Dramatizing the violence, spoiled beauty of Uganda

SNAKEPIT

By Moses Isegawa

Knopf, $24, 272 pages

REVIEWED BY SUDIP BOSE

The rise to power of Idi Amin in January 1971 marked the beginning of the most terrifying and violent period in Uganda’s history. Between the time he seized control of Milton Obote’s socialist government and the time he himself was ousted, by Julius Nyerere’s invading Tanzanian forces in 1979, some 500,000 Ugandans had been slaughtered.

Nobody was safe from the dictator’s fickle, paranoid wrath. Judges, bureaucrats, professors, priests, political rivals, wives, members of Mr. Obote’s old regime — all were targeted by Amin’s notorious, bloodthirsty killing squads.

The nightmarish world of Amin’s Uganda is the setting for Moses Isegawa’s uneven second novel. The book’s protagonist, Bat Katanga, having returned to Uganda from Cambridge University, secures a bureaucratic post in the ministry of power and communications and is charged with fixing a government that is chaotic, corrupt, and grossly inefficient.

Bat is full of optimism, dreaming of the wealth he hopes to accumulate, and the arc of the novel describes his startling ascendancy, “his triumphant entry into the bastions of power” and then his very predictable decline, from innocence to experience, from young optimist to a man defeated, “drenched in sweat on the edge of despair, with the look of madness or grief in his eyes.”

One of the instruments of this decline is violence, an almost unspeakable violence that is hinted at on the novel’s first page, when Bat is being interviewed for his new post by Uganda’s minister of power and communications, Gen. Samson Bazooka Ondogar, aboard a military helicopter, its “spinning blades like whirling knives.”

There’s an important spatial dimension, as well, to this image of Bat and the corrupt Bazooka soaring above the Ugandan countryside. The general (a kind of Ugandan Tony Soprano) has attained considerable status in his life; he lives, so to speak, in the clouds.

This is what Bat wants, too — “the possibility of upward mobility”; here, in the first pages of the novel, Bat gets a metaphorical taste of such mobility while traveling far above the earth’s surface. To be airborne is to be invincible, powerful, able to rise up above the earthbound and the helpless, and to survey it all with detachment.

Even when on the ground, Bat craves motion and speed, which often veers into recklessness. We see a very confident Bat, unaware that Bazooka has set him up for a terrific fall, waking “early each morning, [driving] to the city, outracing most cars on the way, and [arriving] at his office with the high of speed still fizzing in his blood.”

With this same disregard for consequences does he embark on a relationship with Victoria Kayiwa, who — unbeknownst to him — has been sent by the general to spy on him, a woman whose job it is to entrap political subversives.

Victoria, though her intentions are hardly pure at the start, ends up falling for Bat, viewing him as “her godsent deliverer” who might rescue her from the world of evil she inhabits. But after getting her pregnant, Bat casts Victoria aside for another woman.

Story Continues →