A Primate's Memoir, page 11
Now, I had been hoping to go to Uganda for some time, to fulfill a dream of sitting at a particular crossroads that I had spotted on the map. It was a perfect crossroads—to the north, the only road ran to the desert and on to Sudan. To the west, Zaire and the Congo. To the south, on to Rwanda and Burundi and the mountain gorillas. I could visualize it—a dusty empty crossroads, with, perhaps, a rusted laconic sign—“Sahara, bear right, mountain gorillas, left, Congo, straight. Buckle up for safety.” I dreamt of sitting underneath that sign as a hitchhiking tabula rasa, to go in whichever direction a ride presented itself—a mosquito net in case my ride took me to the Congo, a thin shawl to wrap around my head in case it was the desert, a sweater for the mountain gorillas.
But now I went to Uganda to see the overthrow of Idi Amin. You remember Idi Amin, I’m sure, two decades after his ouster. While probably no more savage or brutal than most dictatorial murderers, he managed to combine it with such a boyish demeanor, such a joie de vivre, that he was irresistible to the Western press. He did sordid mundane things like kill his people and terrorize his country and loot its wealth. But he also had a certain loony panache about it all. He was, as the Western press often said, a buffoon. He declared himself the king of Scodand and serenaded his guests with Scottish accordion music, dressed in kilts. He sent silly outrageous telegrams to other world leaders, reminiscent of a king of Uganda a century earlier, who sent love letters to Queen Victoria and invited her to come to his royal village as his umpteenth wife. He threatened the British expatriate community in Kampala and was mollified when prominent British businessmen carried him around in a sedan chair. Oh, the buffoonery. And he became just one of a number of Africa’s postindependence leaders, if the rather solid documentation is to be believed, to kill his opponents and then eat them. How could the West resist? Amin could not have been invented more satisfyingly by Westerners who got the heebie-jeebies at the idea of independent Third World nations—he declares himself the king of Scotland and is a cannibal.
He destroyed his country while most of Africa’s other leaders looked the other way, a point of considerable bitterness among Ugandans to this day. His only consistent critic was Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, an intensely dignified principled man who was, on some visceral level, probably as upset by the buffoonery as by the terror. Nyerere campaigned incessantly for Amin’s ouster, supported the many rebel groups that had sprung up in Uganda’s misery. In a grandiose miscalculation, in 1979, Amin declared that Nyerere was just an impotent old hen and seized a piece of Tanzania. In African circles, these were fighting words indeed, and Tanzania counterattacked. And, oddly, bowled over Amin’s army. Nyerere was then faced with the difficult decision of following the Organization of African Unity’s cherished rule about respecting the sovereignty of other African leaders (i.e., the colonials gerrymandered the hell out of the continent’s borders out of capricious European interests, but it was now in everyone’s best interests not to touch those sacred demarcations) or pushing on and ousting the murderer. He went for the latter, and within a few weeks of relatively fierce fighting in which Tanzania’s troops were aided by a wellspring of local support, Amin and his people were driven out of the capital.
Everyone went bonkers in Kampala. Dancing in the streets, the radio said. A new government, and end of fear, emptying of the jails and the torture chambers.
The Tanzanian army had swept up the western side of Lake Victoria and looped east to Kampala. The north of the country was still in control of Amin’s people, as was the whole eastern side bordering Kenya. The Tanzanians concentrated on the eastern front and managed to open up a narrow corridor to the Kenyan border. That was the day I entered Uganda from Kenya.
I had wanted to travel at the end of this stretch with the baboons. I was feeling, atypically for me, a journalistic reflex, a desire to see history being made, and I was moved by this particular history—dancing in the streets, a freed people. I spent my years at college flirting with the Quakers and, intellectually, thought that it would be important for me to test the ideals of pacifism that I was toying with by observing an undeniably just war.
Ah, this is nonsense. I was twenty-one and wanted an adventure. I wanted to scare the shit out of myself and see amazing things and talk about it afterward. And for the previous month, I had been missing someone badly, and I thought that going to a war would make me feel better about it. I was behaving like a late-adolescent male primate.
