Chapter VI (Beginings)

I met Kintu three years ago in a nightclub. I had almost completely vanished. My gradual disappearance from myself was almost complete and there was barely anything left of me. Just shreds and debris. I went to a club to get drunk. I did not expect to meet the original man. The first one.
      
         There must be moments when Club Capri is empty. I have never seen them, but logic dictates that they must exist. Because no one lives here.
         In those moments the wandering eye of a janitor slipping over a shock of black and white slides on unperturbed because the giant monochrome of the machine’s entrails is so familiar.
         But at nights like this, when Capri is most alive, the black of shadows falls on the black paint of the walls and obscures their darkness with a more threatening, more potent darkness, and the white of the tabletops and the checkered floor disappears under the urgent flashing rainbows of disco lights. A thousand colours, from the clothes of a thousand dancers, dominate the sweeping eye. And if you are dancing right, you do not notice that these are the only colour Capri has. Colour that is borrowed. Capri has no soul.

        
       Some buildings do, they have an emotional essence, and that is more apparent when they are empty; that is when you feel it the most. The sternness of an office, the cruelty of a factory, the malice of a courtroom, the love of a home. And the feeling touches those who enter it, and so when it is full of people, the people are tinted by the colour of the room. But Capri is soulless. It needs to borrow from the hectic, drunk, fast-talking people in it, as they jump and fall in jerking motions, smiling as if they are happy.
      
       The music was thick and strong and it was beating into my back as I sat at the bar gazing into a bottle of Pilsner.
       “Asio. Ngolinga sema. Ngolinga sema tewawalina. Ngo osema.” To my left a dark-skinned man with a hard jaw and large frowning eyes was staring at me. “Injibuusanwe. Asio, ngo sema,” he said.
       He wore a navy blue blazer over a dark shirt that was open at the neck to show off a heavy gold necklace. He had a marine cut. The fashions were those of your average Capri playboy, but the skin beneath them was too dark, the eyes were too sharp, the jaw too set for him to really be something that frivolous.
       “Do I know you?” I asked, resenting the intrusion.
       He sneered. “Nyawaiko,” he said, then was done with me. He turned his attention to the bartender and raised two fingers. It rarely happens at Capri, but the bartender responded immediately, and carried two Nile Specials to him. “Cheers,” he said to the bartender and walked off.
      
       “Who was that?” the woman next to me asked.
       “Don’t know. Crazy guy. Couldn’t understand a word he said,” I answered, then I returned to our interrupted non-conversation.
      
       Which was interrupted again only minutes later, when she said, with surprise, “Look.”
         I looked.
         At the foot of the stool stood a little girl. First I noticed that her face was all eyes and hair— she had big girl eyes and two enormous puffs meticulously combed and tied up above her ears. Then I noticed that she was wearing a cheap and shapeless dress— it looked like a nightdress.
         Then, only after this, did I notice that there was a little girl, can’t have been a day above six years old, in a nightclub at two in the morning.
         “Asio, musaja ima ngo,” she said. She tugged at my jeans to pull me to follow her.
         She led me to a table at the rim of the club, at the edge where you only had Capri on one side of you. On the other, beyond the wall, was an empty street. The man with the jaw was waiting smiling. “Aaah,” he said in a congratulatory tone. “Naona amekuja. Umekuja. Keti. Keti.” He gestured at the seat opposite him at the table. It was empty. The second beer he had ordered was standing at the other chair waiting. He was holding the first. “Kaa hapo. Hebu mimi na wewe tunene.”
         I sat myself down and, before I could ask who he was, he launched again into that language:  “Nialabako kino kifo kimamsula. Kimamsula dadala.”
         I waved my hands around my ears. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying!” I shouted.
         “Kelele ni mingi. Ngoja.” Then, with the simple act of looking around at the club, a glance passing over the speakers and the lights, he made them withdraw. They crept away, as if obeying polite but firm instructions to leave us to ourselves. The table was now quiet, and there was only one light on it. I don’t know where it came from. It was not one of the Capri lights. It was white.
         “Ngwani?” I asked. The word rolled off my tongue with ease.
         And now that I had finally discovered that I could speak his language, he switched to English. “My name is Kintu.”
         “Kintu who?”
         “Just Kintu. Where I am from, that name is enough.” From the gold chain hung a medallion. In the fresh white light I could see that, embedded in the medallion, was what looked like a tooth.
         “It is the tooth of a cow,” he said. “It is several hundred years old.”
         “An heirloom? Passed down from your fathers?” I don’t know why I was asking. Maybe because he wanted me to.
         “I have no fathers. I am the original father.”
       There are two versions of the story of Kintu. The one they tell children in early primary school, the version the teachers were told by their grandparents before fireplaces at dusk, is that Kintu was the first man. He came down from heaven at the beginning of time with the first cow and a large gourd. He milked the cow to release the rivers of the world, then he tipped his gourd over and spilt out the seeds that grew into all the plants in the world, then he smashed the gourd on a rock and the rock became Nambi, the first woman.
       The other version, the one you learn in university or, if you are curious, in secondary school, says that Kintu was a hun with imperial ambitions. He emerged from the area that is now Eastern Congo (or from the Sudan. Scholars disagree) in the seventeenth century and began conquering and subduing the simple scattered societies around the Lake Victoria until he had a kingdom to call his own beneath his feet.
       When Kintu came to me in the club, he would not tell me which version was true. He did not answer many of my questions. He only told me that he was immortal, and that in a short while, I would become immortal too. When I told him I didn’t want to be, he said I had no choice.

