‘Struggle naught availeth’

UGANDA’S No1 COLUMNIST.. INFORMED, CONTROVERSIAL AND PROVOCATIVE
John Nagenda

As Victorian authors might have put it, I owe it to my loyal readership to explain my column’s continued absence since sometime in August.

Back in 1963 (when the world was younger) I met Ruth and have been with her ever since. About 10 weeks ago, I insisted since her racking cough was getting on our nerves, that she should go and consult doctors. In the end she did and was diagnosed as having a shadow on her lungs.

Not only that, there was one on her liver as well; the primary source seemed to be in the colon. I went cold, since one of the greatest friends of my life, Charles Kikonyogo, despite prolonged fighting in Africa and England, had died of cancer of the liver.

Ruth and I dashed to London and our fears were confirmed by Mr (as advanced surgeons are called) Kmiot of St Thomas’ Hospital. He successfully removed the cancer in Ruth’s colon — including the colon itself — but told me that the secondary cancers in the lungs and liver were still alive and kicking, and that, as he briskly put it, the liver was “extremely diseased”.

There and then I knew “the struggle naught availeth”. (But this is the time to give our Ugandan doctors a well-deserved pat on the back.)

Soon St. Thomas’ announced that it was too late for chemotherapy which would not be used. If you are in weak state chemotherapy will kill you ahead of the cancer itself, and will moreover cause you major pain and suffering.

Kikonyogo told me while undergoing his horrific, and ultimately hopeless treatment that there were many times when he felt that the treatment was more painful than the cancer. That St Thomas’ itself, to say nothing of Kmiot, was against chemotherapy in this case was thus received by me as manna from heaven. So might a condemned person’s last meal be taken, “strictly for taste, not nourishment”.

That was a month ago, and as I write Ruth’s heart is still beating, although her skeletal looks, frightening to behold, are as far to compare as hell from heaven, of the young woman I first clapped eyes on 42 years ago.

Writing the column in these circumstances would therefore have seemed like a drowning man sipping a vintage champagne as the sea gathers around his throat.

When my beloved parents died within seven months of each other back in 1973, he on January 8, and she consequently of a broken heart on September 5, I lost something which I immediately realised I would never recover, although I gained instead the knowledge that henceforth nothing and nobody would ever frighten me into doing something I didn’t want to do.

I wrote a lamentation called Death Twice, which I haven’t yet finished. Ruth, rather than I, knows where it is stored. Somehow I’ll find it, and the title will change to Death Thrice.
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Here in England where I am marooned while Ruth’s impending death hangs over me like the Sword of Damocles, it has been Party Conference season.

The latest is of the Labour Party, whose Leader is Mr. Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, or Tony as he prefers to be called by all and sundry. Can you imagine going up to our Leader, sticking out your paw and saying Yoweri? I shudder! “Tony”, whose Party won the elections for a record (for Labour) third consecutive time is very determined to serve the full five-year course.

It seems only ill health will stop him, although it must be said that at times he looks terrifyingly gaunt and drawn.

At one time it was thought he would move over even before half time. It seems that Madame, the formidable Cherie Booth, likened by many to Lady Macbeth, would have none of that and keeps pushing hard from behind, putting steel in his spine.

Shakespeare should be living at this hour! At any rate the Waiting Man, the Man in the Wings, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, saw his opportunity at this year’s Labour Conference and grabbed at with both hands.

He went as far as to imply that within the year he would be anointed Prime Minister, replacing Blair. The cameras cut to Tony, who looked on the point of throwing up.

Something told you that Brown had over-chanced his hand. But Mr. Brown is a calculating man, so perhaps he was doing so on purpose, disturbing the waters to see what would come of it, or throwing a stone into bees. Your columnist did this 60 years ago and about 50 stings were taken out of his head. Never again!

Mrs Blair must have given her man severe pillow talk. Herself went to war almost immediately. When asked how she would feel if Tony, and she, were to leave 10 Downing Street, official residence of the Prime Minister, she said it was so far off she had not even thought about it, and gave a great dirty laugh — perhaps smirk would be nearer the mark.

What else she gave to Blair I know not. But in his concluding speech he was a man anew, and came out of his corner with both fists flailing. Cut to Gordon Brown; he looked as if he had stomached something very nasty indeed.

For a time before this Labour conference it had looked increasingly as if the Labour leadership, and therefore the premiership, would pass on to Brown in orderly and friendly fashion. Not now.

The machinations are rolling and God knows where they will stop. Truly has it been said that leadership wears big boots!