So I went, hitching on the petrol tankers that were the only vehicles being allowed to pass through the border from Kenya. I made it to the capital of Kampala, spent some time there, hitched further west toward the mountains that border Zaire, at which point I felt too deep into scary unknown territory and turned around, starting to hitch back east to Kenya again. A day into the country, in that eastern corridor, a petrol tanker about thirty minutes in front of us was blown up by Amin’s soldiers. A few days later in Kampala, where there were still corpses everywhere and swarms of vultures in the sky, our district was shelled and the lorry driver and I huddled for the night underneath the vehicle. That was it for my war stories, all the proverbial action that I saw, and that was quite enough. But the main thing was not the war. In a weird way, it was cleansing to have those moments of sheer absolute terror and, when the shelling stopped, to feel the relief. What weighed so much more, what could never abate, was the sickness of the previous decade of Amin.
The euphoria, the release of the looting, had spent itself by the time I got there, and the sense of poison had returned. During the day after Amin fled Kampala, a huge percentage of the stores in the capital were looted by crowds. There was a vague tone in the Western press of “those people running amok once again, destroying their own communities.” It was anything but that. Amin, the repression, and the looting were the logical outcomes of yet another residue of colonialism. At the turn of the century, when the British smashed the Sudanese uprising, they decided to roll on further south, mop up Uganda while they were at it, and bring Nubian troops as their backups. And the Nubians—tribes like the Acholi—stayed, northern Muslim tribes amid a country of southern Bugandan Christians. When the Brits allowed Uganda its independence, they left the Nubian firmly in control of the military. Amin had been a general from the northern tribe, and when he took over, he systematically seized the stores of Kampala and turned them over to his tribal compatriots. Thus, the orgy of looting and revenge against the northerners.
But that felt good for only so long, and now the poison was back. So many years of fear could not be forgotten. Anyone who was educated, who was political, who was a religious leader, who had money, paid for it in some way. I sat one evening with one man, a Bugandan businessman who recited the vehicles that had been taken from him over the years, as if they were his lost children. “First they took UGH365. It was our car. That was a good vehicle. Then they took UFK213. That was the lorry. Then they took UFW891. That was the pickup truck. I used to see the Acholi man driving it around town for years afterward. He was army.” One old man, who helped run the bombed remnants of the YMCA I stayed in, sat and recited the children he had lost. All taken. Two confirmed dead, one who disappeared somewhere down the drainage troughs of Amin’s torture chambers.
The teachers had suffered among the most. Uganda had spectacular education. Churchill, at the time of Victoria’s jubilee, began the British tradition of viewing Uganda as its pearl in Africa, and it developed its education as in no other African colony. By the time of Amin’s coup, its university was unmatched on the continent, its public schools superb. Predictably, the teachers were targeted early. One day in the border town of Tororo, I walked down the street and was seized by an excited trim middle-aged man in a white shirt. “Ah, you are a foreigner, god bless you for coming, this means we are free now, Christ has delivered us through the sons of Tanzania, I used to be a schoolteacher, the school is gone, they burned it, I was in a jail, they tortured me, look where they beat me.” He forced me to sit with him as, more and more manically, he told me his story. In that mad day in Tororo, four different teachers accosted me with their similar stories, all just released, broken, from the jails.
The papers that had just resumed publishing had a phrase already—they referred to the need now for “psychological rehabilitation of the country.” Every gesture, every encounter, every smell, was wrong, was tense, was watchful, was inappropriate. A subliminal sense of wrongness. Too many people ready to seize you and tell you, a stranger, their story. Too many people ready to laugh and kick at some body in the street in Kampala. Too many people pulling away from me in a xenophobic panic on the sidewalk.
