All posts tagged atrocities

The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Wojchiec Jagielski (2009)

Warning: this review contains graphic descriptions of torture and mutilation.

Were you forced to kill any of your relatives or neighbours?
Were you forced to chop off people’s hands or feet with a machete?
Were you forced to gouge out people’s eyes?
Were you forced to rape women?
Were you forced to burn people alive?

(Part of the questionnaire given to freed child soldiers in north Uganda, quoted in The Night Wanderers, page 38)

Wojchiec Jagielski

Wojchiec Jagielski is a Polish journalist who specialises in reporting from the world’s worst conflicts. Hence, for example, ‘Towers of Stone’, his 2009 book about the gruesome brutal wars in Chechnya, along with books on Afghanistan and South Africa.

But it’s not not just reporting – Jagielski is interested in the psychology created by terrible conflicts and, beyond that, in the voodoo, spectral elements, the worlds beyond normal human experience which extreme situations create, the deprivation, degradation, demoralisation spread over long periods, which create new psychic zones.

For this reason – for Jagielski’s interest in moods and alternative states and his interest in depicting them in prose which is often more about poetry and fleeting perceptions than the journalist’s tradition fare of facts and dates – he has often been compared to the famous master of such writing and fellow Pole, Ryszard Kapuściński.

No surprise that snippets of praise from Kapuściński are found on the jackets of Jagielski’s books (”A stunning and beautiful book…Jagielski has scaled the heights of reportage’), or that Kapuściński wrote the introduction to one of his books, or that this very book was nominated for the Ryszard Kapuściński Prize.

Part 1 (Gulu and its night wanderers)

Ugandan elections 2006

The Night Wanderers is set in Uganda in 2006. Nominally Jagielski was in Uganda to cover the February 2006 general election and party politics are, accordingly, described in part 2. But the meat of the book is his descriptions of the appalling plight of the thousands of children abducted by the rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), led by the psychopath Joseph Kony. J.M. Barrie wrote about the Lost Boys but it was a fairy tale compared to this lost generation of Ugandan children.

The Acholi

The north of Uganda is inhabited by the Acholi people. Some 2 million of them have been driven out of their villages, forced to abandon their homes, their fields and crops, to leave behind the graveyards full of ancestral spirits, and instead herded into about 200 refugee camps where they have built huts and live, but which they can never regard as home.

Exemplary cruelty

The rebels terrify civilians by attacking villages, hacking people to death with machetes, chopping off their hands, slitting their throats, clubbing them to death, hacking them to pieces with axes, raping the women, herding people into huts and burning them alive. The cruelty is exemplary: it is punishment for not believing in the wonderfulness of Joseph Kony, and also to terrify entire regions into submission. Thus:

On the orders of their commanders, the guerrillas killed the villagers in extremely cruel ways. They butchered and burned them alive, forced the prisoners to commit cannibalism and infanticide. They raped and tortured, cut off people’s lips, gouged out their eyes, and chopped off their hands and feet. They left behind bloodied corpses and gutted houses. (p.138)

(Why does the LRA cut off people’s lips? As a warning to others not to report encounters with them to the authorities or to the Ugandan Army, p.296.)

Refugee village headman

Jagielski meets Abola Imbakasi, headman of one such refugee camp, Palenga. His meek son, Robert, was taken by the guerrillas for 3 months (p.18). On returning he had to be exorcised by a priest but is still not the same. His mind has been permanently damaged by what he saw and was forced to do.

The children’s treatment centre

Jagielski meets Nora who runs a rehabilitation centre (a ‘children’s treatment centre’) for children who’ve escaped or been rescued from the guerrillas. All of them have killed, multiple times. Jagielski watches one of the therapy methods which is to let them act out what they did as a kind of gruesome pantomime, some of them acting out their own roles, some of them playing the villagers who they hacked, burned, tortured, shot and burned. The terrible questionnaire (p.38).

The journalist’s responsibility

Jagielski explains that he’s never had problems interviewing the commanders and leaders who order massacres and atrocities. They’re always confident it was the only way to achieve justice or peace. They are always full of excuses, justifications and blame others (see Putin’s justifications for murdering civilians in Ukraine).

In his experience it is always much harder talking to the victims of atrocities. For many their story, their experience, is all they have left. Therefore sharing it with a journalist is like a precious trust. Part of which is they think that by sharing their story, it will bring about justice in the outside world, and will bring them peace and closure. It is far harder dealing with these poor people when neither of those things happen, when the world doesn’t suddenly galvanise itself to address their wrongs, when they are left feeling even worse than they did before they told their stories (p.33).

Rebel magic

The ferocity of the attackers, the way they chiefly emerged at night, the way they hid in the jungle and picked off anyone foolish enough to stray into the darker jungle, all this gave rise to folk stories and legends: that they could dematerialise at will, could appear anywhere like witches, had magical powers, that they change the children they kidnapped from humans into savage animals (p.39)

And indeed, villagers, adults, normal civilians who haven’t been inducted, regard returnees from the rebels as ‘spirits of the forest’, as bewitched, soulless, voodoo, jinxed, bad luck (p.49).

Initiation killing

Jagielski learns from Nora’s interviews with countless child soldiers how new initiates into the LRA were forced at gunpoint to murder their own fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, best friends, neighbours, in front of everyone, in front of plenty of witnesses, because then there was no going back, then they were forced to stay. This was the initiation ceremony into the Lord’s Army (p.45).

The boy Samuel

Jagielski is particularly interested in interviewing Samuel, who was abducted at age 9 and was soon afterwards forced to kill his first person, a boy from his village, and whose story Jagielski tries to piece together. Nora tells him the best age to create a child soldier is 9, old enough to be independent, young enough not to really know right and wrong. Mouldable (p.57).

Jackson the journalist

After trips to refugee camps or to interview the children, Jagielski returns to the bar at Franklin’s Inn where he regularly meets Jackson, now a radio journalist, himself inducted into the guerrillas many years earlier. Jackson plays the role of sardonic, satirical commentator on Jagielski’s efforts, claiming that no matter how many questions he asks, he’ll never understand what it’s like (p.46).

Atrocities

The narrative is regularly punctuated by descriptions of the most appalling atrocities, for example on pages 45, 50, 72, 138, 144, 146,

When they had finished their interrogation, the older guerrillas started killing the villagers. The commanders forbade them from shooting unnecessarily, to save bullets, and also because the noise of shots would alert the army. The peasants were tied up and made to lie on the ground, as the guerrillas unhurriedly murdered them one by one – men, women, old people, and also small children who weren’t fit to be prisoners. They killed them with machetes, axes, hoes and large knives usually used as agricultural tools. None of the villagers put up resistance or fought for their lives. Terror and a sense of doom had taken away their capacity for any kind of action. (p.137)

Or the story (repeated twice) of the LRA attack on a funeral procession when they forced the mourners to cook and eat the remains of the deceased, allegedly on the orders of Onen Kamdalu (p.241).

Gulu

Jagielski bases himself in Gulu, administrative capital of north central Uganda and each evening observes the same eerie ritual: every evening as the sun sets thousands of children (as many as 15,000) arrive having trekked from all the surrounding villages, for their own safety, to avoid the risk of being kidnapped and conscripted by the LRA. It is this silent army of forlorn children who arrive every evening and make beds in public spaces and on the sidewalks, who Nora calls ‘the Night Wanderers’ which give the book its title (p.58).

Jagielski describes the arrival of these tens of thousands of silent children in spooky spectral terms. The way the town of Gulu changed its atmosphere. the way adults departed abandoned the streets to the thousands of ghostly children. The peculiar way these children inspired irrational fear in the adult population, harbingers of evil (p.59).

Jagielski tells us he stayed at the Acholi Inn Hotel (p.91). This is a real place, still exists, and you can book a stay there, if you want.

Jagielski tells the history of how Uganda was created as a nation by the British, yoking together completely different peoples and tribes, the Buganda – agriculturalists – in the south, the Acholi, Lango and other peoples who lived by grazing and cattle, in the north.

Milton Obote and Yoweri Museveni

At independence in 1962 the British tried to reconcile these different peoples, making Milton Obote from the Lango tribe prime minister and the king of the Buganda, Frederick Mutesa II, president. But in 1966 Obote overthrew Mutesa and declared himself president. In 1971 Obote was overthrown by his own army chief of staff, Idi Amin from the Kwakwa people. In 1979 Ami invaded Tanzania but was swiftly repulsed and overthrown by the Tanzanian army (for a vivid description of Amin’s horrifying rule and the Tanzanian invasion, see Giles Foden’s powerful novel The Last King of Scotland).

Obote returned to power and swiftly commenced violent repression even worse than Amin’s triggering the Ugandan Bush War against him, led by members of Obote’s army plus tribal opponents. They crystallised into the National Resistance Army (NRA) and attracted support from the many Rwandan Tutsi exiles and refugees living in southern Uganda (who were to go on to form the Rwandan Patriotic Front and invade Rwanda in 1990).

In 1986 Obote was overthrown for the second time and the leader of the NRA, Yoweri Museveni, came to power. Museveni began a campaign of intimidation against the powerful Acholi people in the north and it was this which inspired Acholi resistance.

Alice Auma

Jagielski gives a pen portrait of Alice Auma, a withdrawn young woman who had failed to get pregnant by two husbands and been returned to her father in shame, before she began having visions and claimed to have visitations from spirits and announced she was a prophet of the Lord. She named the chief spirit visitor Lakwena (p.74).

Alice became known as Alice of the Holy Spirit. She set up a temple where she could heal the sick and the mentally disturbed. Then announced she was establishing an army which would not just defend the Acholi from the Ugandan Army’s depredations, but conquer all of Uganda and establish religious rule. She gathered followers from conventional guerrilla forces who were losing encounters against the army. She promised if they sprinkled holy water on their guns every bullet would find its billet, and if they smeared holy oil on their bodies they would be invulnerable.

Although this didn’t actually happen, the intensity of their belief led them to surprising victories over the conventional army and word spread. Conventional troops fled in panic when they heard the psalm-singing Alice army approaching. The army grew to several thousand and fought its way south to within 100 miles of the capital. But then her spirits abandoned her. Her troops said it happened when she crossed the White Nile and went beyond the borders of Acholi land. The central army also recruited powerful witches and magicians and defeated Alice’s army in November 1987.

Alice fled to Kenya where, ten years later (1997), Jagielski interviewed her. She didn’t say much. She claimed to have found a spirit cure for AIDS. She died in 2007.

Joseph Kony

Her father tried to take up her baton for a while but lacked the charisma. Then a new prophet arose in Acholiland, Joseph Kony. He claimed to be visited by Lakwena who had instructed him to create a new army, the Lord’s Army, and liberate Acholiland. One by one other rebel groups folded and ceasefired with the Ugandan army. Only the most fanatical opponents or those who had committed the most barbaric crimes held out and gravitated towards Kony’s army which, by a process of selection, became full of psychopaths, ‘vile, bloodthirsty, accursed creatures’ (p.81). (Jackson explains more about Lakwena, pages 198 to 200).

But they lacked manpower and the villages were no longer as keen to hand over their sons as they had been for Alice’s Army. So Kony took to kidnapping children on an industrial scale. Jagielski thinks the force Kony renamed the Lord’s Resistance Army might be the only child army in history.

