Milo’s devious plan for starting his own rafting company involved buying up all the access-points on the river. The first of these to fall under his sway was Bujagali Falls, where the rafting trips start. Prior to Milo it was a very run-down park and camp-ground. Milo spruced it up, put in Banda huts, showers and toilets, and got the bar running well. The bar was a huge, open pagoda right on the falls. A great place to sit and drink the world go by.
One night Milo and I were well on our way to getting slaughtered. We were alone, aside from the bored askari guard slouched in the corner half asleep with an AK47 across his chest. We decided that it would be a great idea to have turns shooting the gun out across the river. There was a full moon. We roused the guard and asked him for his gun.
“Oh no, Mr Milo, I cannot do that. That is very bad idea.”
We offered him a bottle of beer and he accepted. We walked down to the waters edge, slipped the catch on to single fire, and proceeded to blast off the whole clip, one shot at a time. We were hysterical with laughter. The guard was a bit worried, so we gave him another beer to shut him up. We then sat back down and got so drunk that we fell asleep where we were. The next morning I had a trip and I waited for the bus to arrive, nursing a heavy hangover. Milo was unconscious in the bar with his mouth wide open. I did the trip and got back around 4 in the afternoon. It transpired that about half an hour after I left, Milo had been woken by the local police chief poking him with a baton.
As it was a full moon, all the fishermen had been out getting the midnight catch, when some crazy person had begun shooting at them. The fishermen have long dug-out canoes which regularly sink resulting in their demise. There were about twenty canoes out there, and apparently they had all huddled in the bottom of the canoes, praying to Allah as bullets zipped over their heads. Milo pleaded ignorance to the situation but vowed to help catch the culprits.
The next day, Milo came back from Kampala with a new stereo system. This was a big find. It was very hard to get hold of electronics in Uganda at that time. We set it up in the bar and that night an overland truck with about 20 tourists arrived. We had a great time dancing in the bar to some groovy tunes. Before going to bed, Milo locked the stereo in a hut. He had about 20 locals working for him and he didn’t trust any of them, for good reason. The two tribes that lived in that area were famous in the whole of Uganda for being thieves.
A few days later Milo had to go back to Kampala for a few days. He asked me to watch the bar and camp-ground while he was gone. I was happy to hang out in Budjagali for a few days and drink free beer. The day before Milo was due back, I went to bed after locking the stereo in a banda hut. I got up next morning to an unpleasant surprise. Someone had broken into the hut and stolen the stereo. Milo was going to be very pissed. It had to have been an inside job. One of the 20 locals who worked around the campsite. I narrowed it down to a few possibilities based on freedom of access at the time of the theft. I then interviewed the suspects. Every single one of them looked guilty as hell, but I had no way of pinning down the culprit. I decided to go and report the theft to the local police station.
The local police station consisted of three mud dwellings on the side of the main dirt road. The chief knew who I was. He gave me to one of his ‘top detectives’ to get the facts down. I was taken into the third hut, of which the back wall had collapsed, and he proceeded to file his ‘report’.
“Mazungu, what is your name?”
I told him my name.
“And tell me, in your own words, what has it that happened?”
I started off with the explanation of locking the stereo away in the banda hut. I spoke for about five minutes. The whole time he was busy scribbling on his piece of paper. Then, I stopped to have a look at what he had written.
‘I, Mr Adams, did put one streo in hut banda, because I go to bed, by myselfs, it is dark night and maybe a little cold…’
That was it.
“Oh, come on, dude,” I said. “You can’t write for sh*t. Give it to me. I’ll write it.”
“No, no, mazungu! I am very good writer! You stay there and you tell me. I am the writer!”
“You couldn’t write to save your life. Give me that ******g pencil!”
“Mazungu! I warning you! You no stop me writing! I know how to write better than you!”
“What!? You must be ******g joking!”
And back and forth we went, until at one point he stopped, leaned back on his chair, and fixed me with a shrewd eye. “Ah, mazungu,” he said in a very calm voice. “Now I know the truth. You think you are a very clever mazungu. But you do not deceive me. I am a detective. And I know the truth of this situation.”
I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I just looked at him in a puzzled way until he leapt up off his chair, pointed his finger at me and loudly proclaimed; “You are the thief!”
Something clicked in my head. I grabbed him by the throat and threw him up against the wall. I then proceeded to start screaming in his face while giving him the distinct impression that his life was about to end. The chief and a couple of his deputies came rushing in and pried us apart. The detective began yelling accusations at me, but the chief told him to shut up and get out of his sight. He then apologized to me and said that he had only just been made detective and was perhaps lacking some experience. Did I want to keep making the report? I declined, as I had already been away from the campground too long. I jumped on the back of a bicycle boda-boda and the dude pedaled me the three kilometers back to the camp.
When I got there, an air of quiet desperation hung over the camp. All 20 employees knew how Milo worked. They knew that he would just fire all of them. They were desperate not to lose their jobs. The camp manager, a nice chap named Paul, came to me and explained that they had all put some money together to get a famous witchdoctor to come and find the culprit. A witchdoctor? This I had to see. They had sent a mutatu out to get this dude, who lived near the Kenyan border, about two hours drive away.
Then I heard a car, looked up and saw Milo pulling into the camp. I looked at Paul and said, “You guys are all dead meat.” He nodded at the truth of my words.
Milo came over and immediately asked what was up. I told him. He took a steely look around the group of nervous employees and then demanded to be shown the hut. We walked over and I pointed out where the thief had broken in. He was furious, and rightly so. He had been warned about hiring people from the local villages, but he had done so anyway as he wanted to support them. They had repaid his kindness with this.
We marched back to the group of waiting villagers. “Milo, don’t be too hard on them,” I said.
“I’m going to ******g kill them,” he replied as he popped his boot and pulled out a crowbar. “Who is your prime suspect?” he asked me.
“Godfrey,” I replied. He was the teenage boy who cleaned the camp first thing in the morning. Interestingly enough, Godfrey was nowhere to be seen. Milo grabbed some poor random dude, instructed the askari to hold everyone else there under guard, and dragged the unfortunate into the storage shed. There began a cacophony of banging, yelling and terrified screaming. I don’t know if it was just show, but it sure had an effect on the employees outside. They all took off in different directions, apart from Paul and a couple of older ones. The guard began to lift his AK47 and I dove behind a large rock. This was not looking good.
Last edited by Yeti; 11-07-2015 at 10:36 PM.