Sir Vidia's Shadow Read Free

and they faded away.
    The country was thickly forested, full of browsing elephants and loping giraffes, with soft green hills and yellowing savannah scattered with flat-topped thorn trees. The lakes were large. Lake Victoria was an inland sea. Even Uganda’s crops were pretty, for there was nothing lusher than a hillside of tea bushes, jade-colored with fresh leaves.
Coffee plants looked brilliant and festive when the berries were ripe. The cane fields were dense, and for a reason no one could explain, the road past them, on the way to Jinja, was always carpeted with white butterflies, so thick at times that cars had been known to skid when their wheels crossed them. There were hippos wherever there was water, and there were crocs in the White Nile. At Mubende a witch tree was particularly malevolent, but an offering of a snakeskin or feathers served as counter-magic. An old smoky-brown skull mounted in the roots of a banyan tree at Mityana was so ominous no one dared remove it. The nail driven into the skull was not an afterthought but rather the cause of death. A prince had carried out the execution, but a king had ordered it. Uganda was a country of kings with extravagant titles—the Kabaka of Buganda, the Omukama of Toro, the Omugabe of Ankole, the Kyabazinga of Busoga—and all of them lived in fragile and tumbledown palaces surrounded by stockade fences of sharpened bamboo stakes.
    Down the dusty roads Julian drove with Yomo, stopping in villages to talk to rural teachers. He was in the Extra-Mural Department, which required him to travel in remote parts of the country: in the north at Gulu, Lira, and Rhino Camp; in West Nile, where Yomo was taken to be a Sudanese; at Trans-Nzoia near Mount Elgon, a perfect volcano’s cone; to the border of Rwanda, where in the purple mist they saw a whole range of green-blue volcanoes.
    Uganda had been a protectorate, not a colony, and had known such insignificant white settlement that there was no resentment against whites, and none had been hoofed out of the country as they had elsewhere in Africa.
Muzungus
were a curiosity, not a threat. Ugandans were proud of their kings, who were superior to any European—they had been more than a match for explorers as ingenious as Burton and for all foreign politicians. The lesson for missionaries was Uganda’s notoriety in having produced many of Africa’s first Christian martyrs, when King Freddy’s grandfather, Mutesa I, burned thirty of them alive. But these deaths only excited religious activity, and Uganda’s martyrology served as an inspiration to the missionaries who stalked the bush.
    Indians were a separate category—
muhindis
, “Asians.” People muttered about them, but perhaps no more than Indians muttered about themselves, for they were divided between Muslims and Hindus, and they made jokes about each other, revealing some sense of insecurity. Many Indians seemed genuinely liberated from caste consciousness. Africans envied and disliked them for their supposed wealth and cliquishness. Indians regarded Africans as weak, unreliable, and backward “Hubshees,” which meant Ethiopians. Yet Indians also felt that Africans were unfairly privileged for their political independence, to which some Indians had contributed but from which they were excluded. Indians thought it was laughable that Westerners paid so much attention to Africans. Money given to Africans was money wasted. Indians and Africans were in constant contact, for Indians were shopkeepers and Africans were their customers. There were no marriages between the two groups. Each said the other smelled.
    They were all colonials, Indian and African alike. Just a few years earlier they had all been singing “God Save the Queen.” Before each movie at the Odeon, on Kampala Road, there was a full minute’s footage of the Union Jack flapping in a stiff wind and a trooping-the-colors close-up of Queen Elizabeth on