Interview with Kony

Jagielski gives extended quotes from what I initially took to be a newspaper interview Kony gave, in which he disclaimed all responsibility for kidnapping children, claiming the mutilations were carried out by the Uganda army not him, swearing that his cause is just etc (pages 201 to 203). In fact the material comes from this video interview carried out by Sam Farmer, who must, as the saying goes, have balls of steel to doggedly track down a known mass murderer to his lair.

Warning: this video contains graphic and upsetting images of mutilation.

Sister Rachele Fassere

The story of Sister Rachele Fassere who tried heroically to rescue the 139 girls abducted by the LRA from the most eminent school in the region, St Mary’s convent school in Aboke.

Britain’s imperial behaviour and legacy: pages 71, 104, 154,

The stock African accusation against imperialists, the British, against all outsiders:

‘And that’s where the problem lies – in the names,’ said Jackson…’You give your own names to whatever you find in your country, and you’re convinced that once you’ve named it all, you’re also going to understand it all. But we have our own names too, but we look at things in our own way.’ (p.114)

Part 2 (Kampala)

In part 2 Jagielski leaves Gulu, travelling south by bus (with Jackson) to the capital of Uganda, Kampala. Thus we get a pen portrait of Kampala’s history – one of the few cities in all Africa that existed before the Europeans arrived i.e. that Europeans didn’t found. Winston Churchill was delighted with it and called it the pearl of Africa (p.154)

Jagielski checks into the Speke Hotel where all the foreign correspondents say, meet and swap knowledge (p.122). How western journalists co-op or rip off the hard-earned knowledge of local African journalists (pages 123 to 126).

Spirits

Alice Auma, and Joseph Kony after her, both triumphed because of the nearly universal belief in spirits. The book adverts again and again to spirit belief. For example, the passage about the area around Luwero where so many villagers were slaughtered that there was no-one to give them burial rites and so the spirits of the dead were trapped in this world and entered the bodies of the living (p.146).

Extended passage naming some of the spirits who take Kony, how he behaves when possessed etc, chief among them Lakwena (pages 166 to 169).

Jackson’s family believed that when his father came home from the war he was possessed by a spirit which eventually drove him to hang himself. The entire family and village were too scared to cut the rope he’d hanged himself by under the belief that anyone who did so would themselves be possessed and die, and had to bribe an old, old lady, known to be an ajwaka or healer, to do it.

Part 2 has more history and politics in it than part 1, which was more about individuals like Nora, Samuel et al. Jagielski is quite a repetitive writer. Some ideas are repeated in nearly the same phrasing. The dispossessed refugee men of Penga often raped women:

as if only by inflicting rape could they come alive and shake off their inertia (p.18)

Two hundred pages later, Nora complains that Acholi men are ‘useless’. They steal the money their womenfolk earn, simply abandon them, or rape them:

as if only through violence, by inflicting pain and harm, could they restrain something beyond their control which was causing their former world and old way of life to slip away before their very eyes. (p.237)

In a bigger example of repetition, the sequence of events whereby the British left Obote as Prime Minister and the king of Buganda as president, then Obote overthrew the king to become a dictator (1966), was himself overthrown by Amin (1971), who was overthrown by the Tanzania War (1979), which brought Obote back to power (Obote II), how Obote was even more bloodthirsty than Amin (maybe as many as 500,000 Ugandans died under his second regime), how this triggered the Ugandan Bush War (1980 to 1986), which eventually overthrew Obote and replaced him with Museveni – this narrative is repeated at least twice, some parts of it 3 or 4 times.

Part 2 goes into more detail about the biographies of all three players, Obote, Amin, Museveni, plus the restored king of Buganda, King Kabaka Ronald Muwenda Mutebi or ‘King Ronnie’ (p.140).

Pages about Amin and the mutual loathing between him and Julius Nyerere (pages 142 to 144); ‘the personification of horror (pages 155 to 166, including some of the scenes described in ‘The Last King of Africa’).

Another thing Jagielski repeats is the claim that Uganda became a place of war, horror and death. Because he repeats this kind of phrasing, stretched out to paragraphs, many times, and because the narrative is non-chronological but hops about in time, it becomes hard to figure out which leader it happened under and why it happened. Many passages like this:

Presidents changed but the nightmare continued and Uganda never stopped flowing with blood, as if it had been sacrificed to the god of war and evil. (p.145)

Wracked by lawlessness and violence, Uganda continued to be a bloodbath, doomed to horrific destruction, curse with an apocalypse. (p.164)

After almost two decades of the tyrannical regimes of Obote and Amin, civil wars, massacres, lawlessness and bankruptcy, plague and famine, and one and a half million corpses, it had come to be known as a doomed country… (p.170)

The bravery of British journalist William Pike, who edited the newspaper New Vision without fear or favour, and his lead journalist, Allio Ewaku Emmy (pages 126 to 129).

What triggers the more political flavour of part 2 is that Museveni had prided himself on not being like the old dictators, not hanging on forever…and yet, at the time Jagielski is writing, Museveni was trying to alter the constitution in order to allow him to run for president more than two times (as most constitutions require). That happened in November 2005, which dates the writing of these sections to that moment, rolling on to the subsequent elections of February 2006.

(In fact as I write, at the start of 2024, Museveni is still president of Uganda, having held the post since 1986, 38 years and counting.)

Museveni

Pen portraits of Museveni on pages 129 to 133, 139 to 140, 144 to 145, 170 to 177. Museveni surprised everyone by changing quickly, on taking power, from a firebrand socialist revolutionary guerrilla to a pragmatic head of state prepared to work with western banks and let capitalism thrive.

Museveni on slavery

Museveni discomfited other African rulers with a few home truths:

‘We like to complain about the whites, but have we ever wondered why only Africans let themselves be enslaved? Why didn’t we put up resistance? It was our own greed and quarrelsome nature that ruined us. That’s why we were defeated and conquered. We ourselves are to blame. It was our chiefs, waging fratricidal wars, who took people prisoner to sell them to slave traders from Europe. It was those black traitors who bear the blame for slavery.’ (quoted on page 171)

1. The kind of thing a white person could never say or think.

2. I think he’s wrong though, in two ways. Firstly, the reason Africa was so prey to depredation was because it was the most economically, socially and technologically backward of the continents (with the exception of Australia) due to the reasons laid out at length in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.

But there’s a second thing going on here which is that Museveni, like most modern commentators, is thinking within the framework of black and white that has been firmly established over the past 100 years, which has created a false homogeneity among black people. I’m continually impressed, on a pretty much daily basis – reading the papers, listening to the radio, going to exhibitions – how black activists think there is some kind of inherent unity among black people, that all black people share the same interests and concerns. This seems to me wrong, wrong about any community or group of people.

What I’ve read in the books by Jeal or Hochschild or Segal give the impression that the Africans we’re talking about, in the 1700s and 1800s, didn’t have this simplistic modern binary between Black and White, nor share the modern idea that all black people share a common identity, common goals, need to be united etc. This all seems, as far as I can tell, to have sprung up among black people in the West, whether civil rights movements or black power or Nation of Islam or Black Lives Matters – all these groups define themselves by contrast with whites (and mostly derive from America).

My reading of the sources is that back in the 1700s and 1800s this kind of ‘black consciousness’ simply didn’t exist. Instead Africans identified themselves with tribes, maybe religions, with regions and languages, and regarded all Africans outside their tribal or religious group as others, others who could be quite legitimately enslaved or waged war on or whatever. They had no need to feel guilty as they were smiting the enemy and then selling them into slavery, thus boosting their own prowess, preserving their tribe, making their family wealthy, and that’s what mattered to them.

In a nutshell, Museveni is projecting back onto his ancestors a kind of black consciousness which is a twentieth century (and mostly American) creation and (like America) simply didn’t exist so no-one was aware of it and no-one acted on it, in the period he’s projecting it back onto.

African unity

3. Finally, yet again the strong impression given is that the whole concept of black unity in Africa is a joke. Here’s Michela Wrong describing the moribund Organisation of African Unity:

The summit of the Organisation of African Unity, that yearly get-together where insincere handshakes were exchanged, 29-year-old coup leaders got their first chance to play the international statesman, and the patriarchs of African politics politely glossed over the rigged elections, financial scandals and bloody atrocities perpetrated by their peers across the table.

(‘I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation’ by Michela Wrong, p.357)

Biafra. The Rwanda genocide. The wars in Congo. The civil war in South Sudan. Just the history of Uganda alone makes clear how difficult Africans find it to live in peace with other Africans. One and a half million Ugandans dead in 20 years of civil wars and insurgencies is proof of something.

Look at how the insurgency of the Lord’s Resistance Army got mixed up with ongoing enmity between all the regional nations: at various points the governments of both Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo gave the LRA aid and support, while Sudan backed Kony in retaliation for Uganda’s longstanding support of the secessionist movement in South Sudan.

Where is the ‘African unity’ in any of this? In fact Jagielski’s description of the poisonous backstabbing rivalry between African states is bleakly hilarious (pages 195 to 196).

The Ugandan opposition

Jagielski visits the HQ of the opposition party, the Forum for Democratic Change.

Portrait of Nasser Sebaggala, opponent of Museveni and mayor of Kampala from 2006 to 2011.

Portrait of Museveni’s slighted mistress Winnie Byanyima, who has blossomed into an international figure (pages 178 to 180). Winnie married Museveni’s one-time physician, Dr Kizza Besigye, and encouraged him to become a leading political opponent, to stand in the presidential election against Museveni (180 to 181).

As usual with the African elections I’ve read about, nobody talks about policies, instead the campaigns rotate solely around personality and character i.e. Museveni is the ‘great leader’ who has saved Uganda or Museveni has hung on too long and must go. Playground level.

Bounty hunters

A page on freelance bounty hunters around the world. The international community put a bounty of $1.5 million on Kony’s head, which attracted freelancers (p.193). In that case surely the question is, how come nobody tracked him down and killed him? Simply because he’s surrounded by trigger-happy bodyguards?

Bishop Joseph Kibwetere

Auma and Kony aren’t the only ones possessed by spirits. The story of Bishop Joseph Kibwetere who gathered a large following when he predicted the end of the world for 31 December 1999. He and his followers all burned to death in a church fire in March 2000. Or did he escape? Prophets and visionaries appear whenever there’s a natural disaster, droughts, floods, epidemics (p.209). (It doesn’t so much sound like, as actually is the European Middle Ages.) The ebola epidemic of the early 2000s which was, of course, seen as another attack of bad spirits and, like so many evil things, came from the Congo (pages 210 to 212).

Jagielski’s unhelpful way of describing disease

Jagielski writes about disease in a melodramatic, anthropomorphised way which undermines your trust in his descriptions of other things. Here he is describing the action of AIDS:

But the invisible virus was alive inside her, lying in wait, and when it launched its lightning attack, giving no chance for defence, it was too late to save her. (p.214)

This isn’t a very useful way of talking about or thinking about infectious diseases. Anthropomorphising disease like this is not far short of the local belief in spirits, except that Jagielski doesn’t have the excuse of no education. He’s dumbing down from dramatic effect.

In fact it has two deleterious effects. 1) Talk to any health professional and they’ll tell you we need to remove moralising and stigma from infectious disease. This kind of dumbed-down anthropomorphising encourages scientific illiteracy and folk attitudes. Most western nations are facing health crises, specifically over measles, caused by the decline in MMR vaccinations, triggered by rumour and false information. Many people thought the COVID vaccines were some kind of state-run conspiracy. For this reason discourse about illness should be kept scientific, factual and precise.

