The Nation of Shopkeepers, 1972–77

IN APRIL 1972 I got my results: First Class Honours, one of the best they had ever had in the literature department at Makerere. There was no one to celebrate with. Uganda was a graveyard filling up with the dead and bereaved. Those still mercifully untouched by the killings gave off a whiff of primeval fear. The streets and marketplaces reeked of danger. You heard no loud laughter, and music seemed to shake and tremble as the volume was kept low on small radio sets.

As the day of my departure approached, I believed I would come back and teach one day at Makerere and that Amin’s reign of terror would soon self-destruct. Things were so bad, they could only get better. Surely. TL had always said he wanted the same, to return and work as a zoologist in the profuse, untamed expanses of East Africa. It was not to be. In those final weeks before I was due to fly off, though, I had not even the slightest sense that this was a final parting from who I was and the history that had made me. I was going on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, a thrilling sojourn before real life back home. I left my records and the kitsch stuff of a 1960s young one in storage at the university and entrusted a good mate with old photographs, letters, my school reports and all those precious things girls collect and never want to lose.