ssese-seminal thoughts from a stormy lake in africa

Wrapped in a yellow plastic bag, we were being tossed about on the angrier waters of Lake Victoria. Walls of water crashed and lightning flashed. Mr Ssenkoko narrowed his eyes at me through blades of rain and said “Are you Jewish?”

Up till then I’d been feeling a bit over-excited, perhaps. There’s something oddly intoxicating about knowing you’ll probably die and so flinging one’s fate to the winds and tides and things. Up until the yellow plastic, I’d even been teasing Philip who had had his cape belled out, hen-style, over his cameras to keep them from the wild weather. He was also wearing a particularly funny hat.

Ssenkoko’s question knocked my laughter right out of the boat. What was that supposed to mean? I shook my soggy locks.

Mr Ssenkoko was the manager cum tour guide of the professor’s mosquito ravaged lodge or camp on one of the Ssese Islands, a group of 84 bejungled isles scattered over the north-west waters of Lake Victoria.

The professor was from Kampala International University and, the day before, we’d been driving though the city, on our way out to the lake. What was that?

“Ah yes…” the professor murmured, waving a vague hand at a distinctly off-kilter tower veering dangerously off a hill we were passing. “…It didn’t – ah - quite take off”. We were going to see some of the Ssese islands. Although we only had a couple of days in which to do it, we wanted to go. And the professor had been kind enough to offer to host us.

The tower is the top of a mosque commissioned by Idi Amin in Uganda’s murkier days, but had been miscalculated somehow. Its builders had silently persevered, fully cognisant of the fact that their lives were more at stake the more the tower lean became obvious. One day they abandoned the oddly angled tower and escaped.

At Bukukata on the shore, we stood at the little harbour having our photographs taken by some newsman in front of a ferry. I expect our calm faces appeared in something like the Bukukata Beholder a day or so later while we were being dashed about on the implacid lake.

The ferry wasn’t for us. A taxi boat was. Yamaha powered, it roared off with us and many others, a cargo of bicycles and vegetables. It sped for an hour and a half between the water hyacinth mounds, towards the myriad alluring islands that kept appearing and disappearing behind veils of a descending mist. The bottom of our bucking taxi was awash with black water and banana skins.

Buggala, the largest Ssese island, waited for us in the dusk. Then for another 45 minutes we went by fast van, through a darkening forest of monkey shrieks. At the professor’s place was an open-sided, thatched dining pavilion and bar, some separate buildings housing a kitchen and the people that worked there, a water tower and four almost completed holiday chalets. Although my bed sported a mosquito net, I suspected that the thousand-and-one powerful mosquitoes clustering around me could sort out a little obstruction like that.

At supper, at the pavilion, we were introduced to Mr Ssenkoko. He kept slapping his head like someone enjoying a great joke. Except that I could see, by the light of our lantern, over a not-quite cooked chicken, that Mr Ssenkoko was not the amused sort. Under his own cloud of stingers, he was haughty and dignified, as much as the Professor was absent-minded.

Next day, even after the fruitily delicious breakfast and Ugandan coffee, Mr Ssenkoko seemed in no great hurry to get us onto the lake. The weather didn’t look wonderful but the real reason was that he didn’t want to say there was no boat. There also turned out that morning to be no transport with which to fetch one.

These drawbacks took time to resolve themselves as the sky came down lower and lower. Finally, a boat at the ready, Mr Ssenkoko fetched a huge yellow plastic sheet and stated we were to do exactly as he told us on the water.

We couldn’t see the first island to which we were headed so I asked how long it would take.

“ One hour, because we are controlled by horse power.”

It seemed as if we and the mounds of waterweed were the only things on the eternal dark water. With the first huge lightning flash we hit a beach. Rain pelted us. Up the short beach and towards a group of small houses, each with a canoe in front. There we stood in the rain in front of a closed door.

“Why are we here?” I yelled through the storm. Mr Ssenkoko ignored me.

To Philip he said, “Are you blind?” He indicated a poster on the door and on the poster was a picture of Mr Ssenkoko. It was an election poster and read: Councillor for Bufumira Sub-county, Kalangala District.

Then, seated in blue easy chairs inside, under a blue shade-cloth, at a long coffee table, decorated with blue doilies, we watched Mr Sssenkoko eat a plate of matoke (steamed and mashed savoury banana) and drink a cup of tea. There was a lace curtain across a doorway leading to two rooms beyond and a toothpaste tube on the floor. The squall seemed to be passing over.

Philip was interested to know what all that white was in a distant tree.

“Bards”, said Ssenkoko. I stared at them.

“I think he means buds”, I whispered.

“No. Bards”, Ssenkoko corrected me loudly. “They fly here for the drying fish and settle in that tree.” There were indeed vast beds of little shimmering tilapia and the big white bards above studied them intently.

As soon as we reached the boat, the rain flooded down. It had metamorphosed from a squall to something with much more serious intent. Philip and I had no idea where we were headed if it weren’t into the devil’s maelstrom. But it wasn’t long before another island reared out of the weather.

We ran blindly and got to a stone house or store room that had recently been burned. It was full of charcoal furniture. However, Ssenkoko rushed out soggily again, saying, I thought I heard, that he’d “try to find Madam Tropista”.

“She’s important in the tourism business”, he informed us later, as we plodded back to the wet boat. Just as we’d pushed out, a brilliantly clad woman with whirling hair and a big wet dog materialised out of a swirl of mist on the shore. Madam Tropista?

On the way back to Buggala, the water kept disappearing from under the boat so that we seemed to be travelling through a black sky as much as we dipped through the immense watery troughs of Lake Victoria, the biggest lake in Africa. I realised we were going to be pitched overboard at the very least. It was then that Mr Ssenkoko wrapped us in his length of yellow cling film. Where we all to go down together in a bright bundle?

The mosquitoes would have been disappointed. As it happened they got me instead of the bottom of the lake. Next day, Philip and I were lying sprawled on the back of a fast-moving truck under a singing canopy of equatorial palms, colobars and humidity. We were going back and we were dry and eating a big fish with our hands.