2) The second bad effect is that anthropomorphising illness like this, using this kind of emotionalising, unscientific way of describing disease, opens the door to moralising which quickly leads to judging victims, for example the way AIDS was initially stigmatised as a ‘gay plague’ or more recent slurs about monkeypox. Medieval worldview. Burn witches etc. People need to be encouraged to think about disease in the correct scientific, objective fashion.

A journalist’s complaint

Another thing I didn’t like was his self-centred hand-wringing about the moral challenges and compromises involved in being a journalist.

Messy, abandoned friendships, business started and interrupted, then forgotten, littered the routes of all my journeys. (p.216)

Well, I reflected, as I read the fifth or sixth such passage, if you don’t like it, get a job in an office. A lot of journalists seem to imagine that when I buy a book on a particular subject I’ll really appreciate lots of stuff thrown in about how hard their job is and how they have to continually make work-life compromises and let people down and oh it’s so difficult. Well, I don’t. Boring.

In a way the journalist’s profession has betrayal encoded into it. It demands gaining people’s trust and extracting confidences from them, purely in order to publicise and reveal them, all for a sense of a job well done, for satisfaction, applause and prizes. (p.216)

Like going to see your doctor with troubling symptoms and just wanting a diagnosis and treatment but instead having to listen to a long lecture about how badly paid doctors are and there’s never enough time to see patients and all their other gripes. No. Just diagnose and treat me. Same with journalists: don’t tell me all about your sensitive scruples and heroic regrets. Just tell me the bloody story.

Part 3 (back to Gulu)

To his own surprise, Jagielski didn’t hang around in Kampala to wait for the results of the election. He had unexpectedly bumped into Jackson and decides to return to Gulu. On the way Jackson tells him something extraordinary: most of the guests at the Acholi Inn Hotel where he’s staying are former guerrillas, people who have carried out the most appalling atrocities.

He describes the standard military corruption: all Ugandan soldiers are all corrupt. Their officers keep all their pay for themselves so the ordinary soldiers are forced to steal from the locals, hold them up at temporary roadblocks, even sell their arms and ammunition to the guerrillas.

Not only that, but many of the shops in Gulu sell goods stolen from country villages which the guerrillas  have looted and then send on here. And that the guerrillas, who kidnap other people’s children, send their own children to good public schools here in Gulu. This isn’t a dysfunctional society so much as dysfunctional people. When so many people dysfunction what hope is there for ‘normal’ society?

‘Where two elephants fight, the greatest victim is the grass.’ (Acholi proverb, p.229)

Rehabilitating child brides

Jagielski returns to the child treatment centre. It’s pretty obvious he fancies Nora and she’s quite happy to flirt with him. He admires her tight-fitting jeans. The other care worker, Christine, is careful to knock on Nora’s door, even when it’s open, so she doesn’t walk in on them kissing or worse. I found these scenes a bit icky (for example, page 249).

Lunch. Watching the children at crafts. The eldest girl is 16. All of them who were capable of it, were taken as child brides by guerrilla leaders and have borne children. On returning to the world they are shunned by their families. So the centre teaches them to sew, makes crafts, open market stalls. This is the route to financial independence and, once they’ve earned some money, to interesting some man into marrying them.

Refugees

Refugees are people who may not have lost their lives to war, but their existence has been robbed of its meaning. War has taken away all their faith, hope, dreams and energy. (p.234)

Former guerrilla leaders

Jagielski talks to the former LRA leaders now living quietly at the Acholi Inn:

Jagielski carries out an extended interview with Banya (pages 240 to 248), a characteristic figure in that he had been a senior figure in the formal Ugandan army but quit when Museveni came to power, disgusted that Museveni overthrew the interim rulers (who succeeded Amin) through violence, and also worried Museveni would start persecuting the Acholi (as he did). One day envoys from Kony arrived at his home and told him to come now or they would kill his entire family. So he went with them and was never allowed back.

Christine returning the lost boys

At the centre Nora works alongside Christine. They dislike and avoid each other. Nora thinks Christine obeises herself to a husband who’s moved to Kampala and is rumoured to have taken a second wife. Christine denies all this and thinks Nora is disreputable for not having married and settled down.

A long passage seeing things through Christine’s eyes, the arrival of the first liberated child soldiers at the centre, Christine’s opinion that they need love and support and, above all, to be told it’s not their fault. All of them were forced to kill or mutilate under threat of it happening to themselves.

The best medicine for these damaged children turned out to be routine: wake-up same time, breakfast, chores etc (p.259).

Jagielski accompanies Christine as she takes some of the last boys in the camp back to their various villages, observing their receptions (pages 259 to 269). Life in the dirt poor refugee camps, with absolutely no purpose, is hard for the reclaimed boy soldiers. Many of them run back into the bush, where there’s at least a purpose, and food. Or are so shunned by former neighbours and even their own family that they become embittered, violent. Some of them spontaneously kill.

Mato oput

Jagielski witnesses a ceremony of mato oput meaning reconciliation for a crime, and learns the complex traditional methods for a wrong-doer to admit their guilt, the compensation to be paid by his family, the road to acceptance and reconciliation (pages 266 to 269, 273 to 282).

A detailed description of Acholi beliefs about dead people’s spirits, specially how they persecute the living if they’re not happy (pages 269 to 273). Worth mentioning that a Catholic priest, Father Remigio, accompanied Christine and Jagielski on this trip, and was by his side explaining all aspects of the mato oput ceremony, their provenance and meaning.

The Acholi king

The Achioli king is named David Onen Acana II. His shabby court looks like a provincial post office. Some facts about the Acholi who migrated into north Uganda from Sudan where they were nomadic shepherds, hunters and fishermen.

When he arrives the king is discussing the future of Kony with one of his advisers, Chief Lugai. They’d been invited to meet Kony in the bush but when they got there he didn’t show up. The king and Chief Lugai say Museveni needs to pardon Kony and the International Tribunal at the Hague drop its charges. Only then will Kony come in, and he must be handled with traditional Aconi rites i.e. Mato oput (p.288).

The king then laments at length how the old tribal ways are being destroyed not only by the war, the enforced relocation of 2 million people, but criticism from Christian missionaries and Muslim imams and the new young generation in cities who turn to the West (pages 289 to 291). In other words, the inevitable process of ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’.

Father Cosmas

An interview with the Catholic priest Father Cosmas who is quite clear that Alice was possessed by satanic spirits but that Kony is Satan himself (p.294). Stories he has heard from children who have been rehabilitated and made their confessions to him.

Severino Lukoya

Jagielski says goodbye to Nora, with the uneasy feeling that he has wormed his way into her and Samuel’s affections merely to exploit them for his book then dump them. And that’s what she accuses him of.

The last thing he does in Gulu is go to visit Severino Lukoya. He was the father of Alice Auma who, after Alice’s forces were defeated, claimed that the spirits had entered him and that he was now the spokesman for Lakwena et al. In the event the forces he led were defeated by the Ugandan Army even more heavily than Alice’s, he fled to Kenya, and the mantle passed to Joseph Kony who lied that he was Alice’s cousin. So it’s a family romance, of sorts.

Anyway, Severino quietly returned to Gulu, built a church for his own denomination, and has been living quietly, left in peace by the authorities. Jagielski discovers he is now a very old, weak old man. Severino is assisted by Martin the chaplain who seats him on a chair and hands him one of the holy bottles. Then Jagielski witnesses the old man being possessed by Lakwena.

Severino speaks in Acholi, Martin translates, and it’s basically a recap of Severino’s career i.e. being chosen by God, trying to preach the word of God, going off to bush to live by himself, choosing water to purify and stones to act as weapons and incite his men to fight for the Last Judgement…

Then it’s over and the old man shrinks in his chair, exhausted.

Thoughts

1. This is a very, very good book which doesn’t so much explain as immerse you in the bloody, complex history of modern Uganda and especially the horrifying reality of the LRA’s campaigns and their terrible aftermaths for all concerned.

2. It’s a fount of information not only about the LRA and about Uganda’s troubled history, but many aspects of the folklore and traditional beliefs of the Acholi people, above all their profound belief in the role of spirits in all aspects of human life.

3. It also gathers together a range of valuable eye-witness accounts: from children directly involved, from some of Kony’s henchmen, from Nora and Christine, plus Jagielski’s witnessing of the mato oput ceremony, the knowledge of Father Remigio, the opinion of Father Cosmas, Jackson’s conveying of the voodoo mysticism of the Acholi people which no outsider can really understand.

4. It’s a real shame the book doesn’t have an index as I found myself wanting to reread certain passages or flip through the explanations of particular topics which are scattered in fragments through the text and so hard to re-find unless you’ve made a record or turned down the page. Part of my motivation in making such detailed notes and providing precise page references in this blog is to create such indexes, as best I can, for my own use and as, hopefully, a help to other readers.

5. Jagielski is in the same ballpark as Kapuściński but not in the same class. Kapuściński can be, by turns, genuinely philosophical, reaching deep into human nature, or lyrical, or quirky and drily humorous (as throughout his book about Haile Selassie). Jagielski attempts the same kinds of thing and they’re interesting enough, such as his fairly frequent personification of abstract entities:

The day fixed for the elections overslept and got up late, looking grey. For ages it couldn’t gain full consciousness and get itself going. (p.187)

This kind of thing is entertaining enough, but without the real depth or lyricism of his mentor.

6. Obviously most of the subject matter of The Night Wanderers is beyond appalling but, if you’ve read 20 or 30 books about contemporary Africa, as I have, you get used to Africans massacring each other, generally in the most brutal, sadistic ways possible.

What it makes me wonder is … you know how anti-colonial critics, post-colonial writers and anti-colonial historians often criticise the Europeans for, among countless other crimes, imposing their notion of the nation state onto cultures which were more flexible and fluid, based around tribes and traditional rulers … well, in descriptions of the collapse of whole regions of supposed ‘states’ (such as Rwanda or Congo or Uganda or Sudan) into violent anarchy, I wonder if it’s simply a matter of older traditional African culture reasserting itself, of societies rearranging themselves around their core attachment to tribes…and that the endless guerrilla wars are just the modern name given to the age old tradition of warlords gathering supporters and fighting the ruling king…

They’re called warlords and guerrillas these days but, from my reading of Gerald Segal’s book about Islamic slavery, I learned a lot about the continually shifting, rising and falling kingdoms and empires of west Africa, rising as new warrior chiefs achieved ascendancy, falling as other states seized land and towns under violent new leaders…

So isn’t the violent chaos in many African countries simply a continuation of the old traditions, but now with Kalashnikovs? That’s the strong impression you get from Jagielski’s extended description of the tangled web of insurgencies, civil wars, militias and guerrillas, which completely ignores state borders and sprawls across a huge area of north Africa taking in Somalia, Sudan north and south, Uganda, Congo, Darfur, Chad, Central African Republic, as far west as Niger, large parts of which are under no state control (pages 195 to 197).

And stepping right back – isn’t this patchwork quilt of petty kingdoms based around local chieftains in fact the way most humans have lived through most of history? Wasn’t this the same continually warring tribal world the Romans encountered everywhere they advanced, for example the complex tribal networks of Gaul and Britain endlessly at war with each other as described in Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars? Or, hundreds of years later, the equally complex, warlord-based societies of Dark Age Britain and, indeed, right across post-Roman Europe? Isn’t it, in fact, the natural way most humans have lived in most of history – and the huge, secular, technocratic and democratic states we in the West take for granted, aren’t these the oddities and exceptions to the rule?

