Hot Ice

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The white man wore a clerical collar and clergy black shirt. His bicycle left a narrow trail of red dust as it swerved between open sewers and around mounds of festering garbage in front of tin-roofed huts. Snarling, skeleton-like dogs, trying to scavenge anything humans had not already taken, growled but gave way. There weren’t many of them left, the dogs. Cats had disappeared years ago. Most white priests had too, if for different reasons.

A few Anglicans had remained, made near mad by the African sun, feverish with dengue or malaria, or clinging to demonstrably false hopes that they could improve the lives of those who lived here. Things had, as they say, gone from bad to worse under President-for-Life Amer Bugunda.

As had happened so frequently in this part of the world, the freedom fighter in the heady days of collapsing empires had become today’s tyrant; his rule had become as oppressive as any colonial power.

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