Death wears big boots
Apr 26, 2008
YEARS ago, apropos of some horror, Fate, as is its wont, had served, out of my head some lines sprouted: Death Wears Big Boots/ And When He Has Smiled He Passes On. They made sense to me; still do. Never more so than at the recent dreadful dying of those 20 kids at Budo Junior School, burnt to cinde
By John Nagenda
YEARS ago, apropos of some horror, Fate, as is its wont, had served, out of my head some lines sprouted: Death Wears Big Boots/ And When He Has Smiled He Passes On. They made sense to me; still do. Never more so than at the recent dreadful dying of those 20 kids at Budo Junior School, burnt to cinders and ashes. It happened while I was away in London and I am still trying to catch up; but as are those who were here.
Theories abound on the likely causes of this monstrous tragedy, the most cogent being that it was born of the voracious greed of those who should have been, from top to bottom, the very keepers of those who perished. Words fail us at these moments, but would it be wrong, if all else fails, to apply the same measures which deal with the most vicious gangsters in our society?
By coincidence it is said that some of these who had been seen off by Special Forces (who had been groomed for that purpose) have now resurfaced. The Forces are being unleashed again to destroy them. Why on earth should these Forces, and their methods, not be additionally targetted against those through whose greed families, and Uganda, have lost these young Budonian flowers?
**************
Yesterday I achieved the grand old age of 70. It is not all that far from 69 (naughty French age) to which I had become accustomed, (the age, not the naughty!) but 70 feels a huge leap. This is in part psychological for 70 carries with it the sense that even that halfway word “elderly†must now be firmly discarded forever, and “old†inserted instead.
For example, if I am dispatched by a licensed-to-kill boda bodarider at a zebra crossing (“licensed†by the power these riders say they have been given from on high) “old†is the description the media would append to my name. Do I mind? Not a fig! Don’t cry for me, Reader. Rather I pat myself on the back for having got here at all, although not always comfortably.
Is it merely my imagination that I nearly snuffed it in infancy? I now have no one to ask. But from 1953 a clearer pattern emerges, the year of my exile amongst the Bakiga of Western Uganda, near the Congo border.
One fateful night I awoke with a venomous pain in my lower abdomen. I was self-conscious about making a commotion about this at an hour well past midnight, but quite soon I was yelling to awaken the dead. That grand man, Zebuloni Kabaza, my guardian then and still firm friend now a half century later, without a doubt saved my life. Instead of shouting at me to shut up and await the morning, he got on his bike and set off for the doctor, a hazardous valley and then steep hill away!
That worthy, a young Jewish surgeon called, if my memory serves, Karrack, came at once, and operated immediately we got to his rudimentary surgery. It was a strangulated hernia that he thought wouldn’t have given us more than an hour! About 30 years afterwards, in faraway London on a pretty Sunday morning while walking in Hammersmith, the hammer of a pain struck me not far from my scar of the Kigezi adventure.
Fearing that if I fell and writhed in pain on the street, the London populace would express disgust at the sight of a Blackman so early drunk, I managed it to my dwelling where I was swiftly transported to hospital.
While the young nurses were making merry feeling my incredibly painful “unmentionables†on the stretcher upon which I lay, a quietly commanding Ghanaian consultant came, took one look at me and ordered I be taken straight to theatre where in no time I had been put out and operated upon. For Tortion of the Testes: twisted balls. You untwist them, sew them down, and, except for unwieldy walking for a week or two, you are fine.
Without the op the blood stops going from North to South, or something like that, and you die badly. Then in April ’94, on my birthday, as the guests started arriving at my house at Mengo, so did a feeling of great unease in my left side. I was firmly directed to bed by my guests, the better not to spoil their merriment. By morning I was in a very bad way and was driven to the doctor, my old friend Lwanga. He immediately diagnosed Acute Pancreatitis, and put me on a course of antibiotics of savage measure, with balancing other drugs to contain the antibiotics.
Although I lost 50 pounds in three months (to the undisguised glee of some who thought I was suffering from you-know-what) I started getting better slowly but surely and was finally pronounced fully recovered.
Alack and alas the pancreas it seems had other ideas and now perhaps is the introducer of the wanton Diabetes which I am stoutly combating (“stoutly†being a pun, weight-wise). I could let you go from this litany of woes, but accuracy demands a quick look at my cancer of the prostate four years ago in April, again!