Antonia Lloyd-Jones

A word on the translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. It reads very well indeed. The word order and use of subordinate clauses do not feel as if converted from another language, as often happens with translations from French or German. It reads like English and very well written English at that. There are a few odd turns of phrase, which I enjoyed:

  • When Museveni announced new presidential elections that he intended to win again and extend his reign, Dr Besigye cast him a challenge and stood for election too. (p.180)
  • Museveni had the victory in his grasp. (p.184)
  • Emmy cast him a look but didn’t say anything. (p.194)

The only blemish on her style is her very frequent use of the word ‘whom’ which regular readers of this blog will know I have developed an irrational dislike of. I dislike it’s prissy formality. Nobody says it in actual speech. It is becoming a literary fossil.

There he had met Nora, the first person to whom he had told everything he had seen and endured. (p.187)

‘What about those who don’t even know whom they have killed?’ (p.283)

Despite being British, Lloyd-Jones uses the word ‘pants’ for trousers (p.248) and ‘line’ for queue (p.172). Maybe the sub-editors at the New York publishers insisted. But these are microscopic quibbles. It’s a highly readable, fluid translation.

Credit

The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Wojchiec Jagielski was published in the Polish original in 2009. The 2012 English translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones was published by Old Street Publishing (OSP). References are to the OSP paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on January 31, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/31/the-night-wanderers-wojchiec-jagielski/

The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden (1998)

‘I should have known’, that is the phrase of my life, its summing up, its consummate acknowledgement.
(The narrator of The Last King of Scotland, Nicholas Garrigan, looking back over the sorry series of events depicted in the book, page 119)

Giles Foden

Giles Foden was born in 1967. When he was 5 his parents moved from Warwickshire to Malawi and he spent a lot of his early years in Africa, although he was sent back to Britain to be educated at public school (the very posh Malvern College) then Cambridge.

Foden has written six novels but is still best known for this one, his first novel, which won a clutch of prizes (the Whitbread First Novel Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, a Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize). It gained a significantly greater prominence when it was made into a powerful movie, in 2006, starring Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy, himself just about to be propelled to superstar status in the X-Men movies.

The Last King: premise

The premise of the novel is simple: it’s a first-person narrative told by young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, who goes to Uganda in 1971 on secondment from the British government’s Overseas Development Agency, to see something of the world and, through a chance encounter, is selected by the country’s new military dictator, Idi Amin, to become his personal physician.

Over the next 200 pages Garrigan witnesses Amin’s descent into psychopathic dictatorship, the ethnic killings, the arrests and tortures, mysterious disappearances, the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community, the humiliation of the white community, the rising body count – he witnesses much of this in person, up close and personal, yet fails to intervene, at various key moments, to save friends and colleagues from horrendous fates, becoming more and more morally compromised and implicated in the process.

The reader accompanies Garrigan as he is dragged deeper into an inferno of violence, cruelty, torture, murder and terror until the narrative feels like it’s inhabiting a different kind of reality, one of endless melodrama and horror, war, destruction, evisceration, terrorism, random killings. The narrative turns into a gruelling nightmare.

It’s a solid book at 345 pages but I found it easy and pleasurable to read (at least to begin with) because of the narrative voice Foden creates. Garrigan’s narrative has a relaxed candid manner conveying an appealingly easygoing but observant, slangy but perceptive worldview. Basically, it’s enjoyable being in his company for a couple of days. (Compare and contrast with H.E. Bates’s classic ‘Fair Stood The Wind for France’ which I just finished reading and found a metallic, alienating, cold and heartless ordeal. By contrast, Garrigan is fun, chill and interesting.) Here’s what I mean by casual tone and easy-to-read style:

On the way back, after we’d poured Ivor into his bungalow, Sara invited me in for a whisky. Her place was even more sparsely furnished than mine: not much more than a desk, a chair and a sofa. And a bed, I supposed, though I didn’t get to see that. (p.100)

Apart from ‘sparsely’ it’s pretty much how someone would speak. Sometimes Garrigan’s tone can be consciously entertaining:

She turned a knob and a wave of white noise came out. On top of it or behind it, or wherever things happen in radio world, was an eerie electronic neighing, going up and down jaggedly, and a deep squelchy voice choppily declaiming in a foreign language some repetitive sounding set of orders or other permutation of words and numbers. Altogether, it was as if the football results were being read by one of the prophets. In a snowstorm. On a runaway horse. (p.101)

One of the ways the book challenges the reader is the way this easygoing attitude and approach, which we are encouraged to identify with from the beginning, turns out to be hopelessly inadequate for coping with the increasingly fraught situations Garrigan finds himself in.

Part 1

The narrative starts with a frame. Garrigan explains that he is back in Scotland, safe and sound, looking back over his mad time in Uganda as physician to Idi Amin and is determined to write a history of this period of ‘blood, misery and foolishness’ despite the fact that he seems to be the subject of scandal and criticism, for he tells us the newspapers ‘continue to execrate me’ (p.19). What for? We don’t know, it’s a teaser for what will emerge in the main narrative.

Very briefly Garrigan describes his boyhood and upbringing in the Scottish suburb of Fossiemuir, West Fife, his years as a student doctor. His father, George (p.41) was a stern presbyterian minister: ‘religion covered our family like a fine soot’ (p.19). But after just a few pages we’re on to him graduating as a doctor, to escape his parochial background and see the world, taking the civil service exam.

The narrative slows down to give more detail about his flight to Kampala, meeting the Embassy people (Nigel Stone and the eccentric Major Weir, intelligence officer, who builds model helicopters). He stays at the rundown Speke Hotel while he gets used to the heat, the street life, the food. Meets fellow guest Freddy Swanepoel.

He is posted to assist a Dr Alan Merritt at his hospital in the West Ugandan town of Mbarara. He takes an overcrowded minibus or matatu there, helped and advised by friendly local Boniface ‘Bonny’ Malumba (p.49). Soldiers stop the bus at a makeshift roadblock to demand bribes. When a Kenyan diplomat refuses to pay, the soldiers smash him in the face with a gun. After they’ve gotten off Nicholas goes to help him and is surprised when the Kenyan is very angry, saying ‘where were you when I needed you to stand up for me?’ (p.153) Why does this passage exist? Is it intended to be an early indicator of Nicholas’s cowardice or, to be more fair and accurate, his not knowing what to do in confrontation situations?

So he arrives at Mbarara, some kids guide him out to the medical compound, and we are introduced to Dr Merrit, his tutting wife Joyce (who calls her husband ‘Spiny’) and the servant Nestor. More importantly to the sprawling ‘hospital’ with its primitive facilities. Garrigan gives us an overview of the kinds of patients and diseases they’re called on to treat, which is very interesting (machete wounds, elephantiasis, vaginal fistulas in women caused by giving birth at home in primitive conditions, malaria etc pages 74 to 77).

Earlier Garrigan told us he arrived in Uganda on Sunday 24 January 1971 (p.21). The precise date is important because Amin carried out his military coup, overthrowing the government of President Milton Obote, the very next day, on 25 January 1971.

Why did Amin overthrow Obote? Because he learned that Obote was planning to arrest him for misappropriating army funds and, more generally, threatened the army’s lucrative corruption. In the words of Wikipedia:

The 1971 coup is often cited as an example of ‘class action by the military’, wherein the Uganda Army acted against ‘an increasingly socialist regime whose egalitarian domestic politics posed more and more of a threat to the military’s economic privileges.’

Of course none of this is clear to any of the characters because it’s only just happened, although Dr Merritt gives Harrigan the view of a jaundiced old hand:

‘It’s very simple. This place – chaos, you just have to expect the worst. You think it’s a matter of it having to get worse for it to get better, but actually it just gets worse and worse. Take this new business with Amin. I hear they’re all happy as sandboys right now up in Kampala, but it’ll end in tears, I promise you.’ (p.60)

This little remark obviously plants a seed of expectation of the horrors that will come later. Prolepsis or the anticipation of something that comes later in a story.

Garrigan is introduced to Sara Zach, on secondment from a hospital in Israel, to two Cuban surgeons, and to a ravaged Englishman, Ivor Seabrook, with the ‘destroyed features of the long-term tropical alcoholic’ (p.71) and closet homosexual who seduces the various serving boys. He is taken on field trips by Merritt’s assistant, William Waziri, vaccination and anti-mosquito spraying (pages 79 to 80) on one occasion being stopped at another army roadblock by drunk soldiers demanding a bribe (p.81). Africa.

Altogether this first hundred pages or so give a vivid, fascinating and totally believable picture of an outback medical practice in rural Uganda, packed with fascinating details? How on earth did Foden find out all this stuff?

The new president, Idi Amin, comes to Mbarara to make a speech to an excited crowd. Garrigan records his incoherent thoughts about God, the crowd lap it up, Sara makes notes and hustles them off, scared of being attacked because they’re white.

Cut to a year later, so must be 1972, and he mentions June as the month, when he’s getting used to conditions and has, rather inevitably, started an affair with the tough, no-nonsense, attractive Israeli doctor, Sara, descriptions of picnics in the foothills of the Ruwenzoris mountain range, making love, spotting exotic flowers and birds.

There’s an attack on the barracks in town. The doctors learn that troops were sent from the north and massacred all the Langi and Acholi soldiers, supposedly because they’re from a different tribe than Amin (p.106). Some Americans came snooping round, supposedly journalists, and are themselves killed and buried.

A few months later there’s a mortar attack on the barracks which misses and kills a lot of civilians. Merritt and Sara tend to them. Garrigan’s friend Bonny, and his mother and father, are among the dead.

Garrigan and Sara take in Bonny’s kid brother, Gugu, but he is mute and never speaks again. Eventually his extended family come to collect him. His relationship with Sara breaks down: Garrigan is prone to psychoanalysing everything and comes to realise he and Sara liked having Gugu with them because it created a family feel, gave them both security. With Gugu gone Sara moved back to her own bungalow. The radio reports weirder and weirder speeches by Amin.

Garrigan describes Operation Mafuta Mingi, the name Amin gives to his campaign to intimidate and eventually expel the entire Asian population of Uganda, around 50,000 people. Garrigan watches them being rounded up, their belongings impounded, bullied by soldiers, then driven to the airport deprived of all their belongings.

He records the effects of the expulsion: shops closed because many of them operated on lines of credit from India which terminated overnight. Basic items like salt, matches, sugar or soap became scarce. The army slaughtered a dairy herd for beef and so milk disappeared. This happened in August 1972. Sara had been increasingly distant and one day in October she simply leaves, without telling anyone (p.119). It’s because Amin had also been making speeches attacking the Israelis in Uganda, mostly working on development projects, about 600 of them and so, overnight, they left.

A few weeks later Garrigan has his first personal contact with Amin, being fetched by soldiers because the great leader had driven his Maserati into a cow and sprained his wrist. Garrigan is bowled over by his primeval physical presence. Amin has a soldier pour them brandy which, on the hot day, makes Garrigan light-headed.

And so it is that a letter arrives from health minister Wasswa requesting that Garrigan becomes Amin’s private physician. By this time he’s fed up of the Mbarara hospital which reminds him of the sad affair with Sara so he’s happy to go.

