Accident

                                                               Lino Leitão

(Accident first appeared in THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW in 1988, and was later republished in Short Story International, issue 86.)

 

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Uganda cities like that of Kampala, Jinja and others weren't African as such: they were little Bombays. But now, though they were African, they had become ghost towns, dim and dismal. Nancy Price didn't mind. Asians in Uganda were parasites, they deserved to be thrown out. And those snobbish Britons who lived a leisurely live even after Uganda's independence as though they were still masters and indispensable deserved to be thrown out as well. Nancy had no sympathy for them. Though the British teachers were given kipandes by His Excellency Idi Amin to stay, they had left. Good riddance! 

Nancy was the only White who taught at Immaculate Conception College. She was unlike other Whites; she was neither a coward nor an imperialist. She rather enjoyed it when His Excellency Idi Amin made the British residents of Kampala to kneel down before him. Didn't the Africans always prostrate before the White Colonials? Tit for tat. And in another occasion, His Excellency Idi Amin sat on a chair and made the British residents in Uganda to carry him to the OAU summit conference at Kampala. Nancy loved the way the Britons were humiliated. Those bastards deserved every bit of it. They were getting it back what they did to Africans. The common people of Uganda loved it, too. He was their hero. Nancy Price admired Idi Amin.

People were murdered in large numbers, thrown in the Nile. Amin was cruel and unpredictable; none knew how his mind worked. Everyone was afraid and frightened but not Nancy Price. She taught at the Immaculate Conception College and at her free time, she traveled in her car to any place in Uganda that she fancied. No Amin soldiers seemed to be bothered with her. She felt no less secured. The bestial behavior of Amin and his regime was just an exaggeration of the Western Press. But one thing she noticed was that the staff and the students at the Immaculate Conception College were frightened of her and that bothered her a lot. 

One Sunday morning, she was driving in her car, going to Jinja from Kampala. Near Mabira Forest, she was stopped by four army men. They were young, dressed in smart uniforms. They had guns and they were ferocious and arrogant-looking. She didn't panic, she brought the car to a stop by the roadside. They looked into the car; they asked her to open the trunk. They spoke in Swahili. She didn't understand the language. They got angry with her. They asked her again to open the trunk. They were angry, very angry. They were shouting at her, perhaps obscene words in Swahili. But she managed to keep her cool, she wasn't easily frightened. She was not a coward. But when one of the soldiers pointed the gun at her, close to her temple, fear grabbed her, shaking her body, and her teeth chattered. These guys mean business - they would shoot her and dump her somewhere in the forest. Nobody would know. The solider stood pointing his gun at her, trigger happy. Anytime now. Her eyes were glazed, begging for mercy. She wanted to plead to be spared. She could not. Fear was choking her. They were gloating over seeing her fear-stricken. They tormented her further. 

One of the soldiers fired in the air. Poor Nancy thought that she was finished. No more Nancy Price. She slumped on her seat. The intensity of the fear unlocked her bladder. Her urine cascaded, wetting her pantyhose and the driver seat, creating a small puddle under it. The soldiers went hysterical, laughing and thumping on the ground like a bunch of enthusiastic kids, exclaiming loudly in Swahili. A few passersby were courageous enough to see what the fuss was all about. They too laughed loudly. Nancy Price heard them. Never before in her life had she felt so humiliated. These were indeed savages, brutes and barbarians. 

In the end, having their fun, without molesting her, they let her go. Nancy drove back to the Immaculate Conception Collage. She was seething with anger. "Those fucking bastards!" she ranted as she drove. What could she do? Cooling down, she realized how lonely she was. She wasn't safe. Africa was not her home. She wanted to be with people, not any people, white people. But no white people were around. She thought of Mother Veronica and of Allison Web. She needed to talk to someone. Whom? She couldn't talk to the African staff in the College, she had already sensed that they disliked her. If she told them, they would not sympathize with her. They might laugh in her face. She couldn't face another humiliation. 

She did not know the mental makeup of the Africans, even of the Western-educated ones. She couldn't hold it in any longer. She took a chance and one day, she told it to John Kiwanuka, how the four army men humiliated her. He listened, said not a word and she wasn't sure what was going in his mind. When she was almost finished telling him, she blurted out with anger, "Those Africans soldiers are barbarians, brutes, like a troupe of frenzied chimpanzees in the wild. Shouting and calling everyone from the road to see me in that state as if they had discovered something
unusual."

"They had," John had said. 

She darted a hostile look at him and demanded to know what he meant. He told her very calmly that those African soldiers had discovered that the White could be cowed down by the African and that was a discovery for them. Another discovery was seeing her urinating. 
"That was a discovery too?" Nancy Price asked.
"Of course."
"Didn't they know that the Whites urinate, shit and do all such biological things like rest of the animals?"

"In Colonial Africa the Whites weren't animals, they were divinities. Having divine status, they had separate toilets, separate resident areas, they had everything exclusive for themselves, living a leisurely and luxurious life. Nothing has changed much even now. When I was young, I often wondered if the Whites did really shit, urinate and have sex. When the students got pregnant here, Mother Veronica and the White staff looked down upon them as if they were rubbish, as if the Whites did not do such things. And when the nobilities and royalties came from England on official visits to Uganda, they indeed appeared before our eyes like Gods and Goddesses from heaven. How could such people urinate, shit and have sex? But now, we know better." 

Nancy Price was a sensitive woman. For the first time, she saw the color of her skin was equated with injustice. Her conscience stirred. She was overcome with emotion. Was it guilt? Was it compassion? Or was it love? She didn't know, but on the spur of the moment, she asked John Kiwanuka to marry her. She almost begged him; and in the end, he consented to take Nancy as his wife. 

Our plates were empty; there were no more matoke portions to go around, nor waragi. We had coffee, not from Uganda but from Tanzania. In the end, I took their leave and went home through the snow to put the story on the paper while it was still fresh.

[Lino Leitão is the author of a recently published novel - Gift of the Holy Cross]