One day, I walked in downtown Kampala, near the palace of the new president (a professor, appointed by the tribunal of Ugandan rebels and Tanzanians. He was destined to rule for only two weeks before being replaced, a pattern to be repeated with spasms of coups and countercoups for the next decade until the memories of Amin took on a nostalgic tinge). A busy crowd of people, going about their business. Something subtle happened, and it triggered the gears of fright in everyone’s head. I would guess that three or four people, independently, just happened to stop on the same block at the same time—to remember where they had put the key, to decide which errand to do next, to sneeze. Some psychological critical mass had been reached, enough people were standing still. Everyone stopped dead. It spread, until in the whole downtown, everyone was standing still. We all stared at the presidential palace, everyone breathed tensely, families huddled together. Oh my god, what is about to happen? everyone was thinking. We all stood there in silence, waiting for the next trouble for maybe five minutes, until Tanzanian soldiers came and yelled at everyone to start moving again.
By all logic, the most emotionally persistent moment should have been when I got into big trouble in Kampala. I did something truly stupid, something that someone who had been in Africa merely a day would probably have had the smarts to avoid. I am too embarrassed even to say what I did, but as a result of it, a pair of Tanzanian soldiers decided that I was an exmercenary for Amin’s army. There had been plenty of white guys willing to serve that role, and the soldiers’ thinking was not outrageous. A seething, vengeful Ugandan crowd developed, the soldiers vacillated, I was made to lie facedown on the concrete with a gun pointed at me. It was certainly the most frightening moment of my life. The Kenyan lorry driver I was traveling with argued heroically and convinced them to release me.
The most intense moment, unexpectedly, came later. I had finally felt frightened and disoriented enough that I had to flee, had to get out of that impossible place. I started hitching back east to safe, familiar Kenya again. Despite my near panic to be gone, there was something I very much needed to do, against all logic. I made a detour in the town of Jinja, in order to see the source of the Nile. It is here that Lake Victoria spills over its edge and begins the White Nile. It was here that Burton had dreamt of, that Speke, slipping off on his own, had finally reached, over which one of the great debates of Victorian science raged. I had grown up on all of these men as my heroes, had read Burton’s journals and biographies, had traced their journeys on maps. I wanted to see the point where the Nile began.
It was not hard to find. There was a bridge over it now, a concrete wall below that formed some sort of hydroelectric dam, with a torrent of water bursting through an opening. Oddly, there was even a plaque commemorating Speke’s “discovery” of this spot. Standing at the very center of the bridge, you could see, just below, a staircase coming down the concrete wall, down to a platform right at the water level with a hole in the wall. No doubt related to the workings of this dam. I stood there and looked down, seeing something extraordinary. A soldier had been marched down the stairs, his hands tied behind his back. A rope had been put around his throat and tied to some piece of machinery inside that hole, such that as the river rose, the man had eventually been swept off his feet, so that he had drowned or choked. He was dead, the body bloated and stiff, floating straight out in the rushing water. I thought, Was he Ugandan or Tanzanian? There was too little uniform left to tell. I thought, If he was with Amin, he deserved it. I thought, But no one deserves to die that way. I thought, But how many civilians did he kill? I thought, But maybe he was just a forced conscript, forced to do it. I thought, Yeah, I know what I think of Nazis who said they were just following orders. I thought, I bet the current is too strong there for the crocs to get to his body. I thought, I wonder if he was alive as the waters rose on him, how did that feel? I thought, I wonder if I can get closer, to see, I must remember every detail, so I can tell people about this. I thought, I want to forget this, I want to get the hell out of here, to be home, to be safe. And I stood there, transfixed, unable to move from that spot.
Decades later, in the neurobiology classes I teach, I always spend some lectures on the physiology of aggression. The hormonal modulation of it, the areas of the brain having some influence over it, the genetic components of it. Somehow, each year, it takes more and more lectures to cover the material. There aren’t a whole lot more facts known than about the neurobiology of schizophrenia or language use or parental behavior, just to name a few of the other topics I cover. But somehow, almost embarrassingly, I spend more and more time talking about aggression. I think each year I lecture longer because of that man with his head tied to the dam and because of how long I stood there looking at him, unable to leave. I think it is because of the ambiguity of aggression. It is the most confusing emotion to me, and with the defenses of an academician, I clearly believe that if I lecture at it enough, it will give up and go away quietly, its simultaneous attraction and repulsion will stop being so frightening to me. Parental behavior, sexual behavior, those are usually pretty unassailable positives. Schizophrenia, depression, dementia—definitely bad. But aggression. The same motor pattern, the same burst of viscera and neurotransmitters holding razors, and sometimes we are rewarded as with few other behaviors, and sometimes we have been unspeakably harmful. A just war, a nation freed, and a head jammed in the hole in the concrete. I stood watching for hours, mesmerized, as if to see how long it would take for this man to be washed away, bit by bit, into the Nile.