Ominousness

As it progresses the text drops references to Garrigan’s current position, contrasting the time of writing (now) with the events he’s writing about (then) and emphasising how something has made him re-evaluate everything. The technique adds an air of ominousness, the sense that something dreadful happened in the interim:

  • I realise now that… (p.116)
  • Or so I thought back then… (p.118)
  • Bewildered in Uganda, and not for the last time… (p.128)
  • Looking back, it seems crazy… (p.144)

Part 2 (p.131)

Part 2 opens with a recap of Amin’s birth, boyhood, young manhood, rise in the colonial army, rise in the post-independence army of President Obote, his involvement in smuggling from Congo, his overthrow of Obote in January 1971.

The strange thing about this section is that it seems to be told in a completely different narrative voice from part one. It is mannered and strange in a style so different from the laid-back casualness of part one that I thought it must signal the arrival of a completely new narrator.

I have been able to find out little of the history by which Amin is come to us. After all, who knows where any of us is come from, who could go to the cause?

This unusual phrasing, and the present tense, persist throughout this chapter (chapter 16), throwing me completely off-kilter, wondering if it was a different person talking, or a different type of text, like maybe the transcript of a recording. But no, chapter 17 returns to the normal voice of Garrigan, now installed in Kampala as Idi Amin’s personal physician and with very little to do. Odd.

Anyway, back in the narrative, every encounter with Amin is hair-raising. He is a big man, he dominates his courtiers who laugh with him, applaud his every word, out of obvious terror. He is painted as deeply stupid and illiterate but loving the sound of his own voice, capable of speaking at great length.

For it is true, also, out of my nature, I love to rule! (p.148)

Garrigan is mesmerised and hypnotised by Amin, like the rest of his retinue. The narrative continues to emphasise Garrigan’s gaucheness and insecurity – worry about what he looks like, what he says, how others perceive him, rising to stammering terror when faced with Amin. He is, after all, only a few years out of university. The book is a study in callowness.

After the weird opening chapter part 2 settles down into a series of brilliantly imagined scenes: Amin phones Garrigan to tell him his son is ill, come over immediately; Garrigan hurries over to discover the boy has put a piece of Lego up his nose, pulls it out and anti-bacs the nose (p.153). The wife is delighted and Amin sends him a Toyota van as reward (admittedly, still painted with the logo of the Asian fashion shop it was confiscated from).

As doctor to the Prez, Garrigan is now living in a bungalow in the State House compound, near Entebbe, a suburb of Kampala. He attends to Amin at the so-called ‘Command Post’, in fact a large suburban villa, or Nakasero Lodge where he spent most of his time (p.155), then at Cape Town, a property on Lake Victoria he awarded himself (p.165).

Garrigan works at the city’s main hospital, Mulago, filling us in on the kinds of patients you get in a big city compared to the countryside (car accidents), working alongside a fellow Scot, senior surgeon Colin Paterson, makes friends with a local surgeon, Peter Mbalu-Mukasa (p.157). The hospital is big enough to have foreign teams, from China, Algeria, Vietnam, Russia, and to be carrying out serious medical research. How did Foden get to know so much about tropical medicine? And not just knowledge but a feel for all the spin-offs and insights of doctoring:

Hospitals are like people, they grow, they develop, they learn. And they decay too, and die. (p.163)

He and Mbalu-Mukasa cruise the bars of Kampala and bump into the meaty, dodgy South African Freddy Swanepoel, Garrigan permanently afraid that Swanepoel’s outspokenness about the regime will get him into trouble.

Right from the start Amin had a bonkers fondness for Scotland, having spent some of his military training in Britain there, but it becomes ever more surreal, him outfitting regiments in kilts and making them learn the bagpipes; making booming speeches about how the Scots were like the Ugandans in having suffered from English imperialism. Now Amin invites Paterson and Garrigan for tea and tells them he is going to punish the English community in Uganda for its imperialism. As a local had told him back in Mbarara, ‘First wahindi, then muzungu’ (p.172). He forces some Brits to carry him in a litter through the streets, others to kneel and take an oath of fealty.

Stone, from the Embassy, invites Garrigan for a chat and works the conversation round to asking Garrigan to take advantage of his position to administer Amin with calmatives, tranquilisers, to try and bring him to his senses.

Merritt, his boss at the Mbarara hospital is kicked out, visits Garrigan on the way, says he if he’d stayed at the hospital it might have saved it. He is not the last to blame Garrigan for cowardice or failing to do the right thing.

In another demonstration of his gaucheness Garrigan takes Marina Perkins, wife of the British Ambassador, Robert Perkins, who he’s been chatting up at the swimming pool, on a fishing trip. All goes well till he makes a move to kiss her at which she is shocked and horrified, sits bolt upright and insists he take her home (p.177). He has completely misjudged the situation.

The famous scene (well, a centrepiece of the movie) in which Garrigan is summoned at night to Amin in his bedroom (carefully described) because he is in great stomach pain which, after extensive examination, Garrigan determines to be wind, and helps Amin into a position where he can release a great fart, thus relieving the pain, and overjoying the dictator.

Amin takes Garrigan into his confidence and talks about the burdens of office. He makes a feeble attempt to ask Amin to stop the army killing people which Amin swats aside.

Brief review: he tells us he was in Uganda for eight years in all, two in Mbarara, six in Kampala (p.191). A general overview in which he describes their many meetings, tea and conversation, naively thinking he’s getting to know him. The narrative begins to feel like summaries of a series of episodes:

There’s an attempt to assassinate Amin at an army review, which fails but kills the driver of his jeep. (In fact Amin survived eight attempted coups.)

In 1972 Amin gets married, to wife number four, and the text gives a detailed description of the ceremony and pen portraits of the previous three (chapter 24).

Amin phones Garrigan at all times for confidential chats and to let off steam. In public press conferences he announces he is training to be an astronaut. Also that he is assembling a pan-African army to attack South Africa. An excuse to quote (presumably actual) press meetings and outrageous quotes.

Amin sends inappropriate letters to world leaders, for example Mrs Thatcher on her election as leader of the Conservative Party (February 1975). He publicly states that Hitler had the right idea about the Jews. he did a deal with Colonel Gaddafi and Libyan businesses and soldiers become seen on the streets of Kampala. A lot later, after he’s escaped, in the novel’s aftertime, his sister Moira asks him why he stayed on so long, and let himself be portrayed as being close to such a lunatic. Garrigan can barely understand it himself. He was hypnotised. He’d fallen under Amin’s spell. He knew he was a monster but sometimes thought he loved him. Psychology of a dictator’s minions.

The closer I got to him, the fewer my illusions about him – and still I stayed, more fascinated than frightened. (p.213) (cf his ‘reluctance to get the hell out of there,’ p.222)

One stormy night his friend from the Kampala hospital, Peter Mbalu-Mukasa, turns up. Tells him he’s been having an affair with Amin’s second wife, Kay, and has got her pregnant. Since Amin hasn’t been having sex with her, he’ll know she’s been unfaithful and murder her and any lover he can track down. The man is understandably terrified and asks Garrigan if he can perform an illegal abortion on Kay. Garrigan lets himself be driven to Mbalu-Mukasa’s apartment, encounters the terrified moaning woman, but realises he can’t do it. Not only is he also terrified of being discovered, but he’s never actually performed an abortion and will likely make a mess of it. With all kinds of excuses, he refuses, backs out, and makes his way home.

It’s the last time he sees either. Rumour had it that Mbalu-Mukasa botched the abortion, Kay died of blood loss, and Mbalu-Mukasa committed suicide (August 1974). Worse, Garrigan was invited by the mortuary assistant who shows him Kay’s body and how all four limbs and the head had been detached from it, then clumsily sown back on.

In a bar Garrigan is appalled to see fat oafish Freddy Swanepoel putting his paw on the knee of the trim woman who rejected him, Marina. Chagrin. Worse, at their next meeting Amin tells him Nicholas knows all about his attempts to seduce Marina, about her affair with Swanepoel, and his poor opinion of the South African pilot, who he thinks is a spy.

Stone calls Garrigan back to the Embassy. He makes clear that the Ambassador is just a front man, it’s he, Stone, who pulls the strings. He shows Garrigan a series of photos of Amin taking part in executions and torture. Hundreds of people are dying every day. Stone accuses Garrigan of being complicit in this mass murder. Then he asks Garrigan to murder Amin. Use whatever is necessary, poison, adrenalin or inject air into his heart, whatever it takes. Garrigan refuses, a) because he’s a doctor but b) because, on some level, he likes the man:

There was, I conceded it to myself again, something in me that actually liked the man, monster though he was. (p.231)

To his amazement, Stone tells him the authorities have placed £50,000 in his bank account, with more to come when he achieves the murder. Garrigan turns him down. Next week Amin expels Stone, Perkins, the entire British Embassy.

Then Garrigan’s bungalow is burgled and his journal disappears, the one he’s been keeping notes in on all the events and all his opinions. He gets a midnight call from Amin to go see him immediately. Amin pulls a gun and terrifies a sweating Garrigan who grovels on the floor. Amin tells him that Weir, from the Embassy, told him about Stone’s request that Garrigan murder Amin! Then Amin summarises the contents of Garrigan’s journal and is disappointed at his lack of loyalty.

Then, in a scene which crosses the line from mundane reality into horror, Amin opens a secret door (in his bookshelves) and takes Garrigan deep into the cells and torture chambers which are just a short walk away, along dim concrete passages.

Here he is shown his colleague from the Mbarara days, William Waziri who used to take him on medical tours of local villages. He is pinned down, tied and gagged. Amin says he is associated with enemy guerrillas. Garrigan is forced to watch as soldiers press him to the floor, one stepping on his head, as they use a kitchen knife to saw open his throat, and Waziri’s eyes meet Garrigan’s as they do it.

Garrigan passes out and regains consciousness to discover he, also, is in a prison cell where he stays for a day, being insulted by the jailer who comes to deliver the disgusting food. Obviously all the worst thoughts in the world go through his mind, maybe he’ll be there forever, or be tortured or murdered. In fact, only a day later the door opens and the health minister, Wasswa, is there with clean clothes. He hustles Garrigan along the corridor, telling him he’s lucky to be alive. From the cells they pass along the corridor where prisoners shout at him to help them. Garrigan hesitates but Wasswa tells him there is nothing he can do. Along some more corridors and then through a concealed entrance and, bizarrely, back into Amin’s bedroom where the dictator is resplendent in an electric-blue safari suit and greets him like an old friend.

Amin tells Garrigan he has to renounce his British citizenship and become a Ugandan citizen. Then orders him to come back soon. Amin disapproves of Garrigan’s journal because it is informal and unofficial but approves the fact that he’s a writer. And so he orders Garrigan to come back so that Amin can dictate to him his Life and Achievements.

Next day Garrigan drives straight to the airport to discover Fate is against him. It is July 1976 and terrorists have hijacked a civil airliner and rerouted it to Libya, then Uganda.

Which is why Garrigan is an eye witness to the hostage crisis, and to the arrival of Amin at the airport where he congratulates himself on persuading the terrorists to release the non-Jewish hostages. The captain of the plane refuses to leave without the 40-something Jewish hostages who are being held in a separate room. There is an implied contrast between the professionalism and responsibility of this plane captain, and Garrigan’s shuffling out of all his responsibilities.

