By the time Kanani and Faisi came to the centre of Naakulabye, the sun was severe. Kanani saw the unsightly tenants of the paved town circle and shook his head. Two fat cows, urban in bearing, occupied the space where flowers once grew. One cow lay on the ground chewing the cud, the other stood swishing its tail languidly, oblivious to the traffic circling around it.
'Africans…' Kanani hissed.
He remembered the neat paved walkways, manicured hedges, blooming plants and the dustless streets of colonial Naakulabye and despaired. As a child in the ’30s, Kanani had seen Kampala City take shape in the magical hands of the British. When it came to carving out landscape the white man was a wizard. First, the impala antelopes which the ba kabaka had hunted for generations were banished from the hills. Then the hills were measured and marked, then dug and demarcated into Streets, Roads, Lanes, Places, Squares and Mews. The roads were tarred and paved smoother than mats. Trees and plants of agreeable species were planted at the roadside at precise intervals, then flowers of all colours. Suddenly, there were palm trees in Kampala. Streetlights sprang up between the trees and lit up in the night. Kampala's hilltops were enhanced with beautiful structures. Namirembe and Lubaga were crested with magnificent cathedrals, Kiyaka was crowned with a beautiful Baha'i Temple, Nakaseko with the tall Apollo Hotel, Kololo with a huge TV mast, Makerere with majestic university structures and Lubiri with a modern royal palace. There was hope then. There were systems. There was order. Uganda was on its way to civilisation.
Then independence came.
Kanani was pessimistic right from the start. Ugandans related to the land and to the hills, but not to the art drawn on them by the British. The land was theirs but the city belonged to the British. Kanani had watched, wary, as one by one, Europeans packed and left their city behind. Excited Ugandans, dizzy with euphoria, took their places. He remembered Rev Mackenzie, the senior accountant at Namirembe Cathedral at the time. Kanani was his assistant. He was in Mackenzie's office helping him pack his books in boxes when Mackenzie exploded, 'You're a good person, Canaan.' British people pronounced Kanani's name properly. 'No doubt you'll do a good job. But mark on my words: these buffoons are going to destroy your country.'
Not even Mackenzie's pessimism prepared Kanani for the ineptitude and later, the sheer greed that consumed the city after independence. Through the decades, Mackenzie's words had come to pass like a prophecy. Luckily, churches were unaffected – right from the start churches had belonged not to the Europeans but to God. For Kanani, that dry and dusty town circle in the middle of Naakulabye occupied by fat urbanite cows was emblematic of independent Uganda.
159-160. oldal, Book III (Oneword, 2018)