his dress shirt gap.  

He either begins or ends his commentaries with a brisk giggle—tee hee—or an abrupt laugh—hee hee. 

To further punish these gentle, decent people, AIDS descends upon them. Uganda in my time there endures one of the world’s highest HIV positive rates, a whimpering 30% of the population. The great majority of this is among heterosexuals, striking young and old.  Can it be that AIDS also makes the coffee thrive?  

People call it the slimming disease.   Its affects are seen everywhere in bright equatorial sunshine, in darkest jungle night. Stick people stalk the streets of Kampala, the walking dead.  They also stumble by in villages, they fall in the coffee orchards and lie there to die.

After a day driving the country dirt roads Apollo takes me to dinner at a food stand for a rolex, not a watch, a chapatti rolled around egg, tomatoes and cabbage.  Then he’ll take me to various bars to drink Nile brand beer. Tonight after a few beers he says ‘come’.  

We drive out of Kampala. I feel an inexplicable anxiety as the night turns a deeper black as he takes me away between narrow steep banks of impenetrable cane.  I am feeling the beer and the wonder of the countryside.  This alien equator sky shows me clearly how alone I am.  The Southern Cross is tilting above me.

Apollo stops in a dim clearing before a shack.   He goes in alone.  After a wait I see him wave for me to follow.  

Inside white ghosts greet me repellent in their emaciation.  They are sad in the shadows, a tragic man and woman, maybe young although that’s uncertain. Their faces are craniums bulbing on chicken necks.  They live in destitution.   What they wear is what they have.  Except for a radio, and that’s too loud.  They tell me we hear the Ugandan singer Paul Kefeero, his lament on death, it goes on for a bouncy 15 minutes.

Clearly the couple like Apollo.  He tells me as if they aren’t in the room, “These two are Dutch.”  I see they are dying Dutch soon to be dead Dutch.

We smoke ‘bangi’, raw and hard on the throat in huge reefers.   They give me more Nile beer to drink.  I’m wasted.  Also feeling paranoid.  The condition brings out like pus a white man’s dread of the dark, the dark jungle, of dark people in a heart of darkness. 

Apollo didn’t explain why we’d gone there, or who they were, how he knew them, why he decided to smoke bangi with me.   Most of all to explain what was wrong there with those two.  Maybe he thought any explanation would insult his friends.

Europeans warned me before my trip that in Uganda the subject of tribal identity is best left alone. I never learned Apollo’s. 

On a drink addled evening at a casino in Kampala he introduces me to his chief or king, not sure which.   The chief or king pokes his finger into Apollo’s chest at one point saying, “This one is mine.” 

There are four ancient kingdoms of import in Uganda, that of Buganda, Bunyoro, Busoga and Toro each with a king.   The most revered of these is the Kabaka of Buganda who rules from his palace compound on one of Kampala’s seven hills.  That  ruler now is Muwenda Mutebi II the 36thking, with his queen Sylvia.

Apollo also drives me across the Equator, several times on our voyages to see Uganda’s coffee.  When it happens he always alerts me to the event with shy pride.    He also takes me to the shrine of the martyrs in Namugongo.  That’s where a century ago 45 youths were killed for their Christian faith.  The story goes they were also dispatched for refusing their favors to Mwanga II the gay Kabaka.   Uganda is full of stories, mostly gruesome, some dubious, many magical.

As Apollo shepherds me along on a careful coffee agenda I begin to be uncomfortable with my importance here as an international coffee journalist and  marketing consultant. It’s almost making me blush, although not quite. I am a charlatan salesman.  

Shaming to come with the power they imagine in me.  It’s such a strange fortune for someone from Kansas.   But a fortune indeed and so I persevere with exhausting travels, thousands of sales calls, constant phoning, the devil drives me too.

Apollo is driving me as well, often we stop and chat to farmers, we see washing stations, hulling, drying. I’m seeing coffee trees everywhere.  Vast swathes of postage stamp farms.  In Uganda 500,000 farms rely on coffee. The peasants work a hectare of it at most.  Their families brimming with children cling to it for survival.