That night he is amazed to get a phone call from his Israeli lover Sara, the one who left without saying goodbye. She now reveals she’s a Colonel of the Israeli Defence Force and insists that he describes the layout of the airport at Entebbe, where the hostages are, how many terrorists are guarding them etc. She is obviously laying the groundwork for the famous Israeli raid which frees the hostages.

(The present: slowly we have been drip-fed details about where Garrigan is writing all this. We learn it is in the bothy (‘a basic shelter, usually left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge’) left to him by a great-uncle [Uncle Eamonn, p.336], on a remote Scottish island. It’s from the peace and quiet here, that he is looking back, and trying to patch together, these last horrific months. Pages 249, 256, 263, 266)

As the Ugandan economy collapses, conditions at the Mulago hospital collapse with it. Garrigan continues to work, he considers he has no alternative. One day, during one of their tape recording sessions, Amin gives him a package contained a stuffed mounted lion’s head to deliver to a small plane at Entebbe airport, to the chairman of Rafiki Aviation who will be waiting for it. Garrigan nervously does so, handing it over to this man who gets into a small plane piloted by Freddy Swanepoel, and off it flies. Garrigan later finds out that the plane exploded and crashed for unknown reasons. He’s pretty sure there was a bomb in the package he gave.

It’s only 6 months later that he plucks up the guts to ask Amin about the package. By now their recording sessions have become well established. Garrigan comes close to witnessing examples of Amin’s cannibalism (p.260). Once or twice he has opportunities to kill Amin, one in particular when he is in reach of his holster and pistol. Something always holds him back.

Garrigan has of course been thinking about fleeing the country for years but doesn’t see how he can, now that the airport is tightly watched. His plans are paralleled by Amin’s increasing rhetoric about war with neighbouring Tanzania.

The escape attempt

Garrigan finally packs his necessaries in the van and heads off for the southern border, hoping to cross south into Rwanda via some remote mountain road. Unfortunately he runs into an army checkpoint. When he begins reversing, an army Land Rover comes charging towards him. Mad with panic he drives back the way he came and then wildly off into a road through the jungle which comes to a dead end at a deserted cabin. He leaps out of his van but has no idea what to do till he sees the cabin is slightly raised and wriggles under it. From here he watches the Land Rover arrive, the soldiers inspect the empty cabin, loose off some gunfire, then drive off with the Land Rover and his van, leaving him stranded.

He’s just wondering what to do when a huge snake rears up and bites him in the calf. He stumbles into the jungle and passes out. He comes round in a native village where the villagers have been feeding him and nursing his wound. Lying sick and delirious in a native hut he reflects on the long series of decisions which have brought him, an uptight, callow Scotsman, a ‘casket of emotional defects and diffident, inward-turning passions’ to this catastrophic situation (p.275). When he’s recovered a man indicates that he should follow him along a jungle track.

Obviously Garrigan hopes this will come out at some highway where he can hitch a lift back to civilisation. Instead it’s a further step in the descent into barbarism. they come to a road alright, where there’s a huge pile of corpses, twenty feet high, many still showing the gunshot wounds that killed them.

Feeling like he’ll vomit, Garrigan goes blundering down the road and soon, to his amazement, realises he’s in the vicinity of Mbarara. He carries on to discover a great crowd of locals. Pushing through he sees soldiers beating a figure tied to a chair. Pushed towards the front of the crowd, Garrigan finds the soldier turning and swinging his rifle butt into Garrigan’s ribs. To his absolute horror he realises it’s Gugu, the orphan boy he and Sara took in all those years ago. Now he has become a sadistic boy soldier in Amin’s deadly army.

But even as the boy stands above him, gun pointing towards him, there’s an explosion, presumably from artillery fire, and he sees the boy blown backwards, his chest opening in a splurge of blood.

The Tanzanian invasion

This summary has gone on long enough already. Long story short, Garrigan is rescued by / comes into the custody of Colonel Armstrong Kuchasa of the Tanzanian Defence Forces. In response to a feeble mini invasion of their land by Amin, Tanzania has repulsed the Ugandans and is no only invading, but on a mission to overthrow Amin.

Garrigan is bundled into an armoured personnel carrier (APC) and accompanies the Tanzanian Army, seeing action, coming under fire, seeing soldiers killed around him, protected and fed by the Colonel once he’s understood that Garrigan is a trained doctor, who he gets to tend to his wounded.

So Garrigan accompanies the Tanzanian army all the way to Kampala and is eye witness to its capture (and to the vignette of the destruction of the Volkswagen fleeing from the Embassy quarter across a golf course, which was carrying Dr Gottfried Lessing, East German ambassador and husband of Doris Lessing.)

He is with Tanzanian soldiers when they enter and ransack Amin’s formal residences. He realises he won’t be safe in the streets and makes it across town to the Mulago Hospital. Here it is chaos with the surgeons giving emergency care to all-comers. The head of surgery, Dr Paterson, barely contains his anger at him: ‘How very nice of you to join us, Nick’ (p.299). He, like everyone else, simply thought Garrigan had run away with Amin. Once again he seems to have done utterly the wrong thing at the wrong time. He scrubs up and helps out.

Later, out in the streets he sees rioting followed by looting, alongside bizarre victory marches. He follows the flow of the crowd towards one of Amin’s residences at Nakasero.

Amin redux

The novel builds up to a really weird climax. Garrigan follows the local mob into Amin’s residence, noting how everything has been smashed and looted, following them up to Amin’s bedroom where all portables have been pinched and his big waterbed exploded. But nobody knows about or has opened the secret doorway in the bookcase. So Garrigan does.

And once again, as in a horror movie, relives the experience of walking down the dank concrete corridor. And then, just as in a horror movie, he sees Amin. Standing in one of the chambers which controlled the electricity supply to the torture instruments. Amin is addressing a surreal monologue to a severed head on a plate. Only as he moves around does Garrigan realise with horror that it is the severed head of the Archbishop of Uganda, the same diminutive churchman we met conducting Amin’s fourth marriage way back earlier in the text. The horror.

And then Amin addresses Garrigan. He’s seen him hiding. They have a bizarre dialogue, Amin as relaxed and confident as ever. Amin is made to implicate all the western countries who helped train his army, and train and equip his dreaded security police, the State Research Bureau (p.312).

Finally, unbelievably, Amin asks Garrigan a favour. Turns out that one of the maze of tunnels from his residences comes out at a landmark on the way to the airport. There he has a plane waiting for him. Could Garrigan go to the landmark and collect him and drive him to the airport? Amin comes and stands over him and Garrigan experiences a dizziness and a complexity of emotions which is like drugs or arousal or love – and agrees.

In the event it takes him so long in the general chaos to get hold of a vehicle that he gets to the landmark and waits and waits but Amin never appears. Eventually he drives on in the vague direction of the compound and his bungalow, passes a lake, stops, notices a number of boats moored at the quay, gets down into one, kickstarts the motor and heads off north, casual as that.

It takes 6 or 7 hours, chuntering away all night till he arrives at a quayside in Kenya and quickly makes himself known to the police.

In fact his travails are far from over as a curt Foreign Office official informs him that a) he no longer has British citizenship so might easily be turned away from Britain b) he is universally thought to have been one of Amin’s closest henchmen, so is very unpopular in the press c) he might be charged for murder for his part in planting an explosive device on that small plane that blew up.

Stone forces him to sign a document swearing to be silent about all activities of the British government in Uganda i.e. the offer of payment to murder Amin, but other things as well. In return for signing these non-disclosure agreements, Stone says he will be reassigned his British citizenship.

Lastly, Garrigan has to go through the ordeal of being interviewed by a handful of chosen journalists in a hotel at Heathrow under the supervision of a PR ‘handler’ named Ed Howarth, who is there to ensure the interviews are a one-off event and that Garrigan says nothing which will compromise the British government – an illuminating process for Garrigan and the reader.

Then he is free to go and catches a train north to Scotland, then travels by hire car, then ferry, over to this little island where…he has been holed up in the bothy writing this long account and trying to exorcise his demons.

At the very very end of the narrative the phone rings in the little cottage and…he hears Amin’s voice, friendly and coaxing as ever, tutting about his treatment in the papers and telling him how much he is enjoying his quiet retirement in Saudi Arabia. Is this real? Can this be happening? Will he never be able to escape from dreams and phantasms of the monster? Either way, Garrigan puts the phone down and that’s the end of the narrative.

Summary

Amazing

This is a mind-bogglingly brilliant achievement, an awesome historical novel which not only recreates life in Uganda and Kampala with superhuman accuracy and vividness, but is also a searing insight into the twisted mentality of a psychopathic dictator and, above all, into the psychology of an educated Westerner who lets himself be manipulated into becoming complicit and acquiescent in horrifying atrocities. A terrifying but profound novel which leaves you reverberating with horror for weeks afterward.

Zelig

The main criticism of the novel would be that at some stage, maybe from the incident of Kay’s botched abortion, Garrigan begins to feel like a Zelig character who keeps popping up at key moments during Amin’s career: the death of Kay, then the Entebbe hostage situation, and then the Tanzanian invasion, Garrigan increasingly happens to be at the right place at the right time, with mounting improbability.

I think credibility snaps when he finds himself on the receiving end of Gugu’s rifle butt. That’s just one coincidence too far. From that point onwards Garrigan becomes less like a character and more like a cipher with which to dramatise a checklist of incidents during the invasion. And that realisation feeds backwards, making you think the same about the Entebbe terrorist situation, and other incidents, too.

Maybe it sort of has to be like this – in order to have a dramatic fiction Foden has to make Garrigan part of all these real historic events – but in doing so the story leaves behind plausible realism and becomes something else: first, in the torture cells beneath Amin’s residence, into a genuinely hair-raising horror story; and then follows the delirious sequence of his Land Rover escape, his bite by a snake, his recovery in a native village, his being taken to a huge pile of corpses, and then stumbling across Gugu beating a prisoner to death and, at that very moment, an artillery attack blowing Gugu to pieces etc. By this time the whole thing has become more of a hallucination than a narrative, piling agony on agony, one vivid hyper-violent scene after another, until the reader’s imagination is shredded.

Comparison with William Boyd

William Boyd is another Englishman brought up in Africa by ex-pat parents, sent to a pukka public school then Oxbridge, who also became a novelist tackling African themes. His first novel, ‘A Good Man in Africa’, is about another Englishman completely out of his depth in a dire African country, who drinks too much, makes a fool of himself with women, and completely fails to understand what’s going on around him, leading up to a violent climax in riots and a coup.

So these are two books about useless Brits caught up in violent events in Africa, the difference obviously being that in Boyd’s books it’s played for laughs (‘A Good Man’ is a very funny farce) while in Foden’s the same basic subject is played for tragedy and horror.

Given the grim times we live in, I’d recommend people read the Boyd for its many hilarious scenes and smiling memories although, at the very end, it too has a bitter denouement.

Wikipedia on Idi Amin

The opening summary of Idi Amin’s Wikipedia article:

Idi Amin Dada Oumee (c. 1925 to 16 August 2003) was a Ugandan military officer and politician who served as the third president of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. He ruled as a military dictator and is considered one of the most brutal despots in modern world history…Amin’s rule was characterised by rampant human rights abuses, including political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, as well as nepotism, corruption, and gross economic mismanagement. International observers and human rights groups estimate that between 100,000 and 500,000 people were killed under his regime.