PART 2
The Subadult years
8
The Baboons: Saul in the Wilderness
You never want to be an ex-alpha male baboon in the troop where you were once alpha. By the early 1980s, Solomon sank, but into anything but obscurity. Uriah, not a particularly vicious kid, was not overly cruel to his ex-nemesis after he had unseated him. But everyone else couldn’t get enough of the change. Solomon did not merely trade places with Uriah, becoming number two in the hierarchy. He had held on to the alpha position long past the point when he had the physical means to do so, holding on purely by dint of the status quo and intimidation. Once everyone saw that Uriah had successfully challenged that status quo, everyone else tried it, and by 1980, Solomon had plummeted to ninth rank, solidly middle. And a pattern emerged that has grown familiar to me over the years. When you look at the frequencies of dominance interactions, the typical pattern you see is that, for example, number 4 is having his most interactions with 3 and 5, losing to the former, defeating the latter. Number 17 mostly interacts with 16 and 18. But, as an exception to that nearest-neighbor pattern, you’ll suddenly note that ranks 1–5 are having an extraordinary number of interactions with the lowly number 11. Why are they so intent on rubbing Mister 11’s nose in it all the time? He, invariably, turns out to be the ex-number 1 who used to dominate 1–5. The tables are turned, and baboons are endowed with long, vengeful memories. Solomon got no end of grief. Isaac, Aaron, both in the top six positions in the hierarchy, even Benjamin, who by then was about number 8 or so, got their licks in. Solomon lost his austere minimalist style and became craven and obsequious around those higher ranking and pretty vicious to those lower. He harassed poor, weird Job endlessly, to the point where his probable family of Naomi, Rachel, and Sarah once chased Solomon across two fields. He lunged at me a few times, sending me cowering back inside the Jeep. And, finding the resolution that many ex-alphas come to, he upped and left one day, joining the troop to the south, where, if of a mediocre and declining rank, he would at least be anonymous. He would be seen occasionally when the troops met and hollered at each other from across the river.
There were some changes in the troop on other fronts. Joshua was hitting prime age, and Boopsie and Afghan went wild over him. Devorah had her first child, a daughter who appeared to have been Solomon’s child, since he was the only male to spend time with Devorah during her conception estrus. This had been his last consortship as the alpha male, while he was in the final throes of Uriah’s harassment. Thus the rape of Devorah by Solomon must have occurred when she was a few weeks pregnant. Had Solomon not been toppled by Uriah, this infant would have been growing up now with the troop’s alpha male being reasonably certain that he was her father. Despite the change in the political winds, she was hardly an abandoned child. Between Devorah and her dominating mother, Leah, the kid grew quickly and with no lack of confidence. By chance, the low-ranking Miriam had a daughter the same week, and the differences between the two were striking. Devorah’s daughter was larger, held her head upright first, walked first, sat on her mother’s back first. Devorah could sit and feed while her child was able to wander off; lower-ranking females would cluster around and groom Devorah, for a chance to examine the kid. Miriam’s daughter, in contrast, could go only a few steps before Miriam would nervously retrieve her—the world was full of endless individuals who would be delighted to maul the kid. Miriam had to feed with both hands full, had to frequently scamper away from a fight with the child barely clinging to her belly. Various studies had shown that having the good fortune to be born to a high-ranking mom like Devorah, rather than a Miriam, made for faster, healthier development, and a greater chance of surviving during the tough times. On a day that each of the babies was about a week old, they interacted with each other for the first time. Devorah’s kid scampered toward Miriam’s, who scampered away and ran back to Miriam. A first dominance interaction had just occurred, and it shocked me to think that I could go away that instant, go live decades of my life and return middle-aged, and that asymmetry would probably still be in place.