Uganda, the “Pearl of Africa”, the “Garden of the World”, produces an above average Robusta cherry and an excellent Arabica.  In good years it’s smallholding farmers can produce an astonishing 220,000 metric tons of coffee. It is the most prolific coffee exporter in Africa.  

More than half of the country’s workforce engages with coffee.  Coffee makes for 45% of Uganda’s total foreign exchange income.  A struggling country’s one and only ‘natural’ resource, not counting its children.  

Coffee is Uganda although the people themselves drink tea.  

Under a tin roof I’m looking out over a sanctuary, standing room only, watching the preacher perform cool in the heat as if his black suit were air conditioned.  The congregation before me, below me, is all black, faces upturned in a much needed rapture.  But they are melting, in sweat and tears.  It occurs to me there’s not a white face any direction in a hundred miles. 

Except for the Australian fellow on the dais with me who the preacher positioned in easy reach to grab hold of.  That’s surely because it’s clear enough the Australian bloke with the oversized cross on his shirt front has kept his straw hat on ready to run.

Apollo stands at the back, looking at me proudly, beaming encouragement.   I hadn’t considered that to Apollo I might be a shining prize.  Maybe he’s brought me here as his contribution to the offering plate.  I’m angry thinking him too insouciant.  It occurs to me he’s enjoying my discomfort.

The preacher has already introduced me as a most honored guest, a world famous journalist and the son of a pastor–damn you Apollo I should never have confided that gem to you.  I’m precarious on the edge of my chair the same as when in deepest Tanzania I’d been introduced to speak to an even larger coffee crowd as the African representative of the French government.

Apollo brought me here without any warning on a blindingly clear Sunday morning.  We came to visit the head man of a village, an influential coffee grower.  At his door we were told to call instead at this church.  

It’s some kind of extremely reformed Presbyterian congregation.  Almost everyone in Uganda is Christian save for a handful of Muslims who keep their heads down.  As I wish with all my heart I could do here.  

A strikingly strong premonition assures my I am soon to be speaking.  About what I’m incapable of imagining.  My bipolar inappropriate, suicidal urge is to flip the congregation the bird, although they might not understand the gesture.  Anyway, I haven’t a doubt but that the ladies have machetes near at hand in the folds of their Kanzu dresses.  

I am also here because of Robert Lockwood the plump 5’4” president of the Lockwood Trade Journal Co of New York.  He proposed to me at a dinner  over a lavish table, in his home—a prize 1920 bungalow– in Sutton Manor, an enclave of New Rochelle, republican and protestant, right snug to the Sound where his sailing yacht rode at anchor.  

He easily seduced me.  I accepted him and thereby became born again as his salesman, and journalist, contracted laborer on a 20% commission throughout western Europe, in Cuba and East Africa, a ‘territory’ of one-time colonial empires that I soon learn are not so one-time.  A verbiage to explain why I am here.  Et voila!

The Australian also has a story.  He’s traveled from a twinned congregation in Sydney to Black Africa to offer solidarity with his brethren in a Presbyterian white Christ.  Poor fellow seems to be stifling bleats as he clutches his bible between blanched knuckles. 

Preacher introduces me. I wade through the Nile to reach the lectern.  I manage a few polite comments on their country before motioning to Apollo.  “May I introduce the Director of the Uganda Coffee Development Authority.”  A glance at Apollo to follow the sweep of my hand tells me I’ve scored.

After Apollo’s agony on the cross it’s the Australian’s turn.  But first the preacher offers a prayer, in summary, “Please oh lord reveal to this dear visitor how great is our need for a new Range Rover.  That would be the model P38A .  It is the 2.5 Turbo diesel.  With leather interior please.”  

When Apollo led me out into the high noon blaze of a tropical paradise I tried to smile at the man from Sydney.  He actually raised a hand toward me in supplication.

I am to fly out tomorrow from Entebbe airport.  Something sad and glad for me.  Driving back to Kampala we stop near the shore of Lake Victoria.  The road is a fish market.  We pull up beside a group of naked little boys, maybe eight years old.  The lake glistens on their faces. 

They are each holding a Nile perch of goodly size it seems to me.  ”Mere babies,” scoffs Apollo.  “They can grow to 200 pounds. Tee Hee.”    The boys each hold one fish across their joined palms, head and tail drape over.  

