When I was nine or thereabouts, I ate poison – rat poison – and refused to die. You want the story? You are welcome.
The year is 2005. The day is breaking and, as usual, we are walking to school; my friends, my two siblings, and I. Our school is at least an hour away from home. This explains why we have to drag our sleepy heads out of bed and hit the road each morning before daylight cracks the sky.
We walk in clusters, naturally grouped by the classes we attend. This morning, I am discussing football with Simon. We are Chelsea fans, both of us. Our blood is blue. One day we shall be like Drogba. Simon is better than me at football because he has larger feet and thicker legs, but I’m faster.
He is dragging his feet today and I can’t seem to figure out why. The other kids are tens of steps ahead of us. Usually, we jog to school. We want to arrive on time to attend the morning prep with the students who are in the boarding section. We want to do our homework because we arrived home last evening and tucked the books away. I spent all my time reading my father’s newspapers, and Simon says he watched WBS TV until his eyes were too heavy.
Simon sinks a hand into his bag. Fishes out something. Stashes it into his mouth and starts chewing. He hands me his bag and I serve myself. Doughnuts! A miracle from the gods. You have no idea; how hard I love those things! They should have fallen from heaven instead of manna and quails.
I do not bother asking where he got them from; I already know. His mother runs a shop and there are many more doughnuts and buns and mandazi and everything a child wants to eat. She even has sweets. Many, many sweets. Can you imagine?
We are in class studying about exotic rabbits when Simon’s stomach starts grumbling. Can you mention any exotic rabbits? Well, I can: Chinchilla Rabbit. California White. New Zealand Red. I can go on and on, and on, but I will not. Because I can’t remember any more examples. See what I just did?
Simon’s hand is up. He says, Please Teacher may I go out? and Teacher ignores him. I wink at him and offer him a kind smile, and he returns it. Usually we sit together, but today, Teacher paired me up with this girl, the cheeky one, who has the scent of beans on her breath. Simon repeats the Please Teacher may I go out? phrase a few more times, as if it’s a prayer, but nothing goes his way. Our teacher is pregnant and irritable. She is always pregnant. And everyone calls her Teacher as if she has no name of her own.
A girl screams when Teacher is writing on the chalkboard. All heads turn, as does the teacher’s. She weaves on her feet and pats her large belly. This girl is still standing, and her ka finger is pointing at Simon. He has vomited on his textbook and his eyes are half open. A piece of chalk falls from Teacher’s hand and she stares blankly. My feet carry me to Simon’s desk. I hold him by the shoulders and shake him and shout his name many, many times. He does not answer; he only grunts as if he is snoring. I think he is dying. There is white vomitus on the desk, on the picture of a rabbit in the textbook, on his shoes. So, so much vomitus.
Simon’s eyes are now closed. He looks peaceful in his sleep. Teacher says his vomitus smells of rat poison; pregnant people have their way of smelling things. Everyone agrees with her and my armpits begin itching because Simon and I have been eating the same things since morning. His elder brother, Vinny, is fished out of his class. He searches Simon’s bag and finds an empty kaveera inside. He holds it to his nose, takes a deep, deep breath and makes a face. He opens his mouth to report his findings, but there is a lump in his throat. He doesn’t answer even when Teacher is impatiently asking, Can you smell the poison? Instead, he holds the kaveera to his nose again and draws an even deeper breath, just to be sure he is smelling the right things. I too know this kaveera, and have been eating from it, but I do not open my mouth. Vinny says he remembers it from the previous night. Their mother, tired of the rats roaming her shop and digging holes into everything, had put poison on the doughnuts which had outlived their shelf life. The plan was that she would wake up the following day and distribute pieces in strategic locations around the shop. But well, fate had other plans.
For the next couple of days, Simon is in hospital. He is vomiting more often than he is eating. I, too, am dying. My stomach is being wrung by the devil and I am vomiting like a broken water pipe. My arse is leaking too and there is blood on my toilet paper. I do not breathe a word of it to anyone. Nobody knows how to report themselves that they ate rat poison without smelling it. Their mothers might kill them before the poison does. And besides, I want to become a soldier when I grow up. Soldiers are not cowards. They endure difficult times and refuse to break. The pain in my stomach, the vomiting, the liquid stool and the weak knees are just part of the training. And I am doing well, holding onto my life.
In hospital, Simon is getting well, and he explains that he ate the doughnuts with me. His mother tells my mother when she visits them, and my mother calls my father and narrates everything to him. At supper time, I face a tribunal. Questions come at me like bullets from all directions. Did you eat the poisoned doughnuts? . . . Are you stupid? . . . But Dan, how could you not smell the scent of rat poison? . . . Are you now feeling okay? . . . But how come you are so stupid? . . . Didn’t you see any molds on the doughnuts? . . . The doughnuts were expired, you moron.
