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Title: Snakepit
Author: Moses Isegawa
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004
259 pages
A review by Herby Raynaud
Moses Isegawa's new book Snakepit, set in 1970s Uganda during the rule of the infamous dictator Idi Amin, is a very disturbing portrait of the utter insanity, bloodlust and nihilism which plagued the country during Amin's reign.
The story is told through the experiences of Bat Katanga, who has recently returned to Uganda after finishing a post graduate degree at Cambridge University. Amin has just expelled legions of Indians and foreigners from the country, leaving vacant many of the civil service jobs they once occupied. Bat, brilliant, eager, over-confident, slightly smug, and idealistic, is only too happy to exploit the opportunity presented. Within weeks of his return to Uganda he is interviewed and is quickly hired as Bureaucrat Two in the Ministry of Power and Communications by General Samson Bazooka Ondogar, the director of the ministry.
General Bazooka harbors a deep resentment and contempt for his southern compatriots who enjoyed tremendous social advantages in the pre-Amin era. Bat, as a southerner, is to General Bazooka the embodiment of those privileges and advantages which as a northerner, he was unjustly denied. He hires Bat because he relishes manipulating and destroying the lives of these contemptible southerners.
Even Bat understands that he is a pawn. However, he wrongly believes that somehow his expertise, his education, his efficiency, and his public neutrality will somehow protect him. In a time when power is acquired and maintained through an arbitrary ultra-violence, and any passing whim or heated passion can be satisfied with a barrage or bullets, stick of dynamite, or a henchmans bludgeon or machete, ordinary assumptions of logic, common sense, personal security no longer apply.
The aptly titled Snakepit is thus the story of men intoxicated on extreme power, wealth, and self indulgence; where the only checks and balances on those in power is the capacity to escalate the level of violence and chaos.
Isegawa describes vividly the horrors that can be expected when society makes such radical departure from sanity. The narrative is littered with corpses lying in macabre mass graves where surgeons are hired to sift through dismembered remains and recover the bodies of loved ones. He unflinchingly describes gruesome executions and debauched behaviors. The fact that Isegawa avoids heavy-handed moralizing while simultaneously managing to elicit something approaching empathy for even the most repugnant of his characters, is neat little piece of novelistic legerdemain.
If Snakepit makes any over-arching point at all, it is this: no matter who you are, even if youre Idi Amin wielding absolute power over an entire nation, you are still a pawn to circumstance.
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