Foden takes a middle estimate, that Amin’s regime killed 300,000 Ugandans (p.133).

Africa words

muzunga – white people

musawo – a doctor

Chapter 9, pages 84 to 90, gives an extended explanation of various Swahili terms

the wananchi – ordinary citizens

Credit

The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden was published by Faber Books in 1998. References are to the 1999 Faber paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

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The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard (1970)

WARNING: This review contains quotations which are extremely brutal and/or sexually explicit.

Fingers fretting at the key in her pocket, she watched Travers search through the montage photographs which the volunteers had assembled during anaesthesia. Disquieting diorama of pain and mutilation: strange sexual wounds, imaginary Vietnam atrocities, the deformed mouth of Jacqueline Kennedy. (p.68)

The fact that American edition of the book was titled Love and Napalm gives you fair warning of what to expect.

The Atrocity Exhibition is only a short book, 110 pages in the Granada paperback edition I’ve got, and yet it opens up wide, jagged horizons and makes a tremendous impact because of its format.

The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator. (p.13)

Experiments and collage

Ballard was keenly interested in experimental fiction and art, an interest which reached its peak in the late-1960s. As early as the late 1950s he’d created a series of collages assembled from texts cut out of scientific magazines. In 1967 he began a series of what came to be called ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’, being surreal or collagist parodies of traditional adverts. And we know that Ballard originally wanted The Atrocity Exhibition to be a book of collage illustrations.

I originally wanted a large-format book, printed by photo-offset, in which I would produce the artwork – a lot of collages, material taken from medical documents and medical photographs, crashing cars and all that sort of iconography.

In the event this proved impractical and Ballard ended up creating a kind of verbal equivalent of collage from a sequence of stand-alone prose pieces. These were originally published as stand-alone ‘stories’ in various art and sci fi magazines.

The final text of The Atrocity Exhibition is divided into 15 of these pieces or stories or texts, and then each of these is sub-divided into very short sections, often only a paragraph long. Each paragraph has a title of its own, in bold. The result is to make the book a highly fragmented read and certainly not a ‘novel’ with a consistent linear narrative in any traditional sense. Here’s a typical paragraph, or fragment, or angle.

Auto-erotic. As he rested in Catherine Austin’s bedroom, Talbot listened to the helicopters flying along the motorway from the airport. Symbols in a machine apocalypse, they seeded the cores of unknown memories in the furniture of the apartment, the gestures of unspoken affections. He lowered his eyes from the window. Catherine Austin sat on the bed beside him. Her naked body was held forward like a bizarre exhibit, its anatomy a junction of sterile cleft and flaccid mons. He placed his palm against the mud-coloured areola of her left nipple. The concrete landscape of underpass and overpass mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval, the identity latent within his own musculature.

1. You immediately see the intense but detached pornography of the female body, which never uses swearwords but refers to intercourse and all aspects of sexuality by their strict scientific names, ‘sterile cleft and flaccid mons’.

2. And you immediately see how the sex is intimately and intricately interwoven with equally precise descriptions of architecture and modern transport machines – helicopters flying over the motorway from the airport, a concrete landscape of overpasses and underpasses.

3. And beneath it all, initially obscured by the novelty of the clinical sexuality and the obsessed concrete-mania, lies the characteristic Ballard exorbitance, the Edgar Allen Poe hysteria ‘mediated’, as he would put it, through the detachment of the science journalist, summarising his perceptions as ‘symbols in a machine apocalypse’.

And yet there is no apocalypse. A few cars crash, one helicopter crashes and burns (I think), but there’s nothing like an ‘apocalypse’. The apocalypse – the extremity of all the situations – is all in the mind – of the cipher-characters and, ultimately, of Ballard himself.

The chapters of The Atrocity Exhibition

Here’s a list of the fifteen ‘chapters’/stories and the magazines they were first published in, and dates of first publication. You can see how the composition of the pieces stretched over three years from spring 1966 to late 1969 i.e. was a relatively slow and scattered process.

  1. The Atrocity Exhibition (New Worlds, Vol. 50, # 166, September 1966, excerpt)
  2. The University of Death (Transatlantic Review, No. 29, London, Summer 1968)
  3. The Assassination Weapon (New Worlds, Vol. 50, # 161, April 1966)
  4. You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe (Ambit # 27, Spring 1966)
  5. Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown (New Worlds July 1967, excerpt)
  6. The Great American Nude (Ambit # 36 Summer 1968)
  7. The Summer Cannibals (New Worlds # 186 January 1969)
  8. Tolerances of the Human Face (Encounter Vol. 33, No. 3, September 1969)
  9. You and Me and the Continuum (Impulse, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1966) FIRST
  10. Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy (Ambit # 31, Spring 1967 [the 26 paragraph titles are in alphabetical order])
  11. Love and Napalm (Export USA Circuit #6, June 1968)
  12. Crash! (ICA-Eventsheet February 1969, excerpt) LAST
  13. The Generations of America (New Worlds # 183, October 1968)
  14. Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan (Brighton: Unicorn Bookshop, 1968)
  15. The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race (Ambit # 29, Autumn 1966)

Condensed novels

In one interview Ballard described the chapters or stories as each forming an individual, ‘condensed’ novel.

They’re certainly condensed in the sense that, as you read them, it feels as if lots of the action and description and linking passages which would create an ordinary ‘story’ have been surgically removed. Instead the paragraphs jump between isolated moments or scenes, between characters, between settings, so that it’s often difficult to see how they’re at all related, apart from featuring the same names. I’m not sure I really followed the ‘narrative’ of any of them.

And the prose style is just as ‘condensed’. Although it’s only 110 pages long, The Atrocity Exhibition is a chewy read because every single sentence feels packed with meaning and significance. There’s no filler or run-of-the-mill description or dialogue. It makes you realise how slack the texture of most normal novels is.

The Geometry of Her Face. In the perspectives of the plaza, the junctions of the underpass and embankment, Talbot at last recognized a modulus that could be multiplied into the landscape of his consciousness. The descending triangle of the plaza was repeated in the facial geometry of the young woman. The diagram of her bones formed a key to his own postures and musculature, and to the scenario that had preoccupied him at the Institute. He began to prepare for departure. The pilot and the young woman now deferred to him. The fans of the helicopter turned in the dark air, casting elongated ciphers on the dying concrete.

Threads and themes

So the book consists of fifteen short (7, 8 or 9 page) sections, themselves sharply cut up into 20 or 30 fragments or perspectives which superficially justifies the term ‘condensed novels’.

But actually, the term is quite misleading because the sections are not as free-standing as it implies. In fact there are clear, indeed dominating, threads, themes, images and ideas which link almost all the chapters and make the assembly of the texts together much bigger than just the sum of a bunch of disparate parts.

For a start the same ‘characters’ recur in almost all of them – Dr Nathan the psychiatrist, Catherine Austen a mature love object and Karen Novotnik, a younger woman.

The first three or four sections all feature a central male protagonist who leads the action and the other characters comment on although, in an approach which I enjoyed, this character’s name changes from chapter to chapter – from Travis to Talbot to Tallis and so on – and in each incarnation he’s not quite the same person, as if reality shifts subtly in each story, or as if each avatar each one represents an alternative possible reality. This would explain why the young woman Karen Novotnik appears to die not once but several times, each time in a different scenario.

Celebration. For Talbot the explosive collision of the two cars was a celebration of the unity of their soft geometries, the unique creation of the pudenda of Ralph Nader. The dismembered bodies of Karen Novotny and himself moved across the morning landscape, re-created in a hundred crashing cars, in the perspectives of a thousand concrete embankments, in the sexual postures of a million lovers.

As well as these recurring names, the texts are held together by their obsessive circling round the same handful of images, ideas and names. In fact, the way that the central male figure keeps reappearing under different names made me realise that without much difficulty you could say that the characters aren’t carrying the plot, the obsessions are.

So that the book can really be seen as about the circulation, meeting, mingling, parting and interaction of certain obsessive ideas, images and phrases. It’s as if the obsessions are the real, rounded, multi-dimensional entities, the ones we get to know in detail, who feature in various adventures and permutations, while the so-called human ‘characters’ are just vectors or mediums through which the idées fixes are channelled.

Over and over, the same images, situations, ideas and phrases recur with a claustrophobic, obsessive repetition. Dominant are images of death, war, car crashes, apocalypse. They include:

  • World War III
  • the atom bomb and atomic test sites
  • cars and car crashes and the wounds car crashes create in soft human bodies
  • helicopters flying ominously overhead, Vietnam-style
  • utterly impersonal sexual congress conceived as a form of geometric investigation
  • images over-familiar film stars such as Elizabeth Taylor or Brigitte Bardot
  • newsreel footage of war atrocities, from Auschwitz to Vietnam via Biafra and the Congo
  • the Kennedy assassination (one character is described as obsessively trying to recreate the Kennedy assassination ‘in a way that makes sense’)
  • concrete motorways and multi-storey car parks

Each chapter contains a specific mix of these ingredients, but the same overall list of ingredients recurs across all 15, rotating in ever-changing combinations like a kaleidoscope.

Chapter one: The Atrocity Exhibition

Thus chapter one features characters named Travis, his wife Margaret Travis, Catherine Austen who he’s having an affair with, his psychiatrist Dr Nathan who is analysing Travis’s obsession with creating a kind of one-man, psychological World War III, and Captain Webster who is having an affair with Margaret.

Travis is collecting ‘terminal documents’ (just like Kaldren in the short story The Voices of Time). Travis dreams of starting World War III, if only in his head (‘For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display…’). These terminal documents appear pleasingly random and in a note Ballard tells us they were the result of free association:

  1. A spectrohelion of the sun
  2. front elevation of balcony units, Hilton Hotel, London
  3. transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite
  4. ‘chronograms’ by E.J. Marey
  5. photograph taken at noon 7 August 1945 in the Qattara Depression Egypt
  6. a reproduction of Max Ernst’s Garden Airplane Traps
  7. fusing sequences for ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Boy’, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs

They’re actually quite a good cross-section of JG’s obsessions: the atom bomb, the alienating effect of modernist architecture, deep geological time (which Ballard had painted as returning to dominate the modern world with its dinosaurs and tropical swamps in The Drowned World or the short story Now Awakes The Sea), a Surrealist painting, the obsession with time indicated by the fictional ‘chronographs’.

And hotels, hotels are classic locations for alienation and ennui for Ballard, if they’re abandoned in one of his dystopian futures, surrounded by drained swimming pools, all the better.

So far, so sort-of reasonable, after all characters and themes occur in all novels. But it’s difficult to convey the chaotic and deliberately dissociative texture of the book.

Brachycephalic. They stopped beneath the half-painted bowl of the radio-telescope. As the blunt metal ear turned on its tracks, fumbling at the sky, he put his hands to his skull, feeling the still-open sutures. Beside him Quinton, the dapper pomaded Judas, was waving at the distant hedges where the three limousines were waiting. ‘If you like we can have a hundred cars – a complete motorcade.’ Ignoring Quinton, he took a piece of quartz from his flying jacket and laid it on the surf. From it poured the code-music of the quasars.