The soldier in me takes charge. I deny everything. I did not eat Simon’s doughnuts, I swear. God’s name gets a few mentions and I even dare him to strike me dead if I’m lying. For emphasis, I lick my index finger and swipe it across my neck. The soldier in me is impressed. You see, real soldiers do not confess even when tortured. I once watched a movie in which an American soldier spat blood at his Vietnamese captors who were torturing answers out of him. This American soldier even blew his nose at them and showed them his middle finger for good measure. Of course, they took that finger from him, amputated his left leg, plucked out all his other finger nails and let him bleed to his death, a drop at a time. But still, they got nothing important out of him. Even with his last breath, he was telling them that they were their mothers’ reproductive organs. I think he was lying about his captors being human organs, but it was just a movie. But soldiers are hard, hard people, I assure myself. The soldier in me nods. We do not talk fwaa. So why should I confess my sins just because I have been asked about them?
*
In 2018, I started preparing myself for the official military training. The goal was to attain the utmost fitness levels. No, I was not alone. All my friends had a dream similar to mine – to join the army before our graduation caps returned from the victory toss in the sky; before we took off our graduation gowns. So, we held a meeting, the seven of us, and drafted a training plan. We shall run ten kilometers, we said, every day, and we shall do it in under two hours.
Day one came hard at me. I ate up the whole distance, but in over five hours. I remember limping back to our hall of residence with my guts in hand. I had sweated a river, and the sweat had dried, turning into salt on my face. My friends were active sportsmen and to them, that distance had been simpler than drawing a breath. They had made it back in good time. When they beheld me returning, they held their heads in their hands and laughed, but without showing their teeth. My predicament was sad, and even funnier. But Kakuru, can you manage being in the army? they wondered. So, when will you learn how to eat posho? But are you even aware that soldiers live on posho and beans during their training?
The following morning, I could not feel my legs. My back had given out. My campus wife, the one with brown thighs, bought a gel and rubbed it on my black thighs. Her hands were soft as a baby’s buttocks. Thanks to her magical touch, I could walk again in three days. And five days later, I was ready to return to what we had called our grueling military training.
Over the weeks that followed, the physical exercises were eating my muscles. Wait; I had no muscles in the first place. But by the end of the first month, my collar bones could hold water. My campus wife said she did not want so sit on my thighs any longer. She said my bones made her feel pain like she was sitting on a dry branch of a tree. She did not want to put her head on my chest any longer. She said my countable ribs were too, too hard for her soft cheeks. She did not want to hug me any longer; she said my bones were piercing her chest. I told her to go to hell or find a rich sugar daddy who was fat and she walked out casually, as if nothing had happened. I said, Okay, and trained harder. Soldiers are supposed to be loveless, I consoled myself. That evening I managed tens of press-ups and even more sit-ups. I jumped like a frog and barked at tiredness whenever it tickled my bones. Soldiers do not tire, I said, and worked on.
*
The seven of us did not end up in the army, in case you were wondering.
One has been dead for five years now. One is in Denmark, wearing thick coats because there is too, too much snow over there. Another one is married; he has fathered three stout babies with round faces and too much melanin for my liking. Two are in school again, and I swear they will be buried in their books forever. And then there’s me who is still trying to figure things out. I have attempted – on three different occasions – to join the army, and I have been unsuccessful each time. Even police once rejected me when I gave it a desperate try. Each of those occasions is a story that I will tell one day, but for now, let’s just ignore that path because I still have to mourn the dreams that were real only inside my head and never in the real world.
But sooner than later, that could change. I could become a soldier albeit under entirely different circumstances. The UPDF (Amendment) Bill, 2025 has been cooked and it promises to change everything. All we need is the Fountain of Honor to give it his blessing – of course he will – and by osmosis, we shall have been conscripted into the army. All of us, including you. Just like that! No training, no military drills, no guns. All you need is to be a Ugandan under arrest and you will learn that silver fish is indeed meat. It doesn’t matter that you grew up planning to become a pilot, an astronaut, a traditional healer or any of those stupid dreams babies have.
Legal experts have a lot of bad news for us vis-a-vis this UPDF (Amendment) Bill, 2025. Human rights defenders and opposition politicians are afraid – and rightly so. In order to get us here, our honorable Members of Parliament needed to have deliberate memory loss. They needed to throw several past court rulings under the bus, and pass this bill in spite of the heckling – and then the absence – of most opposition parliamentarians.
In the new world, we can all be tried in military courts – again. All of us, including the regime apologists who think they will always be on the right side of the fence. You too can be tried in a military court. So could your favorite tweep and the boda guy, who wore a red beret, clenched his fist and posed for a picture last week. Speaking of which, the law now criminalizes wearing berets, khakis, combat boots (even black ones) and Kaunda suits. Yes, Kaunda suits now count as military uniform.
As the 2026 general election approaches, we need to think deeply. We might need to clean our wardrobes and discard a few clothes. We might need to censor our tongues, and perhaps, shrink our dreams. The state has armed itself with a law that redefines us as soldiers – not warriors for the nation, but subjects of military discipline. We are not the kind of soldiers we dreamed of becoming when we were little. We are not the kind that trains or serves with honor. All of us are soldiers – but without consent – in a country where dissent is a grenade with the pin already pulled.
Welcome to the barracks.
About the Author:
Daniel Kakuru is a writer of poetry and prose. His debut poetry collection – We Chose Fire – is forthcoming. He drinks, smokes and hopes to die a planned death.