T. S. Eliot dubbed it “the cruellest monthâ€. Having been at death’s door in Johannesburg (including the “life out of the body†experience, seeing myself as bones in a bag at the back of a party, possibly my own) here we are fully recovered from that one, and alive and kicking.
And seventy!
YEARS ago, apropos of some horror, Fate, as is its wont, had served, out of my head some lines sprouted: Death Wears Big Boots/ And When He Has Smiled He Passes On. They made sense to me; still do. Never more so than at the recent dreadful dying of those 20 kids at Budo Junior School, burnt to cinders and ashes. It happened while I was away in London and I am still trying to catch up; but as are those who were here.
Theories abound on the likely causes of this monstrous tragedy, the most cogent being that it was born of the voracious greed of those who should have been, from top to bottom, the very keepers of those who perished. Words fail us at these moments, but would it be wrong, if all else fails, to apply the same measures which deal with the most vicious gangsters in our society?
By coincidence it is said that some of these who had been seen off by Special Forces (who had been groomed for that purpose) have now resurfaced. The Forces are being unleashed again to destroy them. Why on earth should these Forces, and their methods, not be additionally targetted against those through whose greed families, and Uganda, have lost these young Budonian flowers?
**************
Yesterday I achieved the grand old age of 70. It is not all that far from 69 (naughty French age) to which I had become accustomed, (the age, not the naughty!) but 70 feels a huge leap. This is in part psychological for 70 carries with it the sense that even that halfway word “elderly†must now be firmly discarded forever, and “old†inserted instead.
For example, if I am dispatched by a licensed-to-kill boda bodarider at a zebra crossing (“licensed†by the power these riders say they have been given from on high) “old†is the description the media would append to my name. Do I mind? Not a fig! Don’t cry for me, Reader. Rather I pat myself on the back for having got here at all, although not always comfortably.
Is it merely my imagination that I nearly snuffed it in infancy? I now have no one to ask. But from 1953 a clearer pattern emerges, the year of my exile amongst the Bakiga of Western Uganda, near the Congo border.
One fateful night I awoke with a venomous pain in my lower abdomen. I was self-conscious about making a commotion about this at an hour well past midnight, but quite soon I was yelling to awaken the dead. That grand man, Zebuloni Kabaza, my guardian then and still firm friend now a half century later, without a doubt saved my life. Instead of shouting at me to shut up and await the morning, he got on his bike and set off for the doctor, a hazardous valley and then steep hill away!
That worthy, a young Jewish surgeon called, if my memory serves, Karrack, came at once, and operated immediately we got to his rudimentary surgery. It was a strangulated hernia that he thought wouldn’t have given us more than an hour! About 30 years afterwards, in faraway London on a pretty Sunday morning while walking in Hammersmith, the hammer of a pain struck me not far from my scar of the Kigezi adventure.
Fearing that if I fell and writhed in pain on the street, the London populace would express disgust at the sight of a Blackman so early drunk, I managed it to my dwelling where I was swiftly transported to hospital.
While the young nurses were making merry feeling my incredibly painful “unmentionables†on the stretcher upon which I lay, a quietly commanding Ghanaian consultant came, took one look at me and ordered I be taken straight to theatre where in no time I had been put out and operated upon. For Tortion of the Testes: twisted balls. You untwist them, sew them down, and, except for unwieldy walking for a week or two, you are fine.
Without the op the blood stops going from North to South, or something like that, and you die badly. Then in April ’94, on my birthday, as the guests started arriving at my house at Mengo, so did a feeling of great unease in my left side. I was firmly directed to bed by my guests, the better not to spoil their merriment. By morning I was in a very bad way and was driven to the doctor, my old friend Lwanga. He immediately diagnosed Acute Pancreatitis, and put me on a course of antibiotics of savage measure, with balancing other drugs to contain the antibiotics.
Although I lost 50 pounds in three months (to the undisguised glee of some who thought I was suffering from you-know-what) I started getting better slowly but surely and was finally pronounced fully recovered.
Alack and alas the pancreas it seems had other ideas and now perhaps is the introducer of the wanton Diabetes which I am stoutly combating (“stoutly†being a pun, weight-wise). I could let you go from this litany of woes, but accuracy demands a quick look at my cancer of the prostate four years ago in April, again!
T. S. Eliot dubbed it “the cruellest monthâ€. Having been at death’s door in Johannesburg (including the “life out of the body†experience, seeing myself as bones in a bag at the back of a party, possibly my own) here we are fully recovered from that one, and alive and kicking.
And seventy!