“Hee hee. They are brave boys.  There are many crocodiles here.  Last year they ate 4 people.”  

The little boys are euphoric when Apollo buys four of the perch.  One still shudders.  The boy holding it spanks himself with it on the bare butt.  Grins.  A dead perch.

These are to be our supper. For my last supper in Uganda I am invited to Apollo’s home.

Uganda’s people are said to be the most diverse in Africa.  Its history of violence relates in part to this extreme.   The people speak 43 living languages.   Most but not all are of the Bantu language family. English and Swahili are official languages.

Such disparity in what is relatively a small country, Uganda is the size of Oregon, is hard for the foreigner to fathom.  No single tribe and language is strongly dominant.  The Buganda people ostensibly foremost are but 16% of the population.  So much divergence is reflected for example in Idi Amin—he was of the Kakwa tribe, he was Muslim while more than 85% of Ugandans are Christian, he spoke Kiswahili. 

We arrive.  “Hujambo” goes round.  How are you.  

Two of the three children, age seven and nine, the lords of creation in Uganda, are treated with great respect.  I see how they are deeply loved.  Pleasant little ones but very reserved in what  they say and do.  These two are Apollo’s.  These younger ones smile shyly.  They give me side ways glances.  Apollo speaks to them in what I think is Swahili, but don’t ask.  I dread the engulfing silence of embarrassment that I inadvertently cause by word and deed in this place where I am watched so closely.

I see how I frighten the children.  Apollo says “They’ve never seen a white person except on the TV.  Let them touch you.”  At his urging they do this, coming up and hesitantly putting their hands between mine.

“May I kiss them?”  I ask.  

“Hee hee, no no, they would jump off the balcony.”  They have been told to call me Babu, which I learn with a jolt means grandfather. Apollo’s wife calls me Babu too with a little bow.  She surprises me, a beauty dressed in a bird of paradise wrapping neck to toe and a matching turban on top.  As the evening progresses I learn this is her own dress, her own handmade and designed creation.  

Her English is quite good. After a few Nile beers she’s loquacious. My esteem for Apollo rises in the presence of this charming lady.  The couple never kiss or touch.  They don’t even address one another in conversation.

Eventually she casually advises that she has her own business, making cosmetics.  “Investment is welcome,” she offers regally.  Apollo nods his jack-o-lantern face at me.

During the meal the third and oldest child quietly comes and goes, serving the dishes, including the perch. She’s perhaps 12 with tiny buds showing under her smock.  I’ve not been told her name and ask.  Apollo says “No name for you. She is our servant living here and of no importance.”  

Land of great kindness. Indifference too.   

Apollo lives in an apartment block on the edge of Kampala.  It’s three stories.  Half of the apartment is balcony.  The children sleep there under mosquito nets.  For the rest it’s the room where we talk and eat.  I see it is the kitchen too.  I walk through a small bedroom for Apollo and Mrs. Apollo, on my way to a tiny Turkish toilet.  

Carpets on the floors. Cushions for sitting.  The TV.  No table. They have me in what seems to be their one straight back chair.   Nothing on the walls except for a sun drained reproduction of what I believe to be one of Rafael’s Madonnas.

It is growing late, the young children are on their pallets on the balcony.  Light wanes and what I’ve learned to love holds sway, the soft East African night.  The apartment begins to disappear.  The beer makes me happy.  We adults have a single bare bulb hung above our heads and that to me is forming a yellow halo around Apollo’s head.  

The servant child is sweeping the room like a robot on dying batteries.   She’s going to sleep as she sweeps.

I know it’s time for me to ask Apollo to drive me back to the Sheraton hotel.  It’s the one hotel for foreigners in Kampala, with hundreds of look alike rooms and several bars, in which the rich white people passing through can speak in shouts and belch crude laughter.

When I fly away tomorrow I’ll be leaving something most rare and fine, my own discovery too even if rock hewn by grief, by the Nile water coursing by.  That makes me want to be selfish, to linger longer here on my straight back throne, to savor with Apollo another Nile.

I’m hoping Apollo can drive. He’s saying, “Hee-hee, my friend. When you are gone far away don’t forget me.  Tee-hee.”