There is no joined-up, consecutive narrative. Each paragraph is genuinely a fragment in the sense that they don’t cohere into any kind of ‘story’. Instead they are snapshots of the characters’ obsessions. Certainly the ‘people’ in the stories meet, encounter each other, have sex, drive cars because we see this in individual paragraphs. But each consecutive paragraph charts a new scene. They are like fragments from a lot of different jigsaws all jumbled together.

At the end of ‘chapter’ one the bodies of Dr Nathan, Captain Webster and Catherine Austen form a small tableau by the bunker. Maybe they were killed in bombing of the target zone in the disused military zone which Travis seems to have organised.

But the second ‘chapter’ begins with these same ‘dead’ characters – Dr Nathan, Catherine Austen – brought back to life, in new scenes as if nothing had happened. Now they are taking part in a screenshow in a university organised by one ‘Talbot'( a sort of structural variation on Travis) and whose students are ostensibly studying World War III, inspired by the jealous student Koester. Talbot is having an affair with Catherine but sees her body chiefly as a ‘geometry’ of vents and clefts and is more interested in the sculpture he’s building on the roof, metal aerials constructed to hold glass faces to the sun. He is clearly cracking up.

And so it continues, tangling and rethreading a narrow and obsessive networks of themes and images…

Key words

If certain key ideas recur and repeat in endless permutations, so do key words. As so often, I find the words more interesting than the ‘ideas’:

geometry

  • her own body, with its endless familiar geometry…
  • in the postures they assumed, the contours of thigh and thorax, Travis explored the geometry and volumetric time of the bedroom
  • only an anatomist could have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern
  • his wife’s body with its familiar geometry
  • His room was filled with grotesque magazine photographs: the obsessive geometry of overpasses, like fragments of her own body; X-rays of unborn children; a series of genital deformations; a hundred close-ups of hands.
  • the concrete landscape of underpass and flyover mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval…
  • the obsessive geometry of flyovers, like fragments of her own body
  • the geometry of the plaza exercised a unique fascination upon Talbot’s mind
  • a crushed fender; in its broken geometry Talbot saw the dismembered body of Karen Novotny
  • the danger of an assassination attempt seems evident, one hypotenuse in this geometry of a murder
  • For Talbot the explosive collision of the two cars was a celebration of the unity of their soft geometries…

mimetised

  • he assumed the postures of the fragmented body of the film actress, mimetising his past dreams and anxieties in the dune-like fragments of her body
  • the mimetised disasters of Vietnam and the Congo
  • segments of his postures mimetised in the processes of time and space
  • our anxieties mimetised in the junction between wall and ceiling

terminal

  • A Terminal Posture. Lying on the worn concrete of the gunnery aisles, he assumed the postures of the film actress, assuaging his past dreams and anxieties in the dune-like fragments of her
    body.
  • Dr Nathan gazed at the display photographs of terminal syphilitics in the cinema foyer
  • He remembered the aloof, cerebral Kline, and their long discussions on this terminal concrete beach…
  • The Terminal Zone. He lay on the sand with the rusty bicycle wheel. Now and then he would cover some of the spokes with sand, neutralizing the radial geometry. The rim interested him. Hidden behind a dune, the hut no longer seemed a part of his world. The sky remained constant, the warm air touching the shreds of test papers sticking up from the sand. He continued to examine the wheel. Nothing happened.

neural

  • Overhead the glass curtain-walls of the apartment block presided over this first interval of neural calm.
  • The concrete landscape of underpass and overpass mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval, the identity latent within his own musculature.
  • Impressions of Africa. A low shoreline; air glazed like amber; derricks and jetties above brown water; the silver geometry of a petrochemical complex, a Vorticist assemblage of cylinders and cubes superimposed upon the distant plateau of mountains; a single Horton sphere – enigmatic balloon tethered to the fused sand by its steel cradles; the unique clarity of the African light: fluted tablelands and jigsaw bastions; the limitless neural geometry of the landscape.

planes

  • For some reason the planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension, or required elements other than those provided by his own character and musculature.
  • The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies.
  • Her blanched skin revealed the hollow planes of her face.
  • His rigid face was held six inches from her own, his mouth like the pecking orifice of some unpleasant machine. The planes of his cheekbones and temples intersected with the slabs of rainwashed cement, together forming a strange sexual modulus.
  • The planes of her face seemed to lead towards some invisible focus, projecting an image that lingered on the walls, as if they were inhabiting her skull
  • The apartment was a box clock, a cubicular extrapolation of the facial planes of the yantra, the cheekbones of Marilyn Monroe.

This sketchy review of his key vocabulary establishes that what Ballard’s key words have in common is the way they are hard and technical, continually shifting the imagination away from soft human bodies to hard geometries, from sentimental ‘feelings’ towards impersonal, scientific and mathematical notions of ‘neural’ events, planes and geometries.

Art

Ballard made no secret of the immense influence on him of Surrealist painting. He mentions it in pretty much every interview he ever gave, lards his stories with the adjective ‘surrealist’, and frequently refers to specific Surrealist paintings. The Atrocity Exhibition contains references to the following works of art:

  • Max Ernst – Garden Airplane Traps
  • Max Ernst – Europe after the Rain (p.15)
  • Salvador Dali – Hypercubic Christ
  • Max Ernst – Silence (p.21)
  • Salvador Dali – The Persistence of Memory (p.22)
  • Magritte – The Annunciation (p.31)
  • Duchamp – The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even
  • Max Ernst, The Stolen Mirror (p.47)
  • Bellmer sculptures (p.54)
  • Duchamp – Nude descending a Staircase (p.55)
  • Tanguy – Jours de Lenteur (p.85)
  • Max Ernst – the Robing of the Bride (p.85)
  • de Chirico – The Dream of the Poet (p.85)

The art references tend to occur in contexts where they add, expand and complicate existing descriptions.

The ‘Soft’ Death of Marilyn Monroe. Standing in front of him as she dressed, Karen Novotny’s body seemed as smooth and annealed as those frozen planes. Yet a displacement of time would drain away the soft interstices, leaving walls like scraped clinkers. He remembered Ernst’s ‘Robing’: Marilyn’s pitted skin, breasts of carved pumice, volcanic thighs, a face of ash. The widowed bride of Vesuvius.

On reflection, I realise that you could see each of the individual paragraphs as the equivalent of free-standing paintings. That makes a lot of sense. Treating each paragraph as a painting treating a different mood, or angle, or perspective on similar events, covering similar subjects, but each from a different angle and approach – and yourself sauntering past them as they’re hung up on a gallery wall.

Sex and pornography

The text is soaked in sex and sexual perversions and pornography regarded as a clinically detached exercise.

This is justified, if needs be, by Ballard’s view that we are in a hyper-advanced technological society where all experience is mediated by a bombardment of media and advertising imagery to such an extent that naive notions of simple sentimental sex have been scorched out of existence.

The need for more polymorphic roles has been demonstrated by television and news media. Sexual intercourse can no longer be regarded as a personal and isolated activity, but is seen to be a vector in a public complex involving automobile styling, politics and mass communications

The satirical surveys

With a satire which is so straight-faced it’s hard to tell whether he’s laughing or not, the later chapters of The Atrocity Exhibition are notably different from the earlier ones.

They are still laid out as fragmented paragraphs but they more or less cease being (fragmented) narratives and consist of collections of pseudo-scientific surveys and reports.

And these focus relentlessly, obsessively on the conjunction of atrocity and sex, specifically the impact of viewing a) President Kennedy’s assassination b) Vietnam war footage c) general atrocity footage (Auschwitz, the Congo) on the sex lives of an amusingly random and surreal cross-section of audience types, including children, the mentally ill and housewives.

Satirically, the ‘research’ presents evidence that atrocity footage improves workplace efficiency and stimulates a healthy sex drive. Conclusion? Wars of the Vietnam type are good for society.

Using assembly kits of atrocity photographs, groups of housewives, students and psychotic patients selected the optimum child-torture victim. Rape and napalm burns remained constant preoccupations, and a wound profile of maximum arousal was constructed. Despite the revulsion expressed by the panels, follow-up surveys of work-proficiency and health patterns indicate substantial benefits. The effects of atrocity films on disturbed children were found to have positive results that indicate similar benefits for the TV public at large. These studies confirm that it is only in terms of a psychosexual module such as provided by the Vietnam war that the United States can enter into a relationship with the world generally characterized by the term ‘love.’

This fairly blunt satire – although presented in the same-chopped-up paragraphs each headed by a title in bold type as the earlier ‘stories’ – feels drastically different in intention from the earlier stories.

Maybe they reflect the quick escalation in protest against the war which took place in the last few years of the 1960s, and which prompted the equally savage satirical short story The Killing Ground of 1969.

Nuclear satire

Also: In one of his notes to the book, Ballard points out that from the late 1950s and early 1960s, the heyday of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the fact that the world was living under the shadow of impending nuclear holocaust meant that, to anybody who thought about it, everything was permissible. How could you believe in the fuddy-duddy old values of Church and State, all those crowns and gowns, if the world could be incinerated tomorrow?

Not only that, but how can you think about the end of the world and the destruction of the planet except via extremity and satire? As demonstrated by the Stanley Kubrick movie Dr Strangelove which was a) released in 1964 only 2 years before the first Atrocity story was published, and b) filmed at Shepperton studios just round the corner from Ballard’s house. Serendipities. Zeitgeist. Spirit of the Age.

Conclusion for philistines

If Ballard’s obsession with car crashes and clinical pornography seems sick, ask yourself who’s the sickest – novelists who write blistering porno-satire or generals who order napalm by the lakeful to be dropped on peasant villages?

That was the reality of the times Ballard was writing in, and for. Remember the American version of the book was titled Love and Napalm

  • The billboards multiplied around them, walling the streets with giant replicas of napalm bombings in Vietnam, the serial deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe terraced in the landscapes of Dien Bien Phu and the Mekong Delta.
  • Homage to Abraham Zapruder Each night, as Travers moved through the deserted auditorium, the films of simulated atrocities played above the rows of empty seats, images of napalm victims, crashing cars and motorcade attacks.
  • On the basis of viewers’ preferences an optimum torture and execution sequence was devised involving Governor Reagan, Madame Ky and an unidentifiable eight-year-old Vietnamese girl napalm victim.

Remember the photo of that little naked Vietnamese girl running down the road her skin flapping off her where the napalm had burned her? Those photos were all around in 1966, 67, 68. Atrocity Exhibition is Ballard’s response to the TV-mediated hyper-violence and psychic disturbance of the times.

Conclusion for Ballardians

I think it’s his best book. It’s an über-intense encyclopedia of Ballard’s distinctive obsessions and visions. Some people read it as an experimental depiction of the psyche of a man undergoing a nervous breakdown.

I think it’s bigger than that, it presents an (in)coherent way of verbalising a number of the visual, psychological and imaginative pressures anyone living in the modern era is subjected to. The constant, hammering pressure of the motorways, the thundering traffic, the massive planes grinding overhead, the aggressive billboard hoardings, the saturated mediascape, the faces of the same handful of celebrities dinned into our brains, and the deadening and at the same time hysterical impact that has on our imaginative lives, and emotional lives, and sex lives (if we have them).

Joy Division

Wrote a song based on the book, released on their 1980 album Closer, which is a fair attempt to capture the book’s weirdness in another medium.

Credit

‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Jonathan Cape in 1970. Page references are to the 1979 Triad/Panther Books paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

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Posted by Simon on January 31, 2020

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