       He said he had just come from the war in the north and needed to understand. He wanted a witness. He spoke of  evil that billowed off the ground by day, and fell from the black sky at night,  evil that blew in the wind. The newspapers and the reports and the NGOs and the UN would call it a twenty-year-old insurgency that the government has failed to suppress, and use words like Human Rights Abuse and Atrocities. But only Kintu knew as well as the victims how pale and how weak that was. This is what happened: For years bands of monsters in the skins of men had been stomping into the villages, into the lives of those who did not deserve such a fate— they were only people, they did not deserve this— and loot through the huts, then burn them down. Their thefts had deepened the villagers’ poverty, and now their fire made that depth absolute. Everything was gone. But not everything. They would turn to the villagers. Some they would kill, some they would rape. They would take their lives, or take their lives.
       Everything was gone. But not everything. This sort of evil does not subside, this sort of evil grows as it feeds. They would then turn to other villagers with their machetes swinging in dull whirrs of dark iron and if they could not slice the lips, ears, noses cleanly off or if they did not chop the hands, buttocks, legs cleanly off, if the flesh clung to the body by a string of bleeding, desperate faith, their hands would grab in, nails digging in for a stronger grip, and pull, to tear it off. And then they would laugh and let the man, thus mutilated, live. Because they felt it was funny.
       And then they went away. But not alone. They turned their guns on the children and told them to march. Small bodies, naked and wet in a child’s sweat wrung out by the fear and the running and the heat from the burning huts and the splashes of blood that fell from all around them, the small bodies walked around, ahead and behind the monster, and none of the children dared to cry. Don’t cry for your mother, don’t cry for your sister next to you. Don’t even think of what they are going to do to her for the rest of her life. Because if you cry they will put a gun in her hands and tell her that if she doesn’t shoot you, they will start tonight.
       And hope, if you still can hope, that she doesn’t cry. Because then they will put the gun in your hands.
       The monster, through the billows of smoke, dust and noise and the yellow-green haze rising up from other worlds disrupted, retreated, dragging the silent children with it. And the survivors who did not even think of themselves as survivors, looked through eyes blurred with tears and blood, and watched them leave. Everything was gone. Everything.
      
       When Kintu told me this, how he had stood in the midst of the fray, and how many eyes he had seen it through, I tried to do what Kampalans had done for twenty years. You put up barriers to the inner parts of your mind. You erect them quickly and you make them high. “Children Abducted”, “Village Razed To The Ground”, “Men Mutilated by LRA”, “Kony Rebels Strike Again”… you cannot let that knowledge penetrate again. Let it stay on the surface, where you can know it for now, then forget it when the music starts to play on the radio. The new Mariah Carey song. Because if it gets inside, you will feel helpless and useless, because you cannot stop them; and you will feel dirty and cheap like a thief, because they don’t deserve to suffer and you don’t deserve to be secure; and you will feel angry that this happened and spoilt your peace, and you will feel angry for feeling that, and then you will want to forget, and you will say in the silence of your heart that the next time you will not let this knowledge in. I will not let it in.
      
       But, Kintu told me, I didn’